The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  My man yet looks at me too. It’s just I do not now like the way he does it.

  He asks me questions which are aslant of the problem, such as ‘Do you not like my books? Is it that?’

  I shake my head. It’s true I do not love the books as he does, but I could have lived with them, if the box had not come along to divide us. But I do not dare say these words out loud as they would make him angry.

  ‘But I love you,’ he still says, as if that solves all things.

  I look at the floor, as if the boards can tell me more truth than he can.

  And I think of the letter I read this morning:

  ‘I can scarcely bear to think about you when we are not together. Such thoughts come to me …’

  Chapter Six

  Since then the poor little lady

  has fires devouring the marrow of her bones

  ‘You may not go about any longer, Sosia,’ stammered Rabino. ‘I have – have heard things which sadden me. I believe also, from the look of your skin, that you’re troubled with a dangerous disease, for which the only cure is retirement from the kind of life you’ve been leading. You’ve been fortunate to date in escaping it. Some are: I wish we knew why. However, it’s come to you in the end.

  ‘I’m leaving on the table some herbs you must boil in pure water. Bathe those parts of yourself you’ve abused in a tepid infusion. You must do this every day until the sores heal. God will take care of the rest, with time.

  ‘And in the interval, you must not consort with men or you’ll spread the disease. Venice has been good to you, Sosia; you should in this way be kind to the Venetians.’

  Rabino did not look at her as he said this. He did not add, ‘I this morning succumbed to temptation and read your disgusting diary of conquests, and I have put it in the fire.’ She would discover its loss soon enough.

  He pulled a small leather pouch from his black robe and left it on the edge of the table. His hand shook, and a few crushed leaves spilled out of the bag, releasing a bitter perfume into the warm room. He spoke in a timid conciliatory voice, but, as he left, he turned the key in the street door, which he had already placed outside, fearing a struggle. He had long suspected that Sosia was capable of violence against himself – lately he’d started to wonder sometimes about the scars and bruises and starved frames of her little siblings. The more evidence he saw of her crimes, the more he feared her.

  Sosia had already started screaming as he walked out of the door. As he stumbled along the street, his ears were wounded by terrible noises. She cursed him first in her own language, and then in Venetian.

  She shrieked: ‘Kind to the Venetians! I’ll show you kind to the Venetians! No one has been kinder to so many Venetians as me!’

  Shutters popped open along the street. Rabino burned with shame as he felt the eyes of the neighbours on his back. Sosia continued to make guttural cries, beating on the door, the iron bars of the windows. Then she began to break the plates on the table, clapping them together like cymbals. By that time Rabino was almost out of earshot.

  It was then she found the petrified remains of her diary poking out from the embers of the fire.

  It took a morning of destruction before the noise of shattered wood and glass softened to a trickle of powder. By then, Sosia had opened the medical cabinet and was throwing together all the herbs Rabino had carefully dried and pounded in the summer past. From the dozens of little bottles she’d made a heap of glinting dust, which, finally, she kicked into a sudden whispering rainbow.

  She pried from the wall the birth tray that a grateful Venetian patient had given Rabino on their marriage. All Rabino’s fond patients, she knew, whispered at the continued barrenness of their union. On the birth tray, the Triumph of Love was depicted in glowing tempera. Fat Cupid was led in a triumphal chariot. A courtesan rode on the back of a Greek philosopher. The images, showing passion conquering dry intellect in every instance, came from a poem of Petrarch. She threw the tray in the fire and watched the flames cradle, and then devour it.

  Her anger was not spent yet. She needed to hurt Rabino more. She eyed the Ark and its silk curtain. The Torah was, as ever, dressed like a princess – the one item of luxury in their home – but she knew that even Rabino’s forbearance would not survive an act of violence against the instruments of the faith he supposed that they shared.

  ‘I’ll show him what I believe in!’ she said aloud. She ran to the kitchen and pulled a slice of curd cheese from a stone bowl. Back in the soggiorno she pushed a sliver of it into the hem of the silk covering, squashing it flat. Now his Torah would stink! And he would never guess why! As she laughed, panting, she remembered their wedding certificate, the ketubbà.

  She went to a cabinet and pulled the heavy vellum document from a drawer. It was about two feet across, almost square but arched slightly at the top, decorated with vignettes of religious scenes. Between two painted columns a scribe had written out in ink and egg-tempera the words with which Rabino had promised to maintain her with all his riches and wealth under the sky, and to hold as security for the future her bride price until all his resources had been exhausted, even the cloak off his back, in life and death, from the holy day of their marriage, for ever. She, the virgin Sosia, blessed among women, had promised him her life, her faith and the performance of all wifely duties.

  Sosia stubbed her thumb on the word Virgin. She remembered the pallid sheen on Rabino’s sweating face as he polluted his faith by signing the document dishonestly. Perhaps this was why their ketubbà lay hidden in a drawer and not framed upon the wall, a sanctified piece of the matrimonial scenery, as it would have been in other Jewish households. On their wedding day he had already known that she was no virgin, by his own violation, though he did not know how thoroughly violated she was already. She guessed, as she raised the document, that Rabino could not punish her for its destruction, because it had never been truly holy. She suspected he felt guilty enough to forgive her; certainly he cared for her more than he loved himself. This strange humility in him she found contemptibly weak.

  ‘Who are you to lock me in, Mister Husband?’ she sneered aloud.

  Well, then, she must destroy their wedding document with the kind of ritual it deserved. She lifted the curtain of the Ark and opened its golden doors. She took from inside the yad, the Torah-pointer. The little baton of silver bore at one end a tiny golden hand with its index finger extended. It was forbidden to touch the Torah with impure human skin, so Rabino used the yad to point along the dense letters of the scroll as he read aloud the sacred words.

  Now Sosia slashed and scored her marriage certificate with the yad. She used the golden finger to gouge the eyes of the little figures. Then she raked the yad diagonally across the vellum. The words and pictures suffered stripes and weals. Tiny flakes of tempera powdered the table. But the fabric of the ketubbà remained intact: it was almost leather. Sosia was unable to spend all her hatred while it remained so smugly intact.

  Her fury increased. Tugging at the ketubbà her hair fanned out in dark arcs like ripples in brackish water. It seemed to her that if she could destroy the document then she would relieve this anger that burnt her intestines. It came to her instantly, how it could be done. She stopped her slashing and scribbling.

  She knew that Rabino kept among his equipment a maghen kemp, the small instrument that looked like an ornamental axe-head, used in the circumcision ceremony. The maghen kemp was easy to find, wrapped in its ostentatious little pouch of velvet. She had never held it before and was surprised at its weight, which made it seem as if something tugged at her hand, urging her to desist. But still her wrath preserved her from caution.

  With her left hand she held the ketubbà up to the light of the window and with her right hand she drew the maghen kemp slowly down the middle, slicing it in half. The moan of the metal through the vellum stopped her at last. It sounded like an animal dying in a distant room.

  She threw the maghen kemp on to the floor. How useless, thought Sos
ia, were these little weapons of mankind! How they worshipped that scrap of flesh between their legs, showing how they feared and exalted it, by cutting it, scourging it. It was indecent. Women, she thought, had no such rituals. Their private parts were private, or as private as they wanted them to be. No woman gloried in hers; every woman kept it modestly to herself, except as a receptacle for the men who desire to fit themselves there and test the length and thrust of their pieces. No lover of hers had ever commented on her parts in themselves. Their grateful commentary was restricted to expressing the nature of the pleasure their own members had enjoyed inside her. How often shed been invited to admire the length or rosy tint or even the slant of one of them; required to think up poetic phrases in praise of it …

  Sosia placed the pieces of her wedding certificate on the table. She took a taper to the hearth fire and brought the flame to the remnants. The parchment writhed like driftwood as it burnt, slowly, giving off a smell of roasted meat, exactly, Sosia reflected, what it was. The blaze stained the table black before it died into pale ashes.

  In her state of excitement, the itching between her legs had grown intolerable. She went to the kitchen to boil the herbs that Rabino had left for her. While the water heated, she opened the jar in which Rabino stored their annual rent of eight ducats and slipped the money into her sleeve.

  The feel of the coins reminded her of Felice, who never paid her, neither in money nor what she truly desired – compliments. She would go to the Sturion to find him. No matter that she was sweating from her exertions, and Felice hated any human smells upon her.

  With a stick of pain in the bowel, she realised that she would not be welcome without an appointment, and that the reason for this must be that she was not the only woman to visit Felice at the Locanda, that some other woman had lain on that bed beneath him, seen his eyes look down on her, felt his body moving intently over her, heard the neat groan he invariably emitted as he spent himself. She saw her rivals, all, no doubt, as blonde as she was dark, their fingers soft as hers were hard.

  While she pulled on her cloak and boots she embroidered her painful fantasies. Perhaps even that day, earlier, Felice had been with the beautiful landlady, had unravelled that green silk robe, had cupped those soft, large breasts in his hands, admiring the indentations made by his perfect fingernails. Then he would have slid his hands slowly round to the rear of her flanks and drawn her sex suddenly up to his own. Perhaps at this point, he had rung for the chamber boy, while still moving as yet patiently inside her, and when the boy came, and stood wondering in the doorway, he had beckoned him in, raised his tunic and spilled the little boy’s organ out of his hose. Without losing his undulating rhythm, he would use the little pink snout as a handle, pull the boy closer, and suddenly, deftly, withdraw and insert the boy where he had been. The woman, lulled to a happy nervelessness, would smile graciously to acknowledge the substitution and continue to arch and push, smoothly and softly just as before. Only when the boy shuddered to a finish, would Felice draw him away and remount. The boy would sit, drunk with his memories, on the floor, watching Felice and his mistress complete the act.

  Then Caterina di Colonna, unlike Sosia, would be permitted to fondle and kiss Felice’s downy ears.

  Even while she was grieved by this image, it aroused Sosia and she breathed harder. She wanted to run to the Sturion and break in on the scene she had conjured. Felice had never done such a delicious thing with her! Then she remembered that it was Wednesday and there was a more pressing call on her time.

  ‘Damn Felice,’ she hissed under her breath. ‘Jebo bi guju u oko, he’d fuck the eye of a snake.’

  She went to the armadio for the wood-axe and crippled the street door lock with a single blow. Pulling on her cloak, she set off through the steaming calle for her appointment with Nicolò Malipiero and the boys at the church of San Giobbe, taking care to avoid the wider streets and the shops of those who had reason to be grateful to her husband.

  The herbs she left boiling in the grate, forgotten, but she remembered them as she stopped to scratch where she hurt, and wondered idly if the house would catch fire before Rabino came home.

  Chapter Seven

  Can it make you happy

  to remember what you did was right?

  That you broke faith with neither man nor God?

  If it can, then much happiness lies in store for you,

  Catullus, against the graceless pain of this love gone bad.

  Wendelin walked to the customs house promontory at dawn. He had not been able to sleep in the study where he lately passed some of his nights. The shadows under his wife’s eyes forced him to the conclusion that it was kinder to let her sleep alone, that his bulkiness in the bed disturbed her fragile sleep.

  One night he spied on her, arriving home in silence, stealing up to the soggiorno where she sat by the fireplace, rocking their son in her arms. In those moments he saw as he used to, her hands busy with gentle touches, her eyes moist with love, her voice thick with it as she sang quietly to their sleeping baby.

  For a moment Wendelin was jealous of his own child, but he cleansed his thoughts instantly, guiltily. He watched his wife greedily, observed the glow of the fire warming the parting of her hair, which he had loved to kiss, dwelled on the incline of her wrist which he’d rubbed gently with his own so many times, and on the soft lower lip where he used to rest his own. His longing for her rose up inside him like boiling milk. He took an involuntary step forward and his shadow slid into the room ahead of him. His wife shrank back in terror. Then she gathered up the child in her arms and scuttled out of the door. She brushed him gently with her skirt as she passed. He reached out for the touch, just a touch, of fabric warmed by her skin. The grey linen eluded him and he was left grasping empty air, wondering what had happened to the dresses she used to wear, in vivid hues and soft fabrics. Now she dressed like a nun, as if joy no longer became her.

  So he had left her in peace, returned to his study and shut the door, gazed at the beautiful Damascus cabinet for comfort. Later, before it was dawn, he rose from his divan, left the house, walked his usual miles around the town.

  At the customs point he stopped, gazing at the waves, which pushed up in soft blocks as if being modelled by unseen hands. In the old days, Lussièta had hated for him to go to the tower of the Dogana, because it was said that just below its extremity lay the deepest sea cavern in the lagoon. There lived a terrible creature that, on nights without moon, was visible coiling under the waves. It was known to raise its horse-like head out of the water to swallow seagulls. Its body spiralled rhythmically under the waves while it digested its prey.

  This mostro delle acque nere had made him laugh, but Lussièta had frowned, and insisted: ‘Promise me, you will not go there when the night is black.’

  Now she did not care if he came back; perhaps would prefer it if he did not.

  Wendelin, acutely aware that he could not swim, rehearsed in his mind the two steps that would take him over the edge of the jetty. A shaft of moonlight fell through the waves, seeming to show him the way, clear as a road. It calmed him, though he knew he would not do it. It gave him a sense of choice, made him feel less helpless. He reflected that even in the dark days after Johann’s death he had not thought of self-destruction. But then he’d faced the loss of his brother with the help of his wife. Now there was no one to help him face what seemed to be – what else was it? – the death of his wife’s love.

  Standing there at the threshold of the world, Wendelin felt that he had become foreign again, dispossessed of Venice. He shivered. The coolness was clammy and intermittent. Pockets of humid warm air floated around him. Clouds hung fat and yellow, as docile as plucked chickens. Soon the heat would well out of the sky again.

  Wendelin was suddenly homesick for the crisp bite of a Speyer autumn, for the clean washing hung in orderly procession, observing the proper family hierarchies – not the undignified rabble of nappies and stockings that bestrewed the upper levels of
the alleys in Venice. He missed the unindulged babies, the exquisite formality of the shopkeepers in Germany, the unsensuous patter of harpsichord notes in the church, the precise ranks of vines on the hills, the high empty skies of the North, where a rain cloud meant rain and nothing more metaphorical.

  Bitterness spilled into him. He had given all that up. For what? For the dishonest lures of a courtesan city.

  Like any professional flirt, Wendelin thought, Venice is utterly insincere. Unless you bring her something that interests her, she’s indifferent to you.

  And once you have given her what she wants, she has no further use of you.

  And he pictured his wife with feelings discoloured by too much misery. Perhaps, perhaps I’m too soft on her, Wendelin reflected. They say women are of the canine species and prefer a hard hand and hard words – the more she has of both, the more closely a bitch cleaves to her master. Or could it be true all that I was told of the unchastity of Venetian women? Does she crave a man of her own kind?

  He shook his head. That was not the way of his wife’s thinking.

  Clearly she saw him as a tormentor, with the power and desire to inflict suffering upon her. He knew of nothing he might have done – save the acquisition of the hated cabinet – to cause such fear in her, and he had too much respect for her intelligence to think that a mere piece of carpentry could have robbed her of her senses.

  Boats of produce began to appear, scudding in from their various islands to the Grand Canal and Rialto. Friendly boatmen saluted him jovially. Automatically he returned their greetings with polite gestures, making his foreignness immediately apparent. Seeing that he was not one of them, the boatmen turned their backs on him, resumed the conversations that excluded him.