The Venetian Contract

by Fiorato, Marina

  Lastly Annibale donned the distinctive wide-brimmed black hat worn close to the head, and arranged it to cover the white domed forehead of the mask. He was not afraid of contagion for his own sake, but if he became ill, he would no longer be able to heal, and Annibale had no intention of stopping before he had even started.

  Just before he left the glass he took up a wooden cane propped against the wall. The cane was used to both direct family members to attend or adjust the patient, and sometimes to examine the patient with directly. Besides, in wards of infection a medico could describe a circle about himself with a sweep of the cane that none would dare to enter. Annibale flourished it now, like a rapier, for the benefit of his reflection. But what he saw did not convince him. The ensemble looked too pristine and untried, fresh as it was from the tailors and maskerers, the bills of sale still attached to the folds.

  For a moment he saw himself as others would see him, a harbinger of death. The plague doctor’s clothing had a secondary use: to frighten and warn onlookers, and to communicate that something very, very wrong was nearby. The beaked mask in particular looked incredibly macabre.

  Even on an ordinary day he was glad of the mask, for it covered his extraordinarily fine features. Annibale saw himself, as he saw everything, in scientific terms like a creature in a jar at the Scuola Medica in Padua. Of four cats pickled in a jar he could easily see which had the sharpest teeth and the leanest back and the longest leg. As a specimen he knew he was a fine example of homo sapiens, tall for a Venetian, with well-muscled, long, lean limbs, and a tumble of dark hair. His own face, though, was a mystery to him. He acknowledged he had regular features; but to him they seemed unremarkable, these dark eyes and the arched brows over them, and this straight nose with finely flared nostrils and the full lips beneath. However, they had a strange alchemy he did not understand, which acted on women in a way he did not welcome. Annibale liked order, and because he could not control the effect his features had he preferred to cover them up.

  In truth, even when not wearing the beak, Annibale had cultivated a mask of his own; he adopted a brusque manner that gave him the impression of being proud and haughty, solely to keep women – and some men too – at a distance. When he spoke it was with ill-concealed irritation; he did not suffer fools and was known for being short-tempered.

  The brutal truth was that Doctor Annibale Cason was a good doctor because he didn’t really care who lived or died. After his mother had abandoned him as a babe, and the parade of numerous aunts that had raised him in succession had all died, he had no emotional attachments; and despite frequent proposals he had never married. He saw illness as a personal intellectual challenge, which almost had more to do with him than the afflicted, and was therefore extremely successful at treatment. He was known at university as a basilisk of a man, who could watch a babe die without pity.

  In this his fellows did not give him enough credit. Annibale was not entirely heartless, but he kept a little circle of distance around him even without his cane. He had few friends and this suited him. Those he held close to his heart knew the real Annibale; they were few in number, and he had no need of more.

  Padua was a wealthy city and, in his final year when the young doctors were released on the general populace, he had had to attend many rich women. There, in the city where he’d trained, the dreadful mask had served to keep him from the importunities of these bored matrons who were so taken with his comely face, that they would demand that he try their breath on his cheek or that he press his ear to their heaving bosoms to check their throbbing hearts. Today, back in his home city, the mask would serve its true medical purpose.

  Annibale could not believe his luck. Born and raised in Venice, christened in the Church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli, the very church that now sounded the pestilence bell, he had been but one day back from Padua, had spent one night in his old bed in the family home, before the Lord had smitten the city. Now, at last, he would have the chance to put his seven years of learning at the University Medical School, where he had been one of the finest minds of his year, into practice. All the herbals he had read in the libraries, all those mornings spent in the botanical gardens, all those afternoons in the tiered wooden theatre watching his beloved mentor dissecting the cadavers of unlamented criminals, would now be put to use.

  Ready now, he dismissed his reflection as he’d dismissed his man, barked instructions at his cook for that evening, and left the house, almost with a light step. He felt like a knight of old riding to battle and fate had provided him with the most deadly adversary of all to try his lance upon. He, Doctor Annibale Cason, was ready to take on the Plague.

  He noted, on his way through the calli, that his foe had lost no time taking hold of the battlefield. The numerous red crosses daubed on doors, the lime boxes on each corner, the myrtle smoke snaking from every chimney, told him that the Black Death had set up camp, even in so short a time.

  As he arrived at the Campo Santa Maria Nova, the place appointed for him to meet his superior, Annibale had no difficulty picking out Doctor Valnetti, who was dressed exactly the same as he. His mask was slightly different though, for as one of the six chief doctors of the sestieri, he had black eye-glasses painted around his red crystal eyes, a reference to his greater wisdom and learning. Although Annibale thought a great deal of the new-fangled invention of spectacles, he thought the twin black circles gave his superior a faintly comic air.

  Doctor Valnetti was bustling around in an officious manner, bristling with the self-importance conferred upon him by a morning visit, along with the chief medici of the other five sestieri, to the Doge himself. He shook Annibale’s glove briefly.

  Annibale politely observed what his superior was doing – he seemed to be shuffling a pile of dried fish-skins, holding them for a brief second over the yellow fire pit in the centre of the campo, as one would smoke a haddock, and then placing them in a pile like autumn leaves.

  Annibale looked closer and was reminded of one of his many aunts who used to make him risotto con rana. She would slice each of the frogs around the feet and up the back and peel the skin off like a chemise before throwing the membrane in the stockpot. He picked up one of the fish-skins from the pile on the pavings. It had limbs. Then he understood. Incredulous, he turned to his superior. ‘Toads’ skins? Really?’

  Although he tried to sound respectful, Annibale reserved deference for where it was truly deserved, as in the case of his hero, tutor and mentor Hieronymus Mercurialis from the medical faculty at Padua. He could not keep the customary scorn from creeping into his voice.

  ‘Well, not all toads – they are surprisingly hard to find,’ answered the doctor breezily. ‘But there are frogs in Venice aplenty, the canals are stuffed with ’em. So we make do. Such skins were proven to work the last time the Pestilence struck,’ he concluded airily, neglecting to mention that this was a century past. ‘They seemed to be efficacious in cleansing the air in the body’s major vessels.’

  Annibale narrowed his eyes behind the red eyepieces. ‘You mean the blood in the body’s major vessels.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Valnetti. ‘That is what I said.’ He added, rather hurriedly, ‘distribute these in your quartiere. Ease any symptoms as best you can. I’ll see you here at sundown.’ He handed the pile of the toad-skins to Annibale, who grasped at them with difficulty, for they blew about, dry and insubstantial as cinders. Valnetti clapped him on the back. ‘I must say we were surprised to find a doctor to come to Venice, and I certainly didn’t expect a Padua man. Most physicians are running as fast as they can in the opposite direction.’

  Annibale shrugged and another frog’s skin slipped from his grasp. ‘I would rather die in Venice than live anywhere else.’

  Valnetti snorted inside his mask. ‘It might come to that.’

  Annibale felt vaguely uneasy. It had been centuries now since any natural philosopher had believed that air, not blood, circulated in the veins. He, Annibale, had helped to prove the matter beyo
nd doubt when, only last year, he had assisted in the transfusion of blood from a dog to a man, draining the cur’s blood into the opened vessels of a convict. He could have told Valnetti so, leaving out, of course, the fact that the ensanguinated man and the exsanguinated dog had both died. But he didn’t wish to waste his breath. Instead he raised the skins in his arms a couple of inches and asked, ‘Is this it? Frogs’ skins?’

  ‘For now. I am, of course, developing some remedies of my own, but for today, do what you can. And – Cason?’

  Annibale turned back, glad that Valnetti could not see his expression. ‘Don’t confuse them with your fancy Paduan theories. They are simple people, not intellectuals like us.’ And the doctor disappeared like a magician into a pall of smoke.

  The first thing Annibale did once he had turned the corner into the Calle San Canzian was to dump the odious frog-skins in the nearest lime box.

  By the time he returned to the Campo Santa Maria Nova at the end of the day the Plague had beaten Annibale Cason in the lists.

  Annibale had not anticipated just how unequal the struggle would be; he was battling not just the disease but everything else. He was battling with family feeling – mothers who would not leave their infected sons, wives who would not leave the sides of their husbands – so the disease was spreading apace. He was battling the medical establishment: the Council of Health were of Valnetti’s mind and persisted in using the same remedies they had used in the last outbreak of 1464. But worst of all, he was battling the city herself.

  Venice’s palaces were teeming with servants who came and went as they pleased, taking the miasma in their breath and their clothes to the markets and the milliners and the tailors, while in the meaner houses families were crowded into one smoky room, breathing the same septic air.

  Even the daubmen who marked the doors of the infected were taking the contagion from house to house, their persons and their paintbrushes unknowing vectors for the miasma. Cats and curs too who should – in truth – be culled, roamed freely; in the great houses spoiled lapdogs took the disease from one fond hand to the next, and in the poorer wards scavenging strays entered and left the houses of the diseased unnoticed by the distraught residents. There were not even any ratcatchers in evidence to curb the vermin.

  Worse still, beggars stole corpses from the red-crossed houses and cradled them in the streets, pretending the cadavers were family members and begging for coin to ease their sorrow. The younger the corpse, noted Annibale, the greater the return.

  Overlaying it all, Annibale even found the incessant bells unhelpful – at noon some edict had come down from the Consiglio della Sanita that the pestilence bell should ring the day long. The constant chimes from the Miracoli and San Canzian jangled on the nerves of the sick, struck fear into the healthy and were an irritant to the practitioners. Annibale was shorter than ever with his patients; it was his only answer to the pleading, weeping families faced with inconceivable loss. Unable to help them, his anger at himself translated itself into anger at them.

  Annibale worked faster, refusing to acknowledge how much the day had affected him. In Padua, it was true that he had once seen a baby stillborn and had not been moved; but even Annibale’s heart had received a jolt today, not to mention his pride. All his knowledge, from the first year basics of Galen and the four humours, to the final year sophistries of surgery, had afforded him no assistance at all.

  It was twilight before he met Valnetti again, and as Annibale crossed the campo to greet him, his gait was slow and tired, his feet heavy, as if they truly wore the sabatons and spurs of combat. His superior, however, a man of twice as many years, exhibited a lightness of step and looked surprisingly sprightly. ‘A hard day I know,’ said the doctor before Annibale could speak. ‘But it will go better tomorrow, for I have had my apothecaries hard at work.’ He tapped his beak with his gloved finger conspiratorially, then swept his greatcoat back to reveal, with a flourish, what it hid.

  Behind him Valnetti pulled a little red wooden cart with four wheels and a handle, with a grotesque caricature of a doctor daubed clumsily on the side. The cart was fairly rattling with rank upon rank of tiny glass bottles. Annibale picked one out with his gloved hand and held it to the light. A green sludge clung to the sides of the crystal vial as he shook it. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Four Thieves Vinegar,’ answered the doctor proudly. ‘Also known as Marseilles Vinegar. My own recipe. I have altered the specifications a little according to my own research. I am surprised that you do not know it. It has been used time out of mind to treat the Black Death. What do they teach at Padua these days? In my time at Salerno we learned it at the very first lecture.’ He sighed that he was obliged to instruct Annibale and told the tale in a sing-song voice. ‘Four robbers in Marseilles were convicted of going to the houses of Plague victims, strangling them in their beds and then looting their dwellings. For this, they were condemned to be burned at the stake, but the judges were astonished by the indifference of the thieves to contagion. The miscreants admitted they were immune to the Plague and revealed their secret antidote: a vinegar which came to be named after them. The justices demanded to know the composition, promising in return to spare them from the fire.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘They were hanged,’ said the doctor briefly, ‘but that is not really the point of the story.’

  ‘No. No, I suppose not.’ Annibale’s scientific interest was piqued. ‘And what was the composition?’

  ‘Get out your tables,’ said Valnetti importantly. ‘You might want to set this down. In the normal way I would not share such knowledge with another practitioner, but if we are to achieve lower mortality rates in this sestiere than the other doctors can achieve, then we must work together, no?’ He drew closer to Annibale and took a sheaf of papers from his sleeve, divided them roughly in half and gave a pile to Annibale. ‘Bills of Mortality,’ Valnetti said. ‘Paperwork, I’m afraid. You have to fill in one for every soul we lose, even the poor.’ He sniffed. ‘To say nothing of our reward from the Doge, and strictly between ourselves, I have laid a wager with the other five doctors for a tun of Gascon wine that we shall lose fewer souls in San Marco than in the other sixths. Now hark.’

  Annibale obligingly tucked away the bills and got out his notebook and pencil from his sleeve, although privately he thought that there was little his superior could teach him. It seemed, too, that Valnetti cared nothing for his patients – but was Annibale, who liked tilting with Death to see who was the better, any different? Discomfited, he began to write as Valnetti ticked off the components on his black-gloved fingers.

  ‘Rosemary and sage, rue, mint, lavender, calamus, nutmeg. Garlic, cinnamon and cloves, of course; the Holy Trinity in the treatment of most maladies. White vinegar, camphor. And of course, the most efficacious (not to say expensive) of ingredients: greater and lesser wormwood.’

  ‘Artemisia absinthum and artemisia pontica,’ put in Annibale, stung at the earlier slight to his education.

  ‘You steep the plants in the vinegar for ten days,’ said Valnetti as if he hadn’t been interrupted, ‘then force it through a linen sleeve. Are you getting all this?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ lied Annibale, who had stopped writing long since. The potion was a placebo; this random collection of herbs and unguents would neither kill nor cure. He looked at his superior dubiously. ‘And I am to distribute these vials to each household?’

  ‘Gesu, my dear fellow, no!’ the good doctor exclaimed. ‘They cost one ducat each, only to those that can afford it. Of course, if you can get two, so much the better. Go easy though; the apprentices have been working flat out, and cannot make more until tomorrow.’ He lowered his voice and moved so close that their beaks clashed, like crows in conference. ‘Here is a tip for you; if you find a mother with a sick babe – they will pay anything.’

  Annibale stopped listening. He was looking at the painted doctor on the side of the little red cart – beaked and bespectacled, with gaudy red
circles painted high on each cheek symbolizing health. He seemed a grotesque and a buffoon – like Pulcinella, the hook-nosed ancient of the commedia dell’arte. Worse, he was a vulture to pluck coin from the dead and dying, no better that the four thieves of Marseilles. He felt Valnetti slip the handle into his hand.

  ‘You can pull the cart quite easily, look; one ducat each, remember, no less. My costs must be covered. Sell this cartload – it is the only one we have at present – and then be off to your bed. Cason? Cason? Where are you going?’

  Sickened, Annibale had dropped the handle of the cart and walked away. This is not what he had trained for. He headed for the Fondamenta Nuove, the myrtle smoke swirling around him as if he were a Faustian spirit coughed from hell. There on the dock he could breathe again. He took off his mask and threw back his sweaty hair. He shook the smoke from his clothes, breathed the salt air, and began to question.

  What if the citizens were not bottled together to die? What if they could breathe this air, not the choking smoke of burning myrtle? If he could just take them away, treat them as he wanted, not with witchcraft and superstition but with the sound medical precepts to which he’d dedicated his academic life.

  He breathed out the horrors of the day in one long, defeated breath and looked right out to sea. On the distant horizon, through the sickly yellow mists from the plague fires which were rolling into the lagoon, there where the air was clear, he saw where the silver line of the sea clotted into a collection of islands. The glass island, the lace island. And beyond, the lazarets.