The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 14





The Patient Owns the Remedy

Olmina put her arm around my shoulders as I sat shivering on the bed. “Are you ill, signorina?”

“No!” I said angrily, and I wept. “Wilhelm was on the slab, it was him they cut.”

“Oh no!” She put both hands to her face. “My dear. Are you sure?”

I turned my fierce face to hers. “I have no doubt.”

“Such a lively young man!”

“If it weren’t for my abrupt departure…”

“What are you talking about?”

“He must have followed me here. Remember what Signor Gradenigo said?”

It was her turn to be fierce. “You’ve got nothing to do with it.”

“I don’t know. I carry bad luck, like one of those plague women who survive while others die around them.”

“We don’t know what they carry…Maybe it’s a blessing so that they may help others.”

“Oh? And what about my father? He has fled me. Maybe he too has died.”

“Now your wits have gone astray, signorina. You’re no maiden-bane. No one holds the threads that tie us to this life. Not even God, if you ask me.”

“The Fates, then?”

“Maybe, yes—the Spinner, the Measurer, the Cutter.”

“But I feel my father now like a small ghost, as if he lived in the medicine chest in a bottle. What does it mean, if not that he’s gone?”

“It means you’re bereft of your reason, grieving for a living man. Let’s give Wilhelm his due and let the living be.” She lit a small candle, placed it in the window, and murmured a prayer for the young man of extravagant colors. Then she said, “You should sleep now, Gabriella.”

But I barely dozed that night. The next morning, I decided there was no longer anything to keep me in Leiden, for Dr. Otterspeer was the only one who’d truly communicated with my father during his stay. And I now found the closeness of Wilhelm’s body unbearable, for he couldn’t even be laid to rest in a pauper’s grave. The ground was frozen solid. His corpse would be slumped in the icy cellar of a university building near our cottage, waiting for spring, when he would be buried, along with the other dismembered dead from the anatomy theater, outside the town walls.

“That winter of your father’s solitude,” Dr. Otterspeer told me a few days later, “there was more to it, dear child, than I first told you.” He glanced at Olmina and she discreetly left us alone in the kitchen. Lorenzo had gone to the marketplace.

“Once, early on in his stay, when I brought him some supper, he answered the door fully clothed but discalced.” He lifted his eyebrows and opened his gray eyes wide, reliving the moment. “He said that he was effecting a new cure for his own malady. Understand—it was December—the stone floors were cold as ice.”

“What sort of cure?” I asked.

“He said that he meant to draw strength from the earth and shoes were an impediment. They blocked the elementals. I replied that he stood upon stone paving—was that not an obstacle? Then he marched through the frozen garden in his bare feet!”

The peculiar spectacle of my father deliberately striding in full dress but discalced upon the crackling white paths of the botanical garden reminded me of the solar man, in lesser measure. “But when he departed, was he wearing shoes?”

“Boots, boots for the journey, he said. But no more interference from soles when he was residing in a place! ‘If the monks can walk without shoes in observance of spirit, then I can walk without shoes in observance of cure and vigor,’ he explained.”

I envisioned my father pressing dark footprints between the rows of sleeping plants. If only he’d left such prints for me to follow.

“I didn’t understand what he was doing,” said Dr. Otterspeer. “But he was so convinced of his rarefied logic that he almost persuaded me that his experiment—if that’s what it was—might be of benefit. That is, until he became so solitary he was unapproachable.”



I penned a brief note to notify Dr. Fuchs of Wilhelm Lochner’s death, though I delayed sending it. Most likely he would blame me for a double theft, the death of his student and the spiriting away of my father’s papers. Though worse by far would be the loss of his excellent student, for a good mentor like Dr. Fuchs often doubled as a father to his several scholar-sons. At last I sent the letter with a desolate heart. Even though Wilhelm hadn’t been, nor would be, lover, I thought of him as friend. And that word lay like a hand on my heart. Friend. I might have corresponded with him or simply recalled his wonderful, gaudy presence. Now he was butchered, an instrument of science. And I was more alone in the world than before.

Olmina and I began packing while the fog curled and uncurled around us, appearing and disappearing through the gate to the frozen garden. I packed my father’s things in a small satchel within my larger one. Shoes, glasses, notes.

As she packed, Olmina complained, “Signorina, it’s the middle of December. Can’t we wait until March? You’re courting your death with this blind will of yours!”

“What did you say?” I asked, turning away from the window where I stood.

She began moving about my room in a sudden burst of activity, opening drawers and pulling out clothes from the depths of the armoire. Then she spoke again. “You want to force your father out of the thicket! You want the world to yield to you, but you’re no princess or queen! And even queens sometimes hang by their ankles!” Olmina went red and then abruptly thrust her face into her blue apron and ran out of the room, weeping.

I opened the window and stuck my face into the cold air. Shingles of ice slid from the roofs, heated by the chimneys. Icicles shattered like glass or thudded upon the snow. Passersby with miserable faces slogged through the cold slush and mud of the street below. Olmina was right.

Truly it was odd to be gripped by urgency to find my father now, when he’d been gone for so many years. What difference did waiting a month or even a year make? I felt my father to be in some form of danger from a rambling mind, but was I perhaps the one in danger from the opposite? A mind clenched, fixed upon this search?

We should wait until spring and then make our way to Edenburg in Scotia.

I’d almost set my mind to this course of action, when Lorenzo returned from trading words with a few sailors as he gathered our supplies. They’d warned against waiting till March, when the winds gust fiercely in the German Sea.



In the end we compromised: we waited a week to obtain ship’s passage to Edenburg.

In the meantime I wrote a letter to Dr. Hamish Urquhart, professor of natural philosophy in that city, requesting his help with lodging. My father had recommended him highly.

I spent my remaining time in Leiden writing, for the contemplation of disease, I’m reluctant to admit, gave me strange solace.



The Plague of Black Tears:

A Lachrymose Infection of the Tear Ducts, of Causes Unknown

Some midwives say the onset of a foul wind steals words from a person’s lips and causes this plague. Sometimes it afflicts nuns or monks of those orders who take a vow of silence. Prisoners who are forbidden to speak, people who lose their voices out of grief, children who are always ordered to be silent, may all succumb. I’ve observed a certain kind of dream that many of the sufferers have in common, the vision of a city where the inhabitants are forbidden to weep. Their tears must be clandestine, under bridges at night, or as one patient related, “Be sorrow’s vessel, don’t give it away.”

The person is usually not aware of the infection until she reaches the final stages when her tears thicken and turn black. Blindness and death may result. The plague is contagious and will even spread through shared dreams. Strangely this disease is also passed on by women who sew alone at their embroidery frames and cry from the unformed words that populate their loneliness, or by fishermen who are mute as they mend their nets, lost in morose humors that only the sea can bring on. When the women and the men weep, they unwittingly pass tears along the skeins of thread or filaments of net, which travel on to the next person who touches the line. They may also contract the plague if they kiss each other’s eyelids. The sick person may not know about the malady for months, even though she awakens in the morning with dark stains upon the pillow. She may assume the smudges come from her penciled eyelids or brows. But in the advanced state she can’t fail to notice the ink-dark tears that flow from her eyes.



My father often told me, “The patient owns the remedy.” In this wise I followed the cure of a young woman, Annabella, who saved her black tears in inkpots and then wrote with them until over time they clarified. Though the cure was long, the plague thinned and subsided at last. Several victims who didn’t know how to write were still comforted, though I can’t say exactly why, by the little jet-black bottles that they accumulated on their shelves. The only difficulty I encountered, especially in Venetia—a city where they will try to sell you anything—was the connivance of two or three disreputable fools who tried to hawk their own tears. Of course, for a while certain aristocrats coveted these inks that leaked from the intimate sorrows of others, but they soon discovered that their own tears darkened. No one was immune.