The Book of Madness and Cures (6 page)

“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!”

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?”