The Book of Madness and Cures (5 page)

Now I closed and firmly latched the dark green shutters on my window for the last time. “Thank you, Lorenzo,” I told him. “I’m coming. I was just leaving my devotions.” Even as I excused myself in this way, I thought of the old proverb:
Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists.

Lorenzo grinned, as if he’d overheard my thoughts.

I clasped the twin dolphin handles of my oak medicine chest, and refusing Lorenzo’s help (I always carry it myself, wary of the influence of others upon the medicaments), I descended the cramped stairs.

“Mamma?” I called out.

I was greeted with silence. Lorenzo stepped back as I called out her name again, this time adding a farewell.

From the cool recesses of the house, her voice shot out through the corridors. “Now I will be free to enjoy my life!” Her bluster didn’t fool me.

Again, I said, “Farewell!” I wanted to say,
Be well, Mamma. Be content,
but my throat closed and my mouth tasted brackish. The old salt of grief was in it.

There was no reply. Silence dropped like a heavy plumb in my belly, which tightened against it. Against weeping. Despite having endured her swerves of mind and heart for years, I still wanted my mother’s blessing.

Once I was outside, the sun’s glare, multiplied by the water, struck me full on.

“Finalmente!” Olmina glowered in the bow of the pitching gondola.

I stepped into the stern, followed by Lorenzo, and was thrown unceremoniously forward as I flung the chest down with a thud in the center. I chose the seat facing backward, to see the house I was leaving. The faded ocher walls stood discolored by the sea, gray and green at the foundations as if the building itself were a decaying body. Bricks the hue of dried blood were exposed near the water where the plaster had fallen away. The weathered doors, toothed from rot at the bottom, remained closed. Was it possible that I hadn’t noticed the decline of my family’s home until just now?

Yet other houses were in decline too or crutched with scaffolding in restoration. As we slid through the calm water to the steady dip, pull, lift, drip of the oar, I watched the Zattere retreat, then San Marco appear beyond the other bell towers, steeples, canted roofs, the other quarters shabby, mossy, glorious, gleaming, prayerful, lively, sorrowful, muted, exuberant, fleshy, fabulous, then diminished—made one by distance, faint, flat, bluish white, thin as gauze I might use to wrap a wound.

The gondola swayed, and I lifted the satchel of my father’s letters to my lap. Though I knew I’d packed them earlier, I checked again—they were all inside, tied neatly in bundles.

I watched my home recede for the last time. Every faraway window was shuttered against the heat but one. No hand parted a curtain there. No visible face watched us go.

CHAPTER 3

Dr. Cardano’s House

The fields on
the road to Padua shimmered with ripening millet, and an army of cicadas steadily drilled the air. As a curious little girl I’d once brought my father a handful of perfectly split cicada husks and asked what happened to their bodies rent asunder at the highest pitch of summer. Did they turn into small scorched spirits? Did the spirits then chafe the air in heaven? My father had smiled at these questions.
Gabriella,
he teased,
they sing until they burst!

We approached Margera in the gondola after little more than an hour, just as the midday bells began to ring out. My uncle Ubaldo awaited us on the small wooden dock and led us to the animals: five mules and his own horse, Orfeo, a fine black Murgese. Orfeo gleamed darkly in the noonday sun and jostled the mules, which stood nearly as high as he did.

“Gabriella!” My uncle clasped my arm, and through my sleeve I could feel the calluses from ironmongery on his hand. “Aunt Cecilia is very disappointed that you’re not stopping at our home. What’s the hurry after all these years?”

“It’s restlessness unbottled at last, dear Uncle. I don’t want to linger at the outset of the journey, and I’m anxious to cross the mountains.”

I leaned forward for a hasty farewell kiss, first on one cheek and then the other, as Lorenzo finished outfitting the mules with our supplies. How odd it was to say good-bye to the near image of the man for whom I was searching!

After riding sidesaddle for a short distance, I grew uncomfortable, and against Olmina’s protests I unfurled my linen skirts and rode astride my horse (the way my uncle had taught me many summers before). What a relief! In future I vowed to wear breeches beneath my skirts in the style of Venetian courtesans. I’d packed just such a pair of fine women’s breeches for relaxing when skirts felt too oppressive, and now I had another purpose for them. The luxury of damask would serve as riding garment.

Behind me the walls of Venetia—her palazzi,
scuole,
churches, and convents, her infinite exquisite and horrific prisons—blurred with the swampy sea. She was truly a strange theater. For as much as travelers glorified her beauty and wealth, the delicious, insubstantial semblances she put on, I knew her as substantial, weighted, and hard. Stones, bricks, pilings driven into the clay. She stood against the vaporous and mutable sea that was always trying to claim her, and the best she could do was to withstand it, to toy with it for a while. Venetia, a dense accretion of lives, announced the solidity of those lives in a broad villa or narrowing passageway. In stone lions, parapets, and empire. But the water was always there. Much has been made of the city and her looking glass. But sometimes I thought she was a flawed and dull glass (what is glass after all, but sand?) trying to reflect the water without much success. How could our edifices, how could we, in these poor, troubled bodies, cast light?

As we traveled farther away, the city dimmed even more. The men of the Physicians’ Guild and their jealousies lost their edge. The tightening noose of their injunctions against my practice lost its threat. I began to feel free of them, able to work my skills upon whoever was in need of my help along our journey.

I’d already resolved to pursue notes on diseases completely unknown to those most esteemed doctors of the guild. My father would be glad of that. In a letter from Leiden in the spring of 1581, he wrote:

I grow frustrated with my notes at times and have failed to appreciate, perhaps, the good degree of your help in these matters. However did you unravel my thoughts, my girl? I think that maybe your unusual position as a woman in this profession allowed you a certain winding approach that, while appearing childish at the outset, proved more effective than my sharpened intelligence at times. I recall when you brushed the hair of the furry girl, drawing her out of her closet, rather than directly assessing the amount of hair on her body and its obstruction of her life. We were better able to suggest a situation for her, though her parents wouldn’t hear of it. In short, I miss your sinuous logic. Together we make the finer doctor. But alas, the world does not welcome women to this role. Yet I keep you as muse, though you are distant, as you must be.

How many hundreds of miles would we have to travel? Every mile was a thousand steps,
mille,
according to the ancient Romans. Olmina sniffled softly as we rode, but Lorenzo was gleeful. “Stop that noise, woman, we are going to see the world!”

“There is no world outside of Venetia,” she said.

“We will carry our world with us, dear Olmina,” I reassured her.

“It seems that we
are,
” complained Lorenzo under his breath, annoyed at the necessity of three pack mules for our leather bags and provisions.

“Lontan da casa sua, vicino a qualche disgrazia,” Olmina warned.
Far from home, closer to misfortune.

“
O Dio mio,
we cannot live by fear alone!” Lorenzo said, and then he slapped the rump of his mule to escape us.

We both began to laugh at the odd sight of his ruffled thatch of gray hair and short, bony limbs and body jouncing down the dry road.

Later we were no longer amused when the dust settled upon us like grimy flour.
You’re going to regret this journey, Gabriella, for it will only bring hardship!
my mother had warned. We’d only begun, and already my ungloved hands were swollen in the heat as I wiped the grit from my face with a small lace-fringed handkerchief and drew the veil down from my broad straw hat.

We were silent as we passed through the small village of Luciafuccina. No one was about. Undoubtedly they were eating the midday meal in the fields or within the cool of their houses, shuttered tightly against the heat and mosquitoes, which coagulated from the very air and attached themselves to us like floating headpieces.

Lorenzo stood up ahead, swatting at the cloud that hung in a dark halo about his head as he watered his wayward mule at the edge of a line of poplars. Their branches teased us with silvery pieces of light, a treasure that never reached the earth.

Two more hours to Padua.

As we rode on, the flatlands gave way to lazy slopes where villas with ramshackle dovecotes clustered under the cool limbs of great oaks and chestnuts, overlooking orchards strung with grapevines. Stone-terraced or walled gardens of lettuces, radicchio, melons, and herbs checkered the land with an even geometry, as if a giant with a tremendous rake had grooved the curved earth into squares, lines running first one way and then perpendicular, so that the plots would surely appear woven if one were a hawk wheeling above them.

I was lulled by their pleasant aspect; when I felt I might fall asleep on Orfeo’s back, I caught the refreshing smell of wet sand from the Brenta River. The grand gateway into the city of Padua—the pale stone Porta del Portello—was flanked by rows of gondolas and boats knocking against the stone steps. Boatmen loaded all manner of things for market or transport, from caskets of wine, baskets of fruits and vegetables, and lengths of wood to portly dignitaries. Some empty boats thudded with deep, hollow sounds against the stones of the city’s thick bulwarks. The raucous boatmen were a spectacle, emboldened to comment on every passerby, taunting students, singing to women, and hooting even at nobility!

Of course I kept my gaze straight ahead as I rode out in front, though I was tempted to smile at the foolish lyrics they sang to my horse:

Oh handsome black mount,

bearing delight!

I’d gladly swap burdens to give

her the gallop all night!

Lorenzo, who rode at the end of our string of animals, raised his fist. Beside me, Olmina sat upright and impassive as an oar as her mule steadily plodded forward.

My friend Dr. Cardano’s home was a dark red two-story villa, separated from others by walled gardens, overshadowed by a broad plane tree that rested one limb firmly on a corner of the red tile roof, like a workman resting an elbow on a wall, shrewdly observing the world. The villa appeared freshly plastered, like an old fop made up as a young dandy, for the windows and roof still sagged.

Dr. Cardano took some time to come to the door. When he opened it, I noted his muddled look and the sparse white hair gone astray around his face. He smiled and rubbed the top of his head briskly, as if to kindle his wits. The blue veins of his temples stood under translucent skin. “Dear Gabriella! I’ve been waiting for you.”

“I’m so glad to see you, Dr. Cardano!”

I took his thin arm, and we passed into the cool interior of the house, the red tile floors underfoot still holding the cold of night. Olmina followed me. Lorenzo walked around to the back, where he could loose the animals to feed. I was glad to be in this household again, for it had once been a second home for me. I recalled when my father first brought me here as a girl of eight.

He had bragged to Dr. Cardano, “My daughter has a good eye for locating wild herbs, and you’ll find her skillful at making a poultice. But most of all she’s a fine observer.”

“Hmm, we’ll have to be careful what we say and do around her,” joked Dr. Cardano as he bent to take my hand and peer into my face, while I stared at him boldly (a ploy to cover my fright).

“What a plucky child!”

From then on, I grew more and more into the spirited child he imagined me.

We entered a darkened room, where Olmina folded back the creaky green shutters. “How are you, dear girl?” Dr. Cardano turned to me. “You’ve grown into such a captivating woman.”

“Ah, good Doctor, I see that you’re not wasting any time,” I teased.

He shrugged. “I’m old and have no time.”

“Are you ill?” I grew alarmed.

“No, no. Old age is the illness.” He grinned. “But I’m still lively enough.”

The weariness of the road abruptly fell away as I recognized the room my father had habitually occupied when we’d come to stay. The room felt untouched and intimate as a closet left behind by someone who has died.

For a moment I couldn’t bear it. Yet it was a spacious room with a large canopied bed in the center, a small bed niched in the wall, and a pleasant sitting area near the window. From there I could view the silvery orchards of olives and their lengthening shadows cast eastward toward Venetia. Orfeo and the mules grazed contentedly on grasses under the trees. An old woman in a black scarf and dress squatted near the far garden wall, resting her arms on her knees, her skirts fanned out around her.