The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 12





Lost Governance of the Whole

Some travelers like to read about the places they visit in the fine or fantastic accounts of their fellows on the road. Others like to read the work of great persons who’ve resided in those towns or cities they’ll attain. Still others revel in the local tales shared at taverns and inns. I read and reread my father’s letters to find out how the road or the town ahead might reveal him.



Dear Gabriella,

I have secluded myself in the Hollant winter. Dr. Otterspeer, meaning well, strives to draw me out to dinners and dissections, to small conversations and erudite ones, but I don’t have the heart for it. Especially after my stay with Dr. Fuchs, who vented his distasteful suspicions upon me. Something is slipping away…Colleagues are not the friends they once were. We are all grown bitter. Even my mild servants exasperate me with their ordinary questions: What fish would you like from the market, sir, what cheese, what ale? What, what, what. Make your own damnable choices, I thunder at them, and leave me alone! Ah, I don’t doubt you’ve known these moods, daughter. These are the days I work up a fury at myself, like a dog tearing at its fur…Best to end this letter now and stop my growling. Better yet, to not even send this letter!

Your father,

Dottor Ernesto Bartolomeo Mondini



But he’d sent it anyway, this letter that followed his investigations of solar madness in Tübingen.

Nightly I slept with my father’s pages beneath me to prevent Olmina from reading them. Sometimes she idly asked about the notes. “What do they say, your father’s pages? Do they bring you comfort, signorina?”

“Oh, he’s simply expounding on certain ailments brought about by excessive sun.”

“Ah,” she said with a sigh, nudging a place next to me on the deck, where we sat on a crate of half-frozen cheese. “It must be a consolation, then, with all this freezing weather. Though it would be beautiful land, wouldn’t it, if it weren’t for the fact that we’re in it.”

“You’re right about that,” Lorenzo said as he groomed one of the mules to pass the time. “Does this river ever end?”

“Now, where’s your sense of adventure?” I teased.

“I lost that in the lake, I think.”

“Ah, so did I.” I stared at the black water thickening to ice near the banks.

“Oh, let’s think of something to banish the gloom,” Olmina cried. “Would you read to us a little to pass the time? Let’s hear about those that mislaid their brains on account of the sun.”

“No, actually my father’s notes are rather dry and uninteresting in the end,” I answered in a surly tone. For the truth was, I was disturbed by the strange orbits of his thoughts.



Notes toward Manifestations of Solar Madness, Correlative to Lunacy

Instances of sun fevers, unnatural indolence, and solar bedevilment. The sufferer believes himself to be kin to the fire in the sky and wanders naked, shedding his light! The deluded man then sees himself as a god who moves slowly, generates his own heat, emanates excessive sanguinity, believes others are circling him like the sun compassed by six planets in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Or is this the kindling of suicide? Why, he must wonder in cooler moments, does he suffer this grandeur? The man afflicted with sun stands in opposition to a man troubled by that other celestial body, the moon, which quickens and slows, disappears in paltry reflection of the larger orb or in shadow of the earth…I disappear. How might I find relief? For I’ve lost governance of the whole…If the sun could somehow be employed to counterbalance the effects of lunar increase, then the unease, the disease of the lesser body, might subside…I must look into this with others of like intolerance. The circular nature of the madness, a mockery of the sacred, condemns a man to wandering.



What did it mean—lost governance of the whole? I worried about the rambling nature of these notes: I didn’t want anyone, not even Olmina, to know about this.

Olmina frowned and looked away. How much did she really understand about my father’s possible illness? No, she couldn’t know. He’d hidden it so well. Unless my mother had confided in her. Or did we all really know and hide it from ourselves, calling it a quirk or volatility? When truly his mind may have loosened every month. Olmina hooked her elbow through mine as if she understood, and we leaned against one another, sharing our warmth.

“I can tell you about a different kind of light that addles brains up in the mountains,” said Lorenzo, sitting on a bale next to Fedele. He waved his leather currycomb in the air, indicating the Dolomiti.

“What sort of light is that?” I asked, curious.

“The ghost trees.” Lorenzo paused, pulling hairs clotted with dirt out of the comb. “I was only a boy, and I had to bring the wood in for the fire. But the midsummer sun had gone down…”

“Go on, now,” urged Olmina, to my surprise. Usually she’d huff at such tales.

“The woodpile was finished, so my father told me to go into the woods, where sometimes a wolf flashed between the trees. I was frightened, but I knew a place where a great tree had fallen in the wind and broken many branches on the way down. I meant to gather them by the light of the half-moon. But when I got to the place, it was lit up and not by the moon. The tree gave off its own light.”

“How could that be?” murmured Olmina, rapt as a child.

“It was the ghost of it, wrapped round it like a veil or a shroud. It sort of rippled, and I felt it was friendly to me. As I gathered some branches, I touched it.”

“Did it feel like anything?” I asked.

“Like sticking your hand in a slow, cold stream. Then I thought it coveted me and would take me. I ran all the way back to our hut, dropping branches along the way. My father, who I thought was going to whip me, instead clutched me to him. ‘Figlio mio,’ he said, ‘don’t ever go out there again unless I’m with you. Tomorrow we’ll take the ax and cut it up.’ ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ said my mother fiercely. ‘You’ll be stricken with the shadows!’ ”

“What’s that?” asked Olmina.

“You can’t ever get them out of your vision—branches sawing at the edge of your sight. Look left and they stretch left. Look down and they fall. Look up and they lift their rough fingers. Men go mad after a while, axing the air to try to clear the thickets from their eyes.”

We were silent then, each in our own thoughts, observing the smoke rising from hamlets along the shore, mute with cold. Seagulls on sandbars huddled in the snow of their bodies. Only the river spoke.



Later that night after Olmina fell asleep, I began writing in response to my mother’s last letter, loath as I was to prod her vexation and receive another earful.



My dear mamma,

You may admonish me for thinking my father ill or lost, and you mention his mania for the book, for wandering. But I wonder now if there is something else that you couldn’t tell me all these years. I’m asking about madness in the family, my father’s Cipriot branch. I’d like to know what you’ve heard and whether my father ever crossed over, ever descended into that terrible place where the true world disappears. This may have bearing on whether I return, so you would do well to be forthcoming with me. I’m sorry I’m not the daughter you wished, nor are you the mother for whom I longed even though in the end that longing would be better directed to spirit or to Olmina. I wish you no ill. So there is a sad balance between our sorrows. Candor could give us a fulcrum toward change, if you wished it.

1 November 1590

Your daughter, Gabriella



As we drifted past the snow-heaped walls and terraces of Worms, we lost one of the mules to a freeze. The poor creatures had stood roped together on deck under blankets at night, pressed into one another, facing into wind or snow. Lorenzo spoke to them, brushed them down, fed them, and took them ashore to relieve themselves on the longer stopovers. But one mule on the outside of the group refused to eat, and that morning we found him seemingly asleep but gone stiff, showing his teeth in the final grimace.

“Well,” muttered Lorenzo, “he’s gone home to a far better clime.”

“Oh, Lorenzo, how can we keep the others safe?” I cried as I knelt and stroked the dead mule’s neck (so rigid under my hand), aware of the futility of my gesture, stung with shame for my part in his death. I’d been wrong about the weather, though it had improved over the past few days. November had arrived gnashing with ice and blizzard. We should have stayed longer with Dr. Fuchs.

“Give them our blankets,” he answered without pause.

So we did. We also convinced the captain of the river barge to stack goods around our remaining five mules to create a makeshift stall. Now we all wore every bit of clothing we owned, and ate and slept in our many layers. Whenever I sat up on deck, watching the other sailing barges and ships, the shoreline and towns, pass by, I found a place near the mules and stroked them.

Olmina sang to them.

Lorenzo tended them.

I thought of Wilhelm and then pushed him out of my mind. I couldn’t afford affection. I had to keep moving toward my father.



After twelve days, the grisaille fields and icy canals of Hollant appeared at last. We had arrived at Leiden.

We disembarked gratefully, barely knowing how to walk on land again, though the mules frisked and kicked up their hooves with joy after Lorenzo managed to half lead, half heave them down the gangplank. We asked directions to the Hortus Botanicus, where my father’s colleague Professor Otterspeer’s home was located—the helpful, bundled-up passersby viewed us with curious smiles, and I felt welcomed—and soon we found our way there.

When we called upon Professor Otterspeer, we were informed he had unexpectedly departed to visit an ailing sister for a week. Before this news could disturb us, the caretaker, a stout middle-aged man, informed me the professor had kindly obtained a place for us to stay. He led us to a small two-story wood-and-brick cottage just outside the Hortus Botanicus walls.

As we settled into our new lodging, I observed the view outside: you’d barely have known we were staying by a famous garden. Some valiant twigs poked through the snow; a few small evergreen yew trees in large pots suggested a pathway, while the pergola at the very center marked the demise of summer in its hood of snow.

As Olmina prepared our dinner, peeling and chopping, I pulled a chair up to the fire and turned to my notes, for it always lifted my spirits to touch the book once more.



Mithridatum against Poison

The Greek physician Galen has stated that this famous recipe contains fifty-four ingredients. Others claim that the antidote (devised by King Mithradates in Pontus during the first century) contains no more than thirty-six. Whatever the number, the king was defeated by his own antidote, a cautionary tale for whoever wishes to take it in daily dosage. For Mithradates became immune to poison, and when he desired to kill himself honorably in the face of his enemy the Roman general Pompey, the king could not die by poison. He was forced to beg his servant to slay him. Therefore my recommendation is to give in small sips only when the cause under suspicion is poison. Be sure of the signs (and surely this requires another volume for all the varieties of poison). Another danger of daily use is illustrated in the tales of the poison damsels, girls fostered upon small doses of venom from an early age. The slightest kiss from such a girl grown into a woman would be fatal, and so she would be shunned by all men.