The Book of Madness and Cures (29 page)

“That’s no way to treat a lady, now. No falling at the feet, man. Kiss her hand, that’s what they like!”

As he moved toward me, Olmina landed a good swift kick in his shin.

“Aaaah, aaaah!” He bawled like a babe and clutched his leg, playing it to the fullest. The small crowd that had gathered clapped and laughed, and the bagpiper sped up his tune. The Fool now hopped on one foot toward the center of the dancing. He let go of his leg and clutched a morris dancer in women’s garb, who’d appeared, jingling bells at his knees, swaying a large farthingale back and forth in imitation of abundant hips. Unfortunately one of his stuffed breasts fell, though the Fool was quick to help him push it back up, at which moment the faux lady released a hearty fart. The nearby dancers hooted and groaned, giving her wide berth.

The stench drifted over to where I sat—unless it was some other reveler stinking up the air, for there were plenty of them vomiting and relieving themselves under the poplar trees that grew near the road. I’d witnessed a few rustic fairs in the Italian countryside (and courtly festivities as well), where taking one’s pleasure meant dance and drink and bodily evacuations of all sorts.

Lorenzo managed to sit up, grinning, while Olmina helped him rise the rest of the way.

Against all better judgment, I allowed myself a little sip of the aqua vitae he’d left on the stool next to me. It was enough to warm me to the fair. I watched the children beyond the alehouse clustered in games of blindman’s buff, leapfrog, and bowls. Runlets of ale and ivy beer spilled upon the earth. Pretzels and goat pies steamed upon the tables. Carter’s bread and butter. And bowls of a foul-smelling porridge with lumps of sodden meat, probably a tough mutton.

Olmina offered me a flower of marchpane, knowing my fondness for almonds, and I nibbled it slowly, feeling my hunger for sweets return. Ring o’ roses, somersaults, and trundling hoops. The children didn’t care if their parents pulled their hair or swatted them with ladles or the flat side of a hand. It was fair day!

Churlish men strode about on stilts and whooped, some using a stilt to lift a skirt, others stalking up to the alehouse and purposefully bonking their foreheads on the crossbeams of the doors, just to make the children laugh. I found myself laughing, then quietly crying with an empty glass in hand. Olmina and Lorenzo were nowhere in sight. Mortified, I decided to slip away and walk back to the stone house alone, for it wasn’t far from the town. When I stood up, the white-haired vendor came over and slipped a small cheese in my pocket. When I fumbled through coins I emptied onto my palm from a clever purse tied to my skirt, she picked a small one (which I didn’t think was enough) and refused any more. Then she hugged me. “So, even ladies must weep in this life, eh?”

“No help for it. Thank you for the cheese, Grandmother.”

“Oh, I’m not a grandmother anymore. Lost ’em to the pestilence two years ago.” She stared off into the budding trees as if she might find them there.

Now it was my turn to hug her.

Halfway back to the manor, a few men near a twisted oak leered at me. I walked a little faster. One gadder dressed in green presented me a nosegay that I kept for fear of offending and later tossed in the hedgerow. Every now and then I heard a snuffling behind me, as if a man mimicking a wolf was stalking me. When I abruptly turned at the top of the hill to confront the one behind me, I saw the Fool, who promptly bowed widely and said, “Just looking after ye, milady.” A plump little pig was beside him, dressed in a ruff collar. The pig trotted up to me and grunted. The Fool struck a staff that resembled a long femur on the ground three times. “May the cause of yer sorrow be banished!” Then he turned, somersaulted, and ran back to the dancing, the little pig scampering after him as fast as it could.

If my father was dead, I would have his grave. I would have his ghost if I believed in such things. We’d been traveling for eight months, and all my inquiries had led nowhere. One by one I was ticking off the places empty of my father. Though I now possessed his glasses, his shoes, and the description of a man unraveling in Edenburg. Perhaps I was the one unraveling? I had rested enough. I turned to my notes for comfort before urging our departure for Montpellier, where three of my father’s letters had originated. Each time I touched the book, I regained the center of things. I found purpose in text and taxonomy.

Porphyria:

An Abhorrence of Light That Causes One to Suffer Cankers and Grow the Fur of a Beast

From the time she was a very young girl, a woman in Lucca cringed at the light of the sun, the moon, even candle glow. Her hair began to grow in such thick waves from her face and body that from a distance, Irmina was sometimes mistaken for a small costumed bear escaped from the traveling carnival. Her poor, terrified mother begged a family friend, my father’s cousin Signor Giovanni Albani, to send for a doctor. I accompanied my father to Lucca and met the young woman as she cowered in her mother’s wooden closet. As she spoke to us through her pelt, I got the impression that Irmina was an anchoress deprived of solitude. She spoke in short, broken whispers. “I want to go away from people!” I remembered a deer I sensed one morning as the animal stood hidden in a thicket, its attention directed toward me, its stillness an opening in the landscape that led to some refuge.

Irmina’s fur resembled brown water pouring, bending across stones until it reached the top of her loose chemise. I asked her if I could brush it, to gain her confidence, and she nodded. She closed her eyes as I drew the brush through her fur in careful strokes. I almost thought she would purr. After a little while my father steered me back to our purpose. He recommended that we examine her urine and saliva, and then we would suggest a course of remedy. I touched what I believed to be her shoulder and explained that we wished to help her. She shrank from my hand and pleaded with us to convey her to a cave. A small leather-bound Psalter lay near the toes of her red slippers, which protruded from a bristly layer of darker fur on the tops of her feet beneath the hem of her dress.

I thought of Santa Caterina of Siena in her white robes and black cloak, praying in her underground stone chapel at night, while in the hospital rooms of Santa Maria della Scala above her, the ill and the mad suffered in their beds. How did she bear it in the half dark, kneeling before the Man of Sorrows after spending all day tending the wounds, the gangrenes, and the invisible festerings? I once visited the little windowless cave of her chapel and unexpectedly found its half light to be like a hand laid upon the heart. Only a candle, a prie-dieu, and two small paintings, the Christ and the Magdalena completely covered in her own hair, occupied the room. But more than anything it was the odor of inevitability in the stone that strangely lifted my heart. One escaped doubt in the tomb. Here the saint found respite, silence, a recess from the sounds of pain, and acceptance.

After my father pronounced Irmina’s waters barren of happiness, he requested a sample of her spit. When he saw it, he shook his head. “The nine disappointments here originate in her father’s bloodline—discontent in love, in ambition, in beauty, absence of dreams, of wit, of friends, paucity of courage, of perseverance, of spirit. We can’t cure her, my daughter. One of the most important things you’ll learn in the art of physick is the recognition of God’s puzzles or, as some might call them, devil’s knots. He has created someone here who loves animal darkness. We can’t cure her.”

When my father spoke in this manner, I always felt uneasy and feared that the council might hear of his words. But I also sensed some wisdom turning in him like a wobbly wooden wheel. It rolled along but always seemed about to throw a rim and leave us waylaid. We consoled the parents, and as they were a family of some means, my father suggested that they could acquire land near Bagnoregio, a region reputed to contain many caves. The father received our proposal very badly and shouted at us, “My daughter will never leave this house, do you hear! Leave us alone if you can’t cure her! Charlatans!” The mother wept. As we left I glimpsed Irmina at the window, the curtain of her hair separating at the sill where her yellow sleeve and hand appeared, a clenched paw cuffed with lace.

CHAPTER 18

The Sap That Slows the World

The night before
we reached Montpellier, I turned to this letter in unspoken appeal.
Give me a hint in correspondence, give me some fresh direction, Papà.

My dear Gabriella,

My friend the papermaker has departed Montpellier and now I’m mostly alone. The majority of the professors have also left the city for want of students. After the full moon when I am better (for I’ve been keeping to my room for many days now, gnashing upon my own bitterness and illness, my loss of single-mindedness), I shall also leave for the mountains, which they say have benefits far beyond their waters. The ascent, I hope, will prove salutary. Now I have a chance to test my desire for the solitary life, and yet while alone in my bare room, all I can think about is the fresh loaf of bread, salted butter, and wine that the woman here brings me once a day. Imagine! Not that I expected panoplies of angels, but perhaps some insight into melancholia, the discomfiting routine of folding suffering into a day, the way one folds a very letter. I write and expand upon my notes for
The Book of Diseases.
Maybe that’s all there is in the end. Papers on a desk. Papers in a volume. Pages turning in the mind, one after another, or scattered by the wind of moths. I think of those great black emperor moths with crescents marked upon their wings, emblems of night. My mother always said when she spied a moth in the house, “Someone is going to die!” My father would answer, “Someone is always going to die!” And if you can imagine, we laughed. Now, what am I saying, my dear? That one must laugh at melancholia?

14 October 1588
Your humble father

We approached the town in the late afternoon, glimpsing the roofs and towers near the coast, though we couldn’t see the Gallic Sea. It was a place that appeared lit not only by sun, but by some dull refraction of light through water, maybe the long, unseen fingers of salt marsh to the south, for I could smell its languid tang. We saw egrets standing on the backs of white horses in a luminous green field, and as we rode closer, four gulls rested motionless, one upon each corner of the clock tower that pointed skyward, along with the steeples of Notre Dame des Tables, Les Généraux, and Saint Denis. My father would’ve delighted in the symmetry of the birds. And Hamish, like me, might have wished to see them lift from the tower, then light on their corners again, lift and alight.

We passed by walled orchards and lush vineyards, through the archway of the eastern stone gate, and on to the quarter of Saint Firmin the Constant, where the small gray stonework buildings of the university of medicine stood, abandoned.

We knocked at the heavy wooden door of Dr. Joubert’s address, a plain stone abode. A young man in his thirties emerged and greeted us with enthusiasm, like one who hasn’t conversed with peers in a long while. He wore a mustache rather than a beard and appeared to be in excellent health, of sanguine temperament.

“Welcome, Dr. Mondini, splendid to meet you and your companions!” he proclaimed. He bowed to me and Olmina, then nodded to Lorenzo and stepped out into the street. “I have the keys here, there are two—this large iron key is for the front door, and the smaller brass ones are for your rooms. I don’t intend to frighten you, but you’ll want to lock the doors at night for safety. You never know when the Huguenots might come round again, seeking to denounce or detain anyone they think is a Catholic.” He looked right and left in the street, though it was completely empty.

“Thank you, sir, we’ll follow your good advice. As strangers we’re unaccustomed to the ways of your town. But tell me, why do the streets appear so vacant at this early hour?”

“Ah yes. This quarter once housed over three thousand students, and now, since the university was ransacked”—he paused here, looking down out of deference and then back up at us—“there are fewer than a hundred left. Most of the university’s books and furniture were destroyed by the Huguenots, you know, the French Calvinists, during the religious wars.”

I’d heard about this but didn’t realize the extent of the ruin.

“I’m so sorry to hear of it.”

“Well, best not to speak of it any more,” Dr. Joubert said in a low voice. “You never know who’s listening. And since I myself converted, I must forget the old life.” He hastily changed demeanor, moving with a quick, light step as we approached our lodging in one of several pale gray two-story buildings with dark slate roofs, just down the street. He knocked at a worn wooden door, and a young widow with flaxen hair opened and smiled at us shyly. She had a remarkably fresh complexion and lively blue eyes that contradicted her black mourning dress.