by Laurie Sheck
That night Frieda’s face was beside me, her eyes covered with black lenses. In the dark I could make out almost nothing, yet I was sure it was her. I wondered if her lenses made me more distant, smaller, obscure; my refusal less vibrant. And if maybe this calmed her. What new fact about Venice would she tell me? I heard her clear her throat, and waited. But instead of speaking, she picked up a rock (where were we?) and started digging. When the hole was two feet deep and just as wide, she reached in to retrieve the pile of contaminated clothes she’d hidden—hundreds of miniature white handkerchiefs, stained and meticulously folded.
For many hours she unfolded and refolded them. The sun was black, and the few clouds.
Then she raised her hands to her temples, and started tugging to remove the black lenses. But nothing she could do could get them off.
.
Even behind the plague doctors’ red lenses nothing is safe.
Though they try to understand what is happening, soon they see they’re as helpless as anyone.
For months the physician Paolo Belletini meticulously documents every case he oversees: patients with boils so virulent that when those beneath the neck push upward they cause death by strangulation. Grotesque glandular swellings and brightly-striped rashes. Sometimes redness covers the entire body, or a single hemorrhaging blackens every inch of skin. At first he believes such extremity is the surest sign of imminent death. But after thousands of cases he notes that time and again it is the relatively small undramatic bumps called morbilli that are the most consistent indicators of nearly instant death.
So the very thing that isn’t so terrible to look at, that doesn’t repulse the watching eye—this is the most treacherous, most fearful.
The way some thoughts move quietly, almost blandly, yet cut more deeply than the cruelest word.
Why should anything be what we expect?
I lived so briefly in the visible world, touched it so briefly. There is little I can understand—
From this island of small trees, I can’t touch the broadsheets being posted through the city though I know they’re there. Notices of the election of plague guards. New regulations governing burials, bell-ringing, funerals. Penalties against the sale of contaminated goods. Advice on the washing of the face, the hands, the mouth. Instructions on how to perfume letters and books. The proper way to make a fire. The sale of second-hand clothing is forbidden.
Inside the government buildings arguments persist. Where has this suffering come from? Could it have been born of dead fish in the sea? A bad crop of wheat?
The city orders its doctors to gather in the Gran Consiglio. How can the air be corrupt when the stars are of great beauty? Could a single leather jacket passed from one person to another be responsible for the 25 most recent deaths? Might salt water be a disinfectant or is it a destructive carrier? Is there some way it might be both? Why does affliction dance most wildly among the poor?
No birds have abandoned their egg-filled nests. No serpent has emerged from the earth.
The merchant Panizzone Sacco, the gate-guard Besta, and the proofreader Borgarucci all retreat to their separate quarters to chart each day’s death-count and chronicle the unfolding events.
Why is there so much sickness in Venice when the nearby islands of Murano and Guidecca are unaffected?
As I tell you this, as you sit in your red room, how can we understand such harshness as befell the city? And my voice that comes from afar and tries to find you—if you can hear it I still wonder what it means to you—or does it mean anything at all?
For years I lived only with black dirt and the white handkerchief that wouldn’t leave me, my hands pressed to the forest floor, my skin rough with rotting leaves. My voice far from me. Even the trees were dust. And the ferns along the forest floor.
Why do I still come to you? Why do I still wonder if you’ll see me?
How can I understand the separateness of your face, the quietness you live in, your closed, unmoving lips?
And now, throughout the city, even silk is being confiscated, set on fire and thrown into the water.
But why should anything I say know how to reach you? What could that shore with its ashes that hiss for a few minutes and then there’s nothing ever give you?
Why did I ever think that I could know you?
But if I could understand how kindness moves from one body to another, from one mind into another…
As I listened, I tried to understand what it must feel like to spend centuries in silence and dirt, then suddenly hear your own voice emerge from your throat, your eyes suddenly aware of a stranger’s face and body.
It was as if she had no gravity to hold her, nothing but her body which in itself had become a site of wrongness and injustice.
So by bringing me her plague-facts, was she trying to construct some vague simulation of gravity, a kind of tether, a connection between herself and things outside her, though she sensed this was a feeble imitation?
Wasn’t she in need of something to hold her to the earth and the reality of another?
And still I didn’t turn my head, though my refusal pressed like her black dirt inside me.
.
If there is a shard of brutality at the core of every word, a ruthlessness embedded in the plain fact of every word, wouldn’t even kindness, that softest and most gentle, be infected like the rest?
I remembered the word kind-cruel—I’d read it but had never heard it spoken—how it seemed to point to a pervasive complication that felt true.
As even now, though I thought of her need to construct her makeshift gravity, I didn’t picture myself trying to help (though often I thought of her dead child).
I didn’t imagine removing the black lenses.
If I could come all the way to Venice for the one across the ocean, why couldn’t I turn to Frieda, let her know her words had reached another, that in fact she wasn’t alone? Sometimes in my sleep I even walked beside her, felt the rhythms of her breath, the wind blowing her hair—she wasn’t wearing the black lenses. But then the white handkerchief would stretch to a black scrim between us, our footprints dissolving, and Frieda, though so close I could have touched her (though of course I never did), seemed unable to sense I was there, her eyes suddenly cloudy, as if blinded.
I haven’t spoken for several days, I know, and must get back to the facts of the plague-city. I don’t know why I feel them on my skin, restless, pressing in.
In September, 1575, after a delay of many months, the Venetian government finally officially acknowledges the epidemic, though still refuses to label it a plague: “We have understood that within two days twelve persons from the parish of San Zeno have perished…”
By October, the first quarantine houses are being built.
Winter, as usual, brings a brief reprieve.
But in the first week of June, the deaths suddenly quadruple. 270 patients are housed on Lazzaretto Vecchio, and another 580 on Lazzaretto Nuovo. 25,000 have already fled the city.
Of those who remain, 171 die in the first week of July.
By late summer, Lazzaretto Nuovo is “found to be so full of people that there is no space for anyone else.” The lazzaretti are expanded to the islands of Mazorbo and San Erasmo. The Robbe Amorbate, “Sickened Things,” are transported to various monasteries throughout the lagoon.
Shipbuilders from the Arsenale are instructed to produce more housing for the lazzaretti as quickly as possible. On my island alone, this increases the capacity “to a total of 2,000 souls.”
A new law forbids all physicians from fleeing the city, though few actually obey.
Chalked on a stone wall: “Everything I’ve held close has vanished into whisper and ruin.”
Who will bring food into the city?
Keys, doorknobs, windows, gates, everything touchable is suspect.
“Dress in pleasing silks or in cloth with light, sunlit colors,” one authority advises. “Look at beautiful paintings without fear.”
But the poor possess no “pleasing silks,” they only plead that their few goods be spared.
In Milan the Cardinal fasts for three days, walks barefoot three times around the city, dresses “for sadness,” a hood over his head, a metal cord hanging from his neck. He drags his cloak behind him on the ground.
Even on Lazzaretto Vecchio the terror increases. Rotting food and refuse are no longer swept from the rooms. The dying are thrown into the death-pits with the dead.
Does your Titian still dream of his beautiful silks, mix his red pigments? Is his garden still tended as before when it thrived as the grandest, most magnificent, in Venice?
In the face of all that is happening, how do eyes not blind themselves, how do they tolerate their ongoing ability to see?
I wish I could ask you…I wish that I could talk with you…though why should I wonder what you think when I’ve seen much more ugliness and darkness than you have…Yet I still wonder.
No new boats have arrived on my island.
Even as I speak to you, I try to remove these black lenses, but though I lift my hands and start to tug, I understand they will never come off. Is it better not to see all the plague-colors? The reds of the morbilli, the purple stripes of festering skin? Yellow eyes and pus-covered cloth?…Still, I think I’d rather see…But why am I able to see your red walls when everything else remains drained of color? How can your walls slip free from all this blackness?—Why don’t these black lenses tint them?
I lived so briefly in the visible world, touched it so briefly. There is little I can understand……
Pontius Pilate was standing before me wearing the plague doctor’s beaked mask and long black coat. Red lenses covered his eyes. “Can’t you see the roses won’t stop growing?” he said. “I have tried to seal myself against the world, I have wrapped myself in resin and blackness. Yet my mind still sickens with the scent of roses. Why do they fill up the sky like this, and my terrace, and every road into the city? Even my dog’s coat is covered with roses, so how can I let him come near?” Then I was in a forest bordering a shore. I thought I heard the one across the ocean pacing back and forth, maybe waiting for some word from me or lost in her thoughts, but when I turned my head, Frieda was standing on the shore, her eyes covered with black lenses. She held a white cloth and pail of water. It was clear she couldn’t see. Suddenly I had no idea who I was or why I was living. Waves broke on the shore. Gray seabirds circled.
Though my sight is growing dimmer, the times I glimpsed you haven’t faded. I still see your pained walk, and how you read with open books around you, the computer screen glowing. I see what I saw then—scattered angles into open pages:
You read for many hours. Once you brought a document up on your screen but I couldn’t read it.
Those thin slivers of words were the only ones I saw. I never glimpsed your books again. And now that I’ve said those words aloud—now that I’ve told you—I can feel they’ve left me. I stand here alone with my black lenses not knowing what words remain or how to speak them.
I waited for many days, but heard only quiet weeping.
Although for many days her words weren’t coming…and although I didn’t try to show her I could hear her…and although I knew any thinking I kept to myself did no good…each night before I slept I imagined lifting the black lenses from her eyes and washing her face with cooling water.
It’s been many days since I last spoke, but I’m still walking this shore, still wondering why no boats are coming.
And I still have much to tell you about Venice.
As the city continues to suffer, there are many troubling signs and occurrences:
Titian’s paintings are on fire in the Sala del Maggior Consigilo in the Doge’s Palace. Other paintings by Bellini, Veronese, Carpaccio, Pisanello and Vivarini are also up in flames. No one knows why this is happening—Is it the work of arsonists? A sign from God? The trailing tail of a great comet?
Near the stalls for the Ascension Day Fair a fire breaks out in a small shop. The boy standing guard is burned alive.
Many begin to reconsider the famine of 1569, the War of Cyprus, the previous Great Fire of 1574—maybe they were portents, each one a sign of some unspoken wrongness.
Could the plague have been waiting dormant all along, a soft infected heart?
How will Venice ever heal itself? What flaw lies festering within the city? Despite the years of silks and proliferating riches (or could it be because of them?) what is it that’s so terribly wrong?
Other signs are also noted:
On May 26, 1575, a “monstrous birth” is recorded in the Ghetto: “one body but with two heads, four arms, four legs, and in the middle one hole through which the filth is purged.”
“It seems as though it is one body united against another.”
The “monster” is put on display for eight days (it dies on the ninth) to be viewed by the general public for the price of admission.
Is this body our Republic, many ask—grotesque, divided, ailing?
When I was a child I sometimes walked through Patriarch’s Park, bought ices and apricot juice from the stand that said BEER AND COLD DRINKS, didn’t think about such things. Still believed in safety. Believed in my own goodness…
What did I know of thought’s unstoppable lesions, of how time complicates itself and wrongness builds its hidden structures?
Given your fragile bones maybe you thought about such wrongness from the start. How comfort holds within itself the seeds of its own crumbling.
Do you hear Titian’s voice or is he lost to you? Do you miss him as you look at your red walls? His kindness of red silk. His burning paintings—
These black lenses are pressing even harder onto my eyes. Always I feel their rigidity.
Even your red walls are darkening.
.
All night your silence laps against this shore.
As if silence is a form of listening, though I know it’s not.
But why does the thought of you still calm me even as you give no sign that you might hear me, even as your red room grows darker?
The thought that she was growing unable to see me pressed down on me like the weight of her black lenses.
Where was the Venice I once read of where in honor of King Henry III of France, a banquet was set out on a sky of blue-gold cloth, and all the plates and cutlery, the goblets and napkins, were made of spun sugar?
As Frieda’s plague-facts kept building, everything around me, even the most solid, seemed vulnerable, hurt, fragile.
The one across the ocean had written, Think of how fragile they are, the islands of the Venetian Lagoon. So thin and unprotected.
But where was she now…what was she doing? Was she still pacing? Was she even able to move?
Had her sight turned black like Frieda’s?
Then one night when Frieda’s voice still didn’t come, I wondered if maybe she hoped I would be like the merchant Panizzone Sacco, the gate-guard Besta, and the proofreader Borgarucci—a chronicler who locked himself away to document the ongoing history: her forest floor, her handkerchief, her isolation. Maybe she wanted me to be her witness. But then I thought of what she told me: that she trusted me, if she did, because of my silence and aloneness…I could hold the white handkerchief, but never speak of it or pass it to another…
Even though I am no longer able to see you, I still want to bring you the facts of the plague-city.
Despite the ongoing suffering, the Venetian government still refuses to label the pestilence “plague”—a word that would halt trade ships and incite economic disaster.
Instead, they recruit two outside “experts” from Padua who demand exorbitant rewards for their services: “housing, gondolas, and all other conveniences of life for ourselves and our families.”
After some days of examination, they offer their acceptable advice: “Not any house should be sealed. The transport boats to the lazzaretti are unnecessary and must immediately be disbanded.” The government hope
s this will calm the terrified city.
The Senate is eager to concur: “It is best for the public benefit to accept our experts’ most honorable findings. The Sanitation Board has made the plague an invention to serve the purpose of its own self-aggrandizement.”
But suffering doesn’t bow to words. It doesn’t heed evasions.
Soon there are over 100 deaths per day.
One night I watched you look up ‘fact’ on your computer. “In a neutral sense: a course, a deed, an act of conduct.”
Why does the mind fight such neutrality, such conduct? I believe you think about such things as I do, but what proof do I have, why do I sense you’d understand? (Your face in shadow now, your walls…)
The two experts return to Padua where, for their “good works” in Venice, they are each honored with a raise of 250 florins, then after 10 years, one is granted a prime post in Bologna and subsequently appointed First Physician to the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
We say “the body politic” but what happens when that body falls ill? Soon it’s not one body but several. There is the body of those who are able to flee, and the body of those who are too poor and must remain.