The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  For the people to ornament their printed pages by hand, Wendelin and Johann recruited artisans from the scriptorie of the monasteries, and nuns, who, with their delicate fingers, were quicker and cheaper than some of their male counterparts and certainly more tractable than some arrogant scribes, who did not yet know that their big day was nearly over, and sneered at the printers as a weak and short-lived pestilence.

  Wendelin asked Felice and Bruno about Sant’ Angelo di Contorta: ‘This is where your sister lives, no, Bruno? Do the nuns there undertake rubrications?’ While Felice giggled, Bruno had blushed and lowered his eyes: ‘No, they’re slightly more skilled with the needle, I believe, sir.’

  ‘Ach, a pity,’ sighed Wendelin.

  Felice smirked, his face alight with mischief. Wendelin would have liked to ask more, but could see that the turn of the conversation was distressing to Bruno. He addressed himself quickly to more pressing matters.

  The brothers personally took on the training of the illuminators and scribes in their new work of decorating printed pages. They had also to ensure sufficient stocks of gold leaf, azure and saffron for the voluminous labour ahead.

  Once the three hundred books were printed, each sheaf of folios might meet a different fate. Some would be destined for noble libraries. Such clients would want full colour illumination; lesser clients might also order the books in advance for the pleasure of savouring the wait, but they could afford just the decoration of some red hand lettering. It would be prudent also to allow for a few to be handstamped with pictures whittled on wood blocks.

  They lined up binders to take over when the sheets had been printed and decorated. In their workshops the tall folios would be bound in boards of wood covered with tooled or stamped calf, fastened with thongs of leather or bronze clasps. Lettering and patterns would be gilded directly on to the leather with heated rods or into the impressions after the leather had been tooled.

  The much-handled sheets would finally come full circle. For the new printed books would be marketed by the same cartolai that had sold Wendelin the original manuscripts and then the paper on which to print. But the booksellers had to be briefed on how to speak enthusiastically and knowledgeably of the new invention to their own clients, how to demonstrate the beautiful regularity and clarity of the von Speyers’ typeface.

  By August, everything was in place and the real work was about to begin. Wendelin and Johann, it seemed, confronted and surmounted all the problems that face a printer of books, problems unknown to makers of manuscripts. They had even become used to the limping shadow of the little spy from Murano who trailed them in all their various enterprises.

  At that moment Johann von Speyer fell ill under the strain of the administrative toils and the heat of the Venetian summer, to which neither brother had been able to accustom himself. Wendelin watched anxiously as Johann’s cheeks hollowed day by day. The bark of his cough filled the stamperia. Every thud of each machine and the cadence of every conversation were now punctuated by the rasp of Johann’s punished lungs.

  Wendelin wanted to put an arm around Johann’s bony shoulder, but gestures of physical affection came awkwardly to the brothers.

  ‘Don’t worry about me. What about this ink mixture, then?’ gasped Johann, clutching the desk, a grey sweat pearling his forehead. Wendelin could smell the sickness on him, and grieved for it. His brother, always small, seemed to be diminishing in substance every day. Each morning he seemed to use up less of the leather on the chair at his desk, till he looked like a large-headed child who insists on sitting at his father’s place.

  Wendelin knew that Johann’s wife Paola had called in the local doctors and wise women, who applied all their unpleasant concoctions to her husband’s chest and head. Now, according to his own wife, Paola should be calling in a Jewish physician. Listening to Johann’s laboured breathing, he hoped it was not too late.

  * * *

  Does she not see that he’s mortally ill? Does she not care?

  My sister-in-law Paola shows no feeling at all for poor Jo. Instead she drives him on, interferes with his business and asks him impudent questions about the accounts in front of his family! How can a woman be so shallow and so thick-skinned all at once? I only wish my man’s press ran as fast and sharp as her tongue.

  There are better ways to help a husband.

  I lie in bed at night and tell my man stories I’ve heard about the town. He loves to hear them, and in this way he learns more about us, which is good for his work. He can lose himself in my tales and for a while forgets his problems at work and the sound of Jo’s cough.

  However, his taste in stories is not exactly mine. He likes accounts of things that can be explained by practical means or human nature. When I tell ghost tales, then he shifts in the bed and fidgets and wishes that I would stop, not because he’s frightened but because he’s German.

  Of course the world’s mouth gapes open at Rialto and this is where I go to hear my stories, while I poke my fingers among the melons and lift the eggs up to the light.

  There’s a tale from Rialto this day of a man and wife, chicken farmers of Sant’ Erasmo. The wife was of large breasts and those breasts were the man’s joy and delight. And the wife was just as proud in their regard. Her breasts, she said, held her man to her like glue.

  One day the wife took it in her head that she would hatch a chick in between those breasts. A mother hen had died in the night and left one small egg in the nest. The wife saw the egg, lonely as a single white teardrop, and grieved for the hen who was a favoured one of hers. She reached out and took the egg and put it in between the fold of her two breasts. I think that for a moment it must have been cold with the death of its mother, but how quick it must have cleaved to the heat of her breasts – and how soon it must have taken to itself their pink tint. In my mind’s eye I see it there, a peep of pale shell against her skin … but I run off my course. The tale had a sad end.

  For her man did not like the egg in that place. They say that late at night when they lay a-bed the wife would not let him have his acts of love for fear that if she took out the egg it would die of cold and if she left it there while they coupled it would be crushed.

  So the man was left unsatisfied and could but look at her breasts where he thought his own head and lips should be. I can just see his look, sour as a pickled herring – how would my man be if I chose an egg for my breast, not his hand or his lips?

  As I said, it had a bad end, the tale, for the man in the end could not bear it. He took an axe as if to split the egg, and the wife, even with the glint of the steel in her eyes, shrieked that she would not take out the egg. And he cursed her and said that if she loved the egg more than him then she was no wife. And she sobbed that the egg was in need, for its mother was dead. And he yelled that he was in need of acts of love and a wife who would not give them might as well be dead.

  The screams of both of them were heard by all nearby and then a dread noise – the smack of the axe that cleaved first the egg and then her whole heart in two.

  My man grew pale, asking ‘Is this true?’ and I gave him comfort sweet as grated sandal-root, so he forgot not just the question but the tale.

  I did not tell this part to my man – that when I heard this tale I was moved to try my own breasts with an egg and I stole to the box to take one. But my breasts are not so large or so slack that they can hold an egg. The one I chose – a large brown one – slipped to the ground and smashed on my toes.

  As I cleaned up the mess of yolk and shell, I wondered if my sister-in-law could hold an egg between those gaunt breasts of hers. The answer is, of course, that she would not think to try. Just as she will not call in a Jew to tend to Jo, though he begins to fail. There’s one called Rabino Simeon who saved my pa from the drop-plague last year. He lives at San Trovaso, and he always comes, not only to the rich but also to anyone who needs him. I’m sure he would help Johann.

  Paola’s one who cleaves to the old school of thought and hates his rac
e: I’ve heard her say so.

  ‘Don’t print their tracts, there’s no market for them,’ she said once to my man and his brother, and I blushed for her that she’d no shame in ordering our menfolk about.

  She stinks of pride – granite-breasted, the sourest-natured woman I ever met. Paola has a horse’s face and horsebreath too. I smell rotting greens when she leans over to me.

  No, she won’t call the Jew to save Johann. She sets more store on dry doctrinal things and the clink of coins than on the love of her husband, even though she risks his life in doing so.

  I tell my man that Paola must call the Jew.

  My man looks full of doubt, and I tell him that the Jews are the best doctors. The Venetian quacks are just butlers with big bags and fine long tongues for flattering the noble ladies.

  ‘I suppose that Paola forbids it?’ I ask, with scorn in my voice. He shakes his head: he always defends her.

  ‘Do you fear the Jews?’ I ask him. ‘Perhaps you know them not? Do you think them dirty? Perhaps there are none in Speyer?’

  He tells me this is not at all the case; that Speyer has many Jews. They are treated well, have the respect of the town. They live in their own quarter, where they conduct their kind of mass in their own church and even a special bath, called a Mikwe, where they wash before they pray.

  ‘So no,’ he tells me, ‘they are not strange to me, nor dirty; they’re the cleanest race.’

  ‘So let us call this Simeon, then. I hear he’s a wonder.’

  Still he resists, and suddenly I realise what it is. I think he knows that Johann has taken the damp on his lungs, the kind that does not heal, and a good doctor will tell him this truth he cannot bear.

  Paola shows no sign that she understands her peril. How can she be so cold? If I lost my man or his love, I would have no more wish to live. As the year turns round I love him more by each season, more and better, and with a fiercer passion.

  * * *

  Bruno and Morto, and all the other newly recruited workers, looked up anxiously as Johann von Speyer passed them, coughing like a wet cat. He appeared gradually less and less at the fondaco, leaving Wendelin to manage alone. One day they heard that Johann von Speyer had taken to his bed. He was not seen at the printing works after that.

  Wendelin doubled his efforts with the Venetian dialect. He was determined to learn it fluently; he wanted no barrier between himself and the men at the stamperia. It was his task to transmit the detailed knowledge that at present belonged only to Johann, and to a lesser extent to himself. Now that Johann was no longer visible to the men, he needed all the more to ally himself with them. He knew he must learn to speak with his hands, like the Venetians. The arms hanging neatly at his sides while he talked marked him as an outsider.

  But his wife fervently wished him to become accomplished in her language, so she suggested that he ask Bruno Uguccione, that nice young man, to come to their home after supper some evenings and coach his capo in Venetian dialect. There were stories about the town that Bruno had become involved with an unsuitable woman and it seemed a kindly thing to take him off the streets and have him pass his evenings in a loving household.

  Of course Wendelin’s wife meant kindly. She had no conception of the convulsions of jealousy she would rouse in the young editor, every time she ruffled her husband s blond hair, or slid her cheek alongside his, the better to kiss his nose.

  * * *

  Wendelin worked harder. He could not sleep. While Johann dwindled under his damp sheets, stiller and more silent each day, Wendelin felt too much alive, oversensitive to every physical sensation. It seemed to him, in the early hours, that the very birds were nagging the sky to dawn more quickly, that as he paced through his courtyard garden, the plants were squeezing out dew that urgently needed to be transpired into the sky. His ears were tickled by a maddeningly subtle noise, which, he realised, was the slight cracking of the carapaces of rosebuds on the verge of a flourish of petals.

  He could not bring himself to call the Jewish doctor. Paola had dismissed the suggestion, and he could not go against her. Each morning he visited his brother’s bedside, held the waxy hand in his, and talked of business matters. Johann’s eyes flickered in the dim light, but Wendelin could not be sure if his brother had heard anything at all. He took comfort in the thought that he’d told everything. Johann hated not to know what was going on at the stamperia.

  At night, in bed, Wendelin clutched his wife, listening to her breathing, gasping with fear if one breath came a little slower than its predecessors. One morning, hurrying to work as the sun rose briskly at the far end of the Grand Canal, he shook his fist at it and said, ‘Wait, wait for me, wait for Johann. Please! Wait.’

  But three weeks later, in the offices of the Collegio a clerk scrawled across the document which had guaranteed the printing monopoly to Johann von Speyer: Nullius est vigoris, quia obiit magister et auctor: ‘Of no significance, because the said master and petitioner is dead.’

  Chapter Five

  Through many seas and many nations

  I come, dear brother, to take this pitiful leave of you,

  to make last gestures at your grave,

  to utter pointless words over your silent ashes …

  Now and for ever, brother, hail and farewell.

  Wendelin took his brother’s body back to Speyer.

  He could not bury Johann in the shallow ground of the floating town. Death became the city; her very beauty was morbid, but Wendelin felt that Venice was not substantial enough to keep his brother’s body safely. He had horrifying visions of the thin corpse rising up in the mud, the arms still crossed over its breast. He saw himself encounter it, floating down a canal, as he walked over a bridge. Within a day of his death, Wendelin had resolved that Johann must be buried in good firm German soil.

  When rumours of Wendelin’s decision reached the stamperia, two theories vied for grim precedence: that he’d gone mad and that he would never return. In anticipation, the men mourned the printing works – its fascinations, hoped-for profits and the pleasant hierarchies that had begun to take the shape of a family – but no one complained. Wendelin’s transparent grief for his brother was impossible to criticise.

  His wife, to whom Wendelin confided his visions, lay in bed beside him, inscribing pictures of his fears on the black palette of her closed eyelids, so that she might feel them too. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, when filled with these shared terrors, ‘we should take note of them, but should we let them lead us to danger for our own selves?’

  Gently, she reminded him how long the journey would take, and the body, as yet still fresh, would soon become less so. He countered with the coldness of the season. Already there was snow and on the mainland tramps’ were freezing to death in doorways. They were found in the mornings by the street sweepers, who closed their eyes and dragged them to the nearest church.

  ‘To carry a body all the way over the Alps, though!’ keened his wife. ‘How can you think such a thing? There’s no cart that can take those roads in the high snow.’

  ‘We shall think of something.’

  ‘Can we not send Johann with a good courier? His soul has gone before him.’

  ‘No, this is something I must do for my brother.’

  When she saw that he was obdurate (a thing always signalled by his return to German syntax even within the Venetian dialect), Wendelin’s wife insisted that she would come too. She would not be separated from him, she declared. At first he thought this a mere gesture of loyalty, but her very quietness in its reiteration made him realise that she was in earnest. He tried to dissuade her, then found himself disarmed at the thought of her beloved company, at least until the Alps, when he was sure that the hardships of the journey would force her to turn back. There was also the possibility, given the enthusiasm and frequency of their lovemaking, that she might at any moment find herself with child, in which case he would never put the baby at risk in such a venture.

  It was a week later that they set
off. Johann’s body, kept in a side-chapel of San Bartolomeo, was set as ice.

  ‘You see,’ Wendelin told his wife, ‘we have preserved him.’

  She wailed: ‘It is so now, but we must be afraid of every ray of the sun!’

  Paola made no objection to the plan, merely opened her pale eyes wide and nodded. It was she who made sure that Johann’s body was washed in vinegar and anointed with musk, then laid with aloes and other spices in a lead coffin, encased in cypress.

  The weather was in sympathy with their plans. In the Brenta canal, along which the horses pulled their boat against the current towards Padova, the water was grey as stones, with no reflections. The first wagon taking them west towards Brescia jerked through a sere, dead landscape.

  As they rose up into the hills the colour drained from the land as well. Pale, seemingly translucent spires, like ghostly nibs, jabbed the sky. The sumpter horse that bore Johann’s impossibly small coffin plodded on, his eyes demurely on the ground. On the other side, to balance the coffin’s weight, the horse carried a sack of Venetian tooled bookbindings and packets of ink mixture for Padre Pio in Speyer.

  The other packhorses followed at a discreet distance. Wendelin, watching the sumpter and its burden, found that the monotony of the journey imprinted a litany in his mind. He could not refrain from chanting to himself, to the rhythm of his own horse: My brother and the things he died for, my brother and the things he died for.

  Lussièta rode beside him, as close as she could, holding his hand.

  * * *

  Why did I come? How could I not? How could I send my man on such a sad trip all on his own?

  In the end, I saw why he had to do it. Johann’s corpse must go north. He never bonded his blood or soul to Venice, not as my man has done. He could not learn the dialect of our town. His wife was chilly to him: Paola is not a Venetian herself and was already a widow when he married her. Sicilians are strange: small in body, huge with temper. They can brood for a decade. Paola is like that. I know she does not like me. In her sly way, so none should criticise her, she sneaps at me, without seeming to do so, every little word stabbing my ears.