by Laurie Sheck
I thought of how you will never stop breaking, your DNA won’t let you. I wondered what it’s like to live in minutes spiked and broken, each one too unwieldy, too unpredictable for your body. To have to think of the breakages, how you never stop breaking.
And in that split second I first saw you at the fish market, in my mind you were a child lying in a body cast white as the white handkerchief I carry. A sudden, inexplicable hurt went through me, and then my voice was back and I was speaking.
I had lived for so long in silence and black dirt. But when suddenly I could speak again I meant to speak of you, yet spoke only of myself—that I condemned myself. I was looking at you, thinking only of you, yet when I opened my mouth I said, “Who could condemn me more than I condemn myself?” And even if I hadn’t spoken of you, there would have been so many things more interesting and more important to speak of than myself—conductivity, electricity, man’s relationship to animals, the Arctic, silkworms. Why didn’t I speak of them?
I told myself then I would speak to you of Venice, of the suffering here, that I would bring you anything but my own narrowness.
You were alone…I would bring my facts to you…I didn’t know what else I could offer, what else to do.
I thought to myself: it is 1575, 50,000 souls have died in Venice. The Senators have fled. But Cardinal Borromeo walks among the poor with his head uncovered and says to anyone who will listen: “Do not desert the afflicted.” And the notary Benedetti says, “The price of terror is isolation.” He says, “Carry the sick to the hospitals and huts”…“Nourish the infected”…“Touch their feared bodies.”
Though I had been thinking about her drifting away, and how her shore frightened her, nothing could have prepared me for what she just said. I didn’t know how to take it all in.
All I knew was that I felt more naked than I ever thought possible, more exposed, frightened, ugly.
I needed to shut my eyes. I needed to run, but couldn’t.
Then I was sleeping, or maybe thought I was asleep, but wasn’t. I’m not sure what it was. The words kept coming and coming…
And even after that—how many hours or days had passed, were passing?—more words kept coming—
I was drifting away into black space…I was on earth with my ugly hump, but I wasn’t…on earth with my twisted bones, but I wasn’t…or…no…I closed my eyes and all I could see was black space and inside it a body, my body, no more than a speck but still broken…The body was drifting away through black space to where no one could touch it or know it existed, its smudged mouth almost nothing as it drifted farther and farther away into black space, black soundlessness spreading…
For several days I heard nothing. No words from her. No quiet weeping.
Was I in the world as I had been before?—That same world she’d reassured me I belonged to: Your Venice. Your Titian. Had I ever belonged, did I want to?
I didn’t know if I would ever hear her again, or how I’d feel if I did. If I’d listen or maybe turn away.
Why would I want what she wanted to give me?
I have painted my face white and am carrying a white stick. I am on your island. Why is it so hard to find you? Though I’m away from my shore I know I must go back very soon to the white boats that still don’t come or the black space I drift through among particles and infrared radiation, moving farther and farther away, though always I come back. But for now I am here and I wander past the Military Bakeries, and then along the Riva degli Schiavoni, not thinking, not planning—then I look up and see in front of me the old Orphanage that Pero Tafur noted on his visit from Spain in 1436: “There are few weeks or even days when the fishermen do not untangle dead babies from their nets…and so the rulers have taken counsel and founded this hospital with a hundred wet nurses so that those who seek to abandon their children do not kill them but leave them to be raised.”
At these words, my skin grows cold, the white stick turns to ice in my hand. The air is a forest of damp leaves.
Then I am back on my small island.
An endless quiet over the whole earth.
Though I still wait for my white boat, making sure to look out across the water (I couldn’t bear it if it came and went without my knowing), every now and then I still turn toward the barracks. As now, five “suspected cases” are being led from one building to another where the “confirmed” are being kept. I can’t see their faces, only their shaved heads, their gray clothes loose shadows. When the plague doctor comes, will he send them across the water—though with so much sickness in Venice and no sign of it stopping, where is there left to even send them?
Do they exchange a few words as they walk? Or do they walk in a silence closed as the barracks door behind them—
Finally there comes The Day of the White Page. Imagine. After two years and over 50,000 dead, on January 1st, 1577, not one death is recorded in the Health Board’s register.
After so many thousands of pages of symptoms, victims, times and circumstances of death, suddenly there is only blankness—
The city officially proclaims its liberation.
Hearts are filled with “incredible joy”…“emptied of past horrors.”
Celebrations and processionals crowd the streets. The doge walks in humility, bareheaded, without his crown.
But within days the plague chronicler Rocco Benedetti is already noting in his journal: “Restored from the damage of suffering, people are busily funneling into the law courts litigating and fighting. We laugh easily as we stroll down streets still lined with the houses of the dead as though our great tragedy, the near-perishing of our city, never happened…”
How strange it must be to touch again the skin of another, the lips of another.
But what is Time to me? What is the White Page to me?
As she spoke, I found I could listen. When she walked alone and came upon the old Orphanage, or stood isolate outside The Day of the White Page that she could speak of but it would never touch her skin or mean that she could touch another, or as she watched the gray shadows of the confirmed walk from their old barracks, I could feel the same black space I’d drifted away through days before lingering on her body also, its odor of gunpowder, burned metal.
Frieda walked with her face painted white on the Calle de L’Ofizia de la Seda where the dyers’ shops once stood. She had painted her black lenses also, but the whiteness that covered them was filmy, thinner, more sheer. Now that the plague was finally over, why hadn’t she wiped the white stain from her face? Why hadn’t she discarded her white stick?
All around her, laughter and singing from the canals and bridges: Venezia rassomiglia ad una sposa…sposi ed amanti, buona fortuna…Venezia nostra, sei il piu bel nido…
But in her whiteness she seemed almost to hear nothing.
What might it mean to her to feel another’s hand cleansing the paint from her face, loosening the white stick from her grip?
Yet stripped of their covering, wouldn’t the black lenses still remain?
My hand was drawing a damp cloth across her face, trying to cleanse and soothe what she couldn’t cleanse herself.
But I held no cloth. My hand wasn’t moving. And in that moment’s stillness I felt inside my body the blind, isolate whiteness of her body.
Now that the rich have come back to reclaim their abandoned houses and factories, and all the streets that for two years were left empty and untended, the poor are being driven from the city.
“Everywhere the poor go around interrupting”—this from an official report on the current well-being of the city.
Hospitals for beggars are relocated to outside the city’s limits.
Within the year, the Governors of the Mendicanti have banished over 800 paupers. The 300 or so who remain—the elderly, children, the sick—are sent for incarceration to a remote island hospital.
Why does getting rid of the poor feel like freedom to the ones in power?
And why must harshness reassert itself so quickly, w
ith such ease? Has so little been learned from all the years of suffering?
I think of how you can’t hear me or don’t want to—does that also help you to feel free? Though my eyes are black with guilt and I know I shouldn’t ask you.
I’m still standing on my shore, watching for my boat and waiting. Maybe it makes no sense to want to leave for that farther, harsher island, now that the plague has finally ended.
And still I want to go there. I don’t believe the suffering is over.
You who have wondered about kindness, I would ask you why you think there must be so many forms of blindness, so many walls.
Do you believe I am wrong to stand on my dark shore still waiting for my boat to anchor? Though I ask you, I expect no answer—
I imagine, if you could hear or see me, you’d think me foolish to be standing on my shore and waiting, the black lenses fastened over my eyes. Why wait now that the plague is over? But everywhere the danger is still thickening. If Time as we know it is a construct of the mind, then is it wrong to think the dying are still waiting, that somewhere on an island they’re still suffering, wondering if a tenderness might find them? Or maybe they’re not wondering at all, despair having wiped even that from their bodies as they wither toward their unmarked graves—
Why should the white boats not last forever?
Why has this shore become so quiet? What is the meaning of “to mourn”?
That “our” in mourn—why hadn’t I noticed it before?
Yet, like before, I still offered her no gesture.
Pilate stood on his stone terrace watching an eclipse of the sun as he burned in his red migraine, the slow isolate destruction of his mind. Through the darkening streets, tall lamps were being carried. Hadn’t this same phenomenon followed Augustus’s death?—“A total eclipse, then the sky on fire, blood-red comets, glowing embers in free-fall.” Pilate shuddered as he thought this. Each time he tried to calm his migraine a red hand nailed to a cross appeared before him; he understood that it would stay forever. An attendant brought him his red robe but it was made of cobwebs. He put it on. Even the clouds were heavy with the scent of roses, even the sick sun.
The abandoned barracks are black now, and the gravediggers’ makeshift implements, the brick ovens and stone cisterns, the grass covering the nameless graves.
Does Titian’s hand still come to you? Do you feel the kindness of red cloth? Do you think about the one across the ocean and carry her letters in your pocket? Are you in Venice?
Maybe you still wonder about kindness, and why harshness reasserts itself so quickly. Why the poor are being banished from the city.
Do you walk these cobbled streets where I can’t see you?
How does thinking hurt the core of seeing? Or is it seeing that hurts the core of thought?
My eyes wander over the small island of San Giorgio in Alga, and then to another, smaller island, San Giacomo in Palude, but everything is dark there also.
Then I am on the streets of your Venice, though I know I am also on my island, still waiting for the boat to come, and the air still smells of burning metal.
It is Carnival—“Carne Vale”—the “giving up of flesh.”
These are the weeks before Lent. Masked faces swarming everywhere for miles.
There are Lion Heads. Suns. Veils draped from hooded caps. And the mask known as “la Muta” held in place by a disk between the teeth.
In the gambling hall of the Rialto, the players watch from behind white larvas, their cloaks fashioned from old sails.
There’s also the mask known as “la Ganga” behind which men disguise themselves as women.
Even rich and poor can no longer be sorted as they stand beneath the wooden dove releasing flowers into the crowd, though at night they return to different lives, different houses.
Eight harnessed bulls drag a golden boat across the square followed by spangled acrobats and dancers.
The word “I” dissolving, the white X’s washed to nothing—
For many weeks the pageants and spectacles continue.
Pigs are chased in circles, then slaughtered in the front-most Piazetta of the Ducal Palace. The Devil bursts from a fiery ball rolled into the square. Miniature castles are smashed with wooden clubs.
Turks balance on tightropes strung all the way from the boats in the lagoon to San Marco.
Peasants appear in glittering jewels as if from nowhere.
Even the doge watches from his window as the vast pageantry unfolds, his head no longer bare in a gesture of humility but adorned with a gold crown.
I grip the disk of the Servetta Muta between my teeth and stand in an alley not knowing how to belong.
The masked suns are twirling, dimming.
The black lenses ever blacker over my eyes.
The wooden dove still releasing all her flowers.
I believe now that you never heard me.
It had been weeks since I last picked up Bulgakov’s book, but I remembered how, long after Pilate condemns the prisoner Ha-Nostri to death and finally finishes with his earthly life, he sits alone in a stone chair on a desolate summit and stays there for two thousand years.
Mostly he sleeps, but when the moon grows full a terrible agitation overtakes him. He rubs his hands spasmodically, his eyes jerk from side to side. Always he longs for the same thing—a path of moonlight where he and Ha-Nostri can walk side by side, at peace, finally speaking.
Though Frieda was on her island, waiting, and sometimes drifting through black space, she also sat alone in a stone chair on a parched summit overlooking a dry plain.
Maybe this is partly what Florensky meant by the limits of geometry—that there are ways we aren’t ever in just one place. Or that our idea of place is too limited, too narrow.
I looked across the desolate miles to where she sat, the Servetta Muta covering her face, her white handkerchief folded in her lap. A few strands of hair lifted lightly from behind her mask as a cold wind moved in from the surrounding peaks that stood without echo and would never be destroyed.
If I could see color again…if I could know the meaning of to kneel. The meaning of kindness. The meaning of tenderness, to tend. The meaning of to give.
Again I saw Frieda alone in her stone chair on the far summit. She looked at the full moon with blinded eyes. No wind touched her skin or brought to her the slightest sound. Just once she briefly raised her hands to her face, adjusting a mask that wasn’t there.
There’s a boat on the shore, I can see it.
But when I try to walk toward it, my feet sore and burning from the heat, why do I suddenly seem not to be moving at all, even as I’m trying to go forward?
Thousands of black masks toss among the small, declining waves.
If I could know color again, if I could see, even for one second, white sails cutting through blue sky….
Even my white handkerchief is black now. And your quietness, all the ways that I can’t find you.
How could I have ever hoped that you might hear me or turn in my direction?
If I could see into the deepest structure of chaos, would I glimpse an order beyond our human comprehension? Or would I find no order at all, but that what’s real is even wilder, more baffling, than anything I could have thought?
Maybe my white boat will stay forever distant.
How can a black moon grow blacker? This black moon growing blacker, this black wind—
PART II
SAN SERVOLO
Frieda was gone.
I missed her voice, or whatever the various strands of light and dark I thought of as her voice were made of.
Her white boat, her handkerchief, her waiting.
Her love of the word tend.
How she tried so hard to see through her black lenses.
Even as she drifted through black space (the smell of burning metal on her skin) she wanted me to know that unlike her I still belonged to the world and it to me, and that I shouldn’t forget this.
If Ven
ice could outlast its own fragility, or at least manage, beyond all reason, to continue to exist within it, was there some way she might come back to me, that I might hear her once again?
But it was too late to undo my refusal—all the gestures I withheld, my silence.
My room an alien skin, my hands at my sides brittle, unthinking.
I tried to get used to not waiting for her voice. To understand it wasn’t coming, and that silence was itself again, not the intervals between her speaking.
But my sense of time and space felt blind, too narrow. I turned to my Florensky.
“When an opaque body intercepts light in space, the isolation of that body occurs from one side…”
Was that what was happening to me? My body isolate, opaque, and yet I’d come to care for Frieda. And the one across the ocean—I still wished that I could hear from her and know her.
“In a sense all light is active, all matter passive.”
I looked down at my hands, those two persistent lumps, passive, without recourse, brute matter plainly trapped.
Then I came to:
“This passive medium of matter, in its finest and most tender manifestation, is a creature.”