The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  Felice was laughing; Sosia kept talking.

  ‘Then there’s Arnold of Villanova. He says that women who don’t want to conceive should drink water in which the blacksmith’s forceps have been cooled. Where I come from, the Serbian women dip their fingers into the first bathwater of a baby. The number of fingers dipped is to indicate the number of years of barrenness they want. Rabino has other things – goats’ bladders and some herbs. He gives them to poor women who cannot survive any more brats or cannot feed the ones they have.’

  ‘This does not explain why you’re barren, though? I wonder why it has not happened. You make love like a printing machine, relentlessly stamping yourself on men, like a press! A faultlessly efficient contraption. It’s ironic that you cannot seem to utter a page of your own.’

  Sosia gave up. ‘It would be – if I gave a bite of my nipple for irony or babies. But I don’t.’

  She was dressed now and stood at the door, slipping her ledger into her sleeve.

  ‘Any new entries?’ asked Felice. ‘Why am I not in there?’

  Sosia blushed.

  * * *

  I could not be seen to ask about his private doings, so I had my friend make enquiries for me. Caterina di Colonna, who reigns at the Sturion, hears everything with her morning deliveries. The news that is fresh at Rialto by nine of the morning is already stale at her inn, where it was brought in with the milk at dawn.

  Jenson is not so perfect after all! He has lived here two years and already there are four bastard children born to whores and nuns of this town.

  So this Jenson has no fond wife at home, to listen to his worries. He simply buys a whore for her kind of company, and leaves her. He promises, apparently, to provide for any babies in his will, when he dies. He must think this sees off any demands of the heart, and at least it stops the nuns from drowning the little ones.

  It made me fume that he had been so fecund here when my man and I had yet to make a child. News of Jenson’s babes made more hasty my desire for my own. An heir for the stamperia! A loved and legal son! With passion, and with flesh-and-blood, we would defeat the Frenchman. Jenson, who works for abstractions, lives life obscurely as if behind a pane of clouded glass, would not be able compete against that!

  I like to think I know when and how we made our son.

  I have found some good in those heaped scripts my man brings home to ponder as to whether he should print them or not. When he’s at the stamperia I sit in his study and read. The ones I like best are the marriage manuals that tell how to do all things properly in the bedroom. My man need not know it, but I read all these books, more carefully than he does.

  I’m no great lover of books – for I think real life lies in the heart, the home, and the town squares – but in these texts I have faith. The books about how to give birth to the right baby and no other.

  I did all the things to make the child male. What my man wished now Jo had gone was an heir for the stamperia, a little boy to take around the town and show him off. Something Jenson would never do with his bastards.

  The act of love took place, as laid down in the texts, one day at dawn in a cooler month. I took pains that we wore nightcaps to keep the heat in: the books teach that seeds and juice must be kept hot and fresh on their trip to the parts where they join. My man lay on top for this is the best stance for the making of sons and I made sure that we gazed deep in each other’s eyes all through the act. This brought the scales of our souls in the right tilt.

  In the texts, I read sad tales of begettings gone wrong. Some men cannot wait until dawn when the food of the night meal has made its way to the home of the seed. Just one hour before dawn, a spark of too-quick lust will make a girl. Worse still, it can take place that a boy is born who should have been a girl, walks and talks like one, and wants to love his own kind. It’s a risk.

  The rich of the town go to the bad, weaken and die out, for they do not bide how it must be done! They dine luxuriously, drink wine, then go to bed for slow acts of love just when the seed is at the most weak. They have daughters. The poor, on the other hand, grow sons by the treeful for they come home, eat a good simple meal and are asleep so fast they do not blink. In the dawn, when rest has been had, they turn to their wives full of vigour and strong ripe seed and get sons on them, of course.

  I bless this time that most of our kind, and the wives too, are taught to read. Those who row or who sell fish or love do not read, of course, but those of us who have a house, a life, a man – we do. I think that means one third of the town could buy my man’s books and I wish with all my heart that they would do so, for how else shall we two feed and raise the son I read all those books to get?

  * * *

  Bruno’s sparrows did not breed.

  But he could not bring himself to throw away their unhatched eggs. Instead he blew their rotted meat from tiny holes, and their shells became the start of a collection. Now he hunted eggs with a passion. Eggs and feathers of the lagoon birds; the white and grey plumes of the herring gulls, the dark cap feathers of the black-headed gull, the swarthy, greasy tail-feathers of the cormorant. When he could, he went to terraferma and haunted the rivers for kingfishers.

  While he was away, Sosia spent more time with Felice. She was infuriated to learn that Felice called on Gentilia at Sant ‘Angelo. Apart from anything else, such wasted time might have been spent with Sosia herself.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d even met her.’

  ‘Many times. Bruno takes me to see her. Sometimes I even go on my own.’

  Sosia’s face was suffused with dark colour. ‘To see her? She’s not a person. She lives through others, not for herself. Not that she’ll ever find a man of her own. I heard she’s ugly as a badger.’

  She awaited endorsement of this comment, but Felice did not give it. Sosia blanched. Was Gentilia, after all, beautiful? She had not noticed Felice dismissing the concept of Gentilia’s beauty with a flicking finger. Fixed upon his face, she’d missed his gesture.

  Felice mused, ‘Perhaps that’s why Bruno looks haunted. Gentilia’s living on him, like a growth of vine on a tree, parasitically. He always looks ten years older after he’s been to her. He’s grateful for her love, I think, but he doesn’t look well on it.’

  ‘I think in his heart he must hate her! She wants him too hard, and he feels the pressure.’

  ‘You mean she wants him in a wrongful way?’ asked Felice, his brows arching with surprise. Sosia noted with pleasure that she had all his attention now.

  He mused, ‘Now I think about it, she always was a libidinous little girl. How old was she when I first met her? Twelve? No, littler, littler,’ he insisted, patting the air down beside him.

  ‘Even then, she would touch herself, a little too often, in places where it is not done. Bruno never wanted to admit it, but even as a child she made difficulties for him.’

  ‘It’s just as I said, then, about her? I knew I was right.’

  ‘The family all thought that inconvenience would be bred out of her. They assumed the convent would bestow purity on her. Bruno’s relatives had no idea of what Sant’ Angelo di Contorta is about.’

  ‘Some can never have purity,’ said Sosia, significantly. ‘There are things against it …’

  Felice passed smoothly over the possibility of her confiding in him.

  ‘You may be right about Gentilia. Take away the downcast eyes, the circumspect words, the seamless form underneath the grey dress, and what have you got: another ravening woman with her stinks and desires oozing at the same time. And babies dropping out of her.’ Felice looked at Sosia mockingly.

  She smiled. It was good to hear Felice insult Gentilia. It established the bond between herself and the scribe: two canny conspirators against undesirable men and women.

  He swiftly fractured her fantasy. ‘Wendelin’s wife though, now she’s different. Even though she’s huge with child, she’s an utter peach, a little apricot. Perfect, almost as Bruno’s perfect. And she hates me, which I l
ove. She crackles with it.’

  ‘I hate you too,’ offered Sosia, forcing her mouth into a grin.

  * * *

  It was possible to live modestly and piously on Sant’ Angelo di Contorta. The wild girls kept together; those few who wished to follow a genuine calling were ostracised or ignored. Sant’ Angelo was a place of pleasure and the pleasure-expert nuns knew that such a thing should not be forced. Any procuring that was done was usually with at least the passive consent of the nun or the foundling girl concerned.

  At the age of seventeen, Gentilia Uguccione herself was still, unwillingly, pure, unable to understand her exclusion from the happy wanton life of the convent. As a result, she had become excessively withdrawn. She was so reserved it was impossible to say whether she was pretty. She was not, but she had found a way to preserve the ambiguity of the question. She always turned her head away in conversation with strangers. There was something so sincere about her self-deprecation that it did not even attract the men who came whistling through the nunnery looking for virgins or at least girls who could put up a creditable performance of being inexperienced. Gentilia dressed younger than she was. She framed her dormouse cheeks with ringlets coaxed round her fat fingers. She had cultivated a bow to her lips like that of a little noble girl she’d once seen in a portrait.

  All her features were like Bruno’s, but each had grown porcine as if she straddled the orders of the animal kingdom between her brother and a pig. Her nostrils, for example, on close inspection recalled Bruno’s, but her nose was embedded so deeply in her fatty cheeks as to make it resemble a tiny snout. Her chin curved sweetly like Bruno’s, but it was unfortunately one of several. She had Bruno’s shapely mouth, but a slight retraction of the gums exposed more of her teeth than could be considered attractive. The silky wave of Bruno’s hair was bristly in Gentilia’s.

  Gentilia liked to linger among the praying parrots in the main courtyard, bent over her lace, picturesquely, as she saw it. She pretended not to hear the masculine voices or to see the shadows of their acts of debauchery falling on the convent walls in the evening light. She sat pleating her thread and tying her knots, spinning cobwebs of white that spread over her legs, which were straight and shapeless as the columns of an old church.

  Gentilia was as singular in her handiwork as she was in her virtue. Sant’ Angelo was not known for its domestic arts. The convent’s output of lace barely supplied the robes and linen of its own priests or the altar cloths of its church. Gentilia’s work was often seized from her hands when finished and paraded before the visitors, as if this little display of maidenly application might prove the virtue of the disgraced convent, or perhaps, more practically, to stimulate the jaded palates of the men who came there: those who sought the stimulus of a sense of violation were pleasurably agitated at the sight of the snowy lace, though not at the vision of the stolid little lace-maker.

  Gentilia was safe from the depredations of such men. Added to her shyness was the fatty sheen of the middle class on her skin. Any Venetian could read her ancestry in Gentilia’s freckled cheekbones and the broad camber of her hips: she had come from robust stock, and not the small effete blood-pool of nobility, known for its feverish sensuality and nonchalant disregard for morality. A noble girl gone to the bad was what the lechers coveted above all.

  And yet Gentilia could still disturb a male visitor to the convent.

  When she left the room, he would catch a glimpse of her legs – a long glimpse, too long to be accidental – which descended without a hint of taper into her stout shoes. The calves were surprisingly hairy and hideously marked with mosquito bites that had been violently scratched until they blistered. The islands were always haunted by mosquitoes, the visitor would remember, but he could not evade another thought: the well-known Venetian dictum that those whose blood was voluptuously charged attracted the most mosquitoes. A plethora of mosquito bites was the surest indication of multitudinous desires.

  * * *

  Summer has come again. The sun scolds my man’s ear-tips till they glow red. On days and nights that are too hot to breathe we go out to sea. Since I fell with child, I feel this need, for the sake of my blood, which must have salt air, and my nose, which must be cleaned by it, and most of all for the sake of my eyes, which must rest on it. Now that I am growing a creature inside me, I need some relief from our town’s lace of stone and humps of arch and snarls of stone beasts. While they do please the eyes with joy, so at the same time they tire them out – in a good way, of course, as an act of love with a sack of twists and turns does wear a soul out, even though it is with too much good.

  So we go out on the water in a boat. Sometimes we take to the canals and at high tides the water lifts the boat so high that we must lie flattened on our backs as we pass beneath the bridges. We paddle the underbelly of the bridge with our hands to help the boat through, and sometimes the cool stone grazes the plump egg of my upturned belly.

  Most times we go to the islands, where live the monks and nuns, those strange folk who choose to be closed up with God. Or not closed up, as the case may be, for there are many who go to the bad and are worse than all. It’s here, in this sea, they say, that float the babes, those done to death by the nuns at night, as if God snores and prefers to know nought, like the men who begot those poor babes, some on whores, some on nuns.

  And when the babes end up like this, you tell me if it’s better to have a nun or a whore as your ma?

  I did not my own self ever see one yet but I do hear a lot of tales from those who know a man who did, and so on. But there come to the market the same tales more and more, and I start to think there’s some truth in them. They say that these little ones are born on the sea and are in fact in part, because of this, fish. That they have small gills in their necks and small fins on their backs. Some have tails. They float as if they fly, with wings like white-and-pink birds; they have blue eyes not brown, for they’re babes of the sea. Sometimes a fisherman will bring a new merbaby to Rialto and the whole town is hushed with horror before we start again with nervous gabbling. But mostly the fishermen leave them where they find them, and do not mention it. We do not want to be reminded of them or their fate.

  Bruno’s sister Gentilia is a nun at Sant’ Angelo, yet she is pure, I’m told. I have not met her. Bruno seems embarrassed about her, though he loves her. (Poor Bruno, he has become so thin! When he comes to our home I try to feed him up, put plates of delicious food in front of him. ‘Take the wrinkles out of that belly!’ I say, and he blushes. From this, I know that woman of his has no humour to her, or at least none where he’s concerned, and indeed he has become most direfully earnest these days.) Even though we are like family to him, Bruno does not ask us to meet his sister and she remains in seclusion, given up to God, and shall never know the joys of love or motherhood. Poor girl. I also heard that she’s not handsome, so she can have known only half an existence in Venice, where beauty is everything.

  How different life can be!

  I carry my own babe like a good joke inside me.

  I am never sick; I eat what I wish, just twice as much as before. All the time I am full of joy, for I know he shall be a boy. I know that my man shall soon feel that he once more has male kin; that Johann has come back to him in a tiny form. I know he will be a good baby, just as I know that, if he grows up, he will be a good man.

  While I still carry him inside me, I have taken myself to the market to buy us a particular cat. I came home with one who was grey, with stripes and a pink nose, green eyes, and small sag in his paunch. Most important, on his forehead was the ‘M’ mark all tabbies have, to show they were chosen by Mary to soothe the baby Jesus in his crib. The fishwife who sold him told me that he’d served her well with all young ones.

  Now it is too late to think it, I have finally become a little afraid to give birth to a son of a man from the North. I am a small Venetian woman with plump hips but my bones are so delicate, like a bird’s. He’s a huge tall man with great long bon
es. What if I should come to bed of a monstrous great babe who would split me down the middle?

  Another fear has haunted me all along: I am not ready to be my matron-self. I’m not ready to lose my own self in order to be someone’s mother. I fear that in the moment of birth my soul shall go into my baby and I shall be no more.

  Chapter Three

  Hey girl!

  You, without a nice nose,

  without a pretty foot

  or long fingers,

  or a dry mouth

  or a pleasing tongue …

  Does the province tell you that you are beautiful?

  Does it compare you with my Lesbia?

  Times must be bad and blind.

  A plague of baby corpses had haunted the foreshores of Venice for many years. It was not at all unusual for the fishermen to dredge up a few extinct little beings along with their catch, particularly in the waters around Sant’ Angelo di Contorta.

  A few months after she encountered Rabino Simeon, Gentilia Uguccione had been called to the convent’s mortuary. A lone nun, unnaturally blonde and thin as a street cat, awaited her impatiently.

  ‘I hear you can sew,’ the nun said abruptly.

  ‘Yes, a little.’

  ‘Can you sew one of these?’ The nun held up a tiny winding sheet, ragged at its edges. ‘It’s for one of those,’ she added, pointing to a dead baby, pebbly eyes ice blue, laid out on one of the slabs.

  ‘I – I – think so,’ stammered Gentilia.

  ‘Good,’ said the nun. ‘I hope you’re fast. We need a lot of them.’

  And so Gentilia became the shroud-stitcher of Sant’ Angelo di Contorta. Her long days became industrious. The blonde nun had been right: the corpses were many.