The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O'Melveny Read Free Book Online

handful of leaves and stood, then shook out her skirts and looked up into an olive tree as if contemplating this year’s harvest. Then she noticed us and stared. It was that fierce, uncompromising gaze one sees in widows, the constant reprimand against everyone and no one in particular, except perhaps God.
     
    We didn’t speak of my father that evening, for I was too fatigued after supper. When I retired to my room, Olmina already lay gently snoring in her sleeping niche in the wall.
    I sat on the edge of my bed and opened the lid of my medicine chest. I looked upon Asclepius, the physician-god who heals through dreams, and his daughter Hygieia, goddess of sound mind, both painted there in splendid colors by Annibale Brancaccio. The bearded god, draped in a simple robe, stood facing me on the left; in the center was a wondrous staff, sprouting leaves at its tip and twined by the curative snake. On the other side the lovely Hygieia of the blue-green eyes, faintly revealed by her linen garment, stood in profile and gazed outward with a questioning look as she offered a small bowl of some mysterious substance to the snake.
    Soon I closed my eyes and promptly fell asleep.
     
    The next morning I sought out Dr. Cardano so that we could speak of my father, but he fumbled and made excuses, claiming he needed to carry out some professorial errands, among them returning books to a bedridden colleague who suffered from dropsy. I wondered why he was avoiding the conversation.
    I spent most of the day in the orchard, pacing the rows of trees and sitting at the long wooden table with books on anatomy I’d selected from his superb library, feeling guilty (though not too much) that I’d brought them outside without asking him. I pored over the wonderful Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica ( On the Fabric of the Human Body ), for Dr. Cardano owned a much finer and fuller edition than ours. We possessed the Student Epitome in Latin, which presented larger illustrations for studying (but fewer examples), printed on inferior paper.
    This book had the ability to calm me, especially book one—the things that sustain and support the entire body, and what braces and attaches them all (the bones and the ligaments that interconnect them)—for I never ceased marveling at what lies within us, and even the manner in which the parts are named. For instance, Vesalius examines the origins of certain terms: verticulum, vertebra, spondulos. For us, the Latin vertebra means what spondulos meant to the Greeks: any bone of the back, which is also called verticulum by many, probably from the shape of the pivot or whorl ( verticula ) with which women weight their spindles. After reading this, I thought of the spindle whorls of the vertebrae that weight my spinal cord, the nerves spun from the distaff of the brain. Thought resembles the thread drawn out by a woman holding her distaff wrapped with raw wool, the thread lengthened and dropped to the plumb of the spindle and its weight. The heft of gravity, the body always pulling.
    My thoughts unwound, tugged, and wound to another form. I’d never visited Dr. Cardano without my father, whose absence bore down on me like the ponderous day’s heat. One would think that void would be a hollow thing, but no, it was an invisible burden, pervasive, atmospheric, and almost forgotten, until one was struck unexpectedly by its force. There before me, my father had stood under the flowering apples in another season. White petals shook loose around us. “One could almost dream of a different world here in this garden,” he said sadly. “A place without plague or the other countless afflictions that we often bring on ourselves.” We walked through the ancient orchard, where a few hollow, gnarled trunks still brimmed with walnuts the squirrels had stowed there in the fall. The unexpected reserves cheered us. Now I looked for them again. Yes, there they were in the storehouses of the old trunks. Nothing was wasted, not