Island of the Mad: A Novel

by Laurie Sheck

  So why does your Titian stay put in the city? He who could so easily cast his lot with the privileged…

  The magistrates have fled, the councils have emptied.

  The Medical Collegio is now granting numerous dispensations to the wealthy: this one’s “melancholic tendencies require a change of air,” while another must leave Venice because “in order to survive” he “needs to live in good and happy places.”

  Signs appear in store windows: CLOSED TO AVOID THE PLAGUE

  IF I DON’T WANT TO SELL WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT

  THE MAESTRO IS AFRAID

  Once your Venice took great pride in its “unanimitas”—its identity as “the single, unified will, the body and soul of the Republic.”

  The writer Pietro Barozzi asserted, “Our city is one body old and new, noble and ignoble, poor and rich…If any part of this body were to seek disproportionate aggrandizement it would deform itself and become like a body with a nose five feet long, or one whose hand wishes only to be an ear or eye.”

  But now baskets are lowered from windows in the hopes that someone will leave food. But who is there to leave it?

  I try to look through this black air into your room and although I search for a long time I still can’t see you. Did you ever hear me at all? I know I should stop asking this but I still wonder and can never quite decide.

  Are you still in your room or have you left for somewhere else? Maybe you are far from here…

  Where is my white boat? Why is this black shore so quiet?

  For most of my life I thought my quietness would never be heard by another or matter to another. Though the caregivers had renamed me, their noticing seemed clinical, almost a kind of scientific observation.

  But the more Frieda spoke of it and of how she sought but couldn’t find me, the heavier and less private my quietness became.

  Sometimes I still heard—as if from somewhere farther than her words—her quiet weeping.

  And from farther than her words, there were other things she’d brought that were real. I knew they were real, but how close could I truly bring them?—

  I thought of the ones dying on the lazzaretto islands. How they suffered with an extremity that in health they could never have imagined and was beyond anything they could have borne.

  And yet for a short time they bore it.

  What could I know of their minds? What could I know of her shore, her black lenses, the way she hoped that silence is a form of listening?

  “Our inconsolable city,” the Patriarch Giovanni Trevisan writes in a letter as winter brings with it increasing sickness.

  The Senate issues a notice seeking out “remedies from all quarters…whether they be physicians, surgeons, barbers, or any other man or woman who has knowledge, practice, or a secret for treating this mal contagioso.”

  In response, the physician Giaccomo Coppa offers his “special expertise” in exchange for the exclusive licensing and sale of his “incomparable remedies.”

  And for access to his “marvelous experimental secret,” the Senate accedes to the demands of the French Priest, Mansueto, that he be compensated with a lump sum of 500 ducati with an additional 25 ducati for life.

  To the Paduan nobleman Ruggerio dei Conti who proudly asserts that although he is “neither physician nor doctor,” he has come upon a cure, they agree to “give exclusive rights to any profits resulting from his marvelous remedy.”

  But one Emilio Manolesso (profession and qualifications unrecorded) requests only that in exchange for his solution “a certain book be given back to me.”

  In July, 1576, the Consigiliore Dieci pays several hundred ducati to the physician Francesco Rodoano for his “secret remedy,” as well as 400 ducati to an “anonymous person” who promises to “liberate the city within a few days without need of barbers or physicians.”

  Even on Lazzaretto Vecchio, the senior presiding physician demands “at least 3000 ducati, plus 30 ducati tax-free for life and through the lives of my children” in exchange for the “cure” his father-in-law bequeathed to his daughter’s dowry.

  These terms are also accepted by the Senate.

  What happens to facts when they move through money and through fear? In what ways are they no longer true?

  If I could talk to you, if I could ask you…

  I wonder if I will ever see you again, your red walls, your coffee cup, your books…

  A light rain is falling on my shore. I pace back and forth not knowing if I’ll ever leave here.

  Though I can’t see you, I still want to bring you the plague chroniclers’ luminous names: Vincenzo Tranquilli, Muzio Lumina, Girolamo Mercuriale—

  Each one a comet streaking through black space—

  I speak into this air where I once saw you—

  For a long time I thought I might grow used to these black lenses, the grass a stiff black-gray beneath my feet, the sand gray also—But suddenly I’m not sure how to go on anymore. Even as I speak to you I feel I’m drifting farther and farther away into black space and don’t know how to get back. And your room far from me, and your voice I never heard.

  I couldn’t find a way to hold in my mind her small, unprotected body drifting farther and farther away through black space (I lived so briefly in the visible world, touched it so briefly. There is little I can understand…). I’d been renamed for silence and separateness, I’d barely ever touched another’s body—a store clerk’s hand, a doctor’s—so how could I know how to comfort, or ever convince her to come back…Like her, I knew almost nothing…

  For some time I‘d noticed she liked to say your Venice and sometimes even your Titian, as if I belonged to them and they to me, as if she wanted to reassure me that even though I felt alone, unlike her I was still bonded to the world—and that I shouldn’t forget this.

  Even as she drifted farther, she still offered me this kindness.

  For several days I heard only quiet weeping.

  If she had truly drifted away, how could I have heard that? I told myself that even though she wasn’t speaking, the sound of her crying meant she hadn’t left me.

  But it also meant she felt deeply alone.

  Even now, as I’m drifting farther through black space, I don’t understand how I am on my island where I wait for my white boat and feel I can still talk to you, though my throat burns raw with antiparticles and a harsh, metallic odor.

  Even on Lazzaretto Nuovo many are now dying.

  A fleet of 3,000 boats surrounds the shore. Inside them, 10,000 patients brought from your Venice.

  All night the soundless weight of anchors in dark water.

  Grass continues to spread between the cobblestones of the city’s streets. No one walks there anymore. All the way from the Rialto to San Marco, not one single soul.

  And on Lazzaretto Vecchio, the number of confined has reached 8,000.

  Each night at the sounding of the Ave Maria, there’s singing from the barracks.

  How long has it been since I first stood beneath these trees to watch the quarantined going about their days—the healthy working to improve the buildings, preparing meals and trading stories, the ordinary world still firmly lodged inside their bodies. But for the ones who’ve fallen ill so many bonds are crumbling…

  Some leap from their beds, stumble madly through the makeshift gardens, fling themselves into the water.

  It’s true a small number still get well and are able to leave. I’ve seen whole boats of them setting out across the water. Calm light on lifted faces.

  They return to a city where new approaches are being tried: textiles will be boiled instead of burned. But what difference can that make?

  Great plumes of smoke rise constantly from Lazzaretto Vecchio: the incineration of the dead.

  Now that the water is no longer unbroken and the boats heavy with suffering have drawn near, why do I still dream of leaving? Why wait for my white boat? Why head to that other, farther island?

  Meanwhile the new ordinanc
es continue:

  Suspected or convalescent cases are permitted to emerge from their dwellings for two periods of ten minutes each day but must paint their faces white and carry a white stick 1.60 meters long.

  Blind beggars who sing on street corners must henceforth stay indoors.

  (But who is even left to beg from? Mostly it’s the poor who remain, tightly locked inside their houses—)

  Those who beg in front of churches or go from house to house will be punished by imprisonment or whipping.

  Coal carriers, rag dealers, and repairers of old shoes are no longer allowed to take their business to the city’s streets.

  The families of the dead may not accompany the body to the grave.

  “We must learn to find beautiful laws,” one plague-chronicler writes. “We must understand more fully the nature of order.”

  But what laws can save the city? And in what ways might they be beautiful?

  And what beauty is there to be found in the new ordinances that turn against the poor who are blamed for spreading the sickness through the city?

  “Fear leads to extreme sadness of the soul,” Leonardo Foravanti writes in his plague-tract, white X’s on the doors increasing, the plague-silence spreading.

  But there is also kindness.

  Cardinal Borromeo encourages his priests to move among the poor and visit the plague huts: “Do not desert the afflicted.”

  He makes this list:

  “We thank and grant plenary indulgence for all their good actions to:

  Physicians who take the pulse of the plague-stricken.

  Nurses who aid those physicians and touch the feared bodies.

  Barbers who bleed or treat the infected.

  Wet nurses who nourish the infected infants.

  Those who lead or carry the sick to hospitals or huts.

  Those who visit and console the suspected.

  Those who bring messages, medicine, and food to the afflicted and suspected.”

  In Milan, the friar Paolo Bellintani calls for the distribution of daily rations to the poor.

  500 additional wooden huts are built to shelter the new suspected cases.

  “What is the price of terror?” the Venetian notary Benedetti asks. “How might we think of a soul condemned to isolation, sent off to suffer alone?”

  Pilate’s dog was walking over miles of barren earth. A red thorn was lodged in its right, front paw, and with each step the gash grew deeper. Had Pilate sent it away because he could no longer stand the scent of roses on its coat? Or had it wandered off on its own and been unable to find its way back? Or maybe a stranger had lured it away from the only one it loved. It was clear the dog was starving, its ribcage jutting waves. Then Frieda was beside it. In one hand she held a white cloth and in the other a bowl of water. But as she kneeled to hold its bleeding paw I saw that she was bleeding also—the blood pooling on her collarbone and neck, though the site of the wound wasn’t visible. Her face was white with grief, her eyes blinded. Even so, she washed the dog for many minutes, then held it, gave it food. All the while her wound continued bleeding.

  Isola……….isolation.…….i…….

  It’s been so long since I’ve witnessed any color. Are your walls still red? Does Titian’s hand still sometimes come to you in kindness?

  I wish I could show you what I’ve found.

  It’s a curious document from the year 1576 (the year of your Titian’s death, remember?).

  At first it seems just an ordinary plague ledger:

  “August 21: 40 year old man dies within a day. Towards evening a carbuncle breaks out on the right side of his mouth, followed by a high fever. By morning a bubo has formed on his right groin. His heart stops that afternoon.”

  “August 22: 23 year old pregnant woman dies. On Monday morning falls ill with fever. Wed night the fetus has aborted. Black morbilli all over her body. This afternoon ceases breathing.”

  The entries proceed in this way for many months. Hundreds of cases of the nameless dead. And always at the bottom of the page, the signature of the attending physician, Gaspare de Comité.

  But the last page is different.

  Here the doctor records his own symptoms:

  “Wednesday: fever / Thursday through Saturday: there seems to be a reprieve / Sunday: a milky urine, red morbilli / Wednesday: black morbilli covering entire body.”

  Beneath this, he confirms and signs his own time and date of death: “Magister Gaspare de Comité. Died at approximately 5 o’clock in the afternoon. October 23.”

  That night I felt a hand moving over my face. It was the hand of Dr. Gaspare de Comité. First it erased my right eye, then the right corner of my mouth, my right cheek, the jaw bone beneath my right ear. It moved on to my left eyelid but left the eye intact, then erasing the few strands of hair on my forehead, edged down the left side of my neck.

  The hand smelled of camphor, burning coal. In each place it touched me I heard the sound of coldness. How could cold be audible?—yet it was.

  Then I realized Titian was standing beside me, though I couldn’t hear his voice or see red cloth. Could he see that the doctor had erased parts of my face?

  When I turned to ask him, my mouth was a shadow, impotent, half-vanished.

  After some time I realized Frieda was there also. How could he have signed his own death date like that? she asked into the air, of no one, her eyes staring off into the distance.

  For a split second I thought I sensed the one across the ocean pacing back and forth like Frieda, her eyes clouded over. I wanted to tell her about the bag of papers I had found, how I’d learned the doctor’s name and had been to San Servolo.

  But of course when I woke I was alone.

  For the next few days I lived within Frieda’s silence and the silence of the one across the ocean. I touched the worn letters.

  In my sleeplessness many things have begun to happen. Does it matter how or why?…I’ve seen much more ugliness and darkness than you have…I would touch their burning skin, every cell in their bodies raw and unprotected—

  My black shore frightens me, as if there is no softness left in the world anymore, only suffering and harshness and coarse sand.

  Everywhere the innocent are wrapped in desolation. Nearly 50,000 Venetians have now died.

  Even within one illness there are so many types of swellings: eminenta, apostome, carbone, bubone, antrace, dragonzello.

  But what words are there for what goes on inside the mind?

  I know I have no right to speak to you, or to believe that if you heard me my words would be anything you’d want.

  How could I have ever hoped to shed this wet dirt, this odor of decaying branches?

  Why did I lift my eyes to find you?

  What if Venice can never be healed, the white boats forever rocking?

  What if a black cloth has settled over this marsh covered by centuries of hauled stone, and nothing can lift it?

  What if the paintings in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio won’t stop burning, or this white handkerchief inside me?

  And Titian’s hand immolated in that light, your memories of him, his words, his garden?

  What if there is no end to sorrow?

  I ask too many questions, I know. As if these streets weren’t deserted, the doors not locked and marked with X’s.

  In the days when I could see you, I watched one night as you looked up “heal” on your computer: “To become whole or sound, to recover”; “To save, clean, mend, purify, repair.”

  Water can be healed. And suffering. And earth. And bodies.

  I hadn’t known that “heal” can mean to “hide, conceal, keep secret”; “to cover over as with earth.” So seeds are healed inside the ground. And roots in winter.

  But your Venice doesn’t heal.

  Once it was known as “a site of purifying Air emanating from salty canals…this special Air that brings life to the near-dead, joy to the living, health to the sick, strength to the healthy.” It was said
that “Nowhere in all of Europe do people live more healthily than in Venice.”

  What if healing is by its very nature transitory, fragile, a passing stage within a greater wounding?

  Wherever you are, I believe you must wonder about this also—

  Though she said she’d endured much more ugliness and harshness than I had, and I hadn’t disagreed, now, even as I listened to her speak, I imagined her skin merging with the lagoon’s too-thin, eroding shores, or fading further into the blackness she drifted through, its acrid smell of burning metal.

  Though I can’t see you anymore and don’t know how to find you or even know if you’re in Venice, and though my skin is turning thinner, papery, my bones less protected, my eyes more like the eyes the plague doctors imagined, I still want to talk to you. I want to believe that you can hear me.

  Before I grew lost within this blackness, before I put on my black lenses, I saw the blue sclera of your eyes. I’d read about such eyes and the fractured, twisted bones of your illness, the word “incurable” applied to your condition. I’d read about a surgery involving the insertion of a metal rod into the bone’s internal cavity. How even when the bones heal they often heal crookedly and wrongly.

  This aspect of you so visible, and yet you treat it like a secret, so I think it deeply hurts and shames you. But it’s why I noticed you that first day at the fish market. Though your head hung heavily, I could still glimpse the bluish whites of your eyes. And the hump, irregular, lumpy, beneath your camel-colored coat, the awkwardness and worse you have no choice but to carry. I had read about body casts, something wrong with the DNA, children forced to lie in bed for months at a time, the silence too loud, bones fracturing in the middle ear, a quick snap, just like that, each part of them breaking. Even music can cause harm. Even a kind gesture, a wrong turn of the wrist opening a bottle.