The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 16





To Make Way for the New

“I’m your firstfooter!” hooted Hamish on New Year’s Eve.

He had invited us to join a few friends at the table of Dr. Baldino just after midnight. But when he came by to collect us, he stood at our threshold, his eyes darting from one to the other of us with some hidden foolery.

“Won’t you come in a moment?” Olmina asked as we took some time to gather our cloaks and hats.

That’s when he made his announcement and stepped ceremoniously into our sitting room. He was handsomely attired in deep red velvet breeches, jerkin, and doublet, verdant hose, and a coat, and his maroon hat was adorned with a sleek black feather. “The first one to enter your home brings good luck all year,” he announced. Then he produced a bottle of sweet wine, which Lorenzo gladly uncorked and emptied into four thick blue glasses that Olmina brought from the kitchen, for us to toast all round.

“To the New Year, then, the year of our Lord 1591!” I cried, delighted to be celebrating after the somber affair that was Christmas. I’d yearned for the lively colors of Venetia, and now Hamish had brought revelry to our door.

“Ah, so it would be on the Continent! But here in Scotland we’re still in 1590, according to the Anglican Church. It won’t be the New Year’s Day till March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation of Mary. But I see no reason we still can’t celebrate!”

“To our signorina, then, and her father,” called out Olmina.

“To my dear Olmina and Lorenzo,” I answered back, and then I added, “To Dr. Hamish Urquhart and his many gifts!”

The wine tasted of abundant, melodious happiness, and it sustained us after we left our rooms and walked slowly arm in arm, so as not to tumble into the slick streets. Hamish and I, and Lorenzo and Olmina, maneuvered our way through a light snow to Dr. Baldino’s house. Many others were out as well, dancing and singing raucously.

“The church will have a hard time arresting so many people,” Hamish said, laughing, as a man cavorted by us, stuffing his face with a forbidden holiday bun, full of currants, almonds, spices, and whiskey.

When we neared Dr. Baldino’s home, the stone building stood transformed, flickering with warm amber candles in all the windows. “They are lit for strangers to find a way through the night,” explained Hamish. He looked down at me warmly. “For travelers.”

The pungent scent of yew greens and holly freshened the door as we entered, and the cold room we’d passed by on our first visit now blazed with a boisterous fire. The large house thrummed with lute music and affable voices coming from the sitting room on the first floor. It pulsed with conversations and laughter, and hummed with Dr. Baldino’s steady, drawn-out words, as he held forth on some subject while leaning back in a broad gold-brocaded chair. A young manservant, his beardless face marked by a stray eye that scanned the entire scene as well as the individual, carried our coats away to a side closet and drew Olmina and Lorenzo upstairs to sit in the warm kitchen.

Hamish and I had barely begun to navigate our way through introductions and toward Dr. Baldino when Isabella of the long braid, now wound in a silver plait at her nape for the occasion, glided through the rooms with a small bell calling us to supper on the second floor. She wore a black gown with a high bodice and fine ruff and a sheer linen cap, giving her fully the appearance of a lady of the house. She and I were among a handful of women present, though I felt entirely comfortable there in the rooms thick with books, globes, maps, and various cabinets of curiosities. It seemed that along with his study of memory, Dr. Baldino possessed a passion for collecting the things of this world, whether they were natural or human crafted, perhaps so as not to forget the varieties of encounters that could be organized in the great theater of the mind. Chimerical fish and animals (those rogue taxidermies that delight many a collector—who knew if they were real or concocted?), catalogues, libraries, and clusters of things like bones, pressed leaves, shells, and minerals abounded, and Hamish had to pull me along out of the room of shells to come to dinner.

Kind Dr. Baldino sat at the head of the table, frothy white hair combed into some semblance of style. He motioned for me to sit next to him at the long improvised table that spanned one dark red room, made an L-turn, and entered another great room, so that guests were both visible and invisible, the latter’s conversations chiming from the other room like disembodied voices from the past. It wasn’t until a little later that I recognized Lorenzo’s quick remarks and Olmina’s throaty laughter and realized that the other room held the servants, with Isabella presiding (for so Olmina informed me later).

I was glad to be seated between Hamish and Dr. Baldino.

“Tell us, Dr. Mondini, what do you do in your fair city of Venetia to bring in the New Year?” asked the latter, his eyes weepy with contentment.

“Ah.” I thought for a moment, looking down and noticing Hamish’s hand touching a fold of my yellow velvet skirt, which fell over the edge of the chair. “There is always wonderful feasting, but what I most recall are the bonfires and the music.” I glanced from Dr. Baldino to Hamish and back again. “Even if snow and the tramontano winds fall upon the city, muffled men and women bring out their old goods—tables broken beyond repair, rotten curtains, broken cioppini, split wooden ladles, old love letters, though never books! We love our books too dearly, even if they’re brittle and smudged with mold.” It was hard to watch Hamish now, the dusky light kindling in his eyes. “Then we set fire to the old to make way for the new, in all the campi of our city. The fires are cast back by the mirrors of the canals, though I admit sometimes in wilder weather they sputter out. Still, it’s a wonderful sight, fire multiplied by water. Often people shout and throw things out the window and you have to watch your head.”

“Ah yes, I remember!” Dr. Baldino began to laugh. “It’s been many years, but I remember people tossing odds and ends out the window in Salerno. Things crashing down all night long! Once, my brother, Giacomo, flung a marvelous pack of cards out the window on New Year’s, accusing me of cheating because he was losing to me, as he often did. For I could keep the images of the cards he showed clearly in my mind for a long time—laid out as if upon a table. I was furious and ran down to collect as many as I could, before the bonfire consumed them.”

“That must be the original source of enthusiasm for your field of study,” joked Hamish.

“You’re right, dear fellow. It was the university or the gaming tables, and I believe I made the proper choice, don’t you think?”

“Ha, I don’t think so, Orazio,” cried a Spanish gentleman across the table, who’d introduced himself as Melchor de Ecija Zayas, a merchant of fine olive oil. “I wish you’d chosen the tables and come to Genoa with me, or Venetia, your fortunate city, Dr. Mondini.” He nodded at me with a large smile.

I frowned, feigning disapproval in good sport.

Dr. Baldino replied, “Then I might not have made it to ninety-three, eh, Melchor? Someone might have abducted me for my talent or slit my throat at the earliest opportunity. Still, I wouldn’t mind a card game of thirty-one after dinner tonight, if you are prepared to lose.”

“I’d be happy to offer charity to an old man,” Melchor replied, and he rapped the table with his knuckles, imitating the call to lay down cards in the game.

“Oh, and you believe seventy is young?”

“In your distinguished company.” Melchor grinned mischievously, his eyes glinting from the creases of his plump lids.

Dr. Baldino gave a dry chuckle, then turned back to me once more, saying, “The music then, Dr. Mondini, tell us about the music.”

“Sometimes the Fabrianis—have you heard of them?—sing out to one another from rooftops all across Venetia, making a harmonic instrument of the whole city, playing its corridors and muted canals with echoes that ring through open doors and windows, then vibrate in our bodies. The candles multiplied by glass and tides, the scents of Constantinopolis and Mytilene, the platters of fried squid and fish—all were infused with music. I enjoyed nocturnal walks with my servants and friends then, at the turning of the year, viewing the scenes of lit casements and the inhabitants within, listening to the diverse instruments and clear voices.”

I turned my head toward the other room, where, invisible to me, Lorenzo and Olmina, those two who were most dear to me now, conversed with boisterous joy. He laughed and the whole table trembled. She joined in and the sea shook far off in its bed.

“By contrast, Edenburg is a hushed place, wouldn’t you say, gentlemen?” Hamish declared. “No other cities mingle in its air, unless you count the sweets shop managed by the woman from Provins. I must take you there, Gabriella.” He regarded me expectantly.

The two elderly men stared at me, as if suddenly trying to discern the nature of our connection. Was it friendship, collegiality, or something more? I wasn’t sure myself. But I replied in an even tone, “Yes, I’d like that. We could bring back some honeyed fruit or pignolet for the good doctor here.”

“Delightful suggestion,” squealed Dr. Baldino, a small child for a moment. Then he commented, “Dr. Mondini, I also hear that you’re making good use of our library, compiling a wonderful encyclopedia begun by your father.”

“Yes, thank you, by the generosity of the university and, of course, my friend Hamish.”

“I hope that we may see some of the pages before you depart our city?”

“Yes, as long as you promise,” I teased, “not to submit them to your art of memory and claim them as your own.”

“Ah, my dear, I no longer write, and the theater of mnemonics has faded for me now. It is only the rooms of the present I wish to inhabit. In fact there are days when I feel my collections have reached their limit, their linkages burdened to the point of rupture. Sometimes I wish I could wake up to an empty house.”

“That’s when you’ll be dead.” Melchor laughed, obviously a close enough friend to say such a thing.

“Ha! Or completely happy,” Dr. Baldino said with a sigh.

Our conversation soon subsided as plates of boiled salmon, maced conger eels, oysters, periwinkles, mussels boiled with claret and cinnamon, special wheaten bread, and burdock root salad with dried herbs filled our table. Isabella served Dr. Baldino separately, his food mashed or cut into many tiny pieces. Her tender restraint seemed to me the perfect manner of a doctor. There, I thought, that woman has a gift and no one knows it. But then I believed Dr. Baldino did know, for he watched her leave the room with a kind of reverence.

Later, after a dessert of ginger rice pudding and sweet malmsey wine, and more good conversation, we walked toward home, all four of us hanging on to one another, dazed with the night’s merriment. We paused for a moment to look upward. The snowfall had stopped. The clouds broke and offered us a glimpse of night sky bristling with keen bright stars.



By February, I frequented the library only two or three times a week, since I’d acquired patients through the goodwill of Hamish and Dr. Baldino, who referred Scottish ladies to my care. I was glad to earn our keep. I had my rounds back, in a small way. The company of women also provided another window into the life here. One lady in particular kept a garden of medicinals, and though her plants lay dormant, I was glad to discuss the properties of the simples with her, though I spoke to no one of this, cautious and fearful of the witch hunts that cast a disquieting torpor on the winter city. I didn’t want to provoke suspicion in my pursuits of the art of physick.

More than anything, I found I distrusted happiness, besieged as I was by the memory of the curses my mother flung at me when she fell into her lowest moments: “Your father was too fond of you—that’s why he left!” Or “Your father was jealous of you! Now he’s fled in the name of this so-called”—and here she spat out the words—“Book of Diseases, and I’m left with no husband. You were meant to be his helper, not his peer.” At this distance from my mother, I wished I’d done something other than walk away from her. But I was too shocked and hurt. What else could I have done? Perhaps say, I am sorry that you don’t have a husband. She was cornered by old expectations in that great, sumptuous island prison. She was alone. I hadn’t thought much about it then. And I unwittingly goaded her loneliness.

Still, the words stung as they returned to me at the end of February in the library, where I settled among rare books of anatomy, astronomy, philosophy, the splendid books of the hours, and the materia medicas, which I pored over with a kind of passion. How studious the other doctors thought me, yet there were times I read the same passage over and over until the words moved upon the page like insects. Perhaps I needed the cure Theodorus Priscianus recommended for painful thoughts: “If a loadstone be held upon the head it will draw out hidden pain, and the same effect may be obtained by rubbing over the forehead a swallow’s nest thoroughly mixed with vinegar.”

Draw out the pain. I had come to accept that I was driven away from Venetia as much as I was driven toward my father. I had presented myself in every city with such admirable aims: to follow his journey and discover his whereabouts. Did I wish to surpass my father in the art of physick, while lacking the full breadth of his skills? Was I truly a fraud without him? No, I was less experienced and yet I had within me a kind of observation and instinct that failed in him.

Here in the academy I remained a shadow, consoled by the long, polished tables, podiums, great chairs, and benches that harked back to the library of Padua. This was where it all began, the sanctuary of my father. Perhaps the only way I’d ever really know him would be through words and their spent heat. For it was my father who had taught me to love books for themselves, the smell of the vellum and paper, the rare authority of the pages. Here, do you see this marvelous book? The skins of one hundred and eighty-two sheep! he once pronounced, as he slapped his hand down on the stamped leather cover boards. The book is a flock, a jewel, a cemetery, a lantern, a garden, a piss pot! Pigments ground of precious minerals, charred bone, lamp soot, rare plants and insects, pigments formed of the corrosion of copper plates suspended above urine.

One afternoon, Hamish interrupted my reading of a gem-like book of hours, a page where I often lingered, San Geronimo in the Wilderness, his psalms compiled for the sick and the infirm. “I’ve worried for you.” Hamish lightly clasped my left shoulder. “Worried that the shadow of the father also lay upon the daughter. I sent a note a week ago inviting you to walk with me but never received an answer.”

His hand pressed gently through several layers of wool, my cape and sweaters, a linen blouse. A heat rose in my shoulder to his hand as if to a warming brick. There was no one else in the library, and the darkly paneled walls seemed to draw nearer like the sides of a wooden box; the precious volumes also conspired, like heads nodding closer, to overhear our words.

I turned upon the bench and saw only the curved lips in his beard, then felt the rimmed moisture of his mouth upon my forehead, then my lips. He sank next to me and fumbled with my bodice.

I held Hamish’s face between my hands. I sought out his blue eyes. I could paint him now, so carefully did I see his face: his complexion pink as the saint’s in the illumination, the carmine flush of his chest where the shirt flap opened, dangling its careless string. The light saffron hairs. I laid my ear to his chest and he held me. I wanted to know his music. The lute, the sound box, the fretted ribs.

Some women think of love as a rising thing, but I’d always known it as a descent where I might lose myself or my beloved. A sweetness and then a severance greater than original solitude. And so, I feared joy. Yet there in the library, Hamish and I climbed the bright ladder of the body, as if it were sky and we a deafening, twisting flock of birds that could never fall to earth.