The Book of Madness and Cures (10 page)

He patted my shoulder and I yelped.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” he cried.

“What is that fool doing?” barked Dr. Wassler in broken Italian. “Get out of here, peasant, and let me tend to the woman.”

“No! I want him to stay!” I said.

The doctor pursed his lips.

I felt my sore chest and left shoulder with my right hand, palpating for fluid or solid swelling, but then a sharp pain shot under my breath. I wept, unable to tend myself. “Look at all the trouble I’ve caused. Are you all right, Olmina?” I moaned and clasped her hand where it rested near mine.

“I’m soaked.” She sighed. “I’d love a hot bath right now in a fine porcelain tub. And that will happen when we return home,” she declared. When she saw my face, she added, “With your father, may we find him soon, please God.”

Lorenzo grunted assent and stared at the floor.

Dr. Wassler approached and spoke coolly, as if I weren’t present, as if he were demonstrating the skills of dressing a wound to an unseen audience in an anatomy theater. “Nothing is broken here. The worst part may be the bruising or perhaps a torn ligament here in the shoulder.” He spoke to the ceiling as he pressed my shoulder, and I gritted my teeth to keep from crying out.

The doctor’s black eyes met mine. I was glad for his care, but not his disparaging look. His wife approached to apply the leaf plaster on my shoulder and tie it there with bandages of torn cloth.

“So, young woman,” the doctor said, addressing me, “what is the purpose of your journey here in our parts?”

I closed my eyes and left Olmina to explain, for I trusted her to say just enough.

I ached for days, unable to sleep. The doctor’s wife gave me chamomile, gentle flowers that often calmed me, though they had little effect now. Sometimes I dozed while scraps of dim conversation came and went.

“We must persuade her.”

“You’re right, Olmina, though I doubt even now, when her horse crops dirt, that she’ll go back. Our little doctor is tenacious.”

“Our little doctor is a fool!”

I slept.

One night after everyone else had fallen asleep, Dr. Wassler appeared in the dim light of my room in his nightshirt and groped his thick yellow fingers along my arms toward my chest. “What are you doing?” I called out loudly.

“Shhh, be quiet now. I’m observing your responses.”

“In the middle of the night? Go away!”

He sat at the foot of my bed and stared at me. “Be quiet now, I won’t hurt you.”

“Olmina! Lorenzo!” I shouted, raising myself up to my right elbow.

“They’re sleeping in the basement with the smoked hams. They can’t hear you. You can’t summon them unless you practice the black arts. And in that case I’ve a friend who knows how to deal with your kind. He works for the bishop!”

The stairs creaked and Mrs. Wassler rose through the opening in the floor. She was wrapped in a brown wool shawl, her loose black and gray hair rumpled and almost lovely. But she had a fierce look on her face that shocked me. “Come to bed,” she said to her husband’s back.

His face darkened and he shot me a look of pure hatred. “You don’t command me!” He turned to face her. “But as it happens, I’ve finished my examination of the patient.”

She stood aside and waited while he descended the stairs.

“Thank you,” I murmured gratefully.

“I’m sorry for the ill conduct of my husband,” she said. Then she descended the stairs, her face now slack with sadness.

After she left, I rose, aching all over, and clumsily pushed the small table over to the stairs, turned it over to cover the opening in the floor, and set a chair upon it. At least I’d hear him if he tried to enter again. I stirred the fire to bring up some light and pulled my map of Germania from the satchel, laying it out on the bed to plot the next part of our journey.

In the morning I confided to Olmina that we’d depart immediately. She didn’t question me but commenced packing our things. Lorenzo purchased fresh provisions (ham, cheeses, bread, apples, and wine) and a mule, Fedele, from one of the villagers. This plodding animal moved like a barrow loaded with bricks. But chastened by the loss of my horse, I resolved to be grateful for my mule.

As we set out in the early afternoon, I turned to Dr. Wassler, who stood frowning next to the chalky walls and dark half timbers of his house. Nearby, the pine and cedar trees wheezed with the gusty wind that raked their branches. “Thank you, Doctor, for tending my health.” I was glad to leave but vexed with pain. “And I want to express my gratitude to your kind wife.”

He nodded, arms crossed on his tightly buttoned-up shirt and waistcoat. “You should not be traveling north, you know. There are those who would denounce you in our country. A woman doctor is near a witch!”

I recoiled at his words but said nothing. There were such denouncements in Venetia; they were usually rare and aimed at the poor country midwives, like my grandmother. I had no desire to confront the doctor. Who knew how they dealt with such things in this place?

Dr. Wassler then said in a louder voice, “Return to Venetia! Your father, like any good man, would want you at home. No daughter of mine would be wandering the countryside.”

“You have no daughter,” said his wife at the door, bereft of any expression.

I bade her well and she lifted her hand before she turned to go inside.

CHAPTER 6

Before the Sea of Black Woods

We left the
half-drowned village behind us, carefully skirting the receding edge of Lake Costentz as the hours drained like the waters of a wound. An odd assortment of things appeared at the lip of the lake’s descending wake, a line continuously redrawn like those maps of the Old World and the New, where the shapes of sea and land never remain constant from one year to the next.

The dispossessed objects unsettled me: A crumpled lady’s ruff like the jellyfish that beach themselves at the edge of the Venetian Lagoon. Mud-caked wooden drawers, their contents churned and lost or astonishingly preserved in their little arks. A thin baleen comb embedded in silt like a fossil from a cabinet of wonder, an object of no consequence awaiting its turn, in hundreds, even thousands of years, to harden to stone, then be discovered and set upon a shelf to be admired. As a child I’d believed that spirits inhabited every tree, every stone. I’d said to my father, “Everything is alive!”

Olmina had laughed at me. We were at the table, about to dine on her minestrone. The soup made me happy. It had the fragrance of the garden and her hands and the hearth in it.

My father said, “Even the door?” He gestured to the half-open entry.

“All of them,” I answered, pointing to the yawning cupboard, the window shutters, the little painted doors on the book cabinet, the medicine chest.

“Don’t talk nonsense!” my mother said.

“How do you know they’re alive?” asked my father.

“They speak, they say
come
or
go
or
stay.
”

“Ah, and what does the chest say?”

“Don’t encourage her in this foolishness! Do you want a child possessed?”

“It says,
I’m a mouth. Put your ear to me and listen.
”

“That’s enough! Eat your soup.”

“No, you may speak, Gabi. Things do speak to us.”

My mother glared at him and then left the table, stepping out into the courtyard. My father sighed and went after her.

I remained at the table and Olmina sat down to keep me company. “Sometimes we can’t always say what we hear. Others don’t understand.” She smiled at me and patted my hand. “Eat your soup.”

“The medicine chest says,
Everything is alive and everything has a secret.
”

She raised her eyebrows at me. “Lift that spoon before the soup gets cold.”

I obeyed. I overheard my mother from the courtyard, saying, “The girl must be instructed in the ways of the world, not in these fantasies you create for her.”

“But my dear, it’s only a game.”

“A serious game, don’t you think? Given that you’re half here and half there.”

I wondered what she meant. There must have been a gesture too, perhaps her open palm to signify the world, and fingers at the temple to signify the mind.

In the end my father gentled her. “Recall when we first met and strolled arm in arm along the Zattere? With your mother, who taught me the uses of so many herbs? She encouraged your stories about the ships coming in to anchor, the origins of their cargo, the distant world beyond Venetia. She liked my stories too!”

“Ah, my poor mother, and look where it got her! But yes, you appeared to me from one of those ships, from Ciprus. How handsome you were, your ink-black hair almost blue, your eyes half-closed as if dreaming.”

“And you, my dear, were a dazzling species of dove, preening there at the balcony.”

“Now look what you’ve done—distracted me from Gabriella.”

I sipped the last of my soup, tilting the bowl to my lips as I would never have been allowed to do if my parents were at the table.

“Have I? Come back to dinner, then.”

“Scoundrel!” But there was affection in her voice.

I also believed, in my child’s heart, that the world truly wanted each one of us in some way. Now I felt how insignificant our little passage was upon this earth.

We rode late into the evening before coming upon another walled town hooded by thick forest. My head and shoulder ached, numbing my brain to anything other than maintaining an upright position on Fedele. In the sky near Cassiopeia, shooting stars fell like broken lances one after another, piercing the air with stubs of light, repeated on the lake’s surface.

“Remember the Canto della Stella, when we once sang to the stars, signorina, in the Christmas procession near Lago di Garda?” Olmina asked, full of wonder. “You were only a tiny girl when you asked me about the frozen fires of the stars that burned upon the lake. Was the sky above the same as the sky below? Your father laughed at your curiosity and said, ‘Everything above is reflected below. Even the darkness.’ ” She paused, then added, “An odd thing to say, if you ask me.”

I nodded to please her but said nothing. My father respected the darkness, even sought it out at times, when he’d sit musing in a dim room or, during summer, in the courtyard lit only by stars.
The dark is not evil. Only men make it so. Just as foxglove is not an evil plant but becomes poisonous when misused in too great a dosage.
My father sat in the dark to think, because all creation begins in shadow.

We were alone upon the road.

We wound our way through the low hills covered with gray orchards, ghostly fields of grain, and vines, the vast lake gleaming like dull metal to our left, the scythe moon having set long ago, and soon arrived at Überlingen.

Unfortunately the southeast gate was closed to us; the gatekeeper would not open despite our cries. So we turned round and viewed the dim hamlet that spread out from the moat enclosing the town. The faint light that glimmered here and there from houses scattered up the mountain unexpectedly comforted me. They were small, secretive beacons before the sea of black woods where the road led next. We could go no farther this night and would have to rely on one of the houses to take us in.

When we drew close to the half-timber house near the mill, I could make out a wooden sign painted with a crude bed and a bees’ skep, hanging above the door. Lorenzo knocked, and a widow in all-black garb, bent as a latch, came to the door holding a candle. “What’s your business?” she asked, clutching a thin shawl to her chest.

“We’d like a room and some food, please, dear madam,” Lorenzo answered, since he spoke the best German. He hastily removed his rough woolen cap and held it in his hands, nodding to her in courtesy.

She lifted the candle and frowned. “It’s late for travelers to arrive.”

“Right you are, madam, but our journey’s been slow and muddy. My mistress nearly drowned in the lake not so long ago, so we’re riding with more care.”

She scrutinized me. “That explains her piebald face.”

I cringed, embarrassed.

“I thought you’d been set upon by robbers. Or maybe you’re vagabonds setting a trap.” She inspected our faces once more. “Well, come in, then. I’m Widow Gudrun. Mind you, I can only offer a plain repast. Bread, cheese, onions, and beer.”

Lorenzo perked up at this.

“We’re most grateful,” I said.

“And how many days will you stay, then?”

“Perhaps a week. I need to rest in a peaceful place.”

“Apart from the bees in the orchard and the boatbuilders hammering all day down the lane, you should be fine.”

“Ah, I should feel right at home with that,” I answered, thinking of the boatyard not far from our home. “We come from Venetia.”

“Ah, hmm.” She stopped and looked me up and down once more. Then she muttered, “Sea people, then. Well, come in. Lake people aren’t so different. We both share the flux of the water, though we lake dwellers keep more to ourselves, I think. It’s the knowing of a place bound by mountains. While your water seems without end.”