The Book of Madness and Cures (38 page)

The blue worms consume more at night, feasting, it is said in this village, on the conversations in dreams as well as on those spoken beneath archways or around the supper mat spread upon the floor. The family eats everything with their fingers and in their contentment sometimes forgets the necessity of silence. Then the worms capture the words before the women can hear them. The villagers also suffer insomnia, existing in a listless world for months, enduring the many ailments that arise from a cold, wet humor.

Finally the worm completes its cycle and emerges from the ear of its own accord, well fattened and seeking its original host. It burrows back into the desert to finish its hidden life there. Malina told me that there is even a constellation called the Blue Worm, in the southeastern quarter of the sky, perhaps that same constellation that we call Serpens.

I wasn’t certain I would go on looking for my father. I was weary. Even with all my care to retrace his journey, to seek out his peers, I had missed him. I wanted to remain in one place for a while. Yet what about the man who had disappeared in the sandstorm? And Malina appeared to know far more than she revealed. Perhaps it was her way to wait to know me, as she suggested I do before disclosing my purpose to her. Even as I was about to give up, I found another kind of patience, like a coin sewn into my hem. Besides, I knew how to wait. And now I was two.

I watched Malina come and go, visiting the well, milking or feeding the goats, fetching grain from the granary once or twice a day with her basket, to make flatbread. I allowed her to blacken my eyes with kohl to keep the flies away, and to cut strands of my coppery hair to share out with the village women, for the color gleamed as something marvelous to them.

I watched the women and children come and go, visiting Malina’s kitchen, where they consulted her about their ailments, leaving little gifts of dates, eggs, or even firewood. A few times I observed a thin tress of my own, woven into a child’s hair as an adornment.

I satisfied my growing hunger with eggs, goat cheese, flatbread, dried fruits, and honey during the day, and with cuscusu, flatbread, occasional goat meat, walnuts, raisins, olives, and oranges from the port of Messa in the evening when I shared a meal with Malina and Yousef. I didn’t know if I would ever return to Venetia. This land of desert and mountains suited me now.

Malina instructed me in the ways of the djnoun. “Those small spirits,” she said one afternoon as we sat before the hearth, “inhabit all things from the tiniest grain to the largest mountain.”

“But the small ones, why do they matter to us?”

“They live with us. We live with them. It is custom. We bear them respect.”

“Is there a fire djinn, a hearth djinn?”

“Yes, but they love water more. That is why you must sing when you draw from the well, or the djinn who lives there may taint our water!” She taught me a simple chant for drawing water. I murmured the strange words before I dropped the bucket facedown into the well, before the rope unwound from the bricks.

The monks and nuns of Venetia chanted their prayers early in the morning. That sound always made me stand still, no matter what age I was, no matter where I was going. I stood on the damp stones and breathed the chant, tasted the plain harmonies on my tongue. But this music of Taradante didn’t come from within the high cloister walls; it didn’t come from the plague churches dedicated to healing. It came from everywhere, from small red mud courtyards, drifting downward from narrow windows, echoing up from wells, granaries, stables, fields, oases, and wadis where shepherds grazed the animals. Children sang to soothe the djnoun in little stones, water, arjun trees, palms. The women sang, the men. Those who believe the desert is soundless, motionless, are mistaken. Malina told me that the desert herself hums. Nothing stands still. Not even sorrow.

Sometimes I walked alone, feeling safe as the outsider everyone in the village knew, to the oasis near the center of town, where exhalations were particularly strong at dawn and dusk. I knew that Yousef followed me, watched me as if I were a stray. So truly I was not alone. I listened for the indecipherable words that rose and fell from the slow-moving boundaries of stone and sand, beneath the calls of birds shrilling to their kind. Perhaps I wanted to hear the voices of which the old ones spoke, though I really wanted to hear my own ancestors, Venetian and Ciprian, who didn’t inhabit this place.

But I heard only the slippage of time, the seepage of water, and the murmur of conversations in and around the travelers’ tents pitched on the far side of the oasis. Sometimes that was enough. Once, I saw Yousef speaking to a tall foreigner, who stood with his back turned to me outside his tent. He moved his pale hands back and forth as he spoke, a vaguely familiar motion that made my heart leap. I asked Yousef about it.

“That man? He was just asking directions to the souk,” he answered.

“Does the man have red hair?” For his head had been covered by a hood.

“I don’t know.”

I turned away. I didn’t want him to see the expectation on my face—for I still kept the secret hope of Hamish, like another gold coin jangling against the coin of patience in my hem.

CHAPTER 24

The Basin of the Dead

Just before sundown
in midsummer, Malina came to my room and began stopping up any openings, including chinks in the ceiling between the thuja beams. She cautioned me, “Tonight the moon withdraws and covers herself. A time of danger. She veils the mirror, passes through the basin of the dead. Extinguish your lamp, Daughter, and pray that your soul may pass safely through the dark.”
And that of my unborn,
I thought.

After she left, I understood that I was not to leave my room. But filled with insatiable curiosity, I stepped quietly into the small courtyard, fully cloaked. Shutters were latched, carpets hung against the carved wooden doors and windows, whether to protect those within from seeing that other lightless world, or to prevent the disorder of that world from entering the house, I wasn’t sure. I was a shadow among other shadows.

A man shouted once in the medina, in fear or exhilaration, and then the town went mute. The light hairs on my arms rose in apprehension. I climbed a ladder on the north side of my room and sat upon the flat roof of the dwelling. The moon had just risen. The lunar cast upon the listless body of the Sus valley and the surrounding desert mountains slowly wore thin, like an old garment, as a dark curved blade fell across the moon’s face. I watched the slow scything of her light.

An hour passed, and I didn’t move from my place against the wall, knees drawn up to my chest as I sat shivering, on vigil. The moon’s covered disk finally glowed like the clotted stump of an amputated leg or arm (for I had seen several such horrors on men returning from one war or another when they came to be treated by my father) or the bloodied head of an infant emerging from her mother. The stars jumped forward. I placed my hands on my belly. I, who had never given birth, considered the child who quickened there at the center of me.
How should I prepare the way?

Little by little the moon slid into cold radiance once more. The stars receded. A small seep that emerged from an underground spring near the rubble of the outer wall gleamed briefly, then vanished in the sand. An unlikely knot of ferns grew there, and I suddenly craved the young shoots. But as I descended the ladder to gather them, someone moaned without words, a sound like that of a large animal. A smell of old, damp wood rose from the night. I listened for footfalls. Had something come down from the mountains? After a while I heard nothing more, but it so unnerved me I fled indoors. Recalling that ferns offered a cure for fever, I searched for the entry I’d written many months ago for
The Book of Diseases.

Carthusian Spleen:

A Form of Ague Where a Solitary Falls into
Trembling and Sullen Aspect

The disease is named after an order of contemplatives who distill the elixir of life, a rare liquor composed of over a hundred herbs and spices, prepared under the breath of prayer. Unfortunately an outbreak of spleen among the usually kind and peaceful nuns caused their order’s name to be attached to this affliction, when even their elixir could not effect a cure.

The fever acts like a quick fire on the victim and then scorches all those around her. For the mean of spirit exude a certain burnt odor. Some will say that the reek is fiendish, but I’m not sure that evil is so predictable. Sometimes evil gives off a fragrance.

Once, in Udine, an amiable woman scalded by the ague spat insults at her children. A cobbler’s wife in Mainz flung shoes at every customer who spoke the words, “I need…” A young classics teacher in Florentia, noted for patience with her girls, began to lecture upon the necessity of the rod and the cage. “Let punishment instruct the frail body, break the will. Let suffering…” The ague, however, doesn’t affect vengeful souls with the inverse humor, a fact that led my father to say, “Though disease often calls its opposite to table, spleen dines alone.”

Carthusian spleen courts death, mingles bitterness with roar. Yet the fever bows to a fern. I’ve never treated it myself, but my father recommended the gentle and wise spleenwort. This fern grows profusely near freshets and reduces the rancorous fever, chills, and edema of the troubling organ. Spleenwort clenches just as the disease binds, and then the fern uncurls, loosening the bile of a thousand days.

The subsequent night I heard a muffled voice cry out from time to time and then subside. When I questioned Malina, she shrugged evasively and murmured that perhaps one of the neighbors suffered a private grief.

Unable to endure it any longer, I lit an oil lamp and followed the sound of the voice across the red dirt courtyard until I reached the granary.
There, it came from within the storeroom!
The tall tower, with its narrow windows at the top, sent the sound in all directions, making it difficult to mark the source unless you were at the entry. I thought I heard someone call my name,
Gabi, Gabi,
but then the voice fell away into babbling. I unlatched and opened the sagging door. The voice ceased and the dim room appeared empty except for a large mound of barley sloping from the wall to my right.

Old bits of grain and straw crackled beneath my feet as I entered. I lifted the lamp. My stomach tightened when I saw someone huddled in the far corner. A stable stench leapt to my nose from the floor as I stepped forward.

A man in a rough tunic with his back to me crouched there, a torn piece of blue turban cloth tied around his mouth, his arms flung forward on a pile of hay. He seemed a supplicant or a prisoner. His hands were tied at the wrist, and shadows pooled around him. He turned his face a little so I could see the matted gray beard, the faint splinters of light that shone from yellow teeth, the caked blood on his brow where he’d bent his head to raw wrists, arms where dried red rivulets made a crude brocade of his flesh.

My skin prickled.

“Papà?” I whispered fiercely.

His eyes, almost recognizable in the half light, scanned the shadowy room and passed over me as if I were another mud wall. He turned his face away and muttered a rapid string of senseless Latinate words as a dribble of urine ran down his thigh. He clenched and unclenched his hands. He struggled against the long brown cord that bound him to a metal ring in the wall, a ring meant for tying up animals.

“Papà, Papà!” I cried, and he began to bellow through his gag as he butted his head into the straw. Terrified, I dropped the lamp, spilling oil that flashed at my hem and set off his bellowing all the more as I flailed at the flames that tongued my skirts.

Malina came running and threw a blanket on me, choking the fire. Then the air went dark but for the ashen squares of moonlight at the top of the granary. I strained for breath. My father—or the man who seemed my father—thrashed on his meager patch of earth.

Malina pulled me out into the courtyard. “You must not go in there!”

“Who is that man? Why is he bound to the wall like a beast?” My body shook.

“Because he
is
one. Your father went into the desert and he never returned. This creature is bound so that he doesn’t hurt himself.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” I cried, clutching her arms.

She shoved me away and lifted the lamp that she’d set on the well, pushing back her sleeve to show a broken scar on her forearm. “This is where your father sank his teeth. I didn’t want you to get hurt! Forget him. Mourn him, Daughter. He is like this many months, dead but not dead. Since it is our custom to tend strangers who have no one, I keep him. I bathe him once a week and feed him morning and night. Yet every day, he threatens me.”

I couldn’t accept what she told me. “Give me the lamp.”