The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘Yes, it’s true that the monopoly we granted him has lapsed with the death of his brother, and that von Speyer has accompanied his brother’s body back to Germany. But his stamperia still thrives, or at least survives; the men await his return, which is, I understand, imminent. There’s word from Padova that he will be back in the city in two days, storms permitting. I have heard that the weather is already beautiful again at Lake Garda.

  ‘It is my intention that then this very manuscript of Catullus poems will make its way into the hands of the person whom I hope to persuade to give them their new life in modern times.

  ‘One hundred and thirteen poems by an unknown Latin poet. Wendelin von Speyer will take his future in his hands if he accepts the manuscript I shall offer him.

  ‘Catullus will open hearts, deftly as a blade, and they will not be closed again after reading him. Wendelin von Speyer shall need the encouragement of all of us and much help in subtle ways. It will not be an easy decision for him. There are things about these poems … Well, I leave it to you to judge, my lords. If Wendelin von Speyer decides to print Catullus, his reward will not necessarily be gratitude from all quarters.

  ‘We must help him deliver the book into print: to give this single precious manuscript of mine three hundred lustrous heirs.

  ‘And if he proves a little unwilling, a little fearful, then we must see to it that it is less frightening to print Catullus than to leave him unprinted. Let him know that responsibility falls like the rain – most times you may take shelter if you choose, but one day you will be caught in it, with nowhere to hide.’

  Chapter Five

  It’s hard to slough off a love that has grown years on you;

  It’s hard, but you can find a way.

  Only you can do it. Only you shall do it.

  Whether it is possible or not.

  The clouds had parted in front of them all their way back to Venice. By the time Lussièta and Wendelin set foot in Mestre the warm rain had evaporated, leaving the streets shining with puddles dizzy as shaken mirrors. The next day the air in the stamperia still hung heavy, saturated with damp. Wendelin wiped the moisture from his forehead and plunged in among his men.

  He spoke kindly to them, each in turn, encouraging them with scrupulously appropriate praise. He gave attention to whatever minute operation this man or the other concerned himself with. Gradually the heads bent over the presses and matrixes again, and their fear, like a sharp fume, dispersed, as if through the open windows. After an hour the stamperia had settled to its ordinary noises, the thud of paper, the raze of the copper plates, the clicking of letters into forms. The hum of voices rose again.

  Wendelin retired to his corner where he sagged into his chair, discreetly rubbing his taut shoulders against its oak back.

  Nowhere was Johann’s absence more painful than here at the stamperia. Wendelin listened to his workmen, and missed the voice of his brother, the family voice, that timbre so like his own, but quicker to rise in irritation or inspiration, and quicker to cool as well. He felt unruly tears nudging the corners of his eyes, panic gnawing his stomach. He’d lost more than his brother, more than his business partner and collaborator. In his brother’s voice, he realised now, he had preserved his last memories of their home. He thought, outside the fondaco, I shall never speak German again. I shall lose my language and become a nothing-creature, neither German nor Venetian.

  Twice, he half-rose from his chair to say, ‘I am sorry; I cannot go on without my brother. You are welcome to everything I have – it’s but poor recompense for the devotion you have given us.’

  Each time he sank down again. He could not do this. The best way to honour his brother, he knew, would be to make sure that Johann von Speyer would be remembered for all time as the man who brought the first printed book to Venice.

  And so Wendelin von Speyer resolved to continue, hoping that the Collegio’s five-year monopoly had given him a head start. Since returning to Venice he’d discovered ten new printing works in varying degrees of readiness.

  From that first faltering day, he laboured doggedly, finishing the St Augustine De civitate Dei, which Johann had left uncompleted at his death. Wendelin worked without a pause. He kept his men so busy that they had no time to worry about their livelihoods. While the press ran he went out on the streets, sniffing the air, trying to second-guess the currents flowing through the market place. His earnest, wide-eyed face was becoming well known in the area. Everywhere he went, he pressed book-bearing strangers by the hand, looking into their faces, asking them about what they were reading, begging, with the greatest civility, to be informed what they would like to read next. He waylaid respected scribes, questioning them about newly discovered manuscripts. Should he print them? Should he be looking at them? With his head on one side, he asked, ‘It is the coming thing, yes? It is what is wanted, yes?’

  Then he would shuffle-run back to the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, full of plans, muttering to himself, planning where the money would come from to subsidise this next new project.

  Only at the end of 1470 would Wendelin pause to count, and be amazed to realise that in eighteen months he had published thirteen books, in editions of three hundred or more. He knew he should examine the ledgers, to see how many of them he’d sold. But the piles of printed sheets around the stamperia and the pinched faces of the booksellers told him more than he wished to know.

  * * *

  It sounds hard, but what woman does not long some time to have the man she loves cast down some, so that he may need her, desperately? Be lost without her? Look to her for all things, not just food and sons and acts of love?

  When Jo died, my man was sick at heart. It was I who went to the works to tell the men of the journey to Speyer in our own words. It was I who told them to wait for us, to keep their faith in the work. I promised them that I would bring him back. I rushed; I did not leave him more than an hour alone all those dark days.

  And so I also left alone Jo’s wife Paola. She did not cleave to us in her loss. She discharged the requisite spoonful of tears when we came to her with our plan. After that I did not see her at all, except in glimpses. I saw the darkness under her eyes like ruts in the road as she turned away, pretending not to see me. But I heard things: that after Johann died she still had the maid set the table with his place, and cook the foods he liked best. But it was also said of her that she would do that until a new man came to take his place. Perhaps I fancied these things because I could not bear to think on my good luck compared to hers: I still have my man and she has not, and he and I still make love that scorches the curtains.

  Now, moreover, we are sealed together for ever by our long journey which, when I shut my eyes, still comes to my head so I feel dizzy with the roll of horses’ hooves and blinded with snow. I’ve shown my love for him, and my little failure, close to the end, and his ability to forgive it, are just the proof of that. Our love is still great, merely alloyed by the small disappointments which happen in every marriage, and which must be forgiven, out of love, in order to preserve love. Or so I tell myself.

  Since we came home, I’ve found a sack of new ways to bring him comfort. I know I cannot be for him what Jo has been, yet I can be something more.

  Each day, I bring new information to help him on his way in our town. Ways he could not find for himself, I mean.

  If he has a fault, then it’s a tiny one. That carefulness which is the heirloom of his whole race does sometimes cork up his brain. He’s not enough imagination to deal with Venice. He’s too much in love with logic and so the Venetians elude him, like drops of water falling through his fingers. If he wants to sell a book, he talks of the good words inside and the fine cut of the type; he’s puzzled when the Venetians become vague and walk away. To capture a Venetian customer you must tell exotic tales of the hunt for the antelope whose skin is tooled for the cover, and talk not of the book itself but of the dreams that will follow from reading it.

  Everything is strange and spec
tacular to him, but touches him intimately for he lives here, and is no pilgrim or merchant. It’s like a play where he may sometimes go up and mingle with the rich-dressed actors on the stage. Sometimes they acknowledge him, sometimes not. That’s Venetians for you. I tell him it’s not personal.

  For I admit we Venetians are not at all times kind with those strangers who come here. Perhaps we fear they take the joy of this town in the greed of their eyes, tear it off piece by piece: if we were to let them do this, Venice would lose her shape and its style, worn down by their desire, and one day we would have but the ghost of a town to live in and the rubble of our memories.

  So we have our ways to keep the strangers out, even when they are still here. In the crowded campi we slender Venetians walk fast around them and trip up their legs; in the narrow streets we spread our bodies like starfish so they may not pass. With our carts we nip their slow toes. We are quick with the crooks of our arms. We do not smile at them, not once. They must think we have no teeth! Some men of this town will watch with eyes of slate while a foreigner flaps and sweats. He will snarl from the edge of his mouth as fast as he can – the words fall like the pips of a grape, the meaning clear as stones to the poor foreigner, who feels himself a fool. When the Venetian must finally address the poor foreigner in a way he can comprehend, he does so with a sneer, as if to say ‘Yes, the whole world, and your shabby race the most, should wait for our town. No one else measures up to her.’

  So I warn my man, for example, to keep away from the traghetto at Rialto – use any of the other twelve but not that one. The Rialto gondoliers are vicious and will incontinently carry any foreigner straight to a place of worship or a brothel, no matter where he wants to go and whatever the bagattino proffered in payment. Though my man can speak some words in our tongue, there’s no mistaking him for a Venetian, and I hate to see him embarrassed by these acts.

  And I explain to him that if he must do trade with nobles, then he should go to the Broglio at the palace of the Doge, beneath its arches. To make an appointment in their office for a set time is not sufficiently serpentine to give pleasure to the lords – they will not be interested in what he offers in a plodding way. No, he must go to the Broglio betwixt eleven and twelve of the clock in the morning or five and six of the clock in the evening … and his conversation must not start or end with the business in hand, but only approach it by long and pleasant paths.

  It is I who suggests he takes samples of his work to sit in the public rooms of the Locanda Sturion. There they bask in the beauty of my friend Caterina, and the people who finger them under her lovely gaze will be moved to come and buy copies for themselves. I hope. I know she will help us if she can. She’s my greatest friend, although we are so different. Caterina is so serene, so quiet! Compared to her I’ve a mouth like a beggar’s clack-dish.

  Fortunately I have not an indigestion of aunts and cousins, like most Venetian families. I make sure the few I have do not trouble him. Very secretly I tell him which of my cousins are good for him to take into his employ and which of them will steal the ink and fornicate with the cook maids at the fondaco.

  I fear so much he will end like Johann. He comes home ill some nights, hunched over as if he still carries Jo’s coffin on his back. He’s still not used to such savage and unreasonable heat and cold as this town turns on us as the year rolls around.

  Now that I’ve been north I see how it was for him – each day a six-course meal of hot and cold. In the North one moment the sun gilds the hairs on your cheek and next comes a cold wind to slap it and sweep you off your toes, then a splat of a quick rain and some time of grey light and then a burst of blue …

  ‘I am parched for weather,’ he says, as if what we have is not that. I try to see his point but it’s hard for me. I think we just have better weather than in the North, and there stirs in me the old fear: Is he homesick for Speyer, does he want to go back there? What did he promise his parents when he was alone with them? We’ve never talked of it once in all these months since we came home.

  The little lines cluster around his eyes like pink pleated silk from crinkling his eyes up against the hot white light. There’s no hue to his skin. He burns to red at the lightest touch of the sun and then it makes me laugh to loose his shirt and see the cream-white chest thatched with blond hairs beneath his red face, as if that face were that of some other man entirely. I love both of them, in any case!

  But when I see his white chest, it reminds me of the waxen doll from Sirmione, who now lives here in this house. She hung on my sleeve all the way to the next inn, and there I detached her and hid her in my trunk. When we returned to Venice I put her away in the depths of my mending basket, beneath all those shredded hose I shall never make good again but cannot bear to throw away. I’ve tried to forget about her.

  Chapter Six

  I have come away incandescent

  with your elegance.

  Still intoxicated with his own eloquence, Domenico awoke with the dregs of his speech on his lips and an almost post-coital sense of well-being. His first feeling was of exquisite private pleasure, to have the Catullus manuscript to himself again after a long evening during which the noblemen had too eagerly and roughly handled it. The rapture had in every other way been highly satisfactory. He examined the pages scrupulously for damage, was relieved to find it slight, and laid the manuscript reverently on his desk, flicking away an invisible particle of dust.

  The words are so light that they float above your eyelids. You might grow blind waiting for them to become solid. So Domenico thought, standing motionless in a finger of the sharp sunshine that had followed the downpour. Tall and slender, his silhouette seemed like a deep crack in the light.

  The poems of Catullus had attached themselves to Domenico like adopted children who turn out to be your own bastards. These poems are already inside me; he had thought when he read them the first time. How strange, he mused, that on the hardest things we use not knives but words. Against the hardest things we launch armies of words marching left to right across the page. When we want to hurt someone to the core we aim not spears at him but needling little words. The softest, sweetest things, too, we use words to obtain them.

  Domenico thought about Catullus, wondered at the fifteen centuries’ reach of the Roman poet’s words forward into this glorious Venetian future. Could Domenico’s own thoughts reach back to Catullus? he wondered. Was the poet, trapped in some similar sunlit moment in the past, sensitive to these feelings that now held Domenico still as silence?

  Domenico marvelled at how little he knew of the writer: only one salient and consuming fact – that they inhabited the same wasteland of desire. For Domenico, in the very rhythms of the Latin poet there lurked a seductive spell. The words fell like limbs thrashing in a bed, sometimes violently, sometimes languorously, and the repetition of the most throbbing phrases had a climactic cadence to it. The whole book was heavy with hard caresses given and received. To a connoisseur of words, like Domenico, who swilled them in his mind like a wine-lover his favourite vintage, the Catullus manuscript was a living thing, more alive even than a woman in his arms.

  Domenico picked up the manuscript and sniffed it, nosing each poem individually. And they are full of delectation (for the eyes, the nose and the mouth speaking it), he thought, full of the fragrant resin of the lasarpiciferius and its odoriferous liquor.

  It smells, he thought, not unlike Sosia Simeon, this manuscript.

  Did Catullus want to die when he thought of Lesbia, the way I want to die when I think of Sosia?

  With characteristic restraint, he suppressed these thoughts in a single sigh and leant over his desk to address a letter to Wendelin’s scholar, Gerolamo Squarzafico. Such poems must be published. Gerolamo would make Wendelin see sense in the end.

  In the meantime, Domenico had the manuscript to himself again for a brief while. He opened the pages again, petal-skinned from so much use. Domenico could not help himself; he started to read again.

&
nbsp; ‘One last time,’ he said aloud.

  In the following hours, Domenico waved away his wife and his secretary. He ate a loaf of bread, tearing the pieces off with his teeth, while reading the book. He took the book with him to his bedroom and placed it on his bed as he undressed, leaning over and never taking his eyes from the page. He fell asleep with the manuscript cradled in his arms and the candle flame still pointing at the ceiling. His wife, offended, did not join him. It did not matter. It was not her that he wanted. It had not been, for some time. He had loved her once, he dimly remembered. But soon after the birth of their heir her caressing fingers in the dark had begun to feel like the talons of an owl.

  Now this book had disturbed him again. When he had closed the binding, he placed his finger in his navel and pushed until the nail drew blood. This made him realise what was bothering him. He wanted Sosia Simeon. He called for a servant and despatched him to the house at San Trovaso.

  Three days later, when he judged the manuscript sufficiently rested from its travails, he greeted Gerolamo Squarzafico and placed the bound papers in his hands, with certain instructions.

  ‘Read it first yourself, so you may better plead its case, then take it straight to him,’ he begged Squarzafico. Knowing the editor’s reputation, he added, ‘Not via the tavern, please. And choose your moment. I don’t want to frighten him. Give him time to settle himself back in Venice. Try not to patronise him too much: these Germans can be ridiculously oversensitive. But make it clear that he may not forever take for granted the patronage of the nobles if he does not make it his business to indulge our tastes …’