The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  She spoke only once, to ask, ‘You are Venetian, yes?’ When he nodded, she gazed at him appraisingly. Discomfited, he turned to examine her siblings.

  As an afterthought, he offered to take the eldest girl as his housekeeper and assistant, even to pay her parents something towards their journey back. They pressed the cold coins back into his fist with their own spider-like hands. They would not accept money for Sosia.

  Very soon, he began to understand why. The girl was vicious. She drove the maid from the house, bleeding and weeping. The tradesmen were terrified of her. She ate as if about to die, though the hips and breasts did not develop any fur-ther. And then there were those looks she gave him, enough to madden any man.

  In just three months she had driven him to the act he now regretted above all others.

  * * *

  It was during the passage on the boat that Sosia had first discovered the commercial uses of her body. A sailor had shown her how she might earn money with her mouth and fingers. Another sailor was found, less cautious than the first.

  The only question she asked them was, Are you Venetian?’ and the only men she refused were those not born in the city.

  Starved of her mother’s caresses, she began to enjoy the sailors’ eager hands upon her; was quick to learn what gave pleasure and what earned the most. By the time she arrived in Venice she was able to read men’s needs expertly as a shepherd might scan the clouds. The doctor Rabino Simeon was no mystery. He did not attract her as the sailors had, but she felt no repugnance in performing that same act with him. She assumed that it would be required at some point, in recompense for his rescue of her.

  The work of a housekeeper did not suit her. Expecting at every moment to pay for her salvation in a different way, she did not feel grateful for the haven Rabino offered. At the house in San Trovaso she splashed her anger against the floors, smeared the windows with gritty rags, slapped rugs over the windowsills, beating them like delinquent boys. When she became Rabino’s mistress, and then his wife, her freedoms increased. Her housekeeping became ever more desultory; Rabino often foraged for himself in the kitchen now. During the few, but interminable evenings when her husband was at home in the early days of their marriage, he taught her to read Latin and to perfect her Italian.

  Nervously Rabino complimented her, telling her he was astonished at the absorbency of her mind. Words seemed to lodge in Sosia’s memory with no effort on her part, grafting themselves in clusters rather than singly. The longer the word, the more quickly she learned it. Rabino did not know that she refined her vocabulary even further on her own, pretending, with him, to be slower than she was. When he was not at home, she ranged the studio restlessly, looking for unread texts, particularly any he thought unsuitable for her. Now that she could speak Italian, she quickly learned Venetian as well, and this meant that she could go outside, and, wrapped in the shadow of her cloak, find entertainment and revenue in the streets. Even with her yellow badge, Sosia was able to find physical relief and her own unusual kinds of emotional enjoyment among the Venetians.

  She sold herself at variable prices, becoming expert at gauging what the market would stand and what she could afford to give away because she would have willingly paid for it herself. She refused, despite the dangers, to affiliate herself to any one madam or pimp, but sought to supplement her pocket money from random eye-contacts in the crowd. Her business was usually transacted in silence, in alleyways, disused buildings or the luxurious studios of the rich or noble. The only question she asked was ‘You are a Venetian, yes?’

  She spent her earnings on ephemera; a ripe peach out of season, a pair of jewelled shoes she would never wear, silk chemises she wore once, with someone, and then used to clean the phials in Rabino’s small apothecary studio. Then she burned them. She bought books, trading them away for new ones as soon as she had read them. She bought a row of pink pearls from a pawnshop. She knew they carried a tragedy of their own from the way they recoiled in her hand as she examined them. But this innocent pathos of the pearls was their power. When she wore them, customers were drawn to her. The pearls looked like a row of small, hard nipples, never yet touched.

  Sosia was not a proper Venetian courtesan, protected and spoiled. She was not educated as they were, in the arts of poetry and luxury. She knew of such women and saw them in the street, sometimes. The Veronese scribe Felice Feliciano had explained their courses to Sosia: they would engage with a steady clientele of five or six noble lovers, each of whom might grind his grain with her on his appointed night of the week. The days of the society courtesan were hers to sell or repose in as she wished. Felice Feliciano would always say that there was something erotically attractive to these young noblemen in the idea of sharing one whore between them, and perhaps also a competitive edge to be honed in the bedchamber. From this, the courtesan could only profit, financially and physically.

  Sosia had no such aspirations. She preferred brief encounters, as many as possible. She liked the variety. To attract it, she presented herself variously. She could change the expression of her face so that it seemed to alter its lineaments. Some days she went out as a beautiful woman and attracted the kind of men who loved only faces. Other times she went out as an ugly woman, and attracted the true sensualists.

  And so, in the first twelve years of her marriage, she had made her preferred kind of acquaintance with merchants and senators, barrow-pullers and shopkeepers, and finally the scholar-nobleman Domenico Zorzi and the mad scribe Felice Feliciano. While she insisted on variety, she did not object to repeating the same from time to time and so some men became regular appointments, the regularity of the encounters always decided by Sosia herself. She took different pleasures from each of them, and kept a diary, recording each man in one of three columns: Golden Book, Bourgeois and Gutter.

  Merchants and shopkeepers kept her well dressed and fed with luxuries. The barrow-pullers were humorous and often surprisingly refined in the arts of love. Domenico, she took for power and for his library, Felice for the glamour of procuring something universally desired. And because there was something about Felice Feliciano that even she, Sosia Simeon, could not resist, perhaps she less than anyone else in Venice.

  Chapter Four

  No one sees what’s written on the spine

  of his own autobiography.

  By the time he was nine, the only thing that Bruno could really remember about his father were the pads of his fingertips. Signor Uguccione had been a musician in the private orchestra of the Doge, playing every kind of wind instrument, a quiet man, eloquent only in musical notes. Bruno and his sister Gentilia grew up to the love-songs of the flute leaking from under the door of their parents’ bedroom every night.

  In those times, even more than now, Venetians were truly amphibious, moving without fear and indifferently over water and land. Indeed in those vigorous days of early empire, land was changed into sea and shore into land at will with bridges, irrigations and reclamations. The Venetians treated the sea with a familiarity bordering on disdain, receiving respect in return, as with any slave and mistress. The sea surrounded the city, pounding like the unquiet breast of a bird. Only occasionally it reached out the claw of a wave and pulled one or two Venetians into its jade-green depths.

  As it did with Bruno’s mother and father, caught in a sudden vicious storm on the Day of the Dead, as they went in their little sandolo to the island of San Pietro in Volta to pay their respects to three generations of Bruno’s paternal ancestors buried there.

  The bodies of Bruno’s parents were washed up, side by side, on the shore of the Lido with the next tide, the petals of the flowers intended for the grave speckling the shallow water around them like funereal confetti.

  An aunt and uncle from Pesaro arrived in Venice to decide the fate of the two children.

  The uncle planned to take the children home to Pesaro. But he soon realised that, Venetians, they would not thrive away from the lagoon. When he explained his wishes to them, they stare
d uncomprehendingly, as if they did not believe in a place outside Venice. Their very language was contaminated, as he saw it, with the sea. In conversation, their every image was watery; their little hands swam in fluid gestures. Their Italian accent was poor; he could barely understand their strong Venetian dialect. At the funeral of their parents, they clung together, like two fish caught on the same hook.

  The uncle wrote home to his own father (in a letter Bruno found on his desk and skimmed guiltily) that his nephew was to be enrolled in the boarding school of the Abate Guarino. Gentilia was to be taken in as a novice at Sant’ Angelo di Contorta, which appeared to be the best-known convent in Venice.

  Sant’ Angelo was conspicuous for all the wrong reasons, but the well-meaning uncle from Pesaro knew nothing of them. There had been no time for investigations during his hurried days sorting the affairs of his inconveniently unworldly sister and brother-in-law. Venice appalled him: the leached light, the skittering reflections, the choking damp, the Byzantine ways of the people. The city herself is a courtesan, cloying, corrupt, confusing, he wrote to his father. The quicker we act, the sooner we may leave the pernicious place. I am drowning here, I cannot bear it.

  The aunt and uncle kissed the tops of the children’s heads and both cheeks as they delivered them to the convent and school respectively. Bruno asked only one favour: that Gentilia might be taken first and that he might accompany her there, and say goodbye to her in her new home.

  Neither child cried or asked questions on the journey.

  ‘Shock,’ the uncle mused aloud standing unsteadily at the prow of the boat with his upright little nephew. ‘Mercifully. Time enough for grief later.’

  As the boat docked at the island of Sant’ Angelo di Contorta, the uncle asked his wife, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ His thickset little niece clung moistly to his hand and he found the sensation unpleasant.

  ‘Better with the nuns,’ the uncle mumbled and his wife nodded. ‘She won’t find a husband in Venice. She’s as ugly as a punch in the eye, that one. The boy got all the looks.’ Bruno looked at Gentilia, hoping that she had not heard. She seemed unconscious of the words, lost in impenetrable thoughts. Luckily the abbess at Sant’ Angelo di Contorta had agreed to take her in immediately. It did not occur to either uncle or nephew to wonder why.

  A young boatman with patrician features thrust a plinth across the jetty to the boat and the family filed ashore. Bruno and Gentilia marched side by side to a cloister where a blonde nun greeted them with a meagre display of warmth.

  Kneeling to examine the child’s face, she had snorted and risen abruptly. ‘She’ll be a good girl, I fancy,’ she said. She slapped Gentilia lightly on the rump and pointed to a gated entrance.

  * * *

  It was said that more scholars came out of the Guarino school than armed men from the Trojan horse. But Bruno hated the place, in which it was a wonder he retained any education at all.

  Mayhem reigned in the classroom. While the teacher bravely read aloud from Aesop or Cicero, the boys fought duels, made paper boats, beat each other with their slates, stabbed each other’s fingers with their slate pencils, deployed their rear ends out of the windows, doodled in their precious palimpsests, produced dishevelled blinking parrots from their pockets.

  Somehow, despite the distractions, Bruno prospered in his studies. His command of Latin was faultless; his ancient Greek had soon surpassed his master’s. He had an instinct for perfection; a misspelled word on the page seized his attention like a sharp stink in his nostrils. Only his handwriting marked him down as an imperfect student. It grew out of proportion to him. His passion for swiftness ruined his ability to write beautifully. Tall ascenders and descenders leapt tangentially from tiny rounds in his script. Gradually, with his teeth gritted, Bruno forced his handwriting into an uneasy harmony, but he would always regret that his calligraphy lacked grace.

  As he grew from child to adolescent, his personal appearance, in contrast to his writing, was entirely pleasing, though he was unaware of it himself. He never noticed older women turning to look at him in the streets; never caught the warm eyes of girls his own age.

  He visited Gentilia every week on the island of Sant’ Angelo. Even as they grew too old for fairytales and games, they spent hours devising stories in which they took the important roles. Bruno, the official scribe, recorded the stories on second-hand manuscript paper, inscribing Volume Two, Part three, in his rapid script. Gentilia always ended up marrying her brother, with a voluminous output of babies.

  ‘But you are going to be a nun,’ Bruno would object. ‘You are to be married to God.’

  ‘God loves all babies,’ said Gentilia, stubbornly. She blew out through tight lips and hopped heavily from one foot to the other.

  ‘But you may not have them, if you are a nun.’

  ‘I will make such beautiful and so many babies that God will be proud of them and love them better than all the rest,’ she replied, implacable, sucking a hank of hair and knitting her brows.

  Gentilia added, ‘And if God says no, then I shall become a witch or a courtesan.’

  Bruno worried. His fellow schoolboys made sure he could not close his ears to all the rumours about Sant’ Angelo di Contorta. He asked his sister: ‘Has anyone tried to touch you? Have you seen things that trouble you?’

  To such queries, Gentilia turned a blank face, and took up a dry lock of hair to chew.

  * * *

  At fifteen, Bruno had passed all his examinations with distinction and was sent by his uncle to be educated at the University at Padova. He proved a brilliant student. He also made brilliant friends, including the incomparable, eccentric scribe Felice Feliciano, who had bustled up to him in the street one day and grasped his hand, saying: ‘Yes, it’s true you are the most beautiful boy in this university.’

  Bruno had blushed and replied – for everyone knew Felice – ‘But my handwriting is inexcusable.’

  ‘I forgive you,’ Felice had replied. ‘Your face excuses you. We shall be friends. Intimate friends.’

  From the beauteous Felice, whose tawny colouring and perfect features were one of the wonders of Padova, this was a potent compliment. Bruno blushed and turned away modestly. When he looked up, Felice was still nodding and smiling with delight.

  The two of them spent all their free time together, making expeditions into the forests to practise their archery. Bruno excelled at the sport, though he was sad to come home with long poles of sapling strung with tiny songbirds.

  When Bruno’s studies kept him in his rooms, it was Felice who visited Gentilia on the island of Sant’ Angelo, taking letters and gifts from her brother. When he could, Bruno went too. Gentilia appeared to be neither happy nor unhappy. She was clearly well cared for; she had gained a significant amount of flesh. The lace edge of her chemise was clean; her hair was combed to a dull shine, the parting straight and translucent as the spine of a feather.

  But he had lost the ability to read her eyes, which disturbed him.

  ‘Are you content here?’ he asked, where no asking would have been necessary before.

  Gentilia merely squeezed his hand, which was invariably in hers, and showed him her needlework, humming under her breath.

  * * *

  After two years Bruno returned to Venice to take up his position with Johann and Wendelin von Speyer’s printing works. He worked hard, lived frugally, socialised only with scribes and other editors, and, when he could, made the boat trip to Sant’ Angelo di Contorta to see Gentilia. It was a small life, a life ascetic in the antique sense, intensely focused on the written word, the written word of the past.

  He lived in relative penury in two rooms above a silk-dyers in Dorsoduro. Slugs made slimy trails across his wooden floor by day and night. He had learned to reach out with an experimental finger before placing his feet on the floor when he woke in the morning, lest he experience the moist squelch he dreaded between his toes.

  He was grateful for the separate entrance to his ro
oms. Unlike most tenants, he did not have to pass the gamut of the neighbours’ curiosities to enter his private quarters. A small stair led up directly from the street to the space that was his alone.

  Not quite alone. He had two pet sparrows. He had acquired them after first hearing of the famous sparrow poems of Catullus, a mysterious Roman poet whose work could be read only by the privileged scholars who had access to a handful of manuscripts in circulation. But the fascinating poems were becoming known by word of mouth. Bruno was able to memorise the sparrow poem in a few minutes when he heard it from a scribe in a tavern. By coincidence the same day, at the Rialto market, he spied the two thin little birds at a twittering stall. They were huddled together, palpitating in unison like two chambers of a single, feathery heart. He had carried them home in his pocket.

  The sparrows had flourished under Bruno’s affectionate hand. In May of that year they presented him with five tiny eggs, ash-blue in colour and spotted with brown. He took it as a good omen.

  It was 1468, an eager spring was cluttering the cracks in the paving stones with tiny daisies, Bruno was eighteen years old, and Venice was alive with possibilities for a young man of his very talents.

  Chapter Five

  But what a woman says to her desirous lover

  should be written on the wind and the running water.

  Every year Venice married the sea. Each June, in the ceremony of the Sposalizio, the Doge sailed into the lagoon and dropped a golden ring into its acquiescent depths.

  In exchange the sea brought to Venice a dowry: a merchant empire. She brought Barbary wax and rock alum from Constantinople, furs, amber, pitch and hemp from Russia, horses and wheat from Crimea; ironmongery and bowstrings from Bruges, spun cotton from Damascus, molasses and preserved fruits from Messina, cochineal from Coron, wormwood borax, camphor, gum arabic, seed pearls and elephants’ teeth from Alexandria and Aleppo, glistening currants from Patras. Never was a bride so luxuriously dowered. The match seemed sure to prosper.