The animal stench, mules’ braying, and icy air creeping through chinks in the stones awakened me. One of the mules shifted his hooves in agitation. The door was slightly ajar; Lorenzo had gone out, perhaps to relieve himself. I got up and peered out upon a changed landscape: the earth was muffled under snow.
The tips of my fingers tingled even within their gloves, and my toes within their boots. I saw the faint pockmarks of Lorenzo’s footsteps leading down toward the edge of the stunted pines.
Someone moved there. My spine sharpened. The beasts sheltering with us jerked their heads up and down now in a panic. Olmina slept her blessed sleep, undisturbed. As I watched, the brown figure whipped something side to side. I stood halted by fear. The bear, for that was the thing I beheld, shook Lorenzo like a sack of grain. I couldn’t move. Then I jerked into motion, yelled, and stumbled forward, falling halfway to my knees. The massive bear chuffed and dropped Lorenzo. It swung its head back and forth, reading my smell. Here comes Death, I thought, my mind honed to a single point of dread.
The bear stood, his russet pelt crackling with frost. His paws were clotted with snow, splotched with blood. I was too far now from the hut to retreat. Then a small gust snapped my cloak out behind me. The bear snorted, then loped downhill into thicker woods.
By the time Olmina appeared at the door of the hut crying our names, I was kneeling beside Lorenzo, clasping his bloody head in my lap, his eyes wide open to nothing. I sobbed, “Don’t you leave me, Lorenzo! Stay with me!”
Olmina lurched toward us and crumpled. At first she looked past her husband into the pines as if she didn’t believe what she saw. That was some other man. She would search for Lorenzo at the edge of the woods.
I tried to put his viscera back in his body. I put snow in the cavity to stanch the bleeding. I put snow on his throat, which immediately soaked red. I shook his shoulders to wake him up. This couldn’t be. Olmina wept, opened her arms to the frozen sky, and bent to Lorenzo. “Dio mio, no! Husband, don’t go, don’t go!” She keened so loudly the mountain itself shook with her cries.
We dragged him up the slope slowly. At last we settled his body in the shed and covered him with a blanket, much to the terror of the animals, who smelled bear on him and clambered up against each other and the back wall. The mules would have bolted if Lorenzo hadn’t tied them so well. I took them outside to calm them and secured them to the iron ring set in the stone wall of the shed, all the while looking downhill at the dark red trail in the snow. I didn’t want to let the goats loose. The bear was still out there.
Olmina uttered such harsh cries at Lorenzo’s feet that I pressed my hands to my ears and dropped down beside his shoulder, sobbing. Then I put my palm to his cheek. He was cold.
After some time—whether one hour or many, I didn’t know, for it was impossible to tell the time beyond that daylight still remained—Olmina said, “I must wash him and sit vigil.” She turned her face to me, haggard with sorrow and fear. “Could you find some twigs to start a fire? Don’t go far.”
When I returned with an armful of damp twigs and dead branches, she’d struck a fire, using dry straw, behind stones that had been set in one corner by the shepherds as a crude hearth. A small opening in the thatch drew the smoke away. Olmina lit two candles, one at Lorenzo’s head and one at his feet. The four goats crowded up against each other in the farthest corner, bearing quiet if uncomprehending witness. I filled our pot with snow to melt for the final cleansing of the body.
But first we dragged him outside and washed him with snow. There was no other way. We removed his tunic and shirt, his breeches and hose, his leather shoes. We folded up each piece of clothing, even if it was torn. It shocked me to see his leathery, wrinkled body with its terrible wounds. We knelt, each taking one side of him, Olmina his left side, and I his right. We scoured the half-frozen crusts of blood upon his arms, neck, face, making the only sound on the mountain—shhh, shhh, shhh. Snow against cold flesh. But when I reached his legs and feet, the place where the toes were missing, I couldn’t go on.
Olmina moaned and lay her head down upon his chest. What would we do without him? We scrubbed and stopped, shivering, then resumed the work, our hands red from his blood, raw from cold. At last we carried him inside the shelter. The water was warm by now, steam curling from the black pot. I tested it with my finger. Warm water for a dead man.
We laid Lorenzo out upon our best red blanket, a candle beside his shoulder. We each wadded up a piece of his torn shirt, dipped it in water, and wrung it out. I folded the cloth and drew it across his face, down his neck and shoulder, his arm, cleaning between the fingers as if he were a child. We mended him as best we could. I sewed his left arm shut with a strand of my hair. Olmina sewed his neck with a gray thread of her hair.
There were other gashes that we couldn’t close. We lay a torn square of linen across his belly, a rough veil to cover the wound.
Olmina looked across at me. “Where, truly, then, is his heart?”
“Here,” I said, placing my hand atop hers and setting it on his bristly white chest, slightly closer to her. She lay her other hand on mine.
“There was no priest—he had no priest to bless him.” She lifted her head and whispered hoarsely, “He didn’t receive his Communion. Signorina, we must say the prayers for him.”
“We don’t need to say them. The mountain wind will be Vespers for him. The birds will say Matins. The animals Lauds.”
She stared at me and shook her head.
We washed his lower body, his hips, legs, feet. He was clean. He was cleaner than he’d ever been. I scraped under his nails with a small twig. Olmina stroked his hair into place. Then she continued to stroke his hair. There, there.
At last we dressed him. I brought in the mules, since it was growing dark, and latched the door. We were exhausted and lay down on either side of Lorenzo. Sleep fell like a bludgeon.
When I woke, the whole night had passed. Lorenzo, lifeless and cold, lay next to me. I touched his rigid hand and began to cry like a child.
Olmina was strange, and she wandered in her speech and her body, pacing in and out of the shed. “I must fetch a priest. Otherwise what will become of his soul in purgatory?”
I didn’t try to stop her. I let the mules out on a tether so they wouldn’t stray far. Some returned and stood at the door or came inside, shuddering with cold. I also tried to urge the goats outside. Two of them refused. They watched me solemnly, and I preferred them to a priest. Olmina trudged back and forth.
After a while we lit new candles at Lorenzo’s head and feet and sat beside him. We didn’t eat. I spoke some words from Purgatorio for his soul.
From the most sacred waters I returned
remade in the way that trees are new,
made new again, when their leaves are new,
pure and ready to ascend to the stars.
Olmina repeated her prayers. Sometimes I heard her, sometimes I wept. But I said nothing more. This was how the two goatherds found us. Astonished, they spoke little, but they knelt, and each placed a hand upon Olmina’s shoulders. They removed their black caps as if Lorenzo were one of their own. They came back with shovels and helped us to bury him farther down the mountain in thawed ground. We brought our mules and supplies with us. The herders dug a narrow hole. One of them rolled a large stone upon Lorenzo’s chest, to keep wild animals from scavenging him. One of them also brought a simple cross of two pine branches lashed well at the center with leather, which he planted upon the fresh mound. Olmina bent to the cold earth above him and would not be moved. But at last, with dark approaching, the men lifted her and set her upon a mule. They led us down to the village of Xeu Durgel. Lorenzo lay in the mountain. He’d always loved the high places. But it was bitter to leave him in a foreign land, to which we would never return.
CHAPTER 20
Like Cures Like
Olmina didn’t speak for a long time. Sometimes at night in the stone farmhouse where we found lodging, she sobbed withou
t cease. The sound undermined time, the round of days, so that I wasn’t sure when I had heard it and when I was remembering it or even anticipating the sorrow to come. I slept night and day for long stretches. The distances drawn upon maps were now small compared to the distances between one day and the next, between Olmina and me. We hadn’t held each other since his death. Blame was never spoken, but the consequences of my choices harried me like the sharp clicking of her rosary beads. If only I hadn’t chosen the journey. If only my father. If only Lorenzo. The bear. God.
When I asked the farmer about the town named Santa Engracia, the origin of one of my father’s letters, he pointed to the west. I spoke to Olmina about leaving. She nodded wearily in agreement and repeated the old proverb, La lontananza è madre della dimenticanza. Distance is the mother of forgetting.
We would never forget, but I was grateful for the lie. I was reminded of that strange malady I’d noted in the book.
LAPSUS:
A Predicament Where a Woman Abruptly Forgets Her Place of Origin and Conceives an Intense Longing for the World at Large, Often a Distant and Exotic Place, of Which She Possesses Extraordinary Knowledge That Can’t Be Attributed to Books or Hearsay
Just as the melancholic possesses a greater talent for memory, owing to a dry temperament that retains the impressions of things, so the phlegmatic of watery humor often contracts this disease of concurrent forgetfulness and inexplicable knowledge. Surely the cold flux of the humor predisposes the person to such a state.
In one such case, chronicled by Dr. Menasteri of Treviso, a certain peasant named Giovanna, who worked the radicchio fields renowned for the superb bitterness of their vegetables (relished by Caterina de’ Medici), suddenly refused to tend the fields. Her beloved radicchio plants languished. Her husband entreated her, wrung his hands, and finally locked her in their room, one of many peasant dwellings adjoining the large courtyard, because of her bizarre speech and tendency to wander when she left. She no longer knew her home. Giovanna claimed knowledge of a certain place, Akka, where she had never been. There, she said, she was known as Yellow-Wristed Woman. In that village the inhabitants acquired their names from various dyes they concocted to stain their clothing and tents. The dyes derived from the reactions of beetles, plants, moth wings, blood, and urine to sun, moon, and starlight. So Yellow Wrist spread onion skins in the courtyard under the winter stars of the Veneto and arrived at a golden agent, which she walked upon again and again to effect a deeper hue.
Giovanna’s husband brought her wilted heads of radicchio and placed them in her lap as gentle remonstrations, but she let them roll to the floor. Soon she began to appear outlandish, sitting bolt upright in her wooden chair by the locked window, her body surrounded by rotting vegetables. On an afternoon of sudden autumn freeze, which clutched at the ankles of women, her husband returned from the baker with a round loaf of hot bread, hoping to please her. The planks of their rude door were split apart. Giovanna had escaped. Trevisan hounds were employed to find her, but the animals moved back and forth confusedly through the fields, unable to locate her scent.
Giovanna was never found, although stories arrived some years later, regarding a foreigner in the Kingdom of Faz, her complexion pale as a slice of apple, who kept a garden of yellow dye plants and vegetable oddities.
Little is known of a possible cure for this malady because the victim usually disappears and therefore cannot be treated.
After leaving the farmhouse, we traveled for a day and came within view of a faraway inn on a fortified jut of rock that resembled nothing so much as the desiccated tongue of San Antonio, a parched extremity with the village perched like the saint’s last dying word on its tip. We were exhausted. Even the four mules—we left one at the farmhouse in payment for their kindness in keeping us—stiffened at the climb and abruptly stopped, beyond ill temperedness. The air was laden with heat.
We dismounted and struggled along the thin track that slanted up the side of the mountain, with its sparse wood of fisted oaks and hissing swaths of dead grasses. The mules finally allowed us to tug them along. Fedele carried the medicine chest and also bore my notes for the book. When the way became too narrow, I stopped and fastened the satchel of papers to my own back. We found a niggardly stream about halfway up and drank a swill of loose clay that barely blunted our thirst. A great number of sulfurous orange and yellow butterflies also sipped from the muddy trace and didn’t budge when we knelt there or when the animals disturbed them, slopping and grunting as the turbid water silted their mouths. The butterflies flocked to their bristly lips and nostrils and even to our lips and skin to drink our moisture. Thus strangely embellished with their yellow, we waited and let the mules drink their fill, even though Olmina shook her head and warned against bellyache and bloody flux. For a brief moment I caught a glimpse of her former earthy self, but then she disappeared again into silence. She stood away from the world. She went through the motions. Still, I couldn’t help asking her, “What do you think Lorenzo would’ve made of the butterflies?”
She stared inconsolably at the mention of his name, and then answered, “He would’ve liked their color—yellow for fire. They’re creatures of fire.”
When we arrived at the inn, the innkeeper, Cubero, shouted (with a voice that seemed permanently raised against the world), “Salvador! Salvador! Where are you? We have guests!”
As always, I insisted on carrying the medicine chest myself, wary of the influence of strangers upon the medicaments.
I followed an older man with sleepy, half-lidded eyes who carried my satchels up wide, dark stairs, then turned into a small, uneven stone corridor, finally ascending two narrow steps. Olmina trudged after me with her own bag. Once or twice he turned to chide me. “Wait, señora, wait. I will carry the chest for you. It’s not filled with gold pesetas, now, is it?” he scolded good-naturedly. “You should have a good manservant traveling with you to help you with these things.”
“I did, but he’s gone.”
“Ah.” He squinted at me as if he were going to ask a question and then, when he saw my face, decided against it. “You have the old chicken coop, but we’ve made it comfortable and you have the finest outlook, after all.”
He waved his thick arms toward a chasm of red stone below us, a saffron-and-brown patchwork of fields, other walled hill towns, and solitary watchtowers that brooded toward the Morisco country, beyond the ranges. He pushed his shirtsleeves up to his elbows and put his hands on his hips as he regarded me in a plain way, head to toe, and remarked, “The beds here are all the same, so servant and lady are equal!” He grinned and then left the room. I bent slowly to sit in the one wooden chair. Lorenzo would have liked this high place. Olmina sat upon her bag and bent her head to her hand. The room, though small, was cleft by silence.
After a while I asked, “What is that letter you carry in your pocket?”
She started. “I didn’t want to give it to you, for fear . . . for fear of causing distress.” Then because she knew there was no choice, she handed it to me. “I’m sorry, signorina. Dr. Joubert asked me to deliver it to you in Montpellier.” Then she went to the bed farthest from the window, as she knew I liked to look out, and turned away from me as she lay down to nap.
The letter was from Hamish.
My dearest doctor, Gabriella,
How clumsy I’ve been, how remorseful to have caused you misery without mend. If forgiveness is possible, let me dedicate myself to its study. Dear lady, how could you leave without leave-taking? I worry that you endanger yourself and your kind servants with this journey. The road is an incision into the unknown, don’t you see? You can’t dissect the continent in order to discover your father. I trust that this letter travels straight to your heart and is not miscarried. I trust that this letter precedes me. For I have determined to come and fetch you there in Montpellier. If you don’t wish to return with me to Edenburg, then let us voyage back to Venetia. Yes, I will accompany you to your home. And I would woo you if you would per
mit it. There is no other way. Your father is lost and only he may deliver himself. Dear Gabriella, you have read me—you have translated me unto myself. Let me also peruse the words of the volume hidden within your chest, the library of your distractions, passions, virtues, and reflections. I found two of your coppery hairs upon my doublet and now keep them coiled in my pocket. Your image ever before me, I commend myself to your service,
Edenburg
This 24th of April 1591
Dr. Hamish Urquhart
I placed the letter within the pages of my book. Now he’ll never find us, I thought. Yet his words clung to me.
While Olmina slept, I began ordering the pages of diseases and cures, and that settled my mind. There were more than I’d thought. In spite of the heat, I asked Salvador to bring a pot of hot water, for I wanted a cup of mint tea for its calming properties. I opened the chest and removed the bottle of crushed Corsican mint, and though I felt slightly ashamed, I used the last few leaves for a decoction for myself.
Olmina remained asleep in our room while the night pressed upon Santa Engracia like the lid of an iron cauldron. As for me, after bread, tough mutton, salty cheese, and a wine thick with sediment, I retired to the terrace, where I spread out my maps upon a thick oak table by the light of an oil lantern, placing stones at the ends to keep them from rolling back in on themselves.
The Book of Madness and Cures Page 24