Also by Regina O’Melveny
Blue Wolves: Poems and Assemblages
Fireflies: Poems
The Book of Madness and Cures
Regina O’Melveny
www.johnmurray.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by John Murray (Publishers)
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Regina O’Melveny 2012
The right of Regina O’Melveny to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Lines from Purgatorio by Dante Aligheri, translated by W. S. Merwin, copyright © 2000 by W. S. Merwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Lines from capitolo 24 by Veronica Franco in chapter 5, “The Courtesan in Exile,” from The Honest Courtesan, Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice, translated by Margaret Rosenthal, © 1992. Used by permission from the University of Chicago Press
Lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by A. D. Melville (1998), “The Doctrines of Pythagorus,” p. 335, XV, Lines 103–105, used by permission of Oxford University Press.
Facsimile map from The Mercator Atlas of Europe © Walking Tree Press. Reproduced with permission.
Inset map by G. W. Ward
publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-84854-708-7
John Murray (Publishers)
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.johnmurray.co.uk
For Bill and Adrienne
Contents
Map: Gabriella’s Journey
Prologue
God’s Work or the Devil’s Machinations
Salt and Sweet, Tears and Milk
Dr. Cardano’s House
A Tether
One Must Be Kind to Beasts
Before the Sea of Black Woods
The Widow Gudrun
Fires That Never Burn
Dr. Rainer Fuchs, Professor of Botany
Where the Root Is in the House, the Devil Can Do No Harm
Manifestations of Solar Madness
Lost Governance of the Whole
What Was Lost Was Returned
The Patient Owns the Remedy
The Vanishing Bend in the Path
To Make Way for the New
Sorrow Be Banished
The Sap That Slows the World
The Mountains Are Full of Wonderful Creatures
Like Cures Like
A Border Between Continents
My Father’s Keeper
We Are Housed by the Past
The Basin of the Dead
A Secret Accord
Make His Entrance Wide
Stitching Sky to Mountain
Epilogue: Braiding the Tides
Nullaque iam tellus,
nullus mihi permanet aër,
Incola ceu nusquam,
sic sum peregrinus ubique.
No land now, no air
is constant for me.
Because I dwell nowhere,
I’m a pilgrim everywhere.
—Petrarch
Le aque sta via ani e mesi, e po’ le
torna ai so paesi.
The waters vanish for months and
years and then return to their home.
—Sixteenth-century Venetian proverb
That which wounds, shall heal.
—Attributed to the oracle of Apollo
Prologue
“I don’t know where my own body begins or ends,” said the young girl of Imizmiza. Her mother had summoned me, the only woman physician within hundreds of miles, to tend her twelve-year-old daughter, who suffered the grave consequences of corporeal confusion. The girl sat at a cedar table near a narrow window in the red earthen house. She told me, through a dark veil that flickered as she spoke, that she sensed the fear of entrapment that the tethered horse knew in the field. His visible breath pulsed in the cold air as he drew the rope taut, while the groom approached, currycomb in hand. She told me, “The man who strokes the horse with five different brushes in strict order of succession, the man with a head like the knot at the end of a rope, he is smaller than my thumb—” And then she laughed suddenly, surprising me.
Before I could puzzle this out, her mother approached us and chided, “Come, Lalla, put on your riding skirts. You’re taking the horse out today.”
The girl stared at the plank table where her left arm lay with the grain, her right arm resting bent against it. She whispered, “I’m too heavy today, I can’t move.”
And though she made an effort, she couldn’t budge.
When I placed my hand upon the wood lightly, as if touching the fuzzy scalp of an infant, she sighed and closed her eyes. When I removed my hand, she sensed it immediately. I tried to lift her arms from the table but she was rigid. Later, inclined by some inner urging, she separated herself and wandered as if in a trance, when at last her mother could direct her to her beloved horse or to her bed for an afternoon nap.
Wherever Lalla stopped, she became part of the thing she touched. When she rode her walleyed and snorting animal, she sweated like a horse. Froth gathered at her lips and neck. When she slept, she might not wake for days, for the bed itself was her motionless body. Meals were the most difficult. She refused whatever food she touched, confessing a horror of eating her own flesh. Though her mother fed her like a babe with a small wooden spoon, she grew thinner and thinner.
At length I suggested a slow cure. I would need the assistance of her mother and aunt—though the aunt, a large, choleric woman, obstinately insisted that Lalla was not in need of curing, and certainly (she glared, scrutinizing my face and my dress) not by a foreigner. The girl simply possessed a clairvoyant body, the aunt said, challenging me. “We mustn’t take away the girl’s talent.”
“The girl doesn’t have command of her own life! One must stand apart in order to truly know another,” I said.
Lalla’s mother, a small, dark mountain of a woman, also veiled, asked, “Will she be able to marry and bear children?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed.
The cure, then, consisted of words. I advised her mother to name her hand, to name the distaff upon the table, and the table itself. When I came to visit, I’d ask Lalla, “Where is your arm, your hand, your hip?” Sometimes she could answer and point to that part of her body. Other days she regarded me with a kind of panic, as if she didn’t understand my question and feared terrifying penalties for this. I touched her hand, and then her mother or aunt would repeat the word for hand, to calm her. Gradually she responded with more and more movement until her ability to unfasten herself from her surroundings was accompanied by a kind of plaintive joy. For separation meant that she had changed and that the unknown surged forward to meet her.
I’ve since come to believe that the world is populated by multitudes of women sitting at windows, inseparable from their surroundings. I myself spent many hours at a window on the Zattere, waiting for my father’s return, waiting for my life to appear like one of those great ships that came to harbor, broad sails filled with the wind of providence. I didn’t know then that during those fugitive hours beneath the influence of the damp moon, I was already plotting my future in pursuit of the past. I’d grown transparent as the glass through which I peered, dangerously invisible eve
n to myself. It was then I knew I must set my life in motion or I would disappear.
CHAPTER 1
God’s Work or the Devil’s Machinations
Venetia, 1590
From the foreign marks and characters in diverse hands and languages upon the sheet of paper that enclosed it, I could see that my father’s present letter had traveled, a lost communiqué, through many of the cities on his route. It had been nearly a year since I’d heard from him. All told, he’d been gone since August of 1580. Olmina, once my nursemaid and now my servant, had slipped the letter lightly on my desk that stifling July afternoon. She may as well have released a viper that gives no warning before it strikes.
“If my mother reads this, you know she’ll twist it into some kind of offense, no matter what it contains,” I warned, tapping the closed letter nervously on my palm as we stood in my shuttered room, the summer tides slopping noisily on the stones below my window, the warm stench of brine stinging the air. Poor Mamma. She’d always perceived the world to be against her. Happiness was never to be trusted. And yet, I thought vaguely, neither was sorrow. Didn’t each come to season in the other? Sometimes our Venetia gleamed a miraculous city on the summer sea, and later during the winter acqua alta, she sank into cheerless facade. Then the floods engendered spring. Someday she might all be submerged, a dark siren whose lamplit eyes have gone out. Yet others might see beauty there where we walked in the place become water.
“Don’t worry, Signorina Gabriella.” Olmina pressed a forefinger beside her broad peasant’s nose, a sign that she knew how to keep a secret. Her pale blue eyes glinted in the dim light, though I’d seen those same lively eyes turn dull as slate when she was questioned by my needling mother.
“I don’t think she’s even missed him these ten years.”
“Ah, signorina. She seems to yearn for the role of widow . . .”
“So true, dear Olmina. But even there she’s unsuccessful. She’d have to give up her luxuries and frippery.” Though I often sensed a sad futility under her frivolous pursuits. There was more to her, perhaps, than I knew. I’d often seen a fear without cause flickering across her face. If she were a widow, she could wear it more openly, even though the source was still obscure.
“Well, if you don’t mind”—Olmina rolled her hands within her linen skirts, nodding, her gray hair poking out from under her pale, unraveling scarf—“I’ve a stack of dishes to wash in the scullery and my own luxury of a nap waiting for me at the end of that.” She grinned and then stumped down the stairs, her short, formidable figure still strong in middle age.
As I stared at the unopened letter, I thought of the ways my life had shrunk since the departure of my father ten years ago. I didn’t dream of many things anymore, of traveling to distant countries, even with the rare—though ever declining—freedom I could claim as a woman doctor. As we say in Venetia, the world comes to us to beg favor, and I consoled myself with this. Still I could see even now my father’s kindly yet remote ash-brown eyes, his raven-and-carmine robes, and as I held his letter, a small voice that had long been silent within me spoke. Let me accompany you, Papà. Don’t leave me behind.
His previous letter had arrived last year from Scotia, where he expressed his vague intention of traveling even farther north to collect the powdered horn of the unicorn fish, a cure against lethargy. Or perhaps south to the torrid clime of Mauritania or Barbaria, where he might find the rare bezoar stone that takes all sadness into its density and renders lunacy its wisdom. As with the arrival of all his letters over the years, I had marveled at these cures, at the riches his medicine chest must contain by now—and wished deeply to see them for myself, to acquire them for my own. But his words hid something I couldn’t quite name, though they crept like sighs under my breath. Words like lethargy, bezoar, sadness.
I broke the red waxen seal of the letter, which clearly had already been opened several times, the Mondini crest obliterated and then reaffixed. I could make out the smudged name of Tübingen below it, though not in my father’s hand. Was this the city of origin or had it been forwarded or returned there by mistake? How many strangers had read his letter? Looking for evidence of heresy? Surely they were disappointed. As I shook its contents out upon my desk, a single sheet of bone-white paper unfolded. My father’s usual courtesies were absent and his scratchy handwriting appeared labored.
Gabriella,
You may have denounced me or given me up for dead. I cannot justify what has happened any more than I can explain the friction that underlies the harmonious rotations of the spheres. It would be too simple to say, God’s work or the devil’s machinations. I will not be returning and it will be the better for you. I now entirely prefer my own company to that of others. The days perplex my will and yet I have become a perpetual traveler. Do not blame yourself, as you are wont to do. Above all do not send after me.
December
Your father, E. B. Mondini
I let out a long breath.
Then a heat rose in me. Even though my blue room, lit by the slatted green window, gave cooler refuge than most other rooms in our villa on the canal, I felt that I was burning underwater.
After some time, when I folded the missive, I caught a faint whiff of rose attar, my mother’s favored scent. Had she already read my father’s words, or had this essential oil traveled all the way from Mauritania?
I stood up, withdrew from my bodice a chain that held a key warmed by my body, and moved to the foot of my bed. The cassone (once meant for my dowry) now concealed the packets of my father’s letters and could only be unlocked by this key. I turned it and the catch sprang open. The letters were organized in order of arrival rather than creation, because lately I couldn’t tell when he’d penned them. The exact dates no longer appeared on the last few letters. They’d arrived close together but seemed to come from cities as distant from one another as Almodóvar and Edenburg. Had he simply forgotten to note the date? Sometimes the day and month were there, but not the year. Sometimes he wrote only, Winter. And because the letters were entrusted to different couriers, from the princes of Thurn and Taxis’s messengers to traveling merchants, pilgrims, and doctors who’d undertaken scholarly journeys, their dates of arrival were useless in determining his whereabouts at that moment. His words described a meander through Europe that had finally—until today—vanished in silence. My father had become a voice out of time.
A quick, rustling footfall outside my half-open door alerted me to my mother. I slammed the cassone shut, briskly locked it, and fumbled the key back into my blouse.
My plump mother entered in some disarray, her violet red-lined dressing gown flapping about her shoulders, her long, pointed slippers down at the heel though fashionably slashed with many small cuts to reveal the blue beneath purple leather. She came and stood very close to me, setting her green eyes anxiously upon mine.
“So? What did he say?” Her yellow hair (a shocked white at the roots) fell about her face.
I stepped back. “What are you talking about?”
“The messenger left a letter with Olmina.” She waved her white hands. “I followed her and stood outside your door listening to a most charming conversation.”
For the love of the Virgin . . . “I’m a thirty-year-old woman, a doctor who deserves some privacy and respect.” I spoke calmly but clenched both fists at my sides. Though accustomed to my mother’s petulance, I also felt slivers of panic driven under her words. She didn’t want to be cast aside. Sometimes I forgot that my father had left both of us.
“What does he say? Is he returning home, that profligate husband of mine?” She grew more shrill.
“No,” I said. “In fact, it seems he’s never coming back.”
She brought up a hand as if to strike me, or was it to protect herself? Then she let it fall to her side. For a moment her dejection clenched me. My mother, who’d always loomed large, shrank to a troubled child.
We stared at one another.
Olmina appeared on the l
anding behind her, hands still dripping with dishwater (for she’d rushed up to my room the minute she’d heard the commotion). She shook her head. “Come, Signora Alessandra,” she murmured to calm my mother. Olmina touched her elbow but my mother stepped back, crying, “Your hands are wet!” as she pushed past her, descending the staircase in a tumult.
“We live on the water,” I said after she’d gone, “and she fears a drop.”
“Oh, we know it’s not just the water.” Olmina shrugged. “She can’t bear the touch of the tide, any hint of change, you know. When one has known too much early on, then any change is a threat.”
I nodded, recalling the swift rot and death of her father from the plague of 1575. Though a young woman of fifteen, I hadn’t been permitted to say good-bye to my grandfather. My father and mother didn’t want me to see him so disfigured (it was all right to view a patient but not one’s kin), and so, oddly, he remained well in my mind, then gone. But my mother had witnessed his end and somehow she was never done with it. We didn’t ever speak of him.
Olmina added, “I’m sorry, signorina. I didn’t think your mother saw me when the messenger came.” She dried her hands vigorously now on the stained brown topskirt that was folded up into her waistband.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Olmina, remember Signor Venerio lo Grato? Married to the same woman for fifty-one years. He wanted to mend her distrust, I suppose, with his kindness, though it never seemed to be enough. Then one day he took his slow stroll along the canal, and when he returned he stood at the bottom of their stairs shouting, ‘Finito. Finito. I’m done—do you understand?’ And he left her. They say a spring returned to his step.”
She smiled and said, “Yes—his unreasonably bitter wife now had something to be bitter about. I hear he went to live alone on one of the outer islands. Hmm, he was such a handsome youth, those fine calves and thighs . . .”
Then Olmina came over to hug me. “Don’t mind her fits. She’s as regular a squawker as the crows, as Lorenzo likes to say.” Lorenzo was Olmina’s husband, a man who usually kept such comments to himself. I laughed a little at his foolishness. I wished it were that simple.
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