The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘Take it to the Sturion,’ he requested Bruno. ‘You look pale, a little walk would do you good in this long-lived sunshine.’

  Tales of Caterina di Colonna’s loveliness had, of course, reached Bruno, though he had never seen her himself. He was curious to see her face, rumoured to give a strange illumination – though he expected little effect. Her eyes were said to be no less blue than the cover of the book he was carrying, yet he found himself interested only in the specification of their colouring, not in the effect that they might have on him. His love for Sosia had drained his ability to enjoy the beauty of other women. He could watch a pretty girl tie her sandal or bend low over her bucket so that the shadows reached down between her breasts – and feel nothing but regret that she was not Sosia.

  Walking towards the bridge, Bruno noticed Wendelin’s sister-in-law Paola talking intently to a pale red-haired man in front of the church of San Salvador. Her elegance did not attract him at all: he’d always wondered why Johann von Speyer had chosen her. Bruno found her somewhat overbearing, as did all the men at the stamperia, where she was frequently to be found, dispensing advice and, he had to admit, extremely useful information. No one knew how she could find out what she did.

  He put Paola and her mysterious errands out of his mind and descended the wooden steps, turning left into a boiling haze of sunlight and taking the few steps to the Sturion.

  At first glance, the landlady did not appear to match her legend. He came across her in the parlour, where she was bent over a ledger, writing. She was standing with her back to him, one leg a little forward, while she pored over the entries. Her neck was awkwardly inclined, her nose over-large in silhouette. But when she turned to face him, he saw that it was all true: the lamplight of her complexion, the honeyed golds of her hair, and the perfect are of her cheeks. He saw from her self-possession that she was educated in her own effect, conscious of the eyes of men and women constantly upon her. She countered them, as she met Bruno’s now, with a general and vague smile.

  She moved towards him gracefully.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  He did not stammer as he explained his errand, and perhaps it was at this – for she was accustomed to waiting patiently for coherent speech when her beauty had addled the tongues of men who first beheld her – that caused her to widen her own eyes and look at Bruno.

  He did not blush, but met her eyes as he handed over the book; perceiving simplicity and truth in her gaze, he lingered in the contact, not flirtatiously, and without embarrassment.

  He took his leave soon enough, and slipped out into the street. Finding his foot sliding through mud, for the tide had risen high that morning, he was soon already lost again in thoughts of Sosia.

  * * *

  Felice asked: ‘And what did you make of Caterina?’

  Bruno blushed, ‘She was pleased with the book.’

  ‘And pleased with you, too, I hear.’

  ‘In what way should she be pleased with me? We barely spoke at all. It’s a beautiful inn, Felice; I see why you like to live there. I would love to go there with Sosia, to sit in the dining room that faces the canal, eat good foods, and not be ashamed to be there …’

  Felice was irritated. The trouble was that this naïvety on Bruno’s part was absolutely genuine, which made his obsession with Sosia tedious as well as incomprehensible.

  He changed the subject deftly.

  When he was next at the Locanda Sturion, Felice remarked to Caterina, ‘So you’ve met young Bruno Uguccione?’

  Caterina said nothing. She nodded and smiled a little, as if he had offered her a compliment. But from the expression on her face – in that moment she looked like Bruno, the same grace of contour in the cheek, the same mauve shadow above the eye – Felice knew that she was thinking of the boy, as he had suspected she would, when he suggested to Wendelin that he send Bruno over to her with the book. Wendelin had smiled, asking, intriguingly, ‘You too? Lussièta also …’ But Felice had decided the matter too delicate to pursue with questions.

  Caterina turned away from him as soon as she could, on the pretext of stilling a shutter that flapped in the hot wind. But Felice knew that this slight motion indicated the end of all but respectable commerce between them. He watched her transformation, enchanted by its subtlety: now finger-tipping a butterfly out of the window, now farewelling a traveller, now nodding politely to Felice himself, Caterina was renewing her purity.

  Chapter Three

  Yes, the white-heat of the sun pulsed for you once.

  But today she doesn’t want you.

  And, stripped of your power, you must not want her either.

  Don’t keep chasing her escaping shadow.

  Don’t live in desperation like the poor and the damned.

  Be a survivor, be brave, don’t melt.

  Goodbye, girl. From now on unmelting Catullus

  will not ask for you, will not look for what doesn’t want him.

  Rabino, making his way through the streets, marvelled at the misery on the early-morning faces. He noted to himself, It’s always the unhappiest person in the house who rises earliest. As I do.

  His thoughts were on the printer’s melancholy wife.

  He wondered if she would be cheered by the news, which he heard everywhere, that Fra Filippo’s sermons on Catullus were beginning to have the opposite effect to the one the priest had intended.

  Fra Filippo should have known, Rabino reflected, that in Venice there was no better way to make a book irresistible than to condemn it. The more Fra Filippo ranted against Catullus, the louder he condemned its noxious obscenity and its salacious syntax, the more he now seemed to arouse the appetite of the public. The flavour of proscribed fruit is ever more delectable than that which is praised: after the initial swell of revulsion, Catullus had thus become the very thing in Venice.

  Men with barrows were selling Catullus on street corners. They came to the stamperia and paid in cash for the stock. At dawn, they started crying their wares with small phrases translated into Venetian dialect.

  ‘Give me a thousand kisses,’ rasped the hoary barrowmen, winking at the housewives. ‘Come, my sweet …’

  Catullus made no impression on the impassive faces of the scurriers-by. The hour of poetry had not yet come.

  During the mornings, the barrowfuls of Catullus remained unsold. But later in the day, at that needy time of evening when the dusk started to rot the crisp busyness in the air and the colours became languid, then people would begin to think of love, and think of Catullus. In the meantime, the barrowmen cried the books anyway, inscribing the audible memory of the poems upon the ears of passers-by, ready for that moment.

  Rabino picked up a copy as he passed and looked through it. His eyes caught on loving phrases and he thought of his friends Smuel and Benvenuta. What can be wrong with this? he thought. I can see that this book can satisfy the dumb wants and the secret yearnings of every man for tenderness. Then he strayed into the darker parts of the book, and his eyes fell on the lines,

  … He’s married a green girl

  who’s not even come into bud.

  Rabino snapped it shut and walked swiftly away, ignoring the affronted cries of the bookseller.

  In the time of this Catullus, the Romans, Rabino knew, had believed above all in the efficacy of cabbage, to treat dimness of the eyes, heartaches, and cancerous sores. A sprained ankle, according to the Romans, should be held in cabbage steam.

  Even in these modern times, Rabino fought against the local superstitions, picturesque but deadly. Gently, he insisted that placing a dead dove on the chest would not cure pneumonia, nor would eagle marrow make an effective contraceptive, and carrying the heart and right foot of an owl under the left armpit would never remedy the bite of a mad dog. Goose grease mixed with turpentine, he insisted quietly, would not cure rheumatism and earache.

  ‘No,’ he would say quietly. ‘It’s not true that eating a nightingale gives pleasant dreams.’ He denied that larks mus
t be driven away because if that bird should stare at a sick person it meant that he would never recover, but if it averted its eyes then the victim would die. ‘It’s simpler than that,’ he insisted, but in vain.

  Rabino trod the streets, tending to his patients. Most were poor or borghesi but some were nobles, disillusioned with the tinkering and simpering of the Venetian surgeons, and wanting the mystery of Levantine eyes and hands to cure or at least pay attention to their often imaginary ills. The rich Venetians adored to learn about new diseases and would soon be mimicking the symptoms with gusto.

  Boredom had lately forced them back to town from their cool retreats on the Brenta. The prolonged summer suited them ill. They were always tired, teased by their irritable libidos, their bowels disordered by eating only the most refined and richest of foods. Even the truffles must be grated for them and nothing tougher than a shimmering goat’s cheese might be served to them after supper. There were such quick shifts between their deep apathy and their shallow passions – quite often Rabino thought he’d been called in merely to consult on their boredom, as if his attendance on them, waiting for him and talking about him afterwards, gave them something to do.

  Their fatigue was incredible. They were always living under the threat of enthusiastic appointments made for social activities, but tiredness almost inevitably intervened at the last moment; sudden and dramatic onsets of extreme and potentially life-threatening tiredness. It was all very comical to Rabino at times, if it were not for that other vision in his head, of children dying for the want of a mouthful of milk such as the noble ladies fed their cats from their dainty fingertips while he examined a sore toe. The summons would have been urgent but more often than not the affliction of the toe turned out to be a dancing injury.

  Yet he loved them, his noble patients. They were held together, like the city, by a splendid idea of themselves. The lagoon yielded naturally only cockles, crabs and a few fish: Venice had fashioned herself entirely out of her imagination, and in that she had allowed every excess. As she was such an imaginary city it was small wonder that she succumbed so readily to imaginary illnesses, not to mention the vast number of her citizens who considered themselves cursed or bewitched!

  And he would depart almost regretfully into the darker, narrower streets where the women rarely sat if they could stand, and rarely stood still if they could be running somewhere, the better to forage for food to nurture their spindly children and their pale, overworked husbands.

  Rabino knew all kinds of women in Venice, rich and poor, and he’d come to judge them not on their wealth but their proximity to his ideal of womanhood. There was none quite like the wife of Wendelin von Speyer, a woman so transparent with love that she might be a window into Paradise.

  She seemed so dispirited. He could not understand her pessimism when he had seen in her all the best things in life, those that were denied to him.

  * * *

  The sky teases us with early morning mist, as if it intends to bless us with a little rain. But by the eighth hour the soft wet air is scorched away and we know ourselves cursed with the fires of hell for yet another day. At eventide, sometimes, a few doubtful raindrops puncture the arid sky, but they soon change their minds and the night comes on dry as ashes.

  Through all this heat, the kind Jew comes back to see me. I am well by all the signs, but he still comes each day. Not at the same time, at a set hour, but when he passes our way on his rounds. It’s always when my man is gone from the house and from this I see that the Jew does not wish to be paid. He comes and looks on me with brown eyes all moist with what he feels. I know not exactly what he feels, for he is yet strange to me, but I know he feels it strongly when he sees me.

  When I talk to the Jew about my state, I try to keep my voice steady but it goes tottering off into the high notes. He has this way of baring my feelings. With him, there’s no defence: there’s no need of any. Still, it’s bizarre to have him reach inside my soul like this, to make himself at home with all the most secret and tense things I hold inside. Not all, of course, for I do not tell him about my fears or about the cabinet and what it holds. Instead we talk of polite things, like my man’s work. He observes that Catullus seems a great success in the town, and I tell him that yes, at last the folk of this town are taking those poems to their hearts.

  ‘So this is good news for you and your husband?’ He smiles. I nod.

  My heart is torn, very quietly.

  It could be that it’s wrong for the Jew to come here so much and for me to let him. It could be that folk talk ill of us. But I find I do not care now. Since I was sick and went on that cart (I still know not if this was in my head or in my life) I feel bound by no rule save that which spares me pain.

  The hours when the Jew comes are times with less pain, you see. We sit close but not so close as to touch and we say very little. The new maid leaves us and for once she thinks to close the door so we are there, just our two selves, with just our breath in the blistered air.

  Sometimes I tell him the tale of my life, of my man, of our journey over the Alps. When at last the talk fades to nothing I look in his eyes and he in mine for a long time. I lose my sense of myself, of this house, of my place in the world.

  I feel that all is black like the world beneath the sea, as if someone ate all the words. When he rises to go I am calmer than before.

  When he leaves my house I hear the bad calls that follow him in the street. ‘Dirty owl’ they yell as he makes to pass. I hate to hear it. They call him ‘owl’ for that bird wakes in the night. The bird of the dark is like the man who does not know the truth of God – in other words, the Jews, who deny Jesus.

  But when their young ones fall ill or the plague comes to call, then they forget their bad words. Then it’s ‘Send for the Jew! Fast as you can!’

  * * *

  Sometimes he went away to the mainland on a tour of duty with some other Jewish physicians. But these days the roads that took him away from Venice always seemed to have an adverse camber. Carriages veered with their doors hanging open like the broken wing of a pigeon. Rabino found the landlocked cities stagnant and their people but half-alive.

  He remembered the words of the printer’s wife, recalled her hatred of the land and her homesickness for Venice on that terrible pilgrimage to the North. Her words were so fervent they had perhaps infected his own perceptions. He smiled fondly, remembering her vehemence. ‘Land! – Floor for cows, the French say,’ shed declared. ‘Give me marble and stone, say I, floating on water!’

  Outside Venice Rabino too now suffered crises at certain times of the day. As the light faded in the evening, he felt a crawling under his flesh and an unbearable sense of sadness. It was painful for his nerves to hear orchards shuffling in the wind and to see the clouds roaming the sky as if looking for somewhere to rest. Seeing a long shadow cast down a bush-furred hill, arched like a body in rigor mortis, he longed for home, though not for the home he really had, the comfortless house he shared with Sosia … he longed for the home of his imagination, a wife who ran to greet him and kissed him decently on the cheek in front of their children, who crowded around their knees and leapt up like puppies for their own embrace.

  In his fantasy, which he embroidered a little on every journey, he looked up at her – she was as blond and small as Sosia was dark and tall – and intercepted her Madonna-gaze upon their baby. His imagined wife bestowed a little of that gaze on him, too, and he drank it in like a warm tisana on a cold morning, feeling it fill his lungs and stomach with goodness and a nourishment for which he’d been starving since he could remember. Before Sosia had come to despoil his celibacy, he had always been alone.

  Then he remembered by what unwholesome means he’d obtained the wife he had, and bowed his head.

  I do not deserve what I desire.

  Lately he had succumbed to a strange ailment of his own. It would start in the last days he spent in Venice, with blurred sight and headaches that intensified when he arrived on the ma
inland. Since the start of his hours of dark seclusion with the printer’s wife he’d grown hypersensitive to light and sound. The red exclamations of the poppy fields stabbed his eyes. Worst of all, his vision faded as a layer of skin formed over his pupils so that he could not bear to open his lids during the hours of daylight. He performed his duties by touch, like a blind man, listening more carefully than he had before. He returned to Venice half-blind and weak in his limbs.

  The only cure was to live a murky hermit existence in the house at San Trovaso. He rationed himself to an hour or so in the light of a veiled lamp with patients every day until the surfaces of his eyes healed and the dead skin dropped off in tiny little flakes. Only the printer’s wife, who seemed to need it so much, received his attention as before.

  * * *

  They say we are made of four things – wet, dry, hot, cold, and when we are sick, it is because one of these is out of tilt.

  Men are born hot and arid, but wives are too wet by nature, they say, unless their men keep them warm and dry with acts of love. If not, we grow bad and warped, which we show by teasing, nagging and arguing.

  But if this is true, why is this town so wet, and yet so good?

  This town is more wet than all things.

  Of course the men do their best to dry the town. Each year they pull more land from the sea – to do this they send down in the mud long poles so tight-packed that there is no air at all down there. And more than this, they build in all parts. Huge palazzi and towers, each more grand than the next. It used to be that we heard the song of larks all day, now it’s the smash of hammers and the flirt and grunt of the workmen with their barrows and back-loads of stone. Venice grows more beautiful, I less so.

  This town was always fine but now it looks like a rich maid all decked out to wed, in lace of stone.

  Dry, wet, hot, cold.

  I was all these things, when I wed my man.

  I think of the Jew, who wants to help me, but no one ever cured a torn heart with physician’s healing. And the poor Jew is in need of help himself. His eyes have glassed over and he does not see well these days. He still comes to me to ask me how I am, and to talk awhile. He gazes vaguely in the distance, but sits a little closer to me, as without the clear sight of his eyes he finds he does not hear so well.