Malina came running and threw a blanket on me, choking the fire. Then the air went dark but for the ashen squares of moonlight at the top of the granary. I strained for breath. My father—or the man who seemed my father—thrashed on his meager patch of earth.
Malina pulled me out into the courtyard. “You must not go in there!”
“Who is that man? Why is he bound to the wall like a beast?” My body shook.
“Because he is one. Your father went into the desert and he never returned. This creature is bound so that he doesn’t hurt himself.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” I cried, clutching her arms.
She shoved me away and lifted the lamp that she’d set on the well, pushing back her sleeve to show a broken scar on her forearm. “This is where your father sank his teeth. I didn’t want you to get hurt! Forget him. Mourn him, Daughter. He is like this many months, dead but not dead. Since it is our custom to tend strangers who have no one, I keep him. I bathe him once a week and feed him morning and night. Yet every day, he threatens me.”
I couldn’t accept what she told me. “Give me the lamp.”
She didn’t resist as I took it from her hand and stepped back inside the granary toward the man. I touched his shoulder. He jerked back and grunted.
Malina followed me and said, “He was already ailing when he came to me. I tried all my herbs and smokes and the red stones that will stop an inflamed mind, but he must have carried this with him his whole life. We each bear a hidden malady. The seeds lie within until fever, exile, or—”
“Leave me with him,” I interrupted. “I need a sponge, a stool, and a basin.”
Malina observed me coolly and did not move.
“I must do this,” I said. If I could wash him, I would know him. Could the stranger truly be my father?
He watched me with the canny prescience of an animal. I spoke to him in low tones, mumbling whatever came into my head. Lucretius, for instance, which my father sometimes read to me: “All these wandering images still bear the likeness of the things from which they’re shed.”
Science was a puny balm, but still my words calmed us both.
Malina left and quickly returned with the things I’d requested. She set them near me with grave regard. I began to wash him. He stared at me walleyed. I sat on the stool and gently cleansed his mangy hands, extended and bound as they were, though he flinched. I washed the crusted blood and pus from his bristly white arms, the way I might sponge the clotted afterbirth from a newborn. The way I might wash the carbuncles of a plague victim or the gashes of someone wounded in battle. I leaned from the stool and washed his speckled brow, the swollen eyes that rolled in fear at my touch, the foolish wedge of the nose that he shoved into my hand in order to smell me, the lips buckled like dried mud around the gag, the sorry flaps of the neck, and the slumped, furry chest. I untied the gag and he howled once and then quieted.
I lifted his tunic, mopped his wretched, corded back, the sad buttocks, the deflated belly. How sorrowful the body becomes. The feet and toenails rude as hooves. I knelt to his feet and then I knew. For my own feet carried the design of my father’s feet, the second toe a little longer, the others tapered, the fugitive little toe curled into the next toe, hiding its nail.
I scrubbed each one, as if they were the buds on an infant’s foot. I wept, full of bitterness, and then I rinsed the dirtied sea sponge, squeezing slowly with both hands over the basin.
I removed my cloak and dried his body, his feet, with a tenderness that came from old, speechless love. When I finished I looked at his face again, a face that resembled and then no longer resembled my father’s, the uncomprehending eyes, the spittle at the corner of his mouth, and I felt no end to desolation.
Malina stood silently against the opposite wall, watching me.
If this world were joined to the underworld like a city to its image in the sea, I thought, then we might walk upon our lost ones, inverted, footfall to footfall, and know their wanderings as our own. For truly, what had happened to him? I glanced upward toward the ceiling of the tower of the granary and saw nothing but ascending darkness now. I untied my father and he lay in the straw against the wall, fitting himself to its curve to sleep. I placed a blanket over him and rested my hand on his ragged head. Maybe he would dream that he had a daughter somewhere in this world. “Good night, Papà.”
Malina took my arm and drew me outside into the courtyard. The hunchback moon, said to bring good fortune, shed her faithless light upon us.
“What will you do now?” Malina asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know.” I mouthed the words with difficulty, my tongue dry as a parched flake of mud. “I could take my father back to Venetia and care for him there.”
But as soon as I spoke, I knew I couldn’t leave. I had more than my father to consider. And he would never recognize the glistening city he had once called home.
CHAPTER 25
A Secret Accord
I fed my father twice daily in the granary and bathed him once a day. We tied him up to prevent harm. He gnawed himself, even through the cloth. He lunged at us and shook his matted gray hair like a wounded lion. Yousef was wary and wouldn’t go near him. “That man is no one’s father,” he told me one morning in the courtyard. “No, no,” he said, thoughtfully stroking his bristly white beard. “When a man loses himself but remains, we must leave him to the desert. Let the white vultures take him to God.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I muttered, half to him, half to myself, as I cradled my round belly (mostly hidden by loose robes) with my arms.
“Ask the woman, she will help you.”
“No, I must decide, and while I can’t, there’ll be no decision.”
When the moon waned thin as a fingernail, my father grew calmer. I brought him outside for a few days and fastened his rope to the well ring, where from time to time Malina tied up the goats. He ranged the courtyard like a leashed animal and sniffed the air as if he caught the scent of something familiar in this foreign place. Sometimes I brought him a small bowl of figs or olives, but mostly he just scattered them in the dirt, chewing the figs later with the grit stuck to them. He swallowed the olives whole with their pits. I had to take him back into the granary again as the moon waxed full.
I believe he knew me briefly at times.
One hot evening just after the sun had set and the air had begun to cool, he grew quiet and touched my face with his fingers, the way he once touched his books, with tender strokes smoothing the pages. We sat on the rounded edge of the well, and the water below us trembled as if in secret accord with our movements and words.
“Read me, Father . . . What do you see?”
He moved his lips as if searching for some word.
“It doesn’t matter. I am here. Gabi. I won’t leave you.”
Yousef watched us from his narrow window nervously. Then he called out, “Careful, Dottoressa, don’t let your guard down!”
Though I knew the danger, I held apprehension at bay, sensing a shift in my father as if the madness had momentarily loosened its grip. As I brought my hands to his ravaged face, he jerked back a little, but his dull eyes brightened and held mine with odd amusement. He laughed and I laughed with him at some unknown delight. He patted my cheek. We laughed until tears welled up, and then the luster in his eyes went out. He’d once told me that my first syllables as a baby were not words but little grunts of laughter. Now his sounds toward the end were the same. But then he fidgeted with his hands, turned away from me, inspected the surrounding area, and plucked a dusty black olive from the ground, swiftly popping it into his mouth. I sat at the well, soundlessly weeping, as my father fell to all fours and scavenged the earth.
I now agreed with Dr. Cardano that my father had suffered this malady in some form since I was a child. My mother must have known and borne the burden with confusion and shame, anger and impatience, patience. I recalled a night when I couldn’t sleep, went to m
y window, and observed my father, visible under the moon, prowling the courtyard, crunching the gravel pathway loudly beneath his trudging feet, pacing around and around our garden. I didn’t know what he was doing there, but it made my stomach twist. Then I saw my mother’s face dimly at their bedroom window, also watching. Then she withdrew. Later I thought that I’d dreamt it. But how had my father worsened to this point? I’d never know. The moon had hollowed him out.
After our meal on the day that my father and I had laughed together, Malina took me aside, removed her veil, and observed, “Daughter, I notice you do not bleed with the moon.” She waited for me to respond. Her mouth, rarely exposed, was set in a solemn expression.
“I will bear a child in a few months,” I said shyly, staring down at the rug.
“Ah, I thought so!” She broke into a large smile and clapped her hands. “Blessings on this house!”
Heartened by her response, I looked up. “Will you act as my midwife, then?”
“I would be glad,” she declared. “But may I ask, who is the father?”
“I believe he is here in Taradante.”
Now she frowned, puzzled. “Who is it, then?”
“He has been following me and yet keeping his distance.” I stopped, overcome by a sense of his loyalty.
“And does this bring sorrow?” she asked, mistaking my tears.
“No, it brings me joy I never thought I’d know.”
“Ah.” She leaned back as if to take in a broader view.
“His name is Hamish. He’s from the north.”
“But why doesn’t he come to you?”
“Because he discerns that I haven’t wanted him to approach me yet.”
“He is constant, then.”
“He is constant.”
“You must call him to you!”
“I will.” And my heart trembled like an instrument, an aeolian harp shaken by wind, its sound traveling all the way to the oasis and far into the open desert. “But he doesn’t know yet about the child, and I want to tell him myself,” I cautioned her, knowing how easily the village women conversed. The words I spoke at dusk would be in his tent just after nightfall—though the same good news would never reach my father a few feet away.
CHAPTER 26
Make His Entrance Wide
In the dim morning light, as I pushed open the granary door, I found my motionless father on his side upon the straw—an infant curled in sleep. Then, as I looked more closely, he was a lion, teeth bared, arrested midstride while running, front legs (his arms) drawn back to meet hind legs in readiness for the next bound. Oh, Papà! You’ve leapt into the other world.
Were you waiting for me in the wilderness of memory, so you could finally go? Yesterday we laughed together.
I could touch him now without fear.
I placed my hand on his cold body. An impenetrable chill, dense as iron. My father, dead in this hot clime, lay colder than Lorenzo had been in the mountains. I didn’t cry. I numbly washed him, then put on his spectacles, which I’d carried from Tübingen, and his fine shoes, which I’d brought from Leiden. (I kept his calipers from Tremp, for wasn’t he a measure of my life?) My father lay strangely restored by his things in death.
I must have been sitting there for a long time, for Malina entered and asked, “Where have you been? I’ve . . .”And then she saw my blue father in the corner, his livid skin the color of a guttered flame. “Oh!”
“He’s gone,” I said.
“Oh, Daughter,” she murmured, kneeling beside me. “He suffers no more.”
Yousef stood in the entry, drawn by her cry. “The man has left us, then?”
“Yes.”
“Oh Allah, forgive our living and our dead,” he recited in prayer.
“Have mercy on him,” Malina continued as I sat with my hand on my father’s hand. “Keep him safe and sound and forgive him, honor the place where he settles and make his entrance wide; wash him with water and snow and hail and cleanse him as a white garment is cleansed of dirt. Make his grave large and fill it with light.” Then she rose and left me, closing the door.
I didn’t know if an hour or three had passed, for the cool interior of the dark granary registered no lapse of time, but Malina and Yousef returned with a bolt of linen cloth. “This is our custom. Do you wish to wrap him?” she asked quietly.
I paused a moment, seeing my father as he would have been in Venetia, encoffined on a black gondola draped with mourning swags, as two men rowed us to the cemetery island. The sound of the oars rose and fell like rhythmic gusts of wind slapping the palm fronds. “Yes, let us wrap him.”
But I did nothing and only watched my two companions deftly binding my father. Malina knelt and held the linen bolt with her arms folded into it like a spool. Yousef, no longer afraid of him, unwound a portion of cloth, tucked it neatly at the feet, then wound it around my father, enshrouding him all the way to the head, then back again to the feet, then once more to the head, shearing the cloth there neatly with the knife I lent him from the sheath at my waist and tying it off.
In the early evening we put him on a cedar cart to carry him out into the desert. Yousef hitched one of the mules and tossed two shovels next to the corpse, and along with the village gravedigger we wended our way through the narrow streets toward the main gate. Townsfolk hurried inside their dwellings and latched their shutters when they saw us approach. Some murmured prayers. The lopsided wooden wheels of the cart clattered round and round and no one spoke. As we passed beyond the red town walls of Taradante, the sands moaned with a low gray wind. We moved toward an isolated rise above the spreading fingers of a wadi.
“Before he disappeared, he liked that place,” Malina explained.
I liked it too, for one could sit there and view the whole river valley, the red mud villages, the mountains and the sea in the distance.
Malina insisted that we bury my father quickly or his soul would linger in the granary and cause trouble. “We return the dead to their mother as soon as we can so they can find peace.”
“It is not our way, but this is not our place,” I said.
She touched my shoulder. “I am sorry, Daughter.”
When we reached the rise, I observed, “He will like this sky.” The darkening violet expanse overhead met the blur of colorless sand. Dark red mountains presided.
The men dug.
We were all silent, but the shovels chucked sand and rang loudly against the stones. I didn’t cry. I’d been releasing my father strand by strand from the dense weave of my heart for a long time. But the final cut was at once so severe and so small that it seemed impossible he could slip away from me as he did.
A man with red hair in a pale blue djellaba sat watching us from some distance. The child within kicked hard. I felt my father leave, and I was free.
CHAPTER 27
Stitching Sky to Mountain
Afew days later he came to the door. Malina called me from my rough table, where I sat arranging the loose pages of The Book of Diseases. I planned to have the sections sewn into signatures for binding. She returned to her room to leave us alone.
He stood like a tree lit by sun in the afternoon doorway.
“Yousef brought me your note, Gabriella.”
“Hamish.” I tasted the sound of his name, sweet and pungent, precious as cinnamon bark. “Come into the courtyard, where it’s cooler.”
We were shy, our unspoken words like water brimming between us.
Then sand on the tongue, insoluble minerals of love.
Sand crunched beneath our leather slippers. We moved to the date palm and sat beneath its long fans on a freshly swept rug where grains sifted back again. Three goats gazed at us solemnly.
Yousef had gone to the vegetable souk to buy onions.
We leaned together in silence for a long while.
At last Hamish said, “I’m sorry about the death of your father.”
“Oh! But you know, he left long ago.”
“Ah.”
“Oh!” he cried, startled, briefly pulling his hand away. And then he set it back happily. “I’m going to be a father.” And he wept.
The desert day faded. Malina lit a lantern in her room. The moonless blue-black sky hummed with stars that cast their silver through the shadowy palm tree, upon our shoulders, over the courtyard, and across the vast dark earth.
EPILOGUE
Braiding the Tides
Venetia, 1600
Our Damiana was born on December 21, 1591, in the deep of the Maroccan night. Malina attended by candlelight as I gave birth, akin to animals that bear their young in darkness, when such a grace calls for mystery. And Damiana possessed grace as well as wayward will from the beginning, opening her dusky eyes and clasping me with a keen ferocity for life. Hamish was overjoyed to hold her after the months of feeling her move within me, unseen. The fuzz of her fine copper hair shone all around her scalp, and still shone now in Venetia, almost nine years later, though a little darker, much thicker, and longer.
It was braided down her back by my beloved Olmina, whose crooked hands still bound hair and home, though we’d freed her from all chores. She spent most of her days braiding the tides, as she called it, meaning she sat where Lorenzo had once sat on warm days outside our door, recalling the past, mending the present, dreaming the future, as she alternately watched the sea and napped in a chair with her mouth wide open. Sometimes Damiana mischievously tickled her palate with a straw, prompting a sneeze, or dropped a knob of honey on her tongue, rousing her to sweetness.
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