The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

Afterward we drew near the fire, all sitting together contentedly on a single thick bench. But when they heard we were going to Tübingen, Josef proclaimed, “You won’t be able to travel there looking like that, in skirts!”

  Seeing my puzzled face, Gerta spoke up. “The women are gone. They’ve been taken for witches, the little daughters too.”

  Josef hunched forward, coarse gray hair poking like hog bristles from his wrinkled neck. “The bishop of Wirtenberg . . . ,” he mumbled. “His men took them all away from Durlingen, our town. We hid in an old root cellar, or my Gerta would have been taken.”

  The old woman laid a knotted hand on his shoulder.

  I stared into the cinders that flaked apart on the hearth. “What happened to them?”

  “Don’t know, exactly. They never came back. There are towns around here with no women at all.”

  So that was why the old ones were living alone here, hidden in the forest.

  There had been witch trials in Venetia too for many decades. It was worst during the plagues. Widows suspected of consorting with the devil were buried with bricks thrust into their mouths. They were tossed into the trenches dug for the thousands of plague dead on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio. This was said to prevent them from returning to feed upon living children.

  My mother had cried, “What witchcraft? What a scandal! To throw a poor old woman into the common grave, silenced by a brick.” Then, in a low voice, she said to Olmina as I listened nearby, “The inquisitor needs a brick to the head—that’s what I think.” And for once I agreed with her.

  Her own mother had been a widow, condemned during the panic of 1575 but luckily absolved by the influence of family friends. And now I thought, Oh, my mother is a kind of widow. There were the straw widows, those discarded mistresses. But what could I say of a wife who didn’t know where her husband was? Married to want. A lack widow.

  Most of the time a woman accused of witchery in Venetia was a midwife who would be imprisoned, but children were never blamed. The little daughters, Gerta had said. Olmina slipped her arm through mine as we huddled there before the sputtering flames.

  “How could this happen?” I asked, greatly troubled.

  Josef explained: “At first the bishop sent his inquisition to Durlingen and got the help of the village priest, for there was rumor in town of a widow at the edge of the village being a witch. She’d always acted sullen and was ill treated by her husband. But after he died, she said whatever she wanted to, even if it meant that she cursed the landowner who raised her rent, or refused the priest entry to her hovel. I understood her anger, but a woman must bite her tongue, especially a woman alone.”

  “All her children had died or gone somewhere else, like ours.” Gerta spoke more faintly and looked down at her hands as if silently counting her offspring—the dead, the ones gone to sea, the ones gone to other lands for a better life, whom she would never see again.

  “I’m glad, you know”—her voice grew hoarse, as if she were about to weep—“that our daughters have left and been spared the fate of others in our village.”

  Josef put his arm around her.

  She continued, “The widow. When a neighbor wouldn’t allow her goat to graze in his pasture, as he’d always done for her husband, she told him he’d shrivel up. Well, as it turned out, he did, and he never fathered any more children. She also grew an amazing garden of herbs and medicinals that some say came from cuttings she stole from the rectory plot. I wouldn’t begrudge her that, even if she did. Some said that she called down the moon. Sometimes she’d stand by her gate and fling abuse at the passersby . . .”

  “We didn’t mind—she was amusing,” added Josef. “She once called the burgher a sausage head, meaning his sausage was displaced, if you take my meaning.”

  The two of them laughed at that, as did Lorenzo. Olmina just shook her head.

  “But then they took her away. Later they took more women away. We thought it was for questioning. The husbands and sons didn’t interfere,” said Gerta.

  “Maybe they thought that the more they went along with it,” Josef continued ruefully, “the sooner they’d get their women back.”

  “But only the bishop and his men came back,” Gerta said, “and the bishop announced he would make an example of village women who consorted with demons. Especially the weather witches, who’d brought severe cold to the land and ruined the crops. He would purge the village of all the whore witches. That’s what he said.”

  “That’s when we left,” Josef declared. “We know this forest well. I’m a woodcutter. But we have to keep moving, keep hiding. Don’t know when it will end.” He sighed. “A few days ago there was a lot of smoke coming from the village.”

  “And that’s why you must stay away from Durlingen!” warned Gerta.

  “We’ll go by another way to Tübingen,” I agreed.

  “Can’t,” Lorenzo said brusquely. “We need stores.”

  “There’s no other way, then,” Josef spoke flatly. “Go in men’s clothing.”

  I protested. “I don’t have any men’s clothing. And if we get caught? How can we do this?”

  “I think we must,” Olmina admitted.

  Lorenzo didn’t say a word but stared uneasily at us.

  “We must say that we come from Luciafuccina, not Venetia.” (I avoided saying “that glittering whore of the Adriatic,” but I knew it was what foreigners liked to call her.) I smiled at Olmina to reassure her. “From now on, we’re countryfolk.”

  “I never was a Venetian,” objected Lorenzo. “Let me do all the talking.”

  “Oh, now we’re done for!” Olmina said. “Why don’t we pass Tübingen?”

  “No!” I said sharply. Then I softened my tone. “What if my father is there? I have to be sure.”

  “Sure! And sure as the grave!” She stood up and paced the small dirt floor.

  “Oh, little wife,” Lorenzo said softly, “we could just as soon find death here as in the city.”

  “You won’t find your grave here, I can tell you that,” said Gerta in a hurt tone, crossing herself.

  “I meant no offense,” mumbled Lorenzo. Olmina rolled her eyes.

  “We’ll go as men, we’ll travel quickly.” I set down the plan as if I were confident, though my stomach clenched. Olmina moaned and sat back down next to me on the end of the bench. Owls started up in hushed hoot and echo, the sentinels of night, and we huddled in silence for a long while until it was time to sleep.

  Later I awoke, unable to fall back asleep.

  I sat up (I was closest to the wall and so could do this without disturbing anyone) and withdrew quill, ink, and paper from my bag. Still disturbed by the story of the bishop-protector turned tyrant, I began to write in the dim light. The others snored in dreadful discord.

  THE MALADY OF MIRRORS:

  A Rare Disease about Whose Origins Little Is Known

  The sickness is cast in two forms. In the first, a person intends a movement, a look, or a word and carries out its opposite. A woman extends her right hand to caress the hard stubble on her lover’s down-turned chin and pummels his forehead with her left fist. Or a man dealing in pears switches from a plain chant, “Pears, ripe pears!” to a smothered whisper: “Don’t expect to get any pears from me, you villains!”

  In the second form, the person sees the true expression of his movements, desires, and thoughts only within a mirror. A priest (or even a bishop), for instance, intends a pious smile and sees instead the vulgar frown of sanctimony.

  Father Arcibaldo, a clergyman of noble origins, was afflicted with this peculiarity, and he carried a small oval mirror with him everywhere. Set in onyx and bound to his wrist with a silken cord and tassel, the mirror dangled and flashed from the folds of his robes. He could often be seen walking in the Citadella, gazing obliquely at the mirror he held in the palm of his hand, at his face, grotesque and angry, or twisted into a strange smile. Those who wished to divine his true mind often tried to steal a glance in the mirror. He then to
ok to the habit of carrying a heavy stick in his other hand, for smacking those who weren’t swift or subtle enough in their purpose. Some called for him to be defrocked, while others called his disease a hoax embellished by the nobility and clergy alike to excuse his cruel actions and words. Father Arcibaldo himself simply said, “A priest is a different kind of man and therefore must be respected absolutely! No commoner may question him!”

  In the first case, a cure is worked by arming those around the sufferer with mirrors to be fastened upon vests, bodices, hats, and gloves and even upon the brow with a silver ribbon. In the second, the victim must relinquish all his mirrors, thus defeating his singularity. He must look to others for his reflection, the thing perhaps most abhorrent to him.

  As I settled into sleep, I also thought of my mother, who had always wanted me to be the mirror tied to her wrist.

  Early the next morning, Olmina became Goodman Olmo (in Lorenzo’s clothes), and I reluctantly became Gabriele Silvano Mondini (in the woodcutter’s clothes). Gerta cut Olmo’s stiff gray hair to just below her ears with a sharp pair of scissors. My dear companion sat motionless as a wooden saint on the bench, her eyes closed, hands clasped in her lap. Then Gerta turned to me. She stroked my long auburn hair with hands that resembled roots unearthed from an old furrow. “I should cut this, signorina. I don’t think you can hide it.”

  “Let me try,” I insisted, and I stepped outside. I sat on an old stump near the hut and worked the comb through my hair. So many knots! And my neck tense as a rope. But little by little I worked it loose. I brought my hair forward over my shoulder, parted it in three, and plaited it snugly. Pine limbs lifted and fell above me in an uncertain wind.

  I wound the dense braid around my head and tied it beneath a broad hat with flaps that Josef gave me, then shook my head vigorously. The braid stayed firm. Olmo patted the hat, tugged at it all around to make sure it was secure, and pulled the flaps down even farther. She understood how important it was for me to keep my hair. For on nights when I combed out the braid, I cleared my thoughts. Snarls and angers, knots and sorrows, tangles and perplexities. And sometimes little things fell out, like millet or bits of quill. Clenched brown spiders, the black pips of an apple, tiny shells or stones. And once a small animal tooth. When Olmina combed my hair when I was a child, she would lightly rap the comb on the side of my head. “Where do all these things come from, Gabriella? Your hair has a life of its own!”

  I handed over my brocade skirts, bodices, and silk underdresses to the old woman and kept two plain linen smocks (one of which was Olmo’s)—gifts for my sisters, I would say, if we were searched or questioned. Olmo gave up her only other dress and underskirts. I hid my small adornments (the filigreed earrings from my Cipriot grandmother, the simple gold ring from my father) in a handkerchief rolled up inside a leather pouch, the so-called codpiece in my hose, under the front of my rustic shirt and doublet.

  I strode back and forth before Josef and Lorenzo, who turned their heads away, embarrassed by the sight of my legs in woolen hose. I liked the feeling of ease without bodice and skirts. I could breathe and stride freely.

  “Pardon my saying, signorina, but it makes a good manly impression, if you know what I mean.” Olmo was trying to cheer me, and perhaps herself too, for I must have worn an anxious face after I’d handed over my dresses to Gerta. She’d fingered the rich cloth and nodded at her unexpected good fortune, even as Josef looked sulky at the loss of one of his two sets of clothes.

  Then Gerta pulled a small cluster of three oak nuts from her pocket. “From the Holy Oak at the center of the wood. The grandmother tree. They’ll give you strength when you’re broken.”

  As we rode away, I turned in my saddle to bid the old ones farewell, but they’d vanished, their cottage—and my exquisite dresses—already taken back by the shadowy forest.

  “Coraggio!” I said, more to myself than to anyone else, persisting in such bravado, though I knew it was a poor defense against the days to come. Durlingen, empty of women and girls, lay ahead.

  After riding most of the day under the shifting trees and gray sky awash with a thin gruel of clouds, we entered the town. A few chimneys gave off strands of smoke. Everything was shut up tight. Not even a scrawny dog trotted out to nip at our heels.

  We reached the Marketplatz, where dead spikes of loosestrife stood askew. A single sorrowful oak at the center of the square was singed and brown. The stone chapel was closed. A dingy midday drizzle began to fall and the moistened dirt stung our nostrils with a seared odor.

  The wet, burnt smell reminded me of the charred ship that once drifted toward the Venetian Lagoon in a similar grim rain. I was thirteen. My father and his friend Paolo Benvenuti the joiner took me (against my mother’s vehement protests) out to the Cavallino in the late afternoon, where our gondola worked against the tide, one among a black flock of gondolas that had come out to see the ship.

  The edge of the storm swept on toward Venetia and ceased briefly above us while more rain advanced from the east, downpours that resembled dark mourning swags hung over the sea. The rudderless Portuguese caravel drifted near one of the mouths of the lagoon, its lateen sails reduced to sooty gauze, its partly burnt hull, masts, and long yards a black skeleton. The planking had warped away from the frame in places from the spasms of the ship’s fire. On the bow, though, the eyes, painted one on each side by the shipwrights, remained, blistered and peeling, those eyes that Portuguese sailors declare will always see the way. Even so, the ship heaved blindly toward us.

  “It’s a plague ship!” someone shouted in a panic. “They burned it to purge the pestilence!”

  “Or a fire ship!”

  “What’s that?” I asked my father.

  “A ship deliberately set ablaze and abandoned to drift toward the enemy fleet.”

  “What’s it doing all the way up here in our Adriatic groin?” asked a coarser voice.

  “Fools!” my father grumbled. “The ship’s crew was gutted by scurvy or carelessness, more than likely.”

  “Unless it’s one of those vessels cursed by Sant’Elmo and his bloody windlass,” muttered Paolo Benvenuti.

  “You’ve got it wrong,” my father reprimanded him. “Sant’Elmo and his fires at the masthead protect the sailors. They invoke him against seasickness and troubled bowels.”

  “You believe that, do you? Well, he didn’t do much good here, now, did he?”

  “What about you, Gabriella?” My father turned to me. “What do you think?”

  With all the sincerity of my young age, I answered, “The saints forget us sometimes.”

  My father smiled. The caravel broke up on a sandbar, and now we saw its unintended cargo. The burnt dead spilled from the spongy timbers of its belly, a few tangled in the sail stays. But these were not as fearsome as the fat white dog that swam from the wreckage, eyes blunted with hardship, conveying both indifference and hatred as it struggled toward one of the gondolas. The gondolier struck at it with his oar, and the dog swerved toward us. To my amazement, my father stayed the arm of our gondolier and knelt to pull the thrashing animal over the bow, rocking the gondola wildly.

  The beast tore at his glove. But when he spoke to it in a low growl, it dropped to a crouch, snarling and shaking with cold. The sky and sea were lead black now as the pale corpses dispersed around us, giving off a cold, thin light of their own. My father ordered the gondolier to row us home.

  “What shall we name this mongrel, then?” he asked.

  “Cerberus!” I piped up, for I’d been reading stories of the Greek underworld.

  “But he doesn’t have three heads.”

  I considered this. “Not that we can see,” I said.

  “Very well, then.” My father attempted to pat the creature’s head, though the dog recoiled. “May you protect us, Cerberus, as well as you protect that other realm.”

  I sat still beneath the curved wooden canopy in the center of the gondola, opposite my father and Paolo Benvenuti, silently watching th
e dog and the small ocher lights of the living that glowed from the windows of Venetia, across the black water. I wanted to forget the dead floating around me.

  Now in Durlingen, just as on that night long ago, the dead occupied the air around me.

  “Lorenzo, what is that smell?” I asked, still disbelieving, as we circled the scorched tree, for there was more in it than burnt wood.

  “Oh, signorina—signor, I can’t say. I can’t say. The fire seems but a few days old.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The sap bleeding from the tree is new.”

  Perhaps that was why there were no people in the square. It was too crowded with the invisible ones, the women, the little daughters. “We have to leave this place!”

  “Not in a hurry.” Lorenzo spoke in a low, restrained voice. “We don’t want to provoke suspicion. Let’s get our supplies.”

  Olmo looked at him in dismay, but I knew he was right.

  Two men moved beneath a coarse hemp canopy at the corner of the Marketplatz, a young, thickset peddler with a rough table of bread and peppered hams, and a gaunt woodsman selling rope and firewood. They were in the middle of packing up their goods, as there were no other buyers and perhaps had not been any the whole day. They stopped their work and stared at us.

  “You’re not from here, are you?” the stocky man inquired. His grin was slightly contorted by a pink sickle-shaped scar on the left side.

  Lorenzo greeted them and dismounted, while Olmo and I drew our mules beneath the deep eaves of the town hall for shelter from the drizzle. As Lorenzo muttered that we must gain Tübingen by the end of the week and needed supplies, I glanced around the silent town. No curtains were drawn by a curious hand. Not a single child appeared.

  “Not many co-come through here since the—the burnings,” stammered the gaunt one.

  “What burnings would those be, my good man?” asked Lorenzo plainly.

  “Evil ones. The—witches, you know, soured the milk, ca-called down the hail, ruined the crops, raised the plague, stole the newborns, shriveled our manhood!” He spoke in a grotesque singsong as if reciting a nursery rhyme. “Kissed the devil, danced in the woods, strangled the lambs in their sleep. Laid curses on those as refused ’em alms!” The man’s face convulsed, his jaw drawn back, his broken teeth bared.