Six weeks after the crystal incident, my father was seized by an abscess of the brain. It carried him off in a week.
Dr. Zambelli began with the usual "remedies"—opiates to silence the pain. Realizing too late that silence is not the same as health, he turned to castoreum.
The cure produced convulsions; the convulsions concluded the matter.
One minute after my father's last breath, the abscess broke through his ear, as if satisfied that its business was concluded and it could now withdraw.
He died in the very prime of his manhood—thirty-six.
Venicia mourned him sincerely, though not as a father or actor.
He was remembered as a man of invention, praised for his extensive knowledge of mechanics, esteemed by patricians who judged him too talented for the stage he had been forced to tread.
Two days before the end, sensing it near, he asked to see us gathered at his bedside: my mother, his children, and the three patrician brothers Grimani.
His hand trembled as he blessed us, then turned to my mother, dissolved in tears.
"Zanetta," he said, "swear to me you will never raise our children for the stage. I never would have stepped upon it myself had I not been driven there by a certain unfortunate passion."
She gave her word, the Grimani nodded gravely, and the vow was sealed.
My father died soon after, and circumstances themselves conspired to ensure that the promise was kept.
My mother chose me—not out of fondness, for I had done nothing to earn it, nor out of hope, for none existed—but out of simple arithmetic.
Of her children, I was the one most likely to die first.
A charming burden, I was told.
Frail as pastry, speechless for years, incapable of lifting a plate yet somehow capable of bleeding like a stabbed ox.
I walked as if the floor tilted, choked on my food as if it held a grudge, and spent long hours contemplating walls with philosophical intensity.
Doctors descended like gulls on a corpse. Some eminent, some merely loud.
"He loses two pounds of blood a week!" proclaimed one sage. "He cannot have more than eighteen in total—therefore, he must be refilling himself from the air!"
"Impossible," countered another. "The boy is manufacturing blood from chyle!"
They calculated, speculated, scribbled.
I continued leaking.
I learned of all this much later from Signor Baffo—a poet by profession, libertine by vocation, and my father's friend. It was to him that I owe my life.
He wrote to the illustrious Doctor Macop of Padua, who responded with the only diagnosis ever delivered without theatrics:
"The boy does not suffer from loss of blood, but from its stubborn thickness. Nature, unwilling to let him die, relieves itself through weekly expulsions. His stupor is not of the soul but of circulation. Change his air, or bury him."
It was the most sensible advice ever uttered about me. Baffo received it like scripture. I, apparently, was to be saved not by medicine, but by ventilation.
If that sounds unglamorous, remember: many men have owed their lives to less.
On the morning of my ninth birthday, I was taken toward Padua in a burchiello along the Brenta Canal, escorted by my mother, the Abbé Grimani, and Signor Baffo.
It was my first voyage. The water slid beneath us like polished glass; the world moved without appearing to.
I fell asleep beside my mother in the small saloon, rocked by the even rhythm of the oars.
At dawn she rose and unlatched the window.
Light entered softly, I opened my eyes and saw -or fancied I saw- the trees walking.
Their crowns drifted past the window one by one, stately and silent, like courtiers in procession.
"Mother," I whispered, still half-dreaming, "the trees are walking."
She turned, frowned faintly. Grimani and Baffo appeared just then, drawn by my excitement.
"What are you thinking about, Giacomo?" asked the Abbé, amused.
"The trees," I said. "They are walking."
They laughed. My mother sighed the way women do when patience fails them.
"The boat moves, my child, not the trees. Now dress yourself."
Understanding dawned—and then something more dangerous followed it.
"Then perhaps," I said, "the sun does not move either. and that we, on the contrary, are revolving from west to east."
Silence.
My mother's hand froze on her collar. Grimani stared, appalled.
I felt the heat rise to my face, that helpless shame only a child can know when the adult world condemns his curiosity.
I was dismayed and ready to cry.
Then Signor Baffo bent beside me and placed a hand on my shoulder.
"You are right, my child," he said calmly. "The sun does not move; take courage, give heed to your reasoning powers and let others laugh."
My mother, greatly surprised, questioned him: "Have you taken leave of your senses to give such lessons?"
He did not answer her. He drew a sheet of paper toward him and, with a spoon as compass, traced the circles of the planets around the sun. No sorcery, only patient geometry.
He explained how the earth turns, how night and morning follow like obedient servants. His voice made the idea sound inevitable.
I listened as though the world had just begun to make sense.
It was the first true pleasure of my life.
Had he not spoken, I might have been frightened back into silence. Their laughter would have planted ignorance where curiosity had tried to grow.
But Baffo gave me courage, and with it, a habit I have never lost—To reason.
That faculty, I admit, has not carried me very far in life; but whatever happiness I have found when alone with my thoughts, I owe entirely to it.
He died twenty years later, the last of his noble house. His verses, often obscene and always brilliant, survived him thanks to the vigilance of the State Inquisitors, whose mistaken strictness made them treasures.
They ought to have known that despised things are soon forgotten.
We reached Padua just after sunrise.
Ottaviani, the chemist and antiquarian, was waiting on the quay, his wife beside him—a kind woman who smothered me in the caresses that generous people reserve for children they need not keep.
Around their doorstep tumbled half a dozen little ones, among them two girls, Marie and Rose.
They smiled as children do at travellers, and I, already shy of strangers, smiled back without conviction. I mentioned them here by name for they will appear later on in these memoirs.
Ottaviani led us through narrow streets to the house arranged for my lodging.
It belonged to an elderly Sclavonian woman whose walls leaned as if tired of standing. The rooms smelled of vinegar, onions, and resignation.
She received us with a curtsy that might have been courtesy or arthritis.
My small trunk was opened before her; an inventory was read aloud.
My mother handed over six sequins—payment for six months of nourishment, cleanliness, and education, all at a bargain rate.
The old woman lifted her eyebrows. "It is little," she said.
"Then be thrifty," replied Abbé Grimani, ending negotiation.
She pocketed the coins and produced a quill to sign her own defeat.
My mother straightened my collar, kissed my cheek, and said only,
"Be obedient, my son, and docile."
Two virtues, I later discovered, for which I have shown limited aptitude.
Then she left—quietly, efficiently, as one concludes an errand. No backward glance, no scene of parting. It was perhaps her way of being brave.
The door closed. For a moment I stood among my few possessions, feeling very much like one of them.
And so, by the combined efforts of reason, stinginess, and administration, my education began.
In this manner did my family, with perfect propriety, get rid of me.