The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 8





Fires That Never Burn

The next morning, before we departed, I showed Olmina the fragment of L’Amore with only the blindfolded Cupid printed on it. “I guess there are no lovers in my future,” I observed.

Olmina peered at it and rubbed the paper with her thumb. “No lovers that you suspect,” she corrected me with a smile. Hope was a plain thing for her, common as bread. But I couldn’t hold it after Maurizio’s death.

When he fell ill, I didn’t doubt he would recover, for he was a spirited young man. We’d met in the university cloister of Padua, first by shadowy glances, then by introduction through Papà, for Mauro was his student and I was ever at my father’s side. Mauro had persisted with me in spite of my father’s disapproval (though even then at eighteen I was beyond the common marrying age of sixteen). Odd to consider that the father who had once wanted to keep me so close could then abandon me a few years later to my own wits. But Mauro finally won him over with his natural intelligence and his confidence, which hid his own yearning for a father he’d never known. For a while, Papà relented and mentored us both.

Mauro and I also taught one another, in a shared scientific passion for the anatomical mysteries of the body, which soon enough led us to explore what could never be taught. I learned the contours of his sorrows there in his slightly bent shoulders, though surely he could draw himself up in pride for his work. His lucent green eyes always sought me out, not only for supple curve and softness, but also for places I couldn’t see in myself. He gave them to me, gifts of blind sight regained, as if he were a mirror before and behind me—the grace I didn’t know I had, the impatience I’d disowned. I too presented him with invisible impressions. “How well you know me, Gabriella!” he’d say, startled as a wild buck in the woods, when I glimpsed a hidden ferocity or brilliance. And the words! We could use the Latin from Vesalius in ways I am sure no professor ever intended. Arteria magna, ex sinistro cordis sinu oriens, et vitalem spiritum toti corpori deferens… For it was beautiful upon our tongues and we traced all the lines to the heart.

In illness his pulse jumped to my listening ear upon his chest. Though he shook terribly from the fever, he came through the first day glistening, purged. I gave him a tea of holy basil and black pepper. Even after the second bout, two days later, he rebounded. He held my hand with his damp one, those long, pale fingers adept at the vocation of surgery. But the fever wrung him out like a rag. His black hair clumped with sweat and his eyes shone dense as silt. His mother, an elderly woman who’d borne him late in her childbearing life, had a small bed made up for me next to his so that I could remain with him.

“He’ll recover more quickly with love at his side,” she said, and she pressed her papery palm to my cheek.

One morning after a week I awoke and opened the curtain to his bed. He lay still, staring at his blue canopy, rigid mouth open, emptied of breath, his bedsheets drenched as if he’d been lifted from a river and laid upon his bed. I held his cold hand with both my hands, thinking, I must warm him. But death stole the heat.

The world was wrong. The lack was everywhere. His great heart gone and mine gone silent.

My palms went numb for months, though I told no one of this but Olmina, and she said, “The little flames will return, you’ll see, signorina.” Yes, they returned, like scalds from a pot handle. The skin grew slick and pale as scars there. When my father saw my hands, he shook his head. “Grief speaks in strange ways, my daughter.”

Now I tucked the remnant of L’Amore into the pocket of my skirt. Then we took leave of Widow Gudrun at her door. I’d grown fond of her crotchety ways and storytelling in the evenings.

“We’re setting off for Tübingen, to find Dr. Rainer Fuchs, a friendly rival of my father,” I told her. I leaned forward and said quietly, “Dr. Fuchs, like you, employs the curative powers of plants.”

The old woman looked as if she’d been struck. I realized my mistake too late and tried to amend it. “I meant to say that like you, he believes in plant remedies. My father informed me in a letter that Dr. Fuchs is writing a materia medica that he aims to complete before my father finishes his Book of Diseases.”

She frowned at me and crossed her thin arms across her chest.

Of course she couldn’t read, and books mattered naught to her. And here I was prattling on. I blushed. “If you need to send any letters along, we’ll be moving on to Leiden after that. Many thanks for the good meals and fine bed!” I touched my left cheek and shoulder as if to reassure myself that the pain had left too, though a deep ache persisted in my shoulder and chest above my heart. “I appreciate the herbs, and the honey for our journey. My bruises have nearly vanished.”

She looked down. “I only took care of a traveler’s wounds as any good country dweller would.”

“Widow Gudrun.” I moved as if to gently touch her arm.

But she shrank away, seemingly in a great rush to go back inside her house. “The bees need tending,” she explained. But then she paused and seemed to have a change of heart, as one might after having for a long while hidden something that finally can’t be ignored. She leaned forward to confide, “I heard of a Venetian doctor traveling through here a few years ago—I wasn’t going to tell you, didn’t want to worry you. His cures were ineffective and many people grew sicker. If I were you, I wouldn’t ever say I was a Venetian or a doctor. Some are still angry.” Then she gave us a curt wave and disappeared into the dark entry of her house, black skirts flaring behind her.

“A strange woman,” commented Olmina as we headed north, the mules picking up a good pace.

I couldn’t speak for a moment, for if I’d stunned Gudrun by mentioning her art, she’d flung it back at me in warning—though that doctor didn’t sound like my father, for Papà was competent and trustworthy. But how many Venetian doctors were traveling the countryside?

“She’s fearful,” I said, regretting that I’d mentioned her plant cures aloud.

“Ah, the crone’s just used to her own thoughts and none others’,” Lorenzo declared. “Didn’t you notice that we were the only lodgers for the whole two weeks?”

“Yes,” Olmina said, “and I also noticed that she was always going up to her attic late at night too, for who knows what reason!”

“Maybe that’s the only place she can find any peace,” I said, still trying to make up for my slip, though what good it would do now I wasn’t sure. None of us would report her to the bishop anyway.



We veered away from Lake Costentz, riding into the black woods above the Rhine. The pines, beech, and fir closed around us like a heavy mantle, thinning the sunlight. The mules nodded as they slipped into a steady pace, swinging their heads neither right nor left. Though Olmina grew apprehensive, Lorenzo was lighthearted to be among the trees.

He began to recount stories of this wood, the Schwarzwald, that his father had told him. “Beech will lead the way—the old ones live in those trees, and it aids the gout. Some say it tempers those who are quick to quarrel. And pine, that sweetest of woods, eases the heart. Firs foretell the storm before a cloud appears in the sky, when their cones open.”

“And blackthorn?” I asked. “I’ve heard about the benefits of its oil.”

“Ah, he’s a dangerous one, you know—the thorns and the thicket. All I know is blackthorn tells us winter is coming. Contrary as he is, his fruit ripens when all others die.”

Olmina spoke up. “I prefer the elms. What do you say, old man, about them?” She hadn’t ventured a word since we’d entered the woods over an hour earlier.

“Elms belong to the lady and make a fine cordage if you need it,” Lorenzo explained, proud of his lore.

“I like the stands of larch,” I added, “blazing with color. They are fires that never burn.”

A thin wind brushed the uppermost branches above us, like skirts trailing across an immense Persian carpet. At the top of a hill we paused before a small wooden shrine, a box with canted shingles of bark on top that had been nailed to a stout pine trunk. Moss surrounded the crudely carved and painted madonnina within, clad in a faded blue robe with stars. One hand held a lily, and the other palm was open, upturned, whether in supplication or solace I couldn’t tell. Small tapers had been lit and burnt down. “Who would light a candle here?” I mused. “There’s no one for miles around.”

“Pilgrims or thieves, one never knows,” Lorenzo said. “Even curmudgeons pray in these out-of-the-way places.”

I dismounted and opened my saddlebag, removed a small bottle of rose water from my silk bag of powders and scents, and sprinkled some at the feet of the little Virgin. I prayed that we might find my father safe in Tübingen (where one of his letters originated) or that some sign of his whereabouts might come to us. Her face was streaked with a yellow-green fungus, the same luminous growth that mottled the bark and limbs of the trees.

She offered a plainer intercession with God in this remote place, if he happened to be listening. Or perhaps wood was wood, and nobody was listening but the devil in the shadows. Il diavolo si nasconde dietro la croce, they say.

Olmina prayed, while Lorenzo observed the rooks that gathered on the ridge above us.



We met no other fellow travelers in the forest, so when late in the day we saw an elderly peasant couple approach, bent under loads of wood, we were alert.

They looked upon us with equal alarm. I wanted to avoid the suspicions we encountered in the lake villages with Dr. Wassler and the servants of Lord Altenhaus, so I offered them bread and Friuli wine.

“Oh, many thanks, my lady, we’ll take a small sip,” said the portly old man, who appeared hollow, but not sunken eyed, as if only recently deprived of food. His wife, a hunchbacked old woman possessed of a jaundiced complexion, drew Olmina aside and whispered something in an urgent voice.

“Signorina Gabriella,” Olmina began in an anxious tone, “these good people say that we won’t reach the nearest town, Offenburg, before nightfall. They’ve respectfully offered us their own shelter so that we don’t have to sleep out in the wood.”

I stared up the road, enfolded now in a brooding gray haze. In truth, I’d wished to be in Tübingen by now.

I considered the peasants. Did they mean to rob us? I could almost hear my father’s voice: Be shrewd, my girl, no matter what you do. In an unknown place, trust no one.

I called Olmina over out of earshot of the old ones. “What makes you think we can believe them?”

“They’re straightforward, signorina, and very frightened. I can smell the fear in them. I don’t think thieves would be so afraid. We’re alone, unarmed.”

“And pray tell, what does fear smell like?”

“It’s pungent, like animal musk, and sets me on edge too.”

“All right,” I answered reluctantly. “But we must be wary.”

“Lorenzo and I could take turns keeping awake.”

“Well, we’ll see.” I urged my mule back toward the couple and asked, “How far to your shelter?”

“Close by.” The old man waved a hairy, freckled hand.

“All right, then, thank you for the kind offer.”

They brightened and picked up their step. As we turned off the road onto an invisible track, Olmina and Lorenzo walked ahead with the peasants and struck up friendly conversations just out of my hearing. I didn’t mind, for I knew they’d inform me of anything important. It was better this way, for the peasants would feel more comfortable speaking away from my presence.

The old ones, Gerta and Josef, lived deep in the black wood (not so close as Josef first suggested), their dwelling hidden by hawthorn thickets. I was uneasy until we entered the hut and the dry scent of rosemary, mint, and caraway filled our senses. The woman, despite her sallow skin (which should’ve signaled a slow temperament), grew energetic and lit a fire, putting on an iron pot of wild leek soup. The man cut a sausage down from the three that hung from the ceiling. We added our raveled bread, the last of the pickled Venetian sardines, goat cheese, and wine to their rough table and began to eat with great savor.

Afterward we drew near the fire, all sitting together contentedly on a single thick bench. But when they heard we were going to Tübingen, Josef proclaimed, “You won’t be able to travel there looking like that, in skirts!”

Seeing my puzzled face, Gerta spoke up. “The women are gone. They’ve been taken for witches, the little daughters too.”

Josef hunched forward, coarse gray hair poking like hog bristles from his wrinkled neck. “The bishop of Wirtenberg…,” he mumbled. “His men took them all away from Durlingen, our town. We hid in an old root cellar, or my Gerta would have been taken.”

The old woman laid a knotted hand on his shoulder.

I stared into the cinders that flaked apart on the hearth. “What happened to them?”

“Don’t know, exactly. They never came back. There are towns around here with no women at all.”

So that was why the old ones were living alone here, hidden in the forest.

There had been witch trials in Venetia too for many decades. It was worst during the plagues. Widows suspected of consorting with the devil were buried with bricks thrust into their mouths. They were tossed into the trenches dug for the thousands of plague dead on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio. This was said to prevent them from returning to feed upon living children.

My mother had cried, “What witchcraft? What a scandal! To throw a poor old woman into the common grave, silenced by a brick.” Then, in a low voice, she said to Olmina as I listened nearby, “The inquisitor needs a brick to the head—that’s what I think.” And for once I agreed with her.

Her own mother had been a widow, condemned during the panic of 1575 but luckily absolved by the influence of family friends. And now I thought, Oh, my mother is a kind of widow. There were the straw widows, those discarded mistresses. But what could I say of a wife who didn’t know where her husband was? Married to want. A lack widow.

Most of the time a woman accused of witchery in Venetia was a midwife who would be imprisoned, but children were never blamed. The little daughters, Gerta had said. Olmina slipped her arm through mine as we huddled there before the sputtering flames.

“How could this happen?” I asked, greatly troubled.

Josef explained: “At first the bishop sent his inquisition to Durlingen and got the help of the village priest, for there was rumor in town of a widow at the edge of the village being a witch. She’d always acted sullen and was ill treated by her husband. But after he died, she said whatever she wanted to, even if it meant that she cursed the landowner who raised her rent, or refused the priest entry to her hovel. I understood her anger, but a woman must bite her tongue, especially a woman alone.”

“All her children had died or gone somewhere else, like ours.” Gerta spoke more faintly and looked down at her hands as if silently counting her offspring—the dead, the ones gone to sea, the ones gone to other lands for a better life, whom she would never see again.

“I’m glad, you know”—her voice grew hoarse, as if she were about to weep—“that our daughters have left and been spared the fate of others in our village.”

Josef put his arm around her.

She continued, “The widow. When a neighbor wouldn’t allow her goat to graze in his pasture, as he’d always done for her husband, she told him he’d shrivel up. Well, as it turned out, he did, and he never fathered any more children. She also grew an amazing garden of herbs and medicinals that some say came from cuttings she stole from the rectory plot. I wouldn’t begrudge her that, even if she did. Some said that she called down the moon. Sometimes she’d stand by her gate and fling abuse at the passersby…”

“We didn’t mind—she was amusing,” added Josef. “She once called the burgher a sausage head, meaning his sausage was displaced, if you take my meaning.”

The two of them laughed at that, as did Lorenzo. Olmina just shook her head.

“But then they took her away. Later they took more women away. We thought it was for questioning. The husbands and sons didn’t interfere,” said Gerta.

“Maybe they thought that the more they went along with it,” Josef continued ruefully, “the sooner they’d get their women back.”

“But only the bishop and his men came back,” Gerta said, “and the bishop announced he would make an example of village women who consorted with demons. Especially the weather witches, who’d brought severe cold to the land and ruined the crops. He would purge the village of all the whore witches. That’s what he said.”

“That’s when we left,” Josef declared. “We know this forest well. I’m a woodcutter. But we have to keep moving, keep hiding. Don’t know when it will end.” He sighed. “A few days ago there was a lot of smoke coming from the village.”

“And that’s why you must stay away from Durlingen!” warned Gerta.

“We’ll go by another way to Tübingen,” I agreed.

“Can’t,” Lorenzo said brusquely. “We need stores.”

“There’s no other way, then,” Josef spoke flatly. “Go in men’s clothing.”

I protested. “I don’t have any men’s clothing. And if we get caught? How can we do this?”

“I think we must,” Olmina admitted.

Lorenzo didn’t say a word but stared uneasily at us.

“We must say that we come from Luciafuccina, not Venetia.” (I avoided saying “that glittering whore of the Adriatic,” but I knew it was what foreigners liked to call her.) I smiled at Olmina to reassure her. “From now on, we’re countryfolk.”

“I never was a Venetian,” objected Lorenzo. “Let me do all the talking.”

“Oh, now we’re done for!” Olmina said. “Why don’t we pass Tübingen?”

“No!” I said sharply. Then I softened my tone. “What if my father is there? I have to be sure.”

“Sure! And sure as the grave!” She stood up and paced the small dirt floor.

“Oh, little wife,” Lorenzo said softly, “we could just as soon find death here as in the city.”

“You won’t find your grave here, I can tell you that,” said Gerta in a hurt tone, crossing herself.

“I meant no offense,” mumbled Lorenzo. Olmina rolled her eyes.

“We’ll go as men, we’ll travel quickly.” I set down the plan as if I were confident, though my stomach clenched. Olmina moaned and sat back down next to me on the end of the bench. Owls started up in hushed hoot and echo, the sentinels of night, and we huddled in silence for a long while until it was time to sleep.



Later I awoke, unable to fall back asleep.

I sat up (I was closest to the wall and so could do this without disturbing anyone) and withdrew quill, ink, and paper from my bag. Still disturbed by the story of the bishop-protector turned tyrant, I began to write in the dim light. The others snored in dreadful discord.



The Malady of Mirrors:

A Rare Disease about Whose Origins Little Is Known

The sickness is cast in two forms. In the first, a person intends a movement, a look, or a word and carries out its opposite. A woman extends her right hand to caress the hard stubble on her lover’s down-turned chin and pummels his forehead with her left fist. Or a man dealing in pears switches from a plain chant, “Pears, ripe pears!” to a smothered whisper: “Don’t expect to get any pears from me, you villains!”

In the second form, the person sees the true expression of his movements, desires, and thoughts only within a mirror. A priest (or even a bishop), for instance, intends a pious smile and sees instead the vulgar frown of sanctimony.

Father Arcibaldo, a clergyman of noble origins, was afflicted with this peculiarity, and he carried a small oval mirror with him everywhere. Set in onyx and bound to his wrist with a silken cord and tassel, the mirror dangled and flashed from the folds of his robes. He could often be seen walking in the Citadella, gazing obliquely at the mirror he held in the palm of his hand, at his face, grotesque and angry, or twisted into a strange smile. Those who wished to divine his true mind often tried to steal a glance in the mirror. He then took to the habit of carrying a heavy stick in his other hand, for smacking those who weren’t swift or subtle enough in their purpose. Some called for him to be defrocked, while others called his disease a hoax embellished by the nobility and clergy alike to excuse his cruel actions and words. Father Arcibaldo himself simply said, “A priest is a different kind of man and therefore must be respected absolutely! No commoner may question him!”

In the first case, a cure is worked by arming those around the sufferer with mirrors to be fastened upon vests, bodices, hats, and gloves and even upon the brow with a silver ribbon. In the second, the victim must relinquish all his mirrors, thus defeating his singularity. He must look to others for his reflection, the thing perhaps most abhorrent to him.



As I settled into sleep, I also thought of my mother, who had always wanted me to be the mirror tied to her wrist.



Early the next morning, Olmina became Goodman Olmo (in Lorenzo’s clothes), and I reluctantly became Gabriele Silvano Mondini (in the woodcutter’s clothes). Gerta cut Olmo’s stiff gray hair to just below her ears with a sharp pair of scissors. My dear companion sat motionless as a wooden saint on the bench, her eyes closed, hands clasped in her lap. Then Gerta turned to me. She stroked my long auburn hair with hands that resembled roots unearthed from an old furrow. “I should cut this, signorina. I don’t think you can hide it.”

“Let me try,” I insisted, and I stepped outside. I sat on an old stump near the hut and worked the comb through my hair. So many knots! And my neck tense as a rope. But little by little I worked it loose. I brought my hair forward over my shoulder, parted it in three, and plaited it snugly. Pine limbs lifted and fell above me in an uncertain wind.

I wound the dense braid around my head and tied it beneath a broad hat with flaps that Josef gave me, then shook my head vigorously. The braid stayed firm. Olmo patted the hat, tugged at it all around to make sure it was secure, and pulled the flaps down even farther. She understood how important it was for me to keep my hair. For on nights when I combed out the braid, I cleared my thoughts. Snarls and angers, knots and sorrows, tangles and perplexities. And sometimes little things fell out, like millet or bits of quill. Clenched brown spiders, the black pips of an apple, tiny shells or stones. And once a small animal tooth. When Olmina combed my hair when I was a child, she would lightly rap the comb on the side of my head. “Where do all these things come from, Gabriella? Your hair has a life of its own!”

I handed over my brocade skirts, bodices, and silk underdresses to the old woman and kept two plain linen smocks (one of which was Olmo’s)—gifts for my sisters, I would say, if we were searched or questioned. Olmo gave up her only other dress and underskirts. I hid my small adornments (the filigreed earrings from my Cipriot grandmother, the simple gold ring from my father) in a handkerchief rolled up inside a leather pouch, the so-called codpiece in my hose, under the front of my rustic shirt and doublet.

I strode back and forth before Josef and Lorenzo, who turned their heads away, embarrassed by the sight of my legs in woolen hose. I liked the feeling of ease without bodice and skirts. I could breathe and stride freely.

“Pardon my saying, signorina, but it makes a good manly impression, if you know what I mean.” Olmo was trying to cheer me, and perhaps herself too, for I must have worn an anxious face after I’d handed over my dresses to Gerta. She’d fingered the rich cloth and nodded at her unexpected good fortune, even as Josef looked sulky at the loss of one of his two sets of clothes.

Then Gerta pulled a small cluster of three oak nuts from her pocket. “From the Holy Oak at the center of the wood. The grandmother tree. They’ll give you strength when you’re broken.”

As we rode away, I turned in my saddle to bid the old ones farewell, but they’d vanished, their cottage—and my exquisite dresses—already taken back by the shadowy forest.

“Coraggio!” I said, more to myself than to anyone else, persisting in such bravado, though I knew it was a poor defense against the days to come. Durlingen, empty of women and girls, lay ahead.



After riding most of the day under the shifting trees and gray sky awash with a thin gruel of clouds, we entered the town. A few chimneys gave off strands of smoke. Everything was shut up tight. Not even a scrawny dog trotted out to nip at our heels.

We reached the Marketplatz, where dead spikes of loosestrife stood askew. A single sorrowful oak at the center of the square was singed and brown. The stone chapel was closed. A dingy midday drizzle began to fall and the moistened dirt stung our nostrils with a seared odor.

The wet, burnt smell reminded me of the charred ship that once drifted toward the Venetian Lagoon in a similar grim rain. I was thirteen. My father and his friend Paolo Benvenuti the joiner took me (against my mother’s vehement protests) out to the Cavallino in the late afternoon, where our gondola worked against the tide, one among a black flock of gondolas that had come out to see the ship.

The edge of the storm swept on toward Venetia and ceased briefly above us while more rain advanced from the east, downpours that resembled dark mourning swags hung over the sea. The rudderless Portuguese caravel drifted near one of the mouths of the lagoon, its lateen sails reduced to sooty gauze, its partly burnt hull, masts, and long yards a black skeleton. The planking had warped away from the frame in places from the spasms of the ship’s fire. On the bow, though, the eyes, painted one on each side by the shipwrights, remained, blistered and peeling, those eyes that Portuguese sailors declare will always see the way. Even so, the ship heaved blindly toward us.

“It’s a plague ship!” someone shouted in a panic. “They burned it to purge the pestilence!”

“Or a fire ship!”

“What’s that?” I asked my father.

“A ship deliberately set ablaze and abandoned to drift toward the enemy fleet.”

“What’s it doing all the way up here in our Adriatic groin?” asked a coarser voice.

“Fools!” my father grumbled. “The ship’s crew was gutted by scurvy or carelessness, more than likely.”

“Unless it’s one of those vessels cursed by Sant’Elmo and his bloody windlass,” muttered Paolo Benvenuti.

“You’ve got it wrong,” my father reprimanded him. “Sant’Elmo and his fires at the masthead protect the sailors. They invoke him against seasickness and troubled bowels.”

“You believe that, do you? Well, he didn’t do much good here, now, did he?”

“What about you, Gabriella?” My father turned to me. “What do you think?”

With all the sincerity of my young age, I answered, “The saints forget us sometimes.”

My father smiled. The caravel broke up on a sandbar, and now we saw its unintended cargo. The burnt dead spilled from the spongy timbers of its belly, a few tangled in the sail stays. But these were not as fearsome as the fat white dog that swam from the wreckage, eyes blunted with hardship, conveying both indifference and hatred as it struggled toward one of the gondolas. The gondolier struck at it with his oar, and the dog swerved toward us. To my amazement, my father stayed the arm of our gondolier and knelt to pull the thrashing animal over the bow, rocking the gondola wildly.

The beast tore at his glove. But when he spoke to it in a low growl, it dropped to a crouch, snarling and shaking with cold. The sky and sea were lead black now as the pale corpses dispersed around us, giving off a cold, thin light of their own. My father ordered the gondolier to row us home.

“What shall we name this mongrel, then?” he asked.

“Cerberus!” I piped up, for I’d been reading stories of the Greek underworld.

“But he doesn’t have three heads.”

I considered this. “Not that we can see,” I said.

“Very well, then.” My father attempted to pat the creature’s head, though the dog recoiled. “May you protect us, Cerberus, as well as you protect that other realm.”

I sat still beneath the curved wooden canopy in the center of the gondola, opposite my father and Paolo Benvenuti, silently watching the dog and the small ocher lights of the living that glowed from the windows of Venetia, across the black water. I wanted to forget the dead floating around me.

Now in Durlingen, just as on that night long ago, the dead occupied the air around me.

“Lorenzo, what is that smell?” I asked, still disbelieving, as we circled the scorched tree, for there was more in it than burnt wood.

“Oh, signorina—signor, I can’t say. I can’t say. The fire seems but a few days old.”

“How can you tell?”

“The sap bleeding from the tree is new.”

Perhaps that was why there were no people in the square. It was too crowded with the invisible ones, the women, the little daughters. “We have to leave this place!”

“Not in a hurry.” Lorenzo spoke in a low, restrained voice. “We don’t want to provoke suspicion. Let’s get our supplies.”

Olmo looked at him in dismay, but I knew he was right.

Two men moved beneath a coarse hemp canopy at the corner of the Marketplatz, a young, thickset peddler with a rough table of bread and peppered hams, and a gaunt woodsman selling rope and firewood. They were in the middle of packing up their goods, as there were no other buyers and perhaps had not been any the whole day. They stopped their work and stared at us.

“You’re not from here, are you?” the stocky man inquired. His grin was slightly contorted by a pink sickle-shaped scar on the left side.

Lorenzo greeted them and dismounted, while Olmo and I drew our mules beneath the deep eaves of the town hall for shelter from the drizzle. As Lorenzo muttered that we must gain Tübingen by the end of the week and needed supplies, I glanced around the silent town. No curtains were drawn by a curious hand. Not a single child appeared.

“Not many co-come through here since the—the burnings,” stammered the gaunt one.

“What burnings would those be, my good man?” asked Lorenzo plainly.

“Evil ones. The—witches, you know, soured the milk, ca-called down the hail, ruined the crops, raised the plague, stole the newborns, shriveled our manhood!” He spoke in a grotesque singsong as if reciting a nursery rhyme. “Kissed the devil, danced in the woods, strangled the lambs in their sleep. Laid curses on those as refused ’em alms!” The man’s face convulsed, his jaw drawn back, his broken teeth bared.

Lorenzo stared at him and then away. He stroked the long forehead of his mule and then turned back to the first man. “Do you have any apples to sell?”

“No, no, apples are finished. But I’ve got that perry wine. Sure you won’t come and drink with us?” The man was insistent, fixing his stare upon my smooth ungloved hands.

“Sorry, we must be on our way,” Lorenzo answered flatly. He purchased three loaves of rough brown bread and a small smoked ham, stowing them in his saddlebags.

“We’re not good enough then for you folk, are we, you foreigners and your high-flown manners!” The man curled his lip. Then in a throttled voice he said, “Do you think I wanted to give up my child?”

For an astounding moment, I thought he would burst into sobs.

But as we turned our mules, he cried out, regaining his harsh tone, “I’m onto you fine gentleman with your milksop hands, don’t think I don’t know what you are!”

The tall, gaunt one yelled, “Whoremongers, despoilers!”

I kicked Fedele’s stout sides to a quick trot. Without warning, a black-haired cleric scuttled from the building next to the church. Suddenly I felt the long rope of my auburn braid drop to the middle of my back. The cleric opened his mouth as if to shout, and I dug my heels hard into Fedele’s belly. With Lorenzo and Olmo and our threesome of mules following close behind, I bolted through the streets, Fedele’s hoofs clanging stones like hammers against iron. The frightful clamor spurred him on even more toward the edge of firs beyond the town.



I thought I would never be warm again.

I thought I would never sleep.

Sometimes we dozed by daylight, lined up like dead pike on a clutch of leaves, unwilling to risk a fire. We covered ourselves with our blankets and fir needles and left the animals tied to our ankles. We traveled at night through the dismal wood and avoided other villages altogether.

Durlingen—with its burnt square, shut church, priest, scarred peddler, and woodsman—haunted us.



Olmo severed my braid with her cooking knife the first night after Durlingen and it fell heavily to the ground like a viper. I buried it in the prickly loam and Lorenzo helped me to set a heavy stone on top so that no animal would dig it up. For a moment I pictured a starving wolf dragging my red braid through the forest and those vile men filling his body with arrows. I imagined the bishop and his men ransacking the countryside for the mistress of the braid.

When I did sleep, I saw mounds, hundreds of such braids, thin blond, glossy black, thick gray, wispy brown, coppery, curly, short, long, looped together, and tied at the ends. Ribboned. The braids of little girls, maids, mothers, nuns, and crones.

I imagined the townsmen, stricken before the bishop and his inquisitors like those countrymen made to hobble their dogs while the nobility hunted deer through their fields, trampling their crops. I could see the dry branches loosely bound in stacks and set upon one another as firewood.

When I woke at dusk, I could almost smell the bishop’s malevolence in the very air around us, like the smoke of burnt hair.

That’s when I would write a little to keep spirit and senses honed.



Invidia:

An Invisible Worm That Consumes the Heart

In the countryside they say this disease lies dormant for many years in the bowels of wild boar and has its origins in the uneasy corpses they grub in the winter woods when acorns are scarce and there is nothing else to eat. The bodies have not been properly laid to rest. They are the murdered or the lost, the starving or the mad who thrashed their way into the thickets of death and couldn’t be recovered. The unwanted children cast aside in the forest. The prostitutes grown withered. The lepers and their foul rags. The ambassadors from foreign countries and their entire entourages strangled in their sleep. The witches who preferred the wolf to the bishop. The earth gobblers who couldn’t withstand their hunger. The men who grew leaden. The failed miller poisoned by nightshade. The Gypsies who savored the wrong mushroom on their midday outing. The tired saltimbanques. The frantic mothers of blue-lipped soldiers. The lost fathers. The astronomer who swallowed his books in small bites every night to avoid the tribunals. The miller’s daughter. The noblewoman unable to discern day from night, city from wilderness. The suicides. The little girl who ran away. The veneer artist whose crippled hands froze shut in the gray curls of his dead wife. The bubonics. The victims of falling sickness who walked into the woods alone. Survivors of char and blaze who preferred death. The slow of mind and the infirm of body. The lost fathers. The boar snuffle and gobble this half-frozen and decayed flesh. But rancor doesn’t dissolve in the powerful swine stomachs. Instead it lies in the folds of sausages-to-be. The pork-bowel casings in the duke’s cupboard or the peasant’s larder are filled with an envy of the living, which cannot be sated.

One treatment is preventive. As my father cautioned, do not eat pork, or you’ll be eating the undead. The other treatment upon the advice of the Benandanti, the green witches, has been said to work well among those mountain people. The infected person must walk in an unfriendly wood and converse with the abandoned dead. The visits should include certain gifts for the dead, who must be neither kin nor friend. The person must address someone she doesn’t know, ask him what he wants, and honor his request. It seems that sometimes one of the dead may stand for all that are troubling the bowels of the afflicted. Yet the irascible dead may ask for something impossible, like the ears of a former rival or the fingers of one who has wronged them. In the first case, a substitute may suffice, such as a sketch of the rival’s ears or perhaps an earring. But in the second case, there may be no amends, unless it be truth telling, like a rosary repeated over and over again.

The cure is difficult to effect, however, for it may take many years, and often persons stricken with invidia are not willing to persist. Some prolong their conversations with the dead and thwart the cure by delaying their requests. Others prefer the ferocity of invidia to the difficulties of their own lives. Like the bishop of Wirtenberg, who surely envies the women their wisdom, the envious love their disease too fervently and would blight the joy they cannot own.