by Laurie Sheck
“What lies past the single horizon, single scale?”
But as I read, unexpected grief flooded over me. If space and time could collapse and blend into each other, why did so many smaller boundaries still remain? My hands isolate in air. The one across the ocean pacing far away and all alone, burning in her silent, private fevers. And Frieda’s voice alive in my red room though she stood alone on some far island. Florensky seemed not to have written of these pained boundaries among the diverse, shifting planes he depicted.
The stark distances I’d accepted as the inevitable given texture of my life suddenly felt like a series of small cuts and taunting questions.
And still I thought of Frieda. How she was waiting for the boat to take her to the island. And how, though I couldn’t see her, she didn’t seem unreal. Her voice a raw skin. My own skin suddenly too raw, uncovered.
I know you want to get back to your bag of papers, not think of me at all. But what can I do, I still have things to tell you. I was so young when I committed my despicable act, so young when I died for it, so what can I even know of the actual world, how can I even speak of it, having lived in it so briefly? What could I possibly have to say to you at all? What right do I even have to speak? I watch your red walls, and ask myself these questions. Still, I can’t bring myself to leave you. Maybe you think I am buried in Moscow, or outside the small village near the forest where I killed my baby, but how does a voice come to be buried? Does it? How do thoughts? I feel my questions press against your walls, my words growing slowly darker, redder. There are soft turnings in me also, and a sorrow I can barely name and have no right, I know, to feel, yet it lives like my white handkerchief inside me.
The island is cold tonight. It’s said a new cargo boat arrives tomorrow morning. The crew will be quarantined for 40 days to make sure none are carriers of plague. All the cargo—wooden crates of spices, dried fruits, metals, hundreds of crates of colored cloths—will be taken to the storage sheds. But I think those sailors will not need me. They’ll check off the days with thick brown chalk against the walls, bake bread in the stone ovens, wait out their days walking, building, thinking. Time and memory won’t blacken or speed up inside them unlike those on that other, farther island from which no one returns.
The seabirds are circling tonight—their wordless flying.
Now that Frieda’s voice was coming to me, the silence of the one across the ocean whose letters I still hoped might come but didn’t, felt even louder, sharper, more confusing.
That night a hump moved beneath the water’s blackened surface. When finally it emerged on shore, I saw that it was Pilate’s dog. A stained white handkerchief was sticking to its back, and though it tried to shake it off it couldn’t. I walked over to help, but when I reached out my hand, I saw the handkerchief was covering a triangle of raw skin, so how could I pull it off without hurting the dog further? The dog grew thinner and thinner, trembling like a palsied hand. Even if Pilate was a cruel, tormented man, or just a trapped, ordinary man flung into circumstances wildly beyond him, why couldn’t he come help his dog, why couldn’t he at least try to take care of it and feed it? I knew I should take it to my room, give it food, clean water, but also knew this was impossible, though for reasons I didn’t understand.
Then for a few days I heard no voice at all, though at times there was the sound of quiet weeping.
Today I am remembering that on the island where you live there is the Ospedale degli Incurabili—or should I say it was there in the plague year of 1575—I believe it has since been abandoned. So what is it now?—A ruin? A music school? An empty lot? But in 1575 it was inhabited by the ill who weren’t sent to lazzarettos. And it was there that one day a man with a horrible pestilential mange called out in anguish for one of the young fathers. These were the years, of course, when everyone was afraid to touch or draw close to another. The young father was terrified but scratched the patient’s back as was required, then violently convulsed with nausea. But even then he didn’t draw his hand away. This man is suffering, he said to himself (he wrote this down later), I must not shun him, what would I be if I shunned him? Then suddenly, almost without thinking, he lifted his pus-covered finger from the man’s oozing back and placed it in his mouth and sucked it.
And what of my own mouth? What of yours?
And this white handkerchief inside me…
I wonder what you think of what he did. Are you awake now, watching your red walls, hoping that my voice will leave you?
Maybe you don’t even hear me at all—
What does it mean to truly feel the living flesh of another, the presence of another? I ask myself this often.
I still need to find a boat to take me to Lazzaretto Vecchio. I’m not sure why I have told you what I have—
Though I tried to consider Florensky’s theories, and maybe even accept them, I couldn’t get used to the way her voice kept coming even as she brought me the idea of a man willingly touching his lips to another man’s blistering, contaminated skin.
In my whole life I had barely ever touched another. I wasn’t sure I could even remember the last time. Maybe it was when my hand grazed the hand of a salesperson giving me change.
From my childhood reading, I knew that “contamination” has its root in the Latin “contigere”—“to touch.” How that gentlest, most unguarded act can lead to defilement and horror. But the more I thought about the young father, I saw what I should have all along: that what he did was beautiful, his defiled mouth more gentle and tender than I could ever understand. I moved my right hand along my lips, the thin, ignorant borderland of skin.
Sometimes I spend hours thinking about skin, how I carried it into the world as if I weren’t moving through fire and the shadow of fire. That was before my hands became contaminated by my brutal, cowardly act—my skin a place of harm and sorrow. And now, when I think of the plague first entering Venice, I wonder how the newly infected could have even begun to understand what was happening to their skin, their very bodies. The earth and sky no longer benign. The sun suddenly shredding itself, darkening over every visible thing. As if even life itself were shredding. Even thought.
If thought is infection, how could I ever have felt any hint of peacefulness on my skin, and yet I did.
There are so many suffering and dying on the Lazzaretto island. I keep telling you this as if my words could burn or scar you. But why would I want to hurt you? Why would I want to do that to you? Sometimes I suspect I secretly want you to soothe me, though it’s wrong to seek this from you, I know, or to feel I could in any way deserve it. Why do I keep coming to you? Why have I found you at all?
What is trust in the face of damage and contagion? What is love?
I understand that I am nothing. That my suffering is nothing.
This morning a new ship arrived from Malacca. I stood beneath a stand of trees and watched the crew unloading cargo, the Captain chalking inventory onto the barrack’s farthest wall: porcelain, nutmeg, silk, camphor. Afterwards the men played cards, told stories. Now every hour or two a guard walks by, checks off their names against a master list: Antonio Trivisani, Vicolo da Ponte, Zeno Planta, Marco e Antonio di Batista. The date on the page is Sept 13, 1576.
They will stay here 40 days. I wonder who waits for them, not knowing where they are, why they are missing.
I believe you also think about such things.
A soft rain’s beginning, gray seabirds lifting.
I thought again of Ovid’s words: “All things which I denied could happen are now happening.”
Yet wasn’t I supposed to think what I was hearing was my mind’s projection? (Was there a pill for it? Should I be taking one each morning?)
Neuroscience and progress would say this was so. But I wasn’t sure that I believed in progress. Didn’t humankind seem to move from one muddle to another, from one kind of ignorance and misunderstanding to another? Each age a different kind of cage—and those cages truly visible only from a gap of time and distance.
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sp; But though I felt the fact of her voice, I didn’t know how to accept it. Even so, more and more the pores of my skin grew alert and taut with waiting.
And with her words the lengthening shadow of the plague moved toward me.
Then I was walking along a busy Venetian street which turned into a barren plain. A few yards away, someone half-naked lay face down in the dirt. I couldn’t tell if it was a woman or a man. As I drew closer, I saw black sores oozing, split open like the ones the young father had tended even as he grew sick with nausea. (…I must not shun him, what would I be if I shunned him?…) But I was on a barren plain and not knowing what else to do, I ripped off a corner of my shirt, moistened it with bottled water, and swabbed the sores as best I could. I didn’t know if this would help or maybe harm, and felt my ignorance, how little I knew of the real pain that moves through the real body of another. Suddenly I understood I was touching the back of the one across the ocean, though I couldn’t see her face and couldn’t tell if she sensed the cooling water.
Why do I even believe that you can hear me? These small waves are louder than your breath, my own mind louder, harsher. If my hand touched your hunched back, would I feel a yielding softness or a cage of brittle bone?
Now that I have found you, I hear my voice entering the air again like a strange, unseeing bird. Wings jackknifed, wary. It is so odd to hear it after all these years. So many years without speaking, so much dark…
This morning on my island, Lazzaretto Nuovo, the plague doctor has arrived to do his weekly rounds. I haven’t seen him before (I don’t know how long I’ve been on this island—sometimes I’m convinced it’s been months or even years, but then wouldn’t I have already seen him?). He’s wearing a broad black hat, and a black coat that’s covered with suet or wax to fend off infection; it extends from his neckline to his shoes. Both hands are covered with white gloves—I can see this from beneath my stand of trees—and he’s carrying a white stick for measuring distance and fending off infection. He refuses to stand close to anyone, no matter how healthy. He knows that skin is precarious, untrustworthy, deceiving—it can change from pink to black in a few seconds. It’s more dangerous than a mind, and quicker. More willing to erupt and vanish. But I haven’t told you about his mask which looks like the gas masks of your century, but with a beak-like protrusion, the beak long and curved, its cavity filled with rosemary or camphor for detoxifying the air. In your century you know this is useless, though of course you have your own delusions. But it’s too frightening to feel helpless for more than a few days, or often even a few hours, and the plague shows no sign of abating. On the mask are two round eye-pieces of red glass. It’s believed infection enters most easily through the eyes…that anyone can fall sick from just looking at an infected person. And now the doctor turns his eyes from the shore and walks toward the barracks… he’s stepping among the rows of narrow beds, lifting the sheets with his white stick, poking and probing, looking for abscesses and pustules. What does he see through his red lenses?—Our skin and the whole island drenched in redness. Everything flaring, festering, decomposing. Every few minutes he pauses to write in his ledger, then indicates with his hand who can stay another week, who will be sent to Lazzaretto Vecchio to die. And now the boat arrives to take him back, and just as quietly as he came to us he leaves us.
I reminded myself that everything she spoke of had once happened.
That the suffering was real, the bodies poked at by the doctor, real.
During my first days in Venice I noticed the plague doctors’ masks in the shops around San Marco, had realized they were souvenirs of carnival, but the rest of their meaning escaped me.
Now, as I thought of Frieda’s words, my walls burned red as those glass lenses.
I want you to hear me, but maybe I am wrong to want this…Maybe a voice is mostly endangerment and risk and best kept to itself…If speech is a kind of infection…and the desire to be heard, infection…but I don’t know…I watch your closed eyelids’ delicate membranes, their faint pulsations as you sleep. But your voice is unknown to me. I have never heard your voice.
I wish that you would show if you could hear me.
Titian had brought me his love of red cloth, so why couldn’t I turn my head toward Frieda? Why wouldn’t I try to comfort her, as Titian had tried to comfort me?
Though she kept coming to me, and I kept waiting, I wouldn’t show that I could hear her.
Each time, I refused her any gesture. Acted like I didn’t hear her or even know she existed.
(Though more and more I woke to her white handkerchief, its worn edges and blue border.)
.
Why won’t they let me go to Lazzaretto Vecchio?—I want desperately to go there. Maybe you think it’s cowardly and selfish of me to want this—that I am trying to soothe my suffering with the suffering of others. I say I want to tend them, but is this true?—Maybe I’m only trying to tend myself. (My mind still fills with black dirt and wet leaves, the white handkerchief on the forest floor.) But I can’t imagine going anywhere else on earth. The plague doctor wears red lenses over his eyes, tries to cover and protect the deepest recesses of his eyes, but it’s as if my eyes are covered with glass lenses also—only mine are tinted a deep black, or sometimes a blinding, glaring white. But never any other color. And I can never take them off. So what is the world of the thriving to me, the ones who see in colors? What is your Venice to me? There is no place for me among them. And even though Margarita stopped the handkerchief from being brought, I still feel it. I can never forget my terrible act. But if I could finally put my hands to good use, my eyes to good use…I need to go to Lazzaretto Vecchio. To the ones who are suffering and will never return. To those whose eyes are hurt animals violently exposed, with no lenses to protect them. Is it wrong of me to want this? They are falling away from everything they know, even their own names. If I could go to them…if I could tend them…my white cloth dipped into cool water…I would touch their burning skin, every cell in their bodies raw and unprotected—
Why do you keep your lips so tightly closed? Why do you avert your face and never answer? Why do I still believe that you might hear me?
Even if you don’t show that you can hear me, I believe if I gave you the white handkerchief to hold in safe-keeping for me, and you agreed, you wouldn’t speak of it or palm it off onto another. But maybe what I believe has little to do with anything. Maybe who you are is a truth beyond my comprehension, different from what my brain can hold. Maybe what we call knowing is more like angles but not a single point or center. Maybe there are only angles, and those angles keep changing. What if nothing is simply reducible?—but as I say this, my skin grows cold—I take the white handkerchief out of my pocket. It never changes color. Nothing about it ever changes—
As the illness keeps spreading, everyone in Venice is afraid. Windows are shuttered, even the thoroughfares are deserted. Letters are soaked in vinegar before being read if they are delivered at all. Often many months pass without reply. Children are made to carry birds which are thought to bring some small measure of protection—but how?
Sickness comes in waves, grows quieter in winter.
Always the suffering is the same.
Each day more merchants flee the city. On October 7th, 1575, a barrier is erected in the middle of the Rialto Bridge. Those in the worst three siestri may no longer pass into the other three.
The quiet of the streets is broken only by the howling of dogs and screeching of cats being slaughtered, then tossed into the canals.
The red silks that you saw hanging from the dyers’ shops to dry—they’re gone now. Weeds are sprouting up among the cobblestones.
In one year your Titian will be dead.
What does he think of the empty streets, the blank facades of the dyers’ shops, the way the rich have taken the red silks and fled north?
When the senators meet they wear perfumed gloves, a sackful of rue around the neck, grains of arsenic secured above the heart.
I stand on my shore and feel the black lenses hardening over my eyes. A black wind grazes my face.
Will the white boats look black now if they come? How will I even recognize them? Why can I still see your red walls when all else drowns in blackness?
Xenopsylla cheopsis.
Pulex irritans.
These are the names of the fleas that carry plague.
White clouds of insects rise like fragile cities from the bed sheets.
Such softness kills.
Did you know that fleas can jump for hours, even days, without resting? That although they feed on rats and humans they inevitably die of starvation?
Black infested rats invade the dwellings of the poor, multiplying quickly in vast numbers. Imagine dirty wells over-spilling, families huddled in close quarters. Everyone too afraid to go out.
The authorities issue a new edict: All suspect clothing must be burned. But the poor hide what they can. What else is there to use against the cold? Sometimes they bury their coats in the cold earth—
I tell you this as I watch your closed eyes, your face turned to the blank wall.
Think of the shut houses of the poor, black pustules suddenly appearing. The chaos that replaces thought—
Though I told myself I was hearing Frieda’s voice, was I hearing it or seeing it, or both? It seemed to exist in some realm between the two. How could sound have skin?—and yet it did. Frieda, who was a voice and not, a color, a visitor, a wall, a presence and absence and not, a wound and poultice and not, came as a kind of sound-form I had no words for saying. My sense confused me. Her plague-facts building—endless blackening.