The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  Felice comes to the house when my man is out, shaking the snowflakes out of his head like a cat. He knows he’s safe to do so as I am a married woman and may have guests in my parlour. He makes himself at home, sits too close to me and looks at me too hard. He talks to me of bad women; it excites him to disgust me with his tales.

  How can you like a man who has no home? He’s satisfied with living in inns, buying somewhere to lie, and someone to lie with, no doubt, with casual work.

  Yet, yet, he loves to be around women. When he comes to our home and sits beside me, looks at my brown eyes and my blond hair, I see that I please him. He brings me gifts which are just right: a shawl which sets my hair on fire in the winter light; a filch of lace which falls just so on my wrist.

  ‘You are kind,’ I tell him as shortly as I know how. And in return for this simple praise, I get a peddler’s pack of twisted thoughts from him.

  ‘But you see, I note it each time I’m kind; I am aggrandised by it. So I’m not kind really, or if so it is an accident which occurs while I’m enriching my self-esteem.’

  ‘But the effect is kind,’ I insist.

  ‘Mildly, and only incidentally.’

  ‘Did you never do something just out of love?’

  He puts his chin on his right hand and drums the fingers of his left hand on the table, and makes his eyes into slits and knits his brows so he looks like the crude mask of a villain who plots the downfall of a virgin in a play.

  Outside the snow falls in bundles and I feel trapped, as if drowning in the pool of waxlight on the table.

  Felice seems to be waiting for something, and sure enough soon a light footstep is heard in the calle. Felice seems to know exactly how long to stay in order to meet Bruno Uguccione on the doorstep, and when his eyes fall on the face of that young man, it’s as if a kitten has crawled on to his stomach and kneads with its tiny paws.

  ‘Always hanging around the house like fox pie,’ I muttered to Bruno, once, when Felice left, after more embraces than the finale of a play.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Never goes away, because nobody wants it.’

  Of all who work with my man, I like least this Felice. I cannot believe that Giovanni Bellini names him a friend, and gives him the run of his studio.

  * * *

  Giovanni Bellini also wanted Sosia, but not in the way that men normally did. Certainly, he wanted her naked, but she was bemused to see that he wanted her at a distance of six feet, silent and immobile.

  Felice had brought her to the studio.

  ‘I think this is what you need for “Vanity”,’ he said, pushing her forward. Sosia had stood proudly in the light, awaiting approval with no sign of anxiety that it might be withheld. She stared straight ahead while Bellini took in her height and style, peered at her face from both sides with a gentle hand on her chin. Finally he nodded kindly.

  ‘You pay?’ asked Sosia.

  The painter nodded. Then she looked around her at the boards alight with colour. She could see why the Venetians called Bellini the Vivificatore, ‘Bringer-to-life’.

  Felice had rightly foreseen little trouble in persuading Sosia to pose for one of five small allegories to be set into a dressing table.

  ‘You would like it?’ was all she’d asked. ‘You’ll come to watch?’

  She did not worry unduly about the consequences. The table was a private piece and the proposed panel tiny. There was little chance that Rabino would enter a house of the class that had commissioned it, and, if so, he would not have time to examine the furniture as he hurried through the shadows to the bed of the suffering incumbent. And if he did, and he recognised her, would he dare to challenge her? She laughed drily at the thought of her husband stammering his reproaches.

  ‘Be still, please,’ said Bellini.

  Sosia stood in front of a rich velvet curtain. She was naked, goosefleshed with cold despite the small brazier the artist had kindly placed at her feet. Her hair hung down her back. She cradled a paper model of a large mirror fashioned of silver foil, light enough to hold for hours. Whoever approached her saw their own distorted face in that mirror, captured in her arms. In real life she stood alone, but in the painting Giovanni had given her three fat little sprites for company. One putto was childlike and the other was greying prematurely. Both bore lewd horns on their heads. A third putto in a grey robe was about to march past, beating a ridiculously small drum.

  Felice said: ‘I guess you’ve put Sosia on a pedestal to keep the men away from her, for once. You know she earns her living doing what you’re painting her as a dreadful warning against?’

  A ripple of amusement ran through the painter’s disciples, the Belliniani, all hard at work on their own boards, trying to learn how the master made skin tender as a veil and the whites of saints’ eyes warm and liquid as the inside of a softly boiled egg. The laughter spread to the actors who stood about in attitudes; they had come to learn from Bellini’s heartbreaking pietàs how to tell the truth of feeling with eye and gesture. Bellini himself smiled slightly.

  Without moving her body, Sosia spat at Felice.

  ‘Gentle, gentle, Sosia,’ urged Bellini mildly. ‘Look more confident, more serene in your scorn. Aristocratic. Amused, and a little surprised at the folly of men.’

  Bellini stroked another tiny smear of paint over Sosia’s skin, another coat of happiness for the eyes of future beholders. The Belliniani craned their necks.

  Felice shrugged. He left, passing Bruno who was just arriving. The two men embraced affectionately in the doorway. Felice traced the tense lines around Bruno’s mouth with a delicate finger, and smoothed out his eyebrows. Bruno laughed, but the misery was still inscribed on his face.

  Bellini nodded pleasantly for Bruno was a frequent visitor to the studio. He continued with his work, humming sweetly under his breath.

  Bruno did not like the painting. He thought that it showed Sosia’s evil, and none of her allure. It showed her elongated haunches and small, fragile shoulders. It showed the private parts of her, which no one but he should see. Giovanni, Bruno reflected, was not painting Sosia’s features; he was painting the malice under her skin.

  The woman in the painting, like Sosia, was not exactly beautiful, but no man could look at anything else while she was in front of him. Her legs and torso were elongated so that the belly was central to everything. It swelled in a curve that could hold the beginnings of a child. Yet the allegory seemed to warn that the man whose face was trapped in her mirror merely believed, in his vanity, to have begotten a baby upon her.

  How coolly he sees her, thought Bruno. Giovanni knows her better than I do. I could not recreate her like this. It shows how little I know her. If I were to paint a picture of her it would be as a monstrous creature – a huge, engulfing pair of lips, nipples and vulva very close by them. Her left eye, the one not crushed in the pillow, all tangled with her hair like a yellow marble in a tiny nest. And I would paint the inside of her mouth, the pink fork of her sex, the sweat on her lip. I would paint …

  Sosia showed no sign that she took pleasure in his presence. Bruno gazed at her. She was looking out of the window, hoping that her intense scrutiny of the street outside might bring Felice back to the studio.

  Chapter Eight

  My life, my Lesbia,

  you say that this love of ours will

  stay unstained by fighting, for ever.

  Dear Gods,

  let her promise be true!

  Let her be true to what she swears.

  Could we live the rest of our lives

  in this holy state of peace?

  When we were home some months we passed a little spring festa in the street and I threw myself into my man’s arms, to make him dance with me. I thought we could dance out some of our sadness and trample it on the ground. The snow had melted and so could all our griefs, I declared, smiling up at my man with all my might.

  But he stood still. He told me that he could not dance and I stared at hi
m as if I’d seen a ghost.

  ‘But just listen to the music and move,’ I told him. ‘It’s like love. You already know how to do it.’

  Bless him, the dear man blushed.

  ‘I have no sense of rhythm, my darling. Also it seems indelicate to touch you like this, out here in front of everyone.’

  ‘But it’s a sin not to dance,’ I told him. He raised quizzing eyes at me and so I told him the tale of an English priest called Robert who gave a mass in the year 1012 on Christmas Day. The folk of his town were gay with festive spirit and began to dance in the churchyard outside his church. He begged them to stop, but the more he begged the harder they danced. In the end this Robert said: ‘If you cannot cease dancing, then may you dance without ceasing.’ And so it was. Those folk kept dancing for one whole year and felt neither heat nor cold nor the call of sleep. The ground beneath them wore away till they were dancing in a pit. A brother of one girl took her by the arm to make her stop: the arm came off in his hand and she never stopped dancing or missed a single step. In the end a bishop was called and he gave the dancers absolution. Then they stopped. Some died straight away. The rest slept for three days and then woke refreshed and more happy than they had ever been …

  ‘Very well, very well,’ laughed my man. ‘I am conquered by this story. We shall dance.’

  And he began to move like a toy with rust in its joints. I could not stop laughing, and he stopped, full of shame and red as a nobleman’s robe.

  So it was then that I hired a dancing teacher for him. Soon the music got into his blood and jerked his limbs the way it wished. Now he can dance six of our dances. He says this is enough. He does not pretend to be a Venetian, he says.

  He’s so tired. Quick books are good and they are easy on the body so the problem with them is one of the spirit. In the old days each book was made to order by the scribe. Just one order, just one scribe, just one book.

  But when my man prints he’s two score men to pay. For reasons I don’t quite fathom – he says it is more economic – he prints eight score books and who knows who will buy them? It is a temptation like those in the Holy Bible. Because he has the men, and he has the paper, and he has the speed to make quick books, he’s tempted every day to print more. And so the quick books mount up in slow-dwindling piles.

  Then there’s another problem with the nobles. Like Nicolò Malipiero and Domenico Zorzi. And Alvise Capello. They come to the stamperia with big smiles and they order one tall stack of books each time. ‘I shall send a servant and a barrow,’ they say and swirl off in their red robes. But do they pay? Not always. They think it is enough to give their noble custom and be seen in my man’s place of work. It is not. It is in no way just, but we cannot touch the nobles.

  And they make their power felt in subtle ways that hurt more than the plain rude lack of payment. They let my man know he should print what they want, or many are the ways that his quick books might come to grief: lack of paper, for they control it; lack of custom, for we depend on them; lack of help in all the rough matters that must be smoothed out, not just in his business but even in the livelihoods of our two families.

  My man likes even less the ones from our own class who come in to trade. They think that books in their rooms are like pearls on their wives’ throats, a sign of wealth that will help them rise to the top. They buy books they never plan to read. Sure, it is coins on the table, ringing like a bell for us when they come to buy, and they prefer to use gold itself, not promise-notes of it, for they like the shine of it. But my man is sad that they do not read these books into which so much care has been put. They may as well buy false busts of the ancients from Rome, these men, and leave him alone. For they leave him feeling dirty for his trade.

  When he comes home I do not pry curiously into his work, for it would make him re-live his problems to tell them. I hope he may find refreshment in my ignorance of his business. Also, if I do not know all, it means I’m always on his side of the question, for I know of no other. No, I don’t intermeddle in that side of his life. When he comes home I kneel to loose his shoe-latchets by the waxlight and I kiss his toes.

  Of course I am loyal to my man but I do have something secret to tell. It is this. I love talk not books. I love to hear a voice. Words on the page? To me they are like the smell of a rose but no rose in sight. You look round for the rose and you miss it.

  Literature, I think. So? He wears himself thin for this? People who’ve a real live love do not have time for love poems. They do not! They make love on a continual basis, and the book lies closed beneath the bed, lies in wait for the sad times when love is not there. What wife would rather have a book in her arms at night than her man? It is his eyes I crave, not little black scratches on dry paper.

  A poet is not a lover! Once he’s named ‘a poet’ he might as well be called a businessman. He produces words, because words are expected, to order.

  The poets are fools. Lovers do not want them.

  They are not interested in a beautifully turned phrase or a long lovely word. They are only interested in the one they love. He is air and light to them. They live on him, feast on him, read his face. They want nothing more. They need nothing more.

  However, I am torn, for I would make an exception for this Catullus.

  For two reasons.

  The first is that he alone among the poets I’ve seen can tell the truth about love and make it come alive. I remember his effect on me when my man read the poems aloud in our bed. So I think he can help those who do not know how to love, those poor folk who thrash in the dark of some clumsy passion and know not how to express it.

  The second is that perhaps he can save us. I believe that if he’s printed, Catullus will sell. Not for the reasons of high poetry or art, but because he will make scandal, which will make noise, which will bring sales. The Zorzis and the Malipieros would spend on that book the way they spend on their courtesans: in sackfuls of ducats.

  With sales the stamperia can survive and my man can stay in Venice. Without Catullus, I am not so sure.

  * * *

  Domenico and Sosia usually met in his library. He was a man of ritualistic pleasures and had early prescribed the style of their encounters.

  Sosia was to arrive by the servants’ entrance, using her own key and then take an inner passage direct to the luxurious book-lined room. (A library such as Domenico’s, she knew, was extraordinarily valuable. It would cost less to line the walls with sable.)

  She was to wear the pink pearls and a simple dress that could be removed with a minimum of struggle. Underneath she was to wear nothing, except a silk chemise he had given her. It must be freshly laundered before each encounter.

  When she arrived, Domenico was always reading at his desk. Although acutely aware of her presence (indeed from an hour beforehand the thrill of anticipation kept him aquiver), he made no sign of having seen her and continued to turn pages, usually two, before he looked up at her.

  Sosia watched him patiently. She liked the way Domenico read, savouring each word like a sweetmeat. Bruno came to any book as if he were opening a little child’s fist, afraid of hurting it, which annoyed her. Felice, she always remembered with a visible flush of pleasure, turned pages like a bird pluming its feathers.

  Gratified by the smile on her face when he looked up, Domenico would rise from his chair and walk quickly to Sosia. He removed her clothes slowly, folding each garment with the precision of a housekeeper and laying each separately on a shelf.

  When she was naked, he would lift her in his arms and carry her to an oversized chair decked with velvet cushions. He would arrange her on his knees so that she lay back with her arms and legs apart, her stomach slanted up to him. She was to lie limply, as if unconscious. He would sit like that, in the exact pose of a Bellini pietà, for half an hour. Sosia closed her eyes and slackened her body, like a dead Christ. Domenico lowered his eyes on her like Mary. Sometimes the tips of his fingers twitched but he observed the same physical immobility as Sosi
a.

  Then, with the subtlest of movements, he allowed one hand to move and it began to trace slow circles on her lower belly. Sosia was not permitted to move or even to moan. Domenico’s fingers rose individually, walking over her thighs like delicate spiders. First one, then another finger left her skin, until he caressed her just with the tip of his second finger, always moving in tiny circles.

  Eventually, even Domenico could not stand it any more, and he stood up to carry her to the desk. He was displeased to note that she always roused herself from her trance then, to what books were placed there. Sometimes she would take one and place it under her hips. Always, he could not help but notice, one penned by Felice Feliciano.

  She always left quickly, without endearment or salutation, reaching for her ducat in silence. Domenico liked to think this was her acknowledgement of his station and the important demands on his time. But there were times when he found her haste indecorous. It was almost as though she felt she had somewhere better to go.

  * * *

  In Giovanni Bellini’s studio, on the divan bed, Felice Feliciano painted an ‘S’ on Sosia’s left buttock. Unlike the crude scar on her back, at which he wrinkled his nose in distaste, Felice’s ‘S’ was beautifully crafted. The left descender was slender and vulnerable. The right was plump and sleek. He flicked in the delicate serifs. Still, she slept on, curled on her side, her hands pressed together. If she were sitting up like that, it would be a confessional position, he thought. He liked that. He had no use for religion himself, but it was an attractive thing in a young woman. Even Sosia, he thought, was cursed with a bit of unconscious goodness, detectable only when she let down her guard.

  Felice said: ‘S for Sosia.’ He admired his slim hand with the squirrel-fur paintbrush elegantly crooked between the second and third fingers. He observed the tableau that they made, he and Sosia, in the tall studio mirror: his own immaculate profile, the gloss of his hair, the athlete’s swoop of his shoulders, and, behind him, Sosia’s naked body, yellow-pink in the candlelight except where his green ink had marked her.