The Leper's Companions (12 page)

Her back was slightly hunched and there was a thickening of flesh and muscle where the neck joined the shoulders, as if something of the stubbornness of her nature had concentrated itself there. Her neck was often painful when she woke in the mornings, but then the pain shifted and was quickly forgotten.

Even though her body had grown tired she knew how much more difficult such a journey would have been when she was still bleeding every month. A bundle of rags stiff with dried blood chafing at her thighs and when there was no blood then the inevitable stirring of a new baby in her womb.

She would often talk to these babies as they grew inside her, becoming fond of them long before she saw their crumpled faces. The one she had felt closest to was the one who had emerged with a huge, slack mouth, like some creature from the seabed. For a few moments he had stared at her with eyes as gray as winter and then he was gone. Her husband had cradled him, not understanding that he was dead until he touched the cold fish mouth with his lips.

Her husband was often with her, but then she had never doubted that he would be. On the first night after they had crossed the sea, he hammered on the door in her dream and burst into the room, hugging her so tight she could hardly breathe.

“Can you feel how I am holding you?” he said. “Can you feel how my body presses against yours? Oh, I am so hungry!”

And then he took her hand and stroked it across the curled hairs of his belly so she knew how empty it was.

“I will feed you,” she said to him, and she put her face close to his and opened her mouth wide like a bird feeding its young so that he could plunge his head inside her and find food.

He was walking beside her now on the road, his step synchronized with hers. When she looked up she saw that we were passing through a great forest of oak trees as powerful as an army of saints or the massed souls of the dead. Their bark was thick and broken and bubbling with old age. Some had been struck by lightning, leaving nothing more than a burnt-out shell of wood and yet their branches were decorated with sprigs of pale young leaves and the ground was littered with acorns.

You could find signs of animals everywhere: patches of deep loose earth where the wild boar had been rooting, the stink of fox, the sharp footprints of deer or bison, and occasionally the presence of some dark shape watching with fear or hunger from among the shadows of the trees.

I so much wanted to talk to the shoemaker's wife. I wanted to ask her about her life and how it appeared to her when she looked back on it. Had she been happy, even during the time when her husband was blind, or when he was crying? How did she see her future now that he was dead and could only visit her in the silence of dreams? Would she choose a different path to follow if she could go back and
begin again, and would that path still find her here on the road, walking?

But before I had the opportunity to speak there was the sound of branches crashing and cracking in the undergrowth and something staggered out from among the trees and stood balanced on two hind legs, swaying and panting in front of us.

It was a creature shaped like a man but covered in shaggy hair like a wild animal. The hair was dark and matted with broken twigs and last year's bracken. The features of the face were hidden in every detail except for the gray staring eyes.

Which was when the hunters came. Two dogs as delicate as hares, ululating their delight in the chase and two men on horseback following at their heels. Between them they cornered their quarry against an oak tree and one of the men threw a net over him, tangling him into it. He made a deep bellowing noise and I heard him cry out, “Mercy, mercy, mercy!” but no one listened to him. A spear was rammed through the mesh of the net and into his heart.

We watched because we could not stop ourselves from watching. The men dismounted and got the body free from the net. They took out sharp knives and they began the work of slitting and pulling until they had removed the covering of skin like a heavy garment. Then we all saw without any doubt that this was a man they had killed, red and shining.

The shoemaker's wife came forward. Sitting beside the
corpse, she took the head in her lap and began to cry. The authority of her anguish made the dogs and the men move back. She was crying for this particular death, but she was also crying for her husband's blindness and his tears and how she still missed the warmth of his body night after night. And all the time she gazed with pity and tenderness at the naked wild man, as raw as a wound.

When finally she came to the end of her lament, she stood up, quite practical and matter-of-fact, drying her eyes and blowing her nose and pushing back the loose hair streaked with gray. “Shall we go on now,” she said quietly, “it's getting late.” She placed herself between me and Sally, like a horse in the shafts of a cart, and we set off once more.

We spent the night at an inn called The Three Kings. We ate roasted stork, which tasted bitter and pungent. We slept in goosefeather beds that swallowed us into their clinging heat. Over breakfast a man who was taking mineral salt and bales of linen to Venice, offered to give us a ride in his cart drawn by two oxen. We settled ourselves among the sacks and bundles. The cart made such a noise as it rattled and juddered along the road that it was impossible to think, let alone try to speak.

The air became colder and more thin as we entered the foothills of the Alps. Trees were replaced by grass and then by rock and scree and the first scatterings of snow. A tiny spike-horned deer darted like a lizard across a steep rock face. Big eagles floated in the sky. The mountains that had
looked as insubstantial as clouds in the morning light, now appeared solid and menacing.

There was a tollgate by the narrow pass that crossed through the barrier of the mountains from one side to the other. We all clambered down from the cart and went to pay our money to a man who took it without speaking or smiling, his hand closing over the coins and vanishing them into a deep pocket.

The larger of the two oxen was taken out of harness and tied to a length of rope and with its head bowed in submission and its feet treading carefully, it led us one by one between the high banks of snow and ice. Occasionally it would pause to smell the snow as if receiving information about areas of fragility that were to be avoided. We were told that should the animal make a mistake then we must quickly let go of the rope before being pulled down into whatever danger had been revealed.

As the shoemaker's wife went through the pass, she knew with an absolute certainty that she would only be making this crossing one time, she would never retrace her steps. The realization made her feel very light-headed, as if she had been drinking wine in the clear air.

The road took shape again as we began to slip and slide our way down into a more southern world. We passed meadows with cattle grazing and the stretched branches of vines. I will never forget my first sight of the black flickering flames of the cypress trees, held up against the blueness of the sky. A
cloud shifted to one side to reveal a glistening lake in the depths of the valley.

The leper turned to me just after I had seen the lake. The pale gleam of his scars shadowed by the gray hood was like the reflection of sunlight on water.

“So you are here with us after all,” he said. “I thought you might be.”

T
he leper was sitting so close to me that his shoulder was leaning and moving against mine. I could feel his heart beating within its cage of bone, the way his hands always shook no matter how he tried to steady them, the stretched tightness of his skin.

“It's different for me, coming here,” he said and his words were as quiet as my own thoughts so that I could not be sure if anyone else heard him. “You see, I am returning home. I was born in Venice and I presumed I would live there all my life. But then I lost someone I had loved and I needed to escape to some distant country until the pain of my sadness had blurred and shifted and become less of a burden to me.

“I set out as a pilgrim bound for Jerusalem but before
I reached my destination the sickness came and turned me into a leper. I had to wander among strangers for a long time. But now that time is over. Soon I will be treading in the footsteps of my own past and I will be able to see how much I have forgotten over the years and how much I still remember.”

Even as he spoke the leper could feel the familiarity of the landscape creeping up on him from all sides. They were following the banks of the river Agio, which feeds the lagoon surrounding the scattered islands of Venice. Big mosquitoes were whirling like noisy halos above his head and their bite was as sharp as ever.

At the edge of the lagoon there was a smell of salt water that was far older and sweeter than the smell of any other he had known since. It came to him like a first dim recollection of childhood. And then there was its soft milky turquoise color, and the sound of it lapping against the side of a pier, and the leper could feel all the sleeping seeds of memory beginning to stir and stretch themselves in a single moment.

A rowing boat pulled up alongside the pier and the boatman smiled a conspirator's smile as the leper stepped aboard. “So you have come back at last,” he said. “Welcome.” His voice rustling like leaves, his teeth black, his breath musty from old wine. When the leper saw the lines of age which had grown on this man's face, he understood then how long he had been gone. But he could not recall the man's name, no matter how he searched for it.

He sat down on a bench between Sally and the shoemaker's wife, while the priest and a woman whose head was turned from him sat on the bench opposite. He watched how the oars broke the water into shattered fragments of reflected light.

They passed those flat islands of mud and reeds that seem to float as thin as lily leaves on the surface of the lagoon. A flock of white egrets flew silently into the air, their wings wonderfully languid. A layer of mist clung around the boat, but the day was becoming clear and in the distance the sun was shining on the metal dome of Saint Mark's church.

And then the woman raised her head and the leper saw who it was. She nodded to him in solemn recognition. Her face was a mask of colors: white and red and black, carnival bright. The slippery cloth of her dress was tight around her breasts. She had not changed at all, although the leper had forgotten the coldness of her expression, the transparency of her skin, and the savagery of her, as if she had clawed feet within her shoes and scaly wings folded between her shoulder blades.

Seeing her now, the leper saw himself as the young man he once had been. He watched as she led him to a room in a house where the wooden bed was carved with curling patterns and painted with fresh gold paint. He felt her licking his skin and biting into his flesh with her teeth and her nails until nothing existed for him beyond the four walls of her being. But then, even as he stared at her, she turned away and vanished and Sally was shaking him and telling him to hurry
because everyone was waiting and the boatman needed to be paid.

In front of him was the palace with its colonnades and balconies and the black and white tiles of the walkway were dizzy under his feet. And here were the two stone pillars marking the entrance to the great square, the one carrying Saint Theodore standing on the back of a crocodile, the other a golden lion brandishing a golden flag.

A metal bar was fixed between the pillars, with a dead man hanging from it, suspended by a chain. The fish market had its place at the foot of the pillars. The leper looked at the heaped fish and the limp man and he found them merging into one double mermaid creature in his mind: the scales becoming skin, the fishtail becoming human flesh, the cold becoming warmth.

He remembered the story of the mermaid who came to the village and brought such chaos with her and he felt he suddenly understood something about Sally and her sadness, which was close to his sadness in a way. And so he told her the story of what had happened to him long ago and how it had changed the direction of his life.

“I was accused of murder,” he said. “The woman I loved was found floating dead in a canal. Everyone said I must have killed her. They wanted to make me confess to the crime and because I remained silent they removed the doors and windows from my house. It was a custom of the city. I had to walk in and out under the scrutiny of strangers. But I did not confess. I ran away.”

“And had you killed her?” Sally asked, her face blank of expression, making it impossible to guess if she also found him guilty.

“No, I don't think so,” the leper said, “although I have gone over the events so often in my mind that I have become uncertain about what really happened, beyond the fact of her death and my unhappiness. I don't even know if we were still together as lovers, or if she had already left me before she died. All that I know is that she was gone and I remained.”

He began to walk more quickly, taking big strides as they crossed the square, so that Sally and the others were almost running to keep up with him.

They passed a church like a forest of tall trees and pushed through a crowd of men who were intense with talk and laughter. The smell of spices which he had almost forgotten. The vivid liquid colors of velvet and silk. A monkey chattering on a chain, and then the woman's voice calling out his name, desperate with anger or despair. And there she was again, staring down at him from the window of a house, her long hair like flowing water.

Now faster than ever over three arched bridges, through a doorway and into a courtyard overhung with the leaves of a vine. Life-sized marble figures were grouped together in the dappled shadows like a welcoming party: naked men and women, a crouching lion with a human face and another creature with sharp wings and clawed feet.

The leper led his companions into this house which had once been his home. The rooms had high decorated ceilings
and the sounds of the day came pouring in through the open windows. Everything had been left undisturbed, although the furniture, the books, the wall hangings, even the plates and glasses, were muffled by a blanket of neglect which gave them a strange uniformity of color and texture.