The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  As I gazed on Lake Costentz I thought against all reason that it looked pitifully small, even though it was an enormous lake. Was this what my father felt in Venetia? The pitiful lagoon? As if a bodice with iron busks were too tightly laced around his soul?

  I walked until I came upon a rank smell and followed it into low-lying bushes. A couple of bustards squawked and flew up. I quickly pressed a crumpled handkerchief to my nose and mouth, choking with the stink. I saw now what they’d been feeding upon. A dead horse, boiling with maggots. Orfeo’s face (for surely it was him), drawn back in a grimace, eyes voided, throatlatch protruding, yellow teeth glowing in the oily flesh. Strands of black ants spilled from his openings. Someone had rifled the saddlebags of their contents.

  And of course the medicine chest was gone.

  I stumbled back. “Lorenzo, Lorenzo!”

  But he couldn’t hear me. I flung my arms out, signaling him till my sleeves came undone from their lacings. At last he noticed and half ran, half hobbled toward me. When he saw what I’d found, he commanded, “Don’t look at him, signorina, please turn away . . .”

  But I couldn’t. Even as a child, I was riveted by the whole messy thing of life—from afterbirth to dissolution. Always fluids, water, blood, urine. Seepage. My father’s sweat standing out in little globules on his forehead in the anatomy theater, in the birthing or dying rooms, in the kitchen over pottage. Once, he hurled the medicine chest across the room in a fury, and the little bottles chattered and broke. Spillage. Mercury, anodyne, infusion, distillation, tincture.

  Lorenzo and I knelt a few feet from the horse in the loose thicket, as if in some wordless prayer. Then abruptly Lorenzo removed the bridle from the collapsed flesh and we salvaged the saddle and the leather bags.

  “Strange that they took the medicine chest but not the tack,” he muttered.

  “Maybe they’ll come back for it,” I suggested. The hem of my dress inadvertently swept across a black kidney in the open back of the horse. I stumbled to the lake’s edge to scrub it. A taste of bile rose to my mouth. Lorenzo meanwhile dowsed the bags and halter in the water. “It’ll be hard to wash the death out of things,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Salt and rosemary cleanse rot,” Olmina used to say when Papà arrived home smelling of corpse.

  “You don’t have to be a doctor to stink of doom. Soldiers, butchers, kings . . .” And he gave a cynical little laugh. “Or a cardinal, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

  Then he touched Orfeo’s hoof and his face fell into grief. “Only the animals understand us, signorina. I don’t think San Francesco preached to them. I think he listened.”

  At last, lugging the wet tack, we left Orfeo to the beaks, teeth, and mandibles that would have him. I placed my hand upon Lorenzo’s shoulder as we walked, startled by its boniness beneath the doublet. What if the reason for my father’s silence were as plain as the silence of this dead horse? Perhaps he had drowned in a swollen river and washed up on a bank far from any habitation. Or robbers had slit his throat and left him in a ditch beneath the blackberry canes. Or he had stridden into a lake wearing iron shoes.

  But these doubts subsided when I remembered his final letter. In the end, he chose isolation. I will not be returning and it will be the better for you . . .

  That evening, I searched for my father’s letter from the autumn of 1584, as someone might turn to a book of hours for solace. There was some phrase: “our rib cages hives for wild bees . . .” I was troubled by the death of my horse. My stunned detachment and revulsion broke into a flood of sadness. Though I’d been impatient with Orfeo, I’d grown to really like the horse, whose fine senses made a closer connection to the world than my own. He had carried me. He was powerful and lithe. Blame edged up to me, and I felt the weight of his death.

  Nothing comes about as one hopes; nothing is as it seems. Today on the road we were seized by ermine-cloaked noblemen who took all our stores and money after falsely greeting us with kindness. One of the noblemen tossed my medicine chest on the ground, squatted to examine its contents, opened some of the bottles, and dumped them on the ground after sniffing each one. Fortunately some of the more valuable cures lay in a hidden drawer that he didn’t notice. His cloak swung open to reveal a burly man in peasant breeches. These were no noblemen. My two men hung their heads, useless as usual, though to be fair we were outnumbered. The five thieves then demanded I prepare a stew of two hares they’d caught. They enjoyed consigning me to the work, while my men stood by, fidgeting awkwardly. The main thief poked me with his riding crop. “Doctors are nothing more than scullery maids anyway, concocting brews, isn’t that so? Let’s see if the good doctor can make us right!” And so I did, with a stew containing sage, garlic, barley, and all-heal (the latter, of course, putting them promptly to sleep). And since the fools didn’t think to share with us, we were alert. We made off with all our stores and most of theirs, as well as some very fine bottles of wine. We took their mules too. I suppose I don’t consider it thievery to steal from thieves, though I wouldn’t recommend it. My conscience still smarted a little, along with the pleasure of imagining their reactions when they awoke. We weren’t far from Edenburg, where my colleague Dr. Urquhart helped us to try to find the owners of the mules (unsuccessfully—thirty men turned up to claim them, so we simply sold them for a pittance) and was glad to share the wine with us. Thus ended my brief career as a thief. Of course we just as easily could have fared otherwise. There could have been a Scotsman with my medicines calling himself doctor, traveling the countryside, wreaking harm, while we lay staring up at the oak canopy forever, our mouths loam, our rib cages hives for wild bees. Now I am ever on the lookout for an ermine-cloaked nobleman or, for that matter, a priest or a ragman. Someone will pursue me and I won’t know who he is, friend or foe.

  CHAPTER 8

  Fires That Never Burn

  The next morning, before we departed, I showed Olmina the fragment of L’Amore with only the blindfolded Cupid printed on it. “I guess there are no lovers in my future,” I observed.

  Olmina peered at it and rubbed the paper with her thumb. “No lovers that you suspect,” she corrected me with a smile. Hope was a plain thing for her, common as bread. But I couldn’t hold it after Maurizio’s death.

  When he fell ill, I didn’t doubt he would recover, for he was a spirited young man. We’d met in the university cloister of Padua, first by shadowy glances, then by introduction through Papà, for Mauro was his student and I was ever at my father’s side. Mauro had persisted with me in spite of my father’s disapproval (though even then at eighteen I was beyond the common marrying age of sixteen). Odd to consider that the father who had once wanted to keep me so close could then abandon me a few years later to my own wits. But Mauro finally won him over with his natural intelligence and his confidence, which hid his own yearning for a father he’d never known. For a while, Papà relented and mentored us both.

  Mauro and I also taught one another, in a shared scientific passion for the anatomical mysteries of the body, which soon enough led us to explore what could never be taught. I learned the contours of his sorrows there in his slightly bent shoulders, though surely he could draw himself up in pride for his work. His lucent green eyes always sought me out, not only for supple curve and softness, but also for places I couldn’t see in myself. He gave them to me, gifts of blind sight regained, as if he were a mirror before and behind me—the grace I didn’t know I had, the impatience I’d disowned. I too presented him with invisible impressions. “How well you know me, Gabriella!” he’d say, startled as a wild buck in the woods, when I glimpsed a hidden ferocity or brilliance. And the words! We could use the Latin from Vesalius in ways I am sure no professor ever intended. Arteria magna, ex sinistro cordis sinu oriens, et vitalem spiritum toti corpori deferens . . . For it was beautiful upon our tongues and we traced all the lines to the heart.

  In illness his pulse jumped to my listening ear upon his chest. Though he shook terribly from the fever, h
e came through the first day glistening, purged. I gave him a tea of holy basil and black pepper. Even after the second bout, two days later, he rebounded. He held my hand with his damp one, those long, pale fingers adept at the vocation of surgery. But the fever wrung him out like a rag. His black hair clumped with sweat and his eyes shone dense as silt. His mother, an elderly woman who’d borne him late in her childbearing life, had a small bed made up for me next to his so that I could remain with him.

  “He’ll recover more quickly with love at his side,” she said, and she pressed her papery palm to my cheek.

  One morning after a week I awoke and opened the curtain to his bed. He lay still, staring at his blue canopy, rigid mouth open, emptied of breath, his bedsheets drenched as if he’d been lifted from a river and laid upon his bed. I held his cold hand. I must warm him. But death stole the heat.

  The world was wrong. The lack was everywhere. His great heart gone and mine gone silent.

  My palms went numb for months, though I told no one of this but Olmina, and she said, “The little flames will return, you’ll see, signorina.” Yes, they returned, like scalds from a pot handle. The skin grew slick and pale as scars there. When my father saw my hands, he shook his head. “Grief speaks in strange ways, my daughter.”

  Now I tucked the remnant of L’Amore into the pocket of my skirt. Then we took leave of Widow Gudrun at her door. I’d grown fond of her crotchety ways and storytelling in the evenings.

  “We’re setting off for Tübingen, to find Dr. Rainer Fuchs, a friendly rival of my father,” I told her. I leaned forward and said quietly, “Dr. Fuchs, like you, employs the curative powers of plants.”

  The old woman looked as if she’d been struck. I realized my mistake too late and tried to amend it. “I meant to say that like you, he believes in plant remedies. My father informed me in a letter that Dr. Fuchs is writing a materia medica that he aims to complete before my father finishes his Book of Diseases.”

  She frowned at me and crossed her thin arms across her chest.

  Of course she couldn’t read, and books mattered naught to her. And here I was prattling on. I blushed. “If you need to send any letters along, we’ll be moving on to Leiden after that. Many thanks for the good meals and fine bed!” I touched my left cheek and shoulder as if to reassure myself that the pain had left too, though a deep ache persisted in my shoulder and chest above my heart. “I appreciate the herbs, and the honey for our journey. My bruises have nearly vanished.”

  She looked down. “I only took care of a traveler’s wounds as any good country dweller would.”

  “Widow Gudrun.” I moved as if to gently touch her arm.

  But she shrank away, seemingly in a great rush to go back inside her house. “The bees need tending,” she explained. But then she paused and seemed to have a change of heart, as one might after having for a long while hidden something that finally can’t be ignored. She leaned forward to confide, “I heard of a Venetian doctor traveling through here a few years ago—I wasn’t going to tell you, didn’t want to worry you. His cures were ineffective and many people grew sicker. If I were you, I wouldn’t ever say I was a Venetian or a doctor. Some are still angry.” Then she gave us a curt wave and disappeared into the dark entry of her house, black skirts flaring behind her.

  “A strange woman,” commented Olmina as we headed north, the mules picking up a good pace.

  I couldn’t speak for a moment, for if I’d stunned Gudrun by mentioning her art, she’d flung it back at me in warning—though that doctor didn’t sound like my father, for Papà was competent and trustworthy. But how many Venetian doctors were traveling the countryside?

  “She’s fearful,” I said, regretting that I’d mentioned her plant cures aloud.

  “Ah, the crone’s just used to her own thoughts and none others’,” Lorenzo declared. “Didn’t you notice that we were the only lodgers for the whole two weeks?”

  “Yes,” Olmina said, “and I also noticed that she was always going up to her attic late at night too, for who knows what reason!”

  “Maybe that’s the only place she can find any peace,” I said, still trying to make up for my slip, though what good it would do now I wasn’t sure. None of us would report her to the bishop anyway.

  We veered away from Lake Costentz, riding into the black woods above the Rhine. The pines, beech, and fir closed around us like a heavy mantle, thinning the sunlight. The mules nodded as they slipped into a steady pace, swinging their heads neither right nor left. Though Olmina grew apprehensive, Lorenzo was lighthearted to be among the trees.

  He began to recount stories of this wood, the Schwarzwald, that his father had told him. “Beech will lead the way—the old ones live in those trees, and it aids the gout. Some say it tempers those who are quick to quarrel. And pine, that sweetest of woods, eases the heart. Firs foretell the storm before a cloud appears in the sky, when their cones open.”

  “And blackthorn?” I asked. “I’ve heard about the benefits of its oil.”

  “Ah, he’s a dangerous one, you know—the thorns and the thicket. All I know is blackthorn tells us winter is coming. Contrary as he is, his fruit ripens when all others die.”

  Olmina spoke up. “I prefer the elms. What do you say, old man, about them?” She hadn’t ventured a word since we’d entered the woods over an hour earlier.

  “Elms belong to the lady and make a fine cordage if you need it,” Lorenzo explained, proud of his lore.

  “I like the stands of larch,” I added, “blazing with color. They are fires that never burn.”

  A thin wind brushed the uppermost branches above us, like skirts trailing across an immense Persian carpet. At the top of a hill we paused before a small wooden shrine, a box with canted shingles of bark on top that had been nailed to a stout pine trunk. Moss surrounded the crudely carved and painted madonnina within, clad in a faded blue robe with stars. One hand held a lily, and the other palm was open, upturned, whether in supplication or solace I couldn’t tell. Small tapers had been lit and burnt down. “Who would light a candle here?” I mused. “There’s no one for miles around.”

  “Pilgrims or thieves, one never knows,” Lorenzo said. “Even curmudgeons pray in these out-of-the-way places.”

  I dismounted and opened my saddlebag, removed a small bottle of rose water from my silk bag of powders and scents, and sprinkled some at the feet of the little Virgin. I prayed that we might find my father safe in Tübingen (where one of his letters originated) or that some sign of his whereabouts might come to us. Her face was streaked with a yellow-green fungus, the same luminous growth that mottled the bark and limbs of the trees.

  She offered a plainer intercession with God in this remote place, if he happened to be listening. Or perhaps wood was wood, and nobody was listening but the devil in the shadows. Il diavolo si nasconde dietro la croce, they say.

  Olmina prayed, while Lorenzo observed the rooks that gathered on the ridge above us.

  We met no other fellow travelers in the forest, so when late in the day we saw an elderly peasant couple approach, bent under loads of wood, we were alert.

  They looked upon us with equal alarm. I wanted to avoid the suspicions we encountered in the lake villages with Dr. Wassler and the servants of Lord Altenhaus, so I offered them bread and Friuli wine.

  “Oh, many thanks, my lady, we’ll take a small sip,” said the portly old man, who appeared hollow, but not sunken eyed, as if only recently deprived of food. His wife, a hunchbacked old woman possessed of a jaundiced complexion, drew Olmina aside and whispered something in an urgent voice.

  “Signorina Gabriella,” Olmina began in an anxious tone, “these good people say that we won’t reach the nearest town, Offenburg, before nightfall. They’ve respectfully offered us their own shelter so that we don’t have to sleep out in the wood.”

  I stared up the road, enfolded now in a brooding gray haze. In truth, I’d wished to be in Tübingen by now.

  I considered the peasants. Did th
ey mean to rob us? I could almost hear my father’s voice: Be shrewd, my girl, no matter what you do. In an unknown place, trust no one.

  I called Olmina over out of earshot of the old ones. “What makes you think we can believe them?”

  “They’re straightforward, signorina, and very frightened. I can smell the fear in them. I don’t think thieves would be so afraid. We’re alone, unarmed.”

  “And pray tell, what does fear smell like?”

  “It’s pungent, like animal musk, and sets me on edge too.”

  “All right,” I answered reluctantly. “But we must be wary.”

  “Lorenzo and I could take turns keeping awake.”

  “Well, we’ll see.” I urged my mule back toward the couple and asked, “How far to your shelter?”

  “Close by.” The old man waved a hairy, freckled hand.

  “All right, then, thank you for the kind offer.”

  They brightened and picked up their step. As we turned off the road onto an invisible track, Olmina and Lorenzo walked ahead with the peasants and struck up friendly conversations just out of my hearing. I didn’t mind, for I knew they’d inform me of anything important. It was better this way, for the peasants would feel more comfortable speaking away from my presence.

  The old ones, Gerta and Josef, lived deep in the black wood (not so close as Josef first suggested), their dwelling hidden by hawthorn thickets. I was uneasy until we entered the hut and the dry scent of rosemary, mint, and caraway filled our senses. The woman, despite her sallow skin (which should’ve signaled a slow temperament), grew energetic and lit a fire, putting on an iron pot of wild leek soup. The man cut a sausage down from the three that hung from the ceiling. We added our raveled bread, the last of the pickled Venetian sardines, goat cheese, and wine to their rough table and began to eat with great savor.