The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  She was agitated. She didn’t want to be there. Bruno wanted to detain her but he could not, any more than he could hold in his fingers the glassy morning light slowly crystallising around them.

  Within seconds, their conversation had taken its usual dismal turn.

  ‘So, do you sleep with him? Why can’t you just tell me?’

  ‘Of course I sleep with him. We have just one bedchamber.’

  ‘No, I mean, as you know, do you share your body with him, as you share it with me?’

  ‘Rabino’s rarely at home. If he comes to my bed, I try to lie above the coverlet, so he doesn’t touch me even by accident.’

  This, too, was an elaborate lie, thought Bruno, but he pursued it anyway.

  ‘So he does not want you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Would he suffer to know how I touch you?’

  ‘He sees me as his wife.’

  ‘Are you not his wife?’

  ‘We live separate lives.’

  ‘But you stay together, so he must love you still.’

  Sosia chose to take the practical interpretation of this question.

  ‘He’s too tired. He looks at me without seeing. I see through him without looking at him. He falls asleep before I finish a simple question about the herbs we need for the apothecary. I think sometimes that he sleeps cunningly so he does not have to face me. It’s what I do with him.’

  ‘In the bed you nevertheless share. Sometimes.’

  Silence.

  ‘In which you do other things than sleep, sometimes.’

  A more dangerous silence.

  He could not guess that Sosia deliberately portrayed a greater intimacy with Rabino than was true, for otherwise Bruno might importune her more daringly, more tediously. The truth was that her marriage to Rabino did not disgust Sosia. She could easily live with its small privations; she had contrived it so that it cost her no pleasure. When Felice Feliciano had sent a messenger to the house not a week after their first encounter, Rabino had wearily transmitted the subtle message, pretending not to know what it meant, and when he saw how she bathed and dressed to attend the appointment he had simply cast his eyes down to the floor and turned back to his herbs.

  * * *

  Later, in his apartments, where he had lured her with promises of silent gratification, Bruno asked Sosia about her mother. She spat and turned away.

  ‘Here in Italy, motherhood is sacred. Is it not so in Dalmatia?’

  ‘My mother was a mother.’ Sosia dragged out the words with contempt. ‘I saw only the degradation. I also saw that she was nothing in that she had us, little rats, sucking and pulling at her all the time. She was nothing more than a feeding bladder, a kind of meal for us to consume. We devoured her. She loved us so she did not even put up a fight.’

  ‘Did you not love her?’

  ‘She became a stranger to me in the war. I did not love her any more. I remember better loving a pomegranate a sailor gave me.’

  ‘What sailor?’

  ‘A sailor.’

  Sosia was already walking away.

  ‘Could you not stay till morning one time?’ he begged, abandoning his dignity at the last minute.

  ‘You would only fall asleep on me.’

  ‘I would never, never … You’re not talking about me. You’re talking about some hideous creature, some composite man you’ve invented so you can hate all men.’

  ‘You think I don’t know men, Bruno?’

  He walked moodily to the cage where his two sparrows sat. Their eggs had not hatched. The stain of rotten meat had watermarked the pretty shells and he’d put them away in a drawer. Perhaps this was his fault. When Sosia stayed away from him, he fed and overfed them until they were unwell with it, their little paunches stiff with seed.

  * * *

  Just once they spent the night together.

  Bruno extorted it from her.

  He spent the day in preparations, buying precious fruits and dried meats from Rialto, scouring the dust from his room, then stacking his books and papers at rakish angles to mitigate the too-careful effect. Although winter had not yet begun to bite he laid a welcoming fire.

  She would not eat the food he had bought at such perilous prices, finding an old milk loaf in the cupboard and scooping out its heart while she strode around the room like a captive lioness, flinging open the windows so all the neighbours might witness her presence.

  ‘I’m choking,’ she said. ‘It’s too hot.’

  He’d thought all he had to fear were the embarrassments of chamber pot and water pitcher, morning breath and his own all-too-visible lack of a change of clothes. But despair came from an unexpected quarter. She would not make love to him.

  ‘I don’t feel good. I feel you forced me to come here. I don’t understand what game you’re playing, Bruno, what you’re trying to prove.’

  Then she kissed him erotically, licking his lips, but when he moved towards her with paddling hands, she snapped: ‘Be more sensitive!’

  He said: ‘But when you kiss me like that my body, this poor primitive construction, thinks this,’ he touched her thigh. ‘That’s what it’s used to.’

  ‘You’ve upset me so much with all your demands that I can’t think of you like that now.’

  Is it like this with Rabino? he longed and dreaded to ask.

  He mourned silently. She’d rather spend her energy not giving me what I want, than the little it would cost to grant me a speck of happiness. Why is that? It’s not even efficient. Because with a few loving words she can release behaviour in me which makes her happy, which gives her pleasure? Perhaps at heart she’s stupid, after all?

  ‘Don’t poke me like that,’ Sosia said, as they lay on the pallet.

  He lay beside her, in the permitted position, every part of him just one inch from her, not touching.

  Now she was smiling at him, wanted to examine him in the candlelight.

  ‘I have to leave very early in the morning,’ she announced, watching his face. ‘There will not be time to make love.’

  ‘You mean when the mattutino strikes?’ The pre-dawn bell marked his normal hour for waking, for his first thoughts about her each day.

  ‘No, later, the maragona.’

  These two bells, one an hour before dawn and the other as the sun rose, punctuated all sleepy early-morning fondlings in Venice.

  An hour later, thought Bruno. But we might rouse ourselves at the mattutino to make love or even talk for an hour. Even more, for in Wendelin’s absence there’s no reason to arrive early at the stamperia. We merely wait for his return, if truth were known, and act as if we do not fear for our futures at all … But no. She does not wish it, I see. She’s determined that I never demand this of her another time. Indeed, I’ve learned my lesson. I would not ask for a night like this again.

  ‘I can sleep now,’ she told him. She kissed him, as she’d never done before, chastely on the cheek. He choked on tears, the imprint of the kiss stinging at the side of his face. She was leaving him, going into unconsciousness, just like leaving him to go back to Rabino. If anything, it was more insulting, more diminishing. It showed how she was able to forget him when he was still at her side, breathing and hurting. She slept heavily, snoring and grunting. Twice, as he stood by the window, looking at the moonlight on the canal, she muttered angry words in her own language. He watched the phosphorescence on the water until his legs numbed.

  In the morning, as he lay hunched and sleepless beside her, she woke and nuzzled his neck. He asked fearfully, hopefully, ‘Do you want to make love then, Sosia?’

  She said, ‘No. I felt a bit of a stirring this morning, but on the whole no.’

  ‘So you love me again?’

  Silence.

  ‘So what is different?’

  ‘Ten hours, I suppose.’

  He recoiled.

  Seeing that, she said: ‘But I have to go now.’

  Throughout the day he would feel a dyspeptic fizzle to every swallow, a
kick nursing in his gut, the bile curdling in his stomach.

  Kind, decent Wendelin von Speyer would ask him, if he knew, ‘Is this the kind of woman you honour with your love?’

  His friend Felice would say, ‘Come with me to Catalani’s. Forget her. What’s so special about her? There are women who will give you pleasure in the having, who will enjoy you.’

  He didn’t want them. He looked at the bed.

  The sheets, full of unspent passion, hung haggardly over the side of the pallet.

  For some reason, the sight of them reminded him of his sister Gentilia.

  Chapter Three

  May you be sacred

  by whatever name you please.

  When the doctor Rabino Simeon was summoned to the island of Sant’ Angelo, it was usually to deal with a clumsily aborted pregnancy or a clandestine delivery gone hideously wrong. The baby was often dead by the time he arrived, in those cases, and the young mother already sedated by the puissant liquors the nuns brewed for themselves. If the girl was a noblewoman, the nuns would call Rabino to see to her, rather than a gossiping Venetian physician. The middle-class girls were left to fend for themselves, he surmised, as the accents of his patients were always patrician.

  He dreaded the calls that took him to the island. One such came to him a mild late autumn night, the boatman of Sant’ Angelo rattling at the door in San Trovaso in the early hours. Stumbling from the divano, Rabino sighed as he recognised the man’s outline downstairs in the moonlight. He shrugged on his robe and gathered certain instruments together. He was out of the house in a few minutes, pausing for a second on the first floor landing to see if Sosia was asleep in the matrimonial bed. She had not been at home when he went to sleep but she was there now, one eye glinting, the other buried in the hair on her pillow.

  ‘Off to do some good, Mister Doctor?’ she whispered. He nodded miserably and turned to run down the stairs.

  The boatman saluted him cheerfully and guided him down to the comfortable seat inside the gondola. Rabino hunched over his bag, trying not to think of what awaited him at Sant’ Angelo,

  A nun with a lantern met him at the jetty and hurried him through the cloisters, even at this hour noisy with the whispering of prayers. Rabino, unlike most visitors, knew that the monotonous chanting came not from devout nuns but from caged parrots kept in every corner. The birds had been trained to pray continually; their chorus drowned the noise of other, less pious activities, taking place at all hours behind the wall of the cloister.

  ‘It’s too late for the child,’ the nun hissed, raising her voice over the mumble of the birds/but we cannot lose the mother. She’s Golden Book.’

  In the cell, Rabino knelt by the luxuriously appointed bed to inspect his patients. Marks on the baby’s neck and the whimpering of the young noblewoman betrayed the heinous scene that had preceded his arrival. The girl was drugged and did not know what had happened to her. She was not even aware of his gentle hands on her.

  As he lifted her arms, heavy with bracelets, she called out a man’s name.

  ‘The father?’ he asked the nun.

  ‘Could be. Could be someone else, too. Likes the men, does this one.’

  Rabino was saddened but not surprised. He knew, to his cost, how the noble nuns of Sant’ Angelo ‘escaped’ without difficulty, and went abroad about the town with more liberty than their married sisters. They enjoyed debauched picnics on neighbouring islands. He’d overheard his rich patients gossiping: tales of satin sheets spread on crisp grass; pressed mullet eggs, salted and smoked, laid out on the bellies of naked nuns for their companions to lick up. It was all one, it seemed, to the Venetian noblemen to secure some courtesans or some nuns for an afternoon’s open-air eroticism. Indeed, for some men the nuns were a more piquant choice. After all, Rabino reflected bitterly, the corrupt nuns of Sant’ Angelo did for pleasure what courtesans merely did for money.

  ‘How old is she?’ he asked, looking down on the pale childlike face. The older nun looked mutinous, so he added, ‘I need to know so I can measure the drugs for an infusion. She seems small, but I want to give her a full dose.’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  Fifteen and already more than one lover! A bastard child fathered in lust and then destroyed! Is there nowhere in Venice, Rabino thought wearily, a woman who knew how to love decently? Who valued the gift of love more highly than her jewels and her own pleasures?

  He called for warm water and fresh linen, opening his bag to find a pouch of herbs.

  At first he barely noticed the little nun who carried in the steaming pitcher, but she did not leave the room, as they usually did, and the heaviness of her breathing drew his attention to her face.

  For a nun of Sant’ Angelo it was most unusually ugly. She was staring at him fixedly.

  ‘Is she your friend?’ he asked, pointing to the young noblewoman now muttering to herself in her sleep.

  The ugly little nun shook her head vehemently. Rabino observed from her features that she was of humble stock. It was unlikely that the aristocratic young sinner would have condescended to befriend such a girl.

  ‘Do you serve her, then? She will survive you know, but I’m afraid that her little baby has perished.’

  The nun shook her head again, and put her thumb in her mouth. Rabino thought, Ah, she’s simple, then. That’s why they entrust her with these sordid tasks, poor creature.

  But at that moment the lantern-bearing nun returned, and swore loudly to see the ugly girl in the room.

  ‘You’ve been told not to come here, Gentilia. This part of the convent is for the Golden Book families. Are you satisfied now? Have you seen all the horrors you wanted to see?’

  The nun turned to Rabino, ‘She’s a real ghoul, that one.’

  She gave Gentilia a push towards the door. ‘Go on out of here. What is it?’

  The girl dipped her head and mumbled a few words.

  ‘Yes!’ exclaimed the older nun, impatiently/yes, he’s a Jew. That’s what a Jew looks like. You’ve seen one now. So go.’

  The girl shuffled away, her head down.

  Rabino packed up his instruments. As usual he refused the coin brusquely proffered to him. He could not accept money for this dirty business.

  As he walked through the cloister back to the boat, he felt eyes on his shoulders. Looking behind him he saw the nose and fat-sheened forehead of the ugly nun, pressed against the bars of a tall gate.

  He thought to himself, And she probably thinks me the most ghastly thing she saw tonight

  Chapter Four

  Suns can be extinguished and rekindle:

  but for us, when once our little light is extinguished,

  there is just sleep for one unending night.

  Give me a thousand kisses, and then a hundred,

  then another thousand, and then a second hundred …

  An unremitting torrent of rain, the first of the autumn, slapped against the windows as Domenico Zorzi presented his private manuscript of Catullus to a select gathering of scholarly nobles. The book, cased in jewelled leather, sparkled with Felice Felicianos illuminations in gold and vermilion. The codex was laid open on a velvet cushion, candles flickering at either side. A Bellini Madonna gazed serenely down on it. Domenico raised his voice above the thrum of water against his tall window.

  ‘It’s an old and a new story, my friends, a story that never stops unravelling, like the rain.

  ‘A young man loved a cruel woman, and died of it. No commoner, the flower of his noble family, who died without a son to carry his name into the future. The dedication of his book shows that he fixed all his hopes on the immortality of his poetry. Life and love had failed him: literature would not. In this he trusted.

  ‘Alas for Gaius Valerius Catullus. It was not to be. Short years after his death, his poems fell silent, fled from the tongue of memory. The most notorious poems of ancient times seemed to have gone to the tomb with him after all. The poems and the poet were extinguished for a thousand years, a tho
usand years in which the art of writing itself fell away.

  ‘Nevertheless, some things do not die of scorn. The poem-book of Catullus in fact continued to germinate quietly in the dark, like a mushroom. There were whispers of Catullus and his songs through the succeeding centuries … the especially learned among you will have noted a word in Boethius in the sixth, a couplet or two clearly Catullan but not attributed in Isidore of Seville and Julian of Toledo in the seventh. I personally deduce, from his writings, that Bishop Rather of Verona read the entire work in the tenth century, but this cannot be proved. Then silence.

  ‘Catullus still had a little longer to wait; another four hundred years. Until almost now, my friends.

  ‘A merchant found the first Catullus manuscript of modern times in or around 1300. The man, unusually well educated for his class, pulled the sheaf of paper out from under a corn measure in a storeroom in Verona. He had no idea of the age or value of his find and sold it on cheaply to a paper dealer who also traded in manuscripts. The dealer paid by the weight, no doubt, and probably did not spend too much time pondering over it. If he had bothered to count them, he would have found that his bundle contained one hundred and thirteen poems.

  ‘The paper dealer would have faced a choice: should he rub out the old words and sell the fine old paper again as palimpsest? Or should he take the manuscript to a scholar and see if it would fetch a higher price with the words left on? The chances of Catullus surviving were just so slender in that crucial moment.

  ‘Fortunately, it was exactly the right moment for Catullus. The world was just then starting to lift its head and look to the light again. For those who wanted to read, the last ten centuries could offer little inspiration. The glorious classical past, in contrast, was now gleaming in the scholars’ imagination like a diamond in the rock.

  ‘And so the Catullus manuscript found its way into the hands of a scholar who gave it to a scribe to copy, lest something should befall the original. And another scribe. And another; until the first manuscript blossomed into a hundred versions of itself. Petrarch himself was said to have owned a copy. My own is my greatest treasure. Freshly illuminated by Felice Feliciano, I’ve brought it here to share with you tonight, for this very week I plan to send it to Gerolamo Squarzafico, the editor who works for Wendelin von Speyer, the printer from Germany who has brought his great machinery here and begun to print, by grace of our kind patronage and inspiration.