The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  At the end of the morning, he showed the book to his assistant, Ianno.

  ‘This is what we have to do battle against.’

  Fra Filippo noted with distaste how the elderly dwarf was as bandy-legged as a three-poled briccola and how the light could be seen to shine between his legs in a way that was hardly Christian.

  Ianno twitched his ears, above the left one of which he bore a most unusual and repulsive birthmark. The deformity was a limpet-sized clump of pink flesh, crimped and coiled like a walnut, resembling a tiny human brain. When he was excited, as now, it glowed and appeared to wriggle.

  Fra Filippo tried not to look at it; it disturbed him, so he looked over Ianno’s shoulder as his assistant lisped: ‘Your honour, I should like you to know I have savagely scourged myself this morning, because I detected in my soul a desire to touch a printed book in the library and because I have found myself looking inside some of the printed books I bring daily into your study.’

  ‘Quite right, Ianno, but perhaps you have been excessive. The blood on your tunic might seem blasphemous in that it resembles the blessed liquid soul of Our Lord in His difficulties. Now take this Catullus and read it for yourself.’

  * * *

  The next morning, Ianno reappeared, scarred and stained. As he spoke of the book, in a thickened voice, the brain above his ear glowed red as lava.

  ‘It is indeed the work of the Devil.’

  ‘It is the work of a many-handed Satan. And now there’s a German demon who can reproduce this filth three hundred times at once. Imagine, Ianno,’ his voice rose to an unlikely choirboy treble, ‘that each one of those three hundred books might be read by a dozen men, this would mean more than three and a half thousand souls would be dirtied and sent to hell by virtue of this foul Devil’s work of printing.’

  ‘No amount of scourging, I fear, can expunge the evil this book has wrought on me, personally,’ interposed Ianno, eagerly.

  ‘And think, if this book were left somewhere a woman could find it? Think of the agitation of the womb it is designed to stimulate. Think of the lewd behaviour of such women, informed by this book.’

  ‘I am thinking,’ whispered Ianno, tightly. His left hand crept up, as it did in moments of stress, to fondle his little brain. Fra Filippo turned his head, feeling nauseated.

  He read aloud:

  Iuventius, if I was allowed to

  kiss those honey eyes of yours

  As much as I’d like to,

  I’d kiss them three hundred thousand times,

  And still not have my fill,

  Not even if that kissing was planted thicker

  Than stiffly curved corn husks in a field.

  Ianno moaned audibly. Fra Filippo brandished the offending page: ‘I have occupied myself with some painful researches this morning better to understand these texts.’

  Ianno wriggled in front of him. Fra Filippo wondered briefly if his assistant was verminous.

  He continued: ‘The strange thing is that performing oral or anal fornications was not immoral to the Romans, but by some strange pagan hypocrisy, submitting to either was thought a lapse.’

  Ianno danced on one foot as if the other was scalded.

  ‘I must leave you now, your honour. It is not possible for me to continue to breathe at this minute, without another scourging.’

  Fra Filippo did not hear him, lost in his vitriolic ruminations. ‘The grotesque fornications of the pagan gods – all kinds of bestiality! – it is all calculated to stimulate evil fantasies in those who are weak …’

  Ianno squeaked, ‘I must go now, really …’

  ‘Fornicators, all of them. Their supreme God, Jove, what is he more than a supreme fornicator, rapist, adulterer?’

  Ianno made indistinct noises, backing out of the room.

  ‘When you return, we must start writing letters.’

  Letters were written. In his scrofulous handwriting, Fra Filippo made a snowstorm of paper against Catullus. His pen, it seemed, was never still. There was not a nobleman in Venice who did not receive a personal missive denouncing the evil new work proposed by Wendelin von Speyer.

  ‘Look to your sons!’ thundered Fra Filippo. ‘Look to their sheets and the guilty stains you will find there, if this kind of book is allowed to continue in Venice!

  ‘Do you know that the young men go now to the Calle di Catullo near San Marco, and that they indulge in lecherous games there, in the name of the poet who has put these ideas in their minds. There they compete to spend their seed in the canals, and touch each other in an unclean manner. Even on the Sabbath they drink to Lesbia, the wanton heroine of the poems, and they seem to have found a foreign woman of Venice to personify her for them. This “Sosia”, this double-woman, is toasted as the new Lesbia.’

  ‘Let me deal with her,’ growled Ianno, on listening to the first draft of this letter. ‘I know some men …’

  ‘Ah no, leave her for a while. She’s useful for us, in a way, and in the meantime you can be sure she’s spreading the pox among all our enemies.’

  And he sent Ianno to the Rialto market, to spread rumours in the best possible way. That is, he had Ianno whisper, importantly, to the most garrulous of shopkeepers, ‘Don’t worry, there’s no cancerous poison in the printers’ ink.’ At his sermons, he arranged for young men to heckle: ‘Fra Filippo,’ they catcalled, ‘is it true that the printers use baby hair to make their paper?’

  Fra Filippo’s sermons were enlivened with a vivid repertoire of gesture. To emphasise a word he would draw his whole body back like a bow when slowly stretching an incriminating vowel, contracting his shoulders at the hissing final consonant, as if discharging a firearm. Those who mimicked him played an easy sport, but even those who had their fun with him unconsciously spread his message.

  His voice was taken notice of. His campaign dovetailed most conveniently with the currency crisis. In catching the public mood, he raised his own profile and his power. His status was confirmed when the campaign began to show results. The rumours against the printers were transformed into lethal charges.

  Three printers were arrested, a Venetian and two Italians from the mainland. To the printing houses came the Signori di Notte, with their chains. As yet, the German fondaco was left in peace: the Germans brought too much profit to the city. Too many noblemen were involved in German businesses and showed themselves intent on protecting their investments.

  Domenico summoned Wendelin to his palazzo and soothed him with assurances. He was fascinated by Wendelin’s ponderous German-scented vocabulary, and detained him for many minutes, so he could hear as much as he could.

  Of course the man had no sense of the artistry in his presswork, being a foreigner and a German. For Wendelin, an alphabetical letter was a letter, not a small poem in its own right. A letter was a letter, and enough of them together made a sentence, and enough sentences together were a book. And a book was ducats in his strongbox. That was all. It would be simple to calm his commercial fears.

  ‘No one takes this crazy priest seriously,’ purred Domenico. ‘And what does de Strata offer the city? You Germans have brought us wealth and efficacy beyond the powers of our own creation. Continue with your work. I shall tell you when it is time to be frightened, if that time ever comes.’

  ‘What about the rumour that the printers are making the confect coins?’

  ‘I wonder where that came from? So complicated! It cannot persist.’

  ‘What about Jenson?’ Wendelin asked. ‘When this dies down, he’ll still be here.’

  Domenico looked displeased at the printer’s lack of subtlety. He did not wish to acknowledge how he shared his patronage these days. He liked Wendelin. And he disliked being caught out in his duplicity.

  ‘I imagine Jenson has his protectors. Nor does he take many risks. Think of yourselves. Remember I have your interests at heart.’

  Wendelin repeated these words to his men at the fondaco and the men returned to work.

  Meanwhile at his
pulpit Fra Filippo looked down on his texts, his pale face appeared to be made of folded paper. His nose was just a pleat, his mouth a slot. From it issued the names of the men whom he sought to condemn.

  Chapter Six

  What an appalling and infidel book!

  Which you must have sent to your Catullus

  in order to finish him off …

  My children, I come to warn you of a most vigorous uncleanness that has fallen upon us.

  To the other afflictions that grip us – concupiscence, plague, the staggers in our cattle and the adoration of demons, I must now append a dread addition: books.

  You may laugh at me, saying: ‘Why, a book is just another soulless object, like a cabbage. How can a book be dangerous? Mere paper and board with a light coating of ink!’

  And I will answer you that a book is more dangerous than Beelzebub himself. Mere paper and board, you say? No! A thousand times no!

  You know not what you say about books, for you yourselves are already beguiled and seduced. A printed book is a triple-turned whore, a cheese full of maggots writhing invisibly! You, led astray by the lies of the printers, see it as a nourishing object; you take the tainted thing unto you, so close you fail to see the pestilence inside.

  There are some among you who must hang their heads and admit that they have seen the manuscript of a filthy work by the pagan poet, Gaius Valerius Catullus. I know, my poor weak children, that there are copies of his viper-vile pages in Venice.

  It is an unholy work, a lewd work, and a work with no merit whatsoever, which has gained a certain reputation by its power to titillate the low tastes of young men. For a hundred years this manuscript has been circulating in Italy, a monstrous apparition corrupting all who touch it. And now a greater danger awaits: I have heard that the barbarous German printers have taken it into their heads to print the book. In order to support their venal ambitions, they would spew out of their dirty little press not just one but three hundred copies at once.

  Printing is quiet like a flood, but it wipes out God’s work just the same, dragging decency in its wake, leaving the direful landscape of devastation, the wasteland that is sin, behind it, and the bleached wrecks of men grovelling in the mud. It is the front guard of a scurvy process that will completely secularise the book, making it wholly evil.

  The book started as all goodness, with one human hand writing the word of God for the chosen to read. The scribes are good and innocent men; copying the pledges of God is their way of fighting the Devil. Scribes wrestle Lucifer word by word, refuting his rank outpourings by multiplying the pure utterances of our Lord. They toil not just with their fingers but their whole bodies! Do they care how their backs hurt, or their kidneys pain them cramped up in their bellies, or how their chests and shoulders knit together? No! They live only for the sweet relief of the moment when they trace their last lines and can offer their work to their Maker.

  The printers, in contrast, do not lift their smallest finger to bring forth what they do. They merely shout for good hardworking Venetians to plough their lazy pages with ugly machinery. The egregious indignity of the actual work is beneath these arrogant Germans.

  Now, born from the evil seed of these printers, there grow whole walls of scepticism, cynicism and profanity. When the books were all written by hand, perhaps one a year, the Mother Church could exercise her benign influence, and check the dissemination of heretical or subversive works, nip evil in the bud. Now the Devil’s works are running out of control. Because of the printers.

  You only have to read their own title pages to see how bad it is. Until recently, they rarely inserted a title page into a book, no doubt wishing to hide their shame in anonymity. But now their pride has grown gilded they’re making their own page the showiest of the whole book, decorated with engravings and great flourishes of type. And how they fall over themselves to accuse each other and denounce one another! They claim that their rivals are producing texts that are merely tangled and contorted masses of corruptions. They condemn other printers for greed, by failing to undertake important corrections merely to save money. The truth is that no brawn-buttocked German printer will put accuracy or decency above profit. I see the true scholars among you nodding sadly at my words.

  What is a printed book anyway? A black-spotted sheaf of beaten rag and rubbish masquerading as a friend! It is a finger-cutting, makeshift thing, full of errors both intended and unintended, and spitefulness, for those who make printed books do so because they have no decent work to do. Those who read them – the same applies.

  What an act of arrogance it is to own a printed book! It positively encourages the vices of pride and sloth! When a novice asked the most holy Saint Francis if he might possess a psalter, the saint refused, saying most righteously, ‘When you have got a psalter, then you’ll want a breviary, and when you have got a breviary, you will sit in a chair as great as a lord, and will say to some brother, ‘Friar! Go and fetch me my breviary!’

  These printed books are as full of dirtiness as an egg is of meat. It is typical of our Germans that they think now to print the filthiest thing around – Catullus. This Catullus is an obscene bird of the night: let him fly out of Venice. Let us not bring on this town the shame of being the first to print his book. His is not the art of poetry; it is the art of brothelry.

  To read Catullus is to drink to excess of a foul wine. It is enfeebling, it brings disgrace on the individual and his kin, and finally it corrupts even the water in the reader’s mouth: he can no longer taste anything holy for his palate has been destroyed.

  The publication of Catullus would be the opening of a sewer upon a clean stream, a suppurating lesion left without a bandage for the flies to feed on. It would be a bestial act performed in the open air where innocent women and children might be infected. The putrid indecorum of the work is nothing to the pride with which the poet and now – by association – the printer flourishes without shame, what are in truth nothing more than the clinical confessions of a depraved young man.

  The reader would be hustled into the most squalid of bedchambers, stripped of his decent coverings and obliged to take part in acts of shame. For believe me, this is the kind of book which intimidates him into lecherous behaviours, even when he would prefer to be innocent.

  You may tell me that Catullus is harmless: he writes of love and makes a little mischief with the bodily functions, that he lets us laugh and dissolves a few of the grey miseries of the day.

  This is mere camouflage. Do not be deceived.

  Saint Chrysostom condemned smutty songs as much more abominable than stench and ordure because we are not uneasy at such licentiousness; we giggle when we should frown, enjoy what we should abhor. So does Catullus too disguise his grime with humour.

  To anyone who loves God, Catullus and all his brother poets of the pagan past are an abomination. Lucretius, Ovidius, Tibullus, Propertius, and worst of all Catullus – what are they but lovers and propagators of moral slime?

  They wallow in their intemperate vice like swine in mud.

  These books are the poisonous distillations of the Devil himself! And I quote from the learned Tertullian. ‘Like the Devil, the Publisher set out to make the dose pleasant by throwing in a Cordial Drop to make the Draught go down. He even steals a few delicious ingredients from the Dispensatory of Heaven. When you see sweet words on a page, remember this! Look upon it only as Honey dropping from the Bowels of a Toad, or the Bag of a Spider.’

  I come to the conclusion, as I must, that all books which contain material not to be found in the Holy Bible are dangerous, and those which contain material which is in the Holy Bible are unnecessary, for you have your priests to tell these things to you, in the pure ways of the church.

  So let us sweep these corrupt and greasy papyruses into the dust and stamp on them.

  And with them, let us get rid of the printers, those misbegotten creatures! Consider the sordid channels through which you get their books! They go from barbarous German printer, to
corrupt merchant, to dealer, to small shops in dark alleys. You buy them not in the open air, in decent places, but in such bleak holes as you would visit to buy a concoction to murder your mother.

  And when you touch them, the filthy black ink leaves stains on your hands.

  And I tell you, that you must be vigilant. My sources tell me that in this year of Our Lord 1472 it has already happened that printed texts have exceeded in number those good books written by the hands of scribes.

  Look to your hands, my people, look at them. Are they stained with this new evill

  Keep away from the paper shops. Evil lurks in there.

  When you leave this church, and you pass on your way to your homes, you may yourself encounter a printer! Even if he does not utter any words in his gravel-strewn tongue, you will know him by his huge clumsy size and his acrid metallic smell. Turn from him! The best thing you can do to serve your God is to spit on him, taking care not to touch him.

  You may pass a man in a barrow, selling printers’ books. Do not succumb to his blandishments, his lies. The best thing you could do to serve your God is to kick his barrow over. If you want to buy one of his books, then pay him for it in cudgels, and throw it in a canal. The world will be a godlier place with one less printed book in it.

  Chapter Seven

  You carry home your lies

  and the curses that cling to them.

  Domenico’s assurances did not comfort Wendelin for long. The accusation of complicity with the counterfeiters attached itself to the printers like a tumour that quickly swelled in its malignity.

  One Venetian printer after another was taken away for questioning, brutal questioning, in the upper chambers of the Doges’ Palace where their screams could not be heard, except in the minds of those who waited for them at home, thin-lipped and weeping.

  Seven printers disappeared. Teachers and booksellers who had associated with them were arrested on charges of sodomy, for which the punishment in Venice, unlike in ancient Rome, was burning alive. And sodomy of course was the sexual art preached by the old Roman and Greek writers, as Fra Filippo loved to remind his parishioners, with all the appropriate illustrative gestures.