The Remedy (5 page)
When I awoke, I was again alone, weak and sore. There was a smell of blood, sweat, and soap in the room, all unpleasantly fused. I felt my belly: It was lumpy and tender, but clearly emptied of its burden. I raised the sheet and saw that my nether parts were bound up in tight clean linens from beneath, which bloomed great dark bruises halfway down my thighs. I looked around for the little creature that should be resting somewhere near by. There was nothing. Not even an empty cot, or swaddling clothes or a feeding horn, or any sign of maternity whatsoever. I could not raise my head. I tried to call for help, but my throat was raw and painful.
I lay still, whimpering with resentment. How dare they leave me alone? And I a Golden Book daughter, owner of a name a thousand years old! I screamed piteously that they had stolen my child and intended to leave me to die. Eventually I wore myself out and passed into sleep again, still sobbing.
When I next roused, they were changing the damp and bloody linens around my privities. To lessen the shame, I still pretended at sleep until the dry rags were fastened and my shift
pulled down over my thighs. Then I opened my eyes and beheld the midwife and two nuns whispering by the door to my cell. I tried to speak but my throat was still constricted. I stared at them with imploring eyes until they noticed that I was awake. They began to speak to me in cool, impersonal tones. In chorus, as if rehearsed, they told me that my son was dead. They explained, all three looking at the floor, that he had tried to emerge with his face and not the crown of his head to the fore, increasing the difficulties of a near-impossible birth. With his large head he threatened to tear me in half. They had been instructed to spare me rather than the child, should the choice arise, and so they called in a doctor who had used the cranioclast on him.
“What is that thing?” I croaked. “Cranioclast?” Still looking at the floor, they described the instrument, an iron tool used to reach into the birth cavern and break the skulls of mother-splitting babies. The doctor had pushed the cranioclast inside me, the pain being almost unnoticeable amid the tearing contractions. But in hearing of it, I thought I remembered a man’s voice and the sensation of cold metal inside me.
“That was when I fainted?” I asked.
They nodded.
“What happened then?”
Unwillingly, they told me. All within the theater of my womb, the doctor had sliced the child’s skull in two halves, sucked out the contents with a syringe, and squeezed the broken bones together. The crushed, dead baby was then pulled out with a hook. All this had happened while I was still unconscious.
“And my throat?” I whispered. “Why does it hurt so much?”
“We were obliged to insert a tube to keep you irrigated with laudanum. Had you woken or moved while he worked the cranioclast and hook then you would have been in the greatest danger.”
My wits being capable of absorbing no more horrors, I fell asleep, for many hours, and when I awoke, I had been freshly dressed below. I licked my lips and found the traces of oat pap on them: They had also fed me while I slept.
For days this was my life. Deprived of my own baby, I had
indeed returned to being one myself. I allowed myself only infant feelings: those of heat, coldness, satisfaction, and voiding.
Later they told me that my absent lover had returned to London, and I asked for the money he had left for my new life outside the convent.
They claimed that these funds had already been exhausted in the care of me during the birth and after. The doctor with the cranioclast was the most expensive in Venice. He feed extra for such emergencies. The drugs lavished on me during my recovery were also of the costliest kind, they added coldly, as if they considered this a poor investment.
“You have lived,” they told me sternly. “You may count yourself fortunate.”
And so they robbed me of my last portion of freedom, having already murdered my son.
Take Conserve of Rue 3 ounces; Venice Treacle 1 ounce; Camphor 8 grains; Oil of Amber 16 drops, mix
.
It reprimands the Animal Spirits when too furious, and ready for Tumult and Explosion, disciplines them into order again, shakes off their heterogeneous Copula, and sometimes expels it quite. Upon these Accounts, it’s found by Experience to be very serviceable to Hysteric Women, howbeit some cannot away with the odious Ructus, which Oil Amber causeth
.
I myself cared little whether I lived or died, but the pull of life was not to be resisted.
When my brain recovered some of its vitality I acted frailer than I was. Mutinous thoughts were stirring. I was not going to be confined in the convent forever, despite what they told me. I lay on my pallet, pondering a viable plan for my subsistence in the world outside.
My lover had frequently taunted me that he had rarely seen better melodramatics on the stage. As I had indeed manufactured much of my behavior in his presence, I confess I fancied myself a very adequate actress.
So this was my hazy ambition: that I would escape the convent—the walls of which had already proved themselves porous to such plans—and become an actress at one of the theaters in Venice. It seemed ludicrously simple. When I regained my health I would slip out on the pretext of an errand, or secretly, using my key. My accent and aristocratic features would ensure me any theatrical interview I desired. I thought my
charms invincible and my confidence remained boundless despite the painful setback I had just endured.
I had reckoned without my new loss of status. While other sportive nuns might quite easily leave the convent for their adventures, I alone was now guarded every hour of the day and night. My key to the outside world had disappeared during my confinement. I was given to believe that my parents had somehow been informed of my recent adventure and had commanded more rigid supervision. I did not believe it. There were times when I asked my guards if my lover had paid them for their vigils, and they always shook their heads.
“It is your Mamma and your Papa,” they grinned. “They are worried for their little girl.”
Then they saw tantrums that were real: screams, tearing of my clothes, even the beating of my head against marble door frames. They remained impassive, turning the vast rusty keys in the three locks that were thought necessary to contain me. There were never fewer than two nuns outside my door, and, when they came to bring me food and water, they were always attended by a third.
And I never heard a word from my lover. I guessed that without the baby to bind me to him, I was even less safe in his regard. I was just another troublesome lover. Perhaps he even resented me for the incompetent birth that had robbed him of an heir.
Whatever his motives, he never manifested himself in person or by letter. Yet still I talked of him brightly, as if this temporary absence had been agreed between us. I saw them shake their heads, which were split with bitter little smiles. I informed them loftily that my key to the gate by the
ruota
had been stolen by some jealous nun while I slept. When I asked for it, they met my imperious request with pitying smiles that raised a turmoil of bile and fear in my stomach. When I screamed insults at them they told me they were not sorry for me personally, but, from the superiority of their virgin state, they pitied foolish, weak womankind, prey to debilitating lusts and therefore clever men. I was an example of such a degraded object, wasting my shuddering heart on a man with all the tenderness of a brandished
hammer. How they enjoyed their righteous miniature sermons! How I abused them, and with what foul language! Until they backed away, blushing and tearful.
After that, they sent a
conversa
to lie in my cell with me, presumably to report on the words I muttered in my dreams. I could not sleep with her in there. I found loathsome both the idea and the very odor of her.… She was not a kinswoman, the
conversa
, and, being of the lower class of sisters, she wore no perfume or pomade. Her naked smell of milk, soap, and musty skin operated repulsively upon my nerves: I told her so. I demanded exclusively Golden Book women around me, insisting that I was used to a greater refinement. My guard slipped away, mouse-snouted, to inform on me. The abbess herself came all the way up to my cell to lash me with her tongue.
“There is a difference between being exclusive and being refined,” she told me, her voice flat and harsh. “These humble women are of good character. You, who have been docile to every vice, have no pretensions to being their better. It ill behooves you to demand company that smells sweeter than your own conscience.”
I thought I had nothing left to lose: I was not afraid of her.
“Are we not in Venice?” I asked sarcastically “Have we been transported to Heaven, where blood counts for nothing and all women are equal, and none more noble than others?”
Trembling with rage, the abbess regarded me. Her mouth moved, but no words came out. She swept out of my cell, and I heard her galloping with undignified haste down the corridor, a noise accompanied, as ever, by the rasp of poor nuns chafing with rags at the wainscoting already bare with such punishment. No doubt the abbess wished she might put me to such ignominious work. But no matter how bad my behavior, my family name set me above that fate. After this confrontation, I was left alone in my cell, dwindled to a creature that was fed and watered, but ignored.
Soon a new torture emerged: When I asked after my lover, they shook their heads as if they did not know what I was talking about.
I screamed out his name, again and again. They mimed complete ignorance of him, smiling as if I played some childish same with them. I screamed more, and they turned away, saying, “There is no such man.”
They would not allow me to purge my bitterness by expressing it to them. As soon as I began to bewail my situation they disappeared, and I was left to tell my sorrows to the damp, leprous walls, down which indeed clammy tears trailed in the only semblance of compassion I ever saw at San Zaccaria.
As soon as I was well enough to walk, I was dragged before the
capitolo delle colpe
to confess my sins of lust and disobedience. I shouted at the sisters, “When I was committing them, you never bothered to caution me!” When they moved to silence me I hissed, “It’s only now I’ve stopped that you condemn me. How much did he pay you? Did you turn away the money?”
A gag of linen infused with bitter herbs was put over my mouth, and I was led back to my solitary cell. From that day forth my one remaining pleasure was denied me: No more sweet food was brought into my room. Just unsweetened porridge, salty bread, and unspiced meats. But I could smell the convent kitchen and I could still make out the fragrant steam of every different cake as it billowed through the air. Those cakes became my calendar for I had no other way of marking the days. On Mondays there was
panpepato
, on Tuesdays marzipan cakes, on Wednesdays tarts made with fruit preserves, on Thursdays
biscotti
with honey and pine nuts, on Fridays ginger wafers, on Saturdays
fritelle.
On Sundays, there was no smell at all, except of candle grease, and just one cruel Sabbath, the warm perfume of chocolate, when some giggling sister left a cup of my favorite beverage on the deep sill outside my window, just beyond reach.
My baby died in the spring.
Summer passed, then autumn, and I never left my cell. I never ate anything that was not merely a tasteless fiber. I drank only water from a chipped cup. My own Murano glass goblet had disappeared. I never spoke to anyone except purse-lipped nuns who clapped their hands rather than speak to me, as if my breath contaminated the air. I amused the gloomy hours of my incarceration
with practicing my pretty voice. I sang all the songs I knew, dwelling bitterly on those that spoke of betrayal. My voice grew sweet and strong, its echoes haunting the corridors. Draped rather than dressed in white rags, I sat hunched in my cell like a mummy, my head down, my mouth open, my eyes blank, singing my unholy dirges. I frightened myself to think how I looked: a specter of evil and misery, inhuman and repulsive.
Winter came, sealing the convent in snow. My cell was icy When I beat the door, screaming for blankets and a fire, they whispered through the keyhole that my parents had refused to spend on such trappings for my cell, in order that I might learn humility through fortitude.
I shrieked until a delegation of nuns came and opened the door, ready to chastize me. Even that they did in whispers. No one knows how to whisper like a nun. No woman can make her face as immobile, her eyes darting all the while!
“We will make you behave like a proper nun,” one simpered, and pulled her habit open a little to show me the hair vest she wore.
“Whatever gives you pleasure,” I suggested maliciously, and they filed out in silence, giving the key an extra turn as they left.
As the metal groaned in the lock, I snapped an icicle from the window of my cell. I cut open a vein in my calf and let a pool of blood throb into my water cup. I tore the linen from my bed, dipped my forefinger in the cup, and wrote his name in blood, in letters as long as my arm. Then I bound up the wound with a strip torn from the same sheet.
Still clutching the icicle in my hand, I screamed at the top of my voice.
When the nuns came bustling through the door they were confronted with the banner draped over my window, with the faint light behind it blackening the blood that spelled out my lover’s name.
Then
they showed some emotion. One cried out and another fainted. The third stood rooted to the spot, mouthing the word I had written.
It was the first time I had heard his name in a year.
I could not breathe.
But I hardened my heart, and I took my chance then.
