The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘Poor Gentilia,’ he said aloud. ‘She doesn’t even know that Sosia has been disgraced, just as she predicted.’

  He thought of his sister as he’d last seen her, muttering to herself, a dark skein of someone’s hair wrapped so tight around her finger that its tip had grown blue. He’d tried to detach the hair but she fought him, vicious as a polecat, and he had backed away, called for nuns to help her and slipped out of the convent.

  As the morning light fortified the shadows of his room, he noticed disturbances. Sosia had been there, he realised. She must have come the previous day, before he came home from work to the dire news about Gentilia. There were signs of her everywhere, and a chemise he recognised on the floor beside the bed.

  ‘She’s used her key; brought another lover here!’ he cried out. ‘Perhaps whoever it was who gave her that copy of Catullus!’

  Then he noticed the strange silence of the room. In the blank shock that followed the news about Gentilia he had forgotten about his sparrows. They were not singing. He rose from the bed pallet and walked to their cage. The birds lay among the seeds, their necks awkwardly ranged, their eyes glassy, their beaks open as if in one last desperate song.

  She had not bothered to close the door to the cage. He reached in and took the little corpses out, one in each hand. He went back to the pallet and lay there, with the birds placed delicately on his breast.

  * * *

  Last night there were knocks on the door in the dead of night and whispering. This morning he came back just briefly and left tight-lipped for work. I pretended to be sleeping when he came to kiss me goodbye, but I leapt out of bed to watch his stiff walk down the icy calle. No time to leave a letter, thank God. No doubt the bad business in the night explains the hunch in his shoulders – perhaps he’s called in help for his plan to do me harm. Now I have a new thought.

  What will he do to our son? Will it be the same thing? A slow death by soft hate, hid as love? Or does he love our son more than me because the babe has his own blood in him, the sap and marrow of the North?

  Our son lies at present in his crib with a thumb in his mouth and four pink fingertips splayed up with one on top of his nose. His eyes are shut, his lids blaze like pearls in the waxlight and the shadows of his each lash stretch like arrows to his cheek. He sucks on his fingers and mumbles some miserable little whines in his sleep. I think he feels what goes on here, poor babe, though he cannot understand it yet.

  I raised my voice against him this morning, for which I am most sorry. He’d crawled into the boudoir of the cat and taken from the heap of scarves the little wax-woman from Sirmione the thieving beast had hidden there.

  I was sewing at the table, with my back to him. I heard him coo and cry with pleasure. I did not turn around. I thought he was playing some happy game with the cat, who will oblige in this way if he’s in the mood for it. Then I realised that the cat was in fact out of the house on some private business of his own. So I jumped up at the same moment my son began to choke.

  A piece of the wax-woman had stuck in his throat. I turned him upside down and beat on his back till the small wet gobbet shot out on the floor. It was only then I saw that he’d not tried to eat her, but had crumbled her to tiny pieces on the floor. Just one piece had gone inside his mouth.

  Little crumbs of white wax lay all around me, none bigger than a fly. The nails that had pierced her kidneys, liver, spleen and stomach lay at odd angles, like a beggar’s crutches thrown down in the snow.

  Well, I thought when I stopped shaking, so long as the baby is safe, this is perhaps the best ending for the wax-woman. My son, in his innocence, has turned her to dust, and not unleashed her magic upon us. It was the only way to rid me of her. Bless him!

  With my son still clinging at my side, like a monkey’s child, I cleaned up all the wax and nails, brushing them into an old linen bag. I walked out of the house to the canal and emptied the bag into the water that was grey and dimpled with sleet. The wax scattered like tiny blossoms in all directions, the fragments torn away from one another by the waves. A swoop of gangster sparrows, thinking them breadcrumbs, hovered over the pieces for a moment, and a couple tried their savour, but, finding it unpalatable, disappeared. Meanwhile the crumbs of wax spread out so I could not hold them all in my eyesight and suddenly they were so diffused that they were invisible, gone to do goodness knows what to goodness knows whom, or to sink without trace.

  Throwing something in the water is just like publishing it, I suppose.

  The baby still sobbed quietly, so I kissed and kissed and kissed the smile back on his face and carried him upstairs to the loft, for there are many things up there for him to look at.

  Most times, all I need to do to make him laugh is open the top of a chest or a drawer and say ‘Eccolaqua! Look what’s in here!’

  It might be just a spoon or a sheet, but the surprise of its sighting and the wonder in my voice is enough to catch his imagination and make him joyous again.

  Now I spend some part of each day in the room in this roof where I keep my old quilts and sheets. I go up there and sit among the pretty dresses I used to wear when I was a loved wife, the shimmering sky-blue Bombazine cotton from Armenia and the pink silk stole from Milan. The smell of lavender comes up my nose and makes me want to drowse and dream on those prodigiously fine days before the paint was dry on our marriage, before we took it on that dolorous journey north.

  Outside it blusters so the snow grows wings and flies around, and the waves bay in an ugly way at the riva.

  My man never comes up here. Except at the centre, the roof is too low for his head. I am safe. That makes me so happy, as does the scent of dried lavender, so that I feel light as a child in the head. In the sifted ruins of our marriage, of our life together now gnawn with fear and doubt, this is what remains: a son, a cat, one quiet, sweet-smelling room with strong dark beams above it.

  He has stayed later even than usual at the stamperia tonight. What business keeps him there I have no idea. All day I’ve felt the air more charged with fear and strain than ever before. And mystery. I brood on more things as the time drags on my hands.

  * * *

  Domenico Zorzi was in the Broglio by the Doges’ Palace when he heard the news in passing. He was conducting a supple piece of business with two merchants who had come, as they all did, to petition the red-robed senators for their patronage in various wise and unwise enterprises. As Domenico shook hands over a land acquisition on the mainland, he heard out of the corner of his ears a whispered phrase, ‘And she’s a doctor’s wife, a Jewess, of course. The lions have been talking about her for ages. I think they’ll burn her, because it’s a nobleman she did it with.’

  Domenico felt his bowels lurch inside him. He stumbled against a column. ‘Forgive me,’ he said to his clients, ‘I have not eaten today.’

  ‘Go, eat!’ they urged him. ‘You must eat! Pasta with butter and white bread first, and nothing cold, it does such damage to the stomach. Then a little sleep.’

  Domenico slipped through the gates of the Doges’ Palace and did not quite run to the office of the Avogadori. He told the smirking clerk: ‘I believe that there’s a case against the Jewess Sosia Simeon. I would like my copy.’

  As he suspected, the Avogadori had anticipated a certain amount of interest in this case. The accusations had been printed a hundred times on good paper. He put his hand out of his red sleeve to grasp the thick sheaf, recognising Wendelin von Speyer’s typeface.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said smoothly.

  He opened the pages, searching for his own name, his eye snagging on words like ‘bestiality’ and ‘diabolical will’. With his lawyer’s eyes, and his lover’s heart, he started to read in detail. With this scrutiny came calmness and a cold, penetrative anger. The tumult of his feelings for Sosia stilled to a single beat, a heavy heartbeat, of hatred.

  How cretinous he had been! First, to think that he himself might be the victim-nobleman of the accusations. Of course, in that case,
he would already have been taken by the Signori di Notte, and not walking around freely. But also, of course, how vain of him to think that he might be Sosia’s only noble lover!

  Bitterness swarmed inside him. She may be damned, he thought, for all I care.

  How generous he had been with her: clothes, money, books – even a first edition of the Catullus poems.

  ‘My God!’ he whispered. ‘It’s that book they found with her. It’s mentioned in the charges. Will they trace it to me?’

  The document had ruined him. He placed his finger in his navel and pushed. He wanted Sosia and now he also wanted her badly hurt. The pain that had begun to haunt his genitals in the last few days was nothing to the agonies he wished on her.

  And if she were first to run the gamut of the toys in the torturers’ arsenal, he shrugged, what of it? I know her; she won’t tell them where the book came from. He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, and running through their grim repertoire in his head. For Sosia, he imagined, in order, subtraction of the tongue, blinding in one eye, breaking on the wheel.

  It did not occur to him to intervene on her behalf.

  When her body was mangled he might finally learn not to want it any more.

  * * *

  Felice Feliciano heard about it at the stamperia, where the workers were huddled together over the news like a group of seagulls around a fresh loaf dropped from the baker’s boat. They’d taken possession of the story and were worrying it between their teeth. They’d claimed it for their own, for they had the glamour of knowing the lady herself. At least by sight. For how many times had she come here looking for Bruno with that yellow light in her eyes?

  ‘And sodomy too,’ he heard hissed under someone’s breath as the vivid account came to a close. It had not taken long to divulge the information, even embroidered with the private fantasies of each man. For months they’d nursed these thoughts inside them when she sauntered in and out of the studio, arrogant as a thin she-cat in season.

  Felice’s first interior thought was of Sosia’s buttocks adorned with many practice circles in green ink, like the eyes of so many serpents.

  Felice thought: To write in green, first seek in the months of March and April the blooms of the Iris and pound the three pendant leaves well and draw off the juice. Add alum. Soak a strip of linen in this liquid and leave to dry. When you wish to draw off the green colour, take a cockle shell together with some lye and the frothy white of an egg, and press the said cloth well until the green colour comes out, and write with it, and it will look well.

  ‘Felice,’ stammered Morto, ‘we must help Bruno.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Have you read the charges?’

  Felice picked up the printed sheet and scanned it quickly. His brows met.

  ‘But this is not about Sosia,’ Felice muttered. ‘What’s going on?’

  Chapter Two

  It’s because of you. My mind’s gone,

  reduced to what it does to serve you,

  so that now I could neither love you

  if you were to become good

  nor stop loving you

  no matter what you do.

  Now I know what it was that disturbed our night.

  I went to Rialto this day and all are at talk and sneak and sniff about the wife of the Jew, my Jew, the one who saved me.

  They say she’s been seized and taken away to the cells and the charge is one dread to tell, for she’s a witch and a whore and has done things which no one can say out loud for fear to turn the air black and bring the crows to peck at you.

  Who knows if it’s true? She’s not of this town and a Jewess, so anyone may exercise a grudge against her … still, there’s no smoke without something roasting, is there?

  How strange that my own Jew should have a whore for his wife. He seems so good, so pure, and yet he must have had his acts of love with her like all the rest. I think on how it must feel to grind grain with one whose private parts are known to all.

  Then I think on those trips we used to make on summer nights, my man and I, by boat, when our son would not sleep. At those times, from the rio, we could catch a glimpse of courts and paths and doors – each place closed up to the world like a nun – save to us, who passed by in our boat in the quiet hours of night, from that point of view which a boat and nought else in this town has.

  It could be that it’s like that with the Jew and his wife. All others have seen the open parts – he alone is privy to a part of herself she kept closed and never rented out? And he feels safe to love her that way?

  I know he has love in him, that he knows what it is, I’m sure of that.

  But what did she feel with her wed man, when she did with him as with all the rest? Did she like those thick black hairs that curl on the top of his hand; did she watch them as he moved to touch her hand or cheek? Did she like to look up and see him above her, with those deep eyes fixed upon her? These thoughts whirl through my brain like dust in the waxlight.

  The priests say it’s wrong for a man to love his wife as if she were a whore – with full lust as if with a girl bought for just that. It may be that this is where we went wrong, my man and me.

  We loved not like man and wife but with the fierce heat of adultery. We were beyond control, and now we are punished for it.

  Our happiness was on loan. We could never have afforded such a luxury.

  The word ‘punished’ reminds me that my sister-in-law Paola came to call on me today, a rare event indeed. She was up to no good, of course, and relishing it. She looked at me down the great length of her nose for a long moment and I was soused in her pity, as welcome to me as a shower of drain water.

  ‘Hello Lussièta,’ she said, in her patronising way and added immediately, lest I think she meant me well by it, ‘I have to warn you that you spend too much time with the Jew doctor. It’s not good for the business.’

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out. She went on: ‘The scandal with his wife taints him even more.’

  Then the words broke free of my throat: ‘But that’s not the real problem, is it, for you? It’s his race, is it not? You had rather lose your husband – one of them, of course husbands come in flocks for you – than consult the Jew doctor who could have saved him. When you refused you might as well have killed Johann.’

  In my mind I continued the sentence, And destroyed my life by sending me and my man back over the Alps from where we might never have returned, and where the first splinter of ice formed inside our love … and meanwhile you carry on without shame in dark alleys with some red-haired foreigner! There was no end to the crimes I was ready to lay at Paola’s door in that moment.

  Paola said coolly: ‘Poor Johann would have died in any case. He had lesions on his lungs when I married him. I knew it would not be for long. You cannot hurt me with these intemperate accusations. I have mourned Johann and I’ve done what he would have wanted: tried to keep the business alive by allying myself with another printer to make the backbone of it stronger.’

  ‘Do you not love your new husband?’ I asked, thinking of the red-haired man.

  ‘You’re so naive it hurts my teeth, Lussièta. You insist on being a child, yet you demand all the privileges of an adult. Wendelin says …’

  ‘You mean you talk to my man when I’m not there … ?’ My voice shrilled though I tried to cool its strident tone.

  ‘About the stamperia. Yes, I attend meetings about the manuscripts they’re considering and I make researches about the books that are wanted. I talk to other printers. I help the men to help themselves, not undermine their every day with notions and tales without the sense it takes to stuff a zucchini.’

  I don’t recall the rest of what she said. Perhaps I stopped listening. The only thing I could think about was this new fact that my man consulted Paola’s opinion and talked to her of matters that he did not bring home to me. Dimly, I heard he had asked her thoughts even on Catullus! Why, he never even mentioned that she came to the
stamperia! I hate the thought of her there, hanging round like a disease.

  It has become his habit to keep secrets from me and to leave me in isolation. I dare not ventilate my opinions in his presence. I have only my friend Caterina and the kind Jew to talk to, and now Paola insists I cut myself off from him, because of things his wife did. In what way is this fair or right?

  Paola and my man conspire to drive me mad. Until I’m under the campo dei morti, they will play with my tired brain, play … indeed something’s already shaken loose, madly scampering round the hutch of my head.

  * * *

  Nicolò Malipiero heard about Sosia at the strangest of times. He was clambering his way up a pile of tables, arranged above the Bellini dressing table painted with her likeness. He was heading for the home-made scaffold where he had tied, after many attempts, an inexpert noose with the cord of his dressing gown. The cord was looped to the fixing of the chandelier, which he’d sheared of its heaviest drops with a large pair of scissors. The pieces of glass now lay smashed on the ground below him. The denuded chandelier swung wildly, its sparse flowers tinkling, while Nicolò threaded the cord through its branches to the sturdy hook in the ceiling.

  For he had, that morning, by coincidence, received a packet from Sosia with a letter to tell him that he no longer existed for her. If he no longer existed for Sosia, then he no longer had any wish to exist in any context whatsoever.

  He could not dwell in his memories, and in the things she had induced him to do. ‘Be a man. If you don’t do it, you won’t see me again,’ she had said that night, smiling in the hectic candlelight while the boys grinned like fish behind her.