The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  I even gave him some of my salve which I make for the eyes of my man, that are often pink when he returns late at night after many hours of squinting at the proofs. Each fresh mixing contains a drop of the oil that flows from the remarkable fountain of Zorzania in Armenia. The merchant at Rialto assured me that it would cure even the most scabrous cutaneous distempers.

  I spread the salve on the Jew’s lids myself. At first I felt a sudden flush of shame that I had touched the private skin of a man to whom I was not wed. That he’s a Jew worried me not at all, for I feel he is closer to me than many of my own race. Men like Felice Feliciano, for example! Boh!

  I could not help but notice that the doctor’s lids are more delicate than my man’s; they are soft and yellow like vellum.

  The Jew says my salve has done him good. I’m glad to be of this tiny service to him, who has helped me so much, even though I do not tell him the whole tale of what ails me. That is confidential to my man and myself, and I shall not betray him by talking of it.

  I have lately trusted the Jew with one secret, though. I’m still troubled by the wax-woman so I showed her to him.

  He turned her over in his hand. I saw that he jumped a little inside his skin when he saw the ‘S’ or ‘5’ marked on her back with nails and hair. I guessed from this they must be very evil symbols.

  ‘What do you think she is?’ I asked, though I’d divined it all too well.

  ‘You found her at Sirmione, you say? I think she’s very old, from the look of her, perhaps from Roman times.’

  ‘So they had witches, even then? Who made such things?’

  ‘It was a little different, I believe. I’ve read somewhere that figures like this were love charms. The person who loved and was not loved’ – and here he stopped and looked at me with such great feeling I feared he’d guessed my secret - ‘would put the figure in the fire to make it dissolve to liquid. This was supposed to melt the heart of their desire’s object. Some people hold that ancient figures like this one have more power than the ones made today. Certainly she’s more finely crafted than anything I’ve seen before.’

  ‘How do you know of these things? Have you studied witchcraft? Do you believe …?’

  I was most surprised to think that the Jew might believe in witches.

  He sighed: Tor myself, no. Too many of my patients think such things work wonders, and spend their money on them, when a good meal of wholesome food would help them so much more. I’ve had to learn about them only to make myself credible in refuting them. I’ve been presented with amulets and figures like this so many times, as an excuse for why they haven’t been to the apothecary for the herbs they really need. It’s quite dispiriting.’

  He handed her back to me quite hastily, as if he found the feel of her unpleasant. This reminded me of something else. I led him up the stairs to my man’s room, and showed him the box, studying his face.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ I asked him, in a careful neutral voice.

  ‘The piece of furniture?’ he asked, and it seemed that he was still distracted with thoughts of the wax-woman.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s unusual,’ he said, and I could see he struggled to know what to say.

  ‘Not evil?’ I persisted. I stroked my nose hard to push the tears back into my eyes.

  ‘Only humans are evil, or their acts. Or their thoughts,’ he said. I found this a shallow, avoiding sort of answer. Then I feared he thought me tainted in the wits for asking what I did. Soon after he left, I realised then that he had not helped me as I wished to find a way to rid myself of the little figure.

  I put her safely back in the cat’s boudoir under some silk scarves and considered what I’d heard. I did not want to put her in the fire. That would make her magic alive again after all these years. Then what things might happen? Who knows whose love was nailed inside the kidneys, liver, spleen and heart of that lady from Roman times, and why? If I burned her, why, she might come back to haunt me!

  ‘And what is she to do with me?’ I asked aloud.

  Now I am more afraid than ever of the wax-woman, and know I must think of some way to turn her into nothing, without making her powerful again. It’s too hard for me to work out, like a toy puzzle for a child who has not all the pieces.

  In the end, it’s easier to think on my usual problems, sad as they are.

  I comb my hair while I read the notes my man has written and left inside the box for me.

  One rake through my scalp and there are thick tendrils of gold on the ivory. Dark gold. My hair is more dark each day. It used to be white-blonde, sun-blonde, cream-blonde. Now it’s ash-blonde, dirty-blonde and if it goes on like this, soon it will scarce be fair at all. In this heat my curls should grow white as lambswool. Instead, each day, they darken like my hopes. I pluck them off my comb, and wrap them in a rag each night, for we believe in this town that every person has one hair on their head, which, if a swallow plucks it, dooms him to eternal perdition. I hide the loose hairs away from greedy birds.

  My man writes, ‘Your skin is like milk, pale as a feathered angel from heaven, as if you were too good for this world.’

  Chapter Four

  When that schemestress Venus had me under thumb,

  this is how she set fire to my heart,

  made it boil like the bowels of Etna or

  the hot springs of Malis,

  blurred my eyes with spaceless tears,

  washed my cheeks with heart-rain.

  There is love that needs tending like a rare plant in an arboretum, where the merest cool breath of air can render it extinct. There is love that thrives on hard rock like a cactus, and the more difficult it is to find the moisture of affection, the deeper that kind sends its roots down. There is love that thrives best on nothing but its own imaginative constructs. And those are far more delectable than anything on offer in the real world. That kind of love is the most hardy, and that is what Bruno bore for Sosia.

  Felice urged him to leave Venice for a while.

  ‘Let’s get out of this heat. Come, let’s shoot some birds, like the old days,’ the scribe urged, unable to resist a soft caress down Bruno’s thin face.

  But Bruno always shook his head. He could not imagine himself outside the city now. He walked obsessively, often in circles, though always tethered to the places where he and Sosia had been together.

  Bruno, making his way to the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, found a service was in progress. The white-robed priest swayed his musical censer like a very serious child with a rattle.

  This was where he was to meet her this evening, not at his apartments. No physical intimacy was to be allowed then, he noted bitterly. She could do without that, from him, today. No doubt that meant she had plans to refresh herself elsewhere, or had come from someone else.

  The steps were occupied by the haunches of a foreign legless beggar who trapped the worshippers with his empty hose. He flung the slack tubes upwards and when the wooden pattens sewn into the ends of his stockings dragged them to the ground, they tangled up the legs and shoes of his victims. Bruno gave the man a coin, and was permitted to pass. When Sosia finally arrived, he was standing just outside the church, gazing in.

  He said to her, by way of greeting, to show her how little he had noticed the hour shed kept him waiting, ‘Have you heard about the new Ca’ Dario that is to be built?’ This was a good opening; it caught her by surprise.

  ‘Hello, Bruno,’ she smiled, acknowledging his advantage. ‘I hear your Catullus is the cheese in the town now.’

  They stood together in the doorway, like the lesser shepherds at the nativity scene, looking upwards at the cupolas where cadaverous painted saints unfurled gold scrolls and at the dark angels of mosaic in the gold architraves; at the terracotta and cream marble chessboard floor, the patinated silver chandelier like the tendril of an exotic fern growing downwards, its candles splayed out at awkward angles from it like the pistils of a stamen. Priests were chanting the lit
urgy, old voices stained with faith like dark teak wood.

  The legless beggar crawled over to them and grabbed at Sosia’s feet, gibbering at her.

  ‘Filthy Croatian,’ she spat.

  Bruno caught her hand, and remonstrated, ‘The poor man only wants to speak to you.’ He imagined some elaborate flattery in the mouth of the beggar.

  ‘To prdio, to govorio, njemu sve jedno, whether he farts or speaks, it’s all the same to him.’

  ‘You know him?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘I know his accent.’ She raised her voice so the beggar could hear her every word. ‘Da moè zavukao bi mu se u dupem, he’s a slimy character – if only he could, he would climb into the arsehole.’

  She kicked him and he moaned. Bruno saw that she had slit the old man’s cheek with the edge of her heel. He leant forward with concern, his arm on Sosia’s wrist. She did not resist. The beggar’s wound was not deep but it filled vividly with blood. He spat at Sosia: ‘Poljubi mičelo kurca!’

  Sosia laughed, ‘That’s a good one!’

  ‘What did it mean? Is that Serbian?’ Bruno asked, anxiously.

  ‘Yes, it’s Serbian. And it means “Kiss my prick’s forehead.”’

  Bruno smacked his hands together at the beggar, to make him desist, as if he were a cat or a small child. The beggar replied with a crude motion of his thumb.

  ‘Ever the master of the ineffectual hand-gesture!’ Sosia sneered at Bruno. She turned on the beggar and asked him, in a neutral tone, where he came from. When he answered, she spat. Bruno, interpreting the exchange although not understanding one word, turned to Sosia.

  ‘But I thought you came from—?’

  ‘Yes, I do, but nowhere is safe from his kind of scum, they come everywhere. Did you never hear of the war in Dalmatia here? Is no one interested in what happened to us?’

  ‘We hear very little; the merchants at Rialto know most of what happens, but only really talk about what is of interest to them. You could explain it to me, what happened to you and your family; tell me about it, Sosia—’

  ‘No.’

  To his surprise, she had taken his elbow and was steering him down the street towards his apartments.

  It was what he’d wished most of all, but there was too much pain pent up inside him. Instead of trotting obediently at her side, he turned on her.

  ‘You always terrorise me into hiding what I feel.’

  In the silence that followed, they walked towards his rooms. Bruno counted their paces to distract himself from his painful thoughts. By the time they arrived at the doorstep, however, his indignation had escaped that containment. He opened his mouth to speak and she broke away from him, running up the stairs, tearing at the ribbon of her cloak.

  ‘You want too much. Won’t this do?’ she asked.

  Her clothes were discarded in a moment and she stood before him naked. Her face distorted with anger, she turned on him, a finger stabbing the air.

  ‘What would you do for me, then? Would you die for me? Would you kill me if that was the better path?’

  ‘What kind of questions are those, Sosia?’

  ‘I feel as if you make some kind of emblem of this love you say you have for me. It’s all about your feelings, nothing about mine, that’s why I feel it so heavily. I want you to think of me, for once, about how I feel. It would do you good.’

  ‘That’s so unfair. I think of nothing else but you. I build my life around you.’

  ‘I never asked you to do that.’

  ‘Sosia, can you not feel how much it hurts to be just a fragment of your life?’

  She looked thoughtful.

  ‘It feels just a fraction of alive.’

  He turned away from her, his head filled with hurtful images. He pictured her looking up from some embroidery when Rabino came home, or filleting a fish for him and lifting the humid shiny flesh onto her husband’s plate. He imagined her, in the black of night, rolling against Rabino’s back in the bed they shared and staying there in the indentation she had made in his slack elderly flesh, as if she were the missing rib trying to push its way back inside Adam. This was what marriage was about. No matter how evilly she spoke about Rabino, or how often she betrayed him, Sosia stayed married to him: this was the proof of the contract’s binding power.

  He followed her into the room, made love to her in miserable silence. She left without a word. He whispered to the empty room: ‘Goodbye, Sosia.’

  He heard her footsteps down the stairs and then the street door click closed. She had not even bothered to slam it.

  Outside lightning scratched feebly at the sky, trying to release the moisture. Darkness inserted itself surreptitiously, as if ashamed over itself. It ambushed the sky by degrees, only clapping its black hand over the light at the last moment, when the palazzi, like bone-white sponges dipped in ink, crumbled their colours away.

  * * *

  I saw a most disgusting thing today at Rialto. It was one of those merbabies that the fisher folk are always talking about. At last one has been brought in for us to see and judge. It turned my belly to look on it: a tiny creature with the head and torso of a human baby and the rear end of a fish.

  It lay on the salt at a fish stall, and next to it was another thing found in the same net. This was a large rat that had been sewn, with the most exquisite stitching, into a baby’s shroud. These two horrors were found in the usual place of the dead babies, near Sant’ Angelo di Contorta.

  The sweaty crowd gazed on them, fascinated, full of theories. The most obvious is that this is the work of a foreign witch. Others were insisting that this merbaby had been washed in from a distant ocean after some accident to its mother. An old fisherman, prodding the horror with salt-crusted fingers, insisted it was just an ordinary baby. He said a fish had tried to eat it, swallowed half and choked on it.

  I turned away, sickened, myself, and walked home sad and slow as a gathering teardrop. Ghost tales are one thing, but such evil things, real and visible, have no charm for me.

  On the way I passed Paola – what an outrage! – talking to the red-haired man so anyone might see her. She saw me from the corner of her eye and did not even blush, so brazen is she. With a flash of some base metal under the hoods of those falcon eyes, she even motioned with her hand that I should come and be presented to her lover. I could see from her finger pointing at me that she was telling him who I was. I pursed my lips and marched on, pretending I had not seen her. I would not give a glass of salt water to know who he is.

  As usual, I went to sit in front of my mirror and look at myself. I look like a child who has aged too fast from hearing too many monstrous fairytales. I turn my neck in fear from this ghost-face but when I steal one more look it’s still there, full of whiteness.

  I ask the Jew what has happened to my hair. He says that he has not seen anything like this before. It’s not natural, he says, and I can see he longs to reach out and touch it, just for a moment, as if the good feelings in the tips of his fingers might bleach it back to its old beauty.

  ‘It could be something you are eating,’ says the Jew. ‘Try to remember what you’ve eaten, and tell me next time I come. Some foods have naturally darkening pigments in them.’

  It’s not the food; it’s the misery that blackens my hair. I remember how my man used to watch me brush it. After a while he could not bear it any more and would come up behind me and enfold me in his big arms, hold me so tight my bones ached and I snuffled for breath. He would do a great damage to my misery if he would just once do that to me again.

  Then I would be blonde again, naturally, no matter what I put in my mouth.

  ‘Not natural,’ I say over and over to myself.

  It was not long before I started to think that this new dark hair was the first sign that my man was trying to do me ill.

  Chapter Five

  What have I done, or what have I said,

  that you sent so many scurvy poets to destroy me?

  At last, the weather broke. Ice storms
and snow suddenly replaced the searing heat, as if autumn had been forsworn entirely.

  At first the Venetians stood in the freezing rain, mouths open, letting the large drops crack like quails’ eggs on their heads, and the water run down their throats. But the cold quickly grew unbearable and they bustled into the taverns, enjoyably lamenting the unspeakable weather, taking out all the old complaints from last winter, dusting them down, and finding them almost inadequate to describe the infidel clouds, gusts, showers and treacherous crusts of ice on the streets. Soon a robe of frozen ermine clad the town in a silence crisped with nostalgia for the former blue-and-white damask skies.

  Back on Murano Fra Filippo was still fulminating like an abandoned pot of oil on the fire.

  Hunched over his desk, he dipped his pen to scrawl another tract against Catullus, but let the ink drop in useless spots upon the page. Outrage had not served him well lately. Nor had sending out his thugs on to the streets at night.

  The Venetians had heard all he had to say about printed books and were looking for entertainment in other places. Only a few members of his congregation, nuns mostly, had stayed faithful to him. When he could number his parishioners on his hands one morning, Fra Filippo knew it was time to change direction.

  He did not like the look of his reduced flock: he performed better to a large and anonymous crowd. The intimacy of the tiny congregation embarrassed him. One woman in particular made a point of sitting under his nose and looking up into his nostrils as he spoke. A shiny little sow of a woman, she sat heavily in her chair, and never moved a limb while he spoke. But she followed each word of his raptly, whispering them to herself under her breath.

  He made enquiries of the piglet, as he thought of her. Ianno came back with the intelligence that she arrived by boat from Sant’ Angelo di Contorta. None of the other parishioners knew her name, but it seemed she was a nun.