The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘Have I ever been truly a part of this?’ Wendelin asked himself, aloud. A sudden throb of hatred for the city churned his belly. It resembled, in its pain, the hostile humiliation of a disillusioned lover. If his marriage had failed, and his business likewise, perhaps he should return home, and start again.

  But a spasm of terror diffused rapidly through his body like a blush, at the thought of being separated from his wife. While they as yet lived together, there was hope that she might come back to him, after all. Their joyous time of love and passion has lasted years: this inexplicable estrangement less than two months. Perhaps the business, too …? With an effort, he distanced his craving thoughts of Speyer. No, he must reconcile himself to this town, find solutions, or at least acceptance, instead of running away from griefs.

  I shall bury my feelings with due ceremony, just as the Venetians like it, he said bitterly to himself. Indeed, this is an excellent town for misery, so long as it is done in style.

  Then he turned to go home, so he might wash the graininess from his eyes before going to work.

  The weather had turned. A suffocating veil of fine rain pressed against him. Now, he found with relief, he might shed a few tears and not be ashamed.

  * * *

  He thought I slept still but I wake each time he rises. Though all is broken and now he no longer even wishes to share a bed with me – yet still that string of love that binds his mind to mine pulls me when he stirs.

  I heard him wash, soft as a cat, and dress, then tread down the stairs light and quick, though I knew his mind must weigh hard on him. How could it not? He is from the North, yet even there they must have hearts.

  I made myself wait till the door clicked shut and his steps went quietly up the path to the street. Then I jumped from my bed and ran down (for I’d kept my clothes on all the night for just this). I padded after him. It was easy to know him, though there were others, miserable as us no doubt, about in the streets then. Here in Venice, when we are wrapped up for the out of doors in this foggy hot-and-cold weather, we learn to know our own kin and friends from just the twist of a shawl or the turn of a hand in a glove.

  So I followed his well-known outline, shaving the walls, just one corner behind, all the way to the customs tower that guards the city and looks out on the bacino. He walked with the tired tramp of an old horse.

  He stood there a long time till the sun rose and the lagoon islands appeared from the mist, floating like trays of soft brown cakes in the sea.

  At one point he took a step as if to fling himself into the waves and my heart rose to my throat. He cannot swim! But he did not jump. After a long while he turned, so I hid at the back of a tall stone wall, resting quiet and secret as the water in a well, and he passed me by and did not see me at all. I eeled around the columns, followed him across the herringbone bricks of the campo, careful not to slip on the smooth Istrian stone at the edge.

  I noticed that he wore too few clothes for the damp of the dawn. Without me to remind him, he does not think of such things. How shiversome he must have felt, out there by the Dogana! As he passed me, his eyes downcast, I saw his hair was all clotted with dew and the raindrops, and I could myself feel, with a shiver, the bite of the chill next to his scalp. He used to touch my hair all the time. Now he does not.

  When the sun beat down later the hair would stand all stiff and sore with sweat. And then would come those old aches the damp sends through all his joints – how I wished I’d bought from that merchant one of those miraculous woollen girdles from the Monastery of Saint Barsamo in Irak.

  Then I saw a skulk of flesh flitting after my man and I felt a squirm of terror in my bowels. From the churn of my bad thoughts about him, my love rose up, and I wanted more than all to protect and save him.

  The little figure trailed him until they were both out of sight. I comforted myself that the light was dawning, and that my man’s towering shadow swallowed up the little man entirely, and I knew for myself that he knew how to take care of himself, even at another’s expense.

  Now I have come home with plans for that box of his. Using soap made of ash and boiled water I shall scour it. Till now I did not touch it; just the knobs to pull the drawers and then with as light a touch as I could. I would hate to feel its dust on my skin.

  I think now I might have erred there. It has come to me that if I scrub and scour that box then it might lose its bad power. I shall clean the filth from it: the present filth and the past filth. Then maybe all will be good between us again, and I shall start to feel content, which I have not done since he brought that thing home.

  * * *

  In a month it would be Christmas again, though there was as yet no respite in the heat.

  Strange smells meandered out of the alleys. The Venetians were already preparing for their Christmas feast of salmon and venison seasoned with hogsheads of honey and kilderkins of mustard. At this time of year the Venetians also devoured herons, bitterns and teal, boars’ heads with lemons in their mouths, fresh sturgeon with whelks and roasted porpoise.

  With these scents in the air, Wendelin’s night-time walks took on the quality of a luxurious nightmare, sensuous and abhorrent at the same time. He was so wearied that his perceptions were equivocal. He accepted every strange sight, every inexplicable vision as yet one more Venetian phenomenon sent to try his tired brain.

  The less he slept, the less lifelike and the more unwholesome the town became to him. Lines of washing created strange new beasts in the moonlight. Their shadows danced bizarrely: torsoless legs in their hose, legless torsos in their nightshirts. Treacherous hidden steps lay in wait for him and unfathomable lights cast into shuttered courtyards, reveries brought to sudden despair by the inexplicable advent of a dead end or a canal at the end of a promising passageway, where he could have sworn he had passed unimpeded the night before.

  One night he passed a small hooded figure motionless at the corner of a street near Ca’ Dario. The face was hidden, as were the hands. Wendelin passed swiftly on. Moments later, there it was again, in front of him, the same hooded figure, and yet he’d walked the intervening hundred yards at a brisk pace, and no one had followed him. He was less frightened than curious, but too polite to scrutinise the creature as he passed it once more. He did not see it again.

  He walked until dawn, and then slipped into a tavern at Rialto, which remained open for those such as himself who could not sleep or those who were driven to be early at work. He sat outside, despite the cold, watching the sunrise and waiting for his own apprentices to arrive on their way to the fondaco. Their sleepy faces raised fond thoughts in him, and he was in need of such warmth.

  Soon a smear of workers, unwashed and slow-footed, appeared. In the dawn light everyone approaching from the east did so in silhouette that rounded into familiarity only as they passed close by. Wendelin found himself making judgements on the gait and garb of strangers – what a scarecrow! lopes like a sad drunkard! – only to find, as the mattutino chimed, that the stick figure who approached him was his editor, Bruno Uguccione.

  He looked at the young man’s face; saw its anguish naked, as yet undisguised by absorption in work. That woman, whoever she is, is killing my dear young man, Wendelin thought. Nothing I love is safe in this town.

  He added, as he reached his hand out to Bruno, and drew him down to the table – perhaps this is, in the end, what it is to love. Perhaps it always ends like this.

  ‘Shall we have our lesson here?’ Wendelin suggested, thrusting aside his own misery to welcome his editor. He waved at the innkeeper to bring some more of the hot tisane for both of them.

  ‘Why not?’ smiled Bruno feebly. There was no chance that Sosia would come to the stamperia this morning.

  He had noticed that Wendelin was less cheerful than formerly but attributed the downturn of his capo’s mouth to the problems of the business. In matters of the heart, Bruno, with the arrogance of youth, felt himself the centre of Fate’s evil attentions, assuming that the pain in his
breast was both more bitter and more poetic than anyone else’s.

  * * *

  It was my idea to clean the box when my man was within the house, and to do it myself and not leave it to the maid, so he should see how I tried to serve him, and make the peace between us, to show that I, for my part at least, still wished to keep our love alive.

  I filled a pail with water warmed by the fire and carried it, with a pile of fresh scouring cloths, to the study.

  I knocked on the door – these days we are so polite with one another! – and he said, ‘Enter!’ in an abstracted kind of voice. He was at his desk, with another Jenson book, a candle and a magnifying lens on the page.

  When he saw me, he started up and a smile flew across his face. Then he looked at the pail in my hand, and the smock I had put on to cover my dress.

  ‘What’s all this for?’ he asked, knitting his brows.

  ‘I shall clean the box,’ I said. It came out all wrong, for what I meant to say, is ‘I shall make your cabinet fresh and beautiful for you.’ I sounded gruff, and he looked less than pleased, as if I meant some act of war against his precious box.

  He said, ‘But it’s not dirty. Your water may cause damage to the paint. You should leave it alone.’

  I hope he did not mean to sound so brusque and cold as he did to me. He was poised on the edge of anger, as if he were at the end of his temper’s tether. But his tone made me a little angry, and so I took a step forward and put the pail in front of the box, upright as a toy soldier.

  ‘I ask you not to do this,’ he said, and again that tinny ring of choler sharpened his German voice.

  ‘It’s the only way,’ I said, grimly, and took one cloth, dipped it in the pail, and pulled it, dripping, across the top of the cabinet.

  He rose and quickly came towards me. His shadow grew huge in the light of the candle and fell across the stripe of wet that I had made.

  So I was looking back at him, trembling, when the roach came out from a crack in the wood. It must have lain there all this time, perhaps from the days at Ca’ Dario. Perhaps it had even come all the way from Damascus, hidden in some black groove as the box tossed in the hold of a pilgrim boat, ballast no doubt to make up for those poor pilgrims who had died on their journey.

  Certainly I had never seen such a large roach in this town before, or one which had such dark wings and whose antlers were so thick with hairs and whose tail curved over its back.

  These were the slow musings of my mind, struck by panic into a slow kind of working, when I turned back to see the roach climb over my fingers and on to my wrist, where it raised its pincers and bit.

  It bit most grievously, but I did not even feel the pain, for first came the horror. You know how I hate all things that creep and crawl. I cannot bear even to see them, let alone to be touched by them. And now this vile roach, this citizen of an evil world, had stung me.

  I shook my hand to dislodge it and only then began to scream, for it would not let loose from the skin it was pinching. I opened my mouth and the moonlight shot into it.

  ‘Help me! Help!’ I shrieked to my man, but he stood still and watched as if this was a play and he had bought a ticket.

  ‘You should not have wet the cabinet,’ he said, and turned his back on me. The roach dropped off then and scuttled away under the box.

  Chapter Eight

  He who wants to catalogue your pleasures

  would first need to know how

  to count the stars above

  And the grains of sands in Africa

  When Gentilia became a witch, she found it surprisingly easy to combine her new profession with that of being a nun.

  She looked into all sides of the question first, deciding on a mixture of stregoneria (simple witchcraft), fatuccheria (evil magic) and herberia (herbal magic).

  She learned the proper adorations of the various demons, how to burn styrax gum, asafoetida and many other substances that give off sweet or foul odours that invade the mind and sway the will.

  Most of all she was interested in binding spells, whatever their nature. The first wise woman she consulted taught her the ways of olive branches. Gentilia pretended to be dying of love for a nobleman, and quickly won the romantic sympathy of the older woman.

  ‘We’ll get him for you, darling, don’t you worry,’ simpered the witch, patting Gentilia’s hand and thrusting out her hips.

  Gentilia’s wise woman had nipples that could clearly be seen in outline through her thin aubergine-coloured gown. Her breasts hung slackly between the two great ovals of sweat that spread from under her arms. The elongated nipples were strangely placed, too close to each other, adding to many and various repulsions of her foreignness and therefore the potency of her spells, at least in the eyes of the suggestible Venetians.

  Walking through the streets with her, Gentilia was invisible to everyone. All had their eyes fixed on the wise woman, though seeming to look at a point just beyond her. No one wanted to meet the eyes of a known witch; that way madness lay.

  Together they went to the market to buy olive branches. In the old woman’s dark kitchen they burned the tips of the branches together, tied each one with string, and dipped it in holy water they had scooped from the baptistry at San Giobbe. While they did so they chanted, ‘As I bind this wood with this cord, so may the phallus of my lover be bound to me.’ Then they took the branches to the garden outside the church and planted them in the ground, chanting, ‘As this wood cannot grow green again, so may not the phallus of my lover be inclined to relations with any other woman.’

  ‘Now you go get him,’ leered the witch, poking at Gentilia’s lower belly with an earth-stained finger.

  Gentilia found other women, other teachers. She learned how to skin a bird backwards, sticking two needles in the head and two needles in the tail. She knew to keep its little corpse in a shuttered room and cast spells to conjure the Devil over it, and that he would surely come, as this was the best bait for him.

  She learned to pick large sage leaves and write on them, that they might be given to an object of love, who, on eating them, would be possessed with passion.

  She received instruction on how to light a candle in front of a tarot card with the Devil on it, how to prepare magical potions to smear on the windowsills and doorways of those to be cursed. She learned how to brush a piece of pork against an unsuspecting Jew, to ensure his downfall.

  She learned to anoint lips of would-be lovers with holy oil, warning them to make sure it stayed slick and slippery until the very moment of stealing a kiss from the person they longed to possess. She learned that women who required the undying fidelity of their men must rub their entire bodies with this oil before sexual congress with them. This formula had the added advantage of leaving the woman free and unbound; while her husband might not stray she was able to engage her body and her feelings wherever she wished after this.

  Gentilia learned how to revive a man’s lust for his wife when he had lost all desire for her. Under the conjugal bed she should place the blade of a plough, and the hoe and shovel used for burying at least one corpse. In other cases she should use the ring in which a young virgin had been married and subsequently died: the affected man must urinate through this ring and would soon find his powers of loving his own wife miraculously restored.

  She learned how to package up a calamita bianca, a white magnet, in a linen bag with cloves and incense and parchment to bring the bearer good luck in all seasons. She learned how to deliver a martellata – a hammering, to the soul of an enemy.

  She learned to cast the beans, and how to read them when they fell. She would mark two of the beans, denoting the loved one and the lover, and then throw a clutch of eighteen in front of her. If the two marked beans fell close together then their love was to be trusted. If not, then there was work to be done, probably in the form of binding spells.

  She learned that the bed was the most powerful place in any house. A man might be tempted by the maids who performed the du
ty of making his bed if they put into that bed all manner of small annoyances … millet, sorghum, spelt, laurel, apple seeds, roots of flowers from each month of the year, peas, wheat husks, small bones from dead babies, coal, stockings, rocks, wood, nails, large needles (one with a head, one without).

  She learned to throw salt into the coals of the fire to make them spit and jump. The hearth was of course another powerful site for magic. She knew that any potions must be cooked in a new pan on that hearth, and that pan must be purchased in the name of the Devil or her intended victim. To conjure up pain, live eels could be put under the coals with needles in the head and heart. She learned to shake an egg to check if it clicked; such enchanted eggs might be buried with a prayer, and prove powerful. She learned the power of measuring things – cords, babies, other things: anything measured was in some way contained and possessed by she who had the knowledge of its dimensions and such knowledge could be put to good use or bad.

  She learned to whip a hearth chain against the wall to make a lover’s heart beat harder, painfully if necessary.

  She learned the formula for potent little letters, the carte di voler bene, refining and repeating the words to herself until she was word perfect.

  She learned to comb her hair on Thursday nights and how to extract single strands from others’ heads without their noticing it, for such hairs were vital ingredients in the most potent of spells.

  When she was ready, and had written two practice exercises, she penned the words on a sheet of parchment, which she quietly dropped in the outlet of the necessario of the house where Sosia lived. Walking swiftly away she noticed the shoes airing on the windowsill and smiled to herself.

  I declare by this contract, Gentilia had written on the parchment, that I make myself the bondswoman of Lucifer and all the princes of Hell. I name him my lord, signed for on the flesh of my body, and I hold myself as his slave under the condition that he serves me in this way: