As to the causes—well, the answers were as plentiful as the contagions. In his last years, her father had been drawn to the theory (which, like many, was built on an ancient one) of a physician colleague in Verona who argued that such diseases traveled by means of tiny malevolent seeds in the air that sat inside clothing and materials and, having entered the body, attacked and overcame the healthy seeds they found there, turning them into an enemy force within. Yet if they were so small as to be invisible, how could any doctor tell where they were hiding? Why were some more dangerous than others? And how, short of burning everything, even the air itself, could we destroy them? To the lack of answers he had brought only more questions. In the end, the outcome was the same: if it was not actually the plague or the pox, whatever it was eventually moved on, only to be replaced by something else the next year, and then another, not entirely unlike it, two years after.
In some ways Zuana is lucky to be kept so busy for if she were not she might find herself thinking of that winter, sixteen years ago, when her own life had started to unravel. The weather itself had been unusual that year, mild right into the beginning of February, and the infection, when he contracted it, had seemed benign enough, though he was old by then—over seventy—and already no longer quite as boundless in his energy. He had sneezed and wheezed, then turned hot and cold, but after two days in bed with a fever, which she had treated according to his instruction, he had got up again, declaring himself to be cured and with the appetite of a horse.
They had dined at table—he had had broth, roasted meat, and a bottle of good Trebbiano wine—and they were sitting together by the fire companionably reading, as was their habit. He was studying one of the recently arrived volumes of Vesalius, as he often did those days, and was deeply absorbed.
When it happened it had been so quick she could barely remember it. She had heard a fast intake of breath, as if he had come across something that annoyed or amazed him—recently he was as much in dialogue with his younger colleagues’ findings as he had first been in awe of them. She had looked up to see or ask what it was that had incensed him in time to register a frown on his face as his head slumped down onto his chest. For a second it seemed as if he had simply fallen asleep, as he did sometimes those days after a good dinner, but then, slowly—so slowly that it seemed as if time itself might have stilled to mark the event—he had leaned to one side and keeled over onto the floor, his hand sliding off the book heavily enough to tear the page as it went.
She had got to him almost as he hit the ground, screaming out for the servants and trying to raise him up. She had done all he taught her: loosening his collar, calling his name, rolling him onto his side—though his body was as heavy and loose as a great sack of grain—and pouring water from the jug into his slack half-open mouth. But already it felt as if there was nothing there. He, her father, was gone. No movement, no breath, no hint of a pulse, nothing. It was as if life, not wanting to cause any fuss or bother or the need for remedies or nursing, had slipped out of him in that one single exhalation of breath.
Later, when the priest had come and the body had been lifted and carried out to lie on the table in his workshop, and the place was full of servants and people wailing, she, who had been too stunned to cry, had gone back to the book on the table to find that it was the sixth volume, dedicated to the thorax, and that the torn page was an illustration from the dissection of the heart showing how the blood moved from the left to the right side. It had been a subject of some vexation to him, this chapter, since it exposed an apparent contradiction between the authority of the great Galen and the evidence of Vesalius’s own knife. Vesalius himself later went so far as to publicly declare Galen wrong—the blood did not, could not move that way, as it was evident to his own eyes that there were no holes in the wall of flesh through which it could travel.
When, many years on, the news of this reached her through the grille, she wondered if perhaps that was what her father had been thinking about when the fit took him, or if the correspondence between the dead organ on the page and the loss of his own vital spirit was a simpler affair, left there deliberately so that she might in some way understand this death better. Certainly with the silence of his heart came the silence of everything, from the sound of his voice to all those thoughts and words from the great library of his experience not yet written down and therefore lost forever.
Get up now, Faustina.
And yet, God be praised, an echo of his voice had returned.
You have mourned enough and there is work to be done.
He had been right. She could not grieve forever and there were things to be done. Almost before the priest had said the last prayers you could hear the flapping of vulture wings in the antechambers, and if she didn’t stop crying soon, how would she notice when his most precious volumes started to slide off the shelves, or how his papers were disturbed by teachers or ambitious students coming to pay their respects and take back a few things they had “left with him for safekeeping”? It was flattery of sorts. A doctor with connections at court left a hole waiting to be filled by others; and what young woman—even if she could command any offers—could possibly want books of herbs and remedies as part of her dowry?
But the real communication didn’t start until sometime after the funeral, a few days before she was due to leave for the convent, when the kitchen girl had been struck down with the most monstrous stomach cramps and headaches that had had her vomiting with their ferocity. She was a long, gangly strip of a girl from the country, at that age where she seemed to be growing too fast for her own flesh, and when Zuana had found her she was in such agonies that she could barely uncurl herself to show the source of the pain.
Come on! Have you forgotten everything I taught you so soon? he had said in her ear as she had bent down beside her.
She had been so nervous that her hand had been shaking as she took the girl’s pulse. When she couldn’t find it in her wrist she went to the neck, behind her ear, where he had taught her, and there she located it, forceful but not so fast as to suggest dangerous fever. She had set to work on the headache, making up a crown of verbena leaves in vinegar and wrapping it around the girl’s forehead, then dosing her with basil water and eau-de-vie to settle or expel whatever was wrenching her gut. And because she would not have slept even if she had gone to bed, she had sat with her through the night as she had tossed and moaned.
Well? he had said, just before dawn, at that hour which seems to suit the dead more than the living. What is your opinion now?
She had laid her hand on the girl’s forehead. “Whatever fever she had is gone. But the cramps continue. I would have expected bowel evacuation by now if there was gut poisoning. Perhaps I should increase the eau-de-vie to help expel whatever is there.”
“Perhaps. And what if there is nothing to evacuate?”
“But there is something. I can feel definite tenderness.”
“Where? Show me.”
She put her hands on the thin shift that covered the girl’s body, moving them down from her stomach gently toward the pubic bone. But the truth is she didn’t know exactly where, for while she had seen woodcuts of the insides of a woman, this was the first time she had actually had flesh under her hands.
“Here.”
But by now he had fallen silent.
The girl moaned, arching her body in response to the pressure and the pain. And now, through her shift, she noticed for the first time the fat buds of new breasts. She got up from the bedside and went into the workroom, pulling down a bag of Saint Mary’s mint and some bugloss leaves, infusing them in a mix of hot water and wine. How stupid! No wonder he had stopped talking to her.