A Golden Web Part 15

Alessandra looked at her own hands and then at the stiff, gray hands of the corpse and her bloodless lips, and she thought about how the human body was but a container. G.o.d filled it up when we were born, then emptied it out again when we died. This corpse was but the empty vessel, Alessandra told herself, for what had been the woman while she lived.

Still, it was difficult to make the first cut-far different, somehow, than when she served as prosector for Mondino. But she said a prayer and cut-and once inside she thought no more about anything but the wonders before her eyes.

Alessandra drained and sponged away as much fluid as she could from in and around the heart. Then she cut a hole in the lowest point-the apex-of the right side. Using a hollow reed, she injected the blue-dyed wax-and then watched to trace its course.

Like the inky squirt of a squid she'd seen while Nicco and his friends fished in the ca.n.a.l, the blue wax appeared suddenly, spreading just beneath the surface of the lungs.

She and Otto exchanged a look of surprise. The thing was as clear as clear could be: From the right side of the heart, the blood traveled to the lungs. She felt her own heart pounding inside her chest and took a deep breath, trying to steady her hands. Then she cut into the bottom-most tip of the left side of the heart while Otto stood by, ready to inject the red-dyed wax.

Something felt odd about the tissues she'd cut. Otto held a candle closer for her. Pushing aside the dead flesh, Alessandra saw what looked like a tiny round doorway-definitely an anatomical structure. She gulped and inserted her own index finger through the hole and then moved it around, exploring. There was a hollow s.p.a.ce instead of solid flesh, like an empty room.

She remembered the movement of the pig's heart-how it contracted and expanded in the chest cavity, as if emptying out and filling again. An empty room-or a pump! She sewed the hole shut. And then, at her signal, she and Otto each injected a large dose of the red dye, more than the hollow room of the heart could hold. While Otto held the candle, she waited to be the world's first witness to the pathway of the blood, through the invisible pores in the septum, from the left to the right side of the heart.

But not one drop of bright red appeared on the right side of the gray flesh of the dead woman's heart. Contrary to everything Alessandra had been taught by Mondino and all she had read, the red-dyed wax they'd squirted in spread down from the left side of the heart out into the body.

The septum-just as it seemed to be-was impregnable! There were no pores in it, either visible or invisible: Alessandra's teachers had been wrong.

She sewed shut the valve at the top of the heart where the blue dye had traveled to the lungs-and then she cut the silk st.i.tches she'd made to sew shut the other doorway. She and Otto both injected red dye into the right side of the heart and watched to see where it would go.

The redness began to dawn in the dead woman's lungs, just as understanding began to dawn inside Alessandra. Blood travels in a loop: from the heart to the lungs and back to the heart again.

She thought of Ibn al-Nafis's drawing again: the rivers of red, the rivers of blue. The blood, all exhausted, went from the heart to the lungs, where something happened that gave it life again. And then that blood-red in the drawing-was returned to the heart, from where it rushed out again, bringing its vital spirit to the rest of the body.

She'd seen it first in her dream: the branches of the bloodred river and the blue. The island-of course! The island was the heart. The bellows were the lungs.

Alessandra felt her own heart, still alive, pounding hard inside her chest. It was as if everything she had ever seen or learned had been leading to this one moment.

The c.o.c.k crowed. Exhausted and near the point of collapse, she wondered briefly what the woman had died of.

During the night's labors, Alessandra had nicked her finger with the knife and another time with the needle-but hardly felt it. She gazed with wonder in the guttering candlelight mixed with the murky light of early morning, how clear it all was now, mapped out in red wax and blue-anyone could see it. And soon everyone would see it!

She told Otto that she would rest then, but only for a couple of hours. She used the waxy blue ink to write a hasty note to Mondino, and then dispatched a messenger to him. She and Otto went up to her old room above the shop, and fell asleep in each other's arms.

Mondino-wildly curious-was more than happy to let Alessandra take his lecture time that morning. Alessandra had told him of her studies with Dame Edita in the witches' quarter. Mondino had even gone there once to meet the lady, although the place was not one he visited gladly. A man of his reputation, after all, had to be careful-very careful-about whom he a.s.sociated with and where he was seen.

The students gathered, as they did when the weather allowed and there was a body involved, by the banks of the Reno, outside the gates of the city.

Rumor traveled fast, as it does in the student quarter: an unusually large and distinguished crowd had a.s.sembled. Word pa.s.sed from man to man, each vying for the distinction of being the first to spread the news that a startling discovery was going to be announced-not by Mondino himself, but rather by his famous young a.s.sistant, Sandro.

Many more people gathered that day at the river than usually attended the lectures. There was to be a show, people said: a magic show of some kind. The people were bored and restless, as nothing exciting had happened for several weeks in Bologna-no public executions, no battles between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. No riots, no lynchings, no royal processionals.

It was a beautiful winter day, and people were happy to pack some bread and cheese and wine sacks, and make the trek out of town to the designated place at the riverside.

When Sandro unveiled the body, the most learned members of the crowd-including Mondino-pressed to the front to see what all the fuss was about. And then the murmurings began. The p.r.o.nouncements were of wonder and admiration. There in the bright, cold sunlight, for all to see, the secret pathways of the blood between the heart and the lungs were revealed as only G.o.d had seen them before, visible now in the same bright blue and scarlet dyes that stained Alessandra's fingers.

"Behold," she said in a lecturer's voice, "the beauty of G.o.d's work!" There were tears in her eyes. Alessandra stood there dressed as Sandro, even though G.o.d and a handful of others knew who she really was: a daughter of Eve. A woman. And a scholar. A sister to Ibn al-Nafis. A daughter of Mondino. A descendant of Galen, Aristotle, and Avicenna.

Otto could not get close enough through the crowd to embrace her. He heard nothing but words of wonder and praise for Sandro and also for his teacher, Magister Mondino. And then Otto saw someone walking up behind her-someone tall and red-haired and big-boned. Someone he hadn't seen for a while.

It was Bene. He grabbed Alessandra from behind. Otto tried to push through the crowd to get to her. But Bene had already torn her scholars' robe and the chemise she wore beneath it. Holding her from behind, he tore the clothes from her body until her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were exposed.

"This is Sandro!" he shouted. "This is your prodigy!"

Otto knocked people down in getting to her. But it was too late to do anything more than cover her with his cloak and punch Bene. He punched Bene hard and called him a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. And as Otto wrapped Alessandra in his arms, he noticed that her skin was burning hot, and her tear-filled eyes were feverish.

A new murmur had begun in the crowd, breaking out now and then in loud, angry rumbles of speech. Someone shouted, "Stregheria!" "Stregheria!"-witchcraft-and a score of others took up the cry. This august and international gathering of physicians, professors, and scholars was quickly converting itself into an angry mob on the sh.o.r.es of the Reno River. There were calls of "Death to the witch!" and "Burn her!"

Mondino's sons, and Mondino himself, joined in helping Otto shield Alessandra from the crowd of men clamoring for her blood. Between the four of them, they were able to bring her, unharmed, to Mondino's house, although by a circuitous route. By the time they got there, she was shaking with fever. "My notebooks!" she cried. "Otto, you must make sure they're safe!"

He sent word to Dame Edita to hide the notebooks where no one would find them.

Mondino and Mina put Alessandra in their very own bed. Otto sent his servant out for broth made from a rooster. Mondino himself made a poultice to cool the fever, and then the fever was replaced by chills.

An angry red rash appeared on the back of Alessandra's hand. Mondino bled her, but only a little because she was so weak. She ate a couple of spoonfuls of the broth. She slept, and when she woke during the night, she was delirious.

The rash traveled up her arm. At times she met Otto's eyes and recognition would come into them again-and then she slept.

Her arm turned the pink of pa.s.sionflowers. Mina called the priest. Otto sent a messenger to Persiceto.

She spoke so faintly, only Otto could hear her.

"Aristotle...," she said, then closed her eyes.

"Save your strength, my love!"

She pressed his hand and looked at him, and moistened her lips. "Although I revere him, Aristotle was wrong about many things."

This, after twenty-four hours of fever and insensible raving. And yet her forehead was still burning. "The three-chambered heart," Otto said, his hopes rising. "The unvascularized brain." He desperately wanted to spare her the effort of speaking.

She shook her head, and he could see from the way she winced that her head was aching. He looked over his shoulder, intending to ask Mina for a fresh compress. But Alessandra, with surprising strength, pulled him closer. "He was wrong about the capacity of women."

He smiled at her, trying very hard not to cry. "Spectacularly so!"

"He said..." She paused, her lips parted, gathering strength. "He said, 'The courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying.' By that measure, Otto, I am a coward."

"Then by that measure, my darling, I am a woman-for I am ready to obey your every command."

She smiled, very faintly; then closed her eyes again, resting.

He changed the compress and took her two feet in his hands, rubbing them because they were cold, then kissing them because he loved her so much and feared she was dying.

She sighed and seemed to breathe more easily. Everyone around the bedside was praying. But as far as Otto was concerned, he and Alessandra were alone together.

She opened her eyes again and looked frightened until she saw him. "Otto!"

"I'm here." He touched her cheek with his.

And then he heard the words, so faint as to seem from another world: "I would not like to be forgotten."

There was a slick of tears then between their cheeks. "You will not be forgotten, Alessandra Giliani!"

Even fainter. "Promise me?"

Author's Note

I found Alessandra Giliani by accident, in the course of looking into the life and work of another female anatomist who lived in Bologna four hundred years later, in the eighteenth century. The little bit of biographical information I found about Alessandra-this daring teenager who dreamed of doing medical research at a time in history when women were burned at the stake with very little provocation-convinced me that a novel just had to be written about her short and marvelous life.

I spent several weeks in and around Bologna, exploring the vast holdings of the beautiful archives and libraries there, housed in buildings that are themselves works of art. I slowly pa.r.s.ed academic articles written in Italian, pored over gorgeous illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, crept around in crypts, and stared at paintings. In all of these, I was looking for the details that tell us what it was really like to live in the province of Emilia-Romagna in the early fourteenth century. What did it feel like to be a young girl then?

I knew that all the contemporaneous paintings of scenes from the Bible had fourteenth-century people posing for them: These were Alessandra's contemporaries, whose ways of reading, sitting, working, learning, loving, and sleeping could be winkled out from these images. A wooden baby walker, a cradle with its rockers arranged end to end rather than side to side, a person hauling water, lovers sequestered in a private room at a public bathhouse, the very plants and flowers were all pieces of the mosaic I started constructing.

The place itself-the quality of the light, the way the birds sang, and even the drift of plum blossoms wafting down on me as I walked off the path of a pilgrimage road-all of these seemed like dispatches to me from another dimension, where Alessandra still lived and wanted her story told.

Now, whether Alessandra Giliani really did live is somewhat of a point of academic controversy. I was unable to find a written record of her name in original doc.u.ments preceding the eighteenth century. One librarian to whom I spoke speculated that Alessandra's accomplishments were so at odds with all that was considered proper that records of not only her but also her entire family may have been destroyed. At least one scholar of medical history feels that it was, in fact, a chronicler of Persiceto in the eighteenth century who made up the whole story.

A funerary urn containing Alessandra's mortal remains is supposed to have been placed in the wall of a particular church in Bologna-perhaps the church that stands today in the Campo di S. Pietro e Marcellino. That church was covered in scaffolding during the entire time I was there. I am still trying to find more precise information about whether and where this urn exists today (I recently ran across a source that claims it's in Florence!). The stone of the urn is said to be inscribed with the following words: In quest'urna le ceneri di Alessandra Giliani, una giovane di Persiceto, abile nelle dimostrazioni anatomiche e discepola, eguagliata da pochi, di uno dei piu famosi medici, Mondino de' Liuzzi, attendono la resurrezione. Essa visse 19 anni. Mor, consumata dal suo duro lavoro, il 26 marzo, anno di grazia 1326. Ottone Agenius l.u.s.trula.n.u.s, con la sua perdita deprivato della sua parte migliore, suo eccellente compagno che ne merit il meglio, eresse questa lapide.

"In this urn, awaiting the Resurrection, are the mortal remains of Alessandra Giliani, young woman of Persiceto, adept at anatomical demonstrations and unequalled disciple of the most famous doctor, Mondino de' Liuzzi. She died at the age of 19, consumed by her hard work, on the 26th of March, year of our Lord 1326. This plaque was put here by Ottone [Otto] Agenius l.u.s.trula.n.u.s, deprived by her loss of his better half, his excellent companion who deserved the best."

After I returned home from Italy, I continued reading everything I could find about fourteenth-century medical education and practice, child rearing and early education, home life, gender roles, and the production of books. Alessandra and her family felt utterly real to me (even though all the members of her family are made up, including what to me is quite a logical guess that her father might have been a stationer, giving Alessandra wide access-so unusual for the time-to hundreds of books).

There are records referring to Mondino's second wife, Mina, and all their children, as well as to their country place in Barbiano. All the facts about Mondino-apart from his personal interactions with Alessandra-are based on research. I don't know for a fact that Alessandra boarded with him-although that, too, seemed logical, given the way things worked back then. Bene is made up. But it was a practice for parishes to sometimes raise money to send one of their best and brightest to medical school.

I've tried to give as realistic a picture as I could of how books were made and distributed in the late Middle Ages. The University of Bologna-the very oldest university in Europe-was an amazing place in the fourteenth century, perhaps more like the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s than anything else. The students were in charge. They hired teachers and fired them. If a student challenged a professor and could prove himself right-well, then that student became the professor. It was a true meritocracy and also probably a pretty rough and tumble place.

The advent of the university-and the sudden need for books-was as much an information revolution as the rise of the internet has been in our own time.

I never thought that history would become one of my life's pa.s.sions. I never even liked history when I was at school, apart from the context of literature, music, and art. But history has lately been revealed to me as the place where I live, where we all live, side by invisible side with others who-if we get quiet enough and listen carefully enough-will touch us and tell us their stories.

-Barbara Quick

Acknowledgments

I have so many wonderful people to thank for their help, support, and encouragement that I hardly know where to start-so I think I'll start at the beginning of the alphabet.

Alisha Niehaus, an exuberantly gifted editor at Dial Books for Young Readers, was the catalyst who made me dip into the well and find this story. It wouldn't have happened without her prodding-at least, not this year.

Caterina Belloni, the Italian journalist who helped me so much while I was writing Vivaldi's Virgins Vivaldi's Virgins, morphed into a full-fledged dear friend (along with husband, Maurizio), letting me rest and recuperate en famille en famille with their daughters Ernestina and Maddelena at their lovely house in Lodi, near Milano. with their daughters Ernestina and Maddelena at their lovely house in Lodi, near Milano.

Decio Armanini, one of Italy's brilliant biomedical researchers who doubles as an oh-so-busy M.D., was my host and guide in the beautiful city of Padova, where he arranged for me to have a private tour of the anatomical theater there, and he and his wife, Isa-also a doctor-shared their insights and entertained me.

Felicia Eth is the literary agent I always hoped to find-fiercely loyal, bristling with literary sensibility, and a person whose judgment I trust unquestioningly.

Giacomo Nerozzi, professor and reference librarian at the Archiginnasio-one of Bologna's architectural gems-was unbelievably generous in seeking out obscure facts for me and then reviewing the final novel from the standpoint of someone with local expertise about the history and language of Emilia-Romagna. His emotional embrace of Alessandra's story was and is of inestimable value to me.

Gloria Serrazanetti, the gracious head librarian in Alessandra's birthplace, San Giovanni in Persiceto, was fully engaged with my project the moment I made her acquaintance. She found sources for me that I never would have found on my own, took great trouble in making them available to me, and shared her intuitions as well as her bibliographic expertise. Her a.s.sistant Daniele even drove me to the train station. I will never forget the kindness and help I was shown in Persiceto-and I hope a statue honoring the memory of Alessandra is erected there someday!

Grace Cavalieri, the prodigiously talented and charming poet and playwright, waved her magic wand and showed me that there really are fairy G.o.dmothers in this world. I am her devoted protegee.

HarperCollins Children's Books brought a wealth of talent, expertise, and enthusiasm to the production and launch of A Golden Web A Golden Web. I want to especially thank Laura Arnold, editor; Suzanne Daghlian, marketing director; Maggie Herold, production editor; Elyse Marshall, a.s.sociate publicist; Joel Tippie, designer; and Hilary Zarycky, a.s.sociate art director.

Jan Gurley, M.D., has provided this writer with untold riches. She gave me a crash course in the anatomy of the coronary-pulmonary circulatory system (sketched on a series of napkins in one of Berkeley's great Indian restaurants). She helped me understand the physiology of what leads up to and follows administration of the Heimlich maneuver. And, best of all, she has allowed me to be honorary auntie to her two wildly talented teenage daughters-Emilia Gurley and Grace Linderholm, who were the novel's earliest readers and generously served as my consultants from first chapters to final draft. Owen Linderholm has expanded both my high-tech and culinary horizons.

John Quick once again held down the fort and looked after the interests of our beloved son while I was off doing my research. Joolian Quick, said son, never ceases to amaze me with his creative spirit, his musical talent, and the power of his smile to light up my world.

Liz and Federico Minoli not only gave me the key to the in-law apartment attached to their magnificent flat in Bologna but unlocked the social heart of the city for me as well. I am more grateful than I can say for the music, the opportunities to wear a pretty dress, and the respite from my labors provided by their friendship.

Liz Stonehill stepped forward with an unparalleled act of generosity when the wolf was at my door in 2007, allowing me to keep devoting my time and energy to Alessandra.

Manuela Teatini, a writer and journalist based in Bologna, first interviewed me and then entered fully into my quest. I am enormously grateful for her hospitality as well as her insistence on driving me to Persiceto, where I struck bibliographic gold.

Maria van Beuren, chatelaine of Toad Hall-a beautiful-beyond-belief, invitation-only writers' retreat in New Hampshire-gave me the warmest welcome and the most magically fun and restorative week of brilliance and hilarity I've ever had in my lifetime. No one knew it when we were born, but Maria is-and will be forever more-my beloved sister.

Roberto Condello's perfect small hotel at the southern edge of Bologna's historic center, the Hotel Porta San Mamolo, was the center of everything for me-friendship, camaraderie, the best cappuccino, and kindness above and beyond what any traveler can reasonably expect. I will always feel grateful to Roberto and the San Mamolo's beautiful manager, Irena Lorja, for treating me to their warmhearted hospitality.

Rosemary Brosnan, my brilliant, sweet, and slyly relentless editor at Harper, made this novel so much better than it would have been without her ministrations. She got the very best out of me-which is what a great editor does, is it not? Rosemary, you rock!