The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  For many years the sea admitted none but Venetians to the rich trade route to the Indies, batting away the advances of her rival, Genoa.

  Venice or no one said the sea proudly, even if God himself were to come a-wooing. (Thus, as always, in the early days of mutual discovery and passion!)

  From the outside the marriage looked healthy and successful, profitable even. Nobody realised that things were going to the bad.

  For lately the sea had been making long eyes at others, yielding to the lisping blandishments of the Spanish and Portuguese merchants and even to the guttural grunts of the English and the Dutch. The Turk of course had reclaimed Constantinople by force in 1453 and was nibbling at the knees, in none too affectionate a manner, of the rest of the Venetian empire. Albania, the Aegean Archipelago and Cyprus were slowly succumbing to the Ottoman.

  Of course, the seas infidelity was not entirely unjustified.

  Like any pampered spouse, Venice had also been neglecting her partner, the sea. The city’s merchant-nobles had become so enervated with comfort that they could barely lift themselves from their velutinous gondolas to enter a workaday galley. They were rarely to be seen at trade on the Rialto Bridge, leaving it to the enterprising middle classes. They sent their money, not their sons, on long ocean voyages; so had their ardour for the sea cooled. Nor had Venice been a faithful partner to her spouse. In marrying the water, Venice had not ever quite cast out from her breast desire for conquest of the land. All through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there had been teasing enmities and violent seductions. Ferrara, Pisa, remnants of the old kingdom of Naples fell under Venice’s wandering eye, though not her thumb. Venice had not yet been taken in adultery, but it lurked in her heart.

  The long-married pair, Venice and the sea, still operated like any old couple. Each kept an absent-minded or lazy eye upon the other. To some extent, little infidelities were used to fuel jealousy, which remained the only way they might still rouse the dirty spark of their former passion for each other. They fussed and quarrelled; they lost respect and occasionally surprised each other. They brought each other trophies.

  They brought together Sosia Simeon and Bruno Uguccione who met on the water, as must happen half the great meetings of mind, body or spirit in Venice. That it happened in a storm of ice was perhaps the sea’s and city’s gentle warning as to how this meeting might turn out.

  * * *

  Chill dawn on the seventh day of March 1468, a traghetto crossing from San Tomà to Sant’ Angelo: a meeting of two pairs of eyes, one yellow-green, the other calf-brown, glowing in pale faces like bleached seedcases on slender stems. In those days the Venetians dressed in black, craftsmen and merchant alike, all the year round. Only senators like Nicolò Malipiero affected red robes. The encasement in black had the curious effect of rendering each face more vivid. With the clothes a virtual uniform, the individuality of each person’s features was shockingly evident.

  Sosia smiled at Bruno with her eyes – the yellow pulsing out of the green – to engage his attention.

  Bruno, his bareta pulled low over his hair, looked like any other Venetian, if immeasurably more attractive.

  Nice boy, thought Sosia, nice eyelashes, nice mouth.

  She liked the way his eyelids were delicately shaded with mauve. His lips looked like the detail of an exquisite painting. His black robe was closed at the front and fastened at the throat with a dribble of pale ribbon. A white chemise showed above the collar, visibly abrading the slight stubble of his chin. She checked the ridges under his cloak that informed her that he wore hose and a silk zipon, a close-fitting waist-length jacket. His sleeves hung down like bells. He had draped a long scarf over his shoulders.

  Yes, thought Sosia, the pretty young man is a borghese, a bourgeois. At home, she saw in her mind, he would have three other suits, a fuine, a squirrel back, miniver and thin silk for summer. She sniffed: He’s not so poor as to smell of the streets but he cannot afford musk and civet to protect himself from their stench. She imagined that he would have a sister or two in a convent and perhaps one married upwards to a minor nobleman.

  Sosia was also dressed in black. It was the safest way to go about the town for someone who wanted to attract attention only at times suitable to herself. Underneath, she wore a luxurious dress of which her husband Rabino knew nothing: a high waist and low neckline. Her sleeves were elaborate: laced segments of brocade, between the gaps of which little puffs of her chemise emerged like sighs of breath on a cold day. She wore her hair coiled at the back and a thick curled fringe at the front. Unless she was engaged in her particular kind of commerce, she kept her eyes downcast.

  The second time, she smiled with her mouth. Bruno blushed. He had not dared to suppose that her first smile was for him; now her stare was unmistakable.

  Sosia thought, Ah, a virgin, how lovely. Doesn’t even know how to bring me on.

  She had felt drawn to Bruno on first sight, an unfamiliar sensation to her. The very discomfort of such a strange feeling kept her interest aroused. From his face, she could see that he was kind. From his movements, she could see he was both quick and gentle. Yes, she would take him, she resolved, seeing the way through to the inevitable sad resolution, even as she contemplated the pleasures of beginning such a storia.

  She smiled again, and now she spoke, and Bruno saw the yellow badge that she had pinned on the underside of her sleeve. It startled him, but it was already too late. She had moved closer to him.

  She said, in a clattering foreign accent, the consonants slanting away from the vowels and then slapping down on them, ‘There are snowflakes in your hands, Signor.’

  It was true. The traghetto shuffled across the canal through a heavy fall of snow. All the Venetians standing motionless in the black boat were dusted with snow like statues. Bruno’s hands, lacking gloves, were curved like little alabaster bowls against his thighs. The snow had gathered between his mottled fingers where it did not melt.

  He met her eyes. A smile was drawn out of him, an idiot’s grin spilling out of his mouth, like a skater spinning off the ice, he thought. He said nothing; nothing came to him, and he looked down in embarrassment. Why should a woman like that address me? Like that, a foreigner, a Jewess, some kind of courtesan, probably, but so beautiful. Such golden skin, such a fascinating slant to her eyes.

  When he looked up again, she had disappeared. He had not yet, in any case, thought of what to say to her. He felt a scalding sense of loss at her departure, a hot confection of regret and embarrassment at his own social incompetence and a small element of relief. He knew without doubt that the unknown Jewess represented the kind of shameful excitement for which Venice was famous, and which he, so far, had managed to avoid.

  He inspected his hands for the snowflakes she described. But after this brief encounter with the strangely fragrant woman, they, too, had melted away, as if they could not withstand the heat of her close-by body.

  Sosia had slipped in front of him and flattened herself in a doorway as Bruno passed, abstracted, studying his hands.

  Hidden in the crowds, she followed him to his work, all the way into the Fondaco dei Tedeschi near the wooden bridge at Rialto. She knew that the large squat building served as a guild for the German community in Venice and as accommodation for the visiting Teutonic merchants. Rabino was known to them, and respected by them, frequently called there to attend Germans suffering from the rigours of the perilous journey over the Alps.

  The young man did not look like a Northerner and nor was he dressed in their style; so he must work for them, as many did. Perhaps he was a sensale, she wondered, one of those trained to monitor the German traders and extract their taxes, keeping a nice percentage for themselves. But this dreamy young man did not have the look of a coin-counter, and nor did he seem prosperous enough to hold the lucrative post of sensale.

  She trailed him through the first open courtyard, now a-grunt and a-jabber with tall Swiss and German merchants at negotiation while their neat serv
ants waited patiently in the arcades. It was easy to see which of them had been in Venice for a long period: those men used their hands when they spoke. The newcomers kept their arms stiffly aligned to their bodies. The water gates were open. Men were carrying in boxes that jangled with pewter and iron utensils. When the canal stirred a smell of beer and sausages poured forth from the kitchens like a sigh of well-being. Sosia walked to the well in the centre of the quiet second courtyard and spun slowly around, looking upwards.

  The design of the place was sternly theatrical, like a court of judgement. She imagined an audience of men crammed into the serried arches above her. The young men would not resist certain hand gestures and smiles. The older men would look at her with the eyes of weary connoisseurs in whom life is rekindled at the thought of a new taste. There would be those who would look with sharp slits of eyes, like the arrow slots of a castle, on whom she would have no effect.

  Bruno had disappeared up one of the four staircases. So she stretched back against the well, craning her neck for a glimpse of him among the columns. Her hands, behind her back, felt the face of the well’s winged lion; it was worn to silk by the sturdy legs of a thousand Germans who had leaned against it.

  She caught sight of Bruno’s smooth cheek flitting between two arches. She glided to the mouth of the nearest staircase, ascending quickly, with her eyes downcast. A man appeared in front of her. He looked at her curiously, but she did not give him time to develop his speculations, walking swiftly to the next floor. She saw no one there except her quarry, whose black robe swirled around a corner out of sight.

  Following ten paces behind, she let him pass through an open door. Then she approached the entrance herself, hovering in its shadow. Through it she saw a group of men bent over a metallic apparatus the size of a wheelbarrow, a boy carrying away quires stamped with black lettering, two other men hunched over fine metal rectangles, another stirring a cauldron of swirling black. Someone slapped a blanket over a metal plate with a sound like a large fish being landed.

  Above the door she observed a sign carved on cherry wood. JOHANN AND WENDELIN DA SPIRA, she read, and the name was familiar to her.

  A fume of hot minerals jolted her from these thoughts and reminded her of the young man whom she had followed here.

  So this is what he does, she thought, the nice young man.

  Chapter Six

  That man seems to me to he a God,

  No, more than a God,

  who can sit opposite you,

  and can at the same time look at you and hear your

  sweet laughter; but miserable, I

  suffer all my senses to be ripped from me.

  For when I look at you, Lesbia, even for a moment,

  I can no longer speak.

  For my tongue has snapped in my mouth,

  For a sudden frail fire scuttles under my skin

  For my ears roar

  For my eyes have fallen into the night.

  ‘Mister Doctor,’ said Sosia over the grey polenta she had drizzled meagrely with gravy, ‘You should have some papers with your name and address on them. Wealthy clients find this kind of detail comforting. You could profit from more rich clients. They get more expensive diseases for which the treatment is longer.’

  Rabino, who had watched two children die of plague that night, raised fragile eyes across the table at her. Why did she look blurred to him these days? He wondered when he had found that repulsive smell attractive. He could not make out what she was saying in that fuzzy voice. Why did everything he ate taste so metallic? She was his wife, but she did not even feel like family. She might well call him ‘Mister Doctor’, never using the name ‘Rabino’. When he touched the skin of his patients, there was more intimacy.

  ‘I never heard of such a thing, my dear, but if you think it’s important.’ He felt the need to be respectful with her, to compensate for the absence of the proper feelings.

  She said: ‘I’ll organise it. With Venetian on one side, and Latin on the other.’

  ‘Very well. I – I must go now. The mother of those two children was nursing a bubo in her sleeve. She tried to hide it from me, because she wanted my entire attention for her babies.’

  ‘Christians?’ asked Sosia, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘Human beings, Sosia, suffering.’

  ‘Can they pay?’

  Rabino lied: ‘Yes, they’ve already given me the money for the apothecary.’

  ‘Then give it to me, I’ll use it for your papers.’

  There was no money. Rabino had planned to pay the apothecary himself. Or to trade some of his own herbs for the prezioso liquore, the triaca, in which the Venetians had so much unfounded confidence. He would go to the Struzzo on the Merceria, or the Carro in the Frezzaria or the Fenice in San Luca, and all the others, if necessary, to see what business he could do for the young mother.

  He envisioned a long, cold walk, faces uplifted cynically to him, at the Fircone, the Siren, the Lily, the Apple or the Sun. The Venetian apothecaries loved to name themselves poetically, as if to add a wreathing of spells to the incantatory nature of their fragrant trade. And if they would not help him, there were smaller places that might do so in exchange for an hour of his time with their own patients or some written advice for a sceptical noble client. Rabino Simeon’s name was worth something in Venice, in spite of his race, or perhaps because of it. In extremis many noble Venetians had more faith in the quick, silent Jewish doctors than in their own fashionable chattering physicians.

  Sosia was still holding out her hand across the table. Rabino leaned back imperceptibly in case she actually touched him.

  ‘Another day, my dear. I have other medical expenses this week.’

  He hurried away, forgetting his threadbare hat on the table. The wind would burn the thin skin of his scalp today. She did not remind him to take it.

  ‘You are pathetic,’ said Sosia, to the hat. She cleared the table. There were many glasses. Last night, Rabino had been able to gather a quorum of ten men to worship. There was as yet no synagogue in Venice herself, and those on the mainland were too far distant for a busy doctor to attend. So the articles of their faith were enshrined in a room in the doctor’s house, and all those Jewish men of business who visited the city on the fifteen-day passes, knew to come to Rabino Simeons home in San Trovaso if they had need to drink of the comfort of their faith, or to feel his gentle hands upon the damaged limbs and flesh that pained them.

  Sosia was supposed to keep their records in order in quires of paper Rabino bought cheaply from the cartolai when he could. Among these rough sheaves she sometimes hid her own ledger, a more elegant document altogether, bound in oxblood leather and containing the finest watermarked paper from Bologna. It had been a gift from Domenico Zorzi, who thought Sosia was interested in poetry, and that she might pen some lines herself. He could never have dreamt the use to which she would put it.

  That morning she opened it and found the column labelled borghese. In it, she drew two lines, with a space in between, in preparation for a new entry.

  * * *

  Sosia cleared the table, washed inside her mouth, her face and between her legs, and set off for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi.

  It was yet so early that the sun had not yet sponged the cloudy albumen of dawn from the outlines of the town, and not a single boat cleaved the melted pearl of the canal.

  By the time she arrived at the opposite riva the sun was rising squarely above the blackened silhouette of the fondaco’s slender frill of roof ornament. In a large room in that building, she knew, was the boy with the mauve-lidded eyes and the silky eyelashes. His skin bore the unmistakable fragility of one who rose early: he was sure to be at work already.

  She raised her arm to shade her eyes. The jut of Sosia’s breast drew forth an automatic chorus among the passing boatmen. Some grunted rhythmically as if already in congress with her; others cried out their wares verbally or with eloquent motions of their hips. A few nodded and smiled with encouraging
familiarity. Some threw languid glances that seemed positively post-coital, as if performing the act of love with her was a foregone conclusion. One articulated his appreciation in grimaces of pain: how could she deprive him of herself for a moment? Another man, gross-bellied and tall, merely opened his mouth to its widest extent, to show how greedily he would consume her – in one bite!

  She was not angry. She knew the provocation she presented: a woman, standing shamelessly alone at dawn, must be a harlot, worn soft and sweet by the night’s grinding of grain, pungent with the sweat and semen of a dozen customers.

  It might have been so another time, reflected Sosia, but not today.

  When she found Bruno she wanted to be the kind of woman he wanted. So she arranged her features into the expression she deemed most suitable: sweet docility surprised by unexpected longing. With this touching struggle inscribed on her face, she walked over the bridge to the Fondaco dei Tedeschi.

  It was Bruno himself who greeted her as she walked into the stamperia. He had been at his desk since the early hours, deep in a manuscript. At the sight of her on the threshold he started up.

  ‘You? I mean, Signorina, may I help you?’

  ‘Yes.’ She did not contradict him. Time enough later, if it were necessary at all, to let him know that she was married.

  She walked towards him, harshly outlined in an envelope of light. Behind her, through the windows, the Grand Canal glittered like an animal’s eye. The shadows of the room seemed to Bruno to be leached with the yellowness of a sudden dawn. The tables and chairs, the printing machine itself, shimmered in radiant dusty haloes. Sosia stopped abruptly in a pool of light, interrupting its good intentions with her dark silhouette. Her body seemed to be gulping up the brightness of the day. Bruno twisted his head to try to discern the expression of her features, but he could not.

  Her voice, foreign, cool and low, rasped softly from this churning hourglass of blackness. ‘You are a printer, yes? I am Sosia Simeon. I need some small sheets. With a name and directions printed on.’