The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 2





Salt and Sweet, Tears and Milk

When I last saw my father, in my twentieth year, he was pacing uneasily near the tall open windows in his study. “I’m planning a journey north,” he’d announced abruptly, his broad back to me as he pulled a book bound in red maroquin from the shelf of his voluminous library. “I’ll be gone for some time.” His black hair, speckled with gray, hung damply about his neck in the noonday heat. “I won’t be able to take you with me.”

He turned and peered at me with hard, indiscernible eyes through round black-rimmed spectacles, holding The Book of Diseases like a small shield and then setting it down upon his slanted desk. As I hesitated to respond, clutching my hands within the pale blue folds of my skirts, he moved closer to the window, his pointed slippers hissing on the smooth terrazzo floor. He removed his jerkin and tossed it on the windowsill, then leaned forward in his linen shirt and claret breeches as if to catch a cooling breeze from the lagoon. None was forthcoming.

I couldn’t find my voice, though I nodded and stared at the reading wheel, which stood at least two meters high, opposite him on the other side of the window. The upright circular device resembled one of those pleasure wheels seen at fairs, hung with little seats (in this case, lecterns) that revolve with much shrieking from the children. It awaited completion by Agostino Ramelli, my father’s friend and an architect of rare literary machines.

“Gabriella. Is that silence of yours…impudence or assent?” my father asked, clasping his hands resolutely behind his back. He would often carry his hands this way, in the manner of men who walk through the city, pondering the silent stones or the rumor of water that lies beneath them.

I shrugged. The air grew closer around us, and though I suffered the heat, I withdrew into a dry, cold temper. I moved toward the reading wheel, edgily tapping one of the larch spokes and setting it in lopsided motion. The oak axle creaked and three small lecterns swung to and fro. There would be eight when it was done.

My father glared at me briefly. Then he sighed, not unkindly, looking back to the sluggish sea. The wheel, motionless now, resembled a large clockwork arrested by neglect. As if the great hub of the sun, to which all other cycles were bound, had lapsed in the sky. The wheel anticipated my father’s volumes on diseases. But his work had come to an unforeseen halt in the universal malaise of August.

“What about Ramelli’s wheel, Papà?” I asked in a pinched voice. “Don’t you want to see it finished? Won’t you complete The Book of Diseases?”

He groaned. He’d been unwell lately and endured a bitter humor. For months I’d devoted time every day to copying his nearly illegible, rapidly scrawled notes on diseases and cures, occasionally taking liberties with those phrases I couldn’t understand and inserting my own. He gently berated me on that account, though he was reluctant to take the time to clarify his intent. So I continued with my own interpretations and simply didn’t show them to him, compiling my own parallel encyclopedia—a mute companion to my father’s volume—which I kept in my chest.

Across the broad canal the gray-green island of the Giudecca shimmered dully in the heat. Thunderclouds lurched upward and sideways, lending their leaden color to the sea and their implausible dead weight to the air.

I spoke again. “You know that I’m your best nurse and scribe. Let me accompany you, Papà. I don’t flinch from a wound; why would I fear a journey?” I placed my hand gently on his thick shoulder. It still conveyed some of the strength of his youth. At that moment one of the great trading vessels slid into view, its sails slack in the windless afternoon.

“I’ve no need for an assistant now. I’ll simply be gathering more notes.”

I removed my hand, leaving a faint, clammy print on his shirt. “But surely you’ll be called upon as a doctor? Who will suture the wounds for you? You know I employ the finest stitch.” It was true, though my hands were rather large and coarse for a woman of my class. What I left unsaid was the fact that his hands were no longer as steady as they had once been. “And the strands of my hair provide the best thread.”

My father once told me affectionately that my wiry red hairs were stronger than threads of linen.

But he shook his head now and placed both arms upon the marble sill, as if struggling to steady his resolve. We watched the mullet fishermen standing in black gondolas upon the water, heard the fletched sound of their arrows stinging the air. How I loved to stand by him in quiet observation of the world. He was my spyglass and magnifying lens, my kind instructor and stern doctor. We witnessed the mingling of cruelty and cure in disease, the loss that redeemed itself in healing and also the loss that never ended. My father possessed no other children and so he had always shared the gifts that were destined for a son with his daughter.

From this distance, the fishermen were almost stationary, planted on a solid gray surface, the tilting of their boats imperceptible. The black cormorants that surrounded them stood out with the certainty of inked type rising from the flat bed of the sea as if they were spelling out the letters of a word. The illusion of I (swallowing fish), S (at rest), T (wings outstretched to catch the sunlight). Was it istante, istanza, istmo? The illusion slipped away when the birds plunged into the water after a stricken fish. From time to time the fishermen struck at the cormorants with poles, oars, nets, or whatever was at hand. The rattle of oars against rowlocks and the cries of the birds disturbed me. My throat tightened suddenly, as if I would cry like a little girl.

“Daughter,” my father finally said, “there will be no discussion on this matter.” He didn’t turn from the window and improbably addressed the air. “You must look after your mother. Your earnings will be hers as well, though I’m leaving ample gold behind to keep the two of you for years. My bags are packed. I need your assistance now in replenishing my medicine chest.”

“I’m occupied this afternoon,” I answered sharply, considering the irascible charge—my mother—being hefted on me. Would she appreciate me finally if I were her support? I doubted it. I clasped my hands upon my stomach. “I have to clean the lancets. We agreed to assist Dr. Torrigiano with a bloodletting while the moon is still in the second quarter, or have you forgotten?”

“You’ll have to go in my place,” muttered my father. “I must attend to the final details of my departure.”

What caused this hasty decision? Or had change formed slowly in the alembic of his discontent?



We were still beside the edge of the sea

like people who are thinking about their journey

who in their hearts go and their bodies stay



I murmured these lines from Purgatorio more to myself than to my father. Still I wanted him to answer me in the old comradely way, but when he just stood at the window in silence, I did not repeat myself.



The next morning my father slipped away while I slept, without any leave-taking. Though he rose early, he must have been exhausted from the quarrel with my mother the night before.

“Don’t tell me what to do!” I’d heard his voice late at night, roaring through the house.

“Why would I try? You’ve never listened to me,” she said glumly. “All that matters to you is that dusty volume of ailments. Yet you fail to cure your own foul temper!”

“You understand nothing, woman!” The floor shook above me as my father strode back and forth in their chamber.

“You understand less! I’ve tried to hold this household together for the sake of your profession and our little family. But you’re a specter to me, always locked up in your study or out on your rounds. And now you’re going to leave altogether?”

“If it weren’t for my daughter and my peers, I’d have left long ago.”

“She’s my daughter too.”

“She may be your flesh, but she isn’t your daughter.”

I couldn’t hear my mother gasp, but I felt it from the vast intake of silence that sucked all the air from our house for an immeasurable length of time.



Now I began my preparations for my own journey. But my mother suspected that something was afoot. Though it was time to retire, she paced the corridor and after a few turns pushed open the door to my room without knocking. She swiftly took in the scene of my satchel and clothing spread out upon the bed, my medicine chest open, and papers scattered across my desk, and she understood.

“Oh,” she said, her face reddening in the warm light of the candles. “You’re going to abandon me. Just as your father did.”

When I ignored her, she added, “Go ahead, waste your fortune, Gabriella. But don’t expect a dowry when you return.”

I stopped my packing, stung by her insinuation (my lack of marriage prospects). “Mamma,” I finally said. “My dowry is here”—I held out my hands—“and here”—I tapped my forehead.

She walked over to my window and peered out past the shutter at the city’s faint lights smoldering in windows, faltering on the water. “Oh, I see, yes—that will serve you well when you encounter a suitor. I can’t wait to hear what he’ll say.” She turned back to face me in frustration. “Or rather what he won’t say, when he disappears quick as a quenched flame.” She pressed both hands to her heart. “I want you to be content, Gabriella. Bear children. Why not marry a good doctor? Why must you be one?” Tears started to her eyes, for we’d had this conversation many times before and I’d left the room. But this time I simply stared at her, fierce and speechless with hurt. We were on opposite sides of a deep channel, no bridge between us. The sea ran on in the dark. She dropped her eyes and began to pace again back and forth the full length of my floor, heels clicking marble and then going mute across the wide Ciprian carpet.

We heard a sputtering and both of us swung to the open doorway. My mother’s gaunt young maidservant hovered nervously with a guttered candle, hooded by a large shadow in the corridor behind her. “Your bed is turned, my lady,” ventured Milena. She fidgeted, rubbing her skeletal neck with her free hand, her long fingers strangely delicate.

I sighed and said, “I’m not abandoning you, Mamma. I will find your husband and make our family whole again.” I spoke with willful sincerity, as if I could claim the distant harmony from childhood, if I hadn’t imagined it in the way a child will construct peace out of necessity. I pushed my extra skirts and blouses down into the leather satchel with my fists to make room for more clothing, to counter my mother’s rancor.

She touched my shoulder. “Gabriella. Don’t leave. I…I need you here.”

I’d never heard my mother say those words. Without looking at her, I answered, “Mamma. My mind and heart are set on this.”

My mother, for once, fell silent. Then she left me.

My mother also left me the day I became a woman. I was thirteen and undressing for bed with Olmina’s help, under my mother’s watchful gaze—a rare occasion. She’d been instructing me as to what gown I should wear for an upcoming wedding when Olmina cried out happily as she tugged my chemise over my head. The dark red streak on my garment announced the change. I hadn’t even sensed it, though now I felt a vague thrill and confusion. She laid the chemise tenderly on the bed. I hugged my sleeping smock to my body, shivering. Tears sprang to Olmina’s eyes—but my mother froze.

“You’re no longer a girl!” she moaned, as if it were an unforeseen calamity. She must have observed my distress at her words, for then she said, “It’s only the beginning of desires you’ll never quell, my daughter. The end of simple pastimes.” She must have been speaking of her own change, for had she forgotten that I assisted my father in his work and engaged in few simple pastimes? That I’d observed disease and death? But she didn’t wish to hear of those things. She bit her lip and fled the room. My body had betrayed her dream of me and it could not be taken back. Salt water had seeped into the well. I no longer belonged to her, if ever I had.

Olmina, not my mother, taught me how to use the sea sponge, how to tie it up under my smock with a silk ribbon (once round my waist, between the legs, then fastened to the waistband) to catch the flow. My mother never spoke of it again.



Late the next afternoon, I continued packing, taking my father’s letters and a small bottle full of ashes from the chest to pack in my satchel.

The previous November, I’d returned from tending an ailing friend to find the letters from my beloved Maurizio (twelve years dead of tertian fever) cast upon the grate, glowing packets of ash, with the string that bound them a hot and shrinking vein. I thought of the fine blue veins beneath his temples, which I’d liked to kiss. His cheek. The perfect cowrie of his ear.

“If you don’t rid yourself of the past, you’ll never possess a life in the present!” my mother had exclaimed as she stood near the charred letters. “I did it for you. Love wants a scorched field for the new seeds to take. Otherwise you’ll never find a husband.”

I’d clasped the fire shovel with such force that she stepped backward in fear and fell against the kitchen table, crying out for her maidservant. I could have struck her. But I turned away to scoop the ashes from the hearth. Later, when I was alone, I poured them gently through a parchment cone into a bottle that I keep in my medicine chest. What a small heap of ashes for so many letters! My lover’s words weighed no more than a few breaths. My father’s letters wouldn’t follow such a fate. I planned to deliver all but a few into the hands of a dear friend, Dr. Cardano, for safekeeping on the first leg of my journey.

Soon, I heard a flamboyant voice from downstairs. It was Cousin Lavinia, who wanted to bid me farewell, for I’d sent her a message by way of Lorenzo.

“Come up to my chamber,” I called out. My mother, not one to miss a conversation, followed her on the stairs.

Lavinia cut a messy figure in the streets of Venetia, for she loved drawing, and as a girl, she reveled with me in copying the various bones and skulls my father kept in his study. “What’s this one, Dottor Mondini?” she’d cry out to him as he wrote at his desk. And though he’d feign annoyance, he usually answered her questions with a smile—questions that I was often too reticent to ask, preferring instead to consult the Vesalius Epitome. Often he’d put down his quill and watch us for a while, as if it gave him great joy. Lavinia studied the bones’ forms for the art of beauty while I learned their names and contours for the art of physick. Thus we often kept each other company on long afternoons in our separate worship of bones.

“Gabriella, you’re really leaving?” she asked. I recalled former visits, Lavinia with rolls of paper under her arm and charcoal stubs in her pockets, the dust smeared on her hands, arms, face, and clothing. Today she was merely out of breath, for—though I envied her ripe beauty—her ample body often slowed her down. My own body, neither full nor thin, seemed ordinary by comparison. She turned briefly to greet my mother, who chided, “My dear, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could resuscitate my daughter’s reason.”

“Ah, you should know better, Signora Mondini,” Lavinia teased, “than to ask me to restore her senses, when you’ve often decried me as lacking my own!”

But my mother was in no humor to smile in reply. Instead she looked down, brooding, as if there beneath the floor in the shifting island mud there might be a god to answer her prayer, to bind a mother and daughter. But finding no answer, she clutched her skirts and left my room.

“So?” Lavinia kissed me on each cheek expectantly.

“Yes, it’s true.” We sat together on my bed. “I’ve resolved to find my father, to bring him back, and to help him complete his encyclopedia, The Book of Diseases.”

“But won’t it be dangerous?”

“Staying here may be more dangerous,” I said, placing my pale hand over hers, with its habitually blackened nails, now also flecked with pigments. She’d been painting with egg tempera. “I’m slowly being smothered, by the guild, by Mamma…”

She nodded. “I’d heard from my mother that guild members condemned your use of certain herbs when the men were in my father’s shop. These rumors stew when you have a gaggle of doctors waiting for their remedies to be measured by my father’s fumbling apprentice.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to protect you. And I thought it idle complaint. After all this time, why would they sever your membership?”

“The reason given was that I lack a mentor.”

“That’s nonsense. There must be a dearth of new patients, so they plucked a reason out of the ether that fills their poor brainpans.”

I laughed and said, “Well, now I can seek my way in the larger world. I’ll visit those cities renowned for their universities of medicine and garner letters of recommendation—how will the guild refuse me then?”

“Yes, Gabriella. You’ll practice your art.” She set a brave face. “Just as I will practice mine. But what about other languages—how will you speak?”

“It will be small worry. Many speak our melodious tongue. And my French and English are fair, since I’ve had occasion over the years to practice with foreign physicians at our table.”

“Where will you go?”

“Come, I’ll show you.” I led her to my desk. “There, and there.” I moved my finger tentatively along one of many possible routes I planned on my Mercator map. The candle flame stood absolutely still in the evening torpor. She bent to watch me.

“See? Beyond Padua the great centers of medicine in Europe beckon: Leiden, Edenburg, Montpellier. And Tübingen, where my father’s last letter was recently marked.”

“But why not stay with Dr. Cardano and write to these other universities for news of your father? Otherwise aren’t you striking out at great risk, into the unknown?”

I barely heard her and instead spoke the names of the cities again in a low voice. My breath quickened, my heart and mind leapt far ahead of me. I glanced toward the open door to the corridor and quickly stepped across my room to shut it. “Lavinia, I want the unknown.” I touched the map, its paper softening to a kind of flesh in the hot, damp air.

She stared at me in astonishment and then flushed with the pleasure of understanding. “I almost wish that I could go with you.”

“Come, then!”

“No, I could never leave Venetia. I don’t hunger for the journey as you do.”

She hugged me impulsively and rushed from the room, her black hair loosening from her snood as it fell on the stairs, her coarse linen work dress rustling stiffly.

“Lavinia!” I cried, picking up the ecru snood. I ran to my window but barely glimpsed her form as she turned the corner near Campo Sant’Agnese. I held the snood for a moment with affection, then pressed it down among my things in the satchel.



The following morning I listened to Olmina knock her wooden clogs about the stones of the Zattere as she paced in irritation. Her singsong voice called up to my window from the narrow wharf. “How long must we wait, signorina?”

And then: “Dottoressa Gabriella, the gondolas are ready!”

Her impatience was born of reluctance. When I asked her and Lorenzo to accompany me on the journey, she’d pleaded, “Let us stay, Gabriella. The journey does not bode well. I smell a corpse in the future.” But she was always casting tarocchi cards and predicting ruin, so I paid her no mind. She continued, “We should be patient and await your father’s return. For sooner or later the city will pull him back to her embrace, no?” She didn’t want to leave her city—the city that rose from the silt of salt marsh, the city that rocked upon the tides like a marvel run aground.

Olmina had ordered my life since birth. A few months before my arrival, her own child had been stillborn, its head wrapped with the caul (a sign of second sight, a talent never to be realized), and so she took me to her breast as a babe; I suckled both salt and sweet, tears and milk. Over the years, she’d protected me from my mother, who’d refused to nurse me, for as a young maiden of only fifteen, she was frightened, I suppose, of what had happened to her body. She didn’t take to mothering easily. And her own mother, a lay healer falsely imprisoned on charges of witchcraft, wasn’t there to tend her. Even now Mamma would tell me, “Oh, Gabriella, I wept when you were born! Your head emerged so misshapen, I thought I’d brought forth a changeling!”

There were a few early years when Mamma amused herself with me as one would with a doll. She dressed me up in uncomfortable frocks. She twisted my damp red hair into ringlets around her finger. She placed me on a cushion before one of the windows so that I could watch the ships on the canal, dusted my face with white powder, and told me not to move when her friends came over to talk and preen. But I remember a day shortly after my third birthday when I didn’t listen. It had drizzled for weeks. Olmina gave me my own bowl of chestnut dough to form dumplings. I squatted on a rug on the kitchen floor (though mostly I just clenched the dough in my little fists with delight and squeezed out bits and pieces). My mother bent over me, firmly holding my arms as if she could fix me to the floor, and said, “Stay here, do you understand? Do not leave this rug, or monsters will come out of the cellar!” But if there were monsters in the cellar, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in our house.

While Olmina rolled the dumplings on the thick table with her back to me, and my mother pulled up a chair and dozed before the cooking hearth, I slipped away, determined to explore the wharf before our house. I hastily put on my child’s cape and woolen cap, and pushing open the door Lorenzo had left ajar when he went out that morning, I tumbled out into the day. The rain had paused, the ships rocked like houses afloat, and I squealed with joy at my freedom, running along the stones to the edge of the water. Merchants stared at me, two nuns asked me where my mother was, sailors sang loudly and waved, and a lady with her servingwoman reprimanded me harshly when I bumped into them. I found a cat with three legs under a bench. I tasted a bit of bread that had fallen on the stones, then spit it out again. I clutched the beautiful damask skirts of a woman in purple who laughed at me and asked me my name. The wind hurt my ears. All at once the dark cloud of my mother descended. “Don’t you ever do this to me again!” she shouted as she yanked me along the stones, my feet flying off the Zattere at intervals. She locked me in her closet. “I’ll confine you to this place from now on, do you hear?”

After sobbing quietly for a while, I fell asleep. Sometime later in the uncertain dusk of that place I awoke beneath a boned farthingale, as if within the rib cage of a great sea creature. In my dense imagining, my mother became a leviathan. I rocked back and forth beneath the ribs of the beast. She couldn’t harm me there, because I was hiding within her. Or so I imagined when Olmina came jangling her ring of skeleton keys to fetch me for supper.

Olmina knew all the secrets of our household, which is why my mother refrained from throwing her out, lest she directly feed the ravenous ear of Venetia, which thrived upon the misfortunes of others. It was Olmina who later, when I attended university, urged me to hide my medical writings, which I promptly did, behind the lesser medical texts that my father rarely consulted. My mother seldom entered his study and had to ask for the key, as my father knew full well her jealous habit of stealing into his papers and shuffling the pages. “Materia medica is your mistress,” she’d say when she was upset. He took the keys with him when he left, citing fears that his rivals might try to steal his writings or his books, though perhaps he was truly wrestling with the rivals within.

For months I suffered my father’s absence twice over: the lack of his presence and the dearth of his written words. I became so disturbed by the locked room that I considered ways to break and enter, with the clandestine help of a locksmith (though I knew it wouldn’t remain secret for long) or by breaking a window with a stone and enlisting the help of a glassmaker as an excuse to go inside using a ladder (though that would be very suspicious, and ridiculous too—bedecked woman doctor swaying upon ladder). Of course these schemes were only a distraction. Some essential part had been stricken from me. But in one of his early letters to me from Padua in the fall of 1580, he had a change of heart.



And in the hub of the reading wheel that we removed to your room before I left, you’ll find a central round peg that, unlike its fellow on the other side, may easily be pulled out. In the small hollow there, you’ll find an extra key to the study. Keep this key, then, for it was yours originally anyway, dear Gabriella. Under no circumstances lend it to anyone. Lock yourself in when you visit the study, so that no one may guess the room has been opened, and enter only with caution, when no one is at home. I trust you’ll continue your studies and writings on diseases, which I may join to my own when I return. Who knows but one day you will outstrip my own research and inquiries into the vast nature of the maladies that beset us. This is the duty you have to your elders, to complete what they cannot…even perhaps to complete the healing that they cannot or choose not to pursue.



I was glad to have access to the study, though after a while my joy carried a bitter aftertaste. As the years passed, my father’s study stood in our home like a strange mausoleum to his absence. I entered from time to time to read and to wipe the shelves and tables, which accumulated dust that fell from I know not where (since the windows and doors were always closed), unless it was the brief dust of the world I brought in with me. I also spoke with his ghost—a peculiar thing to say, I know, when a man is still alive. But that is how it was. Papà, where are you now? What cures are you working? I have a patient suffering languishment, and all the usual simples have failed to quicken her. What must I do?

I never wrote there at his desk, though, because I didn’t want to disturb his things. If I left everything as it had been when he went away, perhaps that unchanging order would hasten his return. But of course nothing was changeless. The ink curled and dried in its pot. Minuscule insects consumed the quills. Webs shrouded the books.

By contrast, I kept the windows of my own room open in nearly every weather. On this day of departure, I gazed across the small side canal at a winged lion of mottled stone with a lifted paw, dispassionate as a saint. He’d inhabited that outlook for my entire life. Sometimes cats slept beneath his mossy stone chest, multiplying his remote expression while the dim mirror of water below overturned him. In the Rialto Market they sold palm-size lions carved in jasper alleged to cure fever and dispel poison, and some carved in garnet, cure-alls and amulets against the dangers of travel. Though I barely believed in such things, I’d purchased one.

The narrow corridor below my third-story room was still pooled in shadow despite the advance of morning. I could see a thin ribbon of sea, the San Vio surging into the swash of the Canale della Giudecca, which joined in turn the Canal Grande di San Marco, then the tides of the lagoon, and finally the open Adriatic. When I breathed in the smell of sea from below my window, I could also detect the metallic scent of ice, the source. Rivers and mountains.

A muffled knock at my door.

I opened it to see Lorenzo, Olmina’s short, wiry husband, who brought me back to matters at hand.

“Dottoressa, please, Olmina is pulling my beard! We must reach Padua by evening. All the leather bags and provisions are loaded, everything except your medicine chest.”

Lorenzo had also joined our household when I was born, his eyes and skin the color of dark shellac, as if he were a man made of wood. He was born in Pinoa, and his mountain dialect gave him a halting speech and manner, like one of those exotic creatures merchants bring back from their travels: Numidians and their dromedaries, or listless Barbary apes. Lorenzo often complained about the moods of the Adriatic. “Just give me terra firma, Tirolia, instead of this city ruled by moon and mud, where our lives are as sloppy as the sea!”

Olmina always defended Venetia (this was the fray and habit of their marriage): “If it weren’t for this city, La Serenissima, we would be griming about in some frozen hut, our feet wrapped in last year’s straw, staring out at your beautiful mountains. That’s firm land for you. Have you forgotten your toes?”

Three of Lorenzo’s toes had gone char black from frostbite and had to be severed when he was a child. He always stuffed the right foot of his brown stockings with wads of wool to compensate for the gap, after plucking burrs from the rough fleece. “La Serenissima!” Lorenzo would repeat sulkily and spit into the sea. He was phlegmy and possessed of a cold, overmoist nature.

Now I closed and firmly latched the dark green shutters on my window for the last time. “Thank you, Lorenzo,” I told him. “I’m coming. I was just leaving my devotions.” Even as I excused myself in this way, I thought of the old proverb: Where there are three physicians, there are two atheists.

Lorenzo grinned, as if he’d overheard my thoughts.

I clasped the twin dolphin handles of my oak medicine chest, and refusing Lorenzo’s help (I always carry it myself, wary of the influence of others upon the medicaments), I descended the cramped stairs.

“Mamma?” I called out.

I was greeted with silence. Lorenzo stepped back as I called out her name again, this time adding a farewell.

From the cool recesses of the house, her voice shot out through the corridors. “Now I will be free to enjoy my life!” Her bluster didn’t fool me.

Again, I said, “Farewell!” I wanted to say, Be well, Mamma. Be content, but my throat closed and my mouth tasted brackish. The old salt of grief was in it.

There was no reply. Silence dropped like a heavy plumb in my belly, which tightened against it. Against weeping. Despite having endured her swerves of mind and heart for years, I still wanted my mother’s blessing.

Once I was outside, the sun’s glare, multiplied by the water, struck me full on.

“Finalmente!” Olmina glowered in the bow of the pitching gondola.

I stepped into the stern, followed by Lorenzo, and was thrown unceremoniously forward as I flung the chest down with a thud in the center. I chose the seat facing backward, to see the house I was leaving. The faded ocher walls stood discolored by the sea, gray and green at the foundations as if the building itself were a decaying body. Bricks the hue of dried blood were exposed near the water where the plaster had fallen away. The weathered doors, toothed from rot at the bottom, remained closed. Was it possible that I hadn’t noticed the decline of my family’s home until just now?

Yet other houses were in decline too or crutched with scaffolding in restoration. As we slid through the calm water to the steady dip, pull, lift, drip of the oar, I watched the Zattere retreat, then San Marco appear beyond the other bell towers, steeples, canted roofs, the other quarters shabby, mossy, glorious, gleaming, prayerful, lively, sorrowful, muted, exuberant, fleshy, fabulous, then diminished—made one by distance, faint, flat, bluish white, thin as gauze I might use to wrap a wound.

The gondola swayed, and I lifted the satchel of my father’s letters to my lap. Though I knew I’d packed them earlier, I checked again—they were all inside, tied neatly in bundles.

I watched my home recede for the last time. Every faraway window was shuttered against the heat but one. No hand parted a curtain there. No visible face watched us go.