The Book of Madness and Cures (22 page)

The next morning, Professor Otterspeer finally sent along a message with his servant, saying that he’d returned to Leiden and that he would come to collect me so that we might attend a dissection.

A few hours later, I watched him approach from between the half-open shutters of my room. I recognized him from the frontispiece engraving to his volume on anatomy, which my father possessed in Venetia, for the artist had rendered a fine likeness. He trudged through the snow along the canal and knocked loudly upon the door. From my second-story vantage, his black scholar’s cap bobbed outlandishly above the frothy lace of his collar, like an overturned bowl on a river.

I gave a last tug to arrange my own ruffed collar, attached to a bit of silk covering my chest. Olmina brought me my new indigo woolen cape with a hood trimmed in ermine. What a luxury! I’d ordered it from a tailor off the Rapenburg Canal the second day after we’d arrived, to stave off the cold. Olmina requested a skirt the color of butter and was much pleased with the finished garment. The Dutch are truly master weavers, I marveled now. Tailor Zander, an uncommonly tall man, had stooped with great flourishes to present the serges from the coarsest thickness to the lightest nap, in tones of red, yellow, blue, brown, cream, and black. I was distracted by his fingers, surely the longest and deftest I’d ever witnessed. He kept a silver thimble on his third finger, even though he wasn’t sewing at the time, and a row of straight pins in his waistcoat.

The anatomy theater would be quite cold, so I hurriedly grabbed my gloves from the windowsill, where I’d thoughtlessly laid them the previous night. The lambskin was crisp, but the wool inside quickly gained warmth from my hands. I stepped out of my room and descended the narrow flight of stairs.

Lorenzo was nodding in an amused fashion at Professor Otterspeer, who stood just inside the door and spoke an Italian in which he fancied himself fluent. When the professor saw me, he smiled imperiously, red cheeked with rosacea, which blossomed like a map upon his face.

“Signorina Mondini, my dear lady! A pleasure to meet you at last, in person,” he declared. “Please forgive my inconvenient delay.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about it, dear Professor,” I replied. “It’s good to meet you as well. I must thank you for procuring our lodging. If you don’t mind, I prefer to be called Dr. Mondini.”

He raised both shaggy eyebrows then as he took stock of me. I was about to step outside, but he stopped me, holding my arm as he lifted up a small cloth sack I hadn’t noticed, and announced, “I have something here that your father left behind.”

I opened it and peered inside to find a pair of gored black shoes, slightly worn, smelling of neglect. Olmina took them from me quickly, saying, “Go now with the professor. You can ponder these later.” She glanced at Lorenzo with a knowing look, as if to say,
The father is growing ever more distracted,
or was it me of whom she was thinking?

“Go on,” said Lorenzo, giving me a little push toward the professor, who’d already stepped outside.

Was my father leaving parts of himself behind, like bread crumbs in the old tales, to tell the path? First the glasses, now these shoes.

“I trust you have viewed an anatomy before?” the professor queried me, somewhat condescendingly, as we began to walk along the canal.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve observed a corpse cutting several times in Padua with my father”—that last word stung—“but I look forward to witnessing the Dutch manner of dissection, if indeed it’s distinct from the Italian.” I added mechanically, “I appreciate your kind invitation,” taking small, hesitant steps on the icy ground.

“Your father would have wished it, though I don’t know if it is kind or not,” he said, “since this morning is thick as unshorn wool.”

We proceeded to tunnel through the fog, which hung so densely now it remained open behind us like a corridor that slowly folded in upon itself.

“Professor,” I said, measuring out my concern in small words, “can you tell me more about my father and his stay here?”

“There is nothing much to tell,” he said curtly, squinting ahead into the dim wall of white. “Your father lodged here for several months in the very cottage you’re renting.”

“Really?” I’d imagined my father in finer receiving quarters.

“Yet he remained a very closed man. It is dangerous to be so closed. He would lock himself up for days at a time. Now, while I’m respectful of the solitary sort, if you’re not a hermit pressed into the discipline of prayer—and maybe even if you are a hermit—the mind can become an extravagant thing, lose its bearings or, contrariwise, become so bent upon a certain object that all manner of balance is lost. Especially for one who is not accustomed to our winters.”

A few other people, spectral, moved past us as we spoke, though we could scarcely see them. It seemed we were alone in a pale room of indeterminate dimensions.

“Did he behave strangely otherwise or say anything untoward?”

“Once, he said he was studying the edifying effects of the grave and needed to be left alone.” My companion shook his head.

“Do you remember any pattern to his moods?”

“What do you mean?”

“Certain days, certain times…?”

“Ah, I see what you mean.” He stopped, looked up, and appeared to be searching the air. “No, I can’t really say that I took note, for I lost patience with him a bit and gave him what he wanted—a self-imposed isolation. I informed him that he could be edified all he wanted, but to let me know when he wished to discuss medicine again, like the good doctor he was. I was somewhat offended, you see, by what I perceived as a lapse in collegiality.”

“Did he ever come round?”

“Yes, the day he left. Your father seemed genial enough then, apologized for his abruptness. He attributed his attitude to the cold and the perpetual dusk of the Rhinlandt winter. He explained that he must further his studies in Edenburg—”

“Ah,” I said quietly, considering my next destination. I had thought we’d go to London, but I decided to go on to Edenburg.

The professor didn’t seem to notice. He continued, “And so graciously, upon departure in the early spring, he embraced me and I forgave him, for I’m affected by the winters myself, and they’ve grown worse and worse these past years.”

The professor stared down toward the canal, which lay solidly frozen, where small boats sat like so many shoes stuck in ice. Occasional objects studded the surface—a barrel, a rasping log, the odd coil of rope, a broken wooden skate.

One question nagged at me, but I didn’t speak it aloud:
Why did he leave his shoes behind?

When we crossed the bridge toward the Beguinage, I shuddered at a bloated gray piglet that stared blankly at the sky, half its body lodged beneath the ice, two legs stuck out like the tines of a pitchfork.

“What a waste of good sausage,” gibed Professor Otterspeer.

I drew my hood close about my face with an involuntary shiver, thinking of the pigs I’d observed as a child, hung from the stable eaves when they were to be butchered, near my great-aunt’s house in Fossatello. Their trussed bodies twisted like the pupae I plucked from bark when I wandered in the woods. The pigs shrieked in the blue morning hour as the butcher and his wife held buckets beneath the brisk red streams issuing from their stuck throats. Even now I couldn’t touch roast pig. Wise Ovid was not altogether wrong when he wrote:

Peace filled the world—until some futile brain

Envied the lions’ diet and gulped down

A feast of flesh to fill his greedy guts.

When at last we reached the anatomy theater, the professor paid our admittance, as was customary, and we entered the hall. We were among the first to arrive, part of an audience that he assured me would be mostly students, some wealthy burghers, a small number of their wives, and other curious townspeople willing to pay the fee. The  corpse lay outstretched on the dissection slab, his body beneath a coarse linen sheet.

“And who is the unfortunate youth?” I asked.

“I believe he was some vagrant, probably searching for work in the mills. He was found on one of the back roads, naked and rigid as a block of wood in the ditch next to his bony mule. Someone had stolen his clothes and boots,” Professor Otterspeer informed me. “The wretch lay unclaimed for several days. An ignorant foreigner, no doubt.”

His comment upset me, but I said nothing.

We approached the subject and the professor lifted the cloth.

“He appears nearly intact,” I observed, avoiding the man’s face, “unlike those cadavers removed from the gibbet, which have been scavenged by wild dogs and ravens.”

He lowered the cloth with a peculiar tenderness. “I’m surprised that you can view the corpse so candidly, Signorina Mondini. Most women keep their distance. As perhaps they should, don’t you think?” There was a slight gleam in his eye, which led me to believe he didn’t speak seriously, though he wasn’t entirely in jest either.

I ignored the fact that he would not address me as Dottoressa. I asked, “So you haven’t brought your wife to attend an anatomy, then?”

“Oh no, my wife would never come, though she has no trouble chopping the head off a pullet and yanking out its entrails! I’ve actually tried to persuade her to visit, for I believe the demonstration to be most enlightening. But she sees no point in it, calls it an unsightly spectacle. But there are other wives here I could introduce you to.” Professor Otterspeer sniffed slightly and withdrew a petit-point handkerchief for his florid nose.

“That won’t be necessary,” I replied. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I didn’t ask how they came by permission to dissect the body. Even though unclaimed, such a corpse in Italy would be buried in a pauper’s grave. In Padua, where for the most part the bodies of criminals were used, dissection was considered the worst possible punishment, inflicted in addition to the death sentence. Some people believed that when the dead were resurrected on Judgment Day, the dissected corpse would wander about searching for its lost parts.

“Well, my dear, your father has certainly raised you with the independence of a good son. I’ll leave you, then, to view our fine collection of skeletons. If you’ll excuse me, I must speak to some of my students.” He bowed and retreated.

When he spoke the word “father”—in fact, every time he’d spoken the word—I felt a numbing cut at the center of me. Now, in this setting, I missed my father more than ever.

I looked once more upon the cadaver, foreshortened from a distance, the head closest, the legs pointing straight away from me. Professor Otterspeer hadn’t replaced the cloth all the way, and the face lay partly exposed. The dark yellow stubble of the dead man’s beard stood out on his chin like random bits of chaff, and his stringy blond hair fell away from his broad brow.

I felt the vague shock I always felt in the presence of the dead, the unsettling sense of defilement, which usually passed like a brief nausea. The man’s life, after all, was gone. He was no more than a carcass of days, but one that would yield up its secret structures, the marvels of the inner body, even in death apparent. I couldn’t allow myself, though, to imagine the color of his eyes, nor what they had sought out in life. The plump young woman, perhaps, who would caress his face, the impoverished family he’d left behind. Or the joy afforded by his mule’s hot breath upon his frostbitten fingers. Nor did I wish to know his name.

Still, the nausea didn’t pass.

I turned away and surveyed the room. I remembered my father’s caution from the very first occasion I viewed a dissection. “If you fear the corpse,” he’d said gently, “be sure not to look at the face or the hands, Gabriella, for they are the most human.” What if my father was such a corpse now, mistaken for a vagrant, his parts cut open and identified, then tossed away in some foreign land as victuals for dogs, rats, and vultures? But I pushed this thought violently from my mind and continued to look around the wooden amphitheater.

Skeletons were arranged in various postures, the human ones holding banners with Latin phrases such as
PULVIS ET UMBRA SUMUS
and
HOMO BULLA
. The skeletons didn’t sadden me but felt familiar and faintly ridiculous, one with a plumed helmet, seated upon a fleshless nag, crossbow in hand, and one in the corner casually leaning on a shovel.

All around me, men with slit pantaloons and doublets, and a small number of women, some with many short slashes in their sleeves and bodices, according to the current fashion, gathered and conversed, their vivid colors alone making the chamber warmer now. I glanced out the long windows on either side of the room but could see nothing of the frozen garden. The fog had orphaned us from the rest of the world.

I walked around the amphitheater and examined the animal skeletons. The wolf, singularly designed for the hunt, seemed almost friendly to me, in that it so resembled a dog. On impulse I stroked the chalky, smooth slope between the eyes. How benign was bone that once was threatening. The weasel presented a sleek form and egg-shaped skull, as if the meal it so relished corresponded to the form of its thoughts. The still deer relayed the quickness of its bones.

But I was most drawn to certain animal skeletons that I hadn’t observed before, such as the elegant swan, emblem of poets. The skeleton was no less pure than the creature. The swan, by virtue of its very size, exhibited mythical bones. Yet along with its beauty there was a kind of monstrosity, especially in the serpentine neck, which seemed inordinately long and curved, surmounted by the skull, which resembled a leper clapper, while the heavier skeletal body and great wings hung behind with a contrary force. The pinions, broad as they were, could mirror those of a seraph. If swans were as fierce as geese, though, then they would be demon and angel in a single creature.

“Signorina?”

The professor had returned. He led me to one of the privileged benches near the front, clasping my elbow through my sleeve most firmly, as if I might fall without his support.