Swimming in the Moon: A Novel Read Free Page B

came, administered the quinine, and wedged himself into a brocade chair. “Now if your woman will bring me— Ah, yes.” Mamma had come with a decanter of Scottish whiskey, our best Venetian goblets, and a plate of rum-soaked babas. I gripped my bamboo rod as he touched the curve of Mamma’s bodice, the thick rope of her braid, her slender waist, and her cheeks, white with rage.
    “More wind . . . harder,” the count snapped when Mamma left. Sweat soaked his linen nightshirt. I had already changed the bedsheets. Yet he swore I let him “wallow like a pauper in filth.” We couldn’t wash, dry, and iron linens fast enough for the sweat, vomit, and soil of his illness. No amount of rosemary and lavender oil could sweeten that room.
    Dr. Galuppi tucked a bit of snuff in his ample nose and watched me fan the count, round eyes roaming my body until, tiring of this, he took out a medical text and read while the count grunted himself into fitful sleep.
    As Paolo had predicted, fever passed swiftly into chills. The count woke with a start and demanded that I cease my infernal fanning and bring blankets, furs, and a fire in the brazier.
    “Do it, girl,” the doctor said, barely looking up. With the fire lit, sweat poured down our faces, but he kept avidly reading, sometimes sketching strange machines in a leather notebook.
    “Close the windows and lie with me. Rosalia, keep me warm!” the count moaned. Slowly the quinine did its work. The tremors ceased and he entered a lull between fever and chills.
    “Good, now try my tonic,” Galuppi announced, closing his book and pouring two liberal glasses of whiskey. He motioned me to a chair in the corner. “Sit there. We may need you.”
    I took my seat, and in the manner of gentlemen, they promptly ignored me, as if I were one more marble bust along the wall. Which was the worst of a servant’s lot, I often wondered: the ceaseless work, pain in every joint, raw, cracked skin, and long hours, or the airy dismissal into nothing, to be called back to life with a flick of the hand? When the count waved at the fur mountain over him, I was to understand: take this away. “A man can go mad in the company of servants,” he muttered.
    “Certainly, certainly. Everyone’s talking about the scene between that woman of yours and Maestro Toscanini. Clearly she’s a hysteric of the most troublesome kind. However, she’s a great favorite of your wife, I believe.” The count nodded, sighed, and pressed his head into the mounded pillows.
    “I have made a careful study of hysteria,” the doctor continued, tapping his book. “The condition is often curable by means of intriguing mechanisms, sadly underused in Italy. With these mechanisms our Anglo-Saxon brethren have excised madness from diverse subjects, or at the least made them more malleable.”
    I must have appeared to be attending to the gentlemen’s talk, for the count lifted a fleshy hand from the coverlet, indicating me. “You. Leave us. Close the door.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    In the dim cool of the corridor, I breathed deeply, free from the sickroom stench. Nannina and Mamma were helping the exhausted laundress. Paolo and the countess must have been reviewing the household accounts again, for I heard murmuring in her study. Barefoot, I crept back toward the count’s chamber.
    “Copious injections of ram’s blood . . . patients as tranquil as sheep,” I heard through the door. The count must have spoken. “Of course, some casualties. There’s much to be learned.” The rosewood bed creaked. In a rustle of sheets, surely I mistook the next report. Was it possible that doctors closed inmates in coffins pierced with holes, lowered them into water until the bubbles ceased, then hauled up the coffins and tried to revive the near-drowned victims? “Confronting death calms the lunatic.” Some muttering followed, which I couldn’t understand, and then: “Whirling chair . . . electric shocks to the female organs sometimes