The Floating Book

  * * *

  Wendelin was rushing back to the house, up the stairs towards their bedroom past his study, past the cabinet, no, stop, there was something sticking out of a drawer. It was his own paper, but pocked with little holes, like insect bites. Had she taken to storing things in there? In the cabinet she hated so much?

  Wendelin opened the drawer, and pulled out the document.

  It was folded in a packet, as were all his love letters to his wife. He opened it and read, scrawled in his own hand, ‘I bind you with the ropes of love, tight, tight.’

  Wendelin felt nauseous. How clumsy was his imagery! How primitive his Italian! He suddenly saw a threat hidden in his own words of love. Perhaps Lussièta too had chosen to read his letter like that, had extracted only what could be malevolent from it.

  He opened another drawer. Another parchment packet lay inside. He read: ‘I want to see your lovely eyes wide open as when rope tightens.’

  He wrenched open other drawers.

  His letters were to be found in every drawer, each one, in this new sinister light, terrifyingly ambiguous.

  Her failure to thrive, her illness, he saw it all now, understood where it had come from.

  But the letters, how? It seemed to him that the drawers of the cabinet had been secreting them, like poison from a gland. More and more letters he pulled out. The cabinet was a veritable manufactory, more productive than the stamperia. But all the letters were written in Wendelin’s own hand.

  ‘I want to possess you in this life – and the next.’

  ‘I won’t be happy till you’re beyond all this pain.’

  Wendelin shivered, stuffed the letters back in the drawers and slammed them shut.

  It’s an evil thing, this cabinet, his thoughts raced. I have let its beauty distort my heart Lussièta was right, he reflected. I should have listened to her. She is sensible of far more things than I, though she scorns most books. She believes and apprehends things at a level that is far deeper than my own perceptions. I merely read and nod my head to the facts that enter. The transaction is shallow. Lussièta’s convictions run in her blood.

  Where is she? he thought suddenly. My poor, sweet, abused darling? I have so many apologies to make her.

  And then he heard a noise upstairs in the attic, a swinging, creaking noise.

  * * *

  Bruno bought a single arrow in the frezzeria. Alone in his apartment, he practised until he could barely hold the bow, until he had to make an effort to miss the target.

  At two in the morning, he approached the cell, stumbling across the unpaved Piazza. He walked through the vines and trees in one corner, past the small stonecutters’ yard in the shadow of the campanile. He automatically turned his head to avoid the stench of the humble latrine that served the populace. Even by night, when the moonlit basilica was at its most gorgeous, the ripe odour of human manure reminded Bruno of the oddly combined magnificence and earth-iness of the Piazza, like a noble lady rusticating at her country villa. By day there were flesh and fruit markets, bakers, dentists and barbers and notaries. There were little shops encumbering the very columns of the Doges’ Palace and a hospital. Disgraced clerics clung to the bars of their cages under the campanile.

  All life and death, he thought, and now Sosia was here among it, not hiding away in San Trovaso for once, but on display for everyone.

  Not that there was anyone to watch her at this dead hour.

  He peered down. Sosia lay asleep, attended by drowsing rats. How could she sleep? Knowing the long torture that awaited her in the morning?

  He knelt down to look more closely. She was half turned away from him and seemed to be in deep slumber. He could see the outline of one eyelid, dark red in the faint moonlight. Her dark hair looked cleaner and more lustrous than he remembered it, as if she were growing to a kind of sainthood. She lay softer in sleep than he had ever seen her, in the brief moments he had watched her at rest in his rooms. She had hooked her hands round her back, with her torso curved and her knees drawn up. From behind, she looked as if she was lying in someone else’s arms.

  I was selfish, thought Bruno, I wanted her to be good. She had no instincts for it. It was like forcing a dog to fly or a cow to swim.

  They were also selfish, he added, those other men. They wanted her to be more bad than she is. And what did her husband want with her? Is he happy with this result?

  How marginal he had been to her life; he had no idea what Rabino Simeon thought of his wife and her apparent crimes, whether he knew or cared that Sosia was not guilty of witchcraft.

  Still on his knees, Bruno drew the bow from his cloak, positioned the arrow. He hesitated for a second, not unsure of his task, but seeking the best angle for the trajectory of his arrow.

  He whispered softly: ‘I love you. I’m sparing you a fate you would despise, my darling. I’m saving you from unbearable pain.’

  In the moment the arrow left the bow, perhaps roused by the singing whir of its flight, Sosia awoke. She looked straight at Bruno, and her lips opened. The arrow went directly to her throat, piercing the vein. It shot through her neck: suddenly its tip glinted at the other side.

  Bruno remembered running his finger along that soft throat. He recalled the moments he’d looked on it with hatred, as lies about her activities emerged from it through her mouth.

  She was trying to claw the arrow from her throat but succeeded only in snapping off the stem, widening the wound from which her blood now pulsed in thick spouts.

  Bruno watched as the rats woke, and surrounded her. He saw her head fall back, the wing of the arrow fall from her hand.

  He did not weep or tremble as he had supposed he would. Instead Bruno felt a sensation of heat in his hands and a burning blush on his cheeks. He’d forgotten to breathe for many seconds; now he fought for air.

  Then he felt a tender hand caress his shoulder, and Felice’s smooth confidential voice in his ear. ‘I thought I might find you here.’

  For a moment, Bruno roused himself to bitterness. ‘Couldn’t keep away from her, then?’ he shot at Felice.

  The scribe closed his eyes briefly, acknowledging the taunt. ‘It’s not that, Bruno. It’s you I was looking for.’

  Bruno was feeling faint. His features were fast decomposing into a grimace, his profile blurring with a slick of tears. Felice peered into his face, reading it. Shocked, he took a step backwards.

  For the first time, Felice looked down into the cell and then back at the bow in Bruno’s hand. Then he brushed Bruno’s hair back from his pale forehead and kissed him there. Swiftly, he took the bow from Bruno’s hand and dropped it in the canal. He came back to Bruno and put an arm around his shoulder, gently uprooting his feet from the paving in front of Sosia’s cell.

  Bruno spun around to look at Sosia but Felice, taking his chin, turned it in the direction of the sea, gently but firmly.

  ‘Quick! We must be quick now, Bruno. We must get away from here.’

  Bruno felt the pads of his feet rise one after another. He looked down on them – yes, he was really walking away. It was possible then, simply to leave. No footsteps followed them. The rasp of their two breaths rose and fell in unison. When they were five hundred paces from the cell, in a square where life still rousted on in the taverns, they stopped and faced one another.

  Neither spoke of what had just happened. They stood in silence, each searching the eyes of the other. They waited for the sounds of discovery from San Marco, for shouts and running feet. None came.

  ‘Gentilia has sent word to me from Murano. She begs you to go to her,’ said Felice, at last. ‘But first there are some things I have to tell you about your sister.’

  He handed Bruno a piece of paper. Gentilia’s careful script covered it. Bruno held it to the light of the tavern door. It was a draft of the letter that cast a spell on the soul of Nicolò Malipiero.

  ‘Gentilia did this?’ Bruno asked, ‘not Sosia?’

  ‘Not Sosia.’

  Bruno lurched wh
ere he stood. With one hand, Felice steadied his shoulder.

  ‘Then I shall not go to her, not now and not ever. Better to go to Sosia. She was honest with it. Innocent, even.’

  Felice said: ‘Sosia was not innocent.’

  ‘She must have been once.’

  Bruno tried to imagine her, not contorted in death but in love and passion, with him, on his pallet. Nothing came to him. The memory of her face had dispersed from his mind like condensation from a mirror.

  Felice was guiding him along the stones, and he did not, for many minutes, ask where they were proceeding with such speed and intent. Only when they reached Rialto and started to climb the wooden steps of the bridge did Bruno pause to ask, ‘Where?’

  ‘To the Locanda Sturion, to Caterina,’ said Felice, ‘she’s asked me to bring you to her.’

  ‘At this time? I – I’m not ready—’

  ‘And nor is she, but it’s good that you go there now, and talk to her a little. It will be good for both of you,’ said Felice. ‘You think love is all about losing. Let me tell you that winning is more beautiful,’ he added, with a smile.

  He was surprised to find that this smile cost him something, and that he was still prepared to give it.

  * * *

  After Wendelin cut her down, his wife smiled at him before she passed out.

  Though she lay unconscious, by the second she grew more fresh and lively in complexion. Her eyelids twitched and more small smiles came and went from her lips.

  The plague sores, too, seemed to grow fainter and he unwrapped her from her outer clothes and laid her on the bed. The bruising on her neck had not yet become livid. In the candlelight she looked as unmarked as she had the day they married.

  While he gazed down on her, panting, she stirred and raised her head a little, offering her lips to him. She tugged at the ribbon of her chemise and reached for his hand, which she brushed over her lips.

  Come to bed, she told him silently. We must find each other again.

  He bent over her, kissing her softly on her nose, her lips, her forehead. She sniffed at his neck, and smiled with pleasure. Then she sniffed again, burying her nose in the skin.

  Before he joined her, but explaining his intentions in sign language first – he wished to follow her example and so avoided words just yet – Wendelin went to the room with the cabinet and smashed it with an iron stool.

  When it was buckled and splintered, he heaved the corpse of it to an open window and pushed it into the ink-black canal. He did not look to see if it floated against the tide, as its eggs had done before it.

  Chapter Seven

  No woman can say that she was loved

  as Lesbia is loved by me, and not lie.

  No bond was ever struck like the one that binds me to her.

  It seems so long since I heard the box smash and fall in the water. Yet just one year has passed since that day, a year of prodigies.

  We have both learned, now, to give and take on the matter of the box. My man has learned to admit that it was wrong to buy it and bring it to our house. I have learned to admit that there was nothing wrong with the letters he wrote me. From the moment he saved me I knew that the missives I’d thought so deadly were merely misunderstood, deformed by the mistaken thoughts that had grown up between us. The box, I mean the cabinet, had not poisoned them, my own mind did that.

  My man has learned to respect the ghosts of Venice. I have learned to laugh at them, under certain circumstances. We have both learned that instinct is not the converse of reason, nor ghosts the opposite of life.

  We have also learned to open our world and love our friends better. It’s not healthy for the soul to be sealed up in a bubble of just two people, no matter what rainbows appear inside. Fondle secrets in your breast and they will cut your heart. When things go wrong, as they do, one needs friends to reach in and explain the truth from the outside.

  Bruno and Caterina come to us often, and Bruno is teaching our son the poems of Catullus. Little Johann lisps them out and they are so sweet on his tongue. I love to hear him tell the sparrow poems. Bruno has started to write poetry himself! He’s too shy to present it in public as yet, but Caterina, blushing, tells me it is beautiful.

  It was at our house that Bruno first came face to face with my dear Rabino, the husband of his old lover, and I thought the moment would be sore. In fact both men stared for a moment, and an identical tear came to the corner of each of their right eyes. Then they silently embraced, while Caterina and I wept, she gracefully, I noisily.

  Now Bruno helps Rabino to record the plagues that sweep the city from time to time, in the hope that one day something may be learned from the pattern of the outbreaks. Rabino in turn goes to visit Gentilia in the place on Murano where they keep her, and it is he who tells Bruno of the progress of her treatment, which is slow, but there is hope of a good outcome in the end. She will never live a normal life, but it may come to a point where she’s not a danger to anyone else. Kind care will stop her from following any more of her gruesome enthusiasms to so evil an end again. When Bruno swears Gentilia did not know what she had really set in motion I believe him. The merbabies, the rats sewn in shrouds, the witchery … I think she was absorbed in her strange passions and her mind was distorted at the same time with guilt. I know how these things discolour the world.

  And Rabino has also helped the unfortunate dwarf who used to assist the vanished priest on Murano. It proved a swift and simple matter to cut off the dreadful birthmark that had blighted his looks, and with its removal such a torrent of sweetness and gratitude has flowed out of the man, that he has become devoted to Rabino and serves him with the loyalty of a disciple and Ianno has become obsessed with doing good where once he committed only badness.

  And in this regard I think of Felice Feliciano who has become obsessed with the colour of gold. He has set himself up as an alchemist, which will surely ruin and disgrace him. He has drifted away from Venice and we see him but rarely, and then he has the blasted look of one cursed by a ghastly spell, like a man who has fallen in love with someone who returns his passion with cruelty. I cannot say I feel sorry at the thought of any misfortune falling on him. For Felice I have as much pity as there is milk inside a pigeon. I hate to think that he comes near Caterina and Bruno, for his corruptions might still cast a shadow between them.

  I would like to say that I’ve softened with regard to my sister-in-law, that matrimonial phoenix Paola. I have not. Best not to dwell on it, but I still fail to see the point of such a woman. I suppose I wish her well. Johann di Colonia seems hale enough, so it will be some time before she’s fitted out with a new husband. I hope the red-haired man does not lack patience.

  Speaking of matrimony, our cat has found a wife who is not impressed with his thievery. He has hung up his swag and sneak. Since he got married, he looks embarrassed all the time. He even looks after the kittens when she goes out on business. Without his profession, he has grown somewhat portly.

  Padre Pio from Speyer comes to visit us this autumn and I hope he shall arrive in time to baptise our new baby. For yes, it seems I am with child again. A daughter, this time, I’ve made sure.

  But something else is growing inside me.

  It is a love of words.

  Now, each day I write a love letter to my man and wrap it around the good bread I prepare for him to eat mid-morning when he first lifts his head from his work at the stamperia and the hunger strikes him.

  As the light falls I wait for him with as much joy as I used to dread his return. I picture him hurrying back to me, the loitering sun poppying his upturned face with its last drops. I see him pass the gondoliers churning fishes. I glimpse him through the wooden masts tiptoeing like drunks and above the waves gasping their last on the pea-green steps. And everywhere he goes there springs up a smile, a confidential arm on his elbow. I see approving nods in his wake, heads drawn together. ‘There goes our Tedeschino, our little German,’ Venetians say to one another. ‘Bless his gentle
ways.’ I see him stop a moment and wipe his eyes, glazed wet with gratitude for these sweet ways our town shows him its love.

  And he in turn comes home with presents for me. Wherever he goes, to the cartolai, to the leather merchants, to the Broglio to talk to the senators, he always asks them, ‘And have you heard any good ghost stories lately?’ and when there is a good one, a ripe one with virgins and beasts and shivers down the back, then he takes me to bed early that night, and recounts it with his arms around me.

  Postscript

  You want something so desperately.

  You long for it

  without hope.

  Imagine the species of joy

  when it comes to you,

  after all.

  Is anyone happier than me?

  Is there anything more to want?

  He was a small man, it turned out, not tall and dark as some had styled him. No earring swung on his lobe. He sprouted no twirling moustachios. He did not swagger, and nor did he mince in the French manner.

  He was red-haired in the sandy way, not with the auburn tints admired in Venice. His face was freckled; his eyes small and pale, his bearing modest. He carried a faint fragrance of rabbit-glue.

  Wendelin was sitting at his desk, absorbed in a proof, a small roll of bread broken in fragrant pieces in front of him. No one else took notice of the red-haired man who stood hesitating on the threshold. He looked like a clerk of the State or a prosperous peddler.

  Finally Morto called kindly to him: ‘The sensale’s office is on the ground floor. We do not buy here.’

  The red-haired man almost whispered, so modest was his speech: ‘Ah no, that’s not it. That’s not … I am Nicolas Jenson and I have come to meet with Wendelin von Speyer.’

  The stamperia fell silent. Each man stood rigid, watching the small man walk uncertainly across the floor towards Wendelin.

  Jenson did not hold out his hand, but a small smile on his face betokened a strong and subtle inner warmth, like that at the core of the earth.