The Remedy by Michelle Lovric Read Free Book Online

move to clean or dress my leg, perhaps hoping that I would die without their further intervention and that they might then say it was of natural causes, that I had hidden myself in the garden and frozen to death in the night.
    I almost wished to satisfy them. I felt no guilt for harming the nun, though she must have been suffering unspeakable agonies from the wound I had inflicted: Someone had come to whisper the news to me, to tell me that the contusion had spread and both eyes were thought beyond repair. My informant took this opportunity to empty a pitcher of foul water over my head. The water soon turned to ice, so that my hair hung down in whitened stalactites. Eventually the cold brought on a pleasant kind of delirium. I fancied myself toast-warm in front of a fire with my lover, and I murmured lewd words to him. I imagined us engaged in amorous congress and I raised my frozen hips to meet his again and again. Perhaps it is in this way, by keeping in motion, by not succumbing to torpor, that I stayed alive.
    As the birds began to open their throats in the pearly darkness just before dawn, I started to feel the cold again, and to ponder the consequences of my act. I was so young, so ignorant, that I had no idea if the nuns might commit me to a summary justice of their own, perhaps stoning me to death, or if I would be bundled into a carriage and sent to Rome to be quartered and burned in the Campo del Fiori.
    I began to be conscious of sounds and smells: the unmistakable rustle of a large rat, the stale stench of the dirty water thawing in my hair. The darkness was leaking by increments from the sky to reveal the black tracery of winter-stripped branches overhead, those same branches from which the nuns had hung sweet jellies to tempt me when I was a child. I licked my dry lips and tried to swivel my head, but they had bound me cruelly across the neck and forehead, even tying string, ignominiously, around my ears.
    I was falling into delirium again when five of the s ignori di notte came to take me away, four to carry me and one to guide our way with a flaming torch. They bore me, still on the plank, through the gate held open by the abbess and two of her hench-women, who saluted me with grim smiles.
    First we crossed the campo of San Zaccaria diagonally. The church leered up like an Oriental ziggurat. There was nothing of Christian kindness in its barbarous frontage. We left it behind and proceeded into the throat of the calle that led toward San Provolo. Passing under the arch, I glimpsed the exquisite relief of the Madonna to whom I had once compared myself. After a moment, that was gone and I heard one of the guards grunt. The night sky then swung round and I was semi-upright, looking on stone: they were carrying me over a bridge. From the top of the bridge, where they levelled me again, I had a glimpse down the canal all the way to the lagoon, which loosed on me a spiteful tongue of gelid air. I was tipped backward as we descended again. My stomach rose up in rebellion and I choked on bile. Then I was righted, and we continued on our way.
    Above me the first tatters of dawn light struck the sneering snouts of stone lions on marble balconies. Beneath them the ivory-coloured teeth of the cornices gnashed in and out of the shadows. In serried stone arches, wrought-metal lanterns dangled from their chains like hunting spiders, as our silent passage disturbed the dead air around them.
    I stared on my city as if it was a dream. The dark canals, the Gothic windows, the courtyards, and the bridges all appeared unreal to me. I looked up at towering walls, everything distorted by my strange viewpoint so that the palazzi loomed over me likebewitched trees in the dark-hearted forest of a nightmare in which a black-clad, hooded troop of men carried a girl with frozen hair on a plank.
    The crust that had formed over my leg wound broke open. I felt the warm trickle of blood—we must have left a trail of drops in our wake. In time