The Leper's Companions

by Julia Blackburn

  He found himself standing on a wooden bridge and looking down at his shifting reflection in the canal. A loose tangle of rubbish was jostling between this floating image and the side of a rowing boat. He could see an empty bottle, a bunch of flowers, a broken piece of gold-painted wood, and a little dog with black and white fur and the red gash of a wound on its side. One ear and the tip of the tail were still dry and somehow alert, but the rest of the body had been pulled under the glaze of the water’s surface.

  And then he was seeing her just as he had found her: facedown and naked, here or somewhere close by. He managed to turn her limp body over and for a moment he thought she must be still alive because he thought he saw a smile flickering across her face. But that was not so and she was dead.

  He remembered running into the Rialto marketplace. Wooden stalls were being set up and people were shouting to each other across the noise of their activity. A man dressed in a long blue robe brocaded in gold thread pushed past him. The man was holding a little bag of spices to his nose to drive out the fetid stink of the city, and like a common thief the leper had snatched the bag from the man so that its sharp scent could spin through his skull like an avenging angel who can drive out any number of devils.

  A group of prostitutes was gathered under the arched colonnades, chattering together in starling voices. Two of them came lunging towards him, hand in hand and laughing. They were balanced on shoes with soles as tall as three clenched fists and they kept slipping on the flagstones which were still wet from last night’s tide. Their faces were sinister behind veils of thin black gauze. They tried to grab hold of him but he got away.

  He passed a fish stall where a tangle of conger eels were pulsating in an earthenware basin, their mouths parted, their eyes gray and without mercy. Next to them was a stall selling hanks of long hair, they hung from poles like the tails of horses.

  He went down a narrow street where the money changers sat hunched and silent in front of their shops, and he bought some silver ducats which could be used as currency all along the coast of the Great Sea, and some bills of exchange. It was a first gesture towards the need to leave this place and go to some other.

  A street of tailors, cobblers and rope sellers. A street of jewelers. A man walking up to him, his breath musty from old wine; he saw now that it was the boatman, although he still could not bring back the name.

  He went into a warehouse, the long building stretching back into its own darkness, and there he bought the things he needed for his journey: a mattress stuffed with sheep’s wool, a duck-down pillow and a scratchy blanket smelling of cat’s piss. He bought sausage, salted tongue and dried biscuit. Plague pills, seasickness pills and pills to prevent constipation. Wax and tinder, a game of chess, a chicken coop and a bag of corn to feed his chickens once he had them. A basin in which to wash his feet and a chamber pot for when the sea was too rough for him to reach the latrine on the side of the ship. A tin box with a good lock, a wooden flute, a white felt cloak, a barrel of wine and two barrels for fresh water. He learned later that thirst is a much more terrible thing than hunger, but he did not know that then.

  The shopkeeper advised him to get a relic to protect him from storms and sickness and sudden danger, so he went into the next church he came across. The waxy marble of the walls on all sides was dancing with ghostly shapes and the waxy marble of the pillars shone like fevered skin. The floor was alive with colored stones: onyx and malachite and agate; red marble, white marble and a pale green marble. There were the curling shapes of seashells outlined in some of the marble slabs and he saw one that was the same size and shape as a man’s head, looking as soft as flesh even though it was sliced through hard stone.

  The Last Judgment covered an entire wall. The damned were crouched among flames which resembled sheaves of wheat and the saved had wings bunched around their heads. In Hell there was a black pool in which floated the white bones of the dead. In Heaven there was a feathered angel who stared at him with a look of compassion across the distance that divided them.

  A priest appeared out of the darkness and showed him a whole jumble of saintly relics heaped up on the floor. Leg bones, arm bones, and fingers covered with shreds of skin. Skulls holding a few strands of hair or a little cluster of teeth. He bought himself a piece of the skull of John the Baptist, which the priest broke off for him like cake.

  The same priest was still in the church now, but bent almost double with extreme old age so that he could hardly lift his head to look up from the whirling patterns on the floor. Nevertherless he seemed to recognize the leper. He took him firmly by the hand and led him to the pile of bones. It had increased in size. The leper bought a fragment from a different skull of John the Baptist.

  Then he returned to his house. He went from room to room looking at his companions who were all sleeping peacefully. The shoemaker’s wife lay on her side, her face damp and flushed. The priest was propped on a pillow. His eyes were closed, and the weariness on his face had lifted, making him appear young again. Sally was sprawled on her belly, her back very white and smooth.

  In the last room that he entered the leper saw himself. He was lying in bed with the woman he had once loved wrapped in his arms and they were both fast asleep. For a while he sat down beside the two of them and the life which he had lost.

  24

  What was it like for the leper to come back? The whole city was haunted by the person he had been before he left, the things he had done and had failed to do while he was here.

  Every bridge, every narrow street, every familiar building, even the enormity of the sky reflected in the lagoon, they all reminded him of what had happened in that other time. He could hear the stones of a wall calling out accusations as he tried to hurry by, the wooden construction of a bridge ordering him to stop and look at what lay beneath it, the water whispering the secret of his own doubts and fears.

  He had returned and already he was desperate to escape a second time. However, this was not possible because, although there were two pilgrim ships tethered like horses in the harbor, neither of them was ready to sail. There was nothing for him to do except to wait and try to learn patience.

  Everyone had a different reason to explain the delay. Some said that beyond the enclosed safety of the lagoon the Great Sea was so wild and angry it would smash through the hull of a ship within minutes and the wind strip every sail from the mast. Others said no, the sea was perfectly calm, the danger came from the pirates who were waiting in ambush around the islands of Dalmatia. There were also reports of plague, and the disfigured bloated bodies of men and women and children, dogs and cattle, lying in heaps along the coast of Istria.

  The leper’s companions waited with him, but without his sense of urgency. They were unconcerned at the way the days rolled into each other and quite content to pass the time by wandering through the city. The leper took them to see the doge’s umbrella, the unicorn’s horn, and the marble throne that had belonged to Attila the Hun. They went from island to island. They walked through churches and gardens and alleyways, through markets and shops. They entered the long dark warehouse which provided for the needs of pilgrims bound for the Holy Land and everything the leper had bought before was bought again.

  He had hardly spoken while they were traveling but now he began to talk and talk. Wherever he went some new image from the past would break onto the surface of his thoughts and demand to be seen and now instead of keeping these things to himself he told them to his companions.

  They listened carefully but without comment. Sometimes he would describe a particular event several times, and with each new telling he became more aware how insubstantial his memories were.

  Eventually the waiting came to an end and a white silk banner was unfurled in Saint Mark’s Square, announcing that a ship was ready and passengers could go on board if they wanted to. So there they were, clambering up a rope ladder and standing on deck with all the others.

  The smell of freshly painted tar. Smoke billowi
ng from the charcoal fire in the kitchen under its canvas awning. The round staring eyes of sheep and cattle in one pen, the screams of a pig in another, beaks and broken feathers protruding from between the slats of a wooden crate crammed with geese and chickens. The oarsmen sitting at the benches where they would eat and sleep and tug at the weight of the water for as long as the journey lasted.

  The leper recognized the captain and several of the sailors, the pilot and the soothsayer who worked together as a team, the scribe who carried his quill pen like a weapon and the ship’s surgeon with his parchment skin and cold hands, always eager to play the part of torturer if the need arose.

  Down five steps and into the dark, low-ceilinged space where the passengers must try to find sleep at night or during the day. Each one was allocated a small area on the floor and told to lie down. Then the outline or his or her body was drawn onto the wooden boards, marking the full extent of private territory. About a hundred would be sleeping here together, with heads pressed close to the creaking walls, shoes and buckets and locked boxes of possessions slipping and sliding and overturning with the movement of the waves. When the leper was last on board there were six horses stabled on the deck just above where his head lay, their hooves grinding into the bone of his skull, stamping and shifting through his restless dreams.

  Someone lifted up the wooden hatch in the middle of the floor and a lantern was lowered on a rope to reveal the area below. Here sand was kept as ballast and the bilgewater slopped from side to side and stank, no matter how often it was pumped out. You could bury eggs and wine and other things in that dank cold if you wanted to. The leper remembered how the body of a dead Venetian lord had been carried here for several weeks, the smell of him seeping through the floorboards and getting stronger and stronger so that even without seeing him it was easy to imagine his white flesh breaking into soft fragments and mixing into a paste with the sand and the water.

  Back up onto the deck and the fresh air. The surface of the sea sparkling. A wind dancing. A big table had been placed next to the main mast and the scribe was seated behind it, writing out each passenger’s details: name, country of origin, the fee which had been paid and what should be done with his possessions should the owner happen to die. When it was difficult to reach land for a burial, the dead were wrapped in shrouds and thrown into the sea. Only a very wealthy Venetian could expect the luxury of having his bones returned home. On the last journey ten men had died on a single night and there were not enough stones to weigh down their shrouded bodies, so they all bobbed to the surface of the sea and followed in the ship’s wake for as long as they could.

  The leper stood in line with the others, waiting his turn to answer the scribe’s questions. Suddenly the trumpets were sounding and shrill whistles were blowing and the mainsail was unfurled to reveal a huge painting of Saint Christopher staring towards the horizon with black-rimmed eyes.

  Seven white banners were flying from the rigging, each bearing a different image. The leper saw one that showed a lion representing the city of Venice and one that carried the red cross of Jerusalem.

  The lead oarsman sang the opening line of a song and the others answered him in one voice as they raised and lowered their oars in unison, pulling the great weight of the ship away from the shelter of the harbor and out towards the open sea.

  25

  The ship followed the line of the coast and always kept the land in view. The floodplains around Venice were replaced by the pale mountains of Istria; you could just make out where geometric blocks of stone had been cut from the marble quarries.

  They could not stop anywhere here because of the threat of plague. Twice they drew in close to a harbor town only to be confronted by an unnatural silence in the streets, lines of corpses laid out on the sand like a fisherman’s catch, a few sad figures waving them away, or worse than that, standing like Death himself and beckoning them to come close and closer still to take a share of the desolation.

  Within a few days the supply of fresh water in the barrels was beginning to taste sour. Instead of eating bread, lettuce leaves and olive oil for breakfast they had hard biscuits soaked in strong wine.

  A bullock and a pig were slaughtered and the sharks appeared miraculously on all sides of the ship as soon as the sea was tinged red with blood and offal. The sharks fought each other over the last scraps of food, their angry bodies cracking and slapping against the water’s surface.

  One of the passengers refused to leave the dank nest of his mattress. “I am going to Paradise,” he said and he lay there drinking wine in the dark until he became as incontinent as a baby and the stink of him filled the entire space. Eventually he was lifted out onto the deck each morning and propped up somewhere in the shade where he continued with his talk of Paradise. And then he disappeared. He must have rolled overboard for the sharks to find him, but no one saw him go or heard him cry out. His possessions were given to the captain and his mattress was thrown into the sea. The space it had occupied was soon taken.

  The passing of time was punctuated by the blowing of whistles and trumpets to announce the need to eat or pray, to rise or go to rest. When there was a fair wind the figure of Saint Christopher with his black-rimmed eyes was spread out against it. When there was no wind the oarsmen struggled to keep the ship moving.

  Among the passengers there was a continuous babble of talk and laughter and sudden quarrel, the playing of musical instruments, the cheering and clapping when someone demonstrated the steps of a dance or how he could remain balanced on his head to the count of twenty. Above that was the sound of the sailors, who sang to each other to distinguish their voices from the general hubbub. They sang out instruction, reassurance and warnings of approaching danger. The oarsmen sang the rhythm of their oars and at night the steersman sang something like a lullaby, a little lilting tune that he repeated over and over as proof that he saw nothing to be afraid of.

  Sometimes the leper would wrap himself into his white felt cloak and would go and sit out on the deck all night long, listening to this song, watching the flicker of a single torch, the bright scattering of the stars, the sudden bursts of phosphorescence in the water. He felt empty of all emotion and curiously insubstantial, as if his body was nothing more than a thin shell that could be blown away with a single breath. His entire past life seemed as distant as some far landscape in which nothing could be distinguished beyond a vague outline of shape and color. It seemed to him now as if many years had gone by since he left the city, or even as if he had never been anywhere else but here on a ship in the night and there was no dawn to be expected to bring an end to it and no other place in the world apart from this one.

  And when the dawn did come he would emerge gray and quiet from a listless eternity and would go and join the others in the business of the day. But his companions noticed that he had become very removed from them and that he no longer told them any of the stories of his life. They watched him and wondered where his thoughts were taking him.

  One morning the soothsayer and the pilot were seen in earnest conversation. Together they examined a map of the coastline that was covered with the tiny scratchings of fast currents and hidden rocks. They both observed how the shadow of the mast fell across the deck and how a flying fish had landed sharp and breathless on the wooden boards, just at the conjunction of light and darkness. That is what made them decide it would be wise to stop at the next island which they could already see approaching.

  And so the ship was brought into the shelter of a wide sandy bay. Some waited to go ashore in a little boat, while others were too impatient and waded waist deep towards the unfamiliar luxury of land.

  Everyone was eager to unwind their cramped bodies and they spread out quickly in all directions. Although there had been a fishing village here in the past, and a few ruined houses bore witness to that fact, the island was known to be uninhabited.

  A creaking chorus of frogs announced where there was fresh water. The asphodels were in bloom, their fat bul
bs lying haphazardly on the stony ground, and their white flowers looking somehow cold and unskinned at the end of a long stalk. A cloud of bee-eaters flew into the air with sudden fright and for a moment they appeared like a rainbow of vivid colors. Wild sage was growing everywhere, its pungent scent released by the trampling of feet. There was also a small spreading plant called porcella, with leaves tasting of nasturtium; everyone gathered it by the handful and ate it eagerly, like cattle turned out to grass after a long winter.

  The leper set off on his own towards the center of the island where he could see a grove of umbrella pines. He had the feeling that he knew where he was going even though he had no recollection of ever having been here before. The scent of the sage, the taste of porcella, the color of the birds, the white tenacity of the asphodel and now the sound of pinecones splitting to release their seeds, it all reverberated like nostalgia for something he had forgotten.

  He reached a stone wall built around a little field in which young barley was growing. This surprised him, because he knew that no one was supposed to be living on the island. Beyond the field there was what looked like the ruins of a house, but when he got closer he saw the dried body of an octopus hanging with stiffened tentacles from a branch fixed between a crack in the wall. There was no other sign of life; no dog to bark a warning or chickens to scatter in a panic of anticipated slaughter. Just the planted barley and the caught octopus.

  The leper went inside the house. It was a single room, in which the bed was a pile of soft pine branches, the table was a piece of wood balanced on stones and there were fresh ashes in the open fire. Half a loaf of bread was on the table and the leper picked it up and broke a piece off, tasting that it had been made from the ground roots of some plant and not from barley or wheat.