The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O'Melveny Page B

man, sat in a small boat for the rest of his days, lovesick over the water.
The powder should be given in the evening, for sleep is advisable thereafter. The course of the dreams will indicate success or failure. The object of desire will appear along with those hidden imperatives that dreams offer us. Hunting scenes and cardoons promise success. The appearance of scissors grinders and women with black teeth warn against intemperance.
     
    My wounds knitted and my bruises faded to a pale mold green. Days flared orange and yellow with autumn trees forewarning winter, rousing me again. I didn’t want to be delayed by an early snow, when Tübingen, a city promising news of my father, lay but a few days’ ride ahead of us. But before we departed, I decided to stroll the rocky northern edge of Lake Costentz, for though I’d nearly drowned in its waters, I liked to safely lean close to its lisp and whisper, cupping my ear. Here was a wordless language, good counsel for the journey.
    Picking up a dead willow branch, I idly struck the thickets along the shore as I walked. Lorenzo, following along behind, laughed a little. This irritated me until I saw myself as he did—an unruly woman whipping the wind, while unbeknownst to her she dragged the flotsam her skirts collected: broken minnow jaws that caught the hem, a scraggly bit of rope stuck with thistle heads, a dark scrap of paper.
    “Now all I need is a saucepot on my head to be Mad Meg,” I said, laughing with him.
    I sat upon a log to disentangle my unintended spoils. When I plucked up the bit of paper, I saw that it came from a crude tarocchi woodcut: L’Amore. But the usual image—a pair of lovers beneath a round green wedding canopy with a little lapdog at their feet—was gone. Instead my hem had snagged the piece with the blindfolded Cupid, a quiver in one hand and an arrow in the other. Such an innocent little god as destroyer. What would Olmina make of this?
    The afternoon light faltered. There was nothing I liked so much as this late harvest season, when shadows lengthened and the world began to retreat from itself. I left Lorenzo to rest on a large, flat rock, glad to be walking alone for a bit. The lake lapped at its shore, a sound like the tides sloshing in the canals back home, but the smell here was tamer. Suddenly I wanted brine. I wanted that large view of sea too, scattered with islands. This curious nostalgia for home did not include people or even buildings, but smells, stones, the way sounds tunneled through Venetian passageways.
    As I gazed on Lake Costentz I thought against all reason that it looked pitifully small, even though it was an enormous lake. Was this what my father felt in Venetia? The pitiful lagoon? As if a bodice with iron busks were too tightly laced around his soul?
    I walked until I came upon a rank smell and followed it into low-lying bushes. A couple of bustards squawked and flew up. I quickly pressed a crumpled handkerchief to my nose and mouth, choking with the stink. I saw now what they’d been feeding upon. A dead horse, boiling with maggots. Orfeo’s face (for surely it was him), drawn back in a grimace, eyes voided, throatlatch protruding, yellow teeth glowing in the oily flesh. Strands of black ants spilled from his openings. Someone had rifled the saddlebags of their contents.
    And of course the medicine chest was gone.
    I stumbled back. “Lorenzo, Lorenzo!”
    But he couldn’t hear me. I flung my arms out, signaling him till my sleeves came undone from their lacings. At last he noticed and half ran, half hobbled toward me. When he saw what I’d found, he commanded, “Don’t look at him, signorina, please turn away…”
    But I couldn’t. Even as a child, I was riveted by the whole messy thing of life—from afterbirth to dissolution. Always fluids, water, blood, urine. Seepage. My father’s sweat standing out in little globules on his forehead in the anatomy theater, in the birthing or dying rooms, in the kitchen