The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 6





Before the Sea of Black Woods

We left the half-drowned village behind us, carefully skirting the receding edge of Lake Costentz as the hours drained like the waters of a wound. An odd assortment of things appeared at the lip of the lake’s descending wake, a line continuously redrawn like those maps of the Old World and the New, where the shapes of sea and land never remain constant from one year to the next.

The dispossessed objects unsettled me: A crumpled lady’s ruff like the jellyfish that beach themselves at the edge of the Venetian Lagoon. Mud-caked wooden drawers, their contents churned and lost or astonishingly preserved in their little arks. A thin baleen comb embedded in silt like a fossil from a cabinet of wonder, an object of no consequence awaiting its turn, in hundreds, even thousands of years, to harden to stone, then be discovered and set upon a shelf to be admired. As a child I’d believed that spirits inhabited every tree, every stone. I’d said to my father, “Everything is alive!”

Olmina had laughed at me. We were at the table, about to dine on her minestrone. The soup made me happy. It had the fragrance of the garden and her hands and the hearth in it.

My father said, “Even the door?” He gestured to the half-open entry.

“All of them,” I answered, pointing to the yawning cupboard, the window shutters, the little painted doors on the book cabinet, the medicine chest.

“Don’t talk nonsense!” my mother said.

“How do you know they’re alive?” asked my father.

“They speak, they say come or go or stay.”

“Ah, and what does the chest say?”

“Don’t encourage her in this foolishness! Do you want a child possessed?”

“It says, I’m a mouth. Put your ear to me and listen.”

“That’s enough! Eat your soup.”

“No, you may speak, Gabi. Things do speak to us.”

My mother glared at him and then left the table, stepping out into the courtyard. My father sighed and went after her.

I remained at the table and Olmina sat down to keep me company. “Sometimes we can’t always say what we hear. Others don’t understand.” She smiled at me and patted my hand. “Eat your soup.”

“The medicine chest says, Everything is alive and everything has a secret.”

She raised her eyebrows at me. “Lift that spoon before the soup gets cold.”

I obeyed. I overheard my mother from the courtyard, saying, “The girl must be instructed in the ways of the world, not in these fantasies you create for her.”

“But my dear, it’s only a game.”

“A serious game, don’t you think? Given that you’re half here and half there.”

I wondered what she meant. There must have been a gesture too, perhaps her open palm to signify the world, and fingers at the temple to signify the mind.

In the end my father gentled her. “Recall when we first met and strolled arm in arm along the Zattere? With your mother, who taught me the uses of so many herbs? She encouraged your stories about the ships coming in to anchor, the origins of their cargo, the distant world beyond Venetia. She liked my stories too!”

“Ah, my poor mother, and look where it got her! But yes, you appeared to me from one of those ships, from Ciprus. How handsome you were, your ink-black hair almost blue, your eyes half-closed as if dreaming.”

“And you, my dear, were a dazzling species of dove, preening there at the balcony.”

“Now look what you’ve done—distracted me from Gabriella.”

I sipped the last of my soup, tilting the bowl to my lips as I would never have been allowed to do if my parents were at the table.

“Have I? Come back to dinner, then.”

“Scoundrel!” But there was affection in her voice.



I also believed, in my child’s heart, that the world truly wanted each one of us in some way. Now I felt how insignificant our little passage was upon this earth.

We rode late into the evening before coming upon another walled town hooded by thick forest. My head and shoulder ached, numbing my brain to anything other than maintaining an upright position on Fedele. In the sky near Cassiopeia, shooting stars fell like broken lances one after another, piercing the air with stubs of light, repeated on the lake’s surface.

“Remember the Canto della Stella, when we once sang to the stars, signorina, in the Christmas procession near Lago di Garda?” Olmina asked, full of wonder. “You were only a tiny girl when you asked me about the frozen fires of the stars that burned upon the lake. Was the sky above the same as the sky below? Your father laughed at your curiosity and said, ‘Everything above is reflected below. Even the darkness.’ ” She paused, then added, “An odd thing to say, if you ask me.”

I nodded to please her but said nothing. My father respected the darkness, even sought it out at times, when he’d sit musing in a dim room or, during summer, in the courtyard lit only by stars. The dark is not evil. Only men make it so. Just as foxglove is not an evil plant but becomes poisonous when misused in too great a dosage. My father sat in the dark to think, because all creation begins in shadow.



We were alone upon the road.

We wound our way through the low hills covered with gray orchards, ghostly fields of grain, and vines, the vast lake gleaming like dull metal to our left, the scythe moon having set long ago, and soon arrived at Überlingen.

Unfortunately the southeast gate was closed to us; the gatekeeper would not open despite our cries. So we turned round and viewed the dim hamlet that spread out from the moat enclosing the town. The faint light that glimmered here and there from houses scattered up the mountain unexpectedly comforted me. They were small, secretive beacons before the sea of black woods where the road led next. We could go no farther this night and would have to rely on one of the houses to take us in.

When we drew close to the half-timber house near the mill, I could make out a wooden sign painted with a crude bed and a bees’ skep, hanging above the door. Lorenzo knocked, and a widow in all-black garb, bent as a latch, came to the door holding a candle. “What’s your business?” she asked, clutching a thin shawl to her chest.

“We’d like a room and some food, please, dear madam,” Lorenzo answered, since he spoke the best German. He hastily removed his rough woolen cap and held it in his hands, nodding to her in courtesy.

She lifted the candle and frowned. “It’s late for travelers to arrive.”

“Right you are, madam, but our journey’s been slow and muddy. My mistress nearly drowned in the lake not so long ago, so we’re riding with more care.”

She scrutinized me. “That explains her piebald face.”

I cringed, embarrassed.

“I thought you’d been set upon by robbers. Or maybe you’re vagabonds setting a trap.” She inspected our faces once more. “Well, come in, then. I’m Widow Gudrun. Mind you, I can only offer a plain repast. Bread, cheese, onions, and beer.”

Lorenzo perked up at this.

“We’re most grateful,” I said.

“And how many days will you stay, then?”

“Perhaps a week. I need to rest in a peaceful place.”

“Apart from the bees in the orchard and the boatbuilders hammering all day down the lane, you should be fine.”

“Ah, I should feel right at home with that,” I answered, thinking of the boatyard not far from our home. “We come from Venetia.”

“Ah, hmm.” She stopped and looked me up and down once more. Then she muttered, “Sea people, then. Well, come in. Lake people aren’t so different. We both share the flux of the water, though we lake dwellers keep more to ourselves, I think. It’s the knowing of a place bound by mountains. While your water seems without end.”