The Book of Madness and Cures (32 page)

Lorenzo passed me a hard crust of bread, a bit of cold cooked sausage, and some cherry brandy from Roussillon. “You must fortify yourself, signorina.”

The two of us munched our food gratefully while the wind roared down the mountain, shaking the thatch above us. A creature snuffled in the leaves outside the hut, too softly for a bear, I thought—probably a hedgehog. Lorenzo pinched the wick, and we fell into a dense animal darkness. He began to snore loudly. In spite of the noise, I began to nod off…

Maurizio whispers, “Gabriella.”

His handsome green eyes stray past me. “Gabriella!” He wears the white smock of the sickhouse and his feet are bare. How beautiful they are, strong and arched, the beveled toes, and then above the ankles I see small wings pulsing. He stands in the center of a long room in Santa Caterina’s Hospital, sweating profusely. Droplets run down his legs and puddle at his feet. Then I’m near his bedside, where he’s lying down. Long rows of vacant beds that fill me with terror line the walls. Perhaps they were emptied by the plague? When I bend to kiss him, he is still and cold. But the pulse in his winged feet contradicts blue skin. I press my lips to his chill forehead, to each dead eye, to the stricken lips. He doesn’t stir. I rest my head on his feet, my long hair a shroud. His pulse is in my ear. I’m sure of it and want to bring him back. I stroke the still-beating wings at the ankles, but Maurizio doesn’t return.

The animal stench, mules’ braying, and icy air creeping through chinks in the stones awakened me. One of the mules shifted his hooves in agitation. The door was slightly ajar; Lorenzo had gone out, perhaps to relieve himself. I got up and peered out upon a changed landscape: the earth was muffled under snow.

The tips of my fingers tingled even within their gloves, and my toes within their boots. I saw the faint pockmarks of Lorenzo’s footsteps leading down toward the edge of the stunted pines.

Someone moved there. My spine sharpened. The beasts sheltering with us jerked their heads up and down now in a panic. Olmina slept her blessed sleep, undisturbed. As I watched, the brown figure whipped something side to side. I stood halted by fear. The bear, for that was the thing I beheld, shook Lorenzo like a sack of grain. I couldn’t move. Then I jerked into motion, yelled, and stumbled forward, falling halfway to my knees. The massive bear chuffed and dropped Lorenzo. It swung its head back and forth, reading my smell.
Here comes Death,
I thought, my mind honed to a single point of dread.

The bear stood, his russet pelt crackling with frost. His paws were clotted with snow, splotched with blood. I was too far now from the hut to retreat. Then a small gust snapped my cloak out behind me. The bear snorted, then loped downhill into thicker woods.

By the time Olmina appeared at the door of the hut crying our names, I was kneeling beside Lorenzo, clasping his bloody head in my lap, his eyes wide open to nothing. I sobbed, “Don’t you leave me, Lorenzo! Stay with me!”

Olmina lurched toward us and crumpled. At first she looked past her husband into the pines as if she didn’t believe what she saw. That was some other man. She would search for Lorenzo at the edge of the woods.

I tried to put his viscera back in his body. I put snow in the cavity to stanch the bleeding. I put snow on his throat, which immediately soaked red. I shook his shoulders to wake him up. This couldn’t be. Olmina wept, opened her arms to the frozen sky, and bent to Lorenzo. “
Dio mio,
no! Husband, don’t go, don’t go!” She keened so loudly the mountain itself shook with her cries.

We dragged him up the slope slowly. At last we settled his body in the shed and covered him with a blanket, much to the terror of the animals, who smelled bear on him and clambered up against each other and the back wall. The mules would have bolted if Lorenzo hadn’t tied them so well. I took them outside to calm them and secured them to the iron ring set in the stone wall of the shed, all the while looking downhill at the dark red trail in the snow. I didn’t want to let the goats loose. The bear was still out there.

Olmina uttered such harsh cries at Lorenzo’s feet that I pressed my hands to my ears and dropped down beside his shoulder, sobbing. Then I put my palm to his cheek. He was cold.

After some time—whether one hour or many, I didn’t know, for it was impossible to tell the time beyond that daylight still remained—Olmina said, “I must wash him and sit vigil.” She turned her face to me, haggard with sorrow and fear. “Could you find some twigs to start a fire? Don’t go far.”

When I returned with an armful of damp twigs and dead branches, she’d struck a fire, using dry straw, behind stones that had been set in one corner by the shepherds as a crude hearth. A small opening in the thatch drew the smoke away. Olmina lit two candles, one at Lorenzo’s head and one at his feet. The four goats crowded up against each other in the farthest corner, bearing quiet if uncomprehending witness. I filled our pot with snow to melt for the final cleansing of the body.

But first we dragged him outside and washed him with snow. There was no other way. We removed his tunic and shirt, his breeches and hose, his leather shoes. We folded up each piece of clothing, even if it was torn. It shocked me to see his leathery, wrinkled body with its terrible wounds. We knelt, each taking one side of him, Olmina his left side, and I his right. We scoured the half-frozen crusts of blood upon his arms, neck, face, making the only sound on the mountain—shhh, shhh, shhh. Snow against cold flesh. But when I reached his legs and feet, the place where the toes were missing, I couldn’t go on.

Olmina moaned and lay her head down upon his chest. What would we do without him? We scrubbed and stopped, shivering, then resumed the work, our hands red from his blood, raw from cold. At last we carried him inside the shelter. The water was warm by now, steam curling from the black pot. I tested it with my finger. Warm water for a dead man.

We laid Lorenzo out upon our best red blanket, a candle beside his shoulder. We each wadded up a piece of his torn shirt, dipped it in water, and wrung it out. I folded the cloth and drew it across his face, down his neck and shoulder, his arm, cleaning between the fingers as if he were a child. We mended him as best we could. I sewed his left arm shut with a strand of my hair. Olmina sewed his neck with a gray thread of her hair.

There were other gashes that we couldn’t close. We lay a torn square of linen across his belly, a rough veil to cover the wound.

Olmina looked across at me. “Where, truly, then, is his heart?”

“Here,” I said, placing my hand atop hers and setting it on his bristly white chest, slightly closer to her. She lay her other hand on mine.

“There was no priest—he had no priest to bless him.” She lifted her head and whispered hoarsely, “He didn’t receive his Communion. Signorina, we must say the prayers for him.”

“We don’t need to say them. The mountain wind will be Vespers for him. The birds will say Matins. The animals Lauds.”

She stared at me and shook her head.

We washed his lower body, his hips, legs, feet. He was clean. He was cleaner than he’d ever been. I scraped under his nails with a small twig. Olmina stroked his hair into place. Then she continued to stroke his hair.
There, there.

At last we dressed him. I brought in the mules, since it was growing dark, and latched the door. We were exhausted and lay down on either side of Lorenzo. Sleep fell like a bludgeon.

When I woke, the whole night had passed. Lorenzo, lifeless and cold, lay next to me. I touched his rigid hand and began to cry like a child.

Olmina was strange, and she wandered in her speech and her body, pacing in and out of the shed. “I must fetch a priest. Otherwise what will become of his soul in purgatory?”

I didn’t try to stop her. I let the mules out on a tether so they wouldn’t stray far. Some returned and stood at the door or came inside, shuddering with cold. I also tried to urge the goats outside. Two of them refused. They watched me solemnly, and I preferred them to a priest. Olmina trudged back and forth.

After a while we lit new candles at Lorenzo’s head and feet and sat beside him. We didn’t eat. I spoke some words from
Purgatorio
for his soul.

     From the most sacred waters I returned

remade in the way that trees are new,

made new again, when their leaves are new,

     pure and ready to ascend to the stars.

Olmina repeated her prayers. Sometimes I heard her, sometimes I wept. But I said nothing more. This was how the two goatherds found us. Astonished, they spoke little, but they knelt, and each placed a hand upon Olmina’s shoulders. They removed their black caps as if Lorenzo were one of their own. They came back with shovels and helped us to bury him farther down the mountain in thawed ground. We brought our mules and supplies with us. The herders dug a narrow hole. One of them rolled a large stone upon Lorenzo’s chest, to keep wild animals from scavenging him. One of them also brought a simple cross of two pine branches lashed well at the center with leather, which he planted upon the fresh mound. Olmina bent to the cold earth above him and would not be moved. But at last, with dark approaching, the men lifted her and set her upon a mule. They led us down to the village of Xeu Durgel. Lorenzo lay in the mountain. He’d always loved the high places. But it was bitter to leave him in a foreign land, to which we would never return.

CHAPTER 20

Like Cures Like 

Olmina didn’t speak
for a long time. Sometimes at night in the stone farmhouse where we found lodging, she sobbed without cease. The sound undermined time, the round of days, so that I wasn’t sure when I had heard it and when I was remembering it or even anticipating the sorrow to come. I slept night and day for long stretches. The distances drawn upon maps were now small compared to the distances between one day and the next, between Olmina and me. We hadn’t held each other since his death. Blame was never spoken, but the consequences of my choices harried me like the sharp clicking of her rosary beads.
If only I hadn’t chosen the journey. If only my father. If only Lorenzo. The bear. God.

When I asked the farmer about the town named Santa Engracia, the origin of one of my father’s letters, he pointed to the west. I spoke to Olmina about leaving. She nodded wearily in agreement and repeated the old proverb,
La lontananza è madre della dimenticanza. Distance is the mother of forgetting.

We would never forget, but I was grateful for the lie. I was reminded of that strange malady I’d noted in the book.

Lapsus:

A Predicament Where a Woman Abruptly Forgets Her Place of Origin and Conceives an Intense Longing for the World at Large, Often a Distant and Exotic Place, of Which She Possesses Extraordinary Knowledge That Can’t Be Attributed to Books or Hearsay

Just as the melancholic possesses a greater talent for memory, owing to a dry temperament that retains the impressions of things, so the phlegmatic of watery humor often contracts this disease of concurrent forgetfulness and inexplicable knowledge. Surely the cold flux of the humor predisposes the person to such a state.

In one such case, chronicled by Dr. Menasteri of Treviso, a certain peasant named Giovanna, who worked the radicchio fields renowned for the superb bitterness of their vegetables (relished by Caterina de’ Medici), suddenly refused to tend the fields. Her beloved radicchio plants languished. Her husband entreated her, wrung his hands, and finally locked her in their room, one of many peasant dwellings adjoining the large courtyard, because of her bizarre speech and tendency to wander when she left. She no longer knew her home. Giovanna claimed knowledge of a certain place, Akka, where she had never been. There, she said, she was known as Yellow-Wristed Woman. In that village the inhabitants acquired their names from various dyes they concocted to stain their clothing and tents. The dyes derived from the reactions of beetles, plants, moth wings, blood, and urine to sun, moon, and starlight. So Yellow Wrist spread onion skins in the courtyard under the winter stars of the Veneto and arrived at a golden agent, which she walked upon again and again to effect a deeper hue.

Giovanna’s husband brought her wilted heads of radicchio and placed them in her lap as gentle remonstrations, but she let them roll to the floor. Soon she began to appear outlandish, sitting bolt upright in her wooden chair by the locked window, her body surrounded by rotting vegetables. On an afternoon of sudden autumn freeze, which clutched at the ankles of women, her husband returned from the baker with a round loaf of hot bread, hoping to please her. The planks of their rude door were split apart. Giovanna had escaped. Trevisan hounds were employed to find her, but the animals moved back and forth confusedly through the fields, unable to locate her scent.