Read Online The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O'Melveny - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Regina O'Melveny
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window, a book of hours open in my lap, though I wasn’t reading it. I loved to watch the light unspooling on the water and the shadows climbing or descending the walls of the villas. If I could discern the patterns in this movement, then, I reasoned in my child’s mind, other worlds would open to me. I’d see things that most people missed, not that I felt unusual in this. My young friends and I believed that most men and women missed half the world (except for my father, who’d mastered an uncanny field of vision and possessed the ability to detect whenever I crept into his study, even though his back was turned to me and he was deep in study).
That afternoon, guests of my mother had arrived and I’d chosen to remain upstairs, though she’d repeatedly called me down, ignoring my wishes. Finally she bustled into my room without knocking, and in a low, pinched voice so the guests below would not hear, she said, “I don’t know what to do with you. Do you want us to donate you as others have given their daughters to the nunnery as tithe?”
“Yes, donate me,” I said defiantly. Her face colored. “I’d be glad to leave!” I knew full well my father would never allow it, so it was an empty rebellion.
At last I relented and went downstairs, where two young women and an old dowager questioned me about my book of hours, my tutors, and my poetry. I’d shown the latter to no one. (My mother had discovered it while poking around my desk. Thief!)
I barely spoke, and later, when her friends left, my mother startled me by crying out, “I really don’t know you at all, Gabriella!” And you never will, Mamma. My mother wanted a daughter to reflect her. Someone to share gossip, clothes, and the latest shape in beauty marks (black felt crescents were all the rage then, glued to a cheek or a shoulder). Someone to be her confidante. But I was a shadow she could never grasp, though she might call that grasping love. Yet I couldn’t truly know her either. When she chastised me, there was always something behind it I couldn’t name, as if she were slipping into a chasm and clutching at me at the same time. I didn’t want to go down with her.
Sitting alone in Dr. Cardano’s office, I shook my head. Here she was, in my thoughts again. I’d left her behind, and she’d still found a way to haunt me. Tonight I wrote with her living ghost there in the room, treading back and forth. How would I ever make peace with her? I set down my incomplete notes for a disease familiar to me on an unbound sheaf of paper.
Melancholia:
When One Is Weighed by a Leaden Sadness
Melancholia seeps into one’s life like the metallic sand of an hourglass. Despondency accrues. One suffers from inertia and wan complexion. My friend Messalina grew so disconsolate that no one could find a cure, not even my father. The use of plants with a moist nature, such as watercress, lovage, and water parsley, could not counter her dry, cold humor. It is said that the black bile of melancholia devours even stone with its terrible acid.
On a bone-aching afternoon of rain, I found Messalina seated by the casement of her room near Campo San Polo, a square of lace abandoned on her lap. She stared at a tiny insect, which crept along the sill. When I addressed her and took her limp hand, she didn’t answer but continued to watch the insect until it wriggled into the miter of the window frame. Years passed like this in a cruel paralysis for Messalina. The women in her family insisted that she rise from bed to resist the dotage of her malady. They dressed her and led her to the casement, moving her like an enormous puppet, so empty of will were her limbs. Before my father left, he counseled her to keep her windows open so she could breathe the salubrious air of the sea and exhale her gloom.
Sometimes she recovered briefly and began to pace through every room, making lists of the most minute repairs that needed attention, much to her mother’s chagrin. “A new
That afternoon, guests of my mother had arrived and I’d chosen to remain upstairs, though she’d repeatedly called me down, ignoring my wishes. Finally she bustled into my room without knocking, and in a low, pinched voice so the guests below would not hear, she said, “I don’t know what to do with you. Do you want us to donate you as others have given their daughters to the nunnery as tithe?”
“Yes, donate me,” I said defiantly. Her face colored. “I’d be glad to leave!” I knew full well my father would never allow it, so it was an empty rebellion.
At last I relented and went downstairs, where two young women and an old dowager questioned me about my book of hours, my tutors, and my poetry. I’d shown the latter to no one. (My mother had discovered it while poking around my desk. Thief!)
I barely spoke, and later, when her friends left, my mother startled me by crying out, “I really don’t know you at all, Gabriella!” And you never will, Mamma. My mother wanted a daughter to reflect her. Someone to share gossip, clothes, and the latest shape in beauty marks (black felt crescents were all the rage then, glued to a cheek or a shoulder). Someone to be her confidante. But I was a shadow she could never grasp, though she might call that grasping love. Yet I couldn’t truly know her either. When she chastised me, there was always something behind it I couldn’t name, as if she were slipping into a chasm and clutching at me at the same time. I didn’t want to go down with her.
Sitting alone in Dr. Cardano’s office, I shook my head. Here she was, in my thoughts again. I’d left her behind, and she’d still found a way to haunt me. Tonight I wrote with her living ghost there in the room, treading back and forth. How would I ever make peace with her? I set down my incomplete notes for a disease familiar to me on an unbound sheaf of paper.
Melancholia:
When One Is Weighed by a Leaden Sadness
Melancholia seeps into one’s life like the metallic sand of an hourglass. Despondency accrues. One suffers from inertia and wan complexion. My friend Messalina grew so disconsolate that no one could find a cure, not even my father. The use of plants with a moist nature, such as watercress, lovage, and water parsley, could not counter her dry, cold humor. It is said that the black bile of melancholia devours even stone with its terrible acid.
On a bone-aching afternoon of rain, I found Messalina seated by the casement of her room near Campo San Polo, a square of lace abandoned on her lap. She stared at a tiny insect, which crept along the sill. When I addressed her and took her limp hand, she didn’t answer but continued to watch the insect until it wriggled into the miter of the window frame. Years passed like this in a cruel paralysis for Messalina. The women in her family insisted that she rise from bed to resist the dotage of her malady. They dressed her and led her to the casement, moving her like an enormous puppet, so empty of will were her limbs. Before my father left, he counseled her to keep her windows open so she could breathe the salubrious air of the sea and exhale her gloom.
Sometimes she recovered briefly and began to pace through every room, making lists of the most minute repairs that needed attention, much to her mother’s chagrin. “A new
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