The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  More than once Bruno saw Wendelin von Speyer shuffling along the rio at strange hours, but thought little of it. For those whose sleep was haunted by business problems or matters of the heart, the streets of Venice were an acknowledged solace. One could not, of course, wander too far from home in the tiny city, and circular perambulations were known to soothe anxious heartbeats. Bruno knew that Wendelin had plenty to preoccupy him, with the sale of books so spasmodic and the executions such a little time past. Only once, when Wendelin seemed to hesitate near Sosia’s door, did a flicker of suspicion cross Bruno’s mind. Not Wendelin too! he’d whispered to himself. Then he thought of Lussièta, and a vision of the many tableaux of perfect love he witnessed in their home put his suspicions to rest.

  Bruno sat at the foot of a well, and peered around its edge towards Sosia’s house. Three hours after sunset, he saw her slip out of the door.

  He followed at a discreet distance, cursing the clumsiness that had overcome him in the last four years, for he often stumbled now where once he’d walked as subtly and gracefully as a cat. He was so occupied in monitoring the quietness of his steps and in not falling over that he did not at once realise where Sosia was going. It was a surprise to him when she stopped at the door of Bellini’s studio, fitted a key into the lock. He saw her stand back a moment as the gush of suppressed heat flew out of the open door. Then she let herself in, striking a match on the lintel and holding it to a candle she had brought with her.

  His first thought was: She has a tryst with some lover in there! But he dismissed it instantly, as too dishonourable, too uncomfortable, even for her. A brief sensation of horror gripped his mind: Could Sosia have also seduced Bellini himself? If that was the case though, he reasoned, there was no need to meet in the studio. Bellini’s wife was dead; she might have gone to his house, using its discreet entrance.

  Bruno’s imagination was still fermenting when he saw through the window that Sosia had lit a lantern now. Her slender figure was flitting between the boards and the pedestals, lifting up silk coverings and laying them down again. Sometimes she went back for a second look at a painting, holding the lantern up to examine it closely.

  She’s looking for something, no, it’s less urgent than that, it’s as if she’s choosing something, thought Bruno.

  Finally Sosia stood a long time in front of one board, in silence. Her back was to Bruno. He could see it was a Madonna, Bellini’s latest masterpiece, finished but still glistening with wetness. Sosia gazed up at the sad face, her shoulders shaking a little. His own eyes met the Madonna’s over Sosia’s back. Mary’s sweet resignation shot through him, and he crossed himself automatically.

  Sosia’s weeping, poor darling, she must be thinking of her own mother, thought Bruno. Then a suspicion crossed his mind. Or she’s laughing.

  Then Sosia drew a long, thin blade from her sleeve and raised it to the painting.

  * * *

  Gentilia Uguccione stood at the window, looking out at the water sliding into the courtyard fountain. She shimmered in substantial silhouette through the dusty autumn light. She was motionless. They had been like this for five hours; the brother crouching in the shadow of the room, spilling his pain, his love, his every nuance of guilt and passion, the entire story of Sosia and himself.

  Until now, Gentilia had wanted to know everything. Bruno had confided sparingly, throwing her unsatisfactory morsels that merely whetted her appetite for full disclosure.

  Today he’d kept nothing back, not even the story that precipitated this confession, of a confused tale of a slashed Madonna in a studio in Venice. This part, no one but herself must ever hear of, apparently, though everyone in Venice seemed to know the character and ill-deeds of this Dalmatian whore who had seduced her brother, this Sosia Simeon. Bruno had forced Gentilia to swear on his life that she would never tell a soul about the painting.

  ‘If it’s found out that I saw her and did not stop her …’ Bruno trembled.

  Gentilia shook her head, no, no. She would not divulge that secret. It seemed to her far less important than other details about Sosia, irrelevant to the case, in fact. Why was Bruno so stricken because there was one less painting in Venice? The town was stuffed with them like a watermelon with seeds!

  Brushing the Madonna aside, she felt breathless trying to classify and store all she had just heard about Sosia. Sweat trickled down her back. She needed time alone to sift, to divide the pertinent facts from the dross. In the meanwhile, she knew that she must begin the process of separating Bruno from what ailed him, even though she would, in so doing, be forced to add to his pain in the short term. She watched a pigeon alight on a stone trough of water and begin to drink. She felt the coldness of the liquid in his beak, cold as her own words. She did not look at Bruno as she spoke.

  ‘You cannot love her, Bruno. She’s thoroughly bad. In fact bad is a feeble word to describe the ways in which she violates everything good people hold sacred.’

  Bruno gazed at his sister. He’d never heard her so articulate before. Perhaps he had misjudged her? Perhaps his fears for her sanity were mercifully unjustified? He was only too relieved to believe it so. He answered her just as he would respond to Felice or Wendelin, in a normal voice instead of the simplified language he had been accustomed to use with her since childhood.

  ‘She’s not bad, not bad at core, I mean. She’s been dispossessed and abused all her life. The abused have only guile or violence to reinstate themselves. She’s no worse than anyone cursed with the kind of life she was born with.’

  ‘Cursed? Rabino Simeon has shown her nothing but kindness. She was taken in by a respectable physician who did her the honour of marrying her, who’s tolerated her perversions, even those she performs with you. There’s no excuse for her. Now that you’ve told me everything, I can give you only this answer. Before, there was room in my heart in which to excuse her on your behalf, because I love you. Now there is no corner unoccupied with her crimes. I feel it like pain in my side.’

  ‘I feel the pain everywhere, but it’s worse without her.’

  ‘Well then, Bruno, does this help? – Think of the millions of men who’ve never known her and who survive well and happily. Think of the hundreds of men who’ve had her in exactly the ways you’ve had her.’ Gentilia watched, with satisfaction, as Bruno flinched at this. ‘And who now live without her, and are healthier and gladder for it. Think of them. You could be one of them.’

  ‘I cannot endure the thought of being without her.’

  ‘Bruno, you look like a dead man.’

  It was true. He reminded her of the men she saw on pallets in the mortuary, awaiting their burials. At the nunnery, Gentilia’s duties now included the laying out of adult corpses. She thought of the bodies she had wrapped. Bruno’s abject face, his numb-looking lips, recalled those who had left this world. She wrinkled up her nose.

  And you smell strange, like old wine, corrupted in the barrel.’

  ‘I’m drinking too much, it’s true. I try to match the oblivion I find with her.’

  ‘Do you want to die, Bruno? That’s where she’s leading you.’

  ‘If I cannot have her, yes. I must go. She might be waiting at my rooms and she will not wait long!’ He groaned softly, ‘How can I face her now I’ve seen what she did to the Madonna?’

  ‘Come back and talk to me again, Bruno. Perhaps letting the words into the air will cleanse you internally. With me, it is safe to talk of such things. With no one else. She’s of no immaculate reputation, and yours will be dirtied if the association becomes known.’

  ‘You are good.’ But as he said it, Bruno felt unease stirring inside him. Gentilia, he intuited, perversely ashamed at the thought, was not good; she was merely constrained to behave as if she were so. If she were free as Sosia, what would she be like? And her curiosity was morbid. She had asked too many questions; she’d burrowed shamelessly into his intimate memories. She had nagged him for details he had blushed to recount. Now she stiffened his apprehensio
ns, taking his hand and speaking forcefully.

  ‘It’s the only thing I know how to be, Bruno. You make me feel that I lack something in that I cannot be the – the love-object – that Sosia is in your life. If only I could,’ she whispered, ‘then you would not need her.’

  Bruno shook his hand free and took a step away from her. Gentilia followed him with her eyes. He could hear her breathing, fast and deep, and saw that she was not quite in control of herself. She bore the vague look she’d sometimes worn as a child, when insisting on bizarre rules to her self-invented games. In this trance-like state, he was afraid of what she might say. He kissed her cheek and raised his hand in a brisk valedictory salutation, but she stopped him with an arm flung out to bar his way.

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ she hissed, ‘I’m jealous of her in her intimacy with you.’

  ‘I cannot bear to hear this, Gentilia. What have I done to you? Have my confessions made you feel unwell in yourself again? Shall I call Suor Nanna for you?’

  ‘It’s not you, it’s Sosia.’

  Bruno moaned, ‘No, I cannot bear this. You must stop. Not just saying these things, but thinking them.’

  He turned abruptly and strode grimly from the room, leaving Gentilia blank-faced, lost in her contemplations.

  Each time he left the island, he vowed that he would not return for more than the normal family visit, once a month, a polite exchange of little news. But every few days Gentilia sent for him, on some transparent pretext or another. He came, sullenly, for he dared not reject her outright: he worried for her.

  He also admitted to himself some selfish motives; despite the deranging effect on poor Gentilia, it was a relief to talk about Sosia to someone, anyone. He had run to her instinctively when he saw Sosia destroy the painting. With Gentilia he had no more need to be polite. He might simply give way to his feelings in her presence.

  Their conversations became more brutal. Gentilia massaged each of his pains with a prodding finger, sending fiery trails of hurt inside him. On every visit she raised new issues that had enlivened her nights’ deranged imaginings.

  And perhaps Gentilia was not the only one to be touched with madness. Bruno himself had begun to hallucinate. He saw Sosia in all kinds of places where she simply could not be. Once, on a boat, he could have sworn he saw her leaning from a window in a palazzo that belonged to the Malipiero family. He told himself this vision was a mirage, conjured out of the hot air hanging over the canal. Another time, delivering a book to Domenico Zorzi, he felt her presence so strongly in the nobleman’s study that it took all his will to prevent him from twitching aside the curtains to see if she was hiding behind them.

  Now, whenever she lay in a brief sleep, after love, he sat up beside her staring at her leather diary on the floor. He still resisted the temptation to open it, but he felt unspeakable things soaking through its binding.

  Chapter Four

  Henceforth let no woman believe any man’s vows.

  What’s more, it was wrong from the start, this strange plot of writing to me. He should not have needed to write to me for I lived in his soul and he lived in mine. The looks that flowed between us were so fluent we scarcely had call to talk. There was no need to scratch it out in ink, as if I was a person separate from him. He had only to smile and I was glad; he had only to sigh and I felt the air departing from my own breast.

  So it was wrong of him to write like that, even when the notes seemed so bright with love at the start. I put it down to his love of books and written words. It has carried him to excess, I told myself, so that he forgets there are things so fine they may not be trapped inside a sentence.

  I have been (in secret, of course, – now there are so many secrets between us!) to hear the priest who says books are bad and though he’s a wrong-headed man full of hate (and so no true man of God), yet I feel he makes some points which all must yield to him.

  He says my man should not print these books of love. Such things should live privately in the breast. Are they not more pure there? More true? Once love is writ, it bears the stain of the man on it, he says, and then purses his mouth like the ejecting end of my cat.

  Then I think to myself, why doesn’t the Church – Fra Filippo, for example – turn on the witches? Do we ever hear him ranting against what is practised in every alley in Venice? Why books, when but a third of us can read? It’s obvious. The man cares not to save souls but to win them for his own adulation. If he preached against daily witchcraft, against our little rituals and wise women, he would be ignored. Do you think the public will give up the superstitions that give colour to their lives? No! The public does not languish for lack of books. There are too many books in Venice. And the ordinary people cannot afford to buy them. Why, Fra Filippo might as well tell them to give up dishes of gilded peacock such as the nobles eat. And so the mob’s taken to a fine hot hatred of books with relish. It costs them nothing and gives them the pleasure of righteous passion. They’re all swelled up with a sense of doing good. Like my man and his love letters.

  He acts as if he does me a big honour with them. I’m supposed to be humble and pleased. I am not. I swear there are days when I think he hates me because I do not love his precious box and what comes out of it.

  I nearly did not go there – to the box – on the first day. When I woke to find his note on my pillow (which was curt; it just said ‘look in the drawer of the cabinet’) I should have feigned not to see it. I could have said, if he asked, that the cat had stolen it away, or the wind blew it off. But I was afraid of this new man of mine, who seemed to place more value on that stick of wood than on me.

  When I saw the note he had not yet left the house, so I knew he was listening for me from downstairs, and I dared not drag my feet. So I jumped out of bed as quick as I could and walked like a ghost in my chemise to the room where he keeps the box. One of the drawers was a tiny bit open, like an eye that winks, but not very well. I wanted to touch it as little as possible. I saw a flash of cream and I snatched the letter out of the drawer like a cat catching a sparrow.

  I left the room straight away. I did not want to read that letter with the cabinet watching me. Yes, it was a nice letter, but nothing could console me for the way of its delivering.

  The next one was nice; the one after seemed somewhat less so, and now …

  This morning, before he left, he drew me out of the bed and kissed me hard on the lips.

  As soon as he was gone I went out into the hall, spread my arms, and turned around and around and around, like an octopus dancing in the sea, until the bitterness of his kiss was blown away. I wish I could unravel all my fears this way, as I used to when I was a child.

  ‘You always …’ he says to me now.

  When he starts with this, I am lost. There’s no gainsaying those dreadful things he says I do.

  ‘You always make everything worse than it needs to be,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you only put your arms around me and tell me that you love me? It’s always I who must make the creeping back to you.’

  I’m too frightened to say, ‘I am too frightened.’ There’s no love in his eye, just a cold spark like when a knife blade catches the light.

  I feel him take up arms against me. At first he’s quiet in his defence. He folds his hands neatly. He tells me: ‘You always shrug off what is your fault.’ If I’m silent, he seems to feel his enemy – that is me – get stronger. (It’s not true of course. I’m weak as a kitten against his rage.) Then he seems to find inside himself a sharp spleen and I fear what he’ll say next. It will be without mercy. I leave the room then, if I can, because I see his next weapons are very grievous indeed and it will be hard to repair the damage they cause. He says he hates me leaving the room more than anything.

  Now the worst has happened: the pain has spread to our acts of love. He comes to our bed, I think, just to prove he’s my man and no one else may have me, like a child with a toy of which he has tired, but for which hell scream if someone else should try to touch it.
He still loves my body each night, but I think it’s just to keep up the show and maintain the peace, where once it was the joy of our each day. ‘Thank you,’ we say afterwards. I to him and him to me, as if we were friends who had done a good turn for one another. Perhaps this is the German way of love and finally it has come out.

  He falls back with a yawn writ large on his eyes and mouth. This, I think, is to tell me he wants sleep and I should stay quiet and not press an extra kiss on him or take his hand, lest he thinks I want something more. If I stroke his hair, he does not groan with pleasure, as he used to. He suffers it in silence.

  Then he lies still, does not reach for me. He’s not asleep, so he can hear me try to eat my tears when they jump up inside of me. He seems to wish to taste my pain, slow and considering, as if it were wine. As if his pride is made more rich because I want him and he wants me not. When he hears me not-weep like this, after a long while, he says soft, as if he dare not speak in a clear voice, ‘Did I do some bad thing to hurt you?’

  What can I say? Does he really need an answer – or does he mock me? Try to stretch out the pain to make it bigger? I feel shamed, dumb, despoiled, found out. Is it such a bad thing that he does not truly want me? I count the things that bless me from him – he’s kind, he loves our son, he works hard, he does not lay a cruel hand on me …

  I scorn my own self and tell myself that I’ve the things all wives want. What kind of whore am I that I must have the wild, fresh acts of love, too? I feel shame that I must have them or else be so low in my spirits. I’ve heard that there’s a courtesan in Venice who gives hot and rare service but if not satisfied by a customer, she will pelt eggs at his back when he departs. Am I like that? Have I been spoilt with a superfluity of pleasures in the past?

  The tears creep to my lids. I am not a bad wife – even in the spreading of the dreadful rumour about the printers I was acting in good heart – and I wish more than all things to show him love in the way most men appreciate it shown the most, but he bars my way, flat on his back; he folds his arms on his chest as if to ward me off, as if I were a bitch in calore that whines to be got with pup. A woman who roams the alleys after red-haired men, like Paola.