The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 20





Like Cures Like

Olmina didn’t speak for a long time. Sometimes at night in the stone farmhouse where we found lodging, she sobbed without cease. The sound undermined time, the round of days, so that I wasn’t sure when I had heard it and when I was remembering it or even anticipating the sorrow to come. I slept night and day for long stretches. The distances drawn upon maps were now small compared to the distances between one day and the next, between Olmina and me. We hadn’t held each other since his death. Blame was never spoken, but the consequences of my choices harried me like the sharp clicking of her rosary beads. If only I hadn’t chosen the journey. If only my father. If only Lorenzo. The bear. God.

When I asked the farmer about the town named Santa Engracia, the origin of one of my father’s letters, he pointed to the west. I spoke to Olmina about leaving. She nodded wearily in agreement and repeated the old proverb, La lontananza è madre della dimenticanza. Distance is the mother of forgetting.

We would never forget, but I was grateful for the lie. I was reminded of that strange malady I’d noted in the book.



Lapsus:

A Predicament Where a Woman Abruptly Forgets Her Place of Origin and Conceives an Intense Longing for the World at Large, Often a Distant and Exotic Place, of Which She Possesses Extraordinary Knowledge That Can’t Be Attributed to Books or Hearsay

Just as the melancholic possesses a greater talent for memory, owing to a dry temperament that retains the impressions of things, so the phlegmatic of watery humor often contracts this disease of concurrent forgetfulness and inexplicable knowledge. Surely the cold flux of the humor predisposes the person to such a state.

In one such case, chronicled by Dr. Menasteri of Treviso, a certain peasant named Giovanna, who worked the radicchio fields renowned for the superb bitterness of their vegetables (relished by Caterina de’ Medici), suddenly refused to tend the fields. Her beloved radicchio plants languished. Her husband entreated her, wrung his hands, and finally locked her in their room, one of many peasant dwellings adjoining the large courtyard, because of her bizarre speech and tendency to wander when she left. She no longer knew her home. Giovanna claimed knowledge of a certain place, Akka, where she had never been. There, she said, she was known as Yellow-Wristed Woman. In that village the inhabitants acquired their names from various dyes they concocted to stain their clothing and tents. The dyes derived from the reactions of beetles, plants, moth wings, blood, and urine to sun, moon, and starlight. So Yellow Wrist spread onion skins in the courtyard under the winter stars of the Veneto and arrived at a golden agent, which she walked upon again and again to effect a deeper hue.

Giovanna’s husband brought her wilted heads of radicchio and placed them in her lap as gentle remonstrations, but she let them roll to the floor. Soon she began to appear outlandish, sitting bolt upright in her wooden chair by the locked window, her body surrounded by rotting vegetables. On an afternoon of sudden autumn freeze, which clutched at the ankles of women, her husband returned from the baker with a round loaf of hot bread, hoping to please her. The planks of their rude door were split apart. Giovanna had escaped. Trevisan hounds were employed to find her, but the animals moved back and forth confusedly through the fields, unable to locate her scent.

Giovanna was never found, although stories arrived some years later, regarding a foreigner in the Kingdom of Faz, her complexion pale as a slice of apple, who kept a garden of yellow dye plants and vegetable oddities.

Little is known of a possible cure for this malady because the victim usually disappears and therefore cannot be treated.



After leaving the farmhouse, we traveled for a day and came within view of a faraway inn on a fortified jut of rock that resembled nothing so much as the desiccated tongue of San Antonio, a parched extremity with the village perched like the saint’s last dying word on its tip. We were exhausted. Even the four mules—we left one at the farmhouse in payment for their kindness in keeping us—stiffened at the climb and abruptly stopped, beyond ill temperedness. The air was laden with heat.

We dismounted and struggled along the thin track that slanted up the side of the mountain, with its sparse wood of fisted oaks and hissing swaths of dead grasses. The mules finally allowed us to tug them along. Fedele carried the medicine chest and also bore my notes for the book. When the way became too narrow, I stopped and fastened the satchel of papers to my own back. We found a niggardly stream about halfway up and drank a swill of loose clay that barely blunted our thirst. A great number of sulfurous orange and yellow butterflies also sipped from the muddy trace and didn’t budge when we knelt there or when the animals disturbed them, slopping and grunting as the turbid water silted their mouths. The butterflies flocked to their bristly lips and nostrils and even to our lips and skin to drink our moisture. Thus strangely embellished with their yellow, we waited and let the mules drink their fill, even though Olmina shook her head and warned against bellyache and bloody flux. For a brief moment I caught a glimpse of her former earthy self, but then she disappeared again into silence. She stood away from the world. She went through the motions. Still, I couldn’t help asking her, “What do you think Lorenzo would’ve made of the butterflies?”

She stared inconsolably at the mention of his name, and then answered, “He would’ve liked their color—yellow for fire. They’re creatures of fire.”

When we arrived at the inn, the innkeeper, Cubero, shouted (with a voice that seemed permanently raised against the world), “Salvador! Salvador! Where are you? We have guests!”

As always, I insisted on carrying the medicine chest myself, wary of the influence of strangers upon the medicaments.

I followed an older man with sleepy, half-lidded eyes who carried my satchels up wide, dark stairs, then turned into a small, uneven stone corridor, finally ascending two narrow steps. Olmina trudged after me with her own bag. Once or twice he turned to chide me. “Wait, señora, wait. I will carry the chest for you. It’s not filled with gold pesetas, now, is it?” he scolded good-naturedly. “You should have a good manservant traveling with you to help you with these things.”

“I did, but he’s gone.”

“Ah.” He squinted at me as if he were going to ask a question and then, when he saw my face, decided against it. “You have the old chicken coop, but we’ve made it comfortable and you have the finest outlook, after all.”

He waved his thick arms toward a chasm of red stone below us, a saffron-and-brown patchwork of fields, other walled hill towns, and solitary watchtowers that brooded toward the Morisco country, beyond the ranges. He pushed his shirtsleeves up to his elbows and put his hands on his hips as he regarded me in a plain way, head to toe, and remarked, “The beds here are all the same, so servant and lady are equal!” He grinned and then left the room. I bent slowly to sit in the one wooden chair. Lorenzo would have liked this high place. Olmina sat upon her bag and bent her head to her hand. The room, though small, was cleft by silence.

After a while I asked, “What is that letter you carry in your pocket?”

She started. “I didn’t want to give it to you, for fear…for fear of causing distress.” Then because she knew there was no choice, she handed it to me. “I’m sorry, signorina. Dr. Joubert asked me to deliver it to you in Montpellier.” Then she went to the bed farthest from the window, as she knew I liked to look out, and turned away from me as she lay down to nap.

The letter was from Hamish.



My dearest doctor, Gabriella,

How clumsy I’ve been, how remorseful to have caused you misery without mend. If forgiveness is possible, let me dedicate myself to its study. Dear lady, how could you leave without leave-taking? I worry that you endanger yourself and your kind servants with this journey. The road is an incision into the unknown, don’t you see? You can’t dissect the continent in order to discover your father. I trust that this letter travels straight to your heart and is not miscarried. I trust that this letter precedes me. For I have determined to come and fetch you there in Montpellier. If you don’t wish to return with me to Edenburg, then let us voyage back to Venetia. Yes, I will accompany you to your home. And I would woo you if you would permit it. There is no other way. Your father is lost and only he may deliver himself. Dear Gabriella, you have read me—you have translated me unto myself. Let me also peruse the words of the volume hidden within your chest, the library of your distractions, passions, virtues, and reflections. I found two of your coppery hairs upon my doublet and now keep them coiled in my pocket. Your image ever before me, I commend myself to your service,

Edenburg

This 24th of April 1591

Dr. Hamish Urquhart



I placed the letter within the pages of my book. Now he’ll never find us, I thought. Yet his words clung to me.

While Olmina slept, I began ordering the pages of diseases and cures, and that settled my mind. There were more than I’d thought. In spite of the heat, I asked Salvador to bring a pot of hot water, for I wanted a cup of mint tea for its calming properties. I opened the chest and removed the bottle of crushed Corsican mint, and though I felt slightly ashamed, I used the last few leaves for a decoction for myself.

Olmina remained asleep in our room while the night pressed upon Santa Engracia like the lid of an iron cauldron. As for me, after bread, tough mutton, salty cheese, and a wine thick with sediment, I retired to the terrace, where I spread out my maps upon a thick oak table by the light of an oil lantern, placing stones at the ends to keep them from rolling back in on themselves.

The innkeeper, Cubero, curious, stood nearby straining to see. I waved him over and, explaining the purpose of my journey, inquired if he’d seen or heard anything about a man who fit the description of my father. He had no recollection of a doctor but suggested that I question the apothecary in Tremp. I traced our journey with my finger, as I had nearly every night since we left Venetia, so that the names of the places we’d passed through began to wear thin, especially those at the beginning, which had been touched most often. As I studied the pages of the book, they too were worn in places as if they’d been touched with an iron.

The Buboes of Morpheus

These carbuncles, unlike the Black Death, do not originate in Sicily’s evil vapors or the Goths’ pestilential camps. They come from the realm of sleep; thus many declare them incurable. The patient dreams that her limbs are covered with large, swollen wheals that have not yet broken the surface. Dire weather threatens downbursts, whirlwinds, and storm cauldrons. When the patient awakes, much to her dismay, she finds an ugly bubo behind her knee or protruding from her calf, and then it begins. What lodges in the body during sleep erupts in the daylight.

I was summoned to Orguégra to treat a young noblewoman renowned for her beautiful pallor who experienced this vision in sleep: Great clouds turned like millstones in the sky, black at the center as if they had dark, oily axles, and then frothed white at the edges. Objects were drawn up into the churn: chairs, Morisco carpets, damask linens, lapdogs, fire irons, legs of lamb, entire libraries, and astrolabes, but no persons were taken. Her buboes bloomed yellow and developed poisonous vortices. I could only hasten their eruption in order to relieve her discomfort more rapidly by applying leaves of mandragora (gathered at night before the dew diffused their healing properties), white Pyrenean clay, and salt with a soft cloth soaked in wine. The wrappings were changed three times daily. She suffered greatly from having her hands bound so that she wouldn’t scratch herself. Her unsightly brown scars threw her into such a rage that she refused to pay me for her hideous survival. Later I heard that while most of her suitors abandoned her, one remained, a certain gentleman of Napoli, who won her vows with the gift of a small collapsible telescope made of brass. Now she could see far away.

At the apothecary’s shop, when I inquired whether anyone had encountered an Italian doctor, a man of moderate height with a slight paunch (though I began to wonder—perhaps my father would be considered tall here or would have grown thin), the apothecary, Alonso Gonzalez, a bony man who twitched, appeared eager to be helpful.

“Yes, I was acquainted with your father, a fine doctor but sullen. Dr. Monatti.”

“His name is Dr. Mondini,” I corrected him.

“Ah yes, of course. The doctor often went on lone walks in the mountains and once spent the night at a watchtower near the gorge of Lamia.” Here the apothecary lowered his voice and nervously tapped his discolored fingers upon the stained pine counter, where many healing powders and secret theriacs had spilled, giving a motley color to the wood. His demeanor resembled that of a priest divulging something in confidence. “The place is stricken, you know—bad waters. But your father wouldn’t believe it, insisted on ‘like cures like.’ Dr. Mondini wanted to cure melancholia with a melancholy place, oh yes. We warned him, my wife and I.” I could see his wife standing motionless behind the half-open door, listening. “The waters are dead there, you know. The color is wrong—chalky blue, can’t see a thing under the surface, no. It’s unnatural. Kills the trees that grow along its banks, and nothing grows in the gorge. It’s one of the few clear passages between Moorish and Christian lands. Many soldiers from both sides were trapped and killed there, but that’s not the evil of the place, no, no.”

Gonzalez’s small black eyes switched nervously from Olmina to me. His pale head seemed modeled of ivory, so opaque was the skin, especially where his black hairline drew an M on the top of his skull.

“The fields of Don Trujillo also saw many dead, but the furrows have come back to life and yielded crops. The river was dead long before the soldiers came. My grandmother told me the waters were confounded by a crime too old for memory, and they curdled at the bottom like bad milk. Imagine a river of clotted souls held between the steep walls of the gorge—clotted souls!” His blotchy hands, studded with dark hairs, worked the air before him in the manner of a conjurer’s.

I jerked my head back slightly, startled, but the narrow little man ran on as if he couldn’t stop himself now. “Padre Pablo of Sevilla the Benedictine was well acquainted with such gorges, having clung to one, living like a vulture, for ten years in the north. He wanted to banish the curse of the waters of Lamia. The good man made exorcisms for days, alone on a ledge with only Padre Bautista as visitor, bringing his bread, water, and wine once a day. But one noon, Padre Pablo lowered his bucket to the river and drew the water against all warnings. When he returned to the village, his brow was knotted and black. They say he tasted the water. During Mass on Sunday, he faltered and sputtered an unknown language. We were all terrified of him. He grimaced from the pulpit. That night he departed with only a small bag of his things and—we think—a candlestick that was missing from the church altar after that night, oh yes. No one ever received word of him again.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this tale. I stared at the rows of ceramic jars, the cobalt-blue Latin names on white glaze, the yolk-yellow and blue-leafed vines that twisted around the lips of those jars where the darker clay spoke through the chipped places. They were less lovely than the majolica jars found in Venetian apothecaries. The least used jars of substances like black hellebore (employed for leprosy) sat coated with a fine umber dust.

Señor Gonzalez continued, “I warned your father not to drink the water, but he committed a worse folly, he bathed in it. If it weren’t for the tower watchman, who was shirking his duties that day and hunting fallow deer near the gorge, your father would have vanished in the dense blue clay, you know. He stood waist-deep in some kind of stupor and had to be roped and hauled out with the help of some horsemen nearby. No one wanted to touch the water, and they burned the ropes after, a loss of good cordage, if you ask me.”

The apothecary peered at me intently, as if it were now my turn to speak of my father. But I was still standing in the opaque water, gently trying to guide him, like a heavy log, to shore. He was wedged there; he wasn’t moving. And I was frightened.

“Did my father, then, succumb to the madness of the waters too?”

“I cannot tell, good señora, for to my mind he was a little peculiar before. He departed hastily, as if the very devil were at his heels. And so you’ve heard nothing from him?”

I wasn’t going to tell Alonso Gonzalez anything, for I knew that I might just as well trumpet it throughout the village as tell such a chin-wagger. I simply shook my head, thanked him, and purchased a few medicinals: adder’s-tongue for drawing out the foulness of wounds, orpine with honey for soothing all manner of lesions and burns, and fennel seeds for their general salutary effect. At least he received the benefit of my purchases for his trouble, though his disappointed face twitched on the left side as I gave him my coins. I glanced up at the half-open door and noticed that the woman was gone. A slim crack of light stood in her place.

“And when exactly was my father here, then?” I asked, feigning a casual tone while fingering the gathers of my brown skirt. “And where did he say he was going?”

“Oh, señora, he left for the north, Venasque. Or the south, I don’t know, maybe Miquinenza or Lérida?”

“Or Almodóvar del Rio!” A woman’s voice came in flowing tones from the other room.

“Please excuse my wife, señora, for her rudeness—just because she is from Andaluzia, she thinks that everyone wants to go there! But your other question, yes, he was here at the end of threshing season, July, three years ago now.”

We thanked him and left with our medicinals. We were barely two houses away from the apothecary shop when his wife ran up to us, a basket slung over her arm.

“I’m on my way to the baker’s, but I have something for you,” she said in a low voice. “Your father exchanged this once for some medicament. I believe his purse was growing thin. Don’t tell my husband!” And she slipped a small calipers into my hand. “I never knew my father,” she added, “so I envy your sadness.” Then she stepped quickly ahead of us, for we were, after all, strangers.

Still I called out my thanks to her, but she didn’t turn her head.

“Quiet, Signorina!” Olmina spoke for the first time that morning. “She has already risked suspicion by speaking to us. Her husband stands peering at the door.”



We left Santa Engracia to explore neighboring villages for traces of the Italian, il Dottor. Sometimes when I conversed with other travelers or villagers, aristocrats or commoners, I wasn’t sure we were speaking of the same man. In one village, il Dottor exhibited habits so unlike my father’s that I suspected I was following the trail of some renegade or madman posing as a doctor. They spoke of il Dottor as a somber man who grunted enigmatic or incoherent comments, administered medicaments, and then took his leave. Some angrily demanded recompense from me. One fellow spoke of il Dottor as a saint, a man of unfathomable kindness who saw all the wounded as equal and would assist an afflicted brigand at the side of the road as soon as a gangrened knight in a chill castle bed.

Olmina wearied of this pursuit and attempted to change my course toward home.

On an afternoon of tremendous wind, we visited Encantat, where wild asphodel grew. My father always mentioned the extraordinary properties of these roots, which relieve spasms of all sorts and increase the flow of urine, purifying the body. Hippocrates also noted that the roots could be roasted in ashes and eaten by women to restore the monthly flow (a treatment that I hoped to test, for my own flow had ceased, just as it had once before in Venetia, when I fell into grief after my beloved’s death). The ancients planted them near the tombs, since asphodel was said to be the favorite food of the dead. I was certain my father wouldn’t have passed up the chance to see them firsthand and gather the bulbs.

We attained entrance to a high pine-forested valley between two stark ridges, directed there by a stout shepherd, who told me the finest white-spears grew there, though most of the flowers were spent by now. My hair blew ragged beneath my straw hat, and Olmina began to dote upon me as one would upon a child or the village fool.

“We really should start back, Gabriellina. A storm is coming. I’ll make you a tasty cheese pie,” she coaxed.

“Since when do you call me Gabriellina? I’m a grown woman,” I shouted at her above the wind. “I want you to help me dig for bulbs!”

Olmina pressed her chapped lips together and frowned at the unforgiving rocky soil, then brusquely turned from me and walked away. I remained among the tall spears, which furiously shook their long leaves, exhausted flowers, and multiplying pods, until I managed to unearth several spindle-shaped bulbs. I stowed them in my bag.

Food for my dead, I thought, though their hunger seemed unending.



After spading the wild asphodel, we returned to Santa Engracia and I fell ill. I felt such a chill that it reached backward into other months and years. I heard Lorenzo sitting there at my side, carving wood with the crisp strokes of a knife. I saw the back of my father at the window and then I didn’t. Messalina appeared, dripping with ocean.

Olmina tended to me. She brought me black radish soup and bread for supper and stroked my forehead with a damp cloth, even though her sighs told me that she was restless and sometimes resentful.

On the third morning, Salvador brought my chamomile tea, strained of flowers, and I felt better. How odd that sometimes a small thing can effect a large reversal. Healing, finally, is invisible.

“I’ve asked too much of you on this journey, Olmina,” I began hoarsely. “And Lorenzo. He never would have died if…”

Olmina began to weep softly and patted my hair. “He loved you very much, Signorina Gabriella, as a man loves a daughter.” She pressed a small pillbox into my palm. I observed Olmina’s age in her mottled, wrinkled hands. “This is yours—your mother was going to throw them out!” The box contained the lost teeth of my childhood. They resembled little shells. “But he kept them in his shirt pocket always, for good fortune, he said, because they once belonged to our little doctor.”

My fist closed over the box, and I pressed my head against Olmina, crying. Lorenzo had carried my teeth like seed pearls as he watched me grow into a woman. And still I wanted to travel to the far ends of the earth—to Barbaria, now—for the father who’d abandoned me.