The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  I tend to our son and our new cat, whom I must tend more than the son for he has in his small head such brains on fire with the wish of things. That fishwife sold me shoddy goods in him. That Madonna mark on his forehead is a fake! He cares nothing for the child; only for himself.

  He sulks when I hear his cry and then hand him straight away a prawn or a piece of bread smeared with fish fat. He wants me to know he’s finer than that. Sometimes – (I should know this without his telling me, he implies) - he cries out loud for the shine of my glass lamp or the soft fuzz on our son’s arm. I myself, being a busy wife, have not time to take note of these special things, so he, the artist of the house, must do it for me: this is his point of view.

  When he feels a lack of attention, he draws patterns in the tray where he dirts. He thinks he is the Bellini of cats!

  So he maintains, but that cat has come to me with bad ways in his blood. He steals! Not such things as cats should steal, such as cheese or cream, but silk scarves and filches of lace and anything made out of sandalwood, which he will sniff for hours.

  It’s his habit to sit on a ledge above our door and cause passing folk to fall in love with him. He makes big eyes at them, opens his muzz to mew with no noise or he will stretch out a paw, so they crane their necks up to him. They want to stroke him, to feed him, some would die for him!

  One time he stretched out his paws and took a man’s hat. Then he jumped with it back in the house where he lay on it, probably for hours, till I found him. When I tried to take it from him he growled like a mountain devil at me, so I gave it up.

  ‘Be ashamed!’ I told him, but he looked no such thing.

  This desire for things is for him a thing of need, not mischief. I’ve followed him and watched him hunt. When he sees a line of fine clothes out to dry, then his paws start to twitch. He hunts those clothes as if they were rats. He stalks, comes close, and springs – ten feet, twelve feet, even more for a scarf with cloth-of-gold trim!

  When he gets to the high point, he grabs the thing he wants and beds in his nails and then waits for his own weight to drag the garment off the line. Sometimes he drops straight in the canal, but he cares not. He swims with his prize in his teeth to the shore and brings it to me to dry by the fire. He knows I will.

  At first I thought these things were gifts for me, but it soon turned out that this was not so. The moment they’re dry he takes them in his maw again and pulls them off to his own nest near the fire, which is as bright as Byzantium with cloth of gold and silks and so on. There he sits, pleased as God on the last day. When we come to him with our brows crossed, peering at his nest, he stays suave. We mumble some silly thing and back away.

  We fear for the law for what could we say if the Signori di Notte received complaints, and so came here and found these things?

  That our cat stole them?

  In days when we were flusher in the pocket, and fuller with pride we might have laughed at this, but our sense of humour has been smutched with worry, like mending in the hands of a too-anxious maid.

  Sometimes my man looks from me to the cat, and I can see in his eyes that he thinks there’s some imbroglio between us, something Venetian, something feminine, something feline, in any case beyond him. Since I left him in Freiburg, he has these doubts of me, for there I showed him a part of myself he could not understand.

  The sadness is that he sees my love of things between the lines as something that threatens us – my ghost stories from the market, for example, more often draw his frowns these days, though I see them as no less than our protection.

  * * *

  Bruno, aware of the kindly glances of Wendelin von Speyer, worked on the Catullus manuscript and it scoured him from the inside. To read Catullus was to call up inside himself the questions he came to work to try to evade.

  Wendelin tried to cultivate a neutral attitude to Bruno at the stamperia, but the affection in his eyes was clear to everyone. Only his son or his wife could make him smile the way Bruno could. And Bruno had been chosen as little Johann’s godfather.

  Anyone with bad news for the printer would ask Bruno to transmit it, knowing that the blow would be softened by the young man’s gentle delivery.

  Bruno would come to Wendelin with the men’s requests for holidays or an extra stipendio to cover medical expenses.

  ‘You think this a worthy request?’ Wendelin would ask.

  Bruno would nod. He quickly learned to bring only such requests to trouble his capo, sifting them in his head before calling on Wendelin’s attention.

  Their evening lessons at Wendelin’s home were a mingled pain and pleasure for Bruno. While his employers’ grasp of the language improved steadily, the domestic joy of the household ate away at Bruno’s envious soul at the same rate. He watched balefully as Wendelin’s wife made clear her passion for her husband. When she looked at him, her eyes never wavered. She gazed at him softly and intensely. If the child meanwhile started to creep in the direction of mischief, she merely used the eyes in the back of her neck possessed by all mothers, remarking, ‘Don’t be thinking that the curse has dropped off that door handle, sweeting,’ as the baby reached a tiny hand for a forbidden drawer behind her back.

  Nor was Wendelin any less attentive to his wife. Bruno noted jealously each time he stroked his wife’s flitting wrist, or caught her up in a sudden embrace as she passed. When she put on her cloak, Wendelin was always there to ease the golden bushel of her hair out of the collar, and smooth it down for her.

  Bruno was grateful for Wendelin’s kindness. He could not have said that he loved his employer, for these days Bruno thought of everything through his passion for Sosia. When he’d heard that Wendelin had lost his brother, one of his first thoughts was has Sosia lost brothers, or sisters? She had shrugged off his question.

  Raindrops fell outside, hard and cold as pebbles. Inside the stamperia, the elbows of twenty men worked up and down.

  Bruno read Squarzafico’s introduction, marking the errors, shaking the crumbs from the soiled manuscript. He’d learned from previous Squarzafico submissions that these crumbs were particularly absorbent to ink. Enormous blots bloomed from them if they caught a drop from his own quill pen.

  Valerius Catullus, lyric writer, born in the 163rd Olympiad the year before the birth of Sallustius Crispus, in the dreadful times of Marius and Sulla, on the day Plotinus [sic] first began to teach Latin rhetoric at Rome. He loved Clodia, a girl of high rank, whom he calls Lesbia in his poetry. He was somewhat lascivious, and in his time had few equals, and no superior, in verse and expression. He was particularly elegant in jests, but a man of great gravity on serious matters. He wrote erotic pieces, and a marriage-song to Manlius. He died at Rome in the thirtieth year of his age, with public mourning at his funeral.

  Bruno’s eyes strayed to vagrant words from the manuscript, from the proof pages upturned on his desk.

  You ask me how many kisses of yours, Lesbia, will be enough for me?

  and

  she’s the one who’s stolen all of the allure from all of the rest

  There were parts that were less lyrical, descriptions of the impotent older man, for example,

  softer than rabbit’s fur, or goose down, or the tip of an ear …

  So Catullus described Thallus, but Bruno turned away from the text, amusing as it was. He only wanted to read the Sosia poems. Silly! Did he say, in his mind, Sosia? Of course he meant the Lesbia poems, the love poems, the hate poems.

  A sudden thought struck him and he rifled through the test proof pages. He clapped his hand on his forehead, scarlet with embarrassment. He’d sent for setting a poem in which the name ‘Sosia’ replaced Lesbia’s! He had wasted time and Wendelin’s money, and possibly revealed Sosia’s name to the sniggering boys who fed the letters into the matrixes. It would only draw their attention more to his error when he asked them to correct it.

  He wondered if Wendelin would really publish them or if he had set the editors this work merely to test his own ner
ve. Until the manuscript was fully set to type, they no more than toyed with it. Bruno knew all the risks they faced if they brought it out in print, and began to trade in it.

  He knew the risks as they stood at that moment, that is.

  Chapter Five

  In the purse of your Catullus

  are only cobwebs

  Suddenly, Venice was emptied of coins. They bled from the city like drops from a holed bucket. For decades the Venetians had lusted for the picturesque tokens of their wealth. They hungered for poryphry, agate, and serpentine, for the relics of saints, for silver reliquaries to decorate their churches. There was only one way to pay for all these pieces of beauty: money. A pouch of silver for a Moor with a shipload of Asiatic silks. A sack of copper for a powerfully smelling monk with the mummified leg of little Saint Tryphon in his basket. A purse of gold for a hard-eyed marble merchant from Carrara. La Serenissima’s few silver and copper mines were exhausted.

  How silent was Venice without money! The jingling of coins seemed to vanish into memory.

  At Rialto, rumours of counterfeit rose up and multiplied. There were whispers of midnight smeltings on the Fondamenta Nuova and a conspiracy to destroy the stability of the state and trick the honest citizens of their wealth. The few coins in circulation were examined under bright sunlight, sniffed at and bitten on. No one knew exactly what symptom of corruption they were looking, smelling or tasting for, but every coin was an object of suspicion.

  A new rumour was distilled from the sweating stalls every day. The infamously subtle Milanese were said to be foisting a fake coinage on Venice. Other sources of the corrupt money were darkly hinted at: the Turk, the Genovese. The level of hysteria among the citizens was raised to an unendurable pitch. With no coins for food, people stopped buying books altogether. Wendelin and his men continued with their work, hoping for better times, or for the crisis to come to a head.

  On 22 May 1472, a shopkeeper refused to accept money offered by a customer. Enraged at the implied insult, the customer drew a dagger from his robe and stabbed the shopkeeper to death.

  Venice was paralysed by this new horror. The blood of her trade seized up at her heart. Fish were left to rot at Rialto because people dared not open their purses to buy it.

  The next day the Council of Ten decreed that all silver coins be withdrawn from circulation. A new issue was struck, the lira Tron, named after the incumbent Doge, the ugly but genial merchant-noble Nicolò Tron, who had as much to lose as anyone from this strange coinless state of affairs.

  But Venice still waited, unsure. Wendelin had never seen the city so quiet. It was as if she had fainted. In the silence of the formerly busy streets all he could hear now was the piping of caged quails. The Venetians were always inordinately fond of eating these plump-breasted little birds, who that year increased their life span fourfold, safe from potential purchasers until the lira Tron had proved itself a viable currency.

  Then, against the counterfeiters, Nicolò Tron launched a reign of terror. Convicted forgers, he proclaimed, would be brought between the columns of the Piazzetta, to have their hands cut off and one eye gouged out. This punishment was inflicted on two alleged Milanese forgers on 29 May 1472. Soon forty-nine people had been arrested. Appeased with blood and mutilations, the Venetian public gradually calmed itself. The lira Tron had triumphed. Coins began to emerge again from silk purses and leather pouches. Foreign merchants heard the news and began to arrive in their ships once more.

  But it was too late for the printers.

  Since the currency crisis, those rumours Wendelin feared above all others had intensified. Certain whispers had emerged as battle cries now.

  Wendelin’s wife was also strangely silent, but he knew, from his men, what was being said at Rialto now. The printers had been implicated in the counterfeit scandal. They were too close to the forgers in the tools of their trade. It had suddenly become dangerous to be associated with the working of metals … the printers punzone was almost identical to a coiners die in shape and function. Even the metal used for casting type, the mixture of tin, lead and antimony, was said to resemble what was found in the crucibles of the captured counterfeiters.

  None of the men could understand it, Wendelin least of all. How had the Venetian public suddenly become so interested in and so expert in such technical issues? The Venetians had never before shown curiosity about such unpicturesque processes as printing or casting, occupying themselves solely in matters of taste and style in the finished products.

  Now everyone knew about the connection between the printers and the coin-makers, and everyone had a finger to point at the makers of books, or words to mutter behind their hands as he passed in the street.

  At their home, Wendelin and his wife sat in silence. They had talked the subject dry, it seemed. But when Lussièta tried to refresh their conversation with a new ghost tale from Rialto, of a miraculous bird that could speak in the voice of malevolent souls long dead, Wendelin turned on her, holding up his hand, his voice unusually sharp.

  ‘I suppose you think it is ghosts who are ruining me? You don’t think I have enemies enough, talking evil and walking around in human skins, alive?’

  Lussièta bowed her head and shot a sharp glance at a drawer in the cabinet where she kept her linen.

  Wendelin, as always, suppressed an unreasonable pang of annoyance at the thought of the contents of that drawer. Lussièta folded their linen as logically as a birdwing but never in a straight, square German shape.

  * * *

  The Doge was besieged with badly spelled petitions for the printers to be exiled from Venice. And a new voice had emerged, sterner and more intemperate than any other. It was that of the cleric Fra Filippo de Strata. The counterfeit scandal had been a message directly from heaven, for a priest who hated printers.

  Who are the authors of our troubles? he scribbled to the Doge, and anyone else who would read. It is the drunken barbarians from the North. And why have they moved here, these brutish Germans? It’s because excesses of venery agree much better with any constitution in our soft southern atmosphere than among the rough blasts of the northern winter.

  Yet the fleshpots of Venice are not enough for them. They graft themselves upon the town like maggots and set to work exhuming the filth of the past. Not only are they bringing forth the works of the pagans – full of errors – but they’re driving the honest, pious, Venetian scribes into the streets where they must corrupt themselves with unholy works and God alone knows what other subsidiary sins.

  Fra Filippo was a Dominican. He was an unattractive man – his face always looked as if it had just been plunged in cold water – but his fulminating sermons had made him a fashionable Sunday morning performer for the entertainment-hungry Venetians. Outside of the pulpit he was less beloved. His irascibility, and perhaps also his lingering personal fragrance of dried meats, had rendered him isolated in his own order. So, for a pittance, he and his assistant Ianno had attached themselves to the elderly Benedictine community of San Cipriano di Murano, where he’d been able to terrorise the frail inhabitants into submission.

  Fra Filippo hated everything new: not just printing, but the new style of art, the newfangled organ music, the new interest in the literature of the pagan past, and even the new architecture delicately unfurling in Venice. From his roost on Murano, he watched with consternation the rise of Mauro Codussi’s new marble building on the nearby island of San Michele in 1469. The Camaldolese, who had commissioned Codussi, were among the first customers of the German printing press, and one of the island’s sons, Frater Nicolò da Malhermi, actually worked on an Italian translation of the Bible for von Speyer. Fra Filippo was horrified. Giving the people the Bible in their own language would confuse and deprave them, without priests like himself to filter and purify the interpretation of certain questionable passages.

  Even more incriminating, in his eyes, was the printers’ preferred choice of texts.

  Heathen writers, he fulminated. Pornographers,
corrupters of the flesh. Greek and Latin eroticists foisted on the minds of the ail-too-susceptible Venetian populace.

  God had struck down Johann von Speyer, Fra Filippo observed, triumphantly, but it appeared that his brother was hoping to keep the vile business alive.

  Fra Filippo made one valid point amongst his ravings: the work of the early printers left them open for criticism. The editors were too busy to slow down and examine their texts minutely for errors. Blatant piracy of existing editions spread the inaccuracies further. Fra Filippo, who delighted in pedantry, was able to point out, in triumph, a multitude of errors that were fatuous, careless or simply ignorant.

  He was, it must be admitted, something of an expert. He spent the proceeds of his collection plate freely, buying up the enemy. All books printed in Venice ended up on his desk, where he turned their pages with a pair of pincers, unwilling to touch the sin-soaked paper, spitting in vast trajectories as he came across yet another obscenity, profanity or scribal error. The lewdness and the inaccuracies all came from the same place, he asserted: the Devil’s repository.

  And yet the number of books in themselves, piled high on his floor, showed Fra Filippo the size of the enemy he faced.

  Fra Filippo could smell printed books. Even when people kept them hidden up their sleeves, the subtle effluvia of the pages did not escape him, as savoury to his craggy nose as the death rattle of new carrion to the tufted ear of a vulture.

  When a handwritten manuscript of Catullus had arrived on his desk Fra Filippo seized it with a cry, his small eyes round with horror. This was an urgent case, for his spies repeatedly told him that the brother of the deceased von Speyer was thinking of publishing the work. Fra Filippo spent the entire morning with it. As he read, little squeaks and groans escaped from him. He sat with his haggard member unaccustomedly smoothed and erect in his lap. He grasped his quill pen like a child its mother’s hand in a tempest.