The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 24





The Basin of the Dead

Just before sundown in midsummer, Malina came to my room and began stopping up any openings, including chinks in the ceiling between the thuja beams. She cautioned me, “Tonight the moon withdraws and covers herself. A time of danger. She veils the mirror, passes through the basin of the dead. Extinguish your lamp, Daughter, and pray that your soul may pass safely through the dark.” And that of my unborn, I thought.

After she left, I understood that I was not to leave my room. But filled with insatiable curiosity, I stepped quietly into the small courtyard, fully cloaked. Shutters were latched, carpets hung against the carved wooden doors and windows, whether to protect those within from seeing that other lightless world, or to prevent the disorder of that world from entering the house, I wasn’t sure. I was a shadow among other shadows.

A man shouted once in the medina, in fear or exhilaration, and then the town went mute. The light hairs on my arms rose in apprehension. I climbed a ladder on the north side of my room and sat upon the flat roof of the dwelling. The moon had just risen. The lunar cast upon the listless body of the Sus valley and the surrounding desert mountains slowly wore thin, like an old garment, as a dark curved blade fell across the moon’s face. I watched the slow scything of her light.

An hour passed, and I didn’t move from my place against the wall, knees drawn up to my chest as I sat shivering, on vigil. The moon’s covered disk finally glowed like the clotted stump of an amputated leg or arm (for I had seen several such horrors on men returning from one war or another when they came to be treated by my father) or the bloodied head of an infant emerging from her mother. The stars jumped forward. I placed my hands on my belly. I, who had never given birth, considered the child who quickened there at the center of me. How should I prepare the way?

Little by little the moon slid into cold radiance once more. The stars receded. A small seep that emerged from an underground spring near the rubble of the outer wall gleamed briefly, then vanished in the sand. An unlikely knot of ferns grew there, and I suddenly craved the young shoots. But as I descended the ladder to gather them, someone moaned without words, a sound like that of a large animal. A smell of old, damp wood rose from the night. I listened for footfalls. Had something come down from the mountains? After a while I heard nothing more, but it so unnerved me I fled indoors. Recalling that ferns offered a cure for fever, I searched for the entry I’d written many months ago for The Book of Diseases.





Carthusian Spleen:

A Form of Ague Where a Solitary Falls into

Trembling and Sullen Aspect

The disease is named after an order of contemplatives who distill the elixir of life, a rare liquor composed of over a hundred herbs and spices, prepared under the breath of prayer. Unfortunately an outbreak of spleen among the usually kind and peaceful nuns caused their order’s name to be attached to this affliction, when even their elixir could not effect a cure.

The fever acts like a quick fire on the victim and then scorches all those around her. For the mean of spirit exude a certain burnt odor. Some will say that the reek is fiendish, but I’m not sure that evil is so predictable. Sometimes evil gives off a fragrance.

Once, in Udine, an amiable woman scalded by the ague spat insults at her children. A cobbler’s wife in Mainz flung shoes at every customer who spoke the words, “I need…” A young classics teacher in Florentia, noted for patience with her girls, began to lecture upon the necessity of the rod and the cage. “Let punishment instruct the frail body, break the will. Let suffering…” The ague, however, doesn’t affect vengeful souls with the inverse humor, a fact that led my father to say, “Though disease often calls its opposite to table, spleen dines alone.”

Carthusian spleen courts death, mingles bitterness with roar. Yet the fever bows to a fern. I’ve never treated it myself, but my father recommended the gentle and wise spleenwort. This fern grows profusely near freshets and reduces the rancorous fever, chills, and edema of the troubling organ. Spleenwort clenches just as the disease binds, and then the fern uncurls, loosening the bile of a thousand days.



The subsequent night I heard a muffled voice cry out from time to time and then subside. When I questioned Malina, she shrugged evasively and murmured that perhaps one of the neighbors suffered a private grief.

Unable to endure it any longer, I lit an oil lamp and followed the sound of the voice across the red dirt courtyard until I reached the granary. There, it came from within the storeroom! The tall tower, with its narrow windows at the top, sent the sound in all directions, making it difficult to mark the source unless you were at the entry. I thought I heard someone call my name, Gabi, Gabi, but then the voice fell away into babbling. I unlatched and opened the sagging door. The voice ceased and the dim room appeared empty except for a large mound of barley sloping from the wall to my right.

Old bits of grain and straw crackled beneath my feet as I entered. I lifted the lamp. My stomach tightened when I saw someone huddled in the far corner. A stable stench leapt to my nose from the floor as I stepped forward.

A man in a rough tunic with his back to me crouched there, a torn piece of blue turban cloth tied around his mouth, his arms flung forward on a pile of hay. He seemed a supplicant or a prisoner. His hands were tied at the wrist, and shadows pooled around him. He turned his face a little so I could see the matted gray beard, the faint splinters of light that shone from yellow teeth, the caked blood on his brow where he’d bent his head to raw wrists, arms where dried red rivulets made a crude brocade of his flesh.

My skin prickled.

“Papà?” I whispered fiercely.

His eyes, almost recognizable in the half light, scanned the shadowy room and passed over me as if I were another mud wall. He turned his face away and muttered a rapid string of senseless Latinate words as a dribble of urine ran down his thigh. He clenched and unclenched his hands. He struggled against the long brown cord that bound him to a metal ring in the wall, a ring meant for tying up animals.

“Papà, Papà!” I cried, and he began to bellow through his gag as he butted his head into the straw. Terrified, I dropped the lamp, spilling oil that flashed at my hem and set off his bellowing all the more as I flailed at the flames that tongued my skirts.

Malina came running and threw a blanket on me, choking the fire. Then the air went dark but for the ashen squares of moonlight at the top of the granary. I strained for breath. My father—or the man who seemed my father—thrashed on his meager patch of earth.

Malina pulled me out into the courtyard. “You must not go in there!”

“Who is that man? Why is he bound to the wall like a beast?” My body shook.

“Because he is one. Your father went into the desert and he never returned. This creature is bound so that he doesn’t hurt himself.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” I cried, clutching her arms.

She shoved me away and lifted the lamp that she’d set on the well, pushing back her sleeve to show a broken scar on her forearm. “This is where your father sank his teeth. I didn’t want you to get hurt! Forget him. Mourn him, Daughter. He is like this many months, dead but not dead. Since it is our custom to tend strangers who have no one, I keep him. I bathe him once a week and feed him morning and night. Yet every day, he threatens me.”

I couldn’t accept what she told me. “Give me the lamp.”

She didn’t resist as I took it from her hand and stepped back inside the granary toward the man. I touched his shoulder. He jerked back and grunted.

Malina followed me and said, “He was already ailing when he came to me. I tried all my herbs and smokes and the red stones that will stop an inflamed mind, but he must have carried this with him his whole life. We each bear a hidden malady. The seeds lie within until fever, exile, or—”

“Leave me with him,” I interrupted. “I need a sponge, a stool, and a basin.”

Malina observed me coolly and did not move.

“I must do this,” I said. If I could wash him, I would know him. Could the stranger truly be my father?

He watched me with the canny prescience of an animal. I spoke to him in low tones, mumbling whatever came into my head. Lucretius, for instance, which my father sometimes read to me: “All these wandering images still bear the likeness of the things from which they’re shed.”

Science was a puny balm, but still my words calmed us both.

Malina left and quickly returned with the things I’d requested. She set them near me with grave regard. I began to wash him. He stared at me walleyed. I sat on the stool and gently cleansed his mangy hands, extended and bound as they were, though he flinched. I washed the crusted blood and pus from his bristly white arms, the way I might sponge the clotted afterbirth from a newborn. The way I might wash the carbuncles of a plague victim or the gashes of someone wounded in battle. I leaned from the stool and washed his speckled brow, the swollen eyes that rolled in fear at my touch, the foolish wedge of the nose that he shoved into my hand in order to smell me, the lips buckled like dried mud around the gag, the sorry flaps of the neck, and the slumped, furry chest. I untied the gag and he howled once and then quieted.

I lifted his tunic, mopped his wretched, corded back, the sad buttocks, the deflated belly. How sorrowful the body becomes. The feet and toenails rude as hooves. I knelt to his feet and then I knew. For my own feet carried the design of my father’s feet, the second toe a little longer, the others tapered, the fugitive little toe curled into the next toe, hiding its nail.

I scrubbed each one, as if they were the buds on an infant’s foot. I wept, full of bitterness, and then I rinsed the dirtied sea sponge, squeezing slowly with both hands over the basin.

I removed my cloak and dried his body, his feet, with a tenderness that came from old, speechless love. When I finished I looked at his face again, a face that resembled and then no longer resembled my father’s, the uncomprehending eyes, the spittle at the corner of his mouth, and I felt no end to desolation.

Malina stood silently against the opposite wall, watching me.

If this world were joined to the underworld like a city to its image in the sea, I thought, then we might walk upon our lost ones, inverted, footfall to footfall, and know their wanderings as our own. For truly, what had happened to him? I glanced upward toward the ceiling of the tower of the granary and saw nothing but ascending darkness now. I untied my father and he lay in the straw against the wall, fitting himself to its curve to sleep. I placed a blanket over him and rested my hand on his ragged head. Maybe he would dream that he had a daughter somewhere in this world. “Good night, Papà.”

Malina took my arm and drew me outside into the courtyard. The hunchback moon, said to bring good fortune, shed her faithless light upon us.

“What will you do now?” Malina asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know.” I mouthed the words with difficulty, my tongue dry as a parched flake of mud. “I could take my father back to Venetia and care for him there.”

But as soon as I spoke, I knew I couldn’t leave. I had more than my father to consider. And he would never recognize the glistening city he had once called home.