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

hinge pin for the dowry chest, for this one is bent; new plaster for the corner of the attic kitchen, for this corner is crooked; a new pot of cochineal for the dressing table—look, the powder on top is darker than the powder underneath…”
And so on. But one dank January, she would not return to us. Every afternoon for a month I visited Messalina, spoke to her, touched her arm or hand, but she didn’t respond. Once, in a moment of weakness, I confided to my friend an unforeseen yearning for other parts of the world. I confess that her silence encouraged me, and I began to work out my plans in the presence of her fixed demeanor. Other times I hoped that my schemes would draw her into her own imaginings or that my discontent would distract her from her own. But it became clear that I wasn’t helping her to recover. She was always seated at the window, her chin resting upon one solemn fist, her eyes blankly measuring nothing.
At last I resolved to try the cure of the Terme of Montecatini, though I couldn’t transport her there. I employed two men to travel to the springs and return with five barrels of sulfurous water. Messalina’s aunt and mother and I set about collecting huge copper kettles and pots that the servants filled with the malodorous waters and hung upon iron hasps in the fireplace. One by one, as the covered vessels boiled, the servants carried them upstairs to her room, where the windows were now shut. When all the pots were set about her, I signaled the servants to remove the lids. Her room filled with moiling vapors until she was nearly obscured at her window seat. As I waded through the steam, which reeked of damp plaster and volcanic minerals, her clammy face appeared above her loose smock and turned toward me like the slow revolution of a globe at the urging of one’s hand. She was an unrecognizable continent, a Sargasso Sea. Glassy beads of sweat stippled her temples and upper lip. When her eyes found mine, her pupils widened as if she had flushed them with tincture of belladonna. Her gall-brown eyes dilated with a ferment that spilled from little wounds everywhere, invisibly issuing from the veins of our lives, from the wall joists and the dark timbers of the ceiling, from the spaces in the perfect square of white lace that her mother desperately continued to lay upon her lap, from the cracks in the gondolas drawn up to the steps in the canals, from the sea itself.
Without uttering a word, Messalina spoke with her eyes: Go away from here, Gabriella, and save yourself! Find your father! It was then I noticed the straight razor hidden in her sleeve and a small open notebook beneath the lace, filled with strange geometries like rhumb lines. I warily removed the razor and she didn’t resist.
Her mother continued the sudorific cure at my suggestion, for it offered Messalina some relief for a few days. But later that February, even as she seemed to be improving, she leapt into the freezing sea and drowned. Now all the shutters on their house were always closed, summer and winter, whether to keep the ghost of Messalina from entering or to prevent her leaving, I could never be sure.
     
    In the refuge of Dr. Cardano’s study, I set down my quill, then closed and tied together the cover boards that protected the manuscript, just as the beeswax candle began to sputter, its warm, unguent scent urging me to sleep. My mother had gone.

One Must Be Kind to Beasts
    When I bade farewell to Dr. Cardano, he startled me by weeping upon my collar as he held me. “So brief a stay after so long, my dear girl. I’ll be here, even if you never find your father.”
    “You’re very kind,” I mumbled in embarrassment. For a moment a part of me balked, a bird hopping in its unbolted cage, terrified of space.
    I restrained an odd impulse to stroke his polished skull as it met my cheek, for simple fondness might be read as invitation to pleasure. A woman must always be so prudent—though I hadn’t longed for a man