The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 19





The Mountains Are Full of Wonderful Creatures



My dear Gabriella,

If a man could be cured by holding council with the very thing that wounds him, then this would be the place. For in this desert, where the night reigns above me like a mantle of fear become awe, all my worst fears—losing myself, the physical infirmities of age, even death—lessen with the knowledge of my utter insignificance. I know it must sound odd, but I am reassured. All my ambitions—my vocation as doctor, The Book of Diseases, that vast encyclopedia that was to be my magnum opus—these things are thin under the firmament. I have never seen stars as I have seen here. The spheres rasp against one another and we can see the sparks! The desert people understand. Stars fly into our faces. I am small, I am small, and I do not care. And then the moon…



Oh, my father, I thought when I reread this undated letter from an unnamed place. When you declare your fears, there is no mention of a daughter or the ones you love. You have left that for me to carry. I always wanted to believe you were going through a difficult time and were making your way back to us. This letter only a kind of elaborate fancy. Perhaps I have deceived myself. Perhaps I will go on deceiving myself for a while.

We departed Montpellier for Santa Engracia. In spite of Olmina’s disappointment that we weren’t traveling east toward Venetia, she was cheered by the fragrance of yellow broom, sweet marjoram, and pungent grasses that flared yellow at the end of the day in the late May light. As we wound our way higher and higher into the mountains, with the peaks of the Pyrenei before us, my breath grew larger. The sweet pine- and fir-scented winds, clean light, and twisting waters cleansed this world and offered something that couldn’t be imagined at lower elevations. The humors found their balance. No wonder the holy ones sought out the high places.

From time to time the face of Hamish arose in the early morning as I awoke, and I could almost hold his round chin, dimpled like the star at the base of an apple. I imagined a life in Edenburg, as the wife of a scholar, with children. But when I glanced in my handheld glass each day, I saw a fuller face, for the journey had kindled my appetite, and a further dimming of youth. I had memorized Hamish as I had memorized my father, but the scent of his hair was the only resemblance the two men shared. A strain of pinewoods, smoky inks, stifling libraries, vellum books—yes, books. He was the story I hadn’t fully read, the book that held a secret.

We often heard the distant bells of small towns clanging the hours, but especially dawn, midday, and evening, for these were the longest tolling. Some nights we slept in plain stone inns for pilgrims; a few nights when we didn’t reach villages by nightfall, we slept out in the open, in shelters that ranged from a ring of old beeches with a fire going all night to keep the wolves at bay, to a tall circular stone enclosure broken on one side and entirely lacking a roof. When I questioned Lorenzo about this curious abandoned structure, he told me it was probably meant to protect the hives from bears. And indeed we found broken skeps inside, but no honey. It proved to be a fine shelter, canopied by the stars at night.

As we rode, steadily zigzagging up the steep mountains, the air cooled. No one worked these slopes for crops, and the shepherds who brought their herds out of the valleys for summer grazing had not yet reached the mountains. Here the soil was pale and spare, the stones reflective, unlike the darker loam of the lowlands, which held the sun. In order to stay warm and capture the best light, I chose the midday hours after dinner to write.

On one particularly gusty afternoon, we came upon two jumbled outcrops of boulders that inclined together near a rocky stream and formed a cunning hollow there, completely sheltered from the wind. The little basin of dark earth, formed by snowmelt that had already evaporated, seemed a warm sod cloak laid down beneath us, like wool to the touch. New grasses (which the mules happily cropped) clumped and needled up around the edges. We sat upon our cloaks, cupped by stone, warmed by stillness.

After we ate our bread, olives, sliced boar meat, and cheese, Lorenzo happily flung himself down on his back and placed his hands under his head, staring upward, where nothing could be seen but an occasional rook and erratic specks of blue that seemed to flake from the sky.

“Oh, look!” I cried, stretching out my arms toward the small butterflies lilting high above us. Everything about them was blue—their wings, their fuzzy bodies. “They’re dazzling! See how they open and close the leaflets of their wings.”

“And what would they be advertising, signorina?” teased Olmina sleepily.

“The mountains are full of wonderful creatures, eh?” Lorenzo joined in. “One might as well feast upon the vision of these gems as fall from a cliff.”

“But beauty is brevity, isn’t it?” I mused.

“How do you measure that?” pondered Lorenzo. “A summer’s worth of life is long to the butterfly. But we want decades. Yet what are they worth if we’re piling loss upon loss? I’d rather count days than years. Each day a year, by butterfly measure.” He chuckled at his own philosophizing. “But I’ve also heard it said that blue butterflies come from the mouths of angels.”

“Ah, some shepherd’s whim.”

“No, signorina, I think there’s a whole flock of them above us now. You sense them more easily in mountain places, you know. Forget cathedrals. Here’s my divine.”

Olmina rolled comfortably onto her side and began to snore lightly. I leaned against a curved stone and began to write about a disease utterly contrary to the pleasant aspect of our resting place.



The Repugnance of Closed Space:

Walls That Bind the Soul

For some sufferers, even the presence of a stone wall in an overgrown garden causes distress. For others, it is a room without windows, a long corridor, or a stairwell. The person may sweat, become chilled, cry out, or contract like charred paper in flame.

A young woman by the name of Esperanza, from Valladolid, clawed the plaster from the walls when she was stricken, as if she were buried alive. Her mother lamented the fact that her daughter had become a vermin and their home a vermin’s nest. Even the addition of windows produced no improvement in Esperanza’s vexation. Her sister complained that she could hear the terrible sound of Esperanza chewing the walls late at night. For although they tied her hands and her feet upon retiring to sleep, she wriggled up to the head of her bed and rasped the wall with her teeth.

Her father, a man of some wealth and reputation, rarely stayed at home, so great was his frustration with his daughter. One afternoon he appeared covered with brick-red dust, the August wind at his heels. He strode into the house, bearing the look of a man who will not be contradicted, and ordered Esperanza into the courtyard. The servants stood about, wringing their hands, fearful of his mood. He barked out orders: “Bring Esperanza’s bed into the garden, and her armoire—put it there beneath the orange trees.” As for her mirrors (for she had several more than was befitting a young woman), he ordered them to be arranged in various corners of the courtyard so as to effect the greatest sense of openness. “Now,” Don Enrique de la Peña said in a tone of stifled anger, “I want to hear no more about it, no more gnawing the walls like a nest of rats, no more burrowing in this household! I have given you a good life, Daughter, and I will not be shamed by your madness!” Esperanza stood like a dead tree in a salt swamp while her father paced the tiles in a state of chagrin and the servants lifted, rocked, and shoved the dark bulks of oak furniture to the places her father had assigned them. She was the still center of their multiple orbits. At last she spoke in a dulcet voice that outraged her father: “Thank you, Papà, I am glad you’ve made this decision.”

He marched out of the house, fists clenched with an unreasonable sense of defeat. Esperanza began to acquaint herself with her new home. Of course the garden was familiar to her, but now it took on a domestic cast that she must investigate. The sky offered escape from the closed rooms, though it still made her uneasy. The greenery was a true relief, not quite a wall and beautifully impermanent. For that is how Esperanza began to think of it. People didn’t understand her and they never had. Her aversion to walls was a horror of permanence. That is why she could never tolerate going to church—all the pronouncements of absolute judgment.

Esperanza never entered the house again. She took her meals out of doors, shat in a hole behind the rosemary, and slept under violent storm (the servants had arranged an oiled cloth tarp over her bed) and stifling sun alike. The maroon bed-curtains faded to a ghastly pink as the weave thinned and shredded. Her four-poster bed, with its headboard carved with putti and grapevines, slowly warped and split. After five or six years the cherubs’ heads separated from their bodies and lifted like tiny oracular spheres toward heaven. The bodies, meanwhile, rotted and furred with a livid green mold, took on the luminosity of the damp forest floor as they descended. Esperanza was now in her late twenties, unmarried and an even greater burden to her family. They had patched the walls of their hacienda, but no guest in that immaculate house could ignore the strange woman wandering in the courtyard and her disheveled articles of dress and furniture.

One afternoon a cousin of hers, four or five years of age, said in the sagacious voice of a child, “Esperanza, why don’t you come inside? The ceiling is square just like the sky. There’s no difference.” For he believed that her dismay came from squares and perhaps she had already overcome her discomfort without knowing it. Instead she began to wail with sudden recognition of the courtyard’s limits and how the unchanging dimension of the sky confined her. Esperanza yanked open the rusted wrought-iron gate at the back of the garden, which hadn’t been opened in years. She stumbled away from the courtyard, from the gleam of her nine mirrors, sunken bed, and dense armoire. She ran into the flooded streets of January and stumbled toward the pine forest at the edge of town, her damp woolen skirts trailing behind her, sprouting phosphorescent orange fungi at the hem. Her loosened bodice harbored small ferns. Her hair supported lichen and club mosses. Her algal skin and above all her stench, like that of a shrunken pond that yields a liquor of decay, emanated for blocks all around. Townspeople swerved away from her, whispering that it must be the green Esperanza, the child who rots at the center of the de la Peña house. She wandered into the forest of Cordera. Though her father searched days and nights with a party of men and lanterns, he never found her. Esperanza’s mother believed she had become a tree, perhaps an elm. She left small things—sweets and earrings—for her daughter at the base of a sapling that had begun to grow near the edge of a wet meadow, where it was rumored Esperanza had been glimpsed by a shepherd before she disappeared.





After three more days of riding, we found ourselves late one afternoon on a narrowing track of unrelenting wind. I trusted Lorenzo to find the way, yet it was true that he didn’t know these mountains.

When I questioned him, he said, “I’m taking us southwest, always southwest, signorina, just as you asked. I’ve got a good sense of the sun.”

I was reassured; still I felt that we were at the ends of the earth. We couldn’t even ride the mules, for the gusts threatened to pitch us off. We held tightly on to ropes that had been fastened to the rock faces with iron rings alongside the path for travelers, and we continued into the evening, for Lorenzo didn’t want to be stranded in this place.

“We must stop, take shelter among the rocks,” I insisted finally, my legs aching and my eyes straining to find sure footing across the scree that had long ago tumbled down from above. The flat stones appeared to lie all on one plane in the waning light, though they really tilted in jagged heaps, making it a tough scramble.

“I can’t go farther,” complained Olmina as she abruptly sat down next to her mule, drawing her woolen cloak and shawl more closely about her.

“No, no, you don’t!” cried Lorenzo. “You don’t know mountains the way I do. These may not be the Dolomiti, but I can smell the weather coming. With this sharp wind, there’ll be a harsh rain, maybe even snow.”

“The sky is clear, old goat!” said Olmina, shaking her fist at him.

Indeed the stars gleamed above us like holes punched in tin over a fire. The crescent moon descended the western sky like a pale gondola cleaving a black sea.

“Do you see the moon? It holds water—a storm is coming. And there below, see the small cottage in the meadow?”

“Yes, Lorenzo, I see it,” I answered, wobbling against the wind, fastening my eyes on the thatched stone hut.

“We can reach it within the hour. Get up on the mule, Olmina, I’ll strap you to Fiammetta’s back.”

“No, no, no!” Olmina fought him away with sudden strength.

“Come on, Nana.” I resorted to my childhood name for her, and she relented.

So we slowly progressed, Lorenzo at the front, leading the five mules, Olmina cowering upon the next to the last one, and I following her on foot, preceding the very last mule, all of us buffeted by gusts that increased in force as they whined through every crevice, leaving us stunned, our ears buzzing. All around us the stark peaks loomed like robed hermits come out of their caves to watch us, some of their pates dusted with snow.

When we reached the hut, it turned out to be a low-roofed shed for animals, with four goats huddled inside. Lorenzo, half bent over in the doorway, struck his flint to tinder, and with the small flame he lit a candle stub. He coaxed the terrified animals into one corner, and then Olmina and I settled in another.

Without a word, my dear companion instantly fell asleep on the straw while the goats stared at us and bleated. I noticed a small paper poking out of her pocket. A letter? I would ask her about it later, but I thought it odd, since Olmina didn’t correspond with anyone as far as I knew, nor could she even write…though she’d taught herself to read, sly woman, perhaps she could write as well? Lorenzo pulled in the five mules, closed the door, and made sure the inner latch was firmly fastened. We were all packed inside that stone hut steaming with animal breath, giving each other warmth and comfort.

Lorenzo passed me a hard crust of bread, a bit of cold cooked sausage, and some cherry brandy from Roussillon. “You must fortify yourself, signorina.”

The two of us munched our food gratefully while the wind roared down the mountain, shaking the thatch above us. A creature snuffled in the leaves outside the hut, too softly for a bear, I thought—probably a hedgehog. Lorenzo pinched the wick, and we fell into a dense animal darkness. He began to snore loudly. In spite of the noise, I began to nod off…

Maurizio whispers, “Gabriella.”

His handsome green eyes stray past me. “Gabriella!” He wears the white smock of the sickhouse and his feet are bare. How beautiful they are, strong and arched, the beveled toes, and then above the ankles I see small wings pulsing. He stands in the center of a long room in Santa Caterina’s Hospital, sweating profusely. Droplets run down his legs and puddle at his feet. Then I’m near his bedside, where he’s lying down. Long rows of vacant beds that fill me with terror line the walls. Perhaps they were emptied by the plague? When I bend to kiss him, he is still and cold. But the pulse in his winged feet contradicts blue skin. I press my lips to his chill forehead, to each dead eye, to the stricken lips. He doesn’t stir. I rest my head on his feet, my long hair a shroud. His pulse is in my ear. I’m sure of it and want to bring him back. I stroke the still-beating wings at the ankles, but Maurizio doesn’t return.



The animal stench, mules’ braying, and icy air creeping through chinks in the stones awakened me. One of the mules shifted his hooves in agitation. The door was slightly ajar; Lorenzo had gone out, perhaps to relieve himself. I got up and peered out upon a changed landscape: the earth was muffled under snow.

The tips of my fingers tingled even within their gloves, and my toes within their boots. I saw the faint pockmarks of Lorenzo’s footsteps leading down toward the edge of the stunted pines.

Someone moved there. My spine sharpened. The beasts sheltering with us jerked their heads up and down now in a panic. Olmina slept her blessed sleep, undisturbed. As I watched, the brown figure whipped something side to side. I stood halted by fear. The bear, for that was the thing I beheld, shook Lorenzo like a sack of grain. I couldn’t move. Then I jerked into motion, yelled, and stumbled forward, falling halfway to my knees. The massive bear chuffed and dropped Lorenzo. It swung its head back and forth, reading my smell. Here comes Death, I thought, my mind honed to a single point of dread.

The bear stood, his russet pelt crackling with frost. His paws were clotted with snow, splotched with blood. I was too far now from the hut to retreat. Then a small gust snapped my cloak out behind me. The bear snorted, then loped downhill into thicker woods.

By the time Olmina appeared at the door of the hut crying our names, I was kneeling beside Lorenzo, clasping his bloody head in my lap, his eyes wide open to nothing. I sobbed, “Don’t you leave me, Lorenzo! Stay with me!”

Olmina lurched toward us and crumpled. At first she looked past her husband into the pines as if she didn’t believe what she saw. That was some other man. She would search for Lorenzo at the edge of the woods.

I tried to put his viscera back in his body. I put snow in the cavity to stanch the bleeding. I put snow on his throat, which immediately soaked red. I shook his shoulders to wake him up. This couldn’t be. Olmina wept, opened her arms to the frozen sky, and bent to Lorenzo. “Dio mio, no! Husband, don’t go, don’t go!” She keened so loudly the mountain itself shook with her cries.



We dragged him up the slope slowly. At last we settled his body in the shed and covered him with a blanket, much to the terror of the animals, who smelled bear on him and clambered up against each other and the back wall. The mules would have bolted if Lorenzo hadn’t tied them so well. I took them outside to calm them and secured them to the iron ring set in the stone wall of the shed, all the while looking downhill at the dark red trail in the snow. I didn’t want to let the goats loose. The bear was still out there.

Olmina uttered such harsh cries at Lorenzo’s feet that I pressed my hands to my ears and dropped down beside his shoulder, sobbing. Then I put my palm to his cheek. He was cold.



After some time—whether one hour or many, I didn’t know, for it was impossible to tell the time beyond that daylight still remained—Olmina said, “I must wash him and sit vigil.” She turned her face to me, haggard with sorrow and fear. “Could you find some twigs to start a fire? Don’t go far.”

When I returned with an armful of damp twigs and dead branches, she’d struck a fire, using dry straw, behind stones that had been set in one corner by the shepherds as a crude hearth. A small opening in the thatch drew the smoke away. Olmina lit two candles, one at Lorenzo’s head and one at his feet. The four goats crowded up against each other in the farthest corner, bearing quiet if uncomprehending witness. I filled our pot with snow to melt for the final cleansing of the body.

But first we dragged him outside and washed him with snow. There was no other way. We removed his tunic and shirt, his breeches and hose, his leather shoes. We folded up each piece of clothing, even if it was torn. It shocked me to see his leathery, wrinkled body with its terrible wounds. We knelt, each taking one side of him, Olmina his left side, and I his right. We scoured the half-frozen crusts of blood upon his arms, neck, face, making the only sound on the mountain—shhh, shhh, shhh. Snow against cold flesh. But when I reached his legs and feet, the place where the toes were missing, I couldn’t go on.

Olmina moaned and lay her head down upon his chest. What would we do without him? We scrubbed and stopped, shivering, then resumed the work, our hands red from his blood, raw from cold. At last we carried him inside the shelter. The water was warm by now, steam curling from the black pot. I tested it with my finger. Warm water for a dead man.

We laid Lorenzo out upon our best red blanket, a candle beside his shoulder. We each wadded up a piece of his torn shirt, dipped it in water, and wrung it out. I folded the cloth and drew it across his face, down his neck and shoulder, his arm, cleaning between the fingers as if he were a child. We mended him as best we could. I sewed his left arm shut with a strand of my hair. Olmina sewed his neck with a gray thread of her hair.

There were other gashes that we couldn’t close. We lay a torn square of linen across his belly, a rough veil to cover the wound.

Olmina looked across at me. “Where, truly, then, is his heart?”

“Here,” I said, placing my hand atop hers and setting it on his bristly white chest, slightly closer to her. She lay her other hand on mine.

“There was no priest—he had no priest to bless him.” She lifted her head and whispered hoarsely, “He didn’t receive his Communion. Signorina, we must say the prayers for him.”

“We don’t need to say them. The mountain wind will be Vespers for him. The birds will say Matins. The animals Lauds.”

She stared at me and shook her head.

We washed his lower body, his hips, legs, feet. He was clean. He was cleaner than he’d ever been. I scraped under his nails with a small twig. Olmina stroked his hair into place. Then she continued to stroke his hair. There, there.

At last we dressed him. I brought in the mules, since it was growing dark, and latched the door. We were exhausted and lay down on either side of Lorenzo. Sleep fell like a bludgeon.



When I woke, the whole night had passed. Lorenzo, lifeless and cold, lay next to me. I touched his rigid hand and began to cry like a child.

Olmina was strange, and she wandered in her speech and her body, pacing in and out of the shed. “I must fetch a priest. Otherwise what will become of his soul in purgatory?”

I didn’t try to stop her. I let the mules out on a tether so they wouldn’t stray far. Some returned and stood at the door or came inside, shuddering with cold. I also tried to urge the goats outside. Two of them refused. They watched me solemnly, and I preferred them to a priest. Olmina trudged back and forth.

After a while we lit new candles at Lorenzo’s head and feet and sat beside him. We didn’t eat. I spoke some words from Purgatorio for his soul.



From the most sacred waters I returned

remade in the way that trees are new,

made new again, when their leaves are new,



pure and ready to ascend to the stars.



Olmina repeated her prayers. Sometimes I heard her, sometimes I wept. But I said nothing more. This was how the two goatherds found us. Astonished, they spoke little, but they knelt, and each placed a hand upon Olmina’s shoulders. They removed their black caps as if Lorenzo were one of their own. They came back with shovels and helped us to bury him farther down the mountain in thawed ground. We brought our mules and supplies with us. The herders dug a narrow hole. One of them rolled a large stone upon Lorenzo’s chest, to keep wild animals from scavenging him. One of them also brought a simple cross of two pine branches lashed well at the center with leather, which he planted upon the fresh mound. Olmina bent to the cold earth above him and would not be moved. But at last, with dark approaching, the men lifted her and set her upon a mule. They led us down to the village of Xeu Durgel. Lorenzo lay in the mountain. He’d always loved the high places. But it was bitter to leave him in a foreign land, to which we would never return.