The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  * * *

  Why, thought Sosia, a thousand yards away, can they not leave me alone? This is what I wanted. They should all just go away and die. Except Felice. Why doesn’t he come to me?

  The little man with the extraneous brain came back. In the dead of night, she heard his breathing misting the bars of her cell. He started his rasping motions inside his cloak almost immediately, at the sight of her.

  ‘Hey little man,’ said Sosia, ‘you’re a priest or kind of priest, is it not right? Or the whoreson slave of some priest? Yes?’

  He flinched, but he was too far lost in himself to stop now.

  ‘Mister Priest-boy, I have something to tell you,’ said Sosia, sitting up in her straw. ‘Confession time, it is. Listen or leave.’

  ‘Aaah,’ said Ianno indistinctly, but he did not leave.

  ‘You know, friend, it’s very interesting in here. I suppose suspense is always interesting. Suspense … your eyes focus on ridiculous details. Arbitrary positioning of objects seems to take on a character that is a threat. A stranger walking past seems authoritative. You become hypercritical of things – why three notices stuck on the wall about my sentence? Nicely printed, but badly spelled. See, there are four mistakes … I’ve come to the conclusion that this irritation and one’s instinct to criticise is the little bit of power one has left.’

  Ianno stopped what he was doing, and crept closer. He’d not expected her to talk, let alone to be so articulate. No one had ever said of her, clever Jewess’ – only ‘dirty Jewess’. He was not sure what use to make of this new insight into the woman, but certainly it had a detumescing effect on himself. He looked down to his groin, disappointed.

  Sosia continued.

  ‘Time elongates, reshapes itself into discrete periods. When you don’t know what will happen next, each moment becomes the beginning of a new period of suspense. Solitary confinement is so wearing; you need the corroboration of periods of time passing to know you are still alive.’

  Ianno sniffed. He could sympathise with this, thinking on his former hours of thankless labour, distributing leaflets for Fra Filippo, copying endless passages from offensive books for his master, and for what gratitude?

  ‘I tell myself stories, true ones, to pass the time.’

  Her voice had become lower and softer, as she seemed to disappear into her own reflections.

  He craned towards the cell, grasping a bar. Sosia looked up at the powerful sinews of his fingers hooked around the metal.

  ‘Would you like to hear?’

  ‘Mmhn.’

  ‘I choose you, then, to tell. Some of the men who fucked me have begged me for this story. They thought that if I told them I would be cured of all the hate inside me. They thought I’d been abused. Some said that by describing my pains I would be released from them. I did not tell them, any of them. I let them wonder. I did not want to be cured of the hate, for that would make me weak. Nor do I now, but I have a wish to talk about it.

  ‘That all right with you, Mister Priest-boy?’

  Ianno nodded.

  And so Sosia told him a story. She told him about her birth in Dalmatia, what it was like to live in a far-off province governed loosely by Venice. The Venetians swept in and out, demanding tribute, taking anything beautiful from the churches and houses, hardly curious about the population they had gathered into their empire for mere strategic reasons.

  Sosia told Ianno about small and bloody civil wars, of little interest to Venice, that sprang up from nowhere and subsided quickly, filling the graveyards. She told him of the soldiers who had killed her grandparents, tortured and rejected her, and the bereavement of her mother’s adoring gaze.

  ‘That was the worst part,’ reflected Sosia. ‘So then my family thought I was dirty, beneath contempt. The soldiers, they said I was not good enough to serve the bed of a Venetian, so they would not have anything to do with me either: then my family acted as though they felt the same way. Even my mother, my mother would not look at me. That killed my heart inside me, more than anything else. It has never come back to life, except that there is one man … but he doesn’t see me, any more than my mother did.’

  Ianno grunted. He knew something about being ostracised, too. He had always known that people preferred not to look at him.

  Sosia continued, describing the flight of her family, the silent journey to Zara, the sordid boat to Mestre. Sparing no detail, she told of how she had seduced and acquired her husband.

  ‘A Venetian, even though he’s a Jew,’ she pronounced.

  Ianno grunted interrogatively.

  Sosia said: ‘You see, I have always thought about it, what they said. The soldiers. That the Venetians wouldn’t touch a scrawny piece like me. The lowest pieces of pigs, those soldiers, could tell me that I was not good enough for Venetians. My family obviously thought the same way after that: I was not good enough for Venetians and so I wasn’t good enough for them either.

  ‘Well, they were all wrong, weren’t they? I was plenty good enough, for plenty of Venetians. Plenty good. I sometimes wonder what my mother would have thought, if she knew that I shared the beds of Venetian noblemen, not dirty soldiers from the provinces. Would she have taken me in her arms if she knew how far I’ve come?

  ‘I’ve had more Venetians than I can count. I’ve cost them plenty, which is how you make men know you’re worth something, by the way, little man.

  ‘So the soldiers were wrong. Venetians have run after me, implored me, gone down on their knees to me, wept for me, abased themselves in all kinds of ways you would find most interesting, little man.

  ‘Not one of them has said I wasn’t good enough. Many of them have wondered if they were good enough for me!

  The bitterness in Sosia’s voice curdled to a whisper and then silence.

  Ianno strained his neck to hear but no further words came from the cell. He slid down from the bars and scuttled away. Sosia had detained him for hours. Already the fingers of dawn were illuminating the pale manuscript of the sky, and it was not safe to linger.

  * * *

  By the twelfth night, the senators had seen enough of the silent, milling crowd. They feared that the situation was building to something grave. They did not like the emphasis given to the life of one worthless foreigner; they did not like the cult of any individual at all.

  A decision was made to clear the riva. In the courtyard of the Doges’ Palace, the guards armed themselves and assembled silently at the huge doors. The moonlight beat down on their helmeted heads.

  At the signal of the quiet bell, the doors opened and they coursed out in two forks, cleaving the crowd in half. They did not waste their breath on yells; they had been instructed to disperse the crowd, to hurt those who would not flee.

  The first blows smote on the tallest heads and certainly a few fell then and there. Those who ran felt the bones of small hands and feet cracking under them for the children died first, of course. A mother fell backwards, her child sprawled back upon her chest at right angles so they formed a crucifix of flesh and blood.

  Within minutes the riva was cleared, except of those who could no longer move. The dying exchanged intimate glances. Dogs careered everywhere, barking at the dead to wake them up, and at the living beseeching instructions.

  Soon even the dogs stopped whimpering and there was only the creak of trolleys come to bear the fallen back to their family homes. By dawn all was silent; the sestiere of the town had opened up to accept their sorrowing, battered sons and closed around them again like the mouths of two great fish. The disorder was over and it would not come again.

  The Senate now made sure of this. Acting on the information of his former assistant, the Council of Forty had sent the Signori to take into custody one Fra Filippo de Strata on the island of Murano. They had learned from their highly authentic source that the priest had been responsible for stirring up the blood of the crowds; it was he who’d roused their anger against the printers and harnessed it to their hatred of the witch fro
m Dalmatia.

  There were no official charges against Fra Filippo, but it would do him no harm, the senators purred, to cool his heels on the mainland for a spell until he’d learned his lesson. At least until the State had punished Sosia Simeon with all pomp and ceremony. The Venetian State would not have its thunder stolen by a hysterical priest with aspirations to be a demagogue,

  ‘He hates books?’ remarked one of the senators. ‘Rovigo hates books too. Let us send him there.’

  There was always a vacancy for a priest in the ugly town of Rovigo, anathematised throughout the Veneto for its brutish ways.

  ‘How big is the congregation there of a Sunday?’ asked another senator.

  ‘Three, perhaps, if you count the verger’s widow and the mice.’

  * * *

  The night before Sosia’s sentence was due to be carried out, Wendelin walked along, talking to his own feet. He wondered if he could have shared his problems with his brother Johann. It had not been their habit to talk of intimate things but these years in Venice and those happy times with his wife had taught Wendelin to open his heart like a child who weeps. It was not easy to become self-contained again.

  The one person he longed to turn to was closed to him now. She would not look at him, except for strange moments when her eyes locked on his and sent an almost palpable comet of pain straight into his heart. He understood that this was her sadness, which he had somehow caused, and that she was mutely asking him to taste it. If he concentrated, he could do so, and it tasted strangely like his own. But he could not understand what made her feel that way.

  The other night, for example, when he arrived home not much before midnight, she’d looked almost frightened to see him. She laid his food in front of him with such a crafty expression on her face that he wondered if she had poisoned it. He felt her breath behind his neck as he bent over his plate.

  She talked more than usual, but of disconnected, strange things. She did not even enquire as to the problems that kept him so late at work. His experiment with scented inks had gone disastrously wrong. He himself had seized the ladle to stop the emulsification that spelled the ruin of all his expensive ingredients. He stirred so hard he’d splashed his hair and face, cried out with the pain of the hot fluid in his eyes. They still hurt sorely.

  Wendelin asked himself now: ‘But did I get sympathy? Did I get salve?’

  She loved ghost stories; to smooth things down he’d even asked for one of those, and all he got was sour berries, no honey, a tirade and a sheaf of bills.

  Pins and needles bit his hands when she looked at him like that.

  At dawn he fled the house and walked swiftly towards the stamperia. He had no time to wash. The perfume still stung his eyes and clung to his hair. In the silent courtyard, he splashed himself furtively with icy water from the well, humiliated and wretched. Now anyone could see how he was exiled from his own home.

  The plague had deranged her, he tried to tell himself. The early symptoms of her distressed state were probably warnings of the disease taking its grip. Yet now that she was well, she derived no apparent pleasure from her continued existence. She had isolated herself from all other creatures, even sent a maid to Rialto, and was as indifferent to the bloom of each grape or plum as she had previously been raptly attentive.

  He remembered how she had once, during their courtship, seized his finger and run it delicately along the fuzzy contour of an apricot. He remembered sharing that same apricot with her, and her laughter, ‘Ecco, my darling, we each have a mouthful of sunshine!’

  Wendelin remembered how he had loved to hear the swish of her dress as she glided up the stairs and the clink of her bracelet against the table as she laid down her fork. Lussièta used to have the most amazing sense of scent, a historical sense of it! With her tiny nose, she could sniff old smells and guess what they were when they were young. Of course most of all, like all the Venetians, she liked the odours of fish, salt water and luxurious perfume … and the scent of his own neck each night when he had kissed her. Then she would bury her nose in the folds of his skin.

  She had wished to live each day to the full. Her tiny frame had been robust with happiness. Her breasts had strained to escape her bodice. Her laugh was always exploding like a sneeze. Flocks of small joys flew up from her, like flicked gold dust, iridescent. Her lips had been full of mischief, forever imprinting quick kisses on his hand, his elbow, his mouth, declaring Aha! You are haunted by butterflies!’ She would seize their son in one hand, scooping up the cat in the other and dance them both around the kitchen in a wild, poetic ballet. Their son had laughed his fat baby chuckle; even the cat had folded its paws and curled its tail, snuggling closer into the crook of her arm as if it, too, like Wendelin, wanted to be closer to the source of all that grace and all that energy. And then she would land great smacking kisses on the heads of the cat and the baby and fling them both into the air for a moment till they landed, a tangled ball of fur and soft pink skin, in her arms, and she would be dipping her head among paws and fat dimpled legs to land yet more kisses upon them.

  The image faded in his mind, merging with the wife he had now, this wife of straw, damp as a wet rope, who slid from his arms, lay slackly in the bed or folded in a chair.

  She doesn’t wish to live now, she who was life itself before, he thought. A sudden, hideous thought struck him. He turned and ran, in the direction of their house.

  Chapter Six

  Love is all armed

  even when he’s naked.

  Paola has come to taunt me again. Like a witch, she knows just which nerve to stab to make me writhe in front of her.

  She brought fruit in a glass dish that she held in front of her like a battle-ram when I opened the door. I did not ask her in, but she walked in anyway and followed my listless steps to the kitchen. There she faced me squarely and said: ‘Your man is not unfaithful to you, you know.’

  What I know is that she means the opposite is true. She who spends her nights on the streets with a red-haired man. For all I know she rents out her body like …

  I slammed my mouth shut and would say nought. I do not reach out for the fruit, for I do not want her to see that my hands show the light and dangle like loose threads.

  When she had gone, I went back to the book about how to deal with wives.

  The book says the little wife should go to the stool. It says the little wife should climb it.

  I can no more bear it.

  I read the last note from the box once more.

  ‘I want to see the air beneath your dancing feet.’

  There is no doubt what he wants. I do not fight more, neither his cold heart nor my mid-fall madness.

  It was only a little love story, I suppose, in its way. But it was mine.

  My bracelets are so heavy I can hardly raise my arms.

  How easily may a love story turn into a ghost story.

  Once I predicted that the fondaco would get its own ghost. Now I think it will be mine.

  * * *

  Bruno sat in the somnambulant Piazzetta, looking at the columns.

  He rehearsed his agony, and hers. It was on a platform here that Sosia would be lashed to the wicker frame before she was beaten and branded. The mark of the witch would be burnt into her cheeks. There would be the smell of her own burning meat loud above her screams.

  He had seen a branding before. He remembered the glow of the brand iron soaking up the red of the fire, and the white sparks which leapt from it as the executioner pulled it from the flames. The crowd had drawn breath then, looking from the red metal to the cheeks of the man, a seller of spells, who was to bear its imprint. Bruno looked away at the last moment, but he remembered the unbearably sweet roasting aroma and the pig-like shrieks of the man as the metal approached his flesh. Then silence, for a long time, before another inhuman cry pierced the air like a bird of prey. It had come much too late, when they all believed him far beyond pain. This was the worst horror, for then in their minds they were forced
to re-live the last unspeakable seconds of his silent agony.

  Sosia never cried, but she would shriek, he knew, at that moment, when it came to her.

  He listened to the campanile. Each of its five bells had its own task. The littlest, the Maleficio, announced death sentences, tinkling down like little drops of blood. It would not toll Sosia’s death today, but that was pure hypocrisy. Sosia could not survive that treatment.

  An owl hooted among the houses. Bruno recalled the old superstition – a girl somewhere near had just lost her virginity. He sat huddled in the moon-light, remembering how that had felt for him, in Sosia’s arms.

  A plan began to stir in his head, almost too hideous to contemplate.

  At dawn, Bruno went to work. Emerging from the shadows, Felice Feliciano greeted him at the door, taking Bruno into his arms and stroking his back.

  ‘But why?’ whimpered Bruno.

  Felice answered: ‘Sosia’s case has shown what the senators always suspected … a low foreigner might use sensuality to bring down a noble Venetian, who is after all a piece of the state.’

  Bruno muttered: ‘But why do we do nothing? Why do we stand around and allow her to be killed slowly?’

  ‘We’ve no power compared to what is ranged against her now. The crowds are disposed to hate her already. They blame her for the massacre. She must bear the full fury of the State and the wrath of the populace between those slender thighs, and upon the scar on her back …’

  At this intimate description of Sosia, Bruno had looked at him, and suddenly understood, as Felice wanted him to do. He knew that this stripping of discretion was Felice’s gift, a way of helping him to hate Sosia, liberating him a little from the pain of her demise. Felice had offered to sacrifice their friendship in order to help Bruno bear his burden a little better. Bruno could understand Felice, and appreciate all this, but he could not bear to be with him.

  ‘I see,’ he said, white-lipped. ‘You too, Felice?’

  ‘Hate me if you must, but, please, my dearest Bruno, you must know that I love you,’ said Felice, and such hopeless love is grievously hard to bear.’