The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 4





A Tether

After a week as Dr. Cardano’s guest, I broached the subject of departure at midday dinner. When one has waited a long time, I reasoned, suddenly one can wait no longer. Even the small delays prove intolerable. Dr. Strozzi, a peer of my father’s, joined us for dinner as well. I turned to address Dr. Cardano at the end of the long oak table. “Have you heard any news of snowmelt in the high passes?”

“Hmm.” Dr. Cardano mulled the question over, frowning a little.

“Are the oxen drawing logs on the roads through Bressanone yet?” I persisted, for that is how they test for avalanches, and the treacherous snows had been heavy this year.

Dr. Cardano glanced at me sternly, holding a spoonful of pottage midair. “Surely you’re not thinking of leaving already?”

I stared down at my bowl, at the peas and beans in their thick mess. “I must cross through the mountains within a few days, so we can reach Tübingen—one of my father’s early stopovers, I believe—before the bitter weather comes. The sooner I leave, the sooner I’ll find him.”

Professor Strozzi stared at me from across the table, the scowl lines on either side of his down-turned mouth a permanent sign of disapproval, so that in fact it was difficult to tell what he really thought. I recalled that the first time I’d seen him (I was a child of only five or six) I’d dubbed him the Statue, for he resembled one of the formidable patrician busts that lined the corridors of the University of Padua.

To my amazement, he said, “But the moon is waxing, and we’ll have to tie you to the quince tree like your father!”

Dr. Cardano shot him a look of such rebuke that it could’ve been a slap.

“Tied to what?” I was sure I’d misheard him.

“Nothing, my dear, nothing,” muttered Dr. Cardano, swiftly turning toward the kitchen and exclaiming, “Ah, here’s the next course—bread, wine, and company makes even fickle Fortune smile!” One of the servant girls carried in a fresh basket of bread, which saturated the air with rosemary, while the other girl brought an egg erbolata studded with parsley and flowers.

“Ah, celestial dish!” squealed Professor Strozzi, whose enthusiasm for astronomy was only surpassed by his gluttony. “A constellation worthy of Cassiopeia’s table, though the queen thought a bit too much of herself!” he said, eying me across the table. “The last time I saw you, Gabriella, you were only a wisp of a girl at twelve, hanging on your father’s every gesture!”

I ignored his gibe. “I’d like to know why he was tied to the quince. Was that some practical joke?”

“Oh no, no,” the professor mumbled uncomfortably, shifting in his chair.

Dr. Cardano intervened. “Leave it alone, dear girl. The limonia chicken is here!”

“I just want—”

“Listen to Dr. Cardano,” chided Professor Strozzi. A tiny bit of egg hung from his chin as he hunched forward.

“I just want a simple answer—why was my father tied to a tree?”

“The only thing that could subdue him,” Professor Strozzi offered dryly. “He was on a tether, you know.”

Dr. Cardano slammed both hands on the table. “The chicken grows cold and the boiled sturgeon is here. We’ll not speak another word till we’ve enjoyed our food!”

“A tether?” I felt my voice rising incredulously.

The professor nodded and began sopping up the garlic sturgeon sauce with a small chunk of bread. Some of his teeth were missing and so he masticated very slowly, though with evident gusto. A distressed Dr. Cardano held the edge of the table as if it would leap away from him.

Uneasily I recalled my father’s rages—especially the moods that erupted out of nowhere in the months before he left. There was also the rumor whispered by my mother, which I’d ignored for years, since she invented tales for her own amusement. Yet I began to question whether some truth shot through this rumor like a bright thread in monotonous silk. As a young girl I’d overheard her speaking in low tones to a friend near the open drawing room window. I played in the courtyard just below, out of sight, arranging a fleet of small wooden ships Lorenzo had carved for me on the sea of gravel.

“Well, it’s no wonder his wits have gone astray. You know about my Cipriot mother-in-law? She told me in a letter that she hung silver spoons from the twisted tree in their courtyard against the evil eye. Against the moon. Her husband railed against her, for more often than not, the spoons would be gone in the morning.”

“How could that be?” asked the friend.

“Oh, I guess the young men—including Bartolo, before he was my husband, of course—got a firm hold in the wall, climbed into the ancient mastic tree, and pocketed what they could reach. Later he broke nearly every window in the house, throwing pilfered spoons at the moon’s reflection.”

“But why did he do that?”

“I don’t know, he was angry!”

“At what?”

“ ‘Too many moons,’ he said. Watching him. He was drowning. Can you imagine? He said that in recollection to me. And after that incident he made himself scarce. He caught a ship to Venetia and soon began his studies in Padua. My father arranged the marriage after he became a doctor. A young man of such promise…I thought him handsome even if fanciful. His foreignness, his strangeness, was attraction.”

I’d always dismissed the family madness as colorful hearsay. But I was also troubled by another possibility hinted at by my mother. When does fancy become lunacy? And what of this tether? Had these men fabricated this story to harm my father out of jealousy? Not Dr. Cardano, surely. Nor even Professor Strozzi, who lived solely for stars, planets, and supper. It was something else.

For the moment, I decided to bide my time, and like the astronomer, I ate with a kind of vengeance, as if food could sate my apprehension—tart chicken, sturgeon boiled in wine, followed by pungent fennel-and-onion salad. Dr. Cardano didn’t pursue the subject of my journey or my father. I would speak to him alone later.

After we finished eating, I stood from the table as the gentlemen relaxed in postures of satiation. “I believe I’ll take a walk in the famous garden of cures,” I announced.

“The sun will overpower you,” Dr. Cardano warned, “and most certainly bring on dyspepsia and an ill temper.”

“I’m already feeling a little ill tempered.”

Dr. Cardano rose. “Young woman, your father would not approve. You should be taking your repose like your sensible servants.” He stood in the doorway that opened onto the inner courtyard, where the terra-cotta walls and paving bricks radiated heat. We could hear Olmina’s cheese-grater snoring in the kitchen and Lorenzo’s frightening gasps outside as he slept, stretched on a bench under the stout, gnarled quince tree.

“My father is not here,” I reminded him plainly. “Besides, I have a great desire to see the garden again, to observe the medicinals in full leaf and bloom. And let’s not forget, for those who are napping, that onions and garlic bring on nightmares.”

Dr. Cardano patted my wrist with his brittle hand, a brief gesture of conciliation, and then lifted his palm to his mouth to suppress a small belch. “You must see the exotics that have arrived from the New World. The patate, the curious sunflowers, and the tomatoes.” Here he paused for a few moments as if he had fallen into reflection. “If you lived here, Gabriella, the garden of cures would always be at your disposal.”

Dr. Cardano hinted at his desire for marriage (a winter groom–spring bride affair, though I was swiftly approaching my summer) in nearly every letter he sent to me. “Ah, and if you hadn’t guzzled wine, you’d know better than to suggest such a foolish thing to me again,” I gently rebuffed him.

“I won’t accompany you, then,” he said contritely, his long face reminding me of some great flatfish. “Giannetta will attend you.”

“Wait.” I lowered my voice. “What’s this about my father being tied to the quince tree?”

Dr. Cardano looked away. “Your father hid his strange moods from you well, Gabriella, although it wasn’t so troubling early on. As he grew older it…worsened…and perhaps that is also part of the reason he left you.”

I pulled him into the corridor, away from the prying eyes of the others. “So this is how you’re trying to dissuade me from my search, by playing up my mother’s gossip about the Mondinis in Ciprus? A clouded mind does not mean madness. Maybe it’s some tangled grief. Or maybe my father suffers an undisciplined heart. We don’t know.” This last statement startled me.

“Oh, Gabriella, I know very little about your father’s family and their history, for your father never wished to speak of it. And yes, I’d heard from your mother once that a certain branch of the family there tended toward madness, though she never divulged the manner of their affliction. But this I know,” Dr. Cardano said. “Your father suffered intemperance of the moon. It…” He waved his hands as he searched for the right words. “It loosened his mind as it grew full. Often he planned his visits here during that time. Can it be that you never noticed that his absences began with the increase of the hunchback moon? That is when we bound him to the tree, to prevent him doing violence to himself. Or others.”

I gasped. “I don’t believe you!”

The doctor blanched and promptly turned away, his head sunken upon his shoulders as he retreated down the marble corridor toward his sleeping quarters.

But I was unrepentant and could not bring myself to follow him. Instead I stepped out onto the hot cobbles of the street, striding toward the garden in the thick, humid light. I didn’t wait for the servant girl Giannetta (ignoring the custom that a woman must never walk alone in the streets) but yanked my straw hat onto my head and hastily tied it under my chin.

In an empty corner of the Hortus Botanicus, beneath an ancient chestnut tree, I found a cool stone bench. Burdened with the heat, I closed my eyes and leaned back against the trunk. The geometer Daniele Barbaro had designed this garden with such perfection, circles within squares within circles, the whole earth and its four directions compassed, to mend the agitation and chaos of the world. I breathed in pennyroyal, dittany, rosemary, meadowsweet, mountain savory, and lemon balm—all excellent for calming the spirits.

Giannetta appeared after a short while, her flaxen hair pulled back in two long braids tied together at the middle of her back. She greeted me with a quick curtsy, then in the smallest voice asked permission to join me on the bench, which I granted. We were the only two in the garden. Though I doubted that she would divulge anything, I asked, “How did you find my father the last time you saw him, my dear?”

“Oh!” She turned the eyes of a startled animal toward me. “I can’t say, signorina. I was so much younger and…”

“Don’t be frightened. We’ll keep it between you and me.”

She stared down at the petit-point work she’d brought with her, colored silks on a linen book bag for one of Dr. Cardano’s herbals. The half-completed embroidery showed a woman gathering herbs that towered above her all out of proportion—great trees of rosemary, fronds of anise, copses of basil. “I think he was a very sad man. I saw him pacing in his room one night when I brought him his tea, and he said that he longed for his own city. I didn’t say anything because it’s not my place, you understand, signorina, though I wondered why he’d leave it, then. That’s when he also mentioned you.”

“Oh?”

“He said, ‘I once had a daughter who… ,’ but then he didn’t want to say any more, and he seemed upset. He gestured that I should leave him.”

“Did he ever say more, to Dr. Cardano, perhaps?” My voice remained calm, though my stomach clenched.

“I’m not the sort who listens at doors. But sometimes I heard them speaking about things I didn’t understand. Mercury and flasks and fire, I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry, Giannetta, I’m not going to lay blame on you. If you think of anything else, you can tell me, yes?”

“Oh yes, signorina. You know, I never had a father, so I think you must be very lucky.” And after that, as if embarrassed by saying so much, Giannetta fell silent and turned diligently to her sewing.

Lucky, I thought, cautiously turning the word around in my mind as if it were a barbed thing. The rhythmic clicks of her needle against the thimble, and the taut pull as it pierced the cloth, joined the sputtering fountain and the monotonous tick and whir of insects to lull me to sleep.

I stand at the edge of an island. The rushes hiss warnings, shhh, shhh, shhh. Venetia floats before me like a dead stickle fish, her spines become toppled bell towers, cathedrals, the pitched roofs of the Ospedale degli Incurabili; all these protrude at odd angles from her bloated form. I wade through sedge grass along the shore. The edges of my sopping gown trail me with small delayed ripples as I search for something in the dull green water.

Then a chest—a medicine chest—appears upon waves that move like lips in speech.

It rolls toward me. As the deep red box dips, I notice the crest of the Mondini family painted upon the lid, a double griffin with a snake in each claw.

The chest opens and spills loose vials upon the water. Hundreds of little bottles roll and gleam and drift apart like droplets of mercury. I try to gather them up in my skirts, but the current disperses them, clinking against each other, into the rushes. I can barely move from the weight of soaked skirts and the pull of mud on my slippered feet. The rushes sigh, shhh, shhh, shhh. The bottles ring out all over the marsh. Other things escape as the chest capsizes—lead boxes, glass bowls sealed with parchment lids, blue quetzal feathers from the New World, snake castings, light bones like wands spinning haplessly in the water. Then scissors, surgical knives and saws, lancets, clamps, forceps, and bleeding tools, mortars and pestles, which unaccountably float. Leeching cups, urine flasks, ear scoops, artificial noses and ears of wood that suggest submerged bodies.

All scatter inward toward the stagnant meanders of the marsh. I want to gather them up.

But I’m gripped by the mud.

I can reach the handle of the chest, however, and right it. But now it is larger and becomes the long skiff of a casket. Shhh, shhh, shhh—

I awoke with a jolt, sweating and adrift. Giannetta still sat next to me sewing (it seemed she must have been stitching an eternity). She took one more loop and left the needle in the cloth. She put her arm lightly around me and wiped my forehead with her handkerchief.

We sat a little longer, saying nothing, before we returned to the house.



That night in Dr. Cardano’s study—he was kind enough to leave me alone at his tilted desk during the evenings—I began work upon my own notes for The Book of Diseases. I took a light supper, goat cheese with bread grilled upon the hearth, dried black olives, and wine. I liked to eat slowly, intermittently, while I formed my thoughts. A chewy crust of bread always anchored my words, while wine brought on certain deft phrases (which didn’t always hold up to daylight).

These hours of candlelight, encircled by a studious darkness, drew me closer to my intent. The muted cries of owls and the sorrowful quavers of nightjars kept me company. Even when I wasn’t putting words to page with the quill and indigo ink I preferred, I was more at peace than in the day.

I realized this was the solitude my father tasted and loved, which I also loved. Often, at home in Venetia, we would read or write in our separate chambers, though I might visit his study from time to time to ask a question about the healing properties of something such as aurum potabile, the gold suspended in spirits that purportedly could be sipped as a cure-all. He would pause, whatever he was doing, and answer me thoughtfully yet simply, as if sharing a piece of bread. “What is meant by gold? The thing in its purity or surrounded by other minerals? The gold of dreams? And then each temperament may react differently, just as elements respond to light, some trapping it, others magnifying it.”

And I would leave his study content, even if the questions were unanswered and more questions lingered. I was comforted merely by the rise and fall of his room’s reflected light upon the canal waters, which I could perceive from my window. Then the light would be extinguished, and this too was reassuring, in the way that the rhythms of work mend the days. I was pleased to be the last one awake in the house, keeping my small vigil.

The light from his room still rose and fell for me, from the various cities of his visitations. I’d been rereading his letters, trying to surmise his route by his mind’s tenor. In one letter from an unnamed place, yet with the date February 5, 1588, he wrote:



How I treasure the dark nights when my candle is the only one lit, perhaps, in the entire city. It may be that when no one else is about, I find greater entrance to my soul. It is not a simple matter of uninterrupted time. No, it is the darkened theater just after the play, the street after the festival, the emptiness that holds the semblances. There is something hallowed about the late hours that suspend one’s life. To be apart, to be silent, to pace or lay down the heart’s agitation. To find in words the plangent bell that calls one home. And if by chance I should move to the window and see another window, far down the street, lit for a scholar or a corpse vigil or even a midnight birth, we are instantly bound by the intimacy of our solitude.



And, I now wanted to add, the intimacy of things! For here in Dr. Cardano’s study I was surrounded by the amiable calm of books, a few small boxes and majolica apothecary jars, which I resisted opening (not wishing to pry into the doctor’s cures without permission), a celestial globe, a bronze armillary sphere, a pair of scissors, a slim knife for trimming quills, and a lonely silver key that hung upon a nail without its companion lock or chest anywhere in sight.

How agreeable to have such a quiet room at one’s disposal. I was free of the interruptions that came at home from my mother, the servants, and the raucous din of ships in the Canale della Giudecca, unloading and loading, thudding, jarring, creaking, along with the loud gabble and shouts of sailors.

But sometimes in stillness, there is left still one’s inner clamor. Perhaps this was the very thing my mother feared most, for she always surrounded herself with chattering friends and never sought a moment to herself. She couldn’t bear that I spent hours alone, as if that solitude were a slight against her. Or perhaps she worried that the daughter bore signs of the father’s obsessions.

Once, as a young girl of ten, I was sitting at the window, a book of hours open in my lap, though I wasn’t reading it. I loved to watch the light unspooling on the water and the shadows climbing or descending the walls of the villas. If I could discern the patterns in this movement, then, I reasoned in my child’s mind, other worlds would open to me. I’d see things that most people missed, not that I felt unusual in this. My young friends and I believed that most men and women missed half the world (except for my father, who’d mastered an uncanny field of vision and possessed the ability to detect whenever I crept into his study, even though his back was turned to me and he was deep in study).

That afternoon, guests of my mother had arrived and I’d chosen to remain upstairs, though she’d repeatedly called me down, ignoring my wishes. Finally she bustled into my room without knocking, and in a low, pinched voice so the guests below would not hear, she said, “I don’t know what to do with you. Do you want us to donate you as others have given their daughters to the nunnery as tithe?”

“Yes, donate me,” I said defiantly. Her face colored. “I’d be glad to leave!” I knew full well my father would never allow it, so it was an empty rebellion.

At last I relented and went downstairs, where two young women and an old dowager questioned me about my book of hours, my tutors, and my poetry. I’d shown the latter to no one. (My mother had discovered it while poking around my desk. Thief!)

I barely spoke, and later, when her friends left, my mother startled me by crying out, “I really don’t know you at all, Gabriella!” And you never will, Mamma. My mother wanted a daughter to reflect her. Someone to share gossip, clothes, and the latest shape in beauty marks (black felt crescents were all the rage then, glued to a cheek or a shoulder). Someone to be her confidante. But I was a shadow she could never grasp, though she might call that grasping love. Yet I couldn’t truly know her either. When she chastised me, there was always something behind it I couldn’t name, as if she were slipping into a chasm and clutching at me at the same time. I didn’t want to go down with her.

Sitting alone in Dr. Cardano’s office, I shook my head. Here she was, in my thoughts again. I’d left her behind, and she’d still found a way to haunt me. Tonight I wrote with her living ghost there in the room, treading back and forth. How would I ever make peace with her? I set down my incomplete notes for a disease familiar to me on an unbound sheaf of paper.



Melancholia:

When One Is Weighed by a Leaden Sadness

Melancholia seeps into one’s life like the metallic sand of an hourglass. Despondency accrues. One suffers from inertia and wan complexion. My friend Messalina grew so disconsolate that no one could find a cure, not even my father. The use of plants with a moist nature, such as watercress, lovage, and water parsley, could not counter her dry, cold humor. It is said that the black bile of melancholia devours even stone with its terrible acid.

On a bone-aching afternoon of rain, I found Messalina seated by the casement of her room near Campo San Polo, a square of lace abandoned on her lap. She stared at a tiny insect, which crept along the sill. When I addressed her and took her limp hand, she didn’t answer but continued to watch the insect until it wriggled into the miter of the window frame. Years passed like this in a cruel paralysis for Messalina. The women in her family insisted that she rise from bed to resist the dotage of her malady. They dressed her and led her to the casement, moving her like an enormous puppet, so empty of will were her limbs. Before my father left, he counseled her to keep her windows open so she could breathe the salubrious air of the sea and exhale her gloom.

Sometimes she recovered briefly and began to pace through every room, making lists of the most minute repairs that needed attention, much to her mother’s chagrin. “A new hinge pin for the dowry chest, for this one is bent; new plaster for the corner of the attic kitchen, for this corner is crooked; a new pot of cochineal for the dressing table—look, the powder on top is darker than the powder underneath…”

And so on. But one dank January, she would not return to us. Every afternoon for a month I visited Messalina, spoke to her, touched her arm or hand, but she didn’t respond. Once, in a moment of weakness, I confided to my friend an unforeseen yearning for other parts of the world. I confess that her silence encouraged me, and I began to work out my plans in the presence of her fixed demeanor. Other times I hoped that my schemes would draw her into her own imaginings or that my discontent would distract her from her own. But it became clear that I wasn’t helping her to recover. She was always seated at the window, her chin resting upon one solemn fist, her eyes blankly measuring nothing.

At last I resolved to try the cure of the Terme of Montecatini, though I couldn’t transport her there. I employed two men to travel to the springs and return with five barrels of sulfurous water. Messalina’s aunt and mother and I set about collecting huge copper kettles and pots that the servants filled with the malodorous waters and hung upon iron hasps in the fireplace. One by one, as the covered vessels boiled, the servants carried them upstairs to her room, where the windows were now shut. When all the pots were set about her, I signaled the servants to remove the lids. Her room filled with moiling vapors until she was nearly obscured at her window seat. As I waded through the steam, which reeked of damp plaster and volcanic minerals, her clammy face appeared above her loose smock and turned toward me like the slow revolution of a globe at the urging of one’s hand. She was an unrecognizable continent, a Sargasso Sea. Glassy beads of sweat stippled her temples and upper lip. When her eyes found mine, her pupils widened as if she had flushed them with tincture of belladonna. Her gall-brown eyes dilated with a ferment that spilled from little wounds everywhere, invisibly issuing from the veins of our lives, from the wall joists and the dark timbers of the ceiling, from the spaces in the perfect square of white lace that her mother desperately continued to lay upon her lap, from the cracks in the gondolas drawn up to the steps in the canals, from the sea itself.

Without uttering a word, Messalina spoke with her eyes: Go away from here, Gabriella, and save yourself! Find your father! It was then I noticed the straight razor hidden in her sleeve and a small open notebook beneath the lace, filled with strange geometries like rhumb lines. I warily removed the razor and she didn’t resist.

Her mother continued the sudorific cure at my suggestion, for it offered Messalina some relief for a few days. But later that February, even as she seemed to be improving, she leapt into the freezing sea and drowned. Now all the shutters on their house were always closed, summer and winter, whether to keep the ghost of Messalina from entering or to prevent her leaving, I could never be sure.



In the refuge of Dr. Cardano’s study, I set down my quill, then closed and tied together the cover boards that protected the manuscript, just as the beeswax candle began to sputter, its warm, unguent scent urging me to sleep. My mother had gone.