The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  When he was not there, I starved for him. For hours I would look at my ring and feed on the light of its small blue stone. Once I saw him in the street, he did not see me for I was on the first floor and looked down on him. He walked slow as trust past my house, his head stiff and sad. I saw he did not do well without me, and I did but poorly without him, and I wished our day yet more close.

  A maiden should not think of how it is to share a bed with the man she shall wed. Yet in my mind I held that image: the great globe of the earth slowly rolling with our bed, and us in it, perched on top, like a wind vane.

  And the other image I kept always in my mind was that of his face, that face I knew yet I knew not. I never thought to marry an outsider! Yet that face of his seemed the very opposite of strange to me. Sometimes it reminded me of a kinsman I’d loved when I was a child, who had died, or gone away and at last come back. Sometimes it called to mind my first-born doll: it was so smooth and pink and round in its lines, and so perfect that I longed to lay myself down beside it and gaze into the eyes till sleep came.

  When it lacked but one day to the one when we were to be wed, I did not see him at all. But as I lay in bed that night, his kiss came to me in the dark, on its own.

  * * *

  The nobleman Domenico Zorzi, to whom the events at the fondaco were reported in less than an hour, called for ink and paper. He scribbled a brief, gracious note to the German brothers, congratulating them on their monopoly and asking to be included in the subscription for their first edition.

  ‘It cannot hurt’, he said aloud, ‘to be kind to these Germans.’ Domenico knew that the von Speyers had seduced the Collegio with the beauty of their typeface. He had himself fallen under the spell of their samples, the lettering impeccably even yet lusciously full in contour, like a slice of a slim black eel that has recently swallowed an egg.

  By the end of that day, Wendelin and Johann were in receipt of fifteen such missives scrawled in aristocratic hands. At Wendelin’s wedding, on the Saturday of that week, liveried servants from three noble families arrived bearing nuptial sweetmeats on platters embossed with the crests from the Golden Book. And there was a gift of wine, too, from Ca’ Dario, the haunted palazzo Wendelin had admired on the day he arrived. Giovanni Dario, who spoke more languages than any other man in Venice, had put his name forward as a subscriber for the new quick books. But when Lussièta heard of its provenance she insisted the Dario wine should be tipped into the canal.

  ‘No one shall be poisoned by ghost wine at our wedding!’ she insisted. Wendelin dared not remonstrate: she looked too beautiful to be argued with at that moment.

  Embarrassed by the attentions of the noblemen, Johann was distracted throughout the day. Wendelin stammered through the service, his eyes fixed on his new wife, as if she was the Holy Star. There was no wedding journey, for the bridegroom was needed at the fondaco. Johann was not entirely well; something caught persistently in his throat and he was unable to keep down food. His energies depleted, he could not spare his brother. After two days secluded with Lussièta in their new apartments, Wendelin returned to work, flushed with the exhaustion of his conjugal felicities.

  And so the brothers von Speyer, dimly aware of what was riding on their shoulders, set to work on their business, began traditions, teaching the Venetians what it was to manufacture learning at a thumping pace instead of a slow-breathing one.

  Chapter Three

  The bonds of marriage bind all creatures.

  See the bulls spreading their broad flanks over their wives,

  the bleating ewes crowd into the shade with the rams,

  the lake rings with the hoarse love-song of the swan.

  The Goddess of love forbids the melodious birds

  to close their beaks.

  The nightingale chants in the poplar tree

  so that you would think she was uttering in music

  the very emotion of love …

  It’s too quick to be wed. The words are gone before you can taste them in your mouth. The ear of your soul limps along behind: ‘Wa—it’ it bleats, ‘Wait! I do not know where to fit this news inside my heart; I shall burst.’

  So, yes, we were wed in San Giacometo at the tenth hour of the day. It was small as well as quick, our wedding. From my side came my ma and pa; from my man’s, just Johann and his new wife Paola, who must be my friend (though how I’m to succeed in this friendship is beyond me as Paola lacquers her face with something so no expression reaches her lips). And the scribe, Felice Feliciano, who dressed so fine as to seem a bride himself.

  Acqua alta had paid its devotions before us. In the swooning damp of the half-drowned church, Johann coughed all through our rite. I did not like this at all, for with each cough of his kin, a new groove was carved on my man’s smooth pink brow. Paola seemed not to notice, never offered him a hand or even a handkerchief.

  I looked behind me, through the open mouth of the church. Outside the grape-black pigeons throbbed ‘I do – I do – I do’ and the colourful scents of various articles of spicery rose up from the market stalls like wedding banners in the flaunting sun.

  You do not say much, when you say the most in the world. You just listen to some words, which are about God and chairs and tables and houses, and you say just ‘Yes, I do,’ and ‘Yes, I will,’ some few times and your name and his, and then it is done, and you are sealed by law for life.

  Then you stand mute and stunned at una festa while all congratulate you, but you hear their auguri as if they were speaking down a tunnel in the earth, and presently (and mercifully) you retire to a room where you mix all your flesh with all his.

  I thank God for this.

  I have but a plain tongue in my mouth, but I tell you our love is a thing to make stars bloom by the light of day. It is love on stilts, and it does reach for heaven … indeed though each new act of love’s the same in its conclusion, it’s yet as variable in the splendour of its execution as the quotidian dawn.

  We cannot be unmixed now. Even as he goes about his work, and I go about the business of being a wife, we’ve only to close our eyes a moment to feel ourselves back in our bed, and the whole day folds up like a box, bringing us together from the diverse parts of the town.

  My man’s quick books are no small thing to make. It’s the hardest thing I know to get work from the men of this town, so much they love to doze and dream. Most things float here to us; we need not raise a finger, let alone a hand. As with the anemones that flower beneath the sea, our nourishment swishes in!

  And so it seems the work of God for my man to find the hands he needs: it’s just as though he must fashion a whole new world here in Venice, a little German world that clicks and ticks on time like a foreign clock.

  * * *

  The new art of mechanical printing was hungry for human hands.

  Wendelin and Johann went out on the streets of Venice, into the salons, the workshops, the bookshops, the studios, looking for the right kind of hands to help them.

  In some ways, the new business of printing was little different from the old one of creating manuscripts: first the ideas and then the substance. So Wendelin and Johann made it known throughout the town that they sought editors. Knowing the vanity of scholars, the brothers insisted that they wanted only editors capable of selecting the most refined manuscripts, correcting their accumulated scribal errors, and writing the most alluring introductions and flourishing dedications to flatter the hoped-for noble patrons.

  From the resulting flood of applicants, they selected Gerolamo Squarzafico, the bibulous classicist, and the scholar Giorgio Merula.

  The next to be hired was Bruno Uguccione, a decent young man of Dorsoduro, who was to assist the senior editors. The scribe Felice Feliciano, who had insisted that the von Speyers meet his protege, put his name forward. Bruno brought his old friend Morto, now a jeweller, with him to his interview. He guessed correctly that the German brothers might find uses for Morto’s clever fingers, but more importantly he cherish
ed the hope of working alongside a familiar face in this foreign enterprise.

  It was evening when Bruno and Morto came to the stamperia. The summer’s day had persisted in coolness when the heat should have burnt off the dew. So the sulphurous smell of the night had not been shaken out of the weave of the town’s streets. Even at midday the leaves had lain shadowless on the stones where they had fallen limply as tears hours before. The town’s dogs thought twice about lifting their legs: it was too much effort. The sun had remained just a drop of molten glass in the sky, awaiting the attention of a master glass blower. The Venetian carpenters fitting out the stamperia with shelves and tables were gripped by desire for sleep. They yawned, stretched themselves extravagantly without inhibition, as if still in bed.

  Everyone stopped and looked up as the two young men entered the subdued room; ten pairs of eyes followed them to the desks of the two German masters who stood whispering in urgent colloquy, Johann making many small, tight gestures towards a proof in Wendelin’s hand.

  Wendelin and Johann, both wiping their perspiring brows with a simultaneous and identical gesture, looked benevolently on the two young men, one with the delectable lineaments of a schoolboy, the other gangling and deathly pale, his nose an unpleasant wedge that blocked out the light. Bruno’s letters from his teachers were enough of an introduction. Moreover, he possessed the kind of face that it would be most pleasant to work alongside. A prepared contract was placed in his hands.

  Morto, who lacked academic references, was set to engraving a tiny slab of copper.

  ‘Ummph,’ said Wendelin, leaning over Morto’s shoulder to see the perfect sparrow he had engraved. ‘You’re hired.’

  * * *

  When I married my man, my women friends told me that I would have a great job of mending to do, not just the normal things – for example to teach him the difference between a mother’s breast and a wife’s, but also to instruct him in all the words of love I would like to hear, and how to button up his rear end to stop crude sounds and worse smells, and many more things besides … but this one, my man, was not even Venetian, and they said he was therefore almost a case beyond hope.

  The women told me that men like the love of their wives only at the start. It’s a sore thing, for they’re like spoilt boys who take just one bite of the peach and leave the rest to rot, or open a bottle of cordial for the white sigh of the bottle and one lone swig, and then go wandering off to look for beer. Worse, there are those that even grow to hate their wives, and do them harm.

  ‘Wed her, bed her, put her in the ground,’ chanted one of the women, and we all stared at her.

  She said, full of her own defence, ‘My husband sings that when he’s in his cups.’

  Well, it’s not like that with my man and me. Nothing could rot the delight we find in one another. The first time we lay together was not so lovely as the last time.

  When we have fallen apart, panting, I love to sleep with my man in this house of ours. It’s a gaunt, auntish little house and we live its every inch. I set flowers in all places, lamps and enough glass from Murano for a tiny cathedral, my man says.

  In each window and every place where light falls, I put glass of red and blue and violet and green … perhaps that’s why my man and I sleep so sweetly, for we are enfolded in colours, like the sparrows of Bengal who, it is said, ornament their nests with living fireflies.

  When we wake, we pull the frail threads of shared dreams from the lids of our eyes. He lays his big head against my breast and I feel my breasts crushed beneath the weight.

  Sometimes, when we lie like this, I feel a great desire to be a part of not just his present life but also his past. I want to know everything that he remembers. I ask him to make me see his own town of Speyer. He starts to tell of the proud priests and merchants and the fine houses, how it’s bigger even than Heidelberg and can be seen from exceedingly far off.

  I break in then.

  ‘But where is your water?’

  ‘Our water?’ he answers, dimly, to obey my need but he struggles to do so.

  ‘Yes, your water to live by.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, understanding at last, and he puffs himself up. ‘Well, of course we have the Rhine,’ he says proudly, as if that meant something to me.

  I look on him adoringly, proud that he knows so much that I do not.

  He takes this in, but wishes me to know about the Rhine without his telling me, for he also wants me to be great of brain and soul, as he believes I am (just because I penetrate the mysteries of the market and the dialect, and know the morrow’s weather from one glint on the sea. Such things that are natural as kissing to me.)

  So he says, ‘You know, the great river, the one which brought me here …’ and he goes on to tell it for me, painting pictures with his voice. And he describes the mountains he came over, the great lakes of the Alps and the deep woods of Germany. All men of the North, he tells me, love their forests with a fervour. ‘A wood is a cathedral,’ he says, ‘but more beautiful and refreshing to the spirit.’

  I find that thought ticklesome and simple. We of this town love nature only when the hand of man has improved it. Was the Grand Canal still grand before we built our palazzi along its edge? I think not.

  My man tells me that the palazzi of his town are shut-up dark places, full of gloom. They’ve great wood doors with iron studs and drawbridges. The folk of Speyer may not make a great show of their wealth lest a great army comes marching across the plains to take it. Instead they build watch-towers – six and seventy of them!

  The main street is five and thirty paces wide and the buildings on either side are fair of form and painted with stories and scenes, some of battles to save the city from those enemies who covet her, and would put her citizens to slavery.

  We are much safer in Venice, where our enemies must float over the sea to us (which they’re not used to, and they are clumsy as pigs on their boats) and should they be so foolish as to dare it, we could easily see them from the horizon and put them to flight. The Genoese pirates got as far as Chioggia once, but we soon saw them off.

  My man is intrigued that I know so much of history and practicality. I am amazed that the girls of his town do not, and many cannot even read. All my friends can read. My sister-in-law can read. Even the harlots of this town are educated, I tell him, to change the subject hurriedly (for he’s forever nudging me to call on Johann’s wife Paola, and I hate to do that. She’s cold as winter with me, and does not wish an intimacy. This is poor behaviour on her part for she and I have much to do to help our husbands, and it would be better if we could do it together).

  The harlots of Venice prove a good distraction from the subject of Paola, and I explain many things to him that make his eyes open wide as a lake.

  So many conversations we have like this.

  My women friends, when they see me yawning at the well, laugh that I have not slept much. ‘It’s not what you think,’ I tell them (though it is that, too). ‘We talked until the fourth hour this morning.’ They shake their heads in disbelief and ask ‘What do you talk about, all those hours?’

  I say, ‘This is what happens when you marry a man who is not of your race. The discovery is never over.’

  ‘What about the nuances?’ they carp, ‘the tiny things, the little words?’

  What of them? If some love has transpired in the steam of translation, I tell them, how very much more has got through!

  They laugh at me, and say I’ll tire of my big bear soon enough. They sneer at my happiness.

  Happiness such as mine, however, laughs at sneers. And yawns with a smile.

  Chapter Four

  Gates, unfold your wings!

  As Morto and Bruno left the fondaco, Johann von Speyer had already turned away, frowning.

  A month was not long, and there must be work awaiting these two when they came back to him; work that would earn its keep.

  In that month, the brothers von Speyer knew that they must find their raw materia
ls: manuscripts to turn to print and the paper on which to print it.

  Wendelin and Johann gently persuaded Lussièta’s father that his cartolaio could not supply all their needs. Deferentially, seriously, they went about the town. There were bonds to be drawn, hands to be shaken, brown eyes gazed into, directly and unfalteringly, by blue and grey ones. And before that there were honeyed words to be spoken, modest glances to be cast at the ground, for the greatest of cartolai were rich and pompous and had to be flattered.

  Nor did the oiling of the wheels stop there. The brothers knew they must secure the interest of patricians, particularly Domenico Zorzi, who read everything and knew everyone, and who manipulated his way with consummate grace around the Senate, obtaining favours and custom for those he patronised. They could not take his early support for granted.

  To make their ink Johann and Wendelin scoured the painters’ studios for smoke-black, boiled linseed oil, turpentine, Greek pitch, marcassite, cinnabar, vermilion, rosin, hard and liquid varnishes, nutgalls, vitriols and shellacs. They bought wine from the wine merchants to dissolve the gall, and wooden batons from the falegnami for stirring their black mixtures. They recruited a well-paid ink-mixer; his recipes were crucial to their vision of printed pages, on which the letters would fly in front of the eyes as if cast simply by wishes upon the air.

  For the styling and casting of the type they hired engravers and metalworkers like Morto with the lightness of touch and artistry to sculpt jewels of letters in reverse on the end of hardened steel punches.

  They found a master jeweller to work as compositore, with the task of placing the tiny letters in sequence, ready to stamp on the paper. He was a skilled craftsman, but, just to be sure, they also hired a corrector to shadow his work. They trained operators, torculatori, to run the press. For inkers they hired students and unsuccessful teachers.