Scott laughed. “She's got her little temple down there. No men allowed."
Sabine dried her hands on a towel. “There is not so much from the Lightbearers’ time. Some books and so."
"But you mentioned something."
"Yes, of course. Just one thing. What do you think? Here—I will walk you out."
He had to get back for the Renaissance Studies dinner. She led him out into the entranceway again. Then she picked up from the mantelpiece what looked like a spice bottle with a screw-on cap. “You see I remember what you told me all those years ago."
He took the bottle. There was some black liquid at the bottom of it, a thick black sludge. Confused, he held it up. She seemed proud of herself. But he felt stupid. “I'd like to see the books,” he said, finally. “Anything. You're sure you couldn't show me the downstairs?"
That, suddenly, was the wrong thing to say. “You're not even paying attention! ‘Fragrant Goddess'—you see I remember. I kept it for you. I knew you would call one day. But you are never satisfied. Always you want more."
Now, in his hotel bed, Jeremy saw what she meant. He was unsatisfied. He wanted more.
He wanted to walk down the dark stairs into her temple, her inner sanctum, as Scott had described it. Fragrant Goddess—was she kidding him? But there was some crude Cyrillic script on the label. Something scrawled in pencil. Was this a joke she had whipped up in her kitchen, with its copper pots and pans?
If so, where had she found the recipe? What was she hiding? Some books and so—what books?
Down in the Lightbearers’ labyrinth, Sabine was waiting for him in the dark. She was lying on her back before the private altar in her temple. But as Jeremy fumbled through the little rooms of his small fantasy, inevitably he found himself grabbing hold of other ghosts, old men long dead. And this was another kind of delusion: Perhaps in Ferson's library there were some undiscovered papers, some new information about Leonardo Fioravanti, the Bolognese alchemist and surgeon who had tormented Jeremy all these years.
In Naples he had discovered the cause of syphilis, the French Pox. Though spread through lechery, the root of it was cannibalism, as he determined by feeding pig meat to a pig, dog meat to a dog, hawk meat to a hawk, and watching them die of the disease. Fioravanti had the cure, though, for it and many other illnesses. Taken both internally and as a salve, his nostrums reduced fevers, knitted broken bones, cured heartsickness, took away all pain, even in hopeless cases, Jeremy thought. “Theriac” was one, made from snake's blood. “Scorpion's Oil” was another. “Fragrant Goddess” was a third, the strongest of all. It was a remedy Fioravanti had learned from a slave, a woman from the Spanish Netherlands whom he had liberated after the siege of “Africa,” a town on the Tunisian coast.
To Jeremy he was a Protean, elusive figure. Because of the lies he told in print and even in his private correspondence, he seemed to represent a new phase in the history of masculine self-invention. This was what Jeremy's book was about. And because he wanted to dramatize the social difference between doctors and empirics in the late Renaissance, Jeremy had tried (or at least lately he was trying) to alternate chapters of conventional historiography with passages of historical fiction. Theory and argument gave way to invented narrative in different sections of the book—an invented secret history of Fioravanti's life, a substitute for the actual Secret History the alchemist had claimed to write, which was of course lost. In these fictional passages, however, Jeremy was beginning to see caricatures of his old professors and other long-standing experts in his field. And in the main figure of the drama, a caricature of himself.
Men staggered into middle age so damaged and so hurt, so guilty, Jeremy thought, every one of them was looking for a magic balm to heal them without any need for introspection or forgiveness. In its multiple drafts, his manuscript now told the story of Jeremy's disaffection, his distrust of academic knowledge, and his embrace, Fioravanti-style, of experience, lies, and sensory information. Now the book was seven hundred pages, and even in his overheated dreams, it was impossible for Jeremy to imagine an academic press would ever touch it.
Impossible, also, to concentrate on the task at hand. Instead of Sabine in her temple, which just a few minutes before he had been decorating with embroidered pillows and silk brocades, bronze statuettes of Hindu deities and clouds of incense smoke, as well as (God help him!) mirrors and exercise equipment while she lay flat on her back on the narrow bench, skirt rucked up, knees out to the side—now it was Arkady Ferson he imagined, an old man sitting stiffly on his stool in the same room.
Arkady Ferson had lived in that house. He had haunted that basement. That had been his refuge, his own inner sanctum, away from the light. Jeremy had seen a photograph (a timed exposure?) of an old man on a stool, a white-haired old man in a dark room. Now suddenly it was obvious that in his pose and gestures he was mimicking the famous engraving of Leonardo Fioravanti from the frontispiece of the Autobiography—maybe there was room for Ferson in his book! Why not? Surely no discussion of empiricism was complete without trying to reproduce, as Ferson had claimed, the alchemist's results. No discussion, also, of charlatanism or fraud.
All of us had broken bones to heal, fevers to bring down—Arkady Ferson, originally from St. Petersburg, had understood that much at least. He had come to Seattle in the 1950s. With his followers he had moved into the big white house and published a series of occult treatises, including two at least on Fioravanti: If illness were a symptom of divine rage, then secret knowledge was God's grace. The adept would begin to glow like a metal vessel in the process of distilling—a metaphor that Ferson took quite literally, hence the sealed windows and the chambers without light.
So: a nut-job, obviously. A dead end. But Fioravanti, too, had been despised and hated by his peers, had died in poverty.
Jeremy didn't want to think about that. He really needed the Butler job. And so to distract himself he returned to his sexual fantasy, determined to organize it in a more efficient way: He would go to the house the next morning, after his triumphant interview. Sabine would have left the door unlocked. Scott was in St. Louis.
But Jeremy wouldn't climb the stairs or go to search for her up on the roof. He would find the basement, and he would bring a flashlight, and in a warren of little rooms he would find a hidden chamber, a closet, really, and on dusty shelves there would be a complete set of the 1609 edition of Fioravanti's works. Maybe there would even be a diary—Alexander would help him with the Russian translations....
No, no, no. In his hotel bedroom, Jeremy dried his hands on the bed sheets and turned over onto his side. “It is incredible how virtuous I am,” he told himself.
Drained of his last erotic impulse, he gave himself up. In the bottom of Sabine's house, in a crystal—no, a carved, hinged, wooden case, he would find the only copy of the master's Secret History, hand written, never published, though referred to often in the Autobiography—the repository of all his alchemical wisdom.
And he would hear Sabine behind him. “What are you doing here?” And he would turn off the flashlight, leaving them in darkness. He would turn toward her, and both of them would glow with secret knowledge or nostalgia or desire. “You're beautiful,” he'd say.
So many regrets. Memories like ghosts. Ah, God, he thought, suddenly sleepy—was it possible that a ghost could move through time, haunting and changing and poisoning the past?
* * * *
On the tenth of September the sea wall was broken in three places after a bombardment lasting thirteen days. Don Juan de Vega, the Spanish viceroy of Sicily, entered the town at four o'clock. There was a slaughter, of course, of the men who'd taken refuge in the mosque.
But by the western wall, near the gardens of Aphrodisium that had given the city its name, all was quiet at the end of the afternoon. Giordano Orsini had allotted the poor neighborhoods to his men. Fires burned there overnight. The Spanish captains had reserved for themselves the mansions of the African governors and the Turkish corsairs.
The richest house in that western district belonged to Brambarac, the African commander. Don Garcia de Toledo chose this house to sleep in. But in the evening when he arrived, he was disturbed to find the roof had collapsed during the bombardment. The upper walls were broken in. Don Garcia stood between the great stone lions at the gate. He sent his men to find another house close by.
Late as usual, and unaware of this change of plans, Leonardo Fioravanti arrived after dark. He had been working in the barracks outside the city, where there was an infirmary. For three weeks since the beginning of the siege, he had spent every hour of daylight in that place, setting broken bones, irrigating gunshot wounds with quinta essenza and balsamo artificiato. Despite all efforts, many soldiers and sailors had died under his hands.
Stinking, weary, and discouraged, he came at last to the lion gate. He had walked in darkness through the deserted roads, and everything was dark. Later he would write of this campaign to say that it was worth a dozen courses in the university. He would boast of his miraculous cures. But at that moment he perceived no benefit. He stood with his hand on the stone haunch of the female lion, surveying the broken building, its black, gaping windows along the front. There were no stars or moon. Torchlight came obliquely from other houses, and the sound of muffled cries.
But in the dark building nevertheless there was a glimmer of candlelight. Maybe Don Garcia was there after all, he thought, in some undamaged section of the palace. So the surgeon persevered up the long flagged path, climbed the long stone steps. And he had been wrong to think that even the front part of the house was nothing but collapsed rubble behind a more-or-less intact façade. For when he looked through the empty door, the yawning wooden casements, he saw the first-floor ceilings were still whole, and there was even a staircase leading nowhere. This he glimpsed in the candlelight, a single tiny flame that hesitated by the stair. Then it disappeared, but not before he had seen the imprint of a small naked foot in the dust—surely a woman's footprint!
"Captain!” he shouted, and then drew his sword. Who was this in the ruined house of Brambarac? News of this prince had even spread to Naples, the splendor of his gardens, the richness of his tables, and the beauty of his many wives and concubines. Maybe one of these still haunted the wrecked mansion.
Though the surgeon still hovered in the doorway, his mind moved boldly through the darkness, following the flame—she might be a Christian woman from Antwerp or Ghent or Brussels, stolen from her family by El Draghut the Corsair, then sold as a slave in the disgusting bagnios of Algiers. Now she was homeless and without refuge in this city of infidels. How grateful she would be to any rescuer or protector, a girl scarcely grown (if you could judge by the size of her footprint), yet skilled in all the lecherous arts.
Shouts came from up the street. The surgeon stepped over the threshold. Sword outstretched, he shuffled into the darkness, following the place in his mind where he had seen the candle flame. Among the piles of rubble he poked his way toward the back staircase. And as he moved, he imagined he saw some light back there, an orange glow reflected from a secret source—perhaps a fire burning in an inner court. Instead, behind the broken staircase he found a wooden stair descending to the cellars.
And at the turning of the stair he saw her—just a glimpse before she disappeared. And he was mistaken to have thought she was carrying a candle. But there was a light that glowed around her and around her hands especially, a dim, orange light.
He put up his sword, slid it back into its sheath. Part of him was too weary for this adventure. In the battle on the beach, he had taken a thrust from an African knight—that was weeks ago, and yet the wound hadn't healed. Walking downstairs was painful, and he managed it a single step at a time, descending into darkness—where was she? She had vanished ahead.
But he could hear her voice ahead of him, a little sing-song murmur gathering him on. At the second turning he went forward like a blind man, both hands outstretched. There was a stone corridor, and a stone chamber at the end of it, and what looked like a fire burning there; he couldn't tell. The witch was waiting with her back turned. She was wrapped in strips of cloth, and there was cloth over her face and hair. The light glowed around her. Limping, he reached for the cloth around her shoulders, stripped it away. Already he understood something was wrong; when she turned toward him he let out a cry. For this was no Christian beauty from the harem of Brambarac, melting with shy gratitude for her deliverance. But she was old, older than he, thirty-one or two at least, with coarse wild hair and a spot on her dark cheek. Her eyebrows were thick and tufted, and there was hair on her upper lip. She stunk of some musky perfume, an oil smeared on her body to hide her rottenness; he wasn't fooled. Limping forward, he grasped hold of her thick neck, crushing her throat before she could make a sound or summon her familiar. He pulled her down onto the floor, pressed the weight of his body into her as she flailed and thrashed—ah, God, would it ever end?
* * * *
Jeremy started awake. Horrified, he sat up in bed.
Heart pounding, he put his hands to his face.
Once he had listened to a lecture on the science of dreams. In it, the professor had claimed that the central figure in a dream, or else the dominating sequence of events, could have no meaning. No, it was the furniture, the incidental details that were able to teach us something about ourselves. Now, awake, Jeremy saw the truth of this. In his dream-state he had grasped something his waking self had missed.
Fearfully, hesitantly, he closed his eyes again. He allowed himself to imagine the stone cellar in Brambarac's ruined palace—this time as a set devoid of actors. There was a series of stone apertures halfway up the wall. And there were bottles, old apothecary bottles with glass stoppers and hand-printed labels—oh, it was obvious. It wasn't Sabine who had mixed up some poisonous sludge as a joke to mock at him and his obsessions. Why hadn't he believed her? She had given him a bottle of Arkady Ferson's Fragrant Goddess, prepared by him and described in his 1969 treatise, the veracity of which Jeremy had always rejected out of hand.
But Ferson must have hidden some of it before he died. Naked, Jeremy jumped out of bed and searched the wastebasket where he had dropped the bottle the previous night. He twisted open the crusted lid, smelled some of the foul liquid. Was it possible the old man had dosed himself with this? Even at the time there had been speculation he'd been poisoned, murdered by some other cult member in a squabble over the foundation's vanished funds. No one had been prosecuted for the crime.
Jeremy resealed the bottle, studied the label. Dushistaia Boginia, it said in Cyrillic letters. Fragrant Goddess. Leonardo Fioravanti had told the story many times, how in Palermo in the 1580s he had cured the wife of the Governor of Sicily. In the middle of the street she had vomited up a hairy, mottled mass as big as a baby. Afterwards she'd been in perfect health.
That was after a single dose. If you read between the lines, it was obvious the elixir contained both arsenic and mercury—effective poisons, as Fioravanti himself had pointed out. The precise recipe, along with its various palliatives, he claimed to have recorded in the Secret History. He did not publish them in the Autobiography, or any of his other books. Dying in poverty in Rome, why should he bequeath to an ungrateful world the secret of these miraculous cures, discovered and refined with so much difficulty?
Why indeed? But there was no time for Jeremy to think about these things. He was already late. He showered, put on his suit, went downstairs for his interview at nine o'clock.
The search committee had a room at the conference. He knocked on the door of a sixth-floor suite in the same hotel. Besides some armchairs and the woman he was supposed to meet, there was a bed with a shiny quilt and a mountain of pillows.
Often he was good at interviews, but not this morning. He found himself distracted by a notion that was almost entirely a fantasy—was it possible that Arkady Ferson had discovered or acquired the Secret History, used its formulae to make a batch of Fragrant Goddess and the o
ther cures? No, it was not possible—the manuscript had never been found. There was no reason, independent of Fioravanti's claims, to assume it had ever existed. And surely, if it had come into his possession, in Brussels or St. Petersburg, perhaps, Ferson would have boasted of it, written about it in his idiotic treatises, sold it when he was short of cash.
Still, at the same time was it credible that Ferson would have drunk the contents of the screw-top bottle if he hadn't at least thought his recipe was genuine? But what an idiot! These ancient manuscripts, discovered at long last, always turned out to be forgeries. What had Sabine said? “Some books and so."
Okay, so maybe Ferson had discovered something, purchased something that turned out to be a fake. Then maybe he had poisoned himself out of stupidity or else despair. Or else he had died of natural causes—that was obviously a possibility, and the screw-top bottle had been prepared as something to impress the Lightbearers, one of a long sequence of frauds: Ferson and Fioravanti were one of a kind! And if Ferson hadn't said anything about the manuscript, it was for the same reason Fioravanti had destroyed it or never written it—the desire for alchemical or secret knowledge, the conviction that secrecy was a prerequisite for holiness or truth. These men weren't professionals like Jeremy, who even now was plotting out an article on this entire subject, a publishable article that would enable him to ace his interview with Butler College, which at this exact same moment he was in the process of blowing with his disjointed and distracted answers to the most basic questions—the woman was looking at him as if he'd lost his mind. They sat in circular armchairs and she stared at him. Had she heard anything about him, any rumor of misconduct? She was attractive, too, in a sharp sort of way, her blond hair pulled back. Sensible skirt. He'd like to have her on this bed with all the pillows. Had anyone slept in it the previous night?
His interview lasted forty-five minutes. When it was over and the door had closed behind him, he scarcely remembered what he'd said. Maybe he had made self-deprecating jokes. Maybe he'd discussed his thesis, summarizing it poorly, because his mind was elsewhere and (it now occurred to him) whole sections had to be rewritten. He stood in the hallway looking at an immense potted plant, thinking that if a man were lucky, his secret history would die with him, the submerged causes and poisonous events. His autobiography would not include them, or anything else that made him special or unique. All that could be pieced together, as if by policemen or detectives searching for clues. That was true for Fioravanti, and Arkady Ferson, and Jeremy as well.
FSF, October 2007 Page 21
