The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  My father had often noted the complement of a woman doctor in the room. “They speak to you more readily, Gabriella, and give you advantage in seeking a cure.”

  “I’m able to listen too, Papà. This art, not taught at university, is my greatest teacher.”

  “Not your father, then?” He smiled as he sat at the desk in his study.

  “Ah, the one must precede the other. How could I learn from you without listening?”

  “Though we all jump in too soon sometimes, don’t you think?”

  “I know, I know,” I said, feeling a hot twinge of embarrassment. “At the beginning I was far too eager to give my opinion. It’s not easy when I have to prove myself tenfold to be taken seriously as a young woman. Two faults in one. Yet every day now I remind myself to bow to the unknown cause.”

  “We worship at the same altar, my dear. Malady and death, the greatest teachers.”

  “And the patient herself,” I couldn’t resist adding.

  Now, as we rode, I sometimes grew annoyed with my horse (though the hot weather also pricked my impatience). We’d entered the sullen dog days of August, month of fevers. Dog Star and sun together in the sky generated more heat (or so the ancients believed). My restless animal balked at the slightest crackle in the dry leaves or even at a thin rivulet threading the road. Lorenzo grumbled at me for my ill temper with Orfeo, but Olmina defended me. “Don’t be harsh on the signorina. Horses aren’t the only ones that catch a burr in the hoof!”

  “But one must be kind to beasts,” he muttered.

  “I’ll try,” I promised him, and I sincerely meant it, though not long after, Orfeo halted and dug in his hooves, stricken by the mystifying vision of a curved stick in the middle of the road. “Boiled-Eggs-for-Brains!” I flung the words under my breath. The pack mules took advantage of the delay to wander off and enthusiastically crop grasses and blue gentian among the stones.

  Lorenzo dismounted and kicked the offending stick aside. He wryly warned, “Don’t forget that trouble rides a fast horse!”

  A fast horse would have gotten us to Lake Costentz by now, I thought.

  The high fields smelled of scythed barley and threshing, old apples, and Rhenish. Sheep stood unmoved in the middle of mountain paths when we rode up, and they turned their implacable dun faces toward us, bleating loudly and sticking their tongues out. Lorenzo sat up in the saddle, leaned forward, and commanded them in a quick, low tone to move their woolly rumps. The flocks miraculously parted. Sometimes, as we moved along, I noticed that the three rear pack mules abruptly picked up the pace, setting off a panicky crunch. Lorenzo would turn round with a long, “Ooooh, oooh,” and slow them down. That they listened to him seemed no small marvel to me. After that, he’d sometimes pivot in his saddle and glance behind us.

  “What are you looking at, Lorenzo?” I’d ask.

  “Oh, nothing, signorina. Just keeping an eye on them.”

  But I noticed that he wasn’t checking the mules as much as scanning behind them. Would wolves hunt us in broad daylight? Or was there a madman roaming the woods? For there were many folk three bricks shy of a load, as Lorenzo would say, turned loose like kittens dumped in a wild place, when they weren’t thrown into the lake in a sack of stones. But Olmina used to say, La paura è spesso maggiore del pericolo, and if indeed the fear was worse than the danger, I should keep it to myself.

  Still, the jitters of the mules often ran through the loose ropes connecting us like the twitching of nerves.

  A week after we’d left Val di Fassa, we finally approached the swollen waters of Lake Costentz. The animals shied back, all six of them, with looks of terror on their long faces. Olmina spoke in a tone of dread. “Ah, Signorina Gabriella, look at the village there on the far shore, the poor drowned cottages.”

  I surveyed the flooded lake (none of us knew how to swim), and blunt misgivings rose up, but I hid them. “Those towns remind me of a collection of bones—like our bodies,” I mused. “Remember the little Chapel of the Innocents, bones as lintels and stacked as posts, skulls and vertebrae as ornament?”

  “Oh, but signorina, where will they live now, those inhabitants of the drowned villages? And by what path will we go?” Olmina cried, pushing her gray hair away from her face, tucking it back into the faded red scarf from which it had escaped.

  “Maybe we can pick our way along the higher ground,” I offered with more conviction than I felt, glancing up at the flanks of the mountains.

  “We can walk the animals,” Lorenzo asserted, and he gestured widely with his lean arm. “The water looks shallow.”

  “I don’t like this one bit,” muttered Olmina.

  “At least it’s not rising—you can see the old high-water marks there, a meter above the present level,” I added, pointing to some rocks banded with mud.

  But none of us moved as we stared at the pale gravel swath of the road where it slid beneath a wide finger of the lake. The reed beds lay sunken, in some places half-submerged, pointing their thin green fingers at the sky. Ducks and coots swam across the underwater track. The day was still warm, but a stiff wind came up from the other shore, raking the lake’s surface into small, choppy furrows as it approached us.

  “Well, let’s get on with it, then,” said Lorenzo, sighing.

  He dismounted and cut a length of willow to sound the water’s depth as he led the way. Olmina and I dismounted and tucked the hems of our skirts into our waistbands so the folded edges rose to our calves. We began to wade ankle-deep, sometimes knee-deep, through the edge of the lake, following the winding trace of the underwater road. My feet slid back and forth in the sloppy leather of my sodden shoes. Lorenzo’s mild limp grew more pronounced; Olmina swayed side to side, swinging the table of her hips in a slow rhythm. We pulled the reluctant animals after us. As we sloshed through sheets of water that mirrored the mountains and fitful heavens, I said, “We’re treading on the sky!” seeking a diversion. Olmina rolled her eyes at me, and Lorenzo said nothing as he probed the flood before him.

  The cold lake rose through my skirts. I became a wick for all that was shapeless and heavy, things that skulked at the bottom of Lake Costentz. Though I prided myself on a certain mettle, I finally stood, shivering and unable to move. Orfeo shoved his sloppy, bristling lips against my ear and I held his anvil head to mine for a moment. Then I pushed through the water again.

  As we shuffled around a small promontory, another village came into view close by. The black wrought-iron benches of the town promenade descended blindly down the slope until they plunged below the water. Alder leaves drifted on the surface, around the roofs of houses that now resembled strange shale-and-wood rafts. The water stuttered in the dark mouths of half-submerged windows. Part of the town was still visible above water, and a few stout men—solemnly smoking long clay pipes at the edge of a cobbled street that vanished into lake—watched us approach as if they were witnessing apparitions.

  Large whitecaps clipped the lake. Orfeo snorted behind me. His hoof caught—suddenly he buckled forward, and I shouted, watching him go down, as a stirrup snagged my left foot and I flipped backward, stunned by cold water. He dragged me along a slippery bank, gasping. The horse labored underwater and we descended. He dealt me a dull blow to the chest and shoulder. I couldn’t breathe. Muted shouts rang out above us. The shocked whites of his eyes flashed as he sank, his legs still toiling.

  My dress coiled around me. Water forced my mouth and broke into my lungs. I flailed hard. The dark sealed my eyes.

  I woke up choking.

  A barrel-chested man bent over me. He smelled of sausages and sotweed. I shook with cold, then retched and retched again, shutting my eyes against the stranger, ashamed.

  “This lady should not be wandering with only servants on this dangerous route, even if she be a pilgrim, which clearly she is not!” His harsh voice boomed over me. “Where is her staff and scallop shell or other holy badge? In plain fact she shouldn’t be on the road at all, which is not a road, now that the la
ke has claimed it!”

  “Signorina Gabriella.” Someone carefully wiped my mouth with a cloth. “Signorina . . .” It was Lorenzo.

  Olmina moved her crooked hands upon my head. “Madre di Dio, come back to us, child!” Her fingers were twigs scraping my skin.

  Two men carried me into a smoky half-timber house nearby that reeked of mildew and up several narrow stairs into a plain attic room. I trembled down to my bones as Olmina changed my wet clothes for dry, while I lay abed. Every few moments I gulped air. My chest burned. I thought, What I truly need is a good infusion of coltsfoot with honey, but before I could ask Olmina to brew it, my heart jolted and I sat up crying, “The medicine chest!”

  Olmina drew me back down to the bed. “Orfeo sank, the chest went with him. But you are with us and that is the most important thing.”

  The medicine chest—the ashes of Maurizio’s letters (a medicament for my own longing —the powder of his words, which I could actually touch), the herbs and metals that I’d collected over the years . . . If I could hold the jar of dried hyssop my father and I had gathered near the hills of Verona, then he would still be with me. Those tiny blue flowers caused bruises to disappear, according to Pliny. The bruises on my chest and shoulder . . . Where was I?

  “What is this place?” I mumbled.

  “You’re in the house of Dr. Wassler, one of the men who pulled you from the lake,” Olmina reassured me.

  I scanned the room, disoriented. A thin, weedy woman stood in the corner wringing her hands. “Who is that?”

  “Mrs. Wassler, who’s preparing a woad-leaf plaster for your wound. Orfeo gave you quite a smart kick with his hoof, poor beast.”

  Orfeo! He was gone.

  The woman squeezed damp leaves over a basin with bony hands. Her blue eyes focused intently on her task, though her thin mouth twitched. A woolen scarf covered her hair. Dr. Wassler stood behind her, frowning, though I couldn’t make him out very well because the only light in the room came from the small fireplace. Were there no candles? When the fire flared for a moment, his freckled head shone, fringed with straw hair, bobbing and nodding as he spoke briskly to his wife. The wind rattled the shutters and droned down the chimney.

  When Lorenzo came to stand beside my bed, I spoke in a whisper so Dr. Wassler couldn’t hear. “Do you still have the maps and my notes for The Book of Diseases?”

  “Yes, yes, signorina,” he answered under his breath. “I have them in safekeeping in my satchel—don’t you fret.”

  He patted my shoulder and I yelped.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” he cried.

  “What is that fool doing?” barked Dr. Wassler in broken Italian. “Get out of here, peasant, and let me tend to the woman.”

  “No! I want him to stay!” I said.

  The doctor pursed his lips.

  I felt my sore chest and left shoulder with my right hand, palpating for fluid or solid swelling, but then a sharp pain shot under my breath. I wept, unable to tend myself. “Look at all the trouble I’ve caused. Are you all right, Olmina?” I moaned and clasped her hand where it rested near mine.

  “I’m soaked.” She sighed. “I’d love a hot bath right now in a fine porcelain tub. And that will happen when we return home,” she declared. When she saw my face, she added, “With your father, may we find him soon, please God.”

  Lorenzo grunted assent and stared at the floor.

  Dr. Wassler approached and spoke coolly, as if I weren’t present, as if he were demonstrating the skills of dressing a wound to an unseen audience in an anatomy theater. “Nothing is broken here. The worst part may be the bruising or perhaps a torn ligament here in the shoulder.” He spoke to the ceiling as he pressed my shoulder, and I gritted my teeth to keep from crying out.

  The doctor’s black eyes met mine. I was glad for his care, but not his disparaging look. His wife approached to apply the leaf plaster on my shoulder and tie it there with bandages of torn cloth.

  “So, young woman,” the doctor said, addressing me, “what is the purpose of your journey here in our parts?”

  I closed my eyes and left Olmina to explain, for I trusted her to say just enough.

  I ached for days, unable to sleep. The doctor’s wife gave me chamomile, gentle flowers that often calmed me, though they had little effect now. Sometimes I dozed while scraps of dim conversation came and went.

  “We must persuade her.”

  “You’re right, Olmina, though I doubt even now, when her horse crops dirt, that she’ll go back. Our little doctor is tenacious.”

  “Our little doctor is a fool!”

  I slept.

  One night after everyone else had fallen asleep, Dr. Wassler appeared in the dim light of my room in his nightshirt and groped his thick yellow fingers along my arms toward my chest. “What are you doing?” I called out loudly.

  “Shhh, be quiet now. I’m observing your responses.”

  “In the middle of the night? Go away!”

  He sat at the foot of my bed and stared at me. “Be quiet now, I won’t hurt you.”

  “Olmina! Lorenzo!” I shouted, raising myself up to my right elbow.

  “They’re sleeping in the basement with the smoked hams. They can’t hear you. You can’t summon them unless you practice the black arts. And in that case I’ve a friend who knows how to deal with your kind. He works for the bishop!”

  The stairs creaked and Mrs. Wassler rose through the opening in the floor. She was wrapped in a brown wool shawl, her loose black and gray hair rumpled and almost lovely. But she had a fierce look on her face that shocked me. “Come to bed,” she said to her husband’s back.

  His face darkened and he shot me a look of pure hatred. “You don’t command me!” He turned to face her. “But as it happens, I’ve finished my examination of the patient.”

  She stood aside and waited while he descended the stairs.

  “Thank you,” I murmured gratefully.

  “I’m sorry for the ill conduct of my husband,” she said. Then she descended the stairs, her face now slack with sadness.

  After she left, I rose, aching all over, and clumsily pushed the small table over to the stairs, turned it over to cover the opening in the floor, and set a chair upon it. At least I’d hear him if he tried to enter again. I stirred the fire to bring up some light and pulled my map of Germania from the satchel, laying it out on the bed to plot the next part of our journey.

  In the morning I confided to Olmina that we’d depart immediately. She didn’t question me but commenced packing our things. Lorenzo purchased fresh provisions (ham, cheeses, bread, apples, and wine) and a mule, Fedele, from one of the villagers. This plodding animal moved like a barrow loaded with bricks. But chastened by the loss of my horse, I resolved to be grateful for my mule.

  As we set out in the early afternoon, I turned to Dr. Wassler, who stood frowning next to the chalky walls and dark half timbers of his house. Nearby, the pine and cedar trees wheezed with the gusty wind that raked their branches. “Thank you, Doctor, for tending my health.” I was glad to leave but vexed with pain. “And I want to express my gratitude to your kind wife.”

  He nodded, arms crossed on his tightly buttoned-up shirt and waistcoat. “You should not be traveling north, you know. There are those who would denounce you in our country. A woman doctor is near a witch!”

  I recoiled at his words but said nothing. There were such denouncements in Venetia; they were usually rare and aimed at the poor country midwives, like my grandmother. I had no desire to confront the doctor. Who knew how they dealt with such things in this place?

  Dr. Wassler then said in a louder voice, “Return to Venetia! Your father, like any good man, would want you at home. No daughter of mine would be wandering the countryside.”

  “You have no daughter,” said his wife at the door, bereft of any expression.

  I bade her well and she lifted her hand before she turned to go inside.

  CHAPTER 6

  Before the Sea of Black Woodsr />
  We left the half-drowned village behind us, carefully skirting the receding edge of Lake Costentz as the hours drained like the waters of a wound. An odd assortment of things appeared at the lip of the lake’s descending wake, a line continuously redrawn like those maps of the Old World and the New, where the shapes of sea and land never remain constant from one year to the next.

  The dispossessed objects unsettled me: A crumpled lady’s ruff like the jellyfish that beach themselves at the edge of the Venetian Lagoon. Mud-caked wooden drawers, their contents churned and lost or astonishingly preserved in their little arks. A thin baleen comb embedded in silt like a fossil from a cabinet of wonder, an object of no consequence awaiting its turn, in hundreds, even thousands of years, to harden to stone, then be discovered and set upon a shelf to be admired. As a child I’d believed that spirits inhabited every tree, every stone. I’d said to my father, “Everything is alive!”

  Olmina had laughed at me. We were at the table, about to dine on her minestrone. The soup made me happy. It had the fragrance of the garden and her hands and the hearth in it.

  My father said, “Even the door?” He gestured to the half-open entry.

  “All of them,” I answered, pointing to the yawning cupboard, the window shutters, the little painted doors on the book cabinet, the medicine chest.

  “Don’t talk nonsense!” my mother said.

  “How do you know they’re alive?” asked my father.

  “They speak, they say come or go or stay.”

  “Ah, and what does the chest say?”

  “Don’t encourage her in this foolishness! Do you want a child possessed?”

  “It says, I’m a mouth. Put your ear to me and listen.”

  “That’s enough! Eat your soup.”

  “No, you may speak, Gabi. Things do speak to us.”

  My mother glared at him and then left the table, stepping out into the courtyard. My father sighed and went after her.