The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  Clodia does indeed write a little herself, witty little party-pieces, and I begrudge her every word about love. I cannot be sure it’s about me.

  For Clodia, the love that comes from me, Catullus, is no more bothersome than a fly.

  But my poems about her are another matter. The trouble is that they are unforgettable. (Unlike those of Caelius.) My songs have served to burnish her reputation: Clodia’s more famous than she was before, because of them.

  It was not long before my friends were passing copies around. Somehow my poems have leaked out of our circle and on to the streets where lovers no doubt quote my songs to one another. Roman memories are absorbent of sweetly flowing words.

  And of course anyone may turn a second-hand phrase to his advantage if he likes the sound of it. So I don’t know whether to rage or smile about it, but now salesmen of all kinds cry their wares with snatches of my poems. The Syrian sausage seller and the Egyptian nut merchant have come to know them by heart, and they are scrawled on the walls of the Baths. My name is not yet attached to them. I am anonymously famous, not what I planned at all.

  So when I went to the man who makes the wax models and began to describe her, he straight away quoted two lines of the sparrow poem to me, with his eyebrows raised.

  Chapter One

  If you keep your tongue locked in a closed mouth

  you throw away all gifts of love …

  A certain invention by Johann Gutenberg had raised a sharp alarm among the members of the Venetian collegio. Printed books from Mainz were flowing into the city, overtaking the production of the native scribes. There were even rumours that the Germans planned to set up their presses in Venice herself. An intemperate faction called for the proscription of printing in La Serenissima and the preservation of the old scribal culture.

  Domenico Zorzi, book collector and scholar, begged to differ. On 18 March 1468, the nobleman addressed his peers on the subject of Johann Gutenberg:

  ‘Some of you mutter darkly at his name, whisper that he is Lucifer’s henchman. What kind of talk is that? Peace! Instead, let us contemplate with our famous Venetian rationality this astonishing invention that has come not to blight our history, but to marry the past to the present.

  ‘It seems that this Gutenberg was born some seventy years ago, a junior nobleman of Mainz, not a commoner, note, my Lords. His first act of genius was the mass-manufacture of mirrors, something that should ever endear him and his imagination to the Venetians! I am informed that the idea of letters cast in metal probably came to him while pouring melted lead or tin over a glass plate.

  ‘Some time around 1450 this Gutenberg invented movable type. I see you wrinkling your brows, but I tell you that this is not a difficult concept. It’s merely a process that makes it possible to print pages of continuous text made from metal letters slotted together in wooden forms. I would have liked to demonstrate the simple tools – but of course they are as yet still barred from Venice.

  ‘This diagram shows the simplicity of the process: here are the parts separately and together. So simple is it that I cannot imagine why it was not invented before! Like Our Lord’s ingenuity with the loaves and fishes, this miraculous device enables writers to feed the minds of the multitudes, individually but all at once and at a price by which any respectable man can enhance his library.

  ‘I ask you, my Lords, with the Turks and Genovese clamouring impudently at our doorstep, if we can still indulge ourselves? Turn our backs on such advance in the world of machines? Stand like storks in the water, putting our heads under our wings, so as not to see how the world outside Venice races ahead?

  ‘Moreover, can you see the beauty of these sample printed pages? Of course, they are German in style. But how much more beautiful would they be if the letters were fashioned by Venetian artisans! In the right hands, printing could be like oil painting, my Lords, like the art of Giovanni Bellini, a fine new thing come to adorn our city.

  ‘And not just adorn it: printing will enrich our minds, too. Some people sneer that we Venetians have no intellect in the purest sense; that no philosophy will ever flow from us; no deeper thinking will ever flourish here. The city is a paradise for the senses, outsiders observe enviously, and eats up our ideas the way the water penetrates the paintwork and makes it fall in flakes.

  ‘I quote from a letter I have received this month from the famous scribe Felice Feliciano, who loves our city but sees it from the affectionate distance of Verona. He writes:

  There must be a repository somewhere at the end of the lagoon where all the pieces of Venice that have floated away are kept. I see it as a hollow, airy Venice, reconstructed from these fragments, a coloured shell of the city, a kind of book of the city, the city expressed in two dimensions, more beautiful than it is in three.

  This is the true soul of Venice, this bubble-city in my dreams. She’s like a transparent floating book, where the pages are concepts visible in colour. Not a thing of the mind, but a piece of beauty dedicated to the senses alone.

  ‘Now, my Lords, I ask you, is this what you want? For Venice herself to propagate the slander that we have no minds, that we lack substance, that we are nothing more than a bubble? A transparent egg as hollow and light as a letter of the alphabet? An empty-headed courtesan of a city?

  ‘Compliments on our beauty have rotted our intellects with vanity. It’s time to prove to the world that Venice has soul and wit to match her peerless face. Now, my Lords, I close. Let us hear what the rest of you think of this new invention of printing and whether we should welcome it into our city, or close our minds against it. What shall it be? Shall we listen to the priests and the pessimists who cry down every new thing? Or shall we open our gates to innovation? Over the Alps, there are men waiting to turn us into a city that prints books, and prospers on it.’

  * * *

  And so, within months of Domenico’s speech, over the Alps came Johann and Wendelin Heynrici from Speyer, with an instinct for success and with letter moulds in their pockets.

  They carried with them letters of introduction written in Italian by Padre Pio, a Roman cleric seconded to the very powerful bishopric of Speyer. Padre Pio, amiably corrupt, would under normal circumstances write such letters for anyone, for an almost negligible fee, but in the case of the two brothers he had done so out of purest friendship. Something about them, at the very first interview in his commodious office, had attracted not just his acute commercial instinct but also his affection. The elder brother was nearly thirty, the younger just five years less. Yet both had the tender patina of the schoolboy about them. As yet, no disillusion, no disappointment had shaved that sweet and eager optimism from their faces and their fair hair was fluffy as chicken down.

  Padre Pio was vastly interested in printing; among his tasks was the propagation of volumes in the bishop’s library. He’d been to Mainz to acquaint himself with the process of movable type, and envisioned nothing but success rolling out of the printing press. He was also one of those surprisingly numerous liberal clerics who saw no danger in the revival of the ancient Latin and Greek texts.

  ‘They’re merely picturesque allegories for God’s true values,’ he always said. ‘Not blasphemous. Anything so enjoyable must surely be a gift from Our Lord. As are grapes and whipped cream.’

  Padre Pio himself had never been to Venice, but he knew what it had to offer an enterprising and energetic pair of Germans with something beautiful and practical to sell.

  On the day they left, he accompanied them to the boat that was to take them down the Rhine to Basel. He embraced them firmly on the quayside, urging them, ‘Go straight to the Locanda Sturion, remember, don’t let them take you anywhere else, and then to the fondaco. And then, to the Piazza! The canals! The courtesans! Ah, Venezia! I wish that I were five years younger! You must write to tell me about it. Everything!’

  He waved until their boat disappeared around a bend of the river. The last sound of home the brothers heard was his voice floating over the churning water
s: ‘The Sturion! Look out for the sign: a silver fish on a red flag.’

  Turning on his heel, Padre Pio thought to himself, ‘I wonder if they’ll be back?’

  * * *

  As they landed, shivering, at Mestre, that cool dawn in the late spring of 1468, the brothers from Speyer stood among boxes and trunks being unloaded on the quay. Had they but known it, a good omen was betokened by these boxes. In them lay the first shipment of Cardinal Bessarion’s gift of his entire library of manuscripts, destined to make Venice a more bookish city. A thousand new volumes, mostly in Greek … for the moment they were carried off to the Doges’ Palace until the library was ready for them.

  The brothers stumbled ashore, dragging their trunks and satchels. Wendelin carried the lion’s share. Johann was by far the inferior in height and strength; he had been from childhood slighter and weaker in his person. Wendelin enjoyed all the physical robustness of the family. But Johann’s presence was more intense. He absorbed the attention of those around them, moving people almost to unease by his investigative gaze.

  In their halting Italian, acquired from archaic tracts and with the help of Padre Pio, the brothers commissioned a porter to carry their bags, heavy with matrixes and iron letters, to a boat. And what a boat! The only transport turned out to be a serpent of black wood, rearing up out of the water at them, slim at the hips and slenderer still at prow and stern, with a beak of silver gnashing in the pale light of dawn. The brothers sat side by side on a velvet banquette, while the porter crouched on a painted bench. They watched a fairytale of a city form in gauzy silhouette in front of them. If they had not read about it in books, they would have thought it was an invention, a fantasy brought on by the extreme rigours of their journey. Tall towers rose against the sunrise; the city seemed like an open book, its pages fanned up, floating on a tray of beaten gold leaf. White palaces, fretted like lace, levitated over the misty water. Others were encrusted with mosaics and painted in tints of lapis lazuli.

  The brothers were silent, afraid to infect each other with their fears by uttering them aloud. Wendelin and Johann clung to the sides of the boat, enthralled, half wishing themselves back in the velvet hills of Speyer, reproaching themselves for their stupidity and arrogance. Who were they to approach this fabled city, and to think that they might bring something new to her?

  The sun rose. The city materialised from its ghostly outlines. A warm breeze tweaked their hair at their scalps, making them quiver. As they approached the shore, smells assaulted them: buttery pastry, sour olives, garlic and lilies. They heard singing, the cries of the street-carriers and, surprisingly, birdsong, infusing the salty air with delicate excitement. Everywhere they saw other foreigners – Turks, Greeks, Egyptians – and heard the clatter of barbarous tongues. Their gondolier poled up the Grand Canal, past palazzi, churches and warehouses of a grace seemingly at odds with their vast scale and utilitarian purpose. The brothers sat up straighter on their banquette, trying not to feel intimidated, thinking of the wonderful new invention in their leather bags.

  We have something to offer, even this miracle city, thought Wendelin, tapping the buckles of his trunk.

  ‘What’s that handsome house?’ he asked their gondolier, passing a palazzo of unusually upright comportment and slender lines. Wendelin noted with satisfaction that its plot was exactly the length of a gondola.

  ‘You don’t want to go there, sir,’ growled the porter. ‘That’s Ca’ Dario. It’s haunted to hell and back.’

  ‘So you believe in ghosts in this town then?’ Wendelin smiled indulgently. It was somehow pleasing to know there was a weakness, a whimsicality here.

  ‘He who does not believe in ghosts will be destroyed by them,’ came the lugubrious reply.

  At Rialto, they disembarked with their porter who led them immediately through narrow streets to the inn of his cousin’s wife.

  ‘Beds soft enough for the seraphim to die on,’ he told them over his shoulder, as if this were a recommendation, ‘Food to satisfy a friar.’ The establishment into which he ushered them looked respectable enough for neither angel nor clergyman. An unkempt woman, a baby clamped to her breast, offered them a scant welcome. The room they were shown reeked sharply of sweat and was so dark that the landlady had to light a candle to locate the bed for them. In its halo, Wendelin saw the giant shadow of a flea leap in silhouette from the mattress.

  After some altercation with the porter, they persuaded him to take them to the Locanda Sturion where their rooms were already commissioned, in advance, by letter. Red-faced with the effort of thwarting the Venetian, and with dragging their heavy bags through the myriad alleys, the brothers felt their hearts beating like flapping sails. Venice had put them to the test already, embroiling them in her Byzantine corruptions. This time, at least, they had won. The porter shot them tenebrous looks from beneath his slender eyebrows, but he now took them, by a miraculously foreshortened route, back to Rialto and their rightful accommodations. As they reached the peak of the wooden bridge Wendelin caught sight of the little silver fish on a red background, just as Padre Pio had promised, and breathed a tremulous sigh of relief.

  The immaculate aspect of the Locanda Sturion seemed to confirm the wisdom of Padre Pio, and reinforced their confidence in all the advice he had dispensed. At first, the beauty of the landlady and the luxury of the rooms, hung with blue and green velvet, silenced them. They caught sight of their own pale faces in mould-tainted mirrors, which trapped the reflection of the water below, and seemed to be melting inside their frames. As soon as the landlady glided from their room, with the most restrained and alluring of smiles, the brothers fell into their beds, which were mercifully and surprisingly free of vermin, and exchanged exclamations of surprise and pleasure for a few minutes. Having settled the question that their landlady was absolutely not a courtesan, they fell asleep and remained unconscious for twenty hours.

  When they awoke it was with a sense of security, a happy memory of the information imparted by their landlady when she had handed them their key, that just a hundred yards away across the Rialto Bridge lay the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the German guild hall, where they knew they would find comradeship and efficiency, competent information and logical ways forward. In less than an hour they were walking through the Rialto market, marvelling at the sunray clock of San Giacometo. As they passed, it squalled the hour of eight in the voice of a cock. It was reliable to the minute, Wendelin ascertained with an expert look at the sky.

  A passer-by stopped to talk to the brothers. A Venetian, he was curious about the strangers, and to hear what they thought of his city.

  He preened and smiled as Wendelin stammered out a halting list of fervent praises.

  ‘And even your clocks are beautiful and work perfectly well,’ Wendelin concluded breathlessly.

  The stranger informed him, smiling, that the internal workings were of course of Sienese manufacture, for it was well known that Venetians could not make clocks which ran to time.

  Wendelin, noting that a quarter hour had passed in this pleasant but profitless discussion, already suspected that Venetians retained no wish to mark their hours in disciplined units.

  However it was impossible to dampen his spirits on this unclouded morning. It even seemed to him a good omen, this successful integration of a foreign machine at the very core of the city, an outsider heartbeat throbbing healthily at Rialto.

  By the end of that morning the brothers had negotiated the use of two bright rooms within the fondaco, and hired two bilingual apprentices. They had made the acquaintance of five German merchants. One of the three Venetian nobleman who supervised the fondaco had welcomed them with a graceful courtesy that mitigated his condescension. Even that seemed well and good to the brothers: everyone must know his place and they had not yet shown the town what they were made of.

  The brothers von Speyer had already learned from their new expatriate friends, that the polished Italians, and most particularly the effete Venetians, regarded Germans as bo
orish and deficient in creativity, good only for making useful objects and fine mechanisms like scale balances which did not fail (another skill singularly lacking in all Venice). Even the famous German painters were admired only by a small group of connoisseurs in Venice.

  So Johann and Wendelin decided, after earnest debate, to re-christen themselves ‘da Spira’ to render themselves more acceptable and less foreign to their adopted city. No one took any notice. The Venetians, hearing their voices, still turned their heads away from them in the street, lest the famous metallic stink of ‘German-ness’ invade their nostrils.

  They grafted themselves, like the twin shoots of an audacious vine, upon the society offered by Venice, quietly forcing themselves, with a becoming modesty, into the company of Venetians, whenever possible. They attended local festas, church benefits, processions; any event where women might decently be met. It was unspoken between them, but they were looking for wives, Venetian wives, to make more intimate their bond with the city with which Wendelin, at least, had been secretly and tenderly in love since that very first day.

  Within a few months of their arrival Johann von Speyer married Paola di Messina, the daughter of a painter. Pale and cool of eye, she was somewhat past first youth. Already widowed once, she brought to the new household two silent, swarthy sons by her former husband. She accepted Johann’s hurried courtship without requiring any trappings of romance whatsoever. This was as well, as he retained little time or energy to devote to the process. Johann laboured and worried to excess. Wendelin hoped that marriage would modulate his brother’s appetite for work, which even to him seemed intemperate at times.

  Wendelin lost his heart, in his charmingly stiff way, to a beautiful, impulsive young girl of the Rialto, the daughter of a bookseller. With her white-gold curls, warm apricot complexion and her slanted dark brown eyes, she was confusingly familiar and unfamiliar to him in her lineaments and colouring.