He was no great beauty, this Francesco Corsellini, but then again neither was his wife. He was a little too hairy for some women, and his steely arms extended from a body built on too much pasta and beer. Graziana would call him L’Orsacchiotto—The Bear—and poke his stomach, and Francesco would respond, “I have earned this. It is relaxed muscle!”
Graziana had thick hair and dark eyes but the rest of her was undistinguished. Still, when Francesco told her she was the most beautiful woman in all of Italy, he believed it. They had been childhood sweethearts and there was rarely a day that he did not thank God for having her as his wife.
They were happy. She was kind. He was devoted. Need more be said?
Unfortunately, yes.
The year was 1347 and a new disease had just arrived from China, the most horrible disease that anyone had ever seen. It swept outward from the ports, into the cities and the Italian countryside, killing people as a forest fire destroys trees. In towns, church bells rang incessantly because it was believed the sound would drive out the illness. Many people thought that the smell of the dead carried the disease, so they walked about with scented handkerchiefs over their faces. Incense burned everywhere, mingling with the stench of death….
And one day, Graziana felt a fever in the afternoon. She retired to her bedroom for a nap. When she woke up that evening, she discovered a boil the size of an egg in her groin, and swelling under her armpits. She knew that the Black Death was upon her.
In the kitchen, Francesco was preparing food. She yelled at him to leave, immediately, because she had the illness. “Gavoccioli!” she yelled. Buboes. She demanded that he save himself, because everyone knew that there was no cure, no hope. She implored, “Leave! Leave now!”
There was a stillness in the kitchen. Graziana lay in her bed, listening to the silence that covered the distance between her and her husband. Then she heard him begin to clank the pots and pans to cover the sound of his crying. This continued for some minutes; then Francesco’s footsteps came down the hall towards her. She yelled and cursed and insisted that he stay away, but he appeared in the doorway with a tray of pasta and some wine.
“You will feel better if you eat, even just a little,” Francesco said. He entered the room, put the tray down, and sat beside her. And then he moved to kiss her.
Graziana tried to pull away. It was the first and only time in her life she attempted to refuse him but Francesco used his blacksmith’s strength to force himself upon her and kissed all her protests back into her mouth. After a few seconds, she realized it was useless to fight and she accepted him. It was done.
They ate a little that night and lay down. Through the window, the full moon looked in on them. “La luna è tenera,” Francesco said. The moon is tender. He closed his eyes and held her tighter. The last thing Graziana saw that night was his sleeping face. When she awoke the next morning, his face was the first thing she saw in the new day. She had a terrible fever, a sheen of sweat upon her, and a galloping pulse.
“Look,” he said gently, “the dark spots have come to your skin.” Graziana began to weep, but Francesco smiled and stroked her hair. “Don’t cry. We don’t have time for tears. Let us love while we still can.”
That very afternoon, Graziana fell into the worst of it. For three days, they lay together. For three days, Graziana went about dying horrendously in his arms while he told her stories about swans and miracles and great loves. On the third midnight of her illness, Francesco awoke to her tortured breathing. She turned her face to his.
“This is it.”
He said, “I will see you soon.”
Francesco kissed Graziana one final time, taking her final breath deep into his chest. “Ti amo,” she said. I love you.
After she passed, Francesco slipped the wedding ring from her finger. He, too, was now deeply ill, but he pulled himself out of bed. He could barely stand, crippled by the nausea and fever, but he forced himself into his blacksmith shop. There was one thing left to do.
He lit the fire and heated the forge. He melted both wedding rings, his and hers, and poured them into an arrowhead mold. When the arrowhead was completed, he set it onto a shaft. He looked down the length of the arrow, ensuring it was as straight and true as any he had ever made.
Francesco pulled down the crossbow that was pinned to his wall. It had belonged to his father, a great archer who had been killed in battle when Francesco and his brother Bernardo were still babies. This crossbow, which had been returned to Firenze by a fellow warrior, was the only possession of his father’s that Francesco had owned. Beyond this one thing, he did not even have memories of the man.
He returned to the bedroom, to Graziana’s body. He reached through the open window and placed the arrow and the crossbow outside. It was now dawn and he called out to a passing boy, so that he could send a message to his brother who lived in another part of town. Within the hour, Bernardo was standing outside the bedroom window.
Francesco implored his brother to come no closer, for fear that he’d pass on the disease. Francesco asked one final favor.
“Anything,” Bernardo said. “I will honor your final request.”
After Francesco made his appeal, he sat on the bed, facing the window. Between heaving sobs, Bernardo lifted the crossbow and put the arrow into place. He took a deep breath, braced his body, and asked the spirit of his father to guide the arrow to its target. Bernardo released the string and let the arrow fly. The shot was precise and death was instant.
Francesco fell backwards into the bed, beside his Graziana, with the arrowhead made of their wedding rings lodged solidly in his heart. He died as he lived, in love.
VII.
No one will ever accuse me of being overly romantic, because after Marianne Engel finished telling the story the first thing I said was “Don’t you find it depressing that they both died from the plague?”
I leave to your imagination the tone of her voice when she said that no, she did not find this story of love “depressing.”
After she left, I examined the story from a number of different angles. It was quixotic: old Italy, sacrifice, devotion, and wedding rings shot clean through the Heart of the Soul’s True Husband. Intellectually, I came to the conclusion that the point of the story probably wasn’t that the pair died from a hideous illness but that there was something poignant in Francesco’s gestures. Nevertheless, if it were I in the kitchen making noodles and my wife started shrieking about her elephantine boils, I’d be out the back door before you could say Jack Robinson.
I waited a few days for Marianne Engel to return, anxious to report that upon reflection I had decided Francesco was not a complete moron. I wanted to show her that I was growing as a person, as they say in clichéd psychojargon, because she needed to be kept abreast of these developments. When she didn’t come, I wondered whether she had been called into the service of the gargoyles or whether I had blown it with my unromantic comments. And then my walnut-sized brain started working again: Blown what? How could I have allowed myself, even for a moment, to imagine us a couple? IDIOT.
Beth came to my bed with a package that she said just had been delivered by courier. I ripped it open to find a note on brown parchment. The handwriting looked as though it had been done with a quill, centuries before, and the letters swooped with a kind of penmanship no longer taught.
Dear One,
I will be working for the next few days.
The spirit has inhabited me once more.
Gargoyles ache to be born.
Be with you soon,
M.
It pleased me to discover that she was not absent because of anything that I had done to keep her away; the reason was simply another carving session.
There was a soap opera on television. Edward had amnesia again, and Pamela’s long-lost sister had just returned from her missionary work in Africa. I pushed my ball bearing up the board. I watched my silver face roll away. I pedaled my feet. More skin was harvested. The morphine continu
ed to drip. The snake continued to lick at the base of my skull. I AM COMING, AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. And there was more: ASSHOLE, LOSER, WHINER, ADDICT, DEMON, MONSTER, DEVIL, FIEND, BEAST, BRUTE, GOBLIN, HAS-BEEN, NEVER-WAS, NEVER-WILL-BE. UNLOVED. UNLOVABLE. UNPERSON.
Ah, what did the fucking bitchsnake know? Marianne Engel had called me “Dear One.”
I thought about Francesco working in the heat of his metal shop. I thought about Graziana eating pasta on her bubonic bed, just a little bit so that she would feel better. I thought about lovers in their time of dying. I tried to imagine being so thoroughly devoted that I would die for someone else; I, who found it difficult enough to imagine living for myself. And then I tried to envision what might happen when I was finally released from the burn unit, and how my relationship with Marianne Engel would change.
The hospital was an insular environment in which I found her eccentricities colorful, but where they had no real ability to affect my daily life in a negative way. I was protected by the regularity of my schedule, and the staff tolerated her because I had fought for her visits and because I had no other friends—except, perhaps, Gregor. As I had only seen her in such a limited, and limiting, environment, I had to wonder: in the real world, how much further might Marianne Engel’s weirdness go?
When she spoke about the multiple hearts in her chest, or her life seven hundred years previous, it was a nice diversion from the monotony. Sometimes it made me uneasy, but mostly it gave me a secret thrill to think that she felt a “magic connection” with me. But how would I have reacted to her if I had met her before the accident? No doubt, I would have dismissed her with a wave of my hand and continued on my way. Just another lunatic. In the hospital, of course, I couldn’t walk away.
A time would come when I could, if I wanted to.
The monastic Marianne Engel, last seen as a child in the early fourteenth century, had been about to start her training in the Engelthal scriptorium. Such institutions had been around for several hundred years, since Charlemagne had ordered that copying rooms be established for the preservation of important written works. In the beginning, of course, bookmaking was almost exclusively devoted to preserving the Word of the Lord.
The scribe’s task was not easy. He—or, at Engelthal, she—had only simple tools: knives, inkhorns, chalk, razors, sponges, lead points, rulers, and awls. Out of concern for the safety of the books, no candles were allowed in the scriptorium. If it was a cold time of year, the scribe could not even warm her hands. The value of the books was such that the writing rooms were often set at the top of an attack-proof tower; the books themselves carried inscriptions warning about the consequences of theft or vandalism. A typical passage might suggest that a book thief would fall into sickness, be seized by fever, be broken on the wheel, and be hanged. Not just one of these fates, but all in succession.
It was a rigorous life, but the scribe could remind herself that each word she copied was both a mark that would count in her favor on Judgment Day and a weapon against Satan. The Archenemy, however, is not the kind to take such attacks without retribution, and so He sent Titivillus, the patron demon of calligraphy, to strike back.
Titivillus was a tricky little bastard. Despite the scribe’s best intentions, the work itself was repetitive and boring. The mind would wander and mistakes would be made. It was the duty of Titivillus to fill his sack a thousand times each day with manuscript errors. These were hauled to Satan, where they would be recorded in The Book of Errors and used against the scribe on Judgment Day. Thus, the work of copying came with a risk to the scribe: while properly transcribed words were positive marks, incorrectly transcribed words were negative marks.
But the Devil’s ploy backfired. The knowledge that Titivillus was at work inspired the scribes to produce more accurate transcriptions. Eventually, Titivillus was no longer able to fill his sacks and was demoted to lurking in churches, recording the names of women who gossiped during Mass.
In any case, the typical script employed by a medieval scribe was called Gothic minuscule—interestingly enough, the same script that Marianne Engel used in her everyday penmanship. Which doesn’t necessarily prove anything, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact.
Six days since Marianne Engel had sent the note. Five days since the most recent patch of flesh had been moved from one part of my body to another. Four days since I had stood for thirty-seven seconds. Three days since my last conversation with Gregor. Two days since I had stood for forty-six seconds, propped up by the ever energetic Sayuri Mizumoto. One day since I’d reverted to spending most of my time thinking about suicide.
When Gregor dropped in, I could see he was still exercising, but there remained a little flab under his chin that he could not get rid of. His newly trimmed goatee helped to hide it, and I complimented him on his improving appearance and asked who the woman was.
He quickly responded that there was no woman. Too quickly, in fact. Sensing that he had tipped his hand, he changed his strategy and tried to shrug it off as casual, but only came across as guilty.
It’s a strange but consistent trait of people who consider themselves unattractive. They look embarrassed if you suggest that they might be interested in someone; because they feel unworthy of receiving attention, they also deny that they would dare to give it.
We were not yet close enough for me to pry, so when Gregor attempted to change the topic, I let him.
Sayuri came bouncing into my room, speaking in italics. “Good morning! Do you have a moment to talk about your treatment?”
I told her I did not. My voice was a dull thud that jangled with metallic edges, like a cutlery tray being dropped to the ground. It was precisely the effect I’d hoped to achieve.
“Shock!” Sayuri exclaimed, covering her mouth with her hand before assuring me that laughter is indeed the best medicine, and began explaining that she was there to conduct a series of tests on my strength and dexterity. My body’s abilities, she explained, were “yet to be determined,” so she would use an instrument called a goniometer to measure the range of motion in my joints. She took hold of my arms and bent them at the elbows, jotting down the results in a little book. She then tested my legs, discovering that my right knee (the one that had been so badly busted) did not have much give. She duly noted this also in her little book. “A bit of a problem.”
Next, to gauge sensation in various parts of my body, she jabbed at me with a goddamn stick and asked how it felt. I told her it felt like she was jabbing me with a goddamn stick. Oh, how she laughed; what a fine comedian I was.
Sayuri handed over her pencil to my undamaged hand and asked me to write a phrase into her book. I wrote, unsteadily, Where is she? (It is another example of my stellar luck that the fire spared my right hand, when I was born left-handed.) Sayuri paid no attention to the words I wrote; she was interested only in my dexterity. She moved the pen to my left hand, the one missing a finger and a half, and asked me to write another sentence. I managed to scribble out the words Fuck this. Sayuri looked at my literary undertaking, and commented that at least it was legible.
She wrapped things up by saying that I’d soon have an exercise program, and that was pretty exciting! “We’ll have you on your feet, strolling around, before you even know it!”
I said that I already goddamn well know how to walk, so how could I possibly get excited about that?
Sayuri pointed out—in a most gentle manner—that while I had known how to walk in my old body, I would have to learn how to do it in my new one. When I asked whether I’d ever be able to walk like a normal person again, she suggested that perhaps I was looking at the process in the wrong way and that I should just concentrate on the first steps rather than the entire journey.
“That’s just the kind of cheap Oriental wisdom I don’t need in my life.”
I suppose it was then that she realized I was looking for a fight and she took a step closer. She said that how well I would eventually walk depended on many th
ings, but mostly on my willingness to work. “Your fate is in your own hands.”
I said I doubted it really mattered to her one way or the other how my progress went, as she’d get her paycheck just the same.
“That’s not fair,” Sayuri replied, providing just the opening that I was hoping for. I took the opportunity to explain to her what “not fair” really was. “Not fair” was the fact that when she went home in the evening to eat sushi and watch Godzilla on the late night show, I’d still be lying in my hospital bed with a tube sucking piss out of my body. That, I pointed out, was unfair.
Sayuri realized there was no point in continuing to talk to me, but still she was graceful. “You’re scared and I understand that. I know it’s difficult because you want to imagine the ending but you can’t even imagine the beginning. But everything will be okay. It just takes time.”
To which I replied: “Wipe that condescending look off your face, you Jap bitch.”
Marianne Engel arrived at my bedside the next day with a small sheet of paper that she shoved into my hands. “Learn this,” she said, and drilled me on the words until I had committed them to memory.
An hour later, Sayuri Mizumoto came into the room, her head held high. She glanced at Marianne Engel, but then focused her eyes on mine. “The nurses said you wanted to see me.”
I did my best to affect a small bow in her direction, though it wasn’t easy lying down. I started to speak the words I’d memorized: “Mizumoto san, konoaidawa hidoi kotoba o tsukatte hontouni gomenasai. Yurushite kudasai.” (This roughly translates as I’m truly sorry that I spoke such terrible words to you the other day. Please forgive me.)
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