Read The Book of Madness and Cures Online
Authors: Regina O'Melveny
The Book of Madness and Cures (40 page)
“Before he disappeared, he liked that place,” Malina explained.
I liked it too, for one could sit there and view the whole river valley, the red mud villages, the mountains and the sea in the distance.
Malina insisted that we bury my father quickly or his soul would linger in the granary and cause trouble. “We return the dead to their mother as soon as we can so they can find peace.”
“It is not our way, but this is not our place,” I said.
She touched my shoulder. “I am sorry, Daughter.”
When we reached the rise, I observed, “He will like this sky.” The darkening violet expanse overhead met the blur of colorless sand. Dark red mountains presided.
The men dug.
We were all silent, but the shovels chucked sand and rang loudly against the stones. I didn’t cry. I’d been releasing my father strand by strand from the dense weave of my heart for a long time. But the final cut was at once so severe and so small that it seemed impossible he could slip away from me as he did.
A man with red hair in a pale blue djellaba sat watching us from some distance. The child within kicked hard. I felt my father leave, and I was free.
A few days
later he came to the door. Malina called me from my rough table, where I sat arranging the loose pages of
The Book of Diseases.
I planned to have the sections sewn into signatures for binding. She returned to her room to leave us alone.
He stood like a tree lit by sun in the afternoon doorway.
“Yousef brought me your note, Gabriella.”
“Hamish.” I tasted the sound of his name, sweet and pungent, precious as cinnamon bark. “Come into the courtyard, where it’s cooler.”
We were shy, our unspoken words like water brimming between us.
Then sand on the tongue, insoluble minerals of love.
Sand crunched beneath our leather slippers. We moved to the date palm and sat beneath its long fans on a freshly swept rug where grains sifted back again. Three goats gazed at us solemnly.
Yousef had gone to the vegetable souk to buy onions.
We leaned together in silence for a long while.
At last Hamish said, “I’m sorry about the death of your father.”
“Oh! But you know, he left long ago.”
“Ah.”
I began to cry and he held me. After a while we looked to the swifts high above us as they caught the invisible life of the air in their quick beaks. I took his hand, placed it upon my full belly, and said, “I will bear your child in two months.”
“Oh!” he cried, startled, briefly pulling his hand away. And then he set it back happily. “I’m going to be a father.” And he wept.
The desert day faded. Malina lit a lantern in her room. The moonless blue-black sky hummed with stars that cast their silver through the shadowy palm tree, upon our shoulders, over the courtyard, and across the vast dark earth.
Venetia, 1600
Our Damiana was
born on December 21, 1591, in the deep of the Maroccan night. Malina attended by candlelight as I gave birth, akin to animals that bear their young in darkness, when such a grace calls for mystery. And Damiana possessed grace as well as wayward will from the beginning, opening her dusky eyes and clasping me with a keen ferocity for life. Hamish was overjoyed to hold her after the months of feeling her move within me, unseen. The fuzz of her fine copper hair shone all around her scalp, and still shone now in Venetia, almost nine years later, though a little darker, much thicker, and longer.
It was braided down her back by my beloved Olmina, whose crooked hands still bound hair and home, though we’d freed her from all chores. She spent most of her days braiding the tides, as she called it, meaning she sat where Lorenzo had once sat on warm days outside our door, recalling the past, mending the present, dreaming the future, as she alternately watched the sea and napped in a chair with her mouth wide open. Sometimes Damiana mischievously tickled her palate with a straw, prompting a sneeze, or dropped a knob of honey on her tongue, rousing her to sweetness.
The tides withdrew and returned and twisted at her feet. And I had my own strands in hand as doctor, wife, and mother. Mea, a girl from the mountains, helped us now with the household and the herbs. She taught Damiana the ways of the mountain women, and my daughter proved her talent with the sick animals on which she helped Mea practice her healing.
The Book of Diseases
was finished at last and published this year. While my father could not hold it in his hands, I held it for him, with all the wisdom he had imparted to me and the good measure I had gained on my own. There would also be the pleasure of passing it on to Damiana.
My mother went to live in Padua with a cousin, for the damp vapors of Venetia brought her many aches in old age and she told me that she’d tired of living on the water. “The earth under my feet will be changeable enough, now that I grow ever closer to it!” she liked to say.
Hamish taught at university and, though a foreigner, thrived in our serene city. His sentences grew marvelously complete. The guild had finally come to their senses regarding my own art of physick and grudgingly accepted me. There would always be some contention, of course, peppering the air. But it came and went.
I possessed a jar of healing stones that I’d carried from the deserts of Barbaria, and sometimes I brought out one bezoar or another to heal a patient. Malina had taught me the distinct virtues of snake, goat, and tree bezoars. I’d also purchased from her a rare gray oval bezoar, which she recommended for all distempers of the mind and body, for it came from the belly of a dolphin found on the beach at Messa. Malina believed that all thoughts, having their source as water, could be purified by this concretion. Once, Damiana helped me in this wise, when I visited a young woman incoherent of speech on a hot September afternoon. I didn’t often allow my daughter to come along, for I feared that she might contract some miasma such as occasionally rises in our city and passes in imperceptible particles from one to another. Yet so far she’d been remarkably vigorous as a child, with few ailments.
Mea also convinced me that my girl was ready after treating various sick cats, lapdogs, hens, and parrots that had fallen ill within our city. She’d even gained something of a reputation. One member of the Council of Ten had called her the Little Animal Doctor and paid her handsomely after she treated his small dog (one of those creatures that have broad ears like the sails of caravels), who appeared to be suffering a palsy of his legs. Her prescription then was simple: “Put him outside, and not in a litter either!” She spoke with all the blunt frankness of her age, which we did not censor. The outcome was good, for the little dog regained his strength and in fact led the distinguished councilor on many a chase across the piazza, which was salutary for the man as well.
To return to the hot September afternoon, then, and my daughter’s first observance of a human patient: The three of us, Mea, Damiana, and I, took the long ride in the gondola that had been sent for us, to the island of Torcello, where the sufferer, Margarita, lived. I bore the medicine chest and allowed my daughter to carry the bezoars in a strong hempen pouch, the snakestone the size of a black hazelnut, the goatstone a chalky acorn, the tree stone an amber nugget, and the dolphin stone a blue-gray egg. They knocked against each other in conversant tones, which she improvised as we walked up the small dock toward the rather run-down house at the edge of the marsh. “The bezoars say they like it out here, Mamma, because there are more souls in the air! Goat says he’s hungry. Dolphin wants me to wash him in the sea…” And she went on like this. The slanted shutters of the house rattled in the breeze, and I noticed that several windows bore no shutters at all, nor were there any windowpanes.
When we encountered the young woman at the house, she was so restless she couldn’t sit still and chattered constantly. I was able to stop her for a moment and determined she had a low fever.
I asked the servant of the elderly aunt (for the young woman’s mother had died several years earlier) to brew the inner white willow bark I removed from the chest. Then Mea showed Damiana how to fold a cloth for the young woman’s forehead, for I planned to administer the beneficial tea as both drink and compress. But we had to stop her pacing first.
Damiana said to her, “Do you want to see my stones, which were got from the bellies of animals and a tree?”
This stopped Margarita in her tracks. “But you must sit in your chair,” I added, picking up the cue from my smart daughter.
“There are too many streams in my head that run on and on, rivulets that run down the mountains—but no, now they are stopped by the snow, the incorrigible teeth of ice won’t let them pass…they strangle…”
“Sit down here.” I led her to the window. “Close the shutters,” I directed the aunt.
“There’s too much draft in this house—you must fix the shutters and put in windowpanes.” For though glass was expensive, I knew that the aunt was prosperous (from the friend who’d recommended me to her), but she kept a strict purse, as women without men often did needfully. Then I nodded at Damiana, who came forward with her pouch and set each stone out upon the young woman’s lap, though Margarita’s legs were jumping nervously. Yet again she held still.
“Hold each stone, then press the one you like against your forehead,” I instructed her. She chose the blue-gray one and pressed its dense shape first to her eyes, then to her temples and forehead.
“You do it,” she said to me. And so I did, also palming her eyes, head, and shoulders while she cupped the heavy bezoar in her hands.
“Now drink your tea.”
But she didn’t want to let go the bezoar, so we just waited with her for a while, Damiana sitting on one side of her and I on the other. At last she passed it to Damiana.
“Will you come back again?”
“Yes, we will,” I answered, smiling at my daughter.
I wholeheartedly want to thank my husband, Bill O’Melveny, who has supported my writing with constancy and love for many years, and my daughter, Adrienne O’Melveny Jaffe, who kept nudging me, saying, “I want to read that story!” I’m grateful to my extraordinary mentors, Jim Krusoe for his boundless generosity and perceptive eye, and Deena Metzger for her abundant encouragement from the very beginning. I’m thankful for the writing group where several of these sections were first written. The following women offered critique and camaraderie: Bronwyn Jones, Elinor Aurthur, Katya Williamson, Bairbre Dowling, Ruth Bochner, and Doris Koenig. Many people have given their support along the way and I thank them—my sister Lisa O’Connor, Cathy Colman, Catherine Halcrow, assistant curator of Biosciences at the National Museum of Science and Industry in London, Rachel Careau, Michelle Latiolais, Carla and Bruce Burman, Joyce Waterman, Irene Rafael, Jill Bonart, Margit Bassler, Jurgen Ladenburger, Jane Alexander Stewart, Jeannette Rasker, Mary Ellen Dorin, Anne Spadone Jacobson, Loretta Sparks, Betty Calame, Alma Luz Villanueva, Brad Kessler, Kate Haake, Eloise Klein Healy, and the community of writers at Antioch University Los Angeles, as well as the remarkable writers in Jim Krusoe’s Wednesday night writing class at Santa Monica College, in particular Dylan Landis, Monona Wali, and Zen Chang.