The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  My friends tell me I’m well, as if this will make it so. Sure, my body is improved, for I can walk, in slow steps, with a score of rests, to the southern shore of Dorsoduro, and I go there when the sun is at its worst as if to scorch off the plague sores and the pain in my heart which is worse than the sores. I live but I am not pleased to be alive. I am lonely as a soldier’s grave by the edge of the sea.

  The Jew saved me, they say. He came each day to sit with me. He gave me drugs and laid rolls of eggs on my breast. But most of all he looked at me, as if he wished that I might live. I think that is what called me back to life.

  This was his strength, then, to wish me to live with his heart and mind. Not like my man who did not wish it at all, but just feigned it at times. Not like my son who would as soon have the teat of a wet-nurse as mine. Not like the cat who stayed in the sick room just to see what came in on my tray for he knew he would get it in the end.

  No, the Jew came to save me because he had a wish to, and this wish must have been strong, for here I am still, despite the Damascus Plague.

  I watch the waves jump round the three legs of the woodpiles accompanying them with small nods of my own head, like a mad wife. I knit my cares to each wave in the hilly water, sending them clambering and sliding to the horizon. But when I turn to leave, I know they will still be there, dog-craven at my feet, waiting to be taken home.

  ‘Sun is good,’ says the Jew when he hears of my hours on the shore. ‘But take care. Do not burn the fluid from your skin. It’s most unseasonably hot this autumn. I never saw weather like it.’

  He does not know that this is just what I wish to do. If the one plague could not kill me, then I choose a plague of sun to lay waste to me, till I become just a straw wife.

  My friend Caterina di Colonna told me, in confidence, that she has recently called the Jew in to attend to Felice Feliciano, who has caught a dose from one of his whores. That’s the price of buying love! He was taken peculiarly when staying at the Sturion and did not even know who he was, so high was the heat of his fever.

  I’ve never understood how Caterina could bear to touch him. With her looks, she could have anyone, a noble like Domenico Zorzi, yet she trifles with Felice. When I say so, she turns to me with her eyes wide open and says, ‘Lussièta, most of us put some time in – in the gutter. Did you never do something beneath your idea of yourself? And yet you could not stop yourself?’

  I think of how I hide the wax-lady, of how I murdered the poor printer Sicculus, how I dissembled with my man on our journey over the Alps, and I hang my head, unable to meet her beautiful eyes.

  I wonder what the Jew thought of Felice? Of course I may not ask! It’s hard to imagine the two of them together. From what Caterina says, Felice will not remember anything about it when he’s well and on his usual courses again, flirting with himself and everyone else like a courtesan who has not yet lost the pleasure of her work. If he should know that the Jew visited him in extremis, that would deflate his crest somewhat!

  And when he’s well, he’ll be round to my house again, to taunt me without seeming to do so. He has declared that the box from Ca’ Dario is the most lovely piece of wood in Venice, and I’m sure he did it just to see the flash in my eye. My man no longer mentions it, or praises it to the skies since I was sick, but nor has he rid us of it.

  I look at the woodpiles. They seem to me to be nailed in place with planks like a poor one’s coffin, the kind which stand in front of the church till some kind soul puts coins on top to pay the man to dig the grave.

  The big boats pass, full of gold or spice or some such stuff as folk think makes their life good. I think you must be glad of heart to love gold and silk, for I tell you that if you are wretched, then there’s no thing that shines or twists which can bring back joy. Just the one you love. He brings worth to all things – or, to tell the truth – he just lends it. If he looks away, does not love you more, then gold is but yellow dust and silk only worm shrouds.

  Some poor ones come to sit in front of me by the sea. Beggars, one of whom lacks legs. He wears empty hose with shoes sewn on the ends. They’ve brought him in a kind of stretcher. Despite that, there seems to be a woman who loves him. She reaches down to hold his hand, and kisses the top of his head. In that moment, I am jealous of them both.

  If anyone passes, they all look pathetic as can be, and hold out their hands for alms. If the person looks to pass without paying them a small tax, then the legless man looks mean and shouts ‘Miser!’

  They trap one man, who turns around and says, ‘How do you know I’m a miser?’ He looks ashamed to be thought a niggard.

  They laugh and say: ‘Show us we’re liars!’

  The man, on fire with blushes, does not see what they’re about and hands them coins that disappear into crevices in their clothes in an instant. This seems to buy them some peace, and for a while they desist from harassing those who pass by. They’re on holiday for half an hour, it seems.

  They point at the ships, chirp like seabirds that have heard of a whole loaf floating nearby. They move from the sun to the shade now, the heat is too fierce for them. I see that they wish to stay moist with love, even though they are poor.

  I, in the meantime, accept the full malice of the sun on my back, feel the sweat pooling in the crooks of my elbows and the backs of my knees.

  I let the sun hate me.

  I walk to the edge of the sea, where the seaweed dances under the water like blood spreading from a wound. I stand there and burn.

  Chapter Two

  What fears she endured in her fainting heart!

  How often did she grow more wan than the white sheen of gold?

  Wendelin’s joy was short-lived. His wife did not die but nor did she thrive. She roused herself from her bed and resumed her duties but she did not return to the flower of her confidence. Her fever had not cleansed her mind of doubt. She never mentioned the cabinet now and he assumed that the reality of her illness had cured her fantastical obsession with it.

  When she was out at the market, Wendelin went to their room and stood at her dressing table. He handled her brush and comb with reverent fingers. He winced at the amount of hair woven into the teeth of the comb and the bristles of the brush. He noticed sorrowfully how the white-gold had darkened in the past few months. In more ways than this, she was losing the lightness of her youth.

  For the first time, he began to regret the absence of anxiety at the beginning of their love. That sureness, the absence of rational thought then – he was paying for it now, it seemed. Their love had been unnatural in its naturalness; and an illusory rush of unearned happiness had deceived him. We skidded into love. I was still dizzy with it when we married.

  He should have known that nothing truly good comes without work and integrity. A love that drops into your lap will not stay there, he thought.

  His wife’s illness had left her fragile in body and spirit. He could see the destruction of her self-belief in her new, jerky movements, her diminished substance, the lack of lustre in her eyes. He was torn with a tender compassion for her losses, quite separate from his own self-pity.

  Since she was sick he had become more creative with his love letters. ‘I want to gather up your feet in my hands with my fingers circling your toes,’ he wrote. ‘I wish to lift the hair from your neck with shivers.’

  If he touched her feet though, that evening, he knew that she would flinch.

  If he said, ‘I love you,’ she would look pointedly at the floor.

  Shyly, he discussed the problems with Rabino Simeon.

  ‘It’s more usual that an experience so close to death leaves exhilaration in its wake,’ the doctor explained kindly. ‘But some poor souls grow melancholy, it’s true. No doubt she fears for the loss of her beauty.’ Rabino blushed, for he knew he had conjured the same image in his mind as Wendelin’s, of the plague sores on Lussièta’s shrunken abdomen, and that he was the only other man to have seen her thus.

  ‘Will the scars n
ot disappear?’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘My poor darling! I believe she trusts they will. How can I tell her? Or not tell her now that I know. I hate to have secrets from her.’

  Rabino took pity. ‘I shall explain it to her as gently as possible.’

  ‘Would you do that? You are too kind.’

  * * *

  His wife out of danger, Wendelin took to walking the streets again.

  After many nights of aimless wandering, he found a pattern that seemed to comfort him. It was in this circuit, between San Samuele to San Vidal, that he started to feel each night the hot breath of someone following him and hear footsteps echoing his own. He would spin around, and could swear that he saw the shadow of something slipping from the corner of the calle. But he never saw anything tangible. In deserted courtyards he heard things, suppressed laughter and whispered screams, words in a dialect that he did not understand, but seemed familiar, like the archaic words of an old nursery rhyme his wife sang to their son.

  Twice he saw the pupil of an eye pressed against the keyhole of a gate as he passed. Too unnerved to stare, he had hurried away. Afterwards he wondered at how he could have seen such an eye when there was no body visible through the iron palings.

  One night, walking near the Grand Canal, he began to feel dizzy with an inexplicable fear. His breath constricted in his throat. Venice loomed around him, a sudden wind banging the shutters and loosening the petals of window-box flowers that swirled like blood-tinted snow. Morsels of strangely formed clouds roamed restlessly across the sky, moonlight pouring through them or suddenly blacked out by them. In gardens hidden behind walls, he heard trees jangling. Taking a deep breath, he found himself choking on tiny feathers wrenched from windswept birds.

  Beneath all these noises beat the slow steady drumming, like a funeral procession, of unseen footsteps, which seemed without hurrying every second to draw closer to Wendelin. With neither a body nor a shadow to endow them with substance, they throbbed like a fever in his head.

  Absurdly, heavily, he started to run. The footsteps quickened. Wendelin lumbered on, lurching right and left into unknown alleys, praying that none should prove a dead end. At last the footsteps ceased.

  Wendelin felt he had gained a few dozen yards on his pursuer at last. He leant back in an alcove, feeling his heart smash to and fro against his ribcage. He waited for the footsteps to pass by, but the silence remained unbroken. He sagged his haunches to the ground, and covered his head, awaiting blows.

  Nothing happened.

  After some moments, he raised himself up and looked around. He emerged back into the street, and continued blindly on his way. He had no idea where he was.

  There was no mistaking the immediate resumption of stealthy footsteps behind him. Wendelin, faint with terror, felt the hairs rise on the backs of his hands. Dark spots, livid as bruises, invaded his vision, and he was no longer sure if he was fully conscious. He gagged as a noose was slipped around his neck and a damp blanket over his head. He was dragged into the shadows, winded, unable to see his assailant. He could smell him, though. An overwhelming stench of putrefaction assaulted his nose and belly.

  Inside the pall of the blanket he retched and coughed. Through its coarse weave he could make out dreamlike details. It seemed that the hand he was fighting off was gloved but he could see that an emaciated wrist protruded from it, marked and striated around the bone as if long buried. He realised that his attacker was much smaller than himself, and yet controlled him easily with a strength that was far superior.

  Wendelin fought until he felt himself losing the will to continue. He had made no impression on his gaoler who merely gripped him calmly in the gloved hands. Finally, numb with hopelessness, Wendelin was forced to relax in the arms of his assailant. Barely conscious, he fell back into the hollowness of the attacker’s breast. He thought vaguely of what would happen next, as he was sure to die. His mind filled up with beautiful images of his wife, of how she might learn to love him again after his death. He called out her name. In his mind a couplet from Catullus repeated itself over and over again: ‘No woman was ever loved as I loved her, no woman …’

  Then, as if Wendelin had spoken aloud, the stranger snarled hotly in his ear, dampening the blanket with his breath: ‘Leave off the filthy poetry, barbarian!’

  Wendelin tore himself out of his attacker’s arms and turned to face him. Giddy and gasping for air, swigging drunkenly on its black moisture, his vision only gradually returned to him. By then there was nothing there, in the corner where he had been held, just a shadow through which he passed his hands again and again, grasping at nothing.

  ‘Lack of sleep,’ he muttered. ‘This is what it does to you along with a surfeit of this town’s noxious vapours. I begin to have nightmares while I yet walk around.’

  * * *

  Why dead? Why not just harmed in some way? In what way did I cause this?

  Is it because, as the doctor tells me, the scars shall not leave my body? I did not much care about that until the thought struck me: does my man know? I could not forfend from asking and the Jew told me that he did. So he’s keeping it a secret from me. Along with what other dark secrets?

  The itch of those scars roams my skin on clawed feet, even where there are no scars. No place on my body is suffered to lie at peace, for the scars have signed my skin like a document that pledges: ‘This marriage is dissolved.’

  Is this why he stays out all night and creeps back to do that bad thing at dawn? When he has emptied his gland of poison into that drawer he leaves promptly and I am stupefied by a tiredness that strikes between the blades of my shoulders and fells me like a split sapling. I lie weak upon the bed, tears pumping from my limp eyes until they are trenched all round with water.

  I try to think on hopeful things. Lately I’ve been wondering about Paola and her mean words to me. Whore that she is (the red-haired man!), and much as I hate her, I own she has a point. Now that my own happy life is over I want to do some real thing to help people. No more rumours, no more secret whispers. I would like to see someone happy. It has occurred to me that the unhappiest person I know, outside myself, is poor young Bruno Uguccione.

  Bruno has become caw-pawed these days. I do not remember him dropping things before, and now he spills his beer on the table and stumbles on our doorstep. He’s developing the wrong way round, not from a great clunch of a fellow to a fine young man, but a fine young man to a sorry sort of creature. He used to be a skilled archer, he tells me, but I wonder if he could bend a bow now? He’s fuzzled with bad love, as bad as if he’d drunk bad wine and too much of it.

  The only cure for a bad love is a new love. This is a solution forbidden to me, for I could never love anyone but my man. However, in the case of Bruno, I can see a different ending. When I think of the two most attractive people in Venice, the faces that come to my mind straight away are his and that of Caterina di Colonna, my friend at the Sturion. Everyone loves her, just as they love Bruno, and yet she wastes the flower of her years taking care of strangers and consorting with the likes of Felice Feliciano. What if she were to have a young man of her own to cherish and rescue? She’s a few years older than him, but it seems he prefers women more mature than himself, perhaps because he was orphaned at a tender age.

  There are certain things I can do to put those two together, and it’s my feeling that this is all it would take, that their two sweet natures would most naturally graft. Their two shy needs might meet and breed a desire! As yet, they do not even know one another, and I aim to confect a meeting.

  Thoughts like this take me out of my sad self. But I return to my brooding soon enough. Since the plague left me I am given to imaginings. It takes nothing to feel myself back on the death cart. When I close my eyes I hear the rumble of the wheels.

  And why do I see rope? All shops, it seems, are full of it. It hangs and swings and coils in front of my eyes no matter where I look. I did not know before how much rope there is in this town.
To hold the beasts, to drag the carts, to tie the boats. The town swarms with rope. All these things, I know, have no harm to them. I say out loud: ‘There’s no harm in rope,’ and then from the edge of my eye I see a thing move like a bad worm and I feel pricks in my hands and cold in the bones of my back.

  When I went to the shop this day, I asked for all the things I needed, but then when the man asked: ‘Basta così? That’s all?’ a voice came from my mouth which said, ‘And a coil of strong rope, please.’

  I went to my purse to pay for the rope we did not need and there was no more coin in it.

  It has been like that for some time now.

  ‘Take it anyway, Signora,’ urged the shopkeeper. ‘Pay next week. Times like these, you never know when you will need a fine piece of rope.’

  * * *

  Bruno took a copy of Catullus to the Locanda Sturion.

  Wendelin had never forgotten the kindness of the landlady when he and Johann first arrived in the city. So, when Lussièta had recovered and he could think on other things, Wendelin asked Bruno to take Caterina di Colonna her presentation volume. It was not from the most expensive vellum quires; nor one of the costly ones printed on heavy paper. It was a good paper, crisp and translucent as the bone of a wren, from the first flower of the main run (before the ink began to smear a little). Wendelin had asked the most dexterous of the nuns he employed to rubricate it, and the cover was tooled in calfskin dyed with real lapis tints and studded with three semi-precious stones. This work had taken two months and by the time it arrived on his desk, Wendelin had almost forgotten why he’d commissioned it.

  It was his wife’s suggestion that Bruno should deliver it. She had roused herself from her listlessness long enough to say that Caterina and Bruno should become acquainted. Wendelin had not questioned her: it was such a pleasure to be able to accede to a simple wish of hers. A discretion born of shyness stopped him from explaining his wife’s motive to his editor.