“I am, Signora—and it’s most urgent that I speak with her. Him!”
Mina laid a hand on his arm. “She’s safe—you needn’t fear.”
“You know?”
Mina nodded.
“Our father is on his way, for other purposes—and he doesn’t know that Alessandra is here.” He wiped the sweat from his eyes. “I must warn her!”
Mina said, “They’ll be hard to find at this hour.”
“They?”
“Your sister has become—most attached to another boarder here, her fellow in the medical school.”
“Oh, that’s just terrific,” said Nicco. “When Father has it in his mind to get her married straightaway.” He looked at Mina. “You say ‘attached.’ As fellow to fellow?”
“I’m afraid their attachment is of a more…passionate nature.”
Nicco held his head in his hands. “If Signore Agenio doesn’t kill him, then our father will—or he’ll kill Father and we’ll all be orphaned.”
“Signore Agenio?” Mina started laughing.
“I do not speak in jest, Madame!”
“I’m sure you don’t, dear young sir. But I doubt Signore Agenio would kill himself—and he’d certainly not want to harm his future father-in-law!” She smiled kindly at Nicco. “And, anyway, Otto is a most gentle and genial young man.”
“Holy Mother of God—excuse me, Signora! Is it possible…?”
“It seems to be,” said Mina, grabbing her cloak. “And I think we had better go find Sandro and tell him that his days are numbered.”
Arriving at the Porta San Felice, Carlo was surprised at how worn out he felt. Once through the gate, he stopped at a tavern in the parish where Otto Agenio was said to lodge, thinking to refresh himself while finding out how to get there.
The tavern was dark and shadowy, lit only by a single candle and the firelight. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Carlo made out a sight that both shocked and upset him: two young men, hidden in a corner together and locked lip to lip in a passionate embrace.
He winced and looked away. And to think his own daughter had begged him to let her come and live in this corrupt and sinful place! How right he’d been to refuse her.
“I’m looking,” he said to the barman who poured his drink, “for a medical student named Otto Agenio, said to board at the home of Magister Mondino.” He put a coin down on the counter. “Do you have a boy who could show me the way?”
“There is no need, governor,” the barman said.
“Is Mondino’s house so close by?”
“Not exceedingly close, but…” The barman began to speak in an exaggeratedly loud voice. “But if someone wanted to find—Otto Agenio—he wouldn’t have far to go.”
There was no one else in the tavern but Carlo, the barman, the two men besotted with each other, and a marmalade cat curled up and purring by the fire. The two men sat apart now, one trying madly to hide his face in the folds of his cloak.
Carlo looked back at the barman, who nodded. “Oh, Lord,” he said, holding his head in his hand. And then, “I will not countenance it!” He drank down his drink in one toss and straightened his clothes. “Signore Agenio,” he boomed, “you might well hang your head in shame before the man who was prepared to give you his precious daughter!”
But it was the other man, the taller one, who came toward him. He faced Carlo, then extended his hand to his lover, a slender man who seemed hardly older than a boy, as Carlo now saw when he raised his pretty face and spoke the word, “Papa!”
Carlo staggered backward, tripped on the cat, and nearly fell into the fire.
Alessandra ran straight into his arms. “Can you ever forgive me?”
Carlo pushed back her hood and held her face in both his hands, shaking his head in disbelief. Letting go, he looked at Otto, but no words would come—or none would emerge from the battle of emotions raging inside him.
And then he said, “I will deal with you later, Alessandra!” He turned to Otto. “Do you understand who this person is?”
Otto dropped to his knees before him. “I do indeed, sir—although I will admit that it took me rather a long time to see through your daughter’s disguise. But I can assure you that I loved her in both guises, first as a friend and now”—he held out his hand to Alessandra, who knelt beside him—“as my wife.”
Nicco and Mina burst into the tavern just in time to see the newlyweds kneeling at Carlo’s feet. Alessandra’s face broke into a great smile at the sight of her brother. She jumped up and ran toward him, and he spun her around as he used to do so long ago, when they were both children. Once Alessandra’s feet were on the ground again, Nicco took Otto’s hands, and enveloped him in a warm embrace.
“We must have a feast,” said Mina, looking on.
“We must have a wedding!” added Nicco.
Alessandra and Otto looked at each other. “We’ve already said our vows before a priest. But it would please me greatly, Papa, if we could have a wedding—a proper wedding, at home.”
They waited until just after Easter, when Otto’s family journeyed to Persiceto. Mondino’s clan came, too, as well as several of Otto’s friends from the University. Every one of the students asked where Sandro was—and none of them saw anything other than the brilliant and beautiful girl Otto’s family had snagged for him. Alessandra thought, once again, how people see what they expect to see, even when something quite contrary to their expectations is right before their eyes.
At her own insistence, Alessandra wore her mother’s wedding gown, which Emilia took great pains to refresh and shake out. Pierina was happy enough to wear the magnificent blue silk dress, which Alessandra arranged to have brought over from the convent; it arrived in Persiceto at more or less the same time as she did. Ursula was so taken up with all the preparations needed for the feast—and so focused on Pierina—that she didn’t bother Alessandra with questions or complaints. The girl was marrying at last—and to Ursula, this was all that mattered.
There was food enough to feed family and friends, and a bevy of servants, students, and beggars besides, over the course of two full days. Lodovico played the lute, Giorgio and Pierina sang, and Carlo and Mondino both got so drunk that they danced the tarantella. Mina almost wet herself from laughing.
The festivities went on for three days. Nicco flirted with Maxie so ardently that Horabilli began to think she would be the only one of the daughters left unmarried. The innkeeper of Persiceto made plans to add a new room with his windfall, and the stone mason was happy in his turn to receive more work, as his wife was pregnant with a new baby. And Alessandra and Otto were as delighted as any newlyweds have ever been, in love with each other and, by extension, with the whole world.
Bene had been invited, but didn’t come—which everyone agreed was a shame.
With Mina’s help, the newlyweds rented a small house not far from Mondino’s. They let it be known that Alessandra’s cousin—none other than the famous Sandro—would be boarding with them. No one who wasn’t in on Alessandra’s secret thought it strange to see Otto and Sandro together. But a couple of people remarked, in passing, that they had yet to see Sandro with his pretty cousin from Persiceto.
Alessandra went one day to the quarter where the Jews lived. And there she watched a butcher kill a calf, slitting its throat and then hanging it upside down on a hook overhanging a bucket. She actually looked into the calf’s still-living eye while the blood and the life drained out of it, and she thought about the difference between the moment when it was alive and the moment when it was dead. She remembered then her dream about the two rivers, but had no sense yet of its meaning.
She passed a stall that had books in it, some of them quite beautifully illuminated, although made of paper rather than parchment and all of them written in what she took to be Hebrew or Arabic. In one of these there was a simple drawing of a person showing the heart and the lungs and—painted in bloodred ink and blue—the veins and the arteries.
She asked the b
ookseller how much he wanted for it but he only laughed at her. She went home and discussed the matter with Otto. And then she came back with two gold coins and bought the book that so intrigued her. She wanted to pay the Jewish merchant to translate the words accompanying the drawing of the heart and lungs. But he protested that he could read very little Arabic, and only poetry. Nonetheless, she made him write down for her, in the Latin alphabet, the name of the man who authored the book. It was Ibn al-Nafis, who was born in Damascus, the bookseller told her—everyone knew of him in the Oriental world. He was a great scholar of law, as well as medicine and philosophy, and had been the personal physician to the Sultan.
Alessandra kept the book close by her bed, where she looked at it every night, trying to parse out what the pictures meant even though she couldn’t make any sense of the words.
On the days when there weren’t any lectures she wanted to attend, she took to revisiting the witches’ quarter. Dame Edita was happy enough to have Alessandra come along with her to gather the ingredients for her medicines. There were hundreds and hundreds of these, from acacia to zedoary, from Armenian bole to sea holly, roebuck rennet, pennywort, and honeysuckle. Slaked lime, lizard, and knotgrass. St. John’s wort and serviceberry. Wood sage and the juice of wild cabbage.
Mondino himself was familiar with such matters, as his own grandfather had been an apothecary. But Dame Edita’s knowledge dwarfed the compendium of materia medica that Mondino knew by heart.
Aware that Alessandra could read Latin—and more trusting of her now—Dame Edita pulled from her trunk an ancient, recipe-stained copy of The Trotula, a centuries-old manual for the medical treatment of women, including beauty remedies. The book had been treated as a sacred object by her mother and her mother’s mother, even though none of them could read it. As Alessandra, by candlelight after business hours, translated the book into the vernacular, paragraph by paragraph, Dame Edita only nodded—and sometimes smiled. The knowledge had been passed down to her, almost word for word.
But Alessandra learned a great deal in this reading—and it struck her how odd it was that there seemed to be a parallel world of women’s medicine, where women were in charge. And another world of Oriental medicine, if her book by Ibn al-Nafis was any indication of the depth of learning there in the faraway lands of the Levant. It made her grateful that she’d come to this place that was shunned by so many.
One day when she was visiting, hooded agents of the Podestà came down the alleyway, pounding at every door, looking for a midwife who was known to everyone there—and yet everyone there denied ever having heard of her. They left with their pikes and their hangman’s noose.
“Any woman with healing powers,” Dame Edita explained to Alessandra, who’d been frightened for her friend, “whether a witch or a future saint, causes their manhood to shrink, and calls out the killers among them.”
Later, when the two had gone out beyond the city walls to look for meadow rue and mugwort, Dame Edita said to her, “Be wary, my dear, about showing the full extent of your true self to any men—because their sense of rightness in the world depends on their belief in themselves as the sex that is stronger and wiser, and far more worthy.”
Alessandra usually listened very carefully and well to what Dame Edita told her. But sometimes—as on this day—she did not take to heart what she heard.
Otto was proof, after all, that not all men were this way. He was always there to help and encourage her. And Mondino himself, once he had gotten over the shock of her unmasking, seemed to have undergone a change in his attitude about women. He even suggested to his own daughters that they, too, might—in time, and if properly veiled—like to start attending lectures.
When Alessandra mentioned to Otto that she wanted a pig to use for a dissection, a fresh pig was delivered to their house that very day. Otto assisted as Alessandra cut it open, starting with the most corruptible parts, just as Mondino had taught her. She asked Otto to write down things as she observed them—and to make drawings as well.
Pigskin was harder to cut than human flesh—tougher, so that she had to score it four or five times with the knife. There was another, thinner skin underneath this one that nonetheless adhered to it. The two could be parted with her finger as she slid it back and forth between them. Something invisible had held the two layers of skin together—something that now was broken.
Cutting through and tearing the incision open wider with her two hands, Alessandra tried to sort out the complexity of what was inside. Everything was fit together like a puzzle, but in every dimension and subtly—just like the skin and underskin, it was all stuck together subtly until she pulled it apart.
She had to use a mallet and Otto’s help to break the ribs and pull aside the breastbone. It was such a mess of organs and blood inside that it was hard to tell what went together and which things were different, one from the other. It seemed to her that there were clear threads holding it all together, almost like the substance a spider uses to spin its webs, except much stronger. There was so much stuffed inside! Once she’d pulled much of it outside the body, it was difficult to credit that it all had fit before. What a shortage of space God had allowed inside a pig’s body for all that it needed to function!
When she was covered in blood and still hadn’t found what she was looking for, she asked their servant to cook the pig’s flesh and sell the rest for sausages. She went to bathe and thought about the dream again and the drawing in her book; it still made no sense to her, and yet she felt as if some important meaning hovered just on the margins of thought, flitting around in her head like a small white moth.
The extravagant gift of twelve more pigs followed in as many months. Alessandra filled half a dozen notebooks with her small, neat writing, and the servant rejoiced at all the smoked pork in their larder.
Alessandra perfected first cutting the pig’s throat and draining the blood out of it before doing the dissection, just as she’d seen the Jewish butcher do with other animals. It made things neater, and she could see more of the vessels where the blood had been. Each time she examined the heart, she looked for the pores that were supposed to allow the blood from the right chamber to flow into the left, where it would mix with air to create spirit, which could then be distributed throughout the body. Perhaps, she thought, the mechanism was different in pigs than it was in human beings. Pigs, after all, had no spirit.
She opened her next pig while it was still alive. Otto was there to take notes for her. Using one of Dame Edita’s recipes, Alessandra concocted a potion to make the pig sleep. She cut through the two layers of skin and the fat, pulled these aside, and saw the matrix of tiny rivers of blood converging in the beating heart and leading to the bellows of the lungs. She knew then that she was close to her answer. She wiped the sweat from her brow and said to Otto, “I want a human body.”
He raised his eyebrows but refrained from saying how difficult a thing it would be, and how dangerous.
It wasn’t that Alessandra wanted to put anyone in harm’s way. It’s just that she was thinking single-mindedly of what she hoped to do. A body—a human body—was the next step.
Corpses for dissection were strictly regulated. Alessandra realized that Mondino would always be the first person notified if a corpse became available.
So Otto, not wanting to disappoint his bride, paid some students to steal a fresh body for him from the graveyard. An orderly at the hospital sent word to him when the woman died. She was a fair-skinned stranger. No one knew her, and she was placed in a pauper’s grave. And less than an hour later, the three cash-poor students dug her up again. They pulled her shroud aside far enough to see that it was the right corpse, and then delivered her, in dead of night, to the address they’d been given. It was a sketchy part of town, where even they—three strapping young men—were frightened to go after dark.
Otto had wisely thought it best that such a thing not take place in their own little home—and Dame Edita was as willing as ever to be of help. She
genuinely liked Alessandra. And, without telling his wife, Otto had been keeping the apothecary well supplied in silver and gold.
The two cauldrons of ink, with wax mixed in, were bubbling over the fire: one made blue with powdered cakes of indigo, and the other bloodred from boiled and strained cochineal beetles.
When the students arrived with their gruesome cargo, Dame Edita’s daughter gave Otto and Alessandra cloths steeped in lavender oil to put over their noses and mouths and block out the smell. They had a hundred candles burning, so that even though it was pitch-dark outside, they could see nearly as well as if it had been day.
Knowing that this woman was someone who had a past and a childhood and family, loves, struggles, hopes, and a story—although all unknown and faraway—made it a much different thing to contemplate dissecting her. This was no pig.
Alessandra looked at her own hands and then at the stiff, gray hands of the corpse and her bloodless lips, and she thought about how the human body was but a container. God filled it up when we were born, then emptied it out again when we died. This corpse was but the empty vessel, Alessandra told herself, for what had been the woman while she lived.
Still, it was difficult to make the first cut—far different, somehow, than when she served as prosector for Mondino. But she said a prayer and cut—and once inside she thought no more about anything but the wonders before her eyes.
Alessandra drained and sponged away as much fluid as she could from in and around the heart. Then she cut a hole in the lowest point—the apex—of the right side. Using a hollow reed, she injected the blue-dyed wax—and then watched to trace its course.
Like the inky squirt of a squid she’d seen while Nicco and his friends fished in the canal, the blue wax appeared suddenly, spreading just beneath the surface of the lungs.
She and Otto exchanged a look of surprise. The thing was as clear as clear could be: From the right side of the heart, the blood traveled to the lungs. She felt her own heart pounding inside her chest and took a deep breath, trying to steady her hands. Then she cut into the bottom-most tip of the left side of the heart while Otto stood by, ready to inject the red-dyed wax.
A Golden Web Page 14
