The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 3





Dr. Cardano’s House

The fields on the road to Padua shimmered with ripening millet, and an army of cicadas steadily drilled the air. As a curious little girl I’d once brought my father a handful of perfectly split cicada husks and asked what happened to their bodies rent asunder at the highest pitch of summer. Did they turn into small scorched spirits? Did the spirits then chafe the air in heaven? My father had smiled at these questions. Gabriella, he teased, they sing until they burst!

We approached Margera in the gondola after little more than an hour, just as the midday bells began to ring out. My uncle Ubaldo awaited us on the small wooden dock and led us to the animals: five mules and his own horse, Orfeo, a fine black Murgese. Orfeo gleamed darkly in the noonday sun and jostled the mules, which stood nearly as high as he did.

“Gabriella!” My uncle clasped my arm, and through my sleeve I could feel the calluses from ironmongery on his hand. “Aunt Cecilia is very disappointed that you’re not stopping at our home. What’s the hurry after all these years?”

“It’s restlessness unbottled at last, dear Uncle. I don’t want to linger at the outset of the journey, and I’m anxious to cross the mountains.”

I leaned forward for a hasty farewell kiss, first on one cheek and then the other, as Lorenzo finished outfitting the mules with our supplies. How odd it was to say good-bye to the near image of the man for whom I was searching!

After riding sidesaddle for a short distance, I grew uncomfortable, and against Olmina’s protests I unfurled my linen skirts and rode astride my horse (the way my uncle had taught me many summers before). What a relief! In future I vowed to wear breeches beneath my skirts in the style of Venetian courtesans. I’d packed just such a pair of fine women’s breeches for relaxing when skirts felt too oppressive, and now I had another purpose for them. The luxury of damask would serve as riding garment.

Behind me the walls of Venetia—her palazzi, scuole, churches, and convents, her infinite exquisite and horrific prisons—blurred with the swampy sea. She was truly a strange theater. For as much as travelers glorified her beauty and wealth, the delicious, insubstantial semblances she put on, I knew her as substantial, weighted, and hard. Stones, bricks, pilings driven into the clay. She stood against the vaporous and mutable sea that was always trying to claim her, and the best she could do was to withstand it, to toy with it for a while. Venetia, a dense accretion of lives, announced the solidity of those lives in a broad villa or narrowing passageway. In stone lions, parapets, and empire. But the water was always there. Much has been made of the city and her looking glass. But sometimes I thought she was a flawed and dull glass (what is glass after all, but sand?) trying to reflect the water without much success. How could our edifices, how could we, in these poor, troubled bodies, cast light?

As we traveled farther away, the city dimmed even more. The men of the Physicians’ Guild and their jealousies lost their edge. The tightening noose of their injunctions against my practice lost its threat. I began to feel free of them, able to work my skills upon whoever was in need of my help along our journey.

I’d already resolved to pursue notes on diseases completely unknown to those most esteemed doctors of the guild. My father would be glad of that. In a letter from Leiden in the spring of 1581, he wrote:



I grow frustrated with my notes at times and have failed to appreciate, perhaps, the good degree of your help in these matters. However did you unravel my thoughts, my girl? I think that maybe your unusual position as a woman in this profession allowed you a certain winding approach that, while appearing childish at the outset, proved more effective than my sharpened intelligence at times. I recall when you brushed the hair of the furry girl, drawing her out of her closet, rather than directly assessing the amount of hair on her body and its obstruction of her life. We were better able to suggest a situation for her, though her parents wouldn’t hear of it. In short, I miss your sinuous logic. Together we make the finer doctor. But alas, the world does not welcome women to this role. Yet I keep you as muse, though you are distant, as you must be.



How many hundreds of miles would we have to travel? Every mile was a thousand steps, mille, according to the ancient Romans. Olmina sniffled softly as we rode, but Lorenzo was gleeful. “Stop that noise, woman, we are going to see the world!”

“There is no world outside of Venetia,” she said.

“We will carry our world with us, dear Olmina,” I reassured her.

“It seems that we are,” complained Lorenzo under his breath, annoyed at the necessity of three pack mules for our leather bags and provisions.

“Lontan da casa sua, vicino a qualche disgrazia,” Olmina warned. Far from home, closer to misfortune.

“O Dio mio, we cannot live by fear alone!” Lorenzo said, and then he slapped the rump of his mule to escape us.

We both began to laugh at the odd sight of his ruffled thatch of gray hair and short, bony limbs and body jouncing down the dry road.

Later we were no longer amused when the dust settled upon us like grimy flour. You’re going to regret this journey, Gabriella, for it will only bring hardship! my mother had warned. We’d only begun, and already my ungloved hands were swollen in the heat as I wiped the grit from my face with a small lace-fringed handkerchief and drew the veil down from my broad straw hat.

We were silent as we passed through the small village of Luciafuccina. No one was about. Undoubtedly they were eating the midday meal in the fields or within the cool of their houses, shuttered tightly against the heat and mosquitoes, which coagulated from the very air and attached themselves to us like floating headpieces.

Lorenzo stood up ahead, swatting at the cloud that hung in a dark halo about his head as he watered his wayward mule at the edge of a line of poplars. Their branches teased us with silvery pieces of light, a treasure that never reached the earth.

Two more hours to Padua.



As we rode on, the flatlands gave way to lazy slopes where villas with ramshackle dovecotes clustered under the cool limbs of great oaks and chestnuts, overlooking orchards strung with grapevines. Stone-terraced or walled gardens of lettuces, radicchio, melons, and herbs checkered the land with an even geometry, as if a giant with a tremendous rake had grooved the curved earth into squares, lines running first one way and then perpendicular, so that the plots would surely appear woven if one were a hawk wheeling above them.

I was lulled by their pleasant aspect; when I felt I might fall asleep on Orfeo’s back, I caught the refreshing smell of wet sand from the Brenta River. The grand gateway into the city of Padua—the pale stone Porta del Portello—was flanked by rows of gondolas and boats knocking against the stone steps. Boatmen loaded all manner of things for market or transport, from caskets of wine, baskets of fruits and vegetables, and lengths of wood to portly dignitaries. Some empty boats thudded with deep, hollow sounds against the stones of the city’s thick bulwarks. The raucous boatmen were a spectacle, emboldened to comment on every passerby, taunting students, singing to women, and hooting even at nobility!

Of course I kept my gaze straight ahead as I rode out in front, though I was tempted to smile at the foolish lyrics they sang to my horse:



Oh handsome black mount,

bearing delight!

I’d gladly swap burdens to give

her the gallop all night!



Lorenzo, who rode at the end of our string of animals, raised his fist. Beside me, Olmina sat upright and impassive as an oar as her mule steadily plodded forward.



My friend Dr. Cardano’s home was a dark red two-story villa, separated from others by walled gardens, overshadowed by a broad plane tree that rested one limb firmly on a corner of the red tile roof, like a workman resting an elbow on a wall, shrewdly observing the world. The villa appeared freshly plastered, like an old fop made up as a young dandy, for the windows and roof still sagged.

Dr. Cardano took some time to come to the door. When he opened it, I noted his muddled look and the sparse white hair gone astray around his face. He smiled and rubbed the top of his head briskly, as if to kindle his wits. The blue veins of his temples stood under translucent skin. “Dear Gabriella! I’ve been waiting for you.”

“I’m so glad to see you, Dr. Cardano!”

I took his thin arm, and we passed into the cool interior of the house, the red tile floors underfoot still holding the cold of night. Olmina followed me. Lorenzo walked around to the back, where he could loose the animals to feed. I was glad to be in this household again, for it had once been a second home for me. I recalled when my father first brought me here as a girl of eight.

He had bragged to Dr. Cardano, “My daughter has a good eye for locating wild herbs, and you’ll find her skillful at making a poultice. But most of all she’s a fine observer.”

“Hmm, we’ll have to be careful what we say and do around her,” joked Dr. Cardano as he bent to take my hand and peer into my face, while I stared at him boldly (a ploy to cover my fright).

“What a plucky child!”

From then on, I grew more and more into the spirited child he imagined me.

We entered a darkened room, where Olmina folded back the creaky green shutters. “How are you, dear girl?” Dr. Cardano turned to me. “You’ve grown into such a captivating woman.”

“Ah, good Doctor, I see that you’re not wasting any time,” I teased.

He shrugged. “I’m old and have no time.”

“Are you ill?” I grew alarmed.

“No, no. Old age is the illness.” He grinned. “But I’m still lively enough.”

The weariness of the road abruptly fell away as I recognized the room my father had habitually occupied when we’d come to stay. The room felt untouched and intimate as a closet left behind by someone who has died.

For a moment I couldn’t bear it. Yet it was a spacious room with a large canopied bed in the center, a small bed niched in the wall, and a pleasant sitting area near the window. From there I could view the silvery orchards of olives and their lengthening shadows cast eastward toward Venetia. Orfeo and the mules grazed contentedly on grasses under the trees. An old woman in a black scarf and dress squatted near the far garden wall, resting her arms on her knees, her skirts fanned out around her.

“Oh, there’s Gesuina, who refuses to use a chamber pot!” Dr. Cardano laughed.

The old woman wiped herself with a handful of leaves and stood, then shook out her skirts and looked up into an olive tree as if contemplating this year’s harvest. Then she noticed us and stared. It was that fierce, uncompromising gaze one sees in widows, the constant reprimand against everyone and no one in particular, except perhaps God.



We didn’t speak of my father that evening, for I was too fatigued after supper. When I retired to my room, Olmina already lay gently snoring in her sleeping niche in the wall.

I sat on the edge of my bed and opened the lid of my medicine chest. I looked upon Asclepius, the physician-god who heals through dreams, and his daughter Hygieia, goddess of sound mind, both painted there in splendid colors by Annibale Brancaccio. The bearded god, draped in a simple robe, stood facing me on the left; in the center was a wondrous staff, sprouting leaves at its tip and twined by the curative snake. On the other side the lovely Hygieia of the blue-green eyes, faintly revealed by her linen garment, stood in profile and gazed outward with a questioning look as she offered a small bowl of some mysterious substance to the snake.

Soon I closed my eyes and promptly fell asleep.



The next morning I sought out Dr. Cardano so that we could speak of my father, but he fumbled and made excuses, claiming he needed to carry out some professorial errands, among them returning books to a bedridden colleague who suffered from dropsy. I wondered why he was avoiding the conversation.

I spent most of the day in the orchard, pacing the rows of trees and sitting at the long wooden table with books on anatomy I’d selected from his superb library, feeling guilty (though not too much) that I’d brought them outside without asking him. I pored over the wonderful Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), for Dr. Cardano owned a much finer and fuller edition than ours. We possessed the Student Epitome in Latin, which presented larger illustrations for studying (but fewer examples), printed on inferior paper.

This book had the ability to calm me, especially book one—the things that sustain and support the entire body, and what braces and attaches them all (the bones and the ligaments that interconnect them)—for I never ceased marveling at what lies within us, and even the manner in which the parts are named. For instance, Vesalius examines the origins of certain terms: verticulum, vertebra, spondulos. For us, the Latin vertebra means what spondulos meant to the Greeks: any bone of the back, which is also called verticulum by many, probably from the shape of the pivot or whorl (verticula) with which women weight their spindles. After reading this, I thought of the spindle whorls of the vertebrae that weight my spinal cord, the nerves spun from the distaff of the brain. Thought resembles the thread drawn out by a woman holding her distaff wrapped with raw wool, the thread lengthened and dropped to the plumb of the spindle and its weight. The heft of gravity, the body always pulling.

My thoughts unwound, tugged, and wound to another form. I’d never visited Dr. Cardano without my father, whose absence bore down on me like the ponderous day’s heat. One would think that void would be a hollow thing, but no, it was an invisible burden, pervasive, atmospheric, and almost forgotten, until one was struck unexpectedly by its force. There before me, my father had stood under the flowering apples in another season. White petals shook loose around us. “One could almost dream of a different world here in this garden,” he said sadly. “A place without plague or the other countless afflictions that we often bring on ourselves.” We walked through the ancient orchard, where a few hollow, gnarled trunks still brimmed with walnuts the squirrels had stowed there in the fall. The unexpected reserves cheered us. Now I looked for them again. Yes, there they were in the storehouses of the old trunks. Nothing was wasted, not even emptiness.



Before the evening meal, Dr. Cardano and I sat together at the small table in the guest room. The windows were closed and shuttered against mosquitoes. Olmina was mending in the corner; we’d barely begun our journey and already I’d torn a hem. I stared at the small fire in the grate (for though the days were hot, the nights fell chill—one could feel the presence of distant mountains). I fidgeted with the green tassel at the corner of the tablecloth.

At last Dr. Cardano haltingly expressed his regret at my father’s disappearance and how unusual it was that his letters ceased. He admitted he possessed no fresh news for me, as he hadn’t received any letters for two years. Still he divulged something of my father’s mood when he departed Padua for Tübingen that August ten years ago.

“He was in high spirits and eager for the journey, though he expressed remorse at leaving you behind. He wanted to protect you from the hardships of the road, my dear. Pardon me for saying this,” Dr. Cardano ventured ruefully, “but I also believe he wanted to inhabit another life, and you would have reminded him of his duties.”

“What other life?” I sat up on the red velvet cushion of my chair.

“The one imagined but never created, which doesn’t succumb to fear. Who knows?”

“And what life is worth living if it shuns those who provide love and consolation?” I protested. I took a sip of the blood-orange grappa the doctor poured for me from a squat amber bottle and coughed, my throat burning from the spirits. Olmina glanced up sharply from her handiwork, frowned at me, then bent her head and resumed her stitches.

Dr. Cardano waited as we listened to the tiny rhythmic pops of her needle in the fabric, followed by the drag of the sliding thread. Then he responded, “The life of the false ascetic—if your father was ever shadowed by a sin, it was this. For he did not wish to turn toward God. He simply wanted no more of the world.” The doctor stared at the pointed toes of his tawny leather slippers at the end of thin-as-a-plow-handle legs.

“My father loathed religion for its deceptions and indulgences.” I spoke in a low voice, afraid of the inquisitor’s ears even in the house of my father’s friend. I was echoing the sentiments of heretic Lutherans. One never knew who was listening at the door.

“Which is why I call his leaning a sin—perhaps he wanted to flee into nothingness, without sanctity,” he mused. “Like those wild woodsmen in Moravia who turn into animals and live on grubs, berries, roots, and any flesh they can scavenge!”

“Dr. Cardano. That’s a legend, not a true account. Are you toying with me? My father turned into a lone beast? No, I believe something has happened to him, to confound his senses, some illness or mishap.”

The quick rasp and snip of Olmina’s scissors punctuated the air.

The doctor uncorked the bottle again with a dull plunk and poured himself another glass of grappa. “Might I see a few of his letters, if you would be so kind?”

“Certainly. In fact, I’d prefer to entrust most of them to you.” I rose and withdrew a packet from my satchel.

“There was rumor of his suffering an unknown illness, from a colleague abroad.”

My heart sank at his mention of this. “What colleague, where?”

“Dr. Fuchs in Tübingen wrote to tell me that your father acted most strangely while staying with him, was very withdrawn and secretive. He often spoke to himself while in his room with the door locked.”

“Oh.” I laughed uneasily. “He often did that at home, working out his ideas aloud. Though it troubled my mother, so that she put cotton wool in her ears. ‘What decent man converses with the air?’ she’d say. It never bothered me, because that is how I knew him. Maybe I thought all fathers did that. Didn’t he speak to himself when he stayed with you?”

“Hmm, well, since my room’s on the other side of the house, I suppose I didn’t hear him. But he was never unsociable.”

“Maybe he and Dr. Fuchs had a disagreement.” I didn’t want to believe that my father had gone austere or, worse, bereft of reason.

Dr. Cardano opened the top letter, one of the first ones I’d received, and began to read it aloud, as if to read it silently was a breach of privacy.



Dear Gabriella,

The decline of the body is certainly a sorrowful thing, as you mentioned in your last letter, especially in the elderly poor, for it is also the decline of the will. This may terrify me more than anything else, for I have found myself capable of bearing pain, but what if I were stranded without recourse to affect my condition? What if my family and means were taken by the plague? I have seen many a starving old wayfarer blank-faced with hunger, hunched in a ditch, hand stuck out like a stick of wood for alms. The eyes of such a person are no longer the eyes of a grandmother or a grandfather but rather the ravaged sockets of permanent grief or hard rage. I fear them, for it is beyond me to help, but for a small bit of bread. The beggar may be the god in disguise, as the Greeks once believed. If so, the gods are everywhere among us, gaunt and withering…



He went on, but I no longer heard the words. I’d read them often enough at home in my room, trying to evoke his company. The fire spent itself and the room grew dark. Outside, the sunlight bled from the red-tiled roofs and left them ashen.

“…Tübingen, December twelfth, 1580.” Dr. Cardano stopped reading. Olmina finished my hem.

“Gabriella?” the doctor asked.

“Yes?”

“Why take this trip to foreign cities to find your father after all these years?”

“If I could persuade him to return, things would greatly improve for us. My mother frets beyond reason. My life in Venetia is a prison. I can no longer practice medicine there, and my father’s last letter proved a fine gadfly, stinging me to change things as they are.”

“I’m an old fool, but I ask you, is this really the best course to follow?”

“Ah, you’ve been troubled by the worry in my father’s letter. ‘Of what use is grief ?’ he used to ask in times of disquiet. ‘It’s for holding each other,’ I said as a girl of ten. It can bring us to that calm when we know we’re not alone, that affection that can even bind strangers.”

“What do you mean?”

“I find solace in every stranger I help with my art of physick.”

“Oh, Gabriella, that is dangerous.”

“Why?”

“Because as you well know, there are those you can’t help.”

“But one must try.”

“The doctor is not a sister of charity, but a scientist, and what you want—even if it’s communion with another—is irrelevant.”

“Not communion, Dr. Cardano, but recognition.”

“Of what?”

“Of pain, brokenheartedness. The more we can openly bear, the more we can cure.”

“I heartily disagree. We must keep the proper distance, my dear.”

Olmina sighed loudly with disapproval.

“What is it, Olmina?”

“Well, I’m no doctor and no educated person.” She shot Dr. Cardano a glance that verged on audacity, and I was glad the fire burned low. Maybe he didn’t see it. Years ago, Dr. Cardano had reprimanded me for allowing—and even encouraging—my servants to speak freely. My father never seemed to care much about it, though he didn’t interfere with his friend’s reproach.

Olmina continued, “Sometimes you folk make too much of a thing that’s simple.”

“So what do you say, my smart maid?” asked Dr. Cardano.

“I’m no maid, to begin with.” I held my breath at that statement, but Dr. Cardano only narrowed his eyes. Olmina continued, “Smart in what way, I’m not sure. But if you ask me what use is grief, I’d say it’s got no use. There’s no mincing of doctors or ranting of frocks at the pulpit that’ll convince me otherwise. We don’t know the use. And that’s why, Gabriella, I think your father kept asking the question.” She looked at me sadly. “It burdened him. I like the answer you gave as a young one best. We may as well hold each other.” She hugged her belly for emphasis and stared back at the fire.

Dr. Cardano shrugged and raised an eyebrow in mild disapproval, though after all these years he was familiar with Olmina’s homely wisdom.

“You may not like my methods, Dr. Cardano, but I must pursue my vocation as much as I pursue my father.”

“You were always headstrong, Gabriella. Why should I think you altered now?” He smiled fondly, then lapsed back into his own thoughts, creasing his brow.

Lorenzo poked his head in the room a moment later. Noting our solemn faces, he said, “I don’t want to disturb your cheer, but supper’s on the table, and I for one am going to eat!”