The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

‘I don’t want it here. I beg you.’

  ‘I’ve paid for it already.’ Wendelin handed her the bill of sale. ‘Don’t cry. You’ll see. You’ll love it,’ He smiled down on her encouragingly.

  ‘I already hate it. It is vile,’ she murmured, indistinctly, into his robe. Then she held the paper up to the light, as she always did, to see the watermark. She cried out, ‘You see! It’s a roach!’ throwing the bill on the floor.

  Wendelin felt himself unexpectedly roused to sharpness. He pulled away from her and took hold of her shoulders. He spoke more loudly than he needed to, staring into her eyes, shaking her slightly.

  ‘Probably a sacred scarab, not a roach. You’re making a big fuss over nothing, my love. You disappoint me. This believing in ghosts is a kind of itch in you, which you are scratching out of control, and it is getting infected.’

  It was strange and distressing to talk to his wife this way. Yet he could not stop himself. And instead of being frightened by this change in him, it seemed that his wife was moved to equal though softer tenacity. She reached for his sleeve, entreating him in a strangely high-pitched tone, ‘Please listen to me.’

  A squall of unaccustomed fury rose up in Wendelin. He shook her hand loose from his sleeve.

  ‘This is not reasonable. You’re too used to having your own way. You’re spoilt, and indulgent of your own wishes. Don’t be a little girl. You should grow up, please. Use your mind on wholesome things.’

  Wendelin’s wife put her rejected hand against her mouth, as if to stopper up a reply. Silence fell between them while they stared at one another.

  ‘Why do you talk to me like this?’ she said, eventually, in a voice thickened with tears.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Coldly, as if I were a stranger.’

  ‘You are imagining it. Stop this, Lussièta.’

  She turned away from him then, and left the room, her shoulders shaking with sobs. He missed her, but he could not bring himself to go after her. He was full of thoughts of the cabinet. In that moment it was more alluring than his headstrong wife: unlike her, it was passive in its beauty, a willing vehicle for his fantasies.

  From the moment he’d seen it, he had decided to put the cabinet to work, to serve his love of his wife. He felt that he’d neglected her lately. Worries about work had made him exhausted and monosyllabic in the evenings. He wanted to revive the freshness of their romance. He planned to place a love letter to his wife in a different drawer of the cabinet each day. On all his walks, to and from work, he contrived the details of his surprise for her. Every morning, as he left the house, he would hear upstairs the happy whine and click of drawers pulled open and shut until she found it, the eloquent token of his adoration of her. He would even write in Italian, to prove how much he loved her, never mind the possible errors of nuance or style!

  ‘You are everything to me,’ he would write, ‘you are the musk and music of my life.’

  He would write, ‘Never stop loving me, you are grain and grass to me.’

  And sometimes he would write out, in his own hand, some lines from Catullus that showed so well how it was to be in love.

  For days he planned his love letters; when he had perfected them then the delightful entertainment would start.

  * * *

  He bought it from Ca’ Dario on the day the sirocco started.

  He should have been at the stamperia, of course; instead he was wandering around the town where trouble could find him. The house is falling down with problems, with Jenson, with the priest Fra Filippo, with debts unpaid – and he brings a dreadful costly thing home, paid for with the silver he earned with books!

  If he has become so much a Venetian that he must buy luxuries, then why not a ruby from Balashan or a white camel from Kalacha? Or six saltwater pearls from Kain-du? Why this dreadful box?

  It’s a well known thing that no man or beast nor maid can do a stroke of work when the sirocco comes. No artist paints. The man who sells roast pumpkin and hot pears closes up his stall and goes home to pull the blankets over his ears. The wig sellers in San Marco lower their hairy poles, for the wind will soon tug the curls loose and send shags of hair flying over the square. Even the hungry courtesan gives but sparingly of her favours. And those of us at home are more bitter than yesterday at the sight of our neighbour’s dirty stoop.

  So I suppose the goat-stinking, plague-ridden sirocco blew him to Ca’ Dario. But it did not pull the coins out of his sleeve to buy that box! I don’t know how he could even go there. I would not want the dust of the street in front of it on the soles of my slippers. He says it’s all tales. He says it’s just a house. A house cannot hurt you, he says.

  But I know Ca’ Dario’s not just a house. One night when I was a girl I tried to run past it. All the glass was black as it is now since the last man died there and there was not a soul that would go in it, by day or dusk.

  Even at ten years old, I knew to run past it. No one had to tell me it was bad. I knew it in the marrow of my bones. The four chimneys worked the sky and each bush of blooms foamed on top of the wall and crawled out with a prod of its branches to take me in. The house craved me.

  Then I saw the light in a small window, high above the street. One sole wavering wax flame, held in one thin hand. And I saw another hand that wrote and wrote and wrote. A hand like a claw with no need to dip ink for its own blood poured in a slim black stream down the quill and out upon the page.

  I stood and watched for I could not walk away. Finally my mother came looking for me and dragged me home while I kicked and screamed.

  I know that was a childhood thing, and years ago now, but I cannot forget it.

  Why did he buy it?

  This is the first time he has gone against me and now there’s a little crack in my world, such as when an eggshell splits with a fissure too small for the eye to see and yet the rottenness still gets in and the life-sap oozes out. Where once I felt safe, I now feel uneasy.

  He could read the terror in my face and felt me tremble in his arms, and yet he proceeded with the box in any case. He did not comfort me for my fear, but instead he made cruel comments about me just when I was most in need of soft words … His eyes turned the colour of slow ice in the mountains and there was a bitter smell on his breath when he spoke to me so harshly. I cannot forget it! Now my heart throbs as the nose does when someone’s struck it hard. And in my belly there’s a feeling as if someone has just ripped something in half.

  I know it is a trivial and childish thing but when he spoke to me like that my mind went straight to the meal I had made for him that day. I’d cooked two of his most favourite dishes, and brought him a surprise of a peach that should not yet be in season. I thought of the ache in my shoulder from sitting long at my needle to mend a tiny tear in his hose, though my own skirt still has a rent in it – but there was not time to do both. Most particularly I thought of the night, a few weeks back, when he brought home his precious Catullus and I coddled it like a love-child. I wondered that he did not think on these things, and give me some dispensation for them, but all he could do was talk of this wonderful box as if it were a woman and he were newly in love with it.

  I realise with a sorry little pain in my heart and lungs that for the first time I do not look forward to the evening when he comes home from work and we may be together from dusk to dawn. I hope he’ll work late today and even wish that it was time for one of his trips to the land to talk to the merchants of paper.

  This thought brings another, even less welcome.

  I fear, in this act of buying the box, that he has begun to be tired of Venice and the sea light on the walls starts to drive him mad. This is the start of his not loving the town, and that means that one day he’ll want to leave and go back North, up over the Alps again. And not come back.

  You see, after all the trouble and the agony of deciding, Catullus is published and yet nothing has happened. A few noblemen have come in for their single copies and that is all. Domenico Zorzi of
course bought two dozen, and speaks airily of more purchases. Nicolò Malipiero is nowhere to be seen. They say he’s been taken ill. The stamperia is silent with foreboding and hope.

  And my man’s solution: he goes out and spends money like water! Coins are scarce as white crows, and not just in my purse. Each time I hand one over I stare at its face a long time first, as if it might burst into song. Soon we shall learn to live upon dew like the insects. And he spends three ducats on a vile haunted cabinet!

  I fear this box is the start of some bad thing, and I wish with all my heart that he had not bought it.

  * * *

  Wendelin deliberated earnestly as to where the cabinet should go. At first he placed it at the end of their bed, but he saw that his wife gave it wide berth, and that she slapped their son’s fingers if he tried to pull at its drawers. He did not want her to hate the cabinet – tried to discourage her from calling it that box’ – so he moved it to his study on the same floor.

  With his hand resting on the cabinet, he would call his wife into his study; ask her to admire the beautiful paintings on the drawers. She stood there, her eyes averted, until he found himself seized once more with anger against her. He spoke a few hard words, watched the tears slide from beneath her lashes. Later, when they ate, she insisted on recounting all she knew about Ca’ Dario for the fourth time, in a faltering voice from which all her habitual confidence had been abducted.

  Wendelin did not know how to argue with his wife. Her seething quiescence and her intemperate outbursts perplexed him to silence, which he feared she thought cold. If he started to talk about the cabinet, she found an excuse to quit the room, or burst into sobs and incoherent recriminations. German wives were not like this.

  He wondered how Johann had dealt with Paola di Messina’s cold fire: he remembered that his brother once remarked mildly that the tartness of his wife’s tongue could sour the milk. He found it impossible to handle Lussièta’s hot eruptions and her noisy tears, and, worst of all, the weary way she interrupted him whenever he tried to explain himself, as if it were a waste of time for him to continue with his speech for she knew how things really lay much better than he did.

  He felt as if each harsh word he used scarred their love in some indelible way. Yet, when he saw how she hated the cabinet, he could not help himself: he disliked her for it.

  But even Wendelin was obliged to admit the eggs inside the cabinet might not be healthy. They were also in the way of his plans. The night before he started his campaign of love letters, he removed each egg, carefully and slowly, from its drawer. Each was different; each perfect. He laid them in a box, intending to present them to Bruno, then realised that he could not face his wife’s recriminations if he did so. Grimly, he walked to the window and emptied the box into the canal from the window. The flotilla of eggs departed immediately, in formation. There was something strange about their movement, but Wendelin could not work out what it was.

  Only later that night did he realise what it was: the eggs had floated away against the tide.

  * * *

  Fate is barking at me like a rabid dog.

  Now the wretched cat has started to ransack my own drawers. He’s learned to stand on his back legs and then he worries the handle of each drawer between his paws fast and furious, as if he were trying to light a fire with kindling. Some handles yield to him and he’s had much pleasure in sleeping in the open drawers, having first thrown everything inside to the floor. If the drawer contains beautiful things, he simply steals them and takes them to his boudoir, where I must pull them out of his bared teeth if I want them back.

  The first time this happened, I came into our kitchen to find a scene of plunder, with five drawers open and the contents scattered. I thought the villain who threw the stone had come back.

  I screamed to my man to come down from his study, ‘We’ve been robbed!’

  My man examined the scene of the crime with care and slowly. In a few minutes he led me to the cat’s corner and showed me the things in there.

  ‘Robbed from the inside,’ he said, ‘the criminal is one of the family,’ and he smiled, but I did not like the way he said it, for all of a sudden it reminded me that it was I who had robbed the printers of their reputations and put their lives at risk, I who should have been looking to their well-being in all things. And I wondered if my man had come to know what I had done and if the cabinet is his conception of a just punishment.

  * * *

  Wendelin prepared the love letters, carefully. He did not want to set up a pattern which he could not maintain, so he drafted the first three score love letters in advance, delighting in the careful sequence of them. He was sure that they would restore his wife’s love and trust, which had so mysteriously unravelled in the few weeks since he acquired the cabinet.

  Lussièta was eating less than she used to and she was looking less plump than before. He felt great tenderness for his reduced little wife, but when he went to embrace her in the kitchen, she stood silent and still in his arms.

  ‘Is this still about the cabinet?’ he asked her.

  She nodded.

  He pulled apart from her, though she clung to him.

  ‘You are unbelievable. How can you be so stubborn?’

  ‘Please,’ she started, but he released her from his arms and gave her a push towards the door.

  She moaned.

  ‘You Venetians—!’ he started, but she was gone already. He felt a sudden desire to see and touch the beautiful cabinet, which would not flinch from his fingers as she did. He ran upstairs to his study, trying to ignore the sound of sobs coming from their bedroom as he passed.

  * * *

  The air sags between us now, where once it snapped with lust.

  He closes down on me. It reminds me of something each time it happens, and I have at last worked out what it is.

  In the eighth month of the year when the kind of heat comes that only the poor can bear, then the rich of this town leave their palazzi and go to the hills for their cool shades. Those palazzi, once full of life, are shut up fast. That’s how my man is. It starts with a few windows closing, but soon the sheets are put over everything, the halls cleared out, then at last there’s nothing but emptiness in him.

  The thing that breaks my heart is that in those moments he’s not someone I know. He’s the kind of man I know I should flee, and not live with as a wife.

  Now I’ve seen that my man can be like this, I know he can be this way again. This envenoms not just the future but also the past with new fears. I look back on all our acts of love and wonder – were they not for him as they were for me? If they were, then how could he now break the faith between us in this way? Or is it that those years were just the start of a wed life that would become bitter like all the others?

  So be it. If I had known it would turn out like this, I would still have loved him with all I had to give.

  I know I’m prone to enlarge things, make large of light things. I try to keep this tendency in check.

  I say to myself, ‘So it is not perfect after all, this love. But why do I weep? Nor is any one day perfect, nor our son, nor our cat, nor one whole thing in the world. I myself am far from perfect. So why should I expect that it would be perfect with my man, all the time, every day?’

  I rap my own knuckles on the bedpost, as if that little pain might drive out the bigger one inside.

  I look in the glass, to see what pain is doing to me. When I’m sad like this, my mouth feels painted on. The corners are dragged down by the heavy paint. When he’s ill-pleased with me, as he seems all the time now, his mouth is set in a line and his lips are pulled back inside, safe from my kisses, should I be brave enough to give them.

  We still have our acts of love. In the dark I cannot see the line of his mouth. We still talk, though it’s hard to get the words out, of daily things – of our son’s new tooth, of the cat’s latest thievery.

  But it’s hard to talk. It seems an affront to the real pain we feel
to speak of these other things, which matter not at all. I suppose we keep the talk going so neither of us is seen to cut the thin thread: we are both terrified of silence falling between us.

  He must have heard my knuckle on the bedhead because he comes into the bedroom, and now he looks wrathfully at me, though for why I cannot guess. I try to smile. Underneath my face, the me who pulls the strings of each feature is sweating over her contraptions, but it’s futile. No smile comes.

  He stands at the foot of the bed, and looks hard at my face, and says, ‘Don’t do this to me!’

  Chapter Three

  That one, whom you see

  stepping out in the sordid style of an actress, or a cockroach

  grinning like a Gallic beagle …

  It did not take Sosia long to devise her revenge upon Giovanni Bellini for the insult of his portrait of her. But it took some time for her to effect it. First of all she wanted to ensure that the portrait would never be seen in public and so she ordered Nicolò Malipiero to buy it for his private rooms, where she alone would see it. Giovanni was already working on another one for the nobleman who had commissioned the original piece.

  And him of course! she allowed, dismissively, but what does he matter?

  She made no objection to Bellini finishing the painting just as he wished, even posing one more time at the studio to allow him to perfect the radiance of the light behind her hair. With every appearance of docility, she accepted the coins Bellini counted into her hand. She bade him farewell civilly and bowed to the Belliniani, sweating over their copies of the great masters originals. She smiled widely at everyone with the utmost and uncharacteristic decorum. But as she sauntered out, grinning like a dog, Sosia pocketed the key that was resting, as usual, on the ledge of the window next to the door.

  She did not to know that Bruno was following her the next evening when she set off. It was not the first time, and he did not invariably do it. But on nights when sleep evaded him he sometimes walked to her house at San Trovaso and watched the door. Often he waited all night, narrowing his eyes at the thought of her indoors with Rabino, in their bed, or worrying that she passed the dark hours elsewhere, with someone else.