The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 23





We Are Housed by the Past

The caravan departed in the blue hour before the hot sun climbed the horizon. It would take five days to reach Taradante. Yousef fitted my mule Fedele as a pack animal, then straddled the other mule, while I engaged a camel for the journey. We rode at the end of the caravan, since camels don’t suffer mules easily in front of them (they don’t suffer humans well upon them either, to be honest), with one heedful camel driver at some distance behind us.

The two Catalonian gentlemen rode ahead of us, having employed three camels just to carry the tomes of their library. Other travelers included Berber traders and a blue-veiled Arab woman of some distinction flanked by two men with scimitars.

We proceeded with a lot of commotion at the outset, the camels snorting, belching, and grunting like dyspeptic old men, while the three drivers shouted brisk commands up and down the line. The camels’ rope bridles and harnesses shook with indigo tassels, as if they still carried bits of night and sleep with them, rendering them cantankerous in the transition. But as soon as the city disappeared behind us, all animals and humans alike settled into an undulant rhythm.

Sitting high on the camel’s hump in a saddle that was no more than folded blankets with a forked wood pommel, I lurched and dropped and lurched. There were no stirrups. I had never ridden anything so uncomfortable in my life, but I hoped, with patience, to learn to fall in with the motion. At least the nausea I’d felt off and on for weeks after leaving the northern lands had passed.

As we rode away from the boundaries of Tanger, we passed the tanners, their goat hides soaking in stone vats of crushed sumac bark, giving off a pungent stench. Next to them, some of the softened hides rested in red cochineal dye, looking like the flayed skins of unnamed martyrs. From these bloodred baths came the beautiful maroquin leather covers of many of our books at home. I hadn’t fully considered it before, but I would never touch those books again without the knowledge of what underlay the art of their bindings.

As we rode across the stark desert plain, with the Atlas Mountains beyond, Cousin Lavinia’s words returned to me from a long-ago letter in which she described painting San Paolo the Hermit. I begin with burnt sienna and lead white but avoid pure white as a ground. It’s too harsh and unforgiving. Even the desert can’t be this absolute in its absence of color. But she’d never seen the Mauritanian earth, its vacant glare nearly stripping one of sight. I could barely look out through the blue-black gauze of my wrapped headscarf, a woven net like the grid of a drawing screen plotting the landscape, the foreshortening, the vanishing point.

By midmorning the faint smoldering curves that marked the wadis snaking out of the mountains were barely distinguishable. Far behind us I observed another caravan dimly, with all the travelers wearing light blue robes. Sweat stung my eyes. The inescapable heat emptied me. There was no perspective, all things were equal: foreground, background, the line of camels, mules, men, and women leveled by the impartial sun, a confounding demon…

It was like the devil in the wall at the Benedictine chapel in Subiaco that I had visited as a child.

My father and I had met a hunched priest with strings of yellow-gray hair like rigging dangling around his face. “There are two walls here,” he warned us, and he pointed his forefinger toward the small crumbling hole in the wall left of the nave. I stepped back, frightened, as he lowered his voice to a whisper. “You must not look there!”

My father directed a question to the priest about the painting of the raven in a niche on the opposite wall. As they walked away, their backs turned to me, I crept up to the hole and peered in. The gap was dark, but gradually I could make out a twisted profile. Then a hand like a rooster’s spur seized me from behind and I leapt back.

“See, see,” hissed the priest, as he released my shoulder. “The devil lives between the walls. He is trapped there forever. But don’t worry, he won’t harm you as long as you don’t let him out.”

The old monk grinned and my father gave a dry laugh like a cough. The painted devil I’d glimpsed between the walls, between the old plain church and the new embellished one, was a leering demon with sharp nails and lurid eyes. It sat crushed between a history forgotten and one reinvented. The whole chapel nested inside the hewn cave of its older form, the way we are housed by the past when we think we are creating something new.



We stopped at a small mudhole to rest until the intense heat of midday passed. As my camel slowly folded his front legs to sit upon the ground, I thought surely I’d plunge forward. All around me the sounds of beasts eagerly lapping water, travelers conversing in parched tongues, and palm fronds crackling in the wind flattened to a dull pitch. Yousef urged me to drink and I did.

As I rested against a palm trunk in a narrow strip of shade, the camel drivers suddenly began waving their arms, yelling, and drawing the animals closer together. Yousef pulled the mules close and quickly wrapped their muzzles with shreds of torn scarf, no small task, as they jerked their heads away from him. Señor Montcada shouted, “The red sharki is coming. Cover up!”

“What’s the red sharki?”

“A hot southeasterly that will scour your skin.”

“How long does it last?”

But he didn’t hear me, for he’d turned and rushed back to his companion, both of them kneeling against one of the camels that bore their books. A thin red haze began to sift through the palm fronds, and then farther out I saw it, a rolling wall of sand that broke across the desert, scuffling and roaring down upon us.

Taut with fear, I squeezed my eyes shut and crouched against the musky camel, whose stink I almost welcomed, for the world returned to three dimensions through scent. As the sand pelted us and I struggled to breathe through my dark scarf in the shifting body of the desert, something stirred within.

I felt it jump—oh!—like a small fish in my belly.

It jumped again! My body had given me signs for months. The nausea, the cease of my cycles, which I’d read as grief, the heaviness I had blamed on my indulgence in sweets—these were all something more. A child swam in my womb.



The mathematicians left us on the fourth day to pursue their calculations in Marruecos. On the fifth day we mounted stark ridges through scant juniper and pine forests. At dusk we approached a walled village, all squares and rectangles and pointed arches, assembled at the base of brick-red mountains. The cool night air returned to me what the heat of day had drained. The pleasing geometry of human dwellings set against the disorders of the desert secured me once more in the world.

At last we had reached Taradante.

After Yousef made a few inquiries of the gatekeepers, we found lodging with the only person who offered beds to foreigners, a middle-aged woman of indigo skin by the name of Malina. Tall, lean, and wrapped in colorful robes and a blue half veil (covering only the lower part of her face), she ushered us into her cool courtyard. The veil, embroidered with small red triangles and dangling tiny silver coins, jangled lightly and glittered as she moved, drawing attention to the gleam of her good eye. The other resembled a dried fig embedded with an opaque marble. She provided me a plain room across the courtyard, separated from her own by a thin stick fence to keep the goats in. It was one of several rooms in the square cluster of red mud rooms and a granary tower that formed her dwelling.

Malina gave Yousef a smaller room to one side of the courtyard, beneath a single great date palm that shaded the animal stalls. Three goats lay in the straw, watching us pensively as they slowly chewed. She also pointed out a slightly larger stall where we could keep our mules. Luckily she spoke some Italian. I wondered, though I didn’t ask, about her kin, who must once have occupied these rooms—whether they died in a plague or war or were lost one by one. For it seemed strange that a woman would live alone in such a compound. There were no other guests.

The next morning I took Malina aside and explained, “I am in need of a woman’s garments, for I am only a man by the clothing I put on to travel in safety.” I didn’t mention that those clothes were growing more uncomfortable around my belly day by day.

“Mmm,” she murmured, and she stared at me. “I noticed your face was beardless and oddly smooth, but then I’m not always sure how to judge foreigners.” Then she smiled as she stroked my cheek. “Don’t worry. I have ample clothing for you.”

I put away my man’s garb and adopted the loose linen and wool robes of the Susa women. Malina kindly offered me these secondhand garments from among her own and gladly accepted payment.

Yousef was not alarmed. “I knew, Dottoressa, I knew,” he informed me quietly, nodding and looking down at his rough feet as he squatted in the courtyard, cleaning a bridle, the first morning I stepped to the well as a woman. “By your scent of salt and sweet. No man, not even a youth, has the smell of a woman.”

“But you acted kindly to shield me…Weren’t you worried about the trouble I’d cause?”

“You pay me well, Dottoressa. There will be no trouble while I serve you.” The old man spoke in a plain tone and continued brushing the bridle clean.

“Thank you, then.” I sat at the edge of the well, a round mud wall surrounding a cistern, capped by a chipped clay jug to prevent evaporation. Nearby, a simple pail tied to a coil of rope could be used to draw water.

“God, who speaks in the beehive, has many riddles, and why shouldn’t we be one of them?” added Yousef, still considering my changing guise.

Malina, who’d probably overheard our conversation, peered at me from her window. Then she entered the courtyard and handed me a small sheathed blade. “Keep this in your belt for the future,” she instructed me. “For though Yousef bears respect, others may not. And you must take the room next to mine.” She directed Yousef to move my things.

My new room, which opened onto the courtyard, was larger and possessed a narrow window and a crude wooden bed frame with a neatly folded pile of hendira blankets, woolens that women wove in pomegranate red, saffron yellow, and night blue, which could be worn as garments or used for sleeping.

A faded wine-red carpet patterned with flocks of triangular birds lay upon the packed earthen floor. In the darkest corner of the room a large cobalt-glazed jar of water with a snug ceramic lid stood like a watchful young child. When I filled my brass cup and drank, I tasted ancient minerals as if the water had passed through the veins of mountains, like those celebrated waters in Umbria, which I still remembered from former journeys with my father.

Later I spoke to her in the courtyard as she fanned herself under the palm. “Malina, I must ask you…I must tell you the reason I am here.” I touched her sleeve.

She regarded me cautiously. “It is not necessary. You may take time.”

“I’ve already traveled a long time to get here.”

Her look softened. “Come inside, my daughter, and I’ll prepare us a cup of tea and something to eat.”

She led me into a room just off her sleeping room and knelt to put wood in the curved mud hearth, which resembled a tall, thick-sided pot, with a wide slit along one side for stoking the fire. After it was well lit, she set a kettle there at the top. Numerous herbs hung drying from the log beams of the ceiling. Several jars lined the base of three walls, and it occurred to me that there were many more than were needed for cooking. We sat upon a large red, ocher, and indigo carpet woven with a great geometric tree and all manner of animals scattered here and there among its branches. It shone dully in worn places where people had sat year after year. When the water boiled she tossed a handful of fresh mint leaves into the small pot, then took a piece of flatbread from a covered basket, spread it with cold, stiff honey from a jar, and passed it to me. A blade of light crept slowly along the wall as the sun sank lower.

“I’m searching for my father, an Italian doctor. His name, like mine, is Dr. Mondini.”

“Hmm.” She poured our tea into earthenware cups.

“He mentioned this place, Taradante, in one of his letters.”

“I’ve heard of an Italian man…”

“Yes?”

“Who stubbornly dressed in blue cape, hose, and plumed hat in the blazing midday.”

I shook my head and frowned.

“I’ve heard of a Venetian swindler with burnt skin. He was lost in the pillars of a sandstorm, or some say he joined the blue people on the salt route. He owes my cousin money.” She narrowed her eye at me.

“That is not my father,” I said heatedly. “He is a doctor!”

“Il Dottor, yes,” she murmured at last. “I know a man who has become a recluse.” Malina put her hand on mine. “Daughter.” She sighed as if reluctant to speak. “He lived here for a time. We worked with the bezoar, the green ones and the stars of antimony. I am a healer of women; he was a healer of men. When his medicines finished, I taught him the smokes, the proverbs, the sand cures. He left almost a year ago.” She sighed. “Sometimes the desert calls us to another dream.”

No, this wasn’t true!

“Stay awhile,” she coaxed, seeing the expression on my face. “You are a doctor too. I will teach you the healings that come from the growing things, the silent ones, and the well spirits. I will tell you the ways we sicken and the ways we recover ourselves again.”

But I couldn’t take in her words. “I can’t believe my father was here, and I’ve missed him!” I sobbed, bringing my hands to my face. Malina let me be.



At dusk, spent and groggy from sadness, I brought Malina the sky map given me by Señor Requesne and unrolled it upon the rug. “I recognize these stars,” she said, lifting an oil lamp. “They were spoken by my grandfather when he seethed with fever.”

“Oh—you must give me their names so I can fill them in.” I wanted to engage myself, to keep going with work.

“Yes, later when the night sky is fully dark.”

“Tell me about another one,” I said.

“Another what?”

“Another malady. I’m writing them down.”

“Ah, Daughter, may I see?” Malina kept up the odd habit of calling me Daughter, though we were nearly the same age. I accepted it, even liked it. She went on, “Your father mentioned a book and it caused him distress. Sometimes he cried out for it: ‘My book, my maladies, my cures!’ ”

So it was truly lost…

“But don’t you have your own papers, Daughter?”

I brought out the satchel with my own large folio of notes. As I straightened the pages to show Malina, I felt an unexpected urge to see them bound. They’d grown into a thing of solid heft and size. Malina ran her dark fingers over the many pages with admiration. Then she began to tell me about the blue worms. Sometimes I stopped her and asked questions, but mostly I just sat upon the rug before the hearth, which she fed now and then with splits of juniper wood as evening crept upon us.



Blue Earworms:

Desert Parasites That Feed upon Human Utterance

They live in the sand dunes and salt marches of Mauritania, where they hibernate for long periods of time at depths of three to seven arm lengths underground. The adults spend their entire lives in subterranean darkness. Thirty years may pass (and in the village of Melilla in Barbaria, it is said that a century elapses) before the worms appear. For reasons unknown, the young emerge all at once at the surface of the desert or shore as bright cerulean-blue worms, the length of a child’s smallest finger. In Mozema, where their brilliance is identical to that of the minaret roof tiles, they are called the little fingers of God. They issue from the sand on nights of the new moon, but only to seek darkness of a different kind, in the warm, moist ear of a woman. No other body crevice will suffice. The blue worms enter the sleepers and reside in the small labyrinths of resonance, grazing upon sounds that drift into the auricle. Some elders say they consume only human speech and howls but are greatly affected by certain languages, which can slow or agitate their activity. Berber and Bedouin words calm, while Portuguese and Ottoman Arabic make them wriggle, causing great distress to the victim. Instruments like the oud and santir generate a low humming among the earworms, a maddening or soothing effect for the person in whom they dwell. The symptoms include muddled hearing; auditory visions brought on by scraping, rustling, and thumping movements; and voluntary muteness in the person who wishes to avoid exciting them.

In certain years, nearly every woman in the village of Alganziza on the coast below Messa falls victim to the blue earworm. The population fluctuates greatly from season to season because of the nomadic peoples who pass through. However, when the earworms begin to emerge, the people paint the white stone walls, houses, and rooftops blue to warn away travelers. The village goes silent. No dogs or other animals are allowed, except for snakes, which are highly prized for their noiseless companionship and consumption of rats. Birds are driven away with long-handled brooms and flailing sticks, though they seldom appear in the town anyway, preferring the river Sus to the north and the date palms along its banks. The inhabitants converse in signs or writings if at all, the men respectful of the women’s silence. If there are secrets, now is the time they will fester.

The blue worms consume more at night, feasting, it is said in this village, on the conversations in dreams as well as on those spoken beneath archways or around the supper mat spread upon the floor. The family eats everything with their fingers and in their contentment sometimes forgets the necessity of silence. Then the worms capture the words before the women can hear them. The villagers also suffer insomnia, existing in a listless world for months, enduring the many ailments that arise from a cold, wet humor.

Finally the worm completes its cycle and emerges from the ear of its own accord, well fattened and seeking its original host. It burrows back into the desert to finish its hidden life there. Malina told me that there is even a constellation called the Blue Worm, in the southeastern quarter of the sky, perhaps that same constellation that we call Serpens.





I wasn’t certain I would go on looking for my father. I was weary. Even with all my care to retrace his journey, to seek out his peers, I had missed him. I wanted to remain in one place for a while. Yet what about the man who had disappeared in the sandstorm? And Malina appeared to know far more than she revealed. Perhaps it was her way to wait to know me, as she suggested I do before disclosing my purpose to her. Even as I was about to give up, I found another kind of patience, like a coin sewn into my hem. Besides, I knew how to wait. And now I was two.

I watched Malina come and go, visiting the well, milking or feeding the goats, fetching grain from the granary once or twice a day with her basket, to make flatbread. I allowed her to blacken my eyes with kohl to keep the flies away, and to cut strands of my coppery hair to share out with the village women, for the color gleamed as something marvelous to them.

I watched the women and children come and go, visiting Malina’s kitchen, where they consulted her about their ailments, leaving little gifts of dates, eggs, or even firewood. A few times I observed a thin tress of my own, woven into a child’s hair as an adornment.

I satisfied my growing hunger with eggs, goat cheese, flatbread, dried fruits, and honey during the day, and with cuscusu, flatbread, occasional goat meat, walnuts, raisins, olives, and oranges from the port of Messa in the evening when I shared a meal with Malina and Yousef. I didn’t know if I would ever return to Venetia. This land of desert and mountains suited me now.

Malina instructed me in the ways of the djnoun. “Those small spirits,” she said one afternoon as we sat before the hearth, “inhabit all things from the tiniest grain to the largest mountain.”

“But the small ones, why do they matter to us?”

“They live with us. We live with them. It is custom. We bear them respect.”

“Is there a fire djinn, a hearth djinn?”

“Yes, but they love water more. That is why you must sing when you draw from the well, or the djinn who lives there may taint our water!” She taught me a simple chant for drawing water. I murmured the strange words before I dropped the bucket facedown into the well, before the rope unwound from the bricks.

The monks and nuns of Venetia chanted their prayers early in the morning. That sound always made me stand still, no matter what age I was, no matter where I was going. I stood on the damp stones and breathed the chant, tasted the plain harmonies on my tongue. But this music of Taradante didn’t come from within the high cloister walls; it didn’t come from the plague churches dedicated to healing. It came from everywhere, from small red mud courtyards, drifting downward from narrow windows, echoing up from wells, granaries, stables, fields, oases, and wadis where shepherds grazed the animals. Children sang to soothe the djnoun in little stones, water, arjun trees, palms. The women sang, the men. Those who believe the desert is soundless, motionless, are mistaken. Malina told me that the desert herself hums. Nothing stands still. Not even sorrow.

Sometimes I walked alone, feeling safe as the outsider everyone in the village knew, to the oasis near the center of town, where exhalations were particularly strong at dawn and dusk. I knew that Yousef followed me, watched me as if I were a stray. So truly I was not alone. I listened for the indecipherable words that rose and fell from the slow-moving boundaries of stone and sand, beneath the calls of birds shrilling to their kind. Perhaps I wanted to hear the voices of which the old ones spoke, though I really wanted to hear my own ancestors, Venetian and Ciprian, who didn’t inhabit this place.

But I heard only the slippage of time, the seepage of water, and the murmur of conversations in and around the travelers’ tents pitched on the far side of the oasis. Sometimes that was enough. Once, I saw Yousef speaking to a tall foreigner, who stood with his back turned to me outside his tent. He moved his pale hands back and forth as he spoke, a vaguely familiar motion that made my heart leap. I asked Yousef about it.

“That man? He was just asking directions to the souk,” he answered.

“Does the man have red hair?” For his head had been covered by a hood.

“I don’t know.”

I turned away. I didn’t want him to see the expectation on my face—for I still kept the secret hope of Hamish, like another gold coin jangling against the coin of patience in my hem.