The Remedy Read Online Free PDF Page A

name mentioned, and one long, dry laugh. I had not made any friends among the nuns: There was no one to defend me, even among those who had shared their amatory adventures with me. We were only coconspirators; there was no warmth between us. In the refectory next morning, seventy pairs of eyes were lifted triumphantly above my head to gaze at a point just over my left ear.
    My status would dimmish fast if I did not quickly recapture my lover’s affections. By our usual messenger, the butcher’s boy who came daily to the ruota for his orders, I sent him a tender letter. I promised to do better. I assured him of my passionate, faithful, subordinate love. But still the next night I waited in vain. And the morning after that the butcher boy stammered the news that my lover would not pay for the delivery of another letter from me.
    On the third night I crept out, making my way out of the gate and disappearing to the Riva degli Schiavoni. My lover had long since arranged things so that I had my own key, and could meet him in the shadow of the church. But I had no safehaven in which to pass the requisite hours. I could hardly go all the way to his rooms at Rialto. I had no money for a gondola, and I flinched at the thought of what might await me there. So I walked up and down the street, pausing to watch the monster-mongers and the retailers of strange sights touting their hermaphrodites, pygmies, mermaids taken on the coast of Acapulco and ambulant Egyptian mummies, all such things that appealed to the imagination of the Venetian crowd. My spirits, however, were too low to be enticed into credulity, so this entertainment soon palled, and I turned my attention to the mountebanks selling their nostrums from their swagged and painted platforms.
    I felt nostalgia for my old life, when my parents dressed me up like an elegant doll to attend the theater, where we sat in the family box, attended by livened servants. Now I was reduced to seeking free amusement from the theatrical charlatans of the riva , just like any poor peasant or foreigner newly arrived in Venice. Yet I stayed out among them for three hours, enjoying the shows, even forgetting myself as I listened to the quacks’ speeches about their Balsamick Dew brushed from a banana in the Gardens of Babylon, or their vials of Restorative Snow collected in the crags of the Caucasus. One brandished a pure white candle, embodying, so he declared, some precious oils extracted from a Royal Spermaceti Whale that had sacrificed itself upon the shore of the River Thames in far-off London, at a place charmingly denominated Blackfriars. Some of these nostrums had even attained the dignity of printed handbills, which I collected with relish and stuffed into my pockets. It was a long time since I had been given anything other than religious tracts to read, and I looked forward to the diversion that these ridiculous high-flown texts would afford me later in my cell.
    When I slipped back into the convent just before midnight, I made sure that my happy sighs and yawns could be heard all down the corridors. I washed noisily and I cried out my lover’s name, as if in the ecstasy of a dream, in the middle of the night.
    And so I did for the next three evenings, trying to forget my plight among the crowds of the riva , mingling with the strangersand Venetians, taking solace from the unaccustomed press of carefree bodies and the colorful entertainment on the mountebank stages. On the third night I took some coins with me and bought a Consolating Mixture against the troubles of childbirth. I knew that it was unlikely to help me, but the fact of having bought it was consoling in itself. I hid the bottle behind a curtain on my windowsill.
    On the fourth night I was followed. Someone must have learned something or perhaps I had performed my part with too much feeling. As I slipped out, I felt a shadow detach from me and when I entered the narrow calle that leads to the riva , I heard the unmistakable