The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  How can I give it truth if he says he does not wish to hurt me? If that were so, how could he bear to let me lie like this and think these thoughts – how can he not wish to hold me and roll the tears back from my face?

  I think of fierce things. I resolve to go to a witch to get a bond-spell to get his love back. I’ve heard there’s one that can do this, using beans and sage leaves. The witch, they say, takes on students of her crafts. Oh, I hate this! I, who loved, was loved, so well, feel to have fallen from grace, to need a witch, to get just a sign of love from her man.

  When I first saw his face in the glass, I did not think it would end like this. I think now that I did not know him at all. When I add these thoughts to the words I must read each day …

  ‘I lose all sense of right and wrong when I look at you,’ I read. ‘Sometimes I want to squeeze the breath right out of you.’

  * * *

  Wendelin lay in bed beside his wife, listening to the little gasps that escaped from her as she tried to hide her tears.

  He longed, after making love to her, to roll her into his arms and take her lips to his and comfort her for whatever it was that ailed her, He had hoped that the love letters in the cabinet, which every day he made more detailed in their passion, would reassure her.

  If words have any use at all, they must he good for this, he thought. But she seemed so afraid of him. She, whose skin had seemed a part of his, so that when they slept they were one warm beast with tangled limbs, now vibrated in pure misery on the furthest corner of the bed from him. Although she lay no more than ten inches from him, he pined for her as if she had fled to another country, for it seemed to him that she had.

  We are in exile from each other, he mourned.

  She had shed the animal spirit that had given her such purity and transparency. She had become complicated, hard to read, always tending to some wound that he seemed to have inflicted, looking at him with hooded eyes, her whole body stiff with offence which seemed to have been caused by him.

  Perhaps, he thought, it cannot work after all, this wedding of Venice and Germany. When I see how the printing press fails, it seems that the marriage is doomed. I was proud and foolish to think I could carry this off and keep the love of so extraordinary a woman.

  And yet, even as he explored his misery, he knew that his love for his wife was a thing apart. Even if she no longer loved him, his love for her had an independent existence. It continued to flower; it was a wonder to him that he might generate in his own breast such a poetry of emotion. The condition of loving her had become so absorbing that it had taken his life in hand. Even at the stamperia he felt enclosed in the shell of her love, enveloped in the delicate albumen of her tenderness, which comprised all things.

  He said aloud, I did not choose to love her, so I cannot choose not to love her, and if I try to hate her it simply does not happen.

  He had only to touch his ear and she was at his side with some aromatic salve for the earache he did not know he had. She never left the bed without covering him carefully with the sheet. She brought him food to the office, and when he opened the linen packet after she’d gone, the panino was always accompanied by a red apple with two careful bites removed to make the shape of a white heart in the red skin. Even these days, though she seemed afraid to touch him in any other way, in the dark she would stroke his hair with a soft hand for hours at a time. He was afraid to acknowledge the tenderness in case he phrased his gratitude wrongly and drove her away.

  All he wanted was her love, the way it was before. He told her all these things in his letters, which he tucked into drawers each morning. He could not understand why they seemed to have the opposite effect to the one intended.

  After a while, Wendelin noticed that the drawers of the Damascus cabinet were opening more slowly, as if reluctantly, while he waited on the doorstep. His wife used to walk promptly to it, obedient to his wish. Now he waited impatiently while her footsteps dragged as if weighted with leads.

  It made no difference that his letters were ever more intense. His wife grew sadder and more sullen. She no longer greeted him at the door, or put her hands into his sleeves when he arrived at the house. The unseasonable heat of this autumn had made her listless, Wendelin thought. The whole town was parching for a drop of cool weather, just as he starved for a return of his wife’s affectionate ways. He tried to write it down.

  ‘I want to put my fingers on the tops of your eyelashes,’ he wrote. ‘I wish to touch your throat with the tip of my tongue while my hands circle around it. I want to see the shine of your eyes again.’

  He took her to bed as soon as he could, each night, taking her hand across the plate of grapes and drawing her up from the table into his arms. She hung back. In the bedroom he ached to smooth back her hair from her face, kiss the nape of her neck, her eyes, and the hollow below her ears. She permitted only the simple act of love that for them had been as an evening prayer all their married life. Then she drew away. All night he longed to cradle her in his arms, whispering his love, to make that frightened look leave her eyes, to replace it by glassy joy and grateful tiredness.

  He no longer waited on the threshold for her footsteps. She lay sleeping when he left each morning, but he hoped that she would soon awake and go to the cabinet, and find the love letter that he had left there.

  * * *

  I cannot bear to stay in the hot house with that box lurking upstairs like a baleful bear. I go marketing, my eyes darting everywhere for distractions. I find none, only my miseries in echo.

  I am shamed in the street. I see wives of men who want them; they’re plump and pelting with passion. They fear nothing at all: why should they? They are adored! For them the big issues are: is the fish fresh? Did my ma eat fresh bread with her soup last night? They thump their hands on the counter and want the news, fast!

  I go to visit my sister-in-law Paola, to see if she’s any more love in her than she used to. I suspect not, in her case, because of the red-haired man, and there is malice in me to see that the new marriage does not take any more than the one to Johann. Paola is my enemy because she did not join me in grafting her man to this town. I still think she killed him by not sending for the Jewish doctor who might have saved him.

  You may see bear-fights and pugilists any time you like in Venice but if you want to see low-down dirty combat, look to the women. There’s blood under their nails!

  She greets me dryly at the door, as if she’s little pleased to see me. Her poise is perfect. She gives nothing away. As ever, she’s excellently mounted in her outfit. I dress my utmost when I go to see her, but she always bests me. Some little twist of braid, some arrangement around the neck. She’s the kind of woman who can stand on one leg even with her eyes shut. (Perhaps because her ankles are thick as a heifer’s despite her wispy waist.) She’s carroty-pated with a bleached kind of face, nothing lively writ on it. I find no information there, and no way into her confidence.

  We talk stiffly of the news of the town, the worst of which is the horror that some madman has destroyed a Madonna of Bellini’s. Rialto’s ablaze with the story and it’s a source of wonder that no one’s yet been denounced. Someone must know who did this foul thing.

  The subject dwindles. Paola, despite the fact that her father’s a painter, feels nothing for art.

  Instead, I ask baldly if she’s with child again, for at least this answers the question, does she lie with her new husband or is she cold with him – is her marriage to Johann di Colonia just another alliance for commercial reasons?

  Then she surprises me. Her face does not take any more colour, and yet I can feel a cold anger poisoning the air in the room, like a dead rat under the floorboards. She turns on me, quivering her whiskers, and says: ‘Why, Lussièta, do you play these women’s games? You are like a child in the park! Don’t you realise what is at stake here?’

  I stare at her dumbly. She’s taken my breath away with this lambaste. I want to say to her, but somehow I don’t, ‘Hold your
rat-trap of a jaw!’

  She continues: ‘Gossip and wives’ tales are not the way to make the stamperia come into profit.’

  I open my mouth in horror, for I think she’s guessed my secret, that she knows it was I who spread the rumour about the printers and the coins that brought the purge upon us all. I wait for a harder blow to fall on me from her tongue. It’s no easier because I know that I deserve it. All this time I have deserved it, and yet I’ve not been punished directly.

  But all she says is this: ‘We must act more like men, talk directly and speak plainly of what we want and what will best succeed. This rivalry between the printers is killing all of them. It’s a male thing, and must be stopped by women. The men are incapable of helping themselves.’

  ‘You mean Wendelin should give up?’ I ask, staring at her.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ she whispers impatiently. ‘We can be cleverer than that.’ Her long sly eyes wrap around me, and I hate her as I’ve never hated anyone, even Felice Feliciano.

  So I do not give her the gratification of asking what she means. I just spin on my heel and say, ‘My man is waiting for me. He hates it if I am not home when he gets there.’

  ‘Indeed,’ says Paola, gazing at her short, ugly, perfect nails. She does not say ‘goodbye’.

  * * *

  Gentilia looked in the mirror more often than a nun should. She feared the straying of a curl, or a smut on her nose, she told herself. She did not wish to draw attention to herself, she thought. But Gentilia rarely corrected her appearance, and with every look she felt more secure.

  What did it matter that her ears were placed too high up on her head not to resemble (in conjunction with her rectangular jaw) a sow’s? She knew that her large eyes were fine and that her hair was of a fashionable pale gold. Sosia must be dark and swarthy. Her hair would be greasy. She probably had little ears strung with glittering arrows of jet. She probably wore her clothes too tightly and her scant breasts thrust up like spoonfuls of cream.

  Gentilia would suffer the blind nuns to touch her face, and it was not really suffering. She loved them to read the softness of her skin, linger over her large eyelids. She liked to feel their breath on her, ugly and old as they might be. Is this how Sosia feels with men? she thought.

  She tried to be graceful and to do so banished the sturdy reality of her body. If she stopped walking, she would consciously place a foot down at an angle to the other, as she had once seen a dancer do in her childhood.

  And she could not look on another girl’s beauty with detachment. If the other young woman had lovely eyes, Gentilia found herself looking at her own hands, or touching her nose, and weighing their counterbalancing charms against the rival, wondering if Bruno would find them attractive, more alluring than what was hers?

  She had asked Felice, once, ‘Am I pretty?’

  His lip had curled and he seemed ready to reply unkindly. His response however was enigmatic: ‘I would rather look at a flower than your face. The beauty of the flower is less dangerous to my peace of mind. There’s something about you …’

  This was, she decided, a compliment and she had glowed with such delight that she distilled a bead of perspiration above her lips.

  She thought of Sosia’s beauty, which surely stopped somewhere barely beneath that skin Bruno was so sick for. In fact, Gentilia refused to acknowledge what Sosia owned as beauty. It was the lure of corruption, the same thing that made men violate their own daughters, or kill an enemy in a dark alley, taking him from behind in dirty silence.

  Sosia had robbed Bruno’s heart, and now threw it back when she had, clearly, finished with it. Insult upon cruelty!

  Gentilia would make her sorry.

  She would tell Bruno this when he arrived the next time.

  She would deal him words like blades to excise the memory of Sosia. She would send them as knives into his soft thoughts of her. She would murder the thought of Sosia inside him.

  But in her darker moments Gentilia pondered on a troubling fact. A man never came to Sant’ Angelo di Contorta without expressing his admiration of her when she was paraded as the very paragon of a demure young nun. Men were often heard to say ‘what an unusually shiny purity to her skin’, or ‘what a saintly expression’, or ‘this is just the kind of woman every gentleman desires as a wife’. Yes, Gentilia’s praises hung on every man’s lips, the young ones, the older ones, the smooth and the decrepit. But they looked over her head, with hungry eyes, for Suor Anna or Barbara.

  Gentilia had not received one proposal, and not even, she realised, one proposition.

  * * *

  Sometimes I wonder why he still makes love to me, almost on a nightly basis, as if nothing were wrong between us. And then I think of a story I heard long ago. It is an Arab tale of a man who lost a poor, thin, ugly camel. He searched high and low for it and in the end offered an enormous sack of gold for its return. When asked, ‘Why do you take so much trouble to get back a beast that is worth less than half the reward?’ the man answered, ‘Don’t you know that the pleasure of finding something you’ve lost is greater than the value of the thing itself?’

  And that makes me think of the wax-woman I found in Sirmione, and who might have lost her. When the cat took to raiding my drawers I pushed the figure to the back of a high one behind some ugly cloths for dusting. I thought that if he ever made his way into that drawer he would sniff the fust of them in disgust and leave it alone.

  I was wrong. He found her anyway, and I caught him in the act of fishing her out. I knew then I must find a safer place, and I thought straight away of the least loved and frequented part of our house. It is of course the place where my man put the box from Ca’ Dario.

  ‘Of course,’ I said bitterly, ‘let us put all the evil things together, where I may close the door on them.’

  So I took the wax-lady in her swaddle of linen and dropped her in the space between the wall and the back of the box.

  The ugly thing seemed to move aside a fraction to accommodate her.

  ‘There!’ I said, and turned on my heel.

  Chapter Five

  Tomorrow let those who have never loved, love;

  Let those who have loved, love tomorrow.

  She knew it was to do with those parts that men have between their legs. The ones she saw only when she assisted at the laying out of a corpse. She herself had laid many such little snouts to one side while other, older nuns cleaned the softer and even uglier parts underneath, which were also furred. She had turned her head aside and looked at the little heap of nastiness only out of the corner of her eye, but afterwards she always felt the ghost of its humid weight on her hands for days.

  On the dead, it was an insignificant scrag of gristle. But Gentilia knew better. She knew that on the living it merely lay in wait, in the coy posture of innocence, ever ready for the moment in which to show the bestiality of which it was capable: the kind which brought forth the bobbing baby corpses in the lagoon and those for whom she sewed the shrouds.

  She had already theorised that, in its fornicatory state, the little snout must sprout many heads, like acorns. Each little head would shrug off its helmet and grow an eye. Blue-eyed men would sport little blue eyes inside their acorns. Brown-eyed men would have brown ones. With all those eyes the head of acorns would look at the woman, the way men in the street looked at women, but worse.

  Meanwhile, Gentilia thought, the hair around those parts would start to stand up stiffly, like a lace ruff. This was to protect the little eyes, like eyelashes, and to make a courting display, inflated like the prismatic breast-feathers of the amorous pigeons she had watched all her life.

  At the sight of the ruff and many small eyes, in Gentilia’s vision, the woman would be obliged to disrobe and even her chemise must be removed. She must stand naked in shame before all the eyes that, at the sight of her poor breasts and belly, would open as wide as they could. The snouts would swish backwards and forwards like an angry cat’s tail. The poor woman would meanwh
ile find her thighs swollen apart so that she could no longer close them, try as she might. Her nipples would open up like little flowers, blossoming like the acorns on the male organ. Her blossoms would be pink and red and they too would have little eyes inside them. She must look up at the face of the man to receive her instruction and he, like a father confessor awarding prayers, would choose which style of copulation she merited.

  At this point Gentilia’s imaginings became vaguer, because in her thoughts it would be Bruno’s voice which she heard and his parts in bud before her. It would be Bruno’s child planted inside her.

  She also knew that she must be very careful not to catch a cold after conceiving the child, because if she sneezed the baby would come bursting out of her nose.

  Since Bruno’s confession, Gentilia’s thoughts had run in painfully tight, angry circles. Sosia has forced him to commit sacrilege, by consorting with a Jewess. What kind of crime would Bruno be committing with me? I’m a bride of Christ, a nun. He would be making God a cuckold. It is also incest, if God is the Father, then Bruno would be guilty of copulating with his father’s wife …

  Better think about it a little longer but in the meantime the hour had come to enclose herself in a light cloak of a grey that perfectly matched her eyes, and go to Venice again. She had some business with those lions on the street corners, those stone lions into whose jaws decent citizens might post their written denunciations of those who performed evil acts.

  Such stone lions were to be found all over the city, their mouths just wide enough to accept a single sheet of parchment, folded twice. Gentilia always wrote her letters to fit in swiftly and smoothly, as no one wanted to be caught in the act of cramming an accusation through those dread apertures.