The Book of Madness and Cures (14 page)

I wound the dense braid around my head and tied it beneath a broad hat with flaps that Josef gave me, then shook my head vigorously. The braid stayed firm. Olmo patted the hat, tugged at it all around to make sure it was secure, and pulled the flaps down even farther. She understood how important it was for me to keep my hair. For on nights when I combed out the braid, I cleared my thoughts. Snarls and angers, knots and sorrows, tangles and perplexities. And sometimes little things fell out, like millet or bits of quill. Clenched brown spiders, the black pips of an apple, tiny shells or stones. And once a small animal tooth. When Olmina combed my hair when I was a child, she would lightly rap the comb on the side of my head. “Where do all these things come from, Gabriella? Your hair has a life of its own!”

I handed over my brocade skirts, bodices, and silk underdresses to the old woman and kept two plain linen smocks (one of which was Olmo’s)—gifts for my sisters, I would say, if we were searched or questioned. Olmo gave up her only other dress and underskirts. I hid my small adornments (the filigreed earrings from my Cipriot grandmother, the simple gold ring from my father) in a handkerchief rolled up inside a leather pouch, the so-called codpiece in my hose, under the front of my rustic shirt and doublet.

I strode back and forth before Josef and Lorenzo, who turned their heads away, embarrassed by the sight of my legs in woolen hose. I liked the feeling of ease without bodice and skirts. I could breathe and stride freely.

“Pardon my saying, signorina, but it makes a good manly impression, if you know what I mean.” Olmo was trying to cheer me, and perhaps herself too, for I must have worn an anxious face after I’d handed over my dresses to Gerta. She’d fingered the rich cloth and nodded at her unexpected good fortune, even as Josef looked sulky at the loss of one of his two sets of clothes.

Then Gerta pulled a small cluster of three oak nuts from her pocket. “From the Holy Oak at the center of the wood. The grandmother tree. They’ll give you strength when you’re broken.”

As we rode away, I turned in my saddle to bid the old ones farewell, but they’d vanished, their cottage—and my exquisite dresses—already taken back by the shadowy forest.

“Coraggio!” I said, more to myself than to anyone else, persisting in such bravado, though I knew it was a poor defense against the days to come. Durlingen, empty of women and girls, lay ahead.

After riding most of the day under the shifting trees and gray sky awash with a thin gruel of clouds, we entered the town. A few chimneys gave off strands of smoke. Everything was shut up tight. Not even a scrawny dog trotted out to nip at our heels.

We reached the Marketplatz, where dead spikes of loosestrife stood askew. A single sorrowful oak at the center of the square was singed and brown. The stone chapel was closed. A dingy midday drizzle began to fall and the moistened dirt stung our nostrils with a seared odor.

The wet, burnt smell reminded me of the charred ship that once drifted toward the Venetian Lagoon in a similar grim rain. I was thirteen. My father and his friend Paolo Benvenuti the joiner took me (against my mother’s vehement protests) out to the Cavallino in the late afternoon, where our gondola worked against the tide, one among a black flock of gondolas that had come out to see the ship.

The edge of the storm swept on toward Venetia and ceased briefly above us while more rain advanced from the east, downpours that resembled dark mourning swags hung over the sea. The rudderless Portuguese caravel drifted near one of the mouths of the lagoon, its lateen sails reduced to sooty gauze, its partly burnt hull, masts, and long yards a black skeleton. The planking had warped away from the frame in places from the spasms of the ship’s fire. On the bow, though, the eyes, painted one on each side by the shipwrights, remained, blistered and peeling, those eyes that Portuguese sailors declare will always see the way. Even so, the ship heaved blindly toward us.

“It’s a plague ship!” someone shouted in a panic. “They burned it to purge the pestilence!”

“Or a fire ship!”

“What’s that?” I asked my father.

“A ship deliberately set ablaze and abandoned to drift toward the enemy fleet.”

“What’s it doing all the way up here in our Adriatic groin?” asked a coarser voice.

“Fools!” my father grumbled. “The ship’s crew was gutted by scurvy or carelessness, more than likely.”

“Unless it’s one of those vessels cursed by Sant’Elmo and his bloody windlass,” muttered Paolo Benvenuti.

“You’ve got it wrong,” my father reprimanded him. “Sant’Elmo and his fires at the masthead
protect
the sailors. They invoke him against seasickness and troubled bowels.”

“You believe that, do you? Well, he didn’t do much good here, now, did he?”

“What about you, Gabriella?” My father turned to me. “What do you think?”

With all the sincerity of my young age, I answered, “The saints forget us sometimes.”

My father smiled. The caravel broke up on a sandbar, and now we saw its unintended cargo. The burnt dead spilled from the spongy timbers of its belly, a few tangled in the sail stays. But these were not as fearsome as the fat white dog that swam from the wreckage, eyes blunted with hardship, conveying both indifference and hatred as it struggled toward one of the gondolas. The gondolier struck at it with his oar, and the dog swerved toward us. To my amazement, my father stayed the arm of our gondolier and knelt to pull the thrashing animal over the bow, rocking the gondola wildly.

The beast tore at his glove. But when he spoke to it in a low growl, it dropped to a crouch, snarling and shaking with cold. The sky and sea were lead black now as the pale corpses dispersed around us, giving off a cold, thin light of their own. My father ordered the gondolier to row us home.

“What shall we name this mongrel, then?” he asked.

“Cerberus!” I piped up, for I’d been reading stories of the Greek underworld.

“But he doesn’t have three heads.”

I considered this. “Not that we can see,” I said.

“Very well, then.” My father attempted to pat the creature’s head, though the dog recoiled. “May you protect us, Cerberus, as well as you protect that other realm.”

I sat still beneath the curved wooden canopy in the center of the gondola, opposite my father and Paolo Benvenuti, silently watching the dog and the small ocher lights of the living that glowed from the windows of Venetia, across the black water. I wanted to forget the dead floating around me.

Now in Durlingen, just as on that night long ago, the dead occupied the air around me.

“Lorenzo, what is that smell?” I asked, still disbelieving, as we circled the scorched tree, for there was more in it than burnt wood.

“Oh, signorina—
signor,
I can’t say. I can’t say. The fire seems but a few days old.”

“How can you tell?”

“The sap bleeding from the tree is new.”

Perhaps that was why there were no people in the square. It was too crowded with the invisible ones, the women, the little daughters. “We have to leave this place!”

“Not in a hurry.” Lorenzo spoke in a low, restrained voice. “We don’t want to provoke suspicion. Let’s get our supplies.”

Olmo looked at him in dismay, but I knew he was right.

Two men moved beneath a coarse hemp canopy at the corner of the Marketplatz, a young, thickset peddler with a rough table of bread and peppered hams, and a gaunt woodsman selling rope and firewood. They were in the middle of packing up their goods, as there were no other buyers and perhaps had not been any the whole day. They stopped their work and stared at us.

“You’re not from here, are you?” the stocky man inquired. His grin was slightly contorted by a pink sickle-shaped scar on the left side.

Lorenzo greeted them and dismounted, while Olmo and I drew our mules beneath the deep eaves of the town hall for shelter from the drizzle. As Lorenzo muttered that we must gain Tübingen by the end of the week and needed supplies, I glanced around the silent town. No curtains were drawn by a curious hand. Not a single child appeared.

“Not many co-come through here since the—the burnings,” stammered the gaunt one.

“What burnings would those be, my good man?” asked Lorenzo plainly.

“Evil ones. The—witches, you know, soured the milk, ca-called down the hail, ruined the crops, raised the plague, stole the newborns, shriveled our manhood!” He spoke in a grotesque singsong as if reciting a nursery rhyme. “Kissed the devil, danced in the woods, strangled the lambs in their sleep. Laid curses on those as refused ’em alms!” The man’s face convulsed, his jaw drawn back, his broken teeth bared.

Lorenzo stared at him and then away. He stroked the long forehead of his mule and then turned back to the first man. “Do you have any apples to sell?”

“No, no, apples are finished. But I’ve got that perry wine. Sure you won’t come and drink with us?” The man was insistent, fixing his stare upon my smooth ungloved hands.

“Sorry, we must be on our way,” Lorenzo answered flatly. He purchased three loaves of rough brown bread and a small smoked ham, stowing them in his saddlebags.

“We’re not good enough then for you folk, are we, you foreigners and your high-flown manners!” The man curled his lip. Then in a throttled voice he said, “Do you think I wanted to give up my child?”

For an astounding moment, I thought he would burst into sobs.

But as we turned our mules, he cried out, regaining his harsh tone, “I’m onto you fine gentleman with your milksop hands, don’t think I don’t know what you are!”

The tall, gaunt one yelled, “Whoremongers, despoilers!”

I kicked Fedele’s stout sides to a quick trot. Without warning, a black-haired cleric scuttled from the building next to the church. Suddenly I felt the long rope of my auburn braid drop to the middle of my back. The cleric opened his mouth as if to shout, and I dug my heels hard into Fedele’s belly. With Lorenzo and Olmo and our threesome of mules following close behind, I bolted through the streets, Fedele’s hoofs clanging stones like hammers against iron. The frightful clamor spurred him on even more toward the edge of firs beyond the town.

I thought I would never be warm again.

I thought I would never sleep.

Sometimes we dozed by daylight, lined up like dead pike on a clutch of leaves, unwilling to risk a fire. We covered ourselves with our blankets and fir needles and left the animals tied to our ankles. We traveled at night through the dismal wood and avoided other villages altogether.

Durlingen—with its burnt square, shut church, priest, scarred peddler, and woodsman—haunted us.

Olmo severed my braid with her cooking knife the first night after Durlingen and it fell heavily to the ground like a viper. I buried it in the prickly loam and Lorenzo helped me to set a heavy stone on top so that no animal would dig it up. For a moment I pictured a starving wolf dragging my red braid through the forest and those vile men filling his body with arrows. I imagined the bishop and his men ransacking the countryside for the mistress of the braid.

When I did sleep, I saw mounds, hundreds of such braids, thin blond, glossy black, thick gray, wispy brown, coppery, curly, short, long, looped together, and tied at the ends. Ribboned. The braids of little girls, maids, mothers, nuns, and crones.

I imagined the townsmen, stricken before the bishop and his inquisitors like those countrymen made to hobble their dogs while the nobility hunted deer through their fields, trampling their crops. I could see the dry branches loosely bound in stacks and set upon one another as firewood.

When I woke at dusk, I could almost smell the bishop’s malevolence in the very air around us, like the smoke of burnt hair.

That’s when I would write a little to keep spirit and senses honed.

Invidia:

An Invisible Worm That Consumes the Heart

In the countryside they say this disease lies dormant for many years in the bowels of wild boar and has its origins in the uneasy corpses they grub in the winter woods when acorns are scarce and there is nothing else to eat. The bodies have not been properly laid to rest. They are the murdered or the lost, the starving or the mad who thrashed their way into the thickets of death and couldn’t be recovered. The unwanted children cast aside in the forest. The prostitutes grown withered. The lepers and their foul rags. The ambassadors from foreign countries and their entire entourages strangled in their sleep. The witches who preferred the wolf to the bishop. The earth gobblers who couldn’t withstand their hunger. The men who grew leaden. The failed miller poisoned by nightshade. The Gypsies who savored the wrong mushroom on their midday outing. The tired saltimbanques. The frantic mothers of blue-lipped soldiers. The lost fathers. The astronomer who swallowed his books in small bites every night to avoid the tribunals. The miller’s daughter. The noblewoman unable to discern day from night, city from wilderness. The suicides. The little girl who ran away. The veneer artist whose crippled hands froze shut in the gray curls of his dead wife. The bubonics. The victims of falling sickness who walked into the woods alone. Survivors of char and blaze who preferred death. The slow of mind and the infirm of body. The lost fathers. The boar snuffle and gobble this half-frozen and decayed flesh. But rancor doesn’t dissolve in the powerful swine stomachs. Instead it lies in the folds of sausages-to-be. The pork-bowel casings in the duke’s cupboard or the peasant’s larder are filled with an envy of the living, which cannot be sated.

One treatment is preventive. As my father cautioned, do not eat pork, or you’ll be eating the undead. The other treatment upon the advice of the Benandanti, the green witches, has been said to work well among those mountain people. The infected person must walk in an unfriendly wood and converse with the abandoned dead. The visits should include certain gifts for the dead, who must be neither kin nor friend. The person must address someone she doesn’t know, ask him what he wants, and honor his request. It seems that sometimes one of the dead may stand for all that are troubling the bowels of the afflicted. Yet the irascible dead may ask for something impossible, like the ears of a former rival or the fingers of one who has wronged them. In the first case, a substitute may suffice, such as a sketch of the rival’s ears or perhaps an earring. But in the second case, there may be no amends, unless it be truth telling, like a rosary repeated over and over again.