The Book of Madness and Cures (34 page)

“Oh, señora, he left for the north, Venasque. Or the south, I don’t know, maybe Miquinenza or Lérida?”

“Or Almodóvar del Rio!” A woman’s voice came in flowing tones from the other room.

“Please excuse my wife, señora, for her rudeness—just because she is from Andaluzia, she thinks that everyone wants to go there! But your other question, yes, he was here at the end of threshing season, July, three years ago now.”

We thanked him and left with our medicinals. We were barely two houses away from the apothecary shop when his wife ran up to us, a basket slung over her arm.

“I’m on my way to the baker’s, but I have something for you,” she said in a low voice. “Your father exchanged this once for some medicament. I believe his purse was growing thin. Don’t tell my husband!” And she slipped a small calipers into my hand. “I never knew my father,” she added, “so I envy your sadness.” Then she stepped quickly ahead of us, for we were, after all, strangers.

Still I called out my thanks to her, but she didn’t turn her head.

“Quiet, Signorina!” Olmina spoke for the first time that morning. “She has already risked suspicion by speaking to us. Her husband stands peering at the door.”

We left Santa Engracia to explore neighboring villages for traces of the Italian, il Dottor. Sometimes when I conversed with other travelers or villagers, aristocrats or commoners, I wasn’t sure we were speaking of the same man. In one village, il Dottor exhibited habits so unlike my father’s that I suspected I was following the trail of some renegade or madman posing as a doctor. They spoke of il Dottor as a somber man who grunted enigmatic or incoherent comments, administered medicaments, and then took his leave. Some angrily demanded recompense from me. One fellow spoke of il Dottor as a saint, a man of unfathomable kindness who saw all the wounded as equal and would assist an afflicted brigand at the side of the road as soon as a gangrened knight in a chill castle bed.

Olmina wearied of this pursuit and attempted to change my course toward home.

On an afternoon of tremendous wind, we visited Encantat, where wild asphodel grew. My father always mentioned the extraordinary properties of these roots, which relieve spasms of all sorts and increase the flow of urine, purifying the body. Hippocrates also noted that the roots could be roasted in ashes and eaten by women to restore the monthly flow (a treatment that I hoped to test, for my own flow had ceased, just as it had once before in Venetia, when I fell into grief after my beloved’s death). The ancients planted them near the tombs, since asphodel was said to be the favorite food of the dead. I was certain my father wouldn’t have passed up the chance to see them firsthand and gather the bulbs.

We attained entrance to a high pine-forested valley between two stark ridges, directed there by a stout shepherd, who told me the finest white-spears grew there, though most of the flowers were spent by now. My hair blew ragged beneath my straw hat, and Olmina began to dote upon me as one would upon a child or the village fool.

“We really should start back, Gabriellina. A storm is coming. I’ll make you a tasty cheese pie,” she coaxed.

“Since when do you call me Gabriellina? I’m a grown woman,” I shouted at her above the wind. “I want you to help me dig for bulbs!”

Olmina pressed her chapped lips together and frowned at the unforgiving rocky soil, then brusquely turned from me and walked away. I remained among the tall spears, which furiously shook their long leaves, exhausted flowers, and multiplying pods, until I managed to unearth several spindle-shaped bulbs. I stowed them in my bag.

Food for my dead,
I thought, though their hunger seemed unending.

After spading the wild asphodel, we returned to Santa Engracia and I fell ill. I felt such a chill that it reached backward into other months and years. I heard Lorenzo sitting there at my side, carving wood with the crisp strokes of a knife. I saw the back of my father at the window and then I didn’t. Messalina appeared, dripping with ocean.

Olmina tended to me. She brought me black radish soup and bread for supper and stroked my forehead with a damp cloth, even though her sighs told me that she was restless and sometimes resentful.

On the third morning, Salvador brought my chamomile tea, strained of flowers, and I felt better. How odd that sometimes a small thing can effect a large reversal. Healing, finally, is invisible.

“I’ve asked too much of you on this journey, Olmina,” I began hoarsely. “And Lorenzo. He never would have died if…”

Olmina began to weep softly and patted my hair. “He loved you very much, Signorina Gabriella, as a man loves a daughter.” She pressed a small pillbox into my palm. I observed Olmina’s age in her mottled, wrinkled hands. “This is yours—your mother was going to throw them out!” The box contained the lost teeth of my childhood. They resembled little shells. “But he kept them in his shirt pocket always, for good fortune, he said, because they once belonged to our little doctor.”

My fist closed over the box, and I pressed my head against Olmina, crying. Lorenzo had carried my teeth like seed pearls as he watched me grow into a woman. And still I wanted to travel to the far ends of the earth—to Barbaria, now—for the father who’d abandoned me.

CHAPTER 21

A Border Between Continents

The evening before
we departed for the port town of Algezer, I pulled out one of my father’s letters, marked Taradante, from the bottom of the packet of letters. I’d read it only once before, unlike others that were frequent companions to my night thoughts. Now it struck me why, for I’d forgotten or refused to see most of what it said.

Dear Gabriella,

I grow weary. Watching the full moon rise over the braided sand of the wadi, I feel that I’m on her white surface. Some say that she is utterly smooth. Others argue that she is composed of seas. Aristotle thought she marked the beginning of the imperishable ether stars and the end of the mutable spheres—earth, air, water, and fire. I am only too mutable here in the desert, my watery brain drawn to her pull like those shellfish that multiply exuberantly in her light. But I am also at a border. This life is my changing element, the sand beyond, my imperishable mind. I am too small for myself. All my life I’ve wrestled with increase, decrease, the gravity of rage and sorrow, the almost weightlessness of forgetting. Cures, panaceas, palliatives. Now I believe the moon is sand, the disk-shaped top of an hourglass draining into the ether away from us. Every month she seeps away and then is turned by some steady, intimate hand. Her own, perhaps. She turns herself. You must turn yourself, Daughter. We can never see it, but we can feel it. My body confines me. I want to live forever. Still I am large enough to rest my head upon her gritty bosom. Be let go. I am nothing more than a mote. But the moon is the wife I have never kissed! She waits for me, she abandons me. She lies in all things moist, the sea and its tributaries, the heart and its vessels, the brain and its damp thoughts, the kidney and its flow, the uterus and its watery longings, the past and its surgent concussions. I wander, I drift, Gabriella, forgive me. I grow weary and must take my rest in the desert. Dreams too partake of the moon. They linger at the gate. If I can sleep, I will tell you my dream. I’ll no longer be thirsty. If only I could trick dry Death once more. There is so little water here and so few cisterns to decoy the moon, though the sea still laps at the edge of the continent. Return, return, you say to me, and I wonder, return where? Shall I retrace my journey to find home?

1589
Your father

We traveled several days from Santa Engracia toward and then through the Andaluzian mountains, to the southwest of Hispania, and arrived at the ancient port town of Algezer. The air was rich with the stink of fish and sea snails.

“Is there an inn nearby?” I asked, after we’d greeted the leathery old man who sat cross-legged, mending a net.

“Keep going west till you get to the fallen wall. You’ll find it just beyond the rubble.” He waved a deeply creased hand with stubby fingers, holding needle and thick thread, toward the far verge of land and then resumed his deft knotted stitches.

But just as we began to follow the track west, he called out, “If you’ve any interest in selling a mule or two, I’d like to know.”

I turned round in the saddle. “Come to the inn tomorrow and we’ll discuss it.”

“And I’ve the good fortune to address…?”

“Dr. Mondini.”

“Ah. Tomorrow, then.” He grinned after us, or rather, I should say, after the mules, which he appeared to be sizing up for a good price.

We settled into plain, whitewashed rooms at the modest inn. From our window on the edge of Andaluzia, we looked across the dusty sea at the Rock of Gibraltar, looming like a watchful white lion. We could also make out the faintest line of the purple Rif Mountains.

I turned to Olmina, to take up a conversation that we’d begun in fits and starts all the way back in Santa Engracia and that even now I half wanted to delay. But at last I asked quietly, “Can you imagine Venetia empty of Lorenzo?”

“It will never be empty of him. That was our home,” said Olmina. She paused. “Gabriellina—I can’t convince you, then, to come with me?”

And I returned a question: “Won’t you come with me to Barbaria?”

“My stubborn Dottoressa.” She laughed hoarsely, and her body shuddered next to mine at the thick sill. “You must follow this through to the end, but how will you recognize the end?”

“I’ll know, somehow, I’ll know,” I answered. “I’ll make the arrangements, then,” I said, leaving her to watch the enormous sea.

Señor Romanesco, our innkeeper, assured me that he would book passage for us. Luckily we had to wait only a couple of days for our ships. Olmina would board the merchant ship
Hyperion
to Venetia early in the morning. I would leave soon after her on the
Charon
to Tanger.

“But why are you traveling alone, señora?” he asked. His mouth, surrounded by a trim black beard, hardened in disapproval. He called me señora, assuming that I was a widow, I suppose.

“I intend to search for my father. One of his letters mentioned a town there, Taradante. Could you tell me if there are any other reputable travelers staying here who seek passage to Tanger? I’m in need of trustworthy companions.”

He leaned forward, placing both hands upon the dizzying geometric mosaics of the counter between us, warning, “You’ll invite thieves and swindlers into your company if you remain a lady dressed as you are. The desert will swallow you!”

I lowered my voice and said, “I will go as a man.”

“Ah. But how will you bear the desert of Barbaria?”

“You know the desert, then? You are Moorish?”

“Ah, the señora is curious,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “But let me say that you’ve come to a border between continents, and as at any border, you’ll find that no one here is quite what they seem. The Morisco is a devoted Spaniard. The Jew is now a
converso.
Even the doctor may be the afflicted, if you take my meaning. But an honest innkeeper is an honest innkeeper.” He clasped his hands and said, “You’ll grow accustomed to the heat and the winds of Barbaria. Learn where the deep wells are, señora. Even the most humble
dar
has its garden, even the most humble soul.”

“And what is a
dar?
” I asked.

“The
dar
in Barbaria is the dwelling place, the house with its rooms around a courtyard, as we have even here.” He waved at the small patio within, with its octagonal blue and green tiled fountain, which cast a cool, unsteady light on the pale walls.

“Truly, I thank you for your help,” I said, turning from him to the submerged shadows of the courtyard, filled with sudden disquiet as I considered the lonely journey ahead.

That evening, Señor Romanesco knocked at our door and announced, “The fisherman has come to look at your animals. I’ll accompany you to the stable.”

I nodded. Olmina also joined us.

I’d decided to keep Fedele and Fiametta, so only the other two were for sale. These would purchase our ship’s passage, so I could still keep a good reserve of ducats.

When I named my price, the man balked. “I can only buy one of them, then.”

“Then it is done,” I concluded.

“Now, just a moment. Let me have a look at them.” He walked around each mule, felt each leg, and tapped the hoofs while they regarded him with mild suspicion, the whites of their eyes widening.

We haggled back and forth. I quietly drove a firm bargain, while Olmina stood nearby, hands on hips, fastening a good hard look at him that would’ve unnerved me in an instant. We were tougher than the old man had anticipated, and Señor Romanesco stood to one side watching the transaction silently without expression.

I stroked the mules’ gray faces, their soft sail-shaped ears, which twitched one way, then another, independently of each other. How far they had borne our supplies with resolute labor! I was sad to let them go, but at least they wouldn’t have to travel aboard a ship again.