A Golden Web (11 page)

“Yes,” said Alessandra miserably.

“Well, then,” said Otto. “We can all go back together. Sandro, why don’t you ride with me and let Bene ride your horse? You’re by far the lightest among us.”

“I’ll walk,” said Alessandra.

“Don’t be silly,” said Otto. “Come on—Lodovico is waiting.”

What was the proper way for a man to ride behind another man? Alessandra, who was used to holding on tight when she rode behind her brother, thought she’d better try to somehow stay on the horse without touching Otto at all. But then he pulled her up so that she was sitting in front of him. “It’s safer this way,” he said, so close to her that she could feel his warm breath on her face.

The ride was an agony of trying not to rub against Otto—fairly impossible, under the circumstances—and a weird sensation of pleasure when she did. She’d never experienced anything like it before: his chest pressed up against her back, her bottom brushing against his thighs. It was very much like having an itch and longing to scratch it—but this itch was not anyplace she could reach or even locate. The feeling was all over her and somehow underneath her skin. She tried to remember if Aristotle had written anything about it—an all-over itch engen
dered by two people coming into bodily contact with each other. But she couldn’t recall ever having read of the phenomenon.

Her agony was compounded, of course, by the knowledge that Bene had just ruined her life. She watched him and noted, with a useless feeling of satisfaction, that he rode poorly. What ill luck that she had needed to relieve herself just then, with Bene lurking close by! He must have set out to trap her. Why else would he be up on the mountains instead of studying, as he said he was going to do?

She should never have shown him the gold! If she’d only told him about it, she could have cut off a large piece of it for herself. He’d never have known the difference. But, then, she reasoned, maybe he wouldn’t have believed that she possessed such a treasure, if she’d only spoken of it. And then he surely would have told Otto, and everyone else, what he’d seen—and then she’d have been done for.

She only hoped that Bene, although only a butcher’s son, would still prove himself to be a man of honor.

They found the others by the water with hooded birds again, standing over their kill. Mondino was in a merry mood. “All right,” he said. He tossed a dead duck to each of them. “Knives out. Let’s see who can gut theirs fastest!”

Alessandra worked with all the urgency brought on by her dread—and a dawning, desperate hope that perhaps Mondino himself would find some way to employ her, in exchange for her room and board. She could go to him, as Sandro, and tell him that she’d had a sudden reversal of fortune—that she’d have to leave Bologna, return home, and give up her education if some financial remedy couldn’t be found.

Or perhaps, she thought with some bitterness, she could simply give in to her family’s wishes and marry whatever scurvy man her father had picked out for her. He was rich, after all. But what chance was there that he’d allow his wife to study medicine? If her father had refused her—her father, who loved her more than anyone else in the world—how could she even dream of another man giving her greater license? She would be doomed to stay and serve this great landowner in one or more of his stupid castles, ordering his
servants around and carrying his keys. He’d get her pregnant and then her life of learning—and maybe even her very life—would well and truly be done for.

Alessandra wielded her knife as she dressed the duck, without even thinking about it at all. She made a clean cut and pulled out the entrails and the crop, placing the heart and the liver in the jar Mondino had brought along. Her duck was ready well before the others, and very neatly done.

Mondino watched her as she rinsed her hands and her knife in the pond, but said nothing except to urge them all to hasten back down to the house and the kitchen fire before the meat began to spoil.

On the lecturer’s chair, high above the corpse, Mondino looked very different and far more intimidating than the fatherly person who enjoyed himself with his family on the weekends. “The knowledge of the structure of the human body,” he said in a voice that was also different, like the voice of God coming down from the heavens, “is the foundation upon which all rational medicine and surgery must be built.”

His two assistants stood below, flanking the body—one to cut and the other to point as Mondino spoke. “Always start with the parts that are most corruptible.” The prosector, knife in hand, made a swift, clean cut down the center of the abdomen, from top to bottom; then he made another cut laterally, from side to side. The students gathered round let out a collective gasp. Most of them had never seen the inner workings of a body before—and here were the entrails of a once-living man, exposed to their eyes.

The corpse was fairly fresh, and it was a nice, cold winter day. But corruption had begun already, and the smell of it was revolting.

Alessandra tried to hold back the liquids that began to rise from her own gullet. The last time she had seen this sight was when she was looking inside her mother’s own corpse. Her eyes stung with tears—but she blinked them away. A couple of other students gagged and retched. But Alessandra mastered her nausea and watched, fascinated, as the prosector lifted up the entrails to better show them.

Mondino read from his own book on anatomy,
quoting from Galen and at times interrupting himself to note points on which his own observations of the human body were at odds with the writings of the ancients. “We are only at the beginning of this new science of anatomy, and there remains a great deal to be discovered and ascertained.”

There were murmurs of dissent among the other learned doctors in the assembly. The writings of the ancient Greeks, with glosses by the Arabs and Persians, comprised the entire basis for the art of medicine.

“For instance,” Mondino carried on, undaunted, “Aristotle wrote of a three-chambered heart.” The prosector, with some difficulty, cut out the heart and put it upon a cloth spread over the torso by his other assistant.

“But as you will see—” Mondino had to raise his voice to make it heard above the bits of conversation and argument and the inevitable jokes people always feel compelled to make in these situations. “The heart is divided into two chambers, not three.” The prosector cut the thick septum dividing the heart, laying the two pieces side by side. The jokes stopped then, and the murmurs took on more of an admiring tone.

The smell was getting worse, though, and a couple of other students turned and retched into the containers that had been placed by a servant, for that purpose, around the courtyard.

Mondino continued. “I quote from our translation of Galen: ‘The blood reaching the right side of the heart goes through invisible pores in the septum to the left side, where it mixes with air to create spirit and then is distributed to the rest of the body.’”

Invisible pores,
Alessandra thought. The septum had seemed quite a bit thicker and tougher than the other tissues, judging from the way the prosector had to work at cutting it. She tried to squeeze to the front of the crowd, longing to take a closer look—but by the time she’d done the requisite work with her elbows, Mondino had already moved on.

“The head must always come next, and last, the extremities.”

It was in the last part of the demonstration that the prosector cut himself—not just a little bit, but badly, so that he was bleeding too heavily to continue.

Corpses were hard to come by. “Blast!” Mondino said,
suddenly sounding like himself again. He looked to his second assistant, who only shook his head.

“You know I’m no good at cutting,
Magister
.”

“You!” said Mondino. He was pointing at Alessandra.

“Me?” she mouthed silently.

“Yes, you—I’ve seen your skill with a knife. Step up—be swift! The body is decaying rapidly.”

And so Alessandra Giliani became Mondino’s prosector, before she was even properly admitted into the medical school—and just in time to earn her room and board. All agreed—and Mondino most readily of all—that she was by far the best prosector he’d ever had, a veritable genius with a knife, with a subtle, delicate touch he’d never seen before in any of his assistants.

The only person present at the lecture who was really unhappy about the turn events had taken—apart from the assistant who’d cut himself—was a big-boned, freckled youth from Lombardia, newly rich and as torn up as the corpse itself with jealousy.

Alessandra could not live as freely as she had before. She was grateful she’d felt rich enough, upon her arrival at
Mondino’s, to pay her room and board for six months in advance. It was unnerving nonetheless to feel that, at any time, Bene might choose to denounce her. But, after a few weeks of feeling anxious about the precariousness of her situation, Alessandra was caught up in the heady joy of being immersed in the very thick of the best learning environment in all of Europe for what she most wanted to study.

Even the knowledge that Otto—the one man to whom she’d ever truly felt drawn in a romantic way—lived just on the other side of a wall from her, ate at the same table with her, and seemed to take every opportunity he could to study, sit, or walk by her side, receded into the background of all the other details of her daily life. She forgot for hours at a time that she was anyone other than Sandro, student
par excellence
and trusted assistant to Mondino de’ Liuzzi. Alessandra Giliani, the girl from Persiceto, began to seem a distant memory—rather like Pierina, Dodo, Nic, and the entire family from the life she’d left behind.

Alessandra had a favorite spot in a little garden near the Piazza di Porta Ravegnana, nestled improbably between
the rival towers of the Asinelli and the Garisenda. The garden was filled with flowers in summertime and had a mossy marble bench near a little pond, where water had been diverted from the canal across the square. The lock on the garden gate was broken. And although many people passed by the Two Towers every day, it seemed that no one thought of sitting in the garden, which was always empty, as if it somehow tended itself.

It was a perfect spot to sit and read when she’d rented part of a book: quiet and fresh and sheltered from the wind. Alessandra wondered if the nobles who lived in the towers ever looked down and saw her there—for she would have been visible from high above. But if they did, they never lodged an objection to the slender youth who sat and read and wrote and thought, there in that little patch of Nature in the very heart of the city with its two hundred towers that rose like a forest of trees.

One day when Alessandra raised her eyes from the text she was reading, she saw a partially made spider’s web backlit by the morning sun. Every strand was visible and shone as if made of the finest threads of gold. The spider itself was small but delineated—because of the lighting—
more clearly than she had ever seen a spider before. She watched as its silvery legs spun round and round in the bright light, as if each leg were in itself a separate living creature. It was indeed spinning its web: She’d never fully understood the significance of the phrase before. And she was dumbfounded by the intricate cleverness of it, this work that was far more skillful than that of any human weaver.

And yet it was only a spider—the very same kind she often killed without remorse, thinking only that it was far better to kill the spider than to be bitten by it while she was sleeping. This worker of miracles. This master artisan. This minuscule, animated jewel-like part of God’s creation.

Alessandra worked hard to keep her changing body well hidden from everyone, but her growing breasts were more and more difficult to hide beneath the length of cloth she wound around her chest, binding it as tight as she could without constricting her breathing. It was especially irksome in the summertime and the harvest season, when it made her sweat. Sometimes, while she wrapped the cloth
around herself, she thought how like a shroud it was, as if she were being prepared for burial while still alive.

She bought great quantities of cloth every month, not only to bind her breasts but also to catch the bloody flux that came out her opening every time the moon was full.

It seemed to be a rule of life, Alessandra noticed, that people saw only what they expected to see. The magicians and conjurors who performed every day in the Piazza Maggiore depended on it—as did perhaps some of the more publicly renowned miracle workers and saints (although Alessandra would never have voiced this opinion aloud).

She might have wondered what truths she herself was failing to see because of the tyranny of her own expectations—but she could not see these in herself any more than the spinning spider could see the process of its weaving.

Bene certainly scowled at her even more than usual. But it seemed that the gold had sufficed to buy his silence. From the day of his windfall and their return from Barbiano, he took to eating his meals away from
home. He didn’t greet her if they passed each other in the city, turning away as if he failed to see her. After a while, Alessandra didn’t think much about Bene at all.

She was very much taken up with her studies. Frustrated with the leaden translations of the ancient masters, she worked side by side with Otto to copy out the truest and most accurate renderings among the different versions they found. She was always buying candles and working by their light in her little room, far into the night.

Otto was showing himself to be a rival for Emilia in his tender care of Alessandra. He often brought her lovely things to eat from his favorite taverns—pots of bubbling stew and delicious pasta, delicately flavored broth and loaves of bread to keep her strong and well, despite all the meals she managed to miss through staying late after lectures and engaging in learned disputations.

She thought how lucky she was to have such a friend. More than once she caught Otto looking at her in such an ardent way that, in time, she came to be convinced that he had fallen in love with Sandro.