Where Monsters Dwell (10 page)

12

Trondheim, 1528

The mendicant monk had
reached the city where he was born. It did not take him long to ascertain that his mother was no longer living. But he was told that the smith had made sure she was buried in the churchyard next to the hospital.

Her grave was not marked—that was the custom of only the rich—but she had been laid to rest in consecrated ground. It was raining when the monk visited the cemetery grove one afternoon, and he stood there for almost an hour. As a boy he had often wondered why she had let him go. He no longer asked that question, but he would have liked to see her again one last time.

On the way out of the cemetery, he decided to pay a visit to the archbishop. He wanted to settle down here in Norway. Having made that decision, he could think back with a certain calm to the years that had passed since he last walked among the muddy streets and alleys of Trondheim.

Venice, 1516

It was three days since they had arrived in this city floating on the water and taken lodging at an inn, where they shared a cramped room. Two years of wandering had passed since they left the cold of the north. In a town in Germany the beard-cutter had worked one long summer as an executioner. He chopped the heads off murderers and drunken witches. Otherwise they kept moving, slowly using up most of the funds the beard-cutter had saved.

They had not yet found the happiness they sought. But the beard-cutter had promised that it was here in Venice, the city he called the greatest in the world, even though the boy had heard that there were even bigger cities in the lands with which Venice traded.

The beard-cutter had even shown the boy the house where Lady Fortuna lived, although she had taken a man’s form. It was situated on a peaceful canal not far from Piazza San Marco, where the enormous campanile stood. That was where Master Alessandro lived. It was said that he had traveled around the Mediterranean collecting books. He had found many treasures in places like the knights’ lovely island of Rhodes and in the lands of the infidels farther east. He had one of the largest collections in the city of works by the old masters, people said. They also said that the famed printer Teobaldo Manucci owed him a debt of gratitude. Master Teobaldo’s unusual series of books featuring ancient Greek and Roman works had acquired a great deal of material from Master Alessandro’s extensive library. Naturally this did not detract in the least from the honor Teobaldo had won for inventing the strange little books that a reader could easily carry under his arm.

But it was not because of the books or Alessandro’s reputation as a book collector that the beard-cutter had set his sights on the famous physician. Master Alessandro was known for one other thing: He opened corpses. Rumor had it that he saw things inside the bodies that no one had ever seen before.

Nonetheless the beard-cutter’s plan did include one of Teobaldo’s famous books—not any one in particular, but one chosen at random. In brief, whatever book Master Alessandro had chosen to take along on his morning walk.

As the boy and the beard-cutter lay in bed at the inn, before the sun had risen and only the craziest roosters in the city had begun to crow, they knew that he would take a book with him on his customary morning walk. He always took these walks after breakfast, and every time he took a book with him. He would hold it carefully, as if he were walking hand in hand with a young girl, said one of the greengrocer wives.

The beard-cutter had already found a young lad to do the job. His own boy could not do it, because he wanted the boy to continue on with him. They were bound together by an invisible bond, as he often told the boy. The two of them had to stay together, at least until they found their happiness.

That is why the beard-cutter had struck up a conversation with one of the beggar lads who cadged money from visitors to Piazza San Marco. The lads were not the only charlatans in Venice. Visitors to the city were swindled out of money at every turn: by the merchants, the barbers, and the innkeepers. But the little boys who begged and searched with their nimble fingers in coat pockets and bags were still the ones who did the least for the money. They were more reviled than the Jews, that tormented people who were locked up behind walls in the cannon foundry, Ghetto Nuovo, at night. The beard-cutter liked to talk to the beggar lads. It had not taken him long, nor did he have to spend many small coins, before he had talked one of them into helping him.

“So you really want me to do it so that he sees me and follows me?” the lad asked after the beard-cutter had explained the task.

“Yes,” the beard-cutter replied, giving him an extra coin. “I hope you’re fast on your feet.”

“Fast enough,” said the lad, taking the coin.

*   *   *

“Tell me again what’s inside of us,” said the boy, as they ate a breakfast of olives, cheese, and sour bread. He still remembered that night in Germany. They had stayed in a little hut on the outskirts of town, and one evening the beard-cutter came back dragging a dead witch he’d thrown into the river at dawn. He fished her out of the water himself. That was his job. But this time he hadn’t taken her away from town to bury her outside the churchyard. He hid her in the woods all day, and in the evening he brought the witch back to their hut. If anyone saw him, he was risking being drowned himself, or maybe even burned alive. Then he sent the boy to bed, while in the light from only two tallow candles, he worked on the dead body all night long. The boy could not see much from the bed, where he was pretending to be asleep, but he heard and smelled everything in the room—the stench that grew worse with each incision and the crunching sound of knives cutting through bone. The boy had never felt so alive. The next day, when the witch was finally buried behind the church, where the path to hell was the shortest, he asked the beard-cutter why he had done it. Why had he risked his life to look inside a human being. But he already knew the answer.

“I simply had to see it with my own eyes,” replied the beard-cutter. “There’s a whole world in there.”

But the beard-cutter had not buried all of the witch. He had kept her skin, preparing it and placing it at the bottom of his sack.

Now, as they sat in the dawn light in their lodgings in Venice, the beard-cutter chewed his bread slowly. The boy noticed the first gray hairs in the man’s coal-black beard. His eyes were still clear, while the rest of his face had a heavy, fatigued look that vanished only when he was most excited, as he was the morning after examining the witch.

“There’s a lot of blood,” the beard-cutter snapped, the way he did when he didn’t want to talk.

“And the blood is stored in the liver, isn’t it?” said the boy.

The beard-cutter nodded.

“And from there it rises up to the brain?”

Again the beard-cutter nodded without a word.

“And the heart is where the soul resides, right? Is that where God lives?”

“God lives everywhere,” said the beard-cutter. Finally the boy had made him want to talk. “God lives in all the body’s four humors, even in melancholia, the black gall. God lives in the liver and the kidneys and the heart. But people say that the blood is the life force itself. When a wounded soldier dies on the battlefield it’s because the life force seeps out of him. But it doesn’t mean that he will be abandoned by God.”

The liver, the kidneys, the heart. The boy listened to these words as though they were the names of angels, living beings he had never seen. But he knew that they also belonged to this world, that they were inside everyone and gave life in ways that were still not understood.

“I think that human beings should understand the works of the Creator. Only then can we truly understand ourselves,” said the beard-cutter. And when he talked like that, the boy knew that he had been lucky. One of the smartest men of his time had taken him under his wing. He would learn much, and one day he would also see for himself. Then he might understand more than what he could read in a book. Wasn’t that exactly what the beard-cutter had said? The reason they had sought out Master Alessandro was that this physician knew more than could be found in books. In any case, that was what was rumored. A rumor that could be dangerous for a man who lived outside the Republic of Venice, which included the city of Padua, with its famous school and its many doctors. In Venice and Padua the city air was freer than in most other places. The beard-cutter explained that autopsies here were regulated by law, and that each year male and female bodies were taken down from the gallows so that the most learned doctors could increase their knowledge of the internal organs of human beings. Venice was not afraid of the pope’s wrath. The city had felt it before and feared it no longer.

“Now,” said the beard-cutter, putting the last bite of bread in his mouth, “it’s time for us to get moving. The sun has reached the rooftops on the other side of the canal. It won’t be long before our good doctor goes out for his walk. Today we don’t want to miss that walk for anything in the world.”

*   *   *

The street urchin met them as they had previously agreed, by the bridge where they could see the front door of Master Alessandro’s house from across the canal. The plan was simple: When they saw him come out the door, the lad would run across the bridge toward the doctor while the beard-cutter and the boy would walk along the canal on the opposite bank toward the next bridge. There they hoped to meet again, and change the path of destiny.

*   *   *

Master Alessandro let his forefinger glide slowly and tenderly along the spines of the books he kept on the little shelf just inside the door of his library. The little shelf was reserved for Teobaldo’s handy little volumes. The rest of the library was filled with parchment rolls and large tomes that he had collected on his travels.

His finger stopped on a work by Plato, which, somewhat indelicately, had been dedicated to Pope Leo. But that might fit nowadays, he thought with black humor, letting his mind drift back to the house in Padua and the corpse that was supposed to be awaiting him there. If that laggard Pietro had done his job at the grave site outside town. But he could not count on it. He had long pondered finding a replacement for his servant Pietro. He made mistakes far too often. Pietro never got used to handling dead people and made mistakes, such as forgetting to tie them down on the cart. Eventually they would fall into the ditch and lose limbs during the transport. Or else he let himself be scared off by the watchmen in the cemetery and came back empty-handed the night after an execution. And he was no good with a knife, so he wasn’t much help during the dissections.

Master Alessandro tucked the book under his arm and left the library. For a moment he placed the book on a table by the door while he put on a voluminous burgundy velvet cape. It kept him warm in this autumn weather. Then he picked up the book to take along on his walk.

*   *   *

Even though the sun was shining, there was a cold wind coming off the sea, the type that felt like it was blowing right through you. Master Alessandro greeted the woman selling vegetables and asked whether there had been frost in the night. She told him that it had not yet arrived, and if they were lucky they might be able to save the whole harvest this year. Alessandro blessed her and promised to buy some turnips from her the next time he came by.

He was taking his usual route along the canal and over the bridge to Piazza San Marco. But he had not even come to the bridge when it happened. A little street urchin who barely came up to the belt on his cloak popped out of nowhere. Alessandro had no time to tighten his grip before the lad grabbed the book out of his hands. Then something odd happened. Instead of turning and vanishing in the crowd, the lad stood still in front of him for a couple of seconds. Alessandro was just about to reach out and grab him when he took off at a run.

Master Alessandro was beside himself. One of these little scamps had made off with his coin purse more than once. Here in Venice he never carried more in his purse than he could afford to lose. But this was a book he had lost, and that was quite a different matter. A book, even one of Manutius’s small ones with the velour spines, was irreplaceable, even sacrosanct. One did not steal a book.

Alessandro was not used to running, but now he ran. He set off after the lad as though a wild beast had been awakened inside him. At the same time he bellowed, “Stop thief!”

A couple of men who were fishing in the canal reacted, but too late. The lad slipped away as they reached out to seize him. Soon he was across the bridge.

On the other side of the canal two people were walking along. A tall man with a big black beard in an expensive but well-worn cloak and a boy of about eleven or twelve. As the man spied the urchin who came running and heard Master Alessandro’s wild howls, he lunged and grabbed the thief by the arm. Then he pulled the book from his hands. The little devil wriggled from the beard-cutter’s grip and got away. But the man was left holding the book. Master Alessandro thought that the lad had escaped rather easily, but he thought no more about it as he went jogging across the bridge to thank the man. The most important thing was that the book was in good hands.

“I presume that this belongs to you?” said the man as Alessandro approached. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Olav the beard-cutter. I come from a land far to the north, and I am a master with my knives. The boy here is named Johannes. He is my apprentice. And to whom do I have the pleasure of offering my hand on this fine, sunny day?”

“Alessandro,” replied the physician, curious. “Tell me, Olav the beard-cutter, you have clearly left your own beard alone, but can you cut other things than beards?”

“There are many ways I can use my knives,” replied the beard-cutter.

PART II

Palimpsest

The center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

—
J
OHANNES THE
P
RIEST, CA. 1550

13

Trondheim, September 2010