The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  The innkeeper, Cubero, curious, stood nearby straining to see. I waved him over and, explaining the purpose of my journey, inquired if he’d seen or heard anything about a man who fit the description of my father. He had no recollection of a doctor but suggested that I question the apothecary in Tremp. I traced our journey with my finger, as I had nearly every night since we left Venetia, so that the names of the places we’d passed through began to wear thin, especially those at the beginning, which had been touched most often. As I studied the pages of the book, they too were worn in places as if they’d been touched with an iron.

  THE BUBOES OF MORPHEUS

  These carbuncles, unlike the Black Death, do not originate in Sicily’s evil vapors or the Goths’ pestilential camps. They come from the realm of sleep; thus many declare them incurable. The patient dreams that her limbs are covered with large, swollen wheals that have not yet broken the surface. Dire weather threatens downbursts, whirlwinds, and storm cauldrons. When the patient awakes, much to her dismay, she finds an ugly bubo behind her knee or protruding from her calf, and then it begins. What lodges in the body during sleep erupts in the daylight.

  I was summoned to Orguégra to treat a young noblewoman renowned for her beautiful pallor who experienced this vision in sleep: Great clouds turned like millstones in the sky, black at the center as if they had dark, oily axles, and then frothed white at the edges. Objects were drawn up into the churn: chairs, Morisco carpets, damask linens, lapdogs, fire irons, legs of lamb, entire libraries, and astrolabes, but no persons were taken. Her buboes bloomed yellow and developed poisonous vortices. I could only hasten their eruption in order to relieve her discomfort more rapidly by applying leaves of mandragora (gathered at night before the dew diffused their healing properties), white Pyrenean clay, and salt with a soft cloth soaked in wine. The wrappings were changed three times daily. She suffered greatly from having her hands bound so that she wouldn’t scratch herself. Her unsightly brown scars threw her into such a rage that she refused to pay me for her hideous survival. Later I heard that while most of her suitors abandoned her, one remained, a certain gentleman of Napoli, who won her vows with the gift of a small collapsible telescope made of brass. Now she could see far away.

  At the apothecary’s shop, when I inquired whether anyone had encountered an Italian doctor, a man of moderate height with a slight paunch (though I began to wonder—perhaps my father would be considered tall here or would have grown thin), the apothecary, Alonso Gonzalez, a bony man who twitched, appeared eager to be helpful.

  “Yes, I was acquainted with your father, a fine doctor but sullen. Dr. Monatti.”

  “His name is Dr. Mondini,” I corrected him.

  “Ah yes, of course. The doctor often went on lone walks in the mountains and once spent the night at a watchtower near the gorge of Lamia.” Here the apothecary lowered his voice and nervously tapped his discolored fingers upon the stained pine counter, where many healing powders and secret theriacs had spilled, giving a motley color to the wood. His demeanor resembled that of a priest divulging something in confidence. “The place is stricken, you know—bad waters. But your father wouldn’t believe it, insisted on ‘like cures like.’ Dr. Mondini wanted to cure melancholia with a melancholy place, oh yes. We warned him, my wife and I.” I could see his wife standing motionless behind the half-open door, listening. “The waters are dead there, you know. The color is wrong—chalky blue, can’t see a thing under the surface, no. It’s unnatural. Kills the trees that grow along its banks, and nothing grows in the gorge. It’s one of the few clear passages between Moorish and Christian lands. Many soldiers from both sides were trapped and killed there, but that’s not the evil of the place, no, no.”

  Gonzalez’s small black eyes switched nervously from Olmina to me. His pale head seemed modeled of ivory, so opaque was the skin, especially where his black hairline drew an M on the top of his skull.

  “The fields of Don Trujillo also saw many dead, but the furrows have come back to life and yielded crops. The river was dead long before the soldiers came. My grandmother told me the waters were confounded by a crime too old for memory, and they curdled at the bottom like bad milk. Imagine a river of clotted souls held between the steep walls of the gorge—clotted souls!” His blotchy hands, studded with dark hairs, worked the air before him in the manner of a conjurer’s.

  I jerked my head back slightly, startled, but the narrow little man ran on as if he couldn’t stop himself now. “Padre Pablo of Sevilla the Benedictine was well acquainted with such gorges, having clung to one, living like a vulture, for ten years in the north. He wanted to banish the curse of the waters of Lamia. The good man made exorcisms for days, alone on a ledge with only Padre Bautista as visitor, bringing his bread, water, and wine once a day. But one noon, Padre Pablo lowered his bucket to the river and drew the water against all warnings. When he returned to the village, his brow was knotted and black. They say he tasted the water. During Mass on Sunday, he faltered and sputtered an unknown language. We were all terrified of him. He grimaced from the pulpit. That night he departed with only a small bag of his things and—we think—a candlestick that was missing from the church altar after that night, oh yes. No one ever received word of him again.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this tale. I stared at the rows of ceramic jars, the cobalt-blue Latin names on white glaze, the yolk-yellow and blue-leafed vines that twisted around the lips of those jars where the darker clay spoke through the chipped places. They were less lovely than the majolica jars found in Venetian apothecaries. The least used jars of substances like black hellebore (employed for leprosy) sat coated with a fine umber dust.

  Señor Gonzalez continued, “I warned your father not to drink the water, but he committed a worse folly, he bathed in it. If it weren’t for the tower watchman, who was shirking his duties that day and hunting fallow deer near the gorge, your father would have vanished in the dense blue clay, you know. He stood waist-deep in some kind of stupor and had to be roped and hauled out with the help of some horsemen nearby. No one wanted to touch the water, and they burned the ropes after, a loss of good cordage, if you ask me.”

  The apothecary peered at me intently, as if it were now my turn to speak of my father. But I was still standing in the opaque water, gently trying to guide him, like a heavy log, to shore. He was wedged there; he wasn’t moving. And I was frightened.

  “Did my father, then, succumb to the madness of the waters too?”

  “I cannot tell, good señora, for to my mind he was a little peculiar before. He departed hastily, as if the very devil were at his heels. And so you’ve heard nothing from him?”

  I wasn’t going to tell Alonso Gonzalez anything, for I knew that I might just as well trumpet it throughout the village as tell such a chin-wagger. I simply shook my head, thanked him, and purchased a few medicinals: adder’s-tongue for drawing out the foulness of wounds, orpine with honey for soothing all manner of lesions and burns, and fennel seeds for their general salutary effect. At least he received the benefit of my purchases for his trouble, though his disappointed face twitched on the left side as I gave him my coins. I glanced up at the half-open door and noticed that the woman was gone. A slim crack of light stood in her place.

  “And when exactly was my father here, then?” I asked, feigning a casual tone while fingering the gathers of my brown skirt. “And where did he say he was going?”

  “Oh, señora, he left for the north, Venasque. Or the south, I don’t know, maybe Miquinenza or Lérida?”

  “Or Almodóvar del Rio!” A woman’s voice came in flowing tones from the other room.

  “Please excuse my wife, señora, for her rudeness—just because she is from Andaluzia, she thinks that everyone wants to go there! But your other question, yes, he was here at the end of threshing season, July, three years ago now.”

  We thanked him and left with our medicinals. We were barely two houses away from the apothecary shop when his wife ran up to us, a basket sl
ung over her arm.

  “I’m on my way to the baker’s, but I have something for you,” she said in a low voice. “Your father exchanged this once for some medicament. I believe his purse was growing thin. Don’t tell my husband!” And she slipped a small calipers into my hand. “I never knew my father,” she added, “so I envy your sadness.” Then she stepped quickly ahead of us, for we were, after all, strangers.

  Still I called out my thanks to her, but she didn’t turn her head.

  “Quiet, Signorina!” Olmina spoke for the first time that morning. “She has already risked suspicion by speaking to us. Her husband stands peering at the door.”

  We left Santa Engracia to explore neighboring villages for traces of the Italian, il Dottor. Sometimes when I conversed with other travelers or villagers, aristocrats or commoners, I wasn’t sure we were speaking of the same man. In one village, il Dottor exhibited habits so unlike my father’s that I suspected I was following the trail of some renegade or madman posing as a doctor. They spoke of il Dottor as a somber man who grunted enigmatic or incoherent comments, administered medicaments, and then took his leave. Some angrily demanded recompense from me. One fellow spoke of il Dottor as a saint, a man of unfathomable kindness who saw all the wounded as equal and would assist an afflicted brigand at the side of the road as soon as a gangrened knight in a chill castle bed.

  Olmina wearied of this pursuit and attempted to change my course toward home.

  On an afternoon of tremendous wind, we visited Encantat, where wild asphodel grew. My father always mentioned the extraordinary properties of these roots, which relieve spasms of all sorts and increase the flow of urine, purifying the body. Hippocrates also noted that the roots could be roasted in ashes and eaten by women to restore the monthly flow (a treatment that I hoped to test, for my own flow had ceased, just as it had once before in Venetia, when I fell into grief after my beloved’s death). The ancients planted them near the tombs, since asphodel was said to be the favorite food of the dead. I was certain my father wouldn’t have passed up the chance to see them firsthand and gather the bulbs.

  We attained entrance to a high pine-forested valley between two stark ridges, directed there by a stout shepherd, who told me the finest white-spears grew there, though most of the flowers were spent by now. My hair blew ragged beneath my straw hat, and Olmina began to dote upon me as one would upon a child or the village fool.

  “We really should start back, Gabriellina. A storm is coming. I’ll make you a tasty cheese pie,” she coaxed.

  “Since when do you call me Gabriellina? I’m a grown woman,” I shouted at her above the wind. “I want you to help me dig for bulbs!”

  Olmina pressed her chapped lips together and frowned at the unforgiving rocky soil, then brusquely turned from me and walked away. I remained among the tall spears, which furiously shook their long leaves, exhausted flowers, and multiplying pods, until I managed to unearth several spindle-shaped bulbs. I stowed them in my bag.

  Food for my dead, I thought, though their hunger seemed unending.

  After spading the wild asphodel, we returned to Santa Engracia and I fell ill. I felt such a chill that it reached backward into other months and years. I heard Lorenzo sitting there at my side, carving wood with the crisp strokes of a knife. I saw the back of my father at the window and then I didn’t. Messalina appeared, dripping with ocean.

  Olmina tended to me. She brought me black radish soup and bread for supper and stroked my forehead with a damp cloth, even though her sighs told me that she was restless and sometimes resentful.

  On the third morning, Salvador brought my chamomile tea, strained of flowers, and I felt better. How odd that sometimes a small thing can effect a large reversal. Healing, finally, is invisible.

  “I’ve asked too much of you on this journey, Olmina,” I began hoarsely. “And Lorenzo. He never would have died if . . .”

  Olmina began to weep softly and patted my hair. “He loved you very much, Signorina Gabriella, as a man loves a daughter.” She pressed a small pillbox into my palm. I observed Olmina’s age in her mottled, wrinkled hands. “This is yours—your mother was going to throw them out!” The box contained the lost teeth of my childhood. They resembled little shells. “But he kept them in his shirt pocket always, for good fortune, he said, because they once belonged to our little doctor.”

  My fist closed over the box, and I pressed my head against Olmina, crying. Lorenzo had carried my teeth like seed pearls as he watched me grow into a woman. And still I wanted to travel to the far ends of the earth—to Barbaria, now—for the father who’d abandoned me.

  CHAPTER 21

  A Border Between Continents

  The evening before we departed for the port town of Algezer, I pulled out one of my father’s letters, marked Taradante, from the bottom of the packet of letters. I’d read it only once before, unlike others that were frequent companions to my night thoughts. Now it struck me why, for I’d forgotten or refused to see most of what it said.

  Dear Gabriella,

  I grow weary. Watching the full moon rise over the braided sand of the wadi, I feel that I’m on her white surface. Some say that she is utterly smooth. Others argue that she is composed of seas. Aristotle thought she marked the beginning of the imperishable ether stars and the end of the mutable spheres—earth, air, water, and fire. I am only too mutable here in the desert, my watery brain drawn to her pull like those shellfish that multiply exuberantly in her light. But I am also at a border. This life is my changing element, the sand beyond, my imperishable mind. I am too small for myself. All my life I’ve wrestled with increase, decrease, the gravity of rage and sorrow, the almost weightlessness of forgetting. Cures, panaceas, palliatives. Now I believe the moon is sand, the disk-shaped top of an hourglass draining into the ether away from us. Every month she seeps away and then is turned by some steady, intimate hand. Her own, perhaps. She turns herself. You must turn yourself, Daughter. We can never see it, but we can feel it. My body confines me. I want to live forever. Still I am large enough to rest my head upon her gritty bosom. Be let go. I am nothing more than a mote. But the moon is the wife I have never kissed! She waits for me, she abandons me. She lies in all things moist, the sea and its tributaries, the heart and its vessels, the brain and its damp thoughts, the kidney and its flow, the uterus and its watery longings, the past and its surgent concussions. I wander, I drift, Gabriella, forgive me. I grow weary and must take my rest in the desert. Dreams too partake of the moon. They linger at the gate. If I can sleep, I will tell you my dream. I’ll no longer be thirsty. If only I could trick dry Death once more. There is so little water here and so few cisterns to decoy the moon, though the sea still laps at the edge of the continent. Return, return, you say to me, and I wonder, return where? Shall I retrace my journey to find home?

  1589

  Your father

  We traveled several days from Santa Engracia toward and then through the Andaluzian mountains, to the southwest of Hispania, and arrived at the ancient port town of Algezer. The air was rich with the stink of fish and sea snails.

  “Is there an inn nearby?” I asked, after we’d greeted the leathery old man who sat cross-legged, mending a net.

  “Keep going west till you get to the fallen wall. You’ll find it just beyond the rubble.” He waved a deeply creased hand with stubby fingers, holding needle and thick thread, toward the far verge of land and then resumed his deft knotted stitches.

  But just as we began to follow the track west, he called out, “If you’ve any interest in selling a mule or two, I’d like to know.”

  I turned round in the saddle. “Come to the inn tomorrow and we’ll discuss it.”

  “And I’ve the good fortune to address . . . ?”

  “Dr. Mondini.”

  “Ah. Tomorrow, then.” He grinned after us, or rather, I should say, after the mules, which he appeared to be sizing up for a good price.

  We settled into plain, whitewashed rooms at the modest inn. From o
ur window on the edge of Andaluzia, we looked across the dusty sea at the Rock of Gibraltar, looming like a watchful white lion. We could also make out the faintest line of the purple Rif Mountains.

  I turned to Olmina, to take up a conversation that we’d begun in fits and starts all the way back in Santa Engracia and that even now I half wanted to delay. But at last I asked quietly, “Can you imagine Venetia empty of Lorenzo?”

  “It will never be empty of him. That was our home,” said Olmina. She paused. “Gabriellina—I can’t convince you, then, to come with me?”

  And I returned a question: “Won’t you come with me to Barbaria?”

  “My stubborn Dottoressa.” She laughed hoarsely, and her body shuddered next to mine at the thick sill. “You must follow this through to the end, but how will you recognize the end?”

  “I’ll know, somehow, I’ll know,” I answered. “I’ll make the arrangements, then,” I said, leaving her to watch the enormous sea.

  Señor Romanesco, our innkeeper, assured me that he would book passage for us. Luckily we had to wait only a couple of days for our ships. Olmina would board the merchant ship Hyperion to Venetia early in the morning. I would leave soon after her on the Charon to Tanger.

  “But why are you traveling alone, señora?” he asked. His mouth, surrounded by a trim black beard, hardened in disapproval. He called me señora, assuming that I was a widow, I suppose.

  “I intend to search for my father. One of his letters mentioned a town there, Taradante. Could you tell me if there are any other reputable travelers staying here who seek passage to Tanger? I’m in need of trustworthy companions.”

  He leaned forward, placing both hands upon the dizzying geometric mosaics of the counter between us, warning, “You’ll invite thieves and swindlers into your company if you remain a lady dressed as you are. The desert will swallow you!”