The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  Except this Sosia Simeon.

  There’s trouble in the town about her. You feel it in the drains first, for the small pools of wet (which have oozed out of them) are stirred with dizzy ripples. You know that the pools, like a magic ball, show events far off. In this case it’s human steps, two, three score steps at once. It is not a good sign. We of this town go by choice in ones or twos. Except at Carnevale (when we go masked and are not ourselves) we are not ones for great parties or groups of friends. Only for badness and conspiracy do we join in force. When there is someone or something to fear or to fight.

  You know there is trouble, too, by what floats on the sea. In the good times the spits of men come in ones like gell-fish, like one good thought on a page. But when they mass in groups, the men’s spits come in fleets.

  Now you see the fleets of spit wash up from the bad parts of town and you know they brood on dreadful matters. Other things float past, too – a bloodied kerchief, short pieces of rope with knots in them.

  My man does not see it, for he’s not of this town. He does not know spit from the spume of the waves, and just now he’s too distracted to look close.

  * * *

  The first night, as Sosia lay in her cell, a very small man, it seemed to her a monk of some kind, came to the bars. He had brought a box with him to stand on so that he might look down on her. She could not see his face beneath his hooded cloak; just the glitter of his eyes, which met her yellow ones and held them.

  As she watched, he produced a bundle of birch twigs from his cloak and began to scourge himself. He beat and slashed at his skin, never taking his eyes from hers. Eventually the little man groaned sweet and low down in his lungs and slumped against the wall.

  His exertions swelled the hood of his cloak with air. She glimpsed a repulsive deformity just like a little brain, pulsing above his left ear.

  ‘See you again, little man,’ said Sosia to his departing shadow.

  * * *

  Wendelin von Speyer was but dimly aware of what was happening to Sosia Simeon. He knew that the poor doctor must suffer for his reputation but he found it hard to believe that the Jew had loved her, as Wendelin himself loved his own wife, with all the heat of heart and loins, with all that was good and rich in his brain.

  When Wendelin passed the crowds of the riva, he wondered how many of them were literate. And of those, he tried to calculate, how many would prefer to read the lurid pamphlets of Fra Filippos, rather than the books that had provoked these paper storms of abuse. Copies of Catullus were still selling, but fitfully now. He’d almost exhausted the first edition. He could not bring himself to commit to another printing, not while things stood as they did.

  The town had its teeth round the scandal of the doctor’s wife, and while the thought of her obsessed everyone, they would not think of buying love poetry.

  Crowds of men and women passed to and fro, over the bridge near the cell that housed Sosia Simeon. Wendelin felt no urge to look on her, to have the memory of her face watermarked on his memory. There were sufficient sadnesses to render his world piteous already. He watched the crowds craning their necks for a glimpse of Sosia and then quickly walking on.

  The Venetians always ripple down the steps, he noticed. I still plod. But they ripple, like snakes. How do they do that when I cannot? he thought, thwarted and unhelpable as a child who tries to calculate the reality of angels.

  He crushed the pages of his latest letter to Padre Pio between his fingers.

  My dear Padre, Wendelin had written,

  Women spit at me in the streets. Why? They think me ungodly! I am in the mood to find it bitterly amusing that the greatest ferocity of the Church has been pitted against the best book and the greatest writer I have put through my press. Fra Filippo has reserved the very nut of his hatred for the most wondrous poet of love.

  I never used to ask, ‘Why publish books?’

  I used to laugh at my wife when she decried words and books. Now I see her point so much more clearly.

  With our pitiful little words, can we hope to do anything more than trap a hollow echo of the truth? Worse, these faint echoes become fixed as a dead butterfly on a pin. People who read books will all have the same things to say and will soon lose the capacity to use their own imaginations. They will begin to believe that all the knowledge that is available is only that which is printed. And what a pathetic small sample of human intellect that is!

  The truth does not come in words. It comes only when you hold someone’s hand and look deeply into her eyes, or when lovers speak silently and voluminously to each other with their fingers. Remember, I have known a happy marriage, and I know these things from life, not just from books.

  Why compare Jenson’s typefaces to mine? What use is it to compare the egglike cavities of the Roman letters to the fabulous fairytale spires of the Gothic ones? In what way is this relevant to life or truth or anything that matters?

  I have lost the faith, my dear Padre. I confess it to you, but to no one else. I think of Johannes Sicculus (the executed printer) and his head falling in the basket, and I feel a great weight falling from myself. That weight was the heaviness of my honest, German sincerity, a useless commodity in Venice.

  Johann and I ventured here because it’s a great commercial metropolis. We did not come here as parasites. We came here bursting with faith and energy. With our daring and our industry, we made lenice the centre of literary activity in all Europe. We have printed more law texts, more Bibles, more classics, more books on philology, medicine, geography and astrology than anyone else. Our books go abroad, to Germany, France and Spain and the Low Countries and even England, making money and jobs for a whole dynasty of Venetians. And what gratitude has Venice shown us for this …!

  What is the lagoon but a wet grave for all our hopes?

  Why should I waste my time on the Venetians? They care nothing for what’s inside their books. They buy them for the beautiful bindings. Lately, to my shame, I’ve even been experimenting with scented inks to see if I can tempt the jaded palates of the Venetians. I am dressing up my books like peacocks, like harlots.

  The fondaco, as I now see it, is just a big birdcage for Germans. We crow, a golden egg rolls down the stairs, and into the hand of some grasping Venetian.

  They say our letters are opened and read, and if this one is then shall I face even worse trouble than before. I find that I’m not caring very much.

  You ask of my wife. I no longer know what to tell you. Please do not ask. Just pray for her.

  Wendelin refolded the crumpled letter and tucked it into his sleeve. As always, his thoughts returned to his wife, to the rustle of her hair as she unwound it, to the dark pupils of her brown eyes fixed upon him as she lay on their bed, awaiting him. Of course those days were gone: now he understood that she did not wish him in their bed. She was too frail from her disease, needed to sleep undisturbed by the clumsy movements of his big body. And she no doubt feared his lust these days, thinking that with one thrust he might break her thin hips apart.

  He shook his head, to dislodge these thoughts. Into the cavity came a vision of young Bruno Uguccione, who had also loved this Sosia. Poor Bruno, another ghost who haunted him, like his wife. Between them, Wendelin’s wife and his favourite employee had lost enough substance to create another being entirely.

  He reflected how two of the loveliest forms he had known – curved and plump inside lustrous skin – had lately wasted to almost spiritual thinness, and that it seemed that the lost flesh had taken their happiness with it. Both had seemed so rich in all the body promised; now they looked as starved as beggars.

  Worst of all, his wife seemed to think that … She seemed to think she was unpalatable to him. How could she?

  * * *

  The legless beggar with the slack hose came to Sosia. He had shuffled on his buttocks all the way from Zannipolo to see the whore from Dalmatia who was to get her just deserts. He could not raise himself to see inside the cell. So he contented hims
elf with a litany of the worst insults of their common language until he tired, muttering the words like a prayer under her window.

  ‘Poljubi mi čelo kurca! – kiss my prick’s forehead,’ he told her. ‘You liked that one, last time. How do you like it now, Missis? Seems from what they say that you kiss any part of a man if he only puts it close to you.’

  She turned her back on his voice, only the drumming of her fingers betraying that she was conscious of him at all.

  ‘You’ll never be a martyr,’ he called to her finally, ‘if that’s what you’re after. Ne pravi se pita od govana – you can’t make a pie out of shit.’

  There were rich pickings for him there; so many tourists came to see the prisoner, presenting so many opportunities to snare them in his empty hose. He decided to take up residence there, as if he were her personal custodian. He performed his little dances for the crowds, waving his arms about like a ballerina, manipulating his ribbon legs like a pair of frenzied marionettes. He stayed for three days, until the Signori moved him along. There had been complaints that he barred the way to the most interesting sight in Venice.

  * * *

  I know my man thinks of the Jew’s wife. Don’t ask me how I know. I just know and it makes me sick, even iller than I was.

  I know he walks past her cell and that he thinks of her. The clever woman, who loves books, unlike me. I think he pays the Jew to come to me, and each time he puts gold in that pale palm he must think of it on the Jew’s wife’s skin, as his used to be on mine.

  I heard she had men by the score, that she scarce knew who was on top of her or at her rear, that she did it with no love, just for the feel of it, any time she felt the need of it, like a beast in a field.

  A vile thought has come in my mind, that my man was one such of hers and that is why he changed. If she’s a witch, then her spell could have reached me this way. It might have been she who wrote those so-called love letters to me; her hand could have been the guide for his.

  I cannot bear this thought of my man with her. I feel a scream swelling in my throat but I must not let it out lest he hears and comes up to look for me. Then he’ll stand with his hand on the door, and not come close, but just stare at me, with that face of his, which I thought I knew but I know not.

  When he comes here again I shall sniff him for her scent, to see if he has been with her.

  I think I cannot bear it, that I must die of this pain, and then my next breath comes and I am still living, though I do not want to.

  There’s a kind of luxury in how bad I feel. It has grandness to it. Now I begin to wonder: did the love we had, my man and me, take us to the same high peak in Paradise; did it match, in reverse, the low point we have now? I cannot remember.

  I think on this whole world of bad loves. Bruno, my man’s nice young man, loves the witch, Sosia. She, I’m told by Caterina, loves Felice, who loves no one but himself and beauty and prefers to cut the fat around the town rather than settle with one woman. I love my man who may want Sosia too. And now, I think, the Jew loves me.

  Chapter Five

  I’ve come at last to know you for what you are.

  Yet I spend my love on you still more lavishly

  now I know you vile and cheap.

  How is it possible, you ask -

  it’s because I know you.

  It’s that hateful kind of love:

  the less you love, the more you love.

  Bruno came to the bars of her cell every night. He waited until Rabino left, watching the slight shadow melt into the lightless pathway. He had thought he would be curious to see Sosia’s husband, the object of so many wretched fantasies. Now Rabino seemed irrelevant, just another man who’d taken his turn with Sosia.

  And for Rabino, Bruno thought, this is just one more deathbed vigil. He’s used to saying farewell to people. I am not; I’m not accustomed to losing people in such a public way. I did not even say goodbye to my parents when they died.

  An image of them, wrapped in each other’s arms, laughing, rose fresh and kind in his mind. Perhaps, he thought now, it was the very absence of goodbyes that had preserved their memory.

  He peered into the cell. Sosia would not even look at him.

  He talked to her anyway, as if she were in a swoon and the sound of his voice might bring her back to life. He told her what he’d learned in the years that he had known her. Looking out at the water that rippled like the greased fur of a cat, he spoke to her of whatever came into his head.

  ‘Listen to the waves, Sosia. The waves are good for the soul. They pace out your pain; they regulate the rhythms of it. Whatever is raging inside you is forced to slow down to accommodate their roll and retreat. Let them help you, my darling, listen, breathing in and out.’

  She turned her head slightly towards the water, and seemed to be listening. He continued.

  ‘What is happening now means nothing to our love. Between us, it’s not even real. We two are so bound to each other by so many strands, all interwoven; you cannot simply snap a braided rope of love. You must cut each filament separately and even then the love will hold out to the last thread before it snaps. That is how I love you. To the last thread.’

  * * *

  Fra Filippo came to see her. He brought a little party of Murano nuns whose dreams he had enlivened with detailed accounts of Sosia’s malfeasances. Unlike those of Sant’ Angelo di Contorta, his own nuns were rigorously pure.

  To their rigid care he had consigned the piglet nun. He’d had the satisfaction of inspecting her, swaddled in a confining garment and gagged with an iron bit.

  As a reward for their efforts he had invited her guards to come to Venice with him for an education in the evils of witchcraft.

  ‘Look at her. Living proof of the existence of she-devils.’ He gestured proudly as if he himself had conjured Sosia as a perfect example for them.

  The nuns tittered like dry leaves underfoot, and covered their mouths with their hands.

  Sosia rolled in her straw and opened her legs to their view. The nuns fled, dropping scarves, sweet cakes and small vials of water and wine.

  Sosia herself made a rare foray to the bars of her window. She looked out, scanning the street, her eyes alert for just one silhouette: Felice Feliciano.

  * * *

  I smelled something in his hair.

  Late home from work, he dipped his head over his food and I sneaked up behind him. I nosed up the back of his head – all the while he saw nothing – till I hit that stink.

  Confounded, I began to blink so fast my lashes snipped up the light. My lips all through supper snapped open and shut like travelling clams. While he chewed like a penitent on the scorched food, I ate bile, and talked of all things but what ailed me: that perfumed drop of sweat from that musk-cat whore, that she-dog from Dalmatia, and still he presented his pink eye for salve, stained no doubt from his evening nuzzling her through the bars of Her cell. Couldn’t keep away from Her.

  ‘It’s all used up,’ I told him, ‘squeezed dry.’

  He looked down, embarrassed.

  I was thinking: Perhaps She’s not the only one – that stink maybe compounds some several flavours of harlot? I have been blind to this all along!

  Meanwhile he tried to be too nice to me, asked me if I had any new ghost stories from Rialto. I cut him short with green-tinged raspberries and a stack of letters from our creditors.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said, as if it were not desecrated.

  We made married love. Other kinds are what I thought of.

  All night I smothered in the fume-cocoon of Her smell, my eyes jammed open as if they could sniff too. I raged when I thought he shammed sleep, worse when I saw he really did. He had the gall to snore the way I like it, soft ruffled growls. His morning kiss slimed like a peddler’s voice.

  Was our love not extraordinary enough for him? Of all shabby acts this is the most threadbare; of all dirty ones the stalest. Better to beat me with a letterform, print on me an S-shaped bruise �
� that’s her name, ‘Sosia’, isn’t it?

  There’s no end to the torture my brain treats me to when I think of him with her. I crave detail. She sells him her flesh – how? By the hour, by the minute, by the kiss?

  Every time I think my curiosity is worn out, something new comes to make it ripe and testy again. Even now, I wonder, is he at the stamperia? Or is he fumbling with some dank whore in a slippery alley?

  Whether you are a modest wife or one who flutters the fringes of her thighs all over town, it all ends the same way.

  * * *

  Sosia’s trial had inflamed the populace. On the tenth night a crowd seethed up around her cell as suddenly and silently as if it had seeped from the stones of the Piazza like acqua alta. What they wanted with the witch-Jewess no one seemed to know; just to be near her seemed to be their object. The atmosphere around her cell was dry and feverish. They crowded round the entrance to the portico of the prison, pinching and kicking to gain an advantageous position.

  This was no ordinary swelling of the crowd. This time they’d brought their wives and children. It seemed that Sosia’s crimes had united them in communal antipathy and outrage.

  Every night, for three nights, they’d gathered there, watching and waiting, as if for a signal. Those closest to Sosia’s cell reported on every moment inside. Their accounts were whispered backwards into the crowd so the news spread like a wave to a far shore. When they heard a new thing, ‘She’s turned on her pallet so her back is to us,’ the crowd seemed satisfied for a while, folding its arms and nodding its collective heads. Each night the tension rose and the numbers increased.

  The weather conspired in the atmosphere of suppressed horror. Night after night, lightning seared the air without releasing any moisture from the hard sky.

  Felice Feliciano looked down from his window at the Sturion on the crowds amassing there by evening, on their way to San Marco. All night he watched, unable to go to bed.

  Sosia’s fate did not pain him, but he carried it heavily. It had affected him in ways he’d not thought possible. The thing was, it had devastated Bruno, and that he found difficult to bear.