The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  Let the nobleman Malipiero himself become inflamed with love for me. So much so that he will have no peace, no repose of spirit or body unless he’s with me. Neither shall he be able to take his place in the senate of the city nor control the impulses of his own body so shall he be distracted in every second by burning thoughts of me.

  I cast a spell on him, binding his love by all Devils who are within and outside of Hell. I bind all his members, his hair, his head, his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his heart and above all his phallus to me.

  If he does not come to me then he shall suffer the pain of the Crown of Thorns, of the evil and vinagrous drink, the sweat of blood on the forehead and the tearing of his liver from his belly.

  For I hold the measurements of his phallus and of all his vital parts, for he has eaten with me of my own powdered blood.

  In return I promise my body and soul at death to the prince Lucifer and his devilish companions. In the meantime may all the hounds of Hell bear me attendance from this day forth.

  Signed, Sosia Simeon.

  Gentilia knew that the large sheet of paper, protected by a parchment pouch, would soon be spotted floating along the canal, and be fished out by curious neighbours. She knew that it would be taken to the local priest and then to the authorities.

  Then the trouble would start. How much trouble even she could not guess though she turned the possibilities over in her mind as she sat on the boat going back to Sant’ Angelo.

  Certainly it would destroy the unknown Malipiero, whom Gentilia begrudged, strangely, just what Bruno begrudged him. But more than that it would destroy Sosia, and Bruno would be left in peace, and then at last be free to show the devotion to her, Gentilia, that she was now ready to accept.

  On the same day that she sent the letter swimming through a cloudy little eddy of filth, she posted a signed denunciation, echoing the contents, through the mouth of the lion at the Doges’ Palace and made a journey to Murano where she left an anonymous missive for the attention of Fra Filippo de Strata.

  ‘An Account of the Printers’ Whore,’ it began.

  That night, at Sant’ Angelo di Contorta, she undressed in her cell until she was completely nude, by the light of a candle which she had bought in the name of the Devil, whispering the name under her breath as she handed over the money. She turned her face to the shadow she had created against the candlelit wall of her cell, and said, ‘I have undressed myself and you dress yourself, good evening, my shadow, my sister, I beg you to go to the heart of Sosia Simeon and strike her a blow.’

  Then she lifted the candle and said to it, ‘Now I understand that I must pay my dues to the Devil.’

  It was Gentilia’s shadow sister, created by her alliance with the candle and the Devil, who arose the next day. This shadow was more powerful than Gentilia, empowered to go out into the public world, for she was dressed to go forth and do the business of the Devil. When Gentilia looked in the mirror, she could not see her: just the camouflaging skin of her former self. But she knew what she had inside. Gentilia reasoned with herself that a witch was a kind of fairy, and fairies were always beautiful and never more than nineteen years old, and always light on their feet and irresistible in their whimsical ways.

  She took the boat to Venice. As if privy to her intentions the boat that day behaved strangely. It lurched like a drunk and righted itself precariously with each wave. Gentilia was not a superstitious person – her witchcraft was purely practical – so she merely folded her hands in her lap and observed the queasy faces of her fellow passengers.

  There’s no danger, she told herself There are boats, she added, which have a shoddy gait, and this is one of them.

  A man leaned over to her, confidentially, gesturing at the beams of the boat. ‘See, it’s been badly put together and will never give a sweet voyage, like some women.’

  He winked at her. She winked back, and laid her hand on his arm, as she had seen nuns do with the men who visited the convent. The man turned away from her, disgusted. He’d caught a whiff of her breath, with its strong smell of cabbage. Her digestion was exceedingly slow and the cabbage soup of one day swilled from the pores of her skin the whole of the next.

  Once landed, she briskly made her way past her whey-faced fellow-passengers and took a gondola to the shop that sold holy oil and linen for shrouds, taking two small detours. One was to the witch who had instructed her, to collect a small vial of foul-smelling liquid. The other was to daub it on a pair of shoes airing on the windowsill of a certain house in San Trovaso.

  Chapter Nine

  What can I do?

  What is there left to trust?

  You asked me for my soul

  as if I had nothing to fear by giving it

  Wasn’t that what you said,

  in so, so many words?

  Since the roach bit me, there’s been silence in our house at night.

  Alone in the kitchen I salved and wrapped the wound, trembling and weeping. The bite was not big, and throbbed rather than burned me. But the poison of that moment lingered in the air, reminding me with every pulse of the times when I used to have his love and my man would do anything to save me from the creatures who creep and crawl.

  When we tiffed before it was like reading of perilous wars from the safe comfort of a deep soft chair. A little adventure in the imagination only. But since the roach there is no more fantasy about it. The conflict is real, the walls have melted away, the armchair disappeared, the pages are gone and we stand on a real battlefield, with real arms to do actual harm.

  It has come to this: although I hate and fear sorcery with all my heart, I think I really shall go to see a wise woman. I’ve heard of a white kind of witch who knows how to get a man back when his love has strayed off.

  I used to laugh in my hand at such tales and look at my face in the glass – at my ripe soft mouth and the full curve of each lash, and the long nut-shape of my eyes and the way they turn up at the ends – and I used to think, ‘Who needs a witch to keep a man?’

  Not now. Not since he let the roach bite me and moved not a muscle to help me; my spirits are bruised black all over. This morning he failed to ask me how I felt, and left for work earlier than usual.

  I’ve seen her in the street. She’s an old lady with a three-point chin that pokes out from dark pink jowls with hairs on them. The lower lids of her eyes hang slack from the balls of her eyes. Can such a one help with love or lack of it?

  I hear that this witch knows all kinds of things – how to make dogs chase the one you hate (this you do with a smear of juice from a bitch in heat on his shoes) or drugs to make a fire burn with no stop or render a man unable to take one scrap of food down his throat so he starves to death, slow but sure.

  Then I think it may be that I can win him back if I make him one more son. So I’ve been back to the books and I’m mad with sad thoughts for it seems I may not ask him these days to do those things which would surely make a son. We do not speak aloud of such intimacies now, where once we laughed and talked with our hands. How can I ask, as the books tell, for him to tie up his left pouch when we make love, as it is seed from the right one that makes boys? I would blush now but to name this part that once I cupped in my hand each night. How can I tell him to leave off the cortinelò wine (whose deep red he loves, and which casts such voluptuous dreams) for it hardens the paunch and stops the making of male seed or sends the seed out cold and of no use. And all the foods we eat – prawns, fish, fruit, herbs – are moist and so make girl seeds. How can I ask him to change his diet? We are not so close that I can talk without a blush of what he puts in his mouth. It is too personal in these days when we are strange to one another. Sometimes I even try to speak to him in German now, stumbling over those break-teeth words, so he can forget I am a Venetian, whom he made the mistake of marrying.

  Gone are those conversations and the laughter beneath the sheet, that talk which some might say was lewd but for us was mouthfuls of joy. As those who love food water at the mo
uth when they talk of saucing the meat, or as Giovanni Bellini quivers a little when he talks of colour, so we used to talk of our acts of love. Not like love poets! We were not the pawns of our fine words, but they were our instruments, which we used to make more precise our pleasures. And worse, according to the books, when we make love, I should ask him to make sure his seed, when it comes forth, is sent straight to the right side of my womb. It is up to me to twist my hips and direct it where it must go. But now I never move beneath him. I lie still and quiet, as if he makes love to my corpse (which I do believe he would prefer). So if, during the act of love, I were to move to point the seed – what would he think? That I’m full of lust again, intent on my own pleasures, and scarce a chaste wife?

  I go to the kitchen but the thought of food stirs in my belly a queasiness. I do not feel well. I know not what ails me, but I shake, hot and cold by turn. I feel all-overish with desire for something, as if I were with child. It seems not, from the other signs. My head hurts all the time. It is an especial kind of headache, arrowed in sharp throbs between my brows. It feels as if an invisible someone was sewing my brows together! I feel the needle stabbing in and out.

  The clamour of the town singes my hot brain. The bells insult me, wringing their clappers and shouting faith in the love of man. Minstrels bleat their songs under my very window. When I walk past the convent of San Zaccaria I hear nuns praying for new admirers, suitors pledging eternal untruths in gondolas, thralls of lovers breathing kisses into each other’s lungs like pairs of bellows. Lies! I want to scream. Pin up your lying mouths and leave me in peace!

  The maid brings me a mess of cucumber boiled to pulp and the broth of a gourd, much gingered, to loose my belly. I see she’s not well either. She says she has a fever and there’s definitely a lump on her neck. I cannot taste or smell things now – I who used to love flavours and perfumes so much! I lie on the bed all day waiting for the night; all night I lie sleepless waiting for dawn. I’m sticky as a blade of grass at sunrise, and my arms itch. I scratch and scratch. It seems that all my fears have oozed out of my body and lie restless on my skin.

  * * *

  Wendelin found himself passing Ca’ Dario yet again, on each of his nightly walks to the Dogana. Any trip to the promontory entailed passing the house, the old home of the cabinet, twice, coming and going. He did not know why he felt drawn to follow this itinerary, but it had come to feel that the Dogana was merely a coincidental stop en route and that his real journey was a forked one, leading both ways to Ca’ Dario.

  Knowing how his wife hated the house, he felt disloyal staring at it, but his footsteps slowed of their own accord as he approached it, and he stopped for long moments, gazing at its rear façade and into the thick bushes of its deserted garden. Each time he did so, he burned with shame, remembering the moment he had let the roach bite his wife and had made no move to help her. He had not yet found the moment to beg her forgiveness.

  Other walks, to distant parts of Venice, seemed to lead to Ca’ Dario.

  Why? It was vacant, soundless.

  Their marriage had become like that house, empty and haunted with the past, he thought. He missed the words that used to flow between them, a rich junket of two languages. Now his wife tried to speak to him with German words, which she pronounced badly, as if to confirm the distance between them.

  What possessed me to be so cold to her? he asked himself. He was too ashamed to raise the dreadful subject, let alone apologise. She never mentioned it herself, hid her bandaged hand if he approached, so that he’d started to think that she had absorbed the offence. Motherhood seemed to make women capable of forgiving anything. Perhaps even the roach had finally brought her to her senses about the cabinet. Looking into the blank windows of Ca’ Dario he wondered, for the hundredth time, which room it had once occupied inside the silent palazzo.

  He found it the most beautiful in Venice. Others raved of the fairytale traceries of Ca’ d’Oro or the Pisani Moretta, but for Wendelin, the simple straight lines of the old Dario house gave him more satisfaction than the fantastic creations of the celebrated new architects. It was, in his opinion, the most sensible-looking house in Venice, perhaps the only one. He hated the thought that it might be torn down to make way for a new palazzo, no doubt gaudy as the rest. Its present lack of ornamentation made it seem honest. A Ca’ Dario jewelled with porphyry and serpentine would look like a good woman painted up as a courtesan.

  One night, as he passed, he heard a high-pitched laugh, like that of a very old man or a very young girl. There was no light, no life to the house, but the voice continued, giggling and singing to itself, from somewhere within the ivy-encrusted walls. The happy snatches were punctuated with sharp thwacks followed by dragging groans in a deeper voice.

  ‘Who’s there?’ called Wendelin. ‘Are you lost? Are you trapped inside the walls? Is someone hurting you? Can I help you?’

  A peal of laughter greeted his words and the sound of something rustling, like a birch broom being dragged through leaves.

  Two small hands appeared above the wall, as if the little person were about to pull him or herself up. But they rested there, inanimate, like cuts of veal. From his distance Wendelin could not distinguish the age or the sex of the owner of the hands, any more than of the disembodied voice.

  He pressed his head against the wall, hoping to hear at least rustling among the bushes. He heard nothing, except the throb of his own pulse.

  Chapter Ten

  O Gods, if pity be among your raiment …

  Tear out from my heart this plague, this pestilence

  Padre Pio, my dearest father,

  I write to you because I must do something with my hands other than strangle one with the other.

  She is sick, my wife, my fate, my little Venetian fish, my heart, my …

  When I say ‘sick’ I mean to tell you that she lies at present on a bed from which I fear she may never rise. It started with a general weakness, and then a bad pain in the head. She became quite unlike herself in many ways … but it turns out that this was probably the early sign of her illness. She has contracted a plague they say was brought to Venice from Damascus. It takes a form that I shudder to describe to you. Our maid has already died of it.

  My wife’s face is perfect as a Madonna’s and when she sleeps she is sweeter than little Bambino Gesù in his manger, but when I lift her linen there are buboes on her swanlike arms, her thighs. They’re pointing out of her perfect skin like small red snouts, moist and hot. From her body, which normally smells of eggs and cream and vanilla, rises a stench of pestilence as if she were already rotting beneath the earth. When I reach for her hand, I find that the stem of a glass is less fragile than her wrists. She is moaning now. I must go to her.

  Some hours later

  I suddenly realise that I have started mourning her before she is even dead. At this, I’m struck cold with guilt. I had consigned her to oblivion while she yet lives. I did this selfishly, so as to put an end to my unbearable suspense, waiting for her to die. It was as if I had smothered her with a pillow before her time! I, who love her …

  Now I know that I was wrong. That smell in fact proves that she still lives. The plague does not feast upon corpses, but on living beings. It may not even be the plague, but some lesser ailment! And while she still breathes I am not alone on earth. I shall not even think that she might go into the silent world. It is certain that I cannot bear the thought of her extinction and my own continued existence at the same time. Not even to protect our child, who squalls at the keyhole while I write. I love him but I would not care to live without her. (Our son loves her with an unthinking love, and scrabbles at the door for her just as a veal-calf brays for its mother. I mean, he is loving her without a soul, as yet. I am loving her with my whole soul.)

  I want nothing to disturb her: I’ve ordered straw to be laid down in the street below so that the footsteps of the passers-by and the wheels of the carts are muffled.

  I have summoned the
Jewish physician Rabino Simeon to our home. I’ve heard good things of this man and now I watch him bend over her – a Jew in my house with his hands on my wife! But I shall not describe him to you, for I realise, and I am glad for it, that it means nothing – race, religion, caste, compared to the great singularity, the clear water, the nectarous feast of a true love between one man and one woman. That is, if it is love such as I bear for Lussièta and have with her, or used to, before she became unwell in spirit and body.

  The doctor is mixing the herbs now and he has placed black stones on her wrists, belly and forehead. I wonder if this is legal. I almost pray that this is witchcraft if only it is omnipotent.

  I close now; the doctor summons me, not with arrogance (as you and I were both told is the style and manner of his race) but with a gentle finger. What a good man he seems to me! My haunches have already risen from the chair as if my dream self is already at her side again. Whatever he says, I shall not hear it unless he tells me she will live.

  I cannot wait for him to leave so I may lay my own hands upon her again. This time I shall not let go … I cannot contemplate the domestical darkness and the loneliness that shall befall me and our child if I should lose her.

  * * *

  Rabino had been in his apothecary studio when Wendelin’s messenger arrived. Sosia was nowhere to be seen. Since the day he had come home to find the ashes of the ketubbà drifting over the kitchen table, the kettle boiling dry and the door in splinters with the lock hanging loosely off the wood, they had tacitly arranged things so that they were rarely at home at the same time. The house had looked as if vicious burglars had sacked it. Quietly, he cleaned and swept up the evidence of her anger. It had been expensive to replace the herbs and powders she had destroyed, but he bore it without reproach. He was not innocent in her regard.