The Book of Madness and Cures

by Regina O'Melveny

  Later I spoke to her in the courtyard as she fanned herself under the palm. “Malina, I must ask you . . . I must tell you the reason I am here.” I touched her sleeve.

  She regarded me cautiously. “It is not necessary. You may take time.”

  “I’ve already traveled a long time to get here.”

  Her look softened. “Come inside, my daughter, and I’ll prepare us a cup of tea and something to eat.”

  She led me into a room just off her sleeping room and knelt to put wood in the curved mud hearth, which resembled a tall, thick-sided pot, with a wide slit along one side for stoking the fire. After it was well lit, she set a kettle there at the top. Numerous herbs hung drying from the log beams of the ceiling. Several jars lined the base of three walls, and it occurred to me that there were many more than were needed for cooking. We sat upon a large red, ocher, and indigo carpet woven with a great geometric tree and all manner of animals scattered here and there among its branches. It shone dully in worn places where people had sat year after year. When the water boiled she tossed a handful of fresh mint leaves into the small pot, then took a piece of flatbread from a covered basket, spread it with cold, stiff honey from a jar, and passed it to me. A blade of light crept slowly along the wall as the sun sank lower.

  “I’m searching for my father, an Italian doctor. His name, like mine, is Dr. Mondini.”

  “Hmm.” She poured our tea into earthenware cups.

  “He mentioned this place, Taradante, in one of his letters.”

  “I’ve heard of an Italian man . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Who stubbornly dressed in blue cape, hose, and plumed hat in the blazing midday.”

  I shook my head and frowned.

  “I’ve heard of a Venetian swindler with burnt skin. He was lost in the pillars of a sandstorm, or some say he joined the blue people on the salt route. He owes my cousin money.” She narrowed her eyeatme.

  “That is not my father,” I said heatedly. “He is a doctor!”

  “Il Dottor, yes,” she murmured at last. “I know a man who has become a recluse.” Malina put her hand on mine. “Daughter.” She sighed as if reluctant to speak. “He lived here for a time. We worked with the bezoar, the green ones and the stars of antimony. I am a healer of women; he was a healer of men. When his medicines finished, I taught him the smokes, the proverbs, the sand cures. He left almost a year ago.” She sighed. “Sometimes the desert calls us to another dream.”

  No, this wasn’t true!

  “Stay awhile,” she coaxed, seeing the expression on my face. “You are a doctor too. I will teach you the healings that come from the growing things, the silent ones, and the well spirits. I will tell you the ways we sicken and the ways we recover ourselves again.”

  But I couldn’t take in her words. “I can’t believe my father was here, and I’ve missed him!” I sobbed, bringing my hands to my face. Malina let me be.

  At dusk, spent and groggy from sadness, I brought Malina the sky map given me by Señor Requesne and unrolled it upon the rug. “I recognize these stars,” she said, lifting an oil lamp. “They were spoken by my grandfather when he seethed with fever.”

  “Oh—you must give me their names so I can fill them in.” I wanted to engage myself, to keep going with work.

  “Yes, later when the night sky is fully dark.”

  “Tell me about another one,” I said.

  “Another what?”

  “Another malady. I’m writing them down.”

  “Ah, Daughter, may I see?” Malina kept up the odd habit of calling me Daughter, though we were nearly the same age. I accepted it, even liked it. She went on, “Your father mentioned a book and it caused him distress. Sometimes he cried out for it: ‘My book, my maladies, my cures!’ ”

  So it was truly lost . . .

  “But don’t you have your own papers, Daughter?”

  I brought out the satchel with my own large folio of notes. As I straightened the pages to show Malina, I felt an unexpected urge to see them bound. They’d grown into a thing of solid heft and size. Malina ran her dark fingers over the many pages with admiration. Then she began to tell me about the blue worms. Sometimes I stopped her and asked questions, but mostly I just sat upon the rug before the hearth, which she fed now and then with splits of juniper wood as evening crept upon us.

  BLUE EARWORMS:

  Desert Parasites That Feed upon Human Utterance

  They live in the sand dunes and salt marches of Mauritania, where they hibernate for long periods of time at depths of three to seven arm lengths underground. The adults spend their entire lives in subterranean darkness. Thirty years may pass (and in the village of Melilla in Barbaria, it is said that a century elapses) before the worms appear. For reasons unknown, the young emerge all at once at the surface of the desert or shore as bright cerulean-blue worms, the length of a child’s smallest finger. In Mozema, where their brilliance is identical to that of the minaret roof tiles, they are called the little fingers of God. They issue from the sand on nights of the new moon, but only to seek darkness of a different kind, in the warm, moist ear of a woman. No other body crevice will suffice. The blue worms enter the sleepers and reside in the small labyrinths of resonance, grazing upon sounds that drift into the auricle. Some elders say they consume only human speech and howls but are greatly affected by certain languages, which can slow or agitate their activity. Berber and Bedouin words calm, while Portuguese and Ottoman Arabic make them wriggle, causing great distress to the victim. Instruments like the oud and santir generate a low humming among the earworms, a maddening or soothing effect for the person in whom they dwell. The symptoms include muddled hearing; auditory visions brought on by scraping, rustling, and thumping movements; and voluntary muteness in the person who wishes to avoid exciting them.

  In certain years, nearly every woman in the village of Alganziza on the coast below Messa falls victim to the blue earworm. The population fluctuates greatly from season to season because of the nomadic peoples who pass through. However, when the earworms begin to emerge, the people paint the white stone walls, houses, and rooftops blue to warn away travelers. The village goes silent. No dogs or other animals are allowed, except for snakes, which are highly prized for their noiseless companionship and consumption of rats. Birds are driven away with long-handled brooms and flailing sticks, though they seldom appear in the town anyway, preferring the river Sus to the north and the date palms along its banks. The inhabitants converse in signs or writings if at all, the men respectful of the women’s silence. If there are secrets, now is the time they will fester.

  The blue worms consume more at night, feasting, it is said in this village, on the conversations in dreams as well as on those spoken beneath archways or around the supper mat spread upon the floor. The family eats everything with their fingers and in their contentment sometimes forgets the necessity of silence. Then the worms capture the words before the women can hear them. The villagers also suffer insomnia, existing in a listless world for months, enduring the many ailments that arise from a cold, wet humor.

  Finally the worm completes its cycle and emerges from the ear of its own accord, well fattened and seeking its original host. It burrows back into the desert to finish its hidden life there. Malina told me that there is even a constellation called the Blue Worm, in the southeastern quarter of the sky, perhaps that same constellation that we call Serpens.

  I wasn’t certain I would go on looking for my father. I was weary. Even with all my care to retrace his journey, to seek out his peers, I had missed him. I wanted to remain in one place for a while. Yet what about the man who had disappeared in the sandstorm? And Malina appeared to know far more than she revealed. Perhaps it was her way to wait to know me, as she suggested I do before disclosing my purpose to her. Even as I was about to give up, I found another kind of patience, like a coin sewn into my hem. Besides, I knew how to wait. And now I was two.

  I watched Malina come and go, visiting the well,
milking or feeding the goats, fetching grain from the granary once or twice a day with her basket, to make flatbread. I allowed her to blacken my eyes with kohl to keep the flies away, and to cut strands of my coppery hair to share out with the village women, for the color gleamed as something marvelous to them.

  I watched the women and children come and go, visiting Malina’s kitchen, where they consulted her about their ailments, leaving little gifts of dates, eggs, or even firewood. A few times I observed a thin tress of my own, woven into a child’s hair as an adornment.

  I satisfied my growing hunger with eggs, goat cheese, flatbread, dried fruits, and honey during the day, and with cuscusu, flatbread, occasional goat meat, walnuts, raisins, olives, and oranges from the port of Messa in the evening when I shared a meal with Malina and Yousef. I didn’t know if I would ever return to Venetia. This land of desert and mountains suited me now.

  Malina instructed me in the ways of the djnoun. “Those small spirits,” she said one afternoon as we sat before the hearth, “inhabit all things from the tiniest grain to the largest mountain.”

  “But the small ones, why do they matter to us?”

  “They live with us. We live with them. It is custom. We bear them respect.”

  “Is there a fire djinn, a hearth djinn?”

  “Yes, but they love water more. That is why you must sing when you draw from the well, or the djinn who lives there may taint our water!” She taught me a simple chant for drawing water. I murmured the strange words before I dropped the bucket facedown into the well, before the rope unwound from the bricks.

  The monks and nuns of Venetia chanted their prayers early in the morning. That sound always made me stand still, no matter what age I was, no matter where I was going. I stood on the damp stones and breathed the chant, tasted the plain harmonies on my tongue. But this music of Taradante didn’t come from within the high cloister walls; it didn’t come from the plague churches dedicated to healing. It came from everywhere, from small red mud courtyards, drifting downward from narrow windows, echoing up from wells, granaries, stables, fields, oases, and wadis where shepherds grazed the animals. Children sang to soothe the djnoun in little stones, water, arjun trees, palms. The women sang, the men. Those who believe the desert is soundless, motionless, are mistaken. Malina told me that the desert herself hums. Nothing stands still. Not even sorrow.

  Sometimes I walked alone, feeling safe as the outsider everyone in the village knew, to the oasis near the center of town, where exhalations were particularly strong at dawn and dusk. I knew that Yousef followed me, watched me as if I were a stray. So truly I was not alone. I listened for the indecipherable words that rose and fell from the slow-moving boundaries of stone and sand, beneath the calls of birds shrilling to their kind. Perhaps I wanted to hear the voices of which the old ones spoke, though I really wanted to hear my own ancestors, Venetian and Ciprian, who didn’t inhabit this place.

  But I heard only the slippage of time, the seepage of water, and the murmur of conversations in and around the travelers’ tents pitched on the far side of the oasis. Sometimes that was enough. Once, I saw Yousef speaking to a tall foreigner, who stood with his back turned to me outside his tent. He moved his pale hands back and forth as he spoke, a vaguely familiar motion that made my heart leap. I asked Yousef about it.

  “That man? He was just asking directions to the souk,” he answered.

  “Does the man have red hair?” For his head had been covered by a hood.

  “I don’t know.”

  I turned away. I didn’t want him to see the expectation on my face—for I still kept the secret hope of Hamish, like another gold coin jangling against the coin of patience in my hem.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Basin of the Dead

  Just before sundown in midsummer, Malina came to my room and began stopping up any openings, including chinks in the ceiling between the thuja beams. She cautioned me, “Tonight the moon withdraws and covers herself. A time of danger. She veils the mirror, passes through the basin of the dead. Extinguish your lamp, Daughter, and pray that your soul may pass safely through the dark.” And that of my unborn, I thought.

  After she left, I understood that I was not to leave my room. But filled with insatiable curiosity, I stepped quietly into the small courtyard, fully cloaked. Shutters were latched, carpets hung against the carved wooden doors and windows, whether to protect those within from seeing that other lightless world, or to prevent the disorder of that world from entering the house, I wasn’t sure. I was a shadow among other shadows.

  A man shouted once in the medina, in fear or exhilaration, and then the town went mute. The light hairs on my arms rose in apprehension. I climbed a ladder on the north side of my room and sat upon the flat roof of the dwelling. The moon had just risen. The lunar cast upon the listless body of the Sus valley and the surrounding desert mountains slowly wore thin, like an old garment, as a dark curved blade fell across the moon’s face. I watched the slow scything of her light.

  An hour passed, and I didn’t move from my place against the wall, knees drawn up to my chest as I sat shivering, on vigil. The moon’s covered disk finally glowed like the clotted stump of an amputated leg or arm (for I had seen several such horrors on men returning from one war or another when they came to be treated by my father) or the bloodied head of an infant emerging from her mother. The stars jumped forward. I placed my hands on my belly. I, who had never given birth, considered the child who quickened there at the center of me. How should I prepare the way?

  Little by little the moon slid into cold radiance once more. The stars receded. A small seep that emerged from an underground spring near the rubble of the outer wall gleamed briefly, then vanished in the sand. An unlikely knot of ferns grew there, and I suddenly craved the young shoots. But as I descended the ladder to gather them, someone moaned without words, a sound like that of a large animal. A smell of old, damp wood rose from the night. I listened for footfalls. Had something come down from the mountains? After a while I heard nothing more, but it so unnerved me I fled indoors. Recalling that ferns offered a cure for fever, I searched for the entry I’d written many months ago for The Book of Diseases.

  CARTHUSIAN SPLEEN:

  A Form of Ague Where a Solitary Falls into Trembling and Sullen Aspect

  The disease is named after an order of contemplatives who distill the elixir of life, a rare liquor composed of over a hundred herbs and spices, prepared under the breath of prayer. Unfortunately an outbreak of spleen among the usually kind and peaceful nuns caused their order’s name to be attached to this affliction, when even their elixir could not effect a cure.

  The fever acts like a quick fire on the victim and then scorches all those around her. For the mean of spirit exude a certain burnt odor. Some will say that the reek is fiendish, but I’m not sure that evil is so predictable. Sometimes evil gives off a fragrance.

  Once, in Udine, an amiable woman scalded by the ague spat insults at her children. A cobbler’s wife in Mainz flung shoes at every customer who spoke the words, “I need . . .” A young classics teacher in Florentia, noted for patience with her girls, began to lecture upon the necessity of the rod and the cage. “Let punishment instruct the frail body, break the will. Let suffering . . .” The ague, however, doesn’t affect vengeful souls with the inverse humor, a fact that led my father to say, “Though disease often calls its opposite to table, spleen dines alone.”

  Carthusian spleen courts death, mingles bitterness with roar. Yet the fever bows to a fern. I’ve never treated it myself, but my father recommended the gentle and wise spleenwort. This fern grows profusely near freshets and reduces the rancorous fever, chills, and edema of the troubling organ. Spleenwort clenches just as the disease binds, and then the fern uncurls, loosening the bile of a thousand days.

  The subsequent night I heard a muffled voice cry out from time to time and then subside. When I questioned Malina, she shrugged evasively and murmured that perhaps one of the neighbors
suffered a private grief.

  Unable to endure it any longer, I lit an oil lamp and followed the sound of the voice across the red dirt courtyard until I reached the granary. There, it came from within the storeroom! The tall tower, with its narrow windows at the top, sent the sound in all directions, making it difficult to mark the source unless you were at the entry. I thought I heard someone call my name, Gabi, Gabi, but then the voice fell away into babbling. I unlatched and opened the sagging door. The voice ceased and the dim room appeared empty except for a large mound of barley sloping from the wall to my right.

  Old bits of grain and straw crackled beneath my feet as I entered. I lifted the lamp. My stomach tightened when I saw someone huddled in the far corner. A stable stench leapt to my nose from the floor as I stepped forward.

  A man in a rough tunic with his back to me crouched there, a torn piece of blue turban cloth tied around his mouth, his arms flung forward on a pile of hay. He seemed a supplicant or a prisoner. His hands were tied at the wrist, and shadows pooled around him. He turned his face a little so I could see the matted gray beard, the faint splinters of light that shone from yellow teeth, the caked blood on his brow where he’d bent his head to raw wrists, arms where dried red rivulets made a crude brocade of his flesh.

  My skin prickled.

  “Papà?” I whispered fiercely.

  His eyes, almost recognizable in the half light, scanned the shadowy room and passed over me as if I were another mud wall. He turned his face away and muttered a rapid string of senseless Latinate words as a dribble of urine ran down his thigh. He clenched and unclenched his hands. He struggled against the long brown cord that bound him to a metal ring in the wall, a ring meant for tying up animals.

  “Papà, Papà!” I cried, and he began to bellow through his gag as he butted his head into the straw. Terrified, I dropped the lamp, spilling oil that flashed at my hem and set off his bellowing all the more as I flailed at the flames that tongued my skirts.