The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  But at the last minute – don’t laugh! – I was struck down by a damnably sudden and most uncharacteristic attack of shyness. I went off with my friends to get drunk, and to them I did not mention the fact that my poems had been born that day, even though thereby I might have prodded the worm of jealousy in at least two of them.

  Even while I drank, I was waiting. Eventually I drank so much that I forgot what I was waiting for, but I awoke from my stupor the next day, hungry as rabbit-raddled Celtiberia and blinking painfully at the aristocratically pale sky, still with a ferment of anticipation in my blood.

  First, there was silence. Three whole days of it. You, who know me so well, can guess at the torment of those noiseless hours. Then Cornelius scratched me a courteous acknowledgement. It was no more than polite, whereas I’d hoped for either outraged rejection or rabid declarations that his every sense had been ravished by my poetry. I didn’t much care which of the two, though I was eager to know which it would be.

  Then it came to me, fuddled with the aftertaste of wine, that I was not the only young poet to present his first-born to the eminent historian; Cornelius was not unduly impressed by the honour I had conferred upon him. Probably, he had not even read the work. My pride somersaulted over this obstacle in a second: So the poor old eunuch cannot deal with them! I told myself. Just wait till the public reads my songs!

  Silence continued for a few more gnawing days, while copies of my poems next made their way to Roman libraries, to the baths, to the pockets of rich men lolling in the porticoes of houses or on their divans at opulent suppers in private houses. I waited for the talk to start. I decided it would be gradual. A groundswell of praise and opprobrium; gross and bare-faced adulation at the Club; late-night fights in taverns to defend my reputation; in the morning, anonymous praise scrawled on the walls of the bathhouse.

  I stayed indoors, modestly reading other poets’ works, with an extremely critical eye. (I maintain no poet simply knows how to write a beautiful poem. He only knows one when he sees its image painted on the air, or hears the fluent cleave of its syllables. With a bit of luck, it’s his own. If you have to ask why’s this stanza short? – then you’ve lost it. Or why the poet used that particular word. Already it’s too late, the poem’s expired. Put it in a box with a lily on top.)

  A week later, nothing had happened. The sky still clenched its heat, never released a drop of rain. No messengers came to me; no more and no fewer invitations arrived than had done so before my book came out. I almost settled into the belief that I had published my songs harmlessly.

  But then, suddenly, I was a sensation!

  It all happened at once, ten days after the poems were born: the messengers, the invitations, the graffiti, the claps on the back, the twisted smiles of the other poets … so that it seemed in one day I moved from obscurity to fame, or, as one of my friends pointed out, from the bedroom to the arena.

  Catullus, Catullus, the public was saying. What’s he like? Lesbia, they were saying, Clodia Metelli, rather! Whore of the Gods! Who also peels young men in alleyways and nuzzles stubbly cremators …

  I must admit that it was as much for the celebrity of my love as for my celebration of it, that I was the flavour of the moment, on everyone’s lips, commoner and blue blood. Why, people who can’t even read know my poems by heart!

  Who could be seen without a copy of my book? The bookseller was rubbing his hands and opening the Falernian – such a rich sigh bubbling forth from the bottle! – to toast the joy of his success.

  I smiled, tried to act modestly, as if the poems were mere family heirlooms, nothing to do with me.

  But, to be candid, Lucius, I’ve already begun to worry about the way the book’s been received. No one praises my imagery; no one savours my words; no one beats their thigh to the seduction of my metre. They talk about Clodia and her damned sparrow. Will the seedy glamour of Clodia’s vices live longer than the songs and eat up my fame as a poet? That thought repeats on me like a rotten anchovy. Outside, at last, it rains in dangling skins of grey, washing my old impatient footprints into foaming drains.

  But it’s too late to wish I had fallen in love with a better woman. Worse still, it’s far too late to cure myself of this hateful love I still feel for her.

  Anyway, I have reasons, since last night even, not to give up hope. It seems that Clodia finds my newfound fame somewhat aphrodisiacal.

  Chapter One

  Then sleep took fright …

  He just does not see the ghostly perils here in this town, because he does not believe in them. He does not fear the fade and massarioli, our fays and goblins, who would love to trip him up just for the joy of watching him stumble. Now September is melting into October, the primest month of witches. Each Thursday night they comb their hair to pull out the strands they use for binding spells. In the hours between midnight and cockcrow they unchain gondolas and put to sea for Alexandria.

  I try to tell him about the undead spirits of Venice, lest he, with his too-trusting nature, should follow one to his peril, never suspecting that it was a creature of the dark zones with every intent to do him harm. Now that my man has brought this Catullus to life again, like a he-witch who brings back the dead, I fear him a marked man among the spirits as well as among the living.

  In the early days of its life, we were frightened that the printing of Catullus would bring the world down about our ears. But the first thing that happened then was … nothing. A silence dark as a wolf’s throat. We believed each next dawn would bring all the polemics, the praise, the disgust, and the compliments. But from the first there was the silence of the grave and eerie in that way, all the more so for the unnatural heat of this season.

  Only three days later was an insult daubed on the door of the fondaco – a few foul words wet from the lips of the priest on Murano, that some disciple thought to slap on the wood in paint. For shame, the visdomini asked my man to pay for its removal! As if we had not problems enough. A dwarf was seen running from the scene, yet no one took pains to chase or catch him.

  Next a rock was thrown through our own window one night, and made a massacre of my pieces of coloured glass. We woke to the crash and lay for one moment throbbing in each other’s arms. Then I ran for the babe, who shrieked in his room, and my man went to the glass, which now framed the window like a jagged crown of thorns. When I came back with the babe on my hip, he was unwrapping a piece of paper from the stone. I saw writing on it.

  ‘What does it say?’ I asked.

  ‘Some stupid witch-curse,’ he said, crumpling it.

  ‘Are you not frightened?’ I asked him, anguished.

  ‘Only of the business failing. Or of losing you two,’ he replied, touching the baby’s trembling lip.

  I shook my head impatiently. ‘That could never happen, losing me.’

  Then, silently, we both remembered I left him in Freiburg, and I recollected how nearly I had destroyed him with the rumour I started at Rialto.

  I tried a different line, asking him to remember his five senses, not his single but too-efficient brain. At least I know, to my own pleasure, that his senses have some imagination and may therefore come to know the danger of ghosts.

  ‘But have you never felt the nightmare touch of a cold hand? Or dreaded it, when you heard a scratch at the door in the middle of the night? Did you never hear a phantom breathe on the back of your neck? Were you never insanely afraid at the sight of a wavering light in the darkness? Did you never smell a ghost? A witch-curse is not to be taken lightly, you know that, don’t you?’

  At all these questions, he just laughed bitterly. ‘I agree that in Venice, if you’re in a ghost-smelling humour, then there’s always a dead rat nearby somewhere, to help you believe in the ghost. If a noise is made, it is by some elastic body. If it has a voice, then it is a beast or a man, with lungs and breath to utter it. If scratching is heard then it is made by some creature with hands or paws.’

  I opened my mouth to protest, and he added, ‘A
nd as it is with scratchings so it is with dismal yellings and groanings and hidden footsteps and all those noises which are fabled to ghosts.’

  His worries are about things he can see, not things he cannot see. The fogdogs at the foot of our rainbows perplex him. The labbering of the living fish at the market makes him uncomfortable. Nicolas Jenson worries him. The cries of our son in the night worry him. This strange long summer makes him ill at ease.

  Nothing touches him intensely as ghost fear fingers me.

  In the blind dead of a Venetian night, there are plenty of ghosts to fear.

  There are so many of them; it is hard to keep them all in mind. I’m always alert to the dangers on his behalf.

  When he must go to the bookbinder at the Abazia, for example, I remind my man about the quite-young ghost (in the sense that the living man died not long ago) of the old miser Bartolomeo Zenni.

  I warn my man – ‘If you see an aged man carrying an enormous sack on his shoulders, if he begs you to help him, do not look him in the eyes. If you do he will turn into a burning skeleton in front of your eyes! And frighten you to death!’

  All Venice still remembers how, on the night of 13 May 1437, there was a terrible fire at the Abazia. Bartolomeo Zenni alone refused to help his neighbours to save their children, being too busy dragging his sack of gold and jewels from the scene. Now he’s dead himself, and it is his unquiet spirit who implores in vain.

  If my man must go to the great ones with the high foreheads at the Scuola di San Marco at Zannipolo, I implore him to take care, for it’s in that quarter that the ghost of the traitor Doge Marin Faliero, his hands tied behind his back, stalks the streets looking for his own head – struck off his body for his crimes. Faliero does not know it is buried between his own legs, poor soul.

  Faliero does not wander the streets alone. On his trail is the phantom of the blind Doge Enrico Dandolo, who took Constantinople for us in the fourth crusade. He carries a sword and perforce slashes his hands continually with its sharp blade, this on account of all the innocent blood he spilt in that far land. He chases Faliero to avenge the honour of the city. He never finds him, for neither of them can see: Dandolo has burning brands instead of eyes and Faliero, of course, has no head at all. Were it not so tragic then it would be quite comical, like all ghost stories, wherein lies much of their power.

  I hate the thought that my sweet man might meet by chance these violent ghosts, who have few kind feelings for those who still live on this earth and less still for those who are strangers in this town. I fear that if he meets with ghosts my man might be struck with a seizure, or a fever to his brain, for when evil meets good, it’s the innocent who suffer the most.

  Least of all, I like him to go by Ca’ Dario, where a family from Dalmatia owns a house I hate. Though Giovanni Dario’s a great lover of books, and buys in good sums from my man, I wish he did not go there. It is the most cursed home in Venice. Giovanni Dario, who conducts a great oriental commerce, and who speaks more foreign tongues than any man in Venice, is planning to rebuild it, I know. Sure it will then be full of eastern traceries and arches – a little piece of Constantinople afloat in our own town! It is at present quite modest in its scale, and plain in its lines, though large in its evil. Now Dario has a daughter he adores and he thinks a great house will make a good showpiece from which to sell her to some Golden Book noble.

  But you cannot build strong foundations over a sodden bloodstain; you cannot drive out a bad spirit that way. It only comes back swelled with strength it’s gained from the effort of flouting you.

  There’s nobody who can afford not to believe in magic in Venice. Not even Germans. Their fondaco is but a few hundred years old, and does not have a ghost, but if you ask me it’s only a matter of time.

  Chapter Two

  Everything is ungrateful.

  In doing good, no good comes to you.

  Someone else had been found dead at the old Ca’ Dario. Murder or suicide, no one knew and it made little difference: the infallible curse had merely claimed another victim. Again the house was cleared in one more attempt to be rid of the evil spirits that inhabited it. There was yet more talk of a fine new palazzo to replace the old one, to expunge its ugly sins with beauty.

  The owners agent sold off the furniture in the Campiello Barbaro, in the shade of a tree. Venetians hurried past, shaking their heads. Who would buy a relic of that tainted place, which, for all its grandeur, ground out corpses like a mill?

  Wendelin, walking past the ramshackle stalls, felt his eyes drawn to a graceful cabinet. Lussièta had made sure he knew of the reputation of Ca Dario, and indeed every haunted alley in Venice. While he sometimes enjoyed her tales, or at least her vivid way of telling them, he did not feel in his own flesh the superstitions of the Venetians. The city failed to frighten him, except in a commercial sense.

  ‘Venice’, he would smile at his wife, ‘is in a state of story-hunger, that’s why she invents ghost stories. It’s just a great growling in the intestines for novelty, for visions.’

  His wife had shaken her head and told him that Venetians died of these things.

  ‘If they die, it’s not of ghosts; they die of too much storytelling and listening and forgetting to be practical That can turn you into a ghost, of sorts.’

  His wife had replied with a smile that he did not yet understand the Venetians. They had left it at that, gone hand in hand to look at their son sleeping in his crib, and all thoughts of disagreement were banished from the room at the sight of his soft lips half opened in a smile.

  But that day at Ca’ Dario, Wendelin found that he had been sufficiently influenced by Venice to be drawn to a beautiful object and to want it for himself. Its purchase might also, he reflected, serve to prove to his wife in a practical way that there was no such thing as a haunted house. An exquisite little piece of Ca’ Dario in their own home would cure her childish fears of the palazzo, and, he hoped, all such places.

  Perhaps it was consolation he sought in the sheer outrageous extravagance of it. At such a grave moment in his economic affairs, it seemed a gesture of blithe and confident faith to invest in something that was worthwhile merely for its beauty.

  And he had the funds in hand. That afternoon he had patrolled the local cartolai. Not one had sold a copy of Catullus that day. No one enjoyed humiliating Wendelin von Speyer, and various shopkeepers had rushed to settle stale debts, so that his sleeve was knotted round a heavy swag of silver. No matter that there were more practical uses for that money at this moment. He gazed at the grey-green cabinet, running his finger over the ridges of the coins inside his sleeve.

  He counted forty-seven drawers, each painted with very pretty and improper scenes of country life. Wendelin drew closer, examining with pleasure the amorous couples entwined in shady groves. Three years ago, he would have turned from it, blushing. Now he regarded the cabinet avidly, noting the four barley-twist legs at the front, the four straight ones at the back, and the dark cracks of age crazing its smooth surface. In the shimmer of the hot day, it seemed to vibrate in front of him, even edge infinitesimally closer.

  He opened one drawer to find a hollow sparrow’s egg, speckled as a poor child’s face. The next drawer held a large black egg, its meat still intact, he judged, from its weight and sour smell. In a third lolled a red egg, hollow and insubstantial as a bubble. A fourth revealed a tiny chicken egg.

  A bird lover or an egg collector must have owned this, Wendelin thought, someone like young Bruno. The thought of Bruno, of whom he was so very fond, endeared the cabinet to him further.

  And a sweet, beckoning idea of how to use it was forming in his head. What a pleasure it would be to bring such a plan into careful execution!

  ‘How much?’ he asked the dealer, leaning closer as a noisy wind gusted between them, stirring the soupy air. The man named a sum as ludicrous as Wendelin had imagined.

  ‘It’s from Damascus, look at the …’

  ‘How much?’ The wind tugged at Wende
lin’s hair, making it stand on end. The dealer showed his teeth.

  ‘This unique and wonderful piece has travelled here over the sea …’

  Wendelin cut him short as courteously as possible. He was in a hurry to be out of the wind, which had insinuated itself under his collar and was ruffling his stubble uncomfortably. Moreover, there was something tawdry to his mind in arguing over money when the beautiful cabinet stood so close by. How could one put a monetary value on such loveliness and usefulness: it would be like naming a price for his own wife. He unknotted his sleeve and handed the man the three ducats he’d named, trying not to think it represented half a year’s rent for a small house. While the Venetian stood open-mouthed, Wendelin explained that two of the apprentices from the stamperia would be there to pick it up at three and a half hours after noon the next day, precisely. The dealer smiled mutely and rummaged in his apron for a bill of sale, which Wendelin briskly folded in his sleeve, glad to have documentary proof of his fantastical acquisition.

  * * *

  ‘From Ca’ Dario?’ his wife shuddered. ‘The Devil lives there.’

  ‘From Damascus, originally. Darling, you know the superstitions in this town about that house are far from reasonable. Men and women die in every palazzo in Venice.’ Blinded with enthusiasm for his purchase, he did not notice the sad strain on her face as she struggled not to contradict him.

  ‘Please don’t bring it here.’

  ‘Ach, now you’re being a little silly, my love. It’s a beautiful thing. You always say we should live with beautiful things around us. Is that not the Venetian way? Look at all this glass you’ve collected.’

  Wendelin drew his wife to his breast. He was irritated to feel her quivering in his arms. It took the edge off the glamour of his impulse. Was he not permitted a sole picturesque gesture? Such as any Venetian might make, and be praised lor it?