I hear loud rattling below me, and I lean over the parapet to see a wooden cart stacked high with bodies wrapped in white linens. I recognize the two men who I have passed in the hall. They strain against the weight of the cart, rolling its great metal wheels across the cobbles. Finally, the monatti and their grisly cargo move out of view. In my mind, I imagine them dumping the bodies in the great trenches along the waterside.
Suddenly, images of my father and my cousin appear in my head, and I realize that my mind sees with greater clarity than it has had since I fell ill days, perhaps weeks, ago. The reality that my father and Paolo must have occupied this same place twists in my gut. I press my eyes against my hands and wish for the cloud of delirium to overtake me again. Where did that woman with the strawberry birthmark go? All I want to do is return to my bed so that I can close my eyes and drift away for good. Surely it is simple.
The next noise I hear is the loud clang of a brass bell at the pesthouse gates and the call of the ferryman. The boats are coming to dock. From my bed, I have heard the shuffling of feet, the crying, the calls of the workers as they unload the sick onto this God-forsaken strip of land in the sea. Do any of these poor souls return to their homes from this hellish exile?
I lean over the parapet and, as if in direct answer to my question, I see some several dozen men and women filing into the courtyard below. It looks as though Hell has emptied its bowels onto the cobblestones. The skeletal figures, white and gaunt, spill into the square, pressing their way toward the gates and the docks beyond. They are a picture of the apocalypse—ragged, ashen beings, little more than walking death. But they push ahead with the force of a mob on the verge of bursting into chaos.
They are leaving this place, I realize, making their way to the next level of hell, the Purgatory that must be the Lazzaretto Nuovo. The Lazzaretto Nuovo occupies another island they call Vigna Murata on the other side of the lagoon. I wonder if the island where those who have shown signs of healing go can really be much better than this place, can be worth the pushing crowds. Whatever the truth, the pressing crowd of wretched patients makes a desperate push toward the next stop on their journey home.
And then, I see him.
From my vantage point, only the top of his head is visible in the swirling, ragged crowd. I recognize the tight curl of his hair, the broad forehead, the even features, the spread of his shoulders. He files into the bustle of ferry passengers, then reaches up to run his hand over the top of his head. I see his broad fingers and forearm then, his honey-colored skin sagging but still gnarled from a lifetime of beating gold into thin sheets. Now, there is nothing but absolute certainty in my pounding heart.
Cristiano.
My battiloro.
Chapter 50
Somehow, I find my voice. It comes out as squeaking and raspy as the rusted wheel of the corpse cart.
“Cristiano!” I clear my throat and try again.
His face. Suddenly it is there below me. He turns toward my voice. I grasp the parapet with both hands and pull myself up. I see his eyes grow wide, and his hands clasp his linen shirt in a ball around his heart. I lean over the parapet.
“Dio Mio! You are sick! No!” he exclaims.
“Yes,” I say. “I went home. I was looking for you… But then I fell ill. I do not know how I got here.”
Cristiano has broken from the mash of ferry passengers now, and pushes his way through the crowd toward the staircase. “Maria! Listen to me. There is nothing but death here. You must leave this God-forsaken place. Come with us! Get on the ferry! I will help you.” He presses toward me.
“Stilda!” One of the corpse-bearers presses his palm against Cristiano’s chest. “Have you lost your senses? She will only bring death to everyone else. Do you not want to live, man? Get on that boat, for the love of God!” He pushes Cristiano roughly back toward the crowd, and I watch him stumble backward into the wall of people waiting to board the ferry.
As much as I want to rush down the stairs into his arms, I know that my legs will not have the strength to take me. I lean over the parapet for support. “Please! Cristiano, you must save yourself. I will only drag you into the grave.” I feel tears begin to spill onto my cheeks.
“You are strong,” he says to me, pushing forward again, and I see his eyes glaze with tears, too. “You must fight!” He starts for the stairs, but this time two large men place their bodies in front of him at the bottom of the treads. He grasps the brick railing and pushes his body forward, but they push back, and I see that he is too weakened to overcome them. One of the men grasps Cristiano’s arm and holds him tight.
I do not try to stop the tears. “Cristiano,” I say pulling myself along the parapet to the top of the stairs. “We have a child. A son. Your son… I tried my best to tell you, but I could not find you. I could not get through the barriers. Now he is in the convent orphanage at Santa Maria delle Vergini. Please, save yourself. Go find him. My father’s sister is cloistered there. You can trust her. She will help you, I am sure of it.”
“Maria,” he presses forward again, against the two men blocking the staircase. One of the men places both hands on Cristiano’s shoulders and pushes him backward. Beyond, I see the last passengers boarding the ferry for Lazzaretto Nuovo, and only Cristiano remains in the courtyard.
“Amigón,” the man says to Cristiano, “unless you want to stay on this island for all eternity, you had better get yourself onto that boat before they close the gates! There will not be another boat for thirty days.”
I grasp the railing at the top of the staircase and lock eyes with Cristiano.
“Giuseppe,” I say. “Your son. He carries the same name as my father. He... he is beautiful.”
Cristiano looks at me again for a long moment. “Maria,” he says, stumbling under the pull of the two men, who are now trying to drag him toward the iron gates. “If we have a son then he is no doubt waiting for you out there,” he says, gesturing toward the gates. “I am waiting for you!” He pounds his open palm against his heart. “For the love of God,” he commands, “get yourself out of this place and return to your father’s house!”
He shakes off the men’s grasp and turns toward the pesthouse ferry. The men follow closely behind, shoving him through the gates and sending him stumbling forward onto the dock. They close them behind him with a loud clang.
Then my knees buckle and I feel the cool brick floor under my cheek.
Chapter 51
Sixty-seven days. I have marked off each one on the hem of my linen shift with a piece of coal that I found burned in the pyre. Each day I fold back the hem and count the marks over again, just to be sure. Sixty-seven days since I laid eyes on Cristiano. He is alive. And I am still alive. Nothing else matters.
From the creaking deck of the plague ferry I look beyond the broad back of an oarsman onto the emerging vista of Our Most Excellent Republic. The sun glints off the small peaks of water, its hot beams searing through the haze that has settled over the surface of the water overnight. As the white fog begins to clear, the walls of the Arsenale shipyard come into view, then two crooked church towers. A few small cargo boats make slow progress across the canal, their metal fittings flashing in the emerging white light.
And from here, the low, tile roofs of Cannaregio come into view.
Home.
The cloud that has hung over me for the darkest season of my life begins to lift.
Around me, several dozen people sit on benches or stand against the wooden handrails. Some press their backs against the railings, taking shade from the beating sun under a canvas cover that flaps loose on one side. Others mill around nervously, waiting to be released back into their lives from their journey to Hell and back. A heavy silence falls over the ferry, the weight and anticipation of it all beyond words.
There are women, men, children of all classes. A few of us have survived the Lazzaretto Vecchio, graduatin
g to the Lazzaretto Nuovo for convalescence. Others—mostly family members of the sick and dying who never developed signs of the pestilence—have only sojourned at the Lazzaretto Nuovo until the doctors cleared them of danger. A handful of health officials and priests who have had contact with the sick have also been forced into quarantine. Most of them carry large sacks of linens, clothing, and other belongings that have been boiled in the steaming pots and aired out in the great fields of the lazzaretto.
As for me, I only have the dull linen shift that covers my depleted body. The orderlies gave me this shift when I disembarked from the ferry that carried me from the old lazzaretto to the new one. They herded us women into a large room where they gave us new gowns, loading the old ones onto a cart headed for the pyre in the center of a large campo. It was the last vestige of what we left behind at the Lazzaretto Vecchio.
Those few of us who were fortunate enough to have improved were sent on a dilapidated ferry across the lagoon to the Lazzaretto Nuovo on the island they call Vigna Murata. There we were freer to roam than in the old pesthouse, and I spent the days restless, wandering the open fields, the storehouses with their stacks of medicinal herbs and the closely guarded rows of goods offloaded from the merchant galleys that had been fumigated with smoke and pungent concoctions.
I did not wish to befriend anyone among the families of the infected. I sat on the far end of the great hall where they served our meals, listening to the strange tongues of the men from the merchant ships moored in the lagoon, who were, along with the rest of us, forced to share the same forty days of Purgatory while we waited to return to our lives.
I hear the rattle of the chain that secures the ferry’s wooden gate. I look up to see a restless crowd forming around the quayside. I hear shrieks, laughter, cries of disbelief. There are joyous calls for those who have come home alive, tears for those who have not come home at all.
I feel my heart clench. All that matters is that I go home. Will he be there in my father’s house, waiting for me as he has promised? I want to go back to Cristiano, back to my father’s house, back to my work. It is all I have ever wanted.
The boatman pushes his way through the crowd to the side of the boat, lashing the encumbered craft to a piling at the quayside. I press into the mass of people waiting to disembark. A slight woman, little more than a waif, is the first to step through the open gate. Behind her, there goes another, then another is released into the crowd of people waiting for their loved ones. One by one, their sunken eyes search the campo for a familiar face. I hear shrieks and cries of relief.
Finally, it is my turn, and I step out into the blinding light.
Chapter 52
In my father’s house, the cobwebs have been swept from the eaves and the stone floor feels cool and smooth under my bare feet. There is a new copper pot hanging from the chain in the hearth, and the comforting smell of boiled onions fills the house.
Zenobia begins to remove the plates from the table, and I stand to help her. “Sit,” she says. “I will take care of it.” She stacks the ceramic plates and walks to the back door to dump the pigeon bones into the canal.
Beside me, Cristiano presses back into his chair, satiated from the dinner his mother has prepared for us. He takes my hand and sets his brown eyes on me, the eyes that have been in my head every day. My heart is so full that I feel it will burst.
Somehow, Cristiano and his mother have managed to bring my father’s workshop back to life. The room is still bare, but there are new things: a few ceramic plates and cups, linens on the beds, and a new cooking pot. In the root cellar, glass jars filled with the fruits of a summer harvest have begun to appear on the shelves.
“I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe all of this,” I say, gesturing around the room.
He shrugs. “My mother brought her own things from the pensión. And her friends helped by giving us what they could spare. It is not much, but you will have what you need.”
“Madre di Dio.” I am overcome, pressing my eyes with the heels of my hands. “How did we make it back here? I spent all those months trying to get to you,” I say, feeling a catch in my throat as the truth of all we have endured washes over me in a thundering wave. “I was at the monastery garden every Friday. Then I tried everything in my power to reach you here, but by the time I managed to get through the barriers to come here you were gone.”
His face is drawn, his once strong body now lean, but with a spark to rekindle. I must hope that I too might recover from my own emaciated form, my grey, sagging skin, my ragged hair beginning to grow out from when it was shorn.
“And I tried my best to find you,” he says, squeezing my hand and gazing at me as if he doesn’t notice any of it. “Your father would only say that you were working for a painter elsewhere in the city. I knew that you were in the San Marco quarter, but I had no idea where to look. And your cousin…” He shrugs. “Then they erected the barriers near the baker’s bridge and none of us could leave the quarter. We were well for a long time as others fell ill. But soon enough, your father and your cousin broke out in the black boils. Then I had to leave.”
“Father… He sent you away sick!” I say, my eyes hardened.
“No, you don’t understand,” he says, grasping my arm, his brow furrowing. “I was still well even after the two of them had taken ill. I tried my best to bring them back to health. Your father kept begging me to leave the house so that I would not get sick. I stayed as long as I could. I tried everything I could to save them, Maria. I am sorry.” He presses his palms to his face.
“You risked your own life for them,” I say, pulling his hands away and looking into his eyes.
“For you,” he says. “For your family, for this workshop. And for my own future. What else was I to do?”
“How did you leave?”
“One day the priest and the inspectors appeared at the door. They neglected to examine me, so your father insisted that I leave before the Sanità returned to nail the cross on the door. Even if I had never fallen ill, if I had stayed in this house it would have meant a death sentence for me, too.”
“But where did you go? The Health Office had no record of you.”
“When I left here I did not know where to turn. I tried to find my mother that first night, but she was not at the boarding house or at the laundry,” he says. “And truth be told I was already not feeling well myself. By the time I had packed up my goods and left the workshop I felt the fever beginning to start. The last thing I wanted to do was infect my mother or anyone who had been kind to me. The old battiloro’s studio where I grew up had already been sold to another guildsman; I could not go back there.”
I feel pained to think of him turned out on the streets, knowing that few would open their doors to a Saracen stranger, especially one who had fallen ill.
“The sisters at the almshouse at Santa Marta took me in,” he says. “Where else was I to go? I was there for only a few days when the black boils began to appear under my arms,” he says, gesturing to his armpits. “Then, well, they appeared here, too, just like they did with your cousin,” he says, running his palms over the insides of his thighs where they meet the groin. “I felt nearly dead already. I could hardly lift my head.”
“They put you in the infirmary?”
“Yes,” he says. “The doctor and some other officials came to visit us there and they told me that I had to leave; otherwise they would have to put the institution under ban and I think the nuns wanted to avoid that at all costs. So, they boarded me on the ferry with a few other foreigners.”
“But you are not a foreigner!” I insist.
“No. And once we were in the lazzaretti there was no difference between any of us. Surely you saw that yourself. There were people from every kingdom and state—rich, poor, black, brown, white, those from the ships out in the lagoon. Anyone who believes we are different, well, pestilence and death make n
o distinction between any of us.”
I press my hands to my face again and thank God that I am free of the hellish pesthouse. I feel Cristiano’s grip on my forearms, and he helps me to standing. He presses me in his arms, then he pulls me by the hand to my father’s bed, where a new firm, straw-stuffed mattress has been placed.
I have never been so grateful for the soft cradle of a bed. I curl into a ball, and Cristiano wraps his body around me. For a few long minutes I bask in the feeling of his strong arms holding me, and I can hardly believe it is real.
Then the events of the past months begin flooding into my head.
“I went to the lazzaretto looking for you,” I say, turning to him and looking in his eyes. “No one could tell me if you were there, and I was scared to death. I wanted to tell you that I was carrying your child.”
“But Maria, I knew,” he says softly. “It is the only reason I am still here walking this earth.”
“You knew?” I gasp, pressing myself up to sitting.
“How do you think I recovered from that place?” he says, the corner of his mouth turning up. Then he draws me into his chest and closes his eyes. “A son. I could not believe it. But it is what made me fight for my life.”
“You knew!” I exclaim again. “How?”
“One day I was working out there,” he says, gesturing to the worktable on the other side of the room where my half-gilded boxes still stand. “It was before your father first fell ill. A boatman appeared in the canal. He slowed when he saw me, and asked if I was Cristiano the battiloro. He said that the gilder’s daughter was sending me a message. It took me a moment to realize that he meant you.”
“A short man in a fine gondola?” I say, grasping for the knowledge that the painter’s boatman might have succeeded in reaching Cristiano, and wondering why that evil boatman did not share this information with me.
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