The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘A nice piece of fabric,’ she will say of my dress, all the while prim as a nun at a christening. In other words: my gown itself is badly made and ill fitting. She, of course, is always stainless and elegant.

  I could never think of Paola and Johann joined in acts of love: easier to conjure them bent over the account books of the household. Their marriage was of the earthenware kind. Still, it must have happened, for there was a daughter and lately a son, to add to the two boys she bore before with her Sicilian man. Johann’s children, young as they are, have taken after Paola in their characters and we do not often see them in our house. I feel that Paola merely borrowed him from Speyer, never took possession of him, as I did with my man.

  So yes, Johann’s remains had to go home. I just did not see why my man was obliged to take them.

  I hated the whole idea. My secret fear was this: if my man went back to Speyer, after this great sadness had befallen him in Venice, he might never come back here. I thought that if I went with him, to remind him hourly of the joys of our town, that he would never forget her necessary beauty, and would not stay long away from it.

  I also saw my task was to keep up his pride in himself. He was lost without Johann, deathly afraid that without his brother the business would falter and fail. If he was alone all those days on the road, I just knew the black picture he would paint for himself. Though I nourish no great affection for printing works, which keep him from me all the day, I’ve never wished him to desist from this employment. Indeed I had some ideas for him, to help him more in the town, and I thought this long journey would give me time to air them all.

  So good were my intentions, but this trip was never fated to be happy, was it? All the sweetness that I’d planned to flow into his ear was soon stopped up in my mouth. Far from mellifluous, I fear my voice more often bore the stale timbre of a scold or a nag. The more sordid were my discomforts on this journey the more ugly were my complaints.

  We sat, endless, endless, behind the flanks of the horse, which sometimes contracted to squeeze out lumps of manure. In spite of this, the rump of the horse made me think of how I was made. I licked my lips and looked to my man to discover if his thoughts drifted likewise and I hoped that he might ask to stop a while so we might retire to a bush. For a moment I was cheered at this prospect but it came to nothing. With Johann’s body stretched in its box behind us and the tops of these great trees drawing my man’s eyes up to God like infernal tweezers he did not think of the tale I once told him of my ma and pa and the horse. He wanted of me just to hold my hand and stroke my hair.

  Va bene, I sighed silently.

  Sometimes I could not stand the shake and jerk of my mount any more and I told them to let me down to walk a space. Then the land came up to slap my feet till they were sore and I had to ask to be helped up again.

  Tall grey birds, more like ghosts of birds, stood still on the ponds we passed, their beaks pointed up as if in reproach. Perhaps it was the process of Johann’s coffin that made them do that. Certainly all the folk we passed along our way would cross themselves at the sight of the box, and sometimes they would spit to forfend his ghost.

  Some people love to travel; even some Venetians are known to take to the road with relish. I cannot comprehend why. Most seasoned travellers are insufferable folk, full of themselves and tales as unlikely as their complexions. My man and I were appalled at the vulgar people, the pompous priests, the know-all merchants, we passed on our journey: how they grated on our nerves, drove us deeper into our satisfaction with one another!

  I was frightened of those inns where the men eyed me, for my man had explained that there were those who sold their wives’ favours to strangers by night to pay for the passage on. In those inns my man, for he’s great in size, pulled me on top of him and I slept on his belly, with his arms around me, and I felt safe then.

  I preferred the nights we slept in fowl-houses – for yes, we did that too. I liked to fall asleep to the soft noises of the roosting birds. Their sleepy shufflings sounded a little like the cluck and gurgle of water in a back canal in our town.

  ‘Doesn’t it sound like home?’ I asked my man craftily. ‘Is it not a delicious noise?’

  But he did not answer, and I could see that, even though we were but little advanced on our journey, the word ‘home’ had two possibilities in it for him now, and the one uppermost in his mind was Speyer.

  * * *

  The roads became steepen Crossing Valtellina, they moved up to the pass of Aprica. Fellow-travellers, smirking over their beer in the inns, told them that they must regard these cold and steep roads as a mere rehearsal for the torture of the high Alps. Wendelin, remembering his journey to Italy, knew that this was true, and was at pains to point it out to his wife.

  ‘Whatever cold you feel here, whatever wind, whatever tiredness, you must, if you are to come over the Alps with me, double and triple it. And there are highwaymen and worse …’

  His wife replied serenely: ‘They will not trouble us when they see the coffin. It would be bad luck indeed to raid a funeral party.’

  She set her lips in a narrow line and smiled. ‘Take me higher.’

  Wendelin felt the warmth of relief flood his skin. He really did not know what he would do without her arms around him every night and her sweet breath against his neck while he slept.

  Every night, when they laid Johann’s coffin in whatever stable or anteroom the innkeeper unwillingly provided, Wendelin would spend some time alone with his brother and in kind words for the gentle horse who bore the burden all day.

  He spoke aloud to Johann’s box, bidding his brother a soft and peaceful night, before joining his wife in the nest of blankets she had already warmed for him.

  But there were other nights when he sat down in the straw with one hand on the coffin, and talked to Johann of his fears for the stamperia and all its staff.

  ‘How am I to continue, Johann?’ he pleaded. ‘I have not the will and anger in me, as you had. I have told the clerk to pay the men as normal while we are away. But with our present funds, as you know, the money cannot last beyond the spring. What am I to do?’

  * * *

  I was seasick; I grew clumsy. I felt dizzy all the time, as if I had drunk something strong. It was too quiet. I fancied I could hear the birds breathe.

  I did not like the hilltop houses, with their black roofs folded over them like the hunched wings of a cormorant.

  ‘Where’s the water?’ I mourned silently, ‘Where is it?’

  My man heard me, anyway, and pointed when he could to streams and falls.

  It was the wrong kind of water.

  Up there the water was everywhere tortured by the land, carded over sharp rocks in shallow rivers, crashing down mountains as if taking its own life because it couldn’t stand the burden of height any more.

  ‘Poor water,’ I kept murmuring under my breath.

  Meanwhile the wind, like a beast that sought advantage, found a way under my cloak and gnawed at my legs.

  The horse that bore the box with Johann inside walked slower and slower, holding all of us back. We lingered on the road, until we heard the old horse’s breath behind us, and then we moved on, slowly, never looking behind.

  This journey gave me a new respect for my man. To think he and Johann made this dreadful trip alone, knowing nothing of our town, just in faith that they would find it good. Now he made it in reverse, I saw he thought of that himself. In coming to our town, he had lost his brother, had started a big concern that may bleed him dry of all his savings before it succeeds.

  ‘Was it worth it?’ I asked him, once.

  ‘For one kiss of your lips, it was worth it,’ he smiled, even though out of breath from the climb. (Leading my horse, he often stumbles but before he saves his knees or his wrists, which are black with bloody grazes, he looks up to me, to make sure my mount is steady and that I am in no peril.)

  At that moment a wedge of geese flew south over our heads. My eyes followed the
m longingly, and my man’s followed mine, regretfully.

  * * *

  When they approached the foothills of the Alps, Wendelin asked his wife yet again if she would return home to Venice.

  In the mountain passes the party would be forced to abandon their carts of provisions. There was no road for wheeled vehicles through the Alps: a combination of packhorse, foot and, when the need arose, boats across lakes, were as yet the only ways to cross the mountains. They would be heading for Basel to join the Rhine, and take one of the canal boats up towards Speyer.

  But before then the roads would rise up so that the tops of hills would be lost in the mist. The temperature would drop to half of what they endured now, and by night black ice would creep over the pathways.

  When Emperor Henry IV had crossed the Alps nearly five hundred years before, his entire court was placed on bullock skins, like magic carpets, and drawn by ropes up the passes. But there were no such luxuries for ordinary travellers of these times. If they were lucky they might be offered the use of the Castilian Threshing Machine, a tree loosely harnessed to an ox, so that as it proceeded it rolled its bush of leaves around, clearing the snow to make a path for the horses.

  There was peril of avalanches, so that each hour their servants had to discharge their muskets into the air, to bring down any loose snow. A false step in any direction and the powdered snow would dissolve, plunging the traveller into a narrow unmarked grave two hundred feet below.

  Herds of shaggy cattle, which terrified Lussièta, roamed the passes. There were tales of dragons around the Luzern Alps, and the ghost of Pontius Pilate in the lake.

  At this, her eyes widened, but she held tight to Wendelin’s hand and declared that she would not leave him.

  * * *

  At first it was just unpleasant.

  There were even good times, when I myself could see the beauty of the place. The trees were crusted with gold like burnt cream pudding. I liked to watch the birds swirl off in funnels of beating wings as we passed. I loved the quick change of mood in those short days: one dip in the road, at three after noon, and we were all of a sudden in regretful evening light. I watched for the moment each day but it always took me by surprise.

  For many miles we travelled behind a cart laden with trees, as if we were great lords and ladies who went abroad only with their own private garden to accompany them, lest the view be for one moment not lovely enough for their spoilt eyes.

  Sometimes we rode above the clouds. I saw the white vapour boiling below us and we were so high up I felt that God might at any moment look down on us, who trespassed so in his realm of gold – for gold it was. The light was gold and the hills seemed to have a great cloth of gold shrugged over them. I confess I wished this God would say to us, when he poked through the clouds, ‘Go home to Venice now. Leave Johann here in my care.’

  God never showed his face though, and soon enough we would go down right into the cloud where we walked like blind men, our horses tied to one another and each step a terror to us.

  The cold was not too terrible as yet. We wrapped parchment round our chests to keep out the worst of it. There was nothing to be done to keep our feet warm. At night a kind landlady would sometimes put them in bowls of cold water, and then she would add cups of hot until we could feel them again.

  I hated the high mountains. When I looked at them I felt sick and many times I varnished the side of my horse with the contents of my belly. And it was a cruel place for beasts that must be deformed to live there. All the cows, for example, had legs considerably shorter on one side in order to keep their grip and stay standing on those steep slopes. It was not natural, the land like an old courtesan, lying on her side, with everything sliding off her at an angle. I hated the grim cleavages and scars of the ravines.

  I began to see why mountain people set so much store by God. Of course we Venetians believe in another world, but it’s as delectable as this one, and in the same style. I explained to my man that on still days we see our whole world reflected on the water, and that glittering vision is probably our conception of Heaven.

  I did not feel any closer to God in the mountains.

  I told my man what I was thinking and, to pass the time I suppose, he argued with me about it. Kindly and gently, of course.

  ‘No, no – it’s the greatness of God, incarnate,’ he insisted. ‘And it’s a kind of Calvary on Earth. When we struggle up here, we bring our souls as well as our bodies a little closer to Heaven.’

  ‘It does not look like something God made. It looks as if some monstrous dogs dug huge holes with their paws and threw up the clods of earth.’

  Of course the Alps are most direfully haunted to hell and back. At night, in the inns, the travellers whispered stories to us. If my man left the table, they lowered their voices and leant over to me, to give me more and more dreadful details.

  Worse still, it’s well known even in Venice that the Alps are bristling with dragons, all kinds that fly or slither or merely stink. There were, we heard, many sightings of these beasts by respected travellers, and each sighting served to confirm the truth of it, as in respect of their appearance the Alpine dragons are always the same; they have the head of a red hairy cat, with whiskers, sparking eyes, scaly legs, a tongue like a snake’s and a tail which is spread in two forks. They prance up on their back legs like a mantis, or take to the sky, always with the front claws raised in front of them.

  * * *

  The road became harder, higher still. Through St Gottard the wind blew round them, and the track that marked the tiny progress of a whole day was pitifully visible from the next station. The travellers were obliged to stuff the mules’ bells with wool for fear of dislodging avalanches. The sumpter horse that bore Johann’s coffin was disturbed by the stark lack of soothing bell music. It went a little mad, and performed three somersaults. It was only stopped from a fourth and certainly fatal one, for it ranged near a crevasse, by the presence of mind and brute strength of the muleteer who caught it by the tail and brought it to its knees, where it brayed and foamed.

  The coffin remained sealed, but for many hours afterwards all in the party continued in silence, their minds’ eyes fixed on images of poor Johann’s remains inside, surely splintered and broken.

  Wendelin’s wife strained her neck, constantly watching out for the cat-headed dragons. All she saw was strange northern sparrows, their head-feathers drained of colour.

  ‘Poor little beasts,’ she said.

  Her own body, formerly blessed with the elasticity of a young rabbit, grew bowed and cramped with cold. Even when she dismounted, she walked like an old woman.

  Everything was denatured in the mountains. The ground was lighter than the sky; the lakes were solid, the complexions of the travellers glowed like those of saints, and even the horses, now shod with protective spikes, looked like dragons.

  They stopped at towns that were cut off for months at a time, which showed fearful evidence of in-breeding, worse than what Lussièta knew of the small islands of the Venetian lagoon. At one place, all the shopkeepers sported the same hairy goitres on their necks. At other villages only the cretinous section of the population was to be found lolling by firesides in otherwise deserted houses: those with their wits intact were out working in the small pockets of tillable land or guarding the sheep.

  They took a boat across the lake of Luzern, ploughing the still water that held tight to mirrored mountains wigged in blue-white. Johann’s coffin was placed upright on the deck, as if he could see through its lead and wood the beauty of the landscape. At the far end of the lake it was again laced to a horse and continued its journey horizontally.

  The further north they went, the more arrogant became the innkeepers. When they arrived at the nightly inn, the landlord no longer deigned to come to the door to meet them. At their knock or call, he would put his head cautiously out of the window, like a tortoise from its shell. He listened in silence to their requests for shelter. If he did not refuse them, the
y might enter. If they asked for the stable, he merely pointed to it.

  As for the rooms, they were always told that the best were reserved for the noblemen, whom he pretended to be his regular clients. There was but one common room to change their clothes, wash, dry their wet cloaks, and that was also the room reserved for eating.

  The innkeeper would never prepare food until the whole night’s company was assembled. Wendelin and his wife sat wrapped in one another’s arms, their stomachs barking up the fumes of starvation, sharp and sour. At vast prices, morsels of unkempt food were served late at night.

  Not surprisingly, some inns had suffered the rage of their guests too often, and the landlords ordered all knives to be taken from travellers on their arrival. Others boasted sheets that were washed but once every six months, no matter how many had slept on them. Some offered beds that were nothing but high cupboards, reached by tottering ladders. Inside were ticks filled with greasy feathers, never replaced and never beaten to scare away the vermin, whose nightly welcome was eager and diligent.

  * * *

  The more north we went, the more Northern my man became. I did not like it. He started to walk stiffly again, as if trying to copy the fat burghers here who wear their hose pulled up high over the barrels of their guts. In Venice he had learned to walk as one should, easily, as if swimming through light air. I did not like him to forget how to do that.

  I spilled a tankard of beer on him, and myself as well, in Freiburg. He turned German again, or at least to ice. He could not look at me.

  ‘Are you mad?’ he asked quietly. I could see in his face he was embarrassed to have a wife such as me. A German wife would never have done such a thing.