The Book of Madness and Cures (31 page)

The Mountains Are Full of Wonderful Creatures

My dear Gabriella,

If a man could be cured by holding council with the very thing that wounds him, then this would be the place. For in this desert, where the night reigns above me like a mantle of fear become awe, all my worst fears—losing myself, the physical infirmities of age, even death—lessen with the knowledge of my utter insignificance. I know it must sound odd, but I am reassured. All my ambitions—my vocation as doctor,
The Book of Diseases,
that vast encyclopedia that was to be my magnum opus—these things are thin under the firmament. I have never seen stars as I have seen here. The spheres rasp against one another and we can see the sparks! The desert people understand. Stars fly into our faces. I am small, I am small, and I do not care. And then the moon…

Oh, my father,
I thought when I reread this undated letter from an unnamed place.
When you declare your fears, there is no mention of a daughter or the ones you love. You have left that for me to carry. I always wanted to believe you were going through a difficult time and were making your way back to us. This letter only a kind of elaborate fancy. Perhaps I have deceived myself. Perhaps I will go on deceiving myself for a while.

We departed Montpellier for Santa Engracia. In spite of Olmina’s disappointment that we weren’t traveling east toward Venetia, she was cheered by the fragrance of yellow broom, sweet marjoram, and pungent grasses that flared yellow at the end of the day in the late May light. As we wound our way higher and higher into the mountains, with the peaks of the Pyrenei before us, my breath grew larger. The sweet pine- and fir-scented winds, clean light, and twisting waters cleansed this world and offered something that couldn’t be imagined at lower elevations. The humors found their balance. No wonder the holy ones sought out the high places.

From time to time the face of Hamish arose in the early morning as I awoke, and I could almost hold his round chin, dimpled like the star at the base of an apple. I imagined a life in Edenburg, as the wife of a scholar, with children. But when I glanced in my handheld glass each day, I saw a fuller face, for the journey had kindled my appetite, and a further dimming of youth. I had memorized Hamish as I had memorized my father, but the scent of his hair was the only resemblance the two men shared. A strain of pinewoods, smoky inks, stifling libraries, vellum books—yes, books. He was the story I hadn’t fully read, the book that held a secret.

We often heard the distant bells of small towns clanging the hours, but especially dawn, midday, and evening, for these were the longest tolling. Some nights we slept in plain stone inns for pilgrims; a few nights when we didn’t reach villages by nightfall, we slept out in the open, in shelters that ranged from a ring of old beeches with a fire going all night to keep the wolves at bay, to a tall circular stone enclosure broken on one side and entirely lacking a roof. When I questioned Lorenzo about this curious abandoned structure, he told me it was probably meant to protect the hives from bears. And indeed we found broken skeps inside, but no honey. It proved to be a fine shelter, canopied by the stars at night.

As we rode, steadily zigzagging up the steep mountains, the air cooled. No one worked these slopes for crops, and the shepherds who brought their herds out of the valleys for summer grazing had not yet reached the mountains. Here the soil was pale and spare, the stones reflective, unlike the darker loam of the lowlands, which held the sun. In order to stay warm and capture the best light, I chose the midday hours after dinner to write.

On one particularly gusty afternoon, we came upon two jumbled outcrops of boulders that inclined together near a rocky stream and formed a cunning hollow there, completely sheltered from the wind. The little basin of dark earth, formed by snowmelt that had already evaporated, seemed a warm sod cloak laid down beneath us, like wool to the touch. New grasses (which the mules happily cropped) clumped and needled up around the edges. We sat upon our cloaks, cupped by stone, warmed by stillness.

After we ate our bread, olives, sliced boar meat, and cheese, Lorenzo happily flung himself down on his back and placed his hands under his head, staring upward, where nothing could be seen but an occasional rook and erratic specks of blue that seemed to flake from the sky.

“Oh, look!” I cried, stretching out my arms toward the small butterflies lilting high above us. Everything about them was blue—their wings, their fuzzy bodies. “They’re dazzling! See how they open and close the leaflets of their wings.”

“And what would they be advertising, signorina?” teased Olmina sleepily.

“The mountains are full of wonderful creatures, eh?” Lorenzo joined in. “One might as well feast upon the vision of these gems as fall from a cliff.”

“But beauty is brevity, isn’t it?” I mused.

“How do you measure that?” pondered Lorenzo. “A summer’s worth of life is long to the butterfly. But we want decades. Yet what are they worth if we’re piling loss upon loss? I’d rather count days than years. Each day a year, by butterfly measure.” He chuckled at his own philosophizing. “But I’ve also heard it said that blue butterflies come from the mouths of angels.”

“Ah, some shepherd’s whim.”

“No, signorina, I think there’s a whole flock of them above us now. You sense them more easily in mountain places, you know. Forget cathedrals. Here’s my divine.”

Olmina rolled comfortably onto her side and began to snore lightly. I leaned against a curved stone and began to write about a disease utterly contrary to the pleasant aspect of our resting place.

The Repugnance of Closed Space:

Walls That Bind the Soul

For some sufferers, even the presence of a stone wall in an overgrown garden causes distress. For others, it is a room without windows, a long corridor, or a stairwell. The person may sweat, become chilled, cry out, or contract like charred paper in flame.

A young woman by the name of Esperanza, from Valladolid, clawed the plaster from the walls when she was stricken, as if she were buried alive. Her mother lamented the fact that her daughter had become a vermin and their home a vermin’s nest. Even the addition of windows produced no improvement in Esperanza’s vexation. Her sister complained that she could hear the terrible sound of Esperanza chewing the walls late at night. For although they tied her hands and her feet upon retiring to sleep, she wriggled up to the head of her bed and rasped the wall with her teeth.

Her father, a man of some wealth and reputation, rarely stayed at home, so great was his frustration with his daughter. One afternoon he appeared covered with brick-red dust, the August wind at his heels. He strode into the house, bearing the look of a man who will not be contradicted, and ordered Esperanza into the courtyard. The servants stood about, wringing their hands, fearful of his mood. He barked out orders: “Bring Esperanza’s bed into the garden, and her armoire—put it there beneath the orange trees.” As for her mirrors (for she had several more than was befitting a young woman), he ordered them to be arranged in various corners of the courtyard so as to effect the greatest sense of openness. “Now,” Don Enrique de la Peña said in a tone of stifled anger, “I want to hear no more about it, no more gnawing the walls like a nest of rats, no more burrowing in this household! I have given you a good life, Daughter, and I will not be shamed by your madness!” Esperanza stood like a dead tree in a salt swamp while her father paced the tiles in a state of chagrin and the servants lifted, rocked, and shoved the dark bulks of oak furniture to the places her father had assigned them. She was the still center of their multiple orbits. At last she spoke in a dulcet voice that outraged her father: “Thank you, Papà, I am glad you’ve made this decision.”

He marched out of the house, fists clenched with an unreasonable sense of defeat. Esperanza began to acquaint herself with her new home. Of course the garden was familiar to her, but now it took on a domestic cast that she must investigate. The sky offered escape from the closed rooms, though it still made her uneasy. The greenery was a true relief, not quite a wall and beautifully impermanent. For that is how Esperanza began to think of it. People didn’t understand her and they never had. Her aversion to walls was a horror of permanence. That is why she could never tolerate going to church—all the pronouncements of absolute judgment.

Esperanza never entered the house again. She took her meals out of doors, shat in a hole behind the rosemary, and slept under violent storm (the servants had arranged an oiled cloth tarp over her bed) and stifling sun alike. The maroon bed-curtains faded to a ghastly pink as the weave thinned and shredded. Her four-poster bed, with its headboard carved with putti and grapevines, slowly warped and split. After five or six years the cherubs’ heads separated from their bodies and lifted like tiny oracular spheres toward heaven. The bodies, meanwhile, rotted and furred with a livid green mold, took on the luminosity of the damp forest floor as they descended. Esperanza was now in her late twenties, unmarried and an even greater burden to her family. They had patched the walls of their hacienda, but no guest in that immaculate house could ignore the strange woman wandering in the courtyard and her disheveled articles of dress and furniture.

One afternoon a cousin of hers, four or five years of age, said in the sagacious voice of a child, “Esperanza, why don’t you come inside? The ceiling is square just like the sky. There’s no difference.” For he believed that her dismay came from squares and perhaps she had already overcome her discomfort without knowing it. Instead she began to wail with sudden recognition of the courtyard’s limits and how the unchanging dimension of the sky confined her. Esperanza yanked open the rusted wrought-iron gate at the back of the garden, which hadn’t been opened in years. She stumbled away from the courtyard, from the gleam of her nine mirrors, sunken bed, and dense armoire. She ran into the flooded streets of January and stumbled toward the pine forest at the edge of town, her damp woolen skirts trailing behind her, sprouting phosphorescent orange fungi at the hem. Her loosened bodice harbored small ferns. Her hair supported lichen and club mosses. Her algal skin and above all her stench, like that of a shrunken pond that yields a liquor of decay, emanated for blocks all around. Townspeople swerved away from her, whispering that it must be the green Esperanza, the child who rots at the center of the de la Peña house. She wandered into the forest of Cordera. Though her father searched days and nights with a party of men and lanterns, he never found her. Esperanza’s mother believed she had become a tree, perhaps an elm. She left small things—sweets and earrings—for her daughter at the base of a sapling that had begun to grow near the edge of a wet meadow, where it was rumored Esperanza had been glimpsed by a shepherd before she disappeared.

After three more days of riding, we found ourselves late one afternoon on a narrowing track of unrelenting wind. I trusted Lorenzo to find the way, yet it was true that he didn’t know these mountains.

When I questioned him, he said, “I’m taking us southwest, always southwest, signorina, just as you asked. I’ve got a good sense of the sun.”

I was reassured; still I felt that we were at the ends of the earth. We couldn’t even ride the mules, for the gusts threatened to pitch us off. We held tightly on to ropes that had been fastened to the rock faces with iron rings alongside the path for travelers, and we continued into the evening, for Lorenzo didn’t want to be stranded in this place.

“We must stop, take shelter among the rocks,” I insisted finally, my legs aching and my eyes straining to find sure footing across the scree that had long ago tumbled down from above. The flat stones appeared to lie all on one plane in the waning light, though they really tilted in jagged heaps, making it a tough scramble.

“I can’t go farther,” complained Olmina as she abruptly sat down next to her mule, drawing her woolen cloak and shawl more closely about her.

“No, no, you don’t!” cried Lorenzo. “You don’t know mountains the way I do. These may not be the Dolomiti, but I can smell the weather coming. With this sharp wind, there’ll be a harsh rain, maybe even snow.”

“The sky is clear, old goat!” said Olmina, shaking her fist at him.

Indeed the stars gleamed above us like holes punched in tin over a fire. The crescent moon descended the western sky like a pale gondola cleaving a black sea.

“Do you see the moon? It holds water—a storm is coming. And there below, see the small cottage in the meadow?”

“Yes, Lorenzo, I see it,” I answered, wobbling against the wind, fastening my eyes on the thatched stone hut.

“We can reach it within the hour. Get up on the mule, Olmina, I’ll strap you to Fiammetta’s back.”

“No, no, no!” Olmina fought him away with sudden strength.

“Come on, Nana.” I resorted to my childhood name for her, and she relented.

So we slowly progressed, Lorenzo at the front, leading the five mules, Olmina cowering upon the next to the last one, and I following her on foot, preceding the very last mule, all of us buffeted by gusts that increased in force as they whined through every crevice, leaving us stunned, our ears buzzing. All around us the stark peaks loomed like robed hermits come out of their caves to watch us, some of their pates dusted with snow.

When we reached the hut, it turned out to be a low-roofed shed for animals, with four goats huddled inside. Lorenzo, half bent over in the doorway, struck his flint to tinder, and with the small flame he lit a candle stub. He coaxed the terrified animals into one corner, and then Olmina and I settled in another.

Without a word, my dear companion instantly fell asleep on the straw while the goats stared at us and bleated. I noticed a small paper poking out of her pocket. A letter? I would ask her about it later, but I thought it odd, since Olmina didn’t correspond with anyone as far as I knew, nor could she even write…though she’d taught herself to read, sly woman, perhaps she could write as well? Lorenzo pulled in the five mules, closed the door, and made sure the inner latch was firmly fastened. We were all packed inside that stone hut steaming with animal breath, giving each other warmth and comfort.