CHAPTER 6

“MEN ATE LUNCH with their friends . . . and dinner with their ancestors in paradise.” Giovanni Boccaccio wrote that in 1348, more than a hundred years ago. Since then the pestis atra has come and gone many times, but in its horror it is always the same. Giovanni survived that first fatal wave of death and in his Decameron he described those three years of the pestilence in aweful detail.

It all began when twelve Genovese galleys sailing from the east brought their corruption to the ports of Sicily. Some say rats carried the infection, some say cats or fleas, but everyone agrees it began with these ships and these sailors tainted by the markets and brothels of Athens and Constantinople and Porec. In their clothes and in their touch, even in their very breath, they carried an invisible poison. Sickness clung to their bones. To inhale the same air was to invite death.

From Sicily the pestilence spread in all directions. From Sicily to Corsica and Sardinia. From Sicily to Valencia and Barcelona, and to all Iberia. From Sicily to Pisa and Florence, to Orvieto and Prato. It was a blaze from the barbarian east that swept all Europe and the lands to the north and west, until nearly half the population of the world lay dead. Some say fewer, but it is not so. There had been warning signs, of course. Earthquakes had shaken Naples and Padua and Venice. Months of rain had destroyed the crops all over Italy. Wine had soured in the casks. People dying of hunger were forced to eat grass and weeds as if it were wheat. Babies died of hunger or the diseases of hunger. And then the Black Pest came.

It was swift and pitiless. Boccaccio tells how the terror began with buboes, tumors in the groin or in the armpits, some as large as a Mary apple, some the size of a quail’s egg. And from here, the groin and armpit, this deadly infection spread to the whole. Mysterious dark spots—black or purple—appeared on the thigh or the forearm, small at first then growing larger in size, and these spots proclaimed the swift approach of death. Death was sometimes instant, a plentiful gush of blood from the nose or mouth, and then no more. Before the dark spots appeared, even before the buboes, a man walking in the street might put his hand to his forehead, draw a deep breath, and fall dead before he could cry out: a long sigh and then extinction. Sometimes death was more leisurely, with fever raging for a week, the limbs wasting and the body sunk in diarrhea and vomit, and then silence. Always it was a most unkind death. The sick became foul, all the matter from their bodies drenched in an overpowering stink, their breath, their sweat, their spittle and shit so putrid no one could bear to stay with them. Besides, to be in the presence of the dying was—with few exceptions—to guarantee your own death.

Master and servant alike gave over all decency. Brother abandoned brother, husband abandoned wife, mothers—it is hard to believe—abandoned their own children. Corpses multiplied, too many for decent Christian burial. The dead who once would have been borne to church with tapers and the singing of dirges were now attended by one or two of the surviving family and by a priest who performed his office swiftly and with small solemnity. Many died in the public streets and sometimes whole families who died at home went unnoticed until the stench from their putrefying bodies alerted their neighbors who would drag the corpses into the street to be carried off to any empty grave. The graves filled up until, desperate, the living stacked the dead like lumber in a common pit, covered them with dirt, sprinkled them with holy water. It was the best they could do.

At this time a new profession sprang up, the becchini, corpse carriers from the rank of peasants who would shoulder the bier and carry it to the nearest churchyard where, blessed or not blessed, bodies were consigned to the waiting pit. Maddened by their unholy task, the becchini themselves sometimes turned murderous, raping and robbing the families of the dead. What, after all, did they have to lose?

And so the living fled the city. As the Pest raged on, some abandoned all good sense and, brutalized, mere animals, gave themselves over to license and folly and lusts of the flesh. Others sought refuge in the high country, isolated from human contact in the clean air, where crops withered in the fields and cattle wandered untended. Still others prayed and fasted and reformed their lives.

Whatever they did, death waited patiently. Boccaccio says that in Florence the pestilence carried off one hundred thousand souls between May and November alone. At Avignon, his Holiness Pope Clement VI waited out the Pest sheltered between two fires that were kept blazing on either side of him whether he sat to his dinner or knelt to his prayers. It was thought that fire would purify the tainted air, but in the end the heat grew too much for him and he decided that the will of God would be better served by taking refuge in his castle on the Rhone. By November the Pest died down and he returned to Avignon, and so the Church of Rome—in a manner of speaking—was preserved.

Such was the pestis atra of 1348 in Italy. It had come upon us for no reason—or for our sins; who can say?—and it left for no reason, and afterward everything remained almost as it was before. We had abandoned industry and rule and prudence, we had committed license and theft and rape, we had abandoned hope and shame. And this held true for all of us: the clergy, the nobles, the peasants, none were without blame. But human nature itself had not changed. The Pest withdrew, slowly, gradually, and once more peasants went to the fields, lawyers began again to twist the law, men and women married and made children and sometimes fell in love. Knights went on crusade. The Pope retained his throne, demanding prayer and penitence and a tithe on all income. Dukes and princes ruled their duchies and their kingdoms. There were fewer workers. There was more land. And in the end the Black Pest passed.

But the Black Pest had not passed for good. It returned and was to return often, with its old savagery and indifference to rank. Every twenty years it returned, the foul dyer liked to say, but he spoke in ignorance, because I knew that in my own life it had returned with ferocity in 1400 and had claimed my mother, and now here it was again in 1417, lying down with me in my narrow cot, staking its claim, hot, determined. There is no set date for dying.

Yes, we have come back to me.

I lay with my hand in my groin, touching that terrible swelling, certain I would die at once. I said a Hail Mary, slowly, but the end did not come, and so I took up my Rosary and began to tell my beads. Before I had completed the first joyful mystery, the Annunciation to Mary, I had fallen asleep. Or if not asleep, into a feverish state where everything was at once very clear and very confused.

I was in the city square and they had nailed the cat to a post and I was to batter it with my shaven skull. But it was not the black cat I had seen that morning. It was the white cat from the courtyard where I had met Maria Sabina. She was calling to me from the edge of the crowd. “You must not strike the cat,” she said. “The cat is sacred to me.” I looked over at her and was astonished to see she was bare to the waist. I pointed at her breasts. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s perfectly natural. How could it be a sin?” The crowd was shouting for me to attack the cat. A trumpet blared. “It’s time. It’s time.” A small boy ran at me from the crowd and began striking my legs with a stick. “You’re not a real monk,” he said, “or you would kill the cat.” He poked the stick under my robe and lifted it above my knee. “Strike him, strike the monk,” someone shouted. “Show us his balls!” “If he has any!” This was Spinetta, the dyer’s wife, as I knew it would be. The cat screeched and a new shout went up. There was the shrill of the pipe and the beat of the tambour and suddenly I was naked before the crowd. Their laughter rose and grew louder and louder. Maria Sabina shouted out, “It’s all perfectly natural. How could it be a sin?” She placed her hands beneath her breasts, displaying them to the crowd, and she was laughing. Everyone laughed with her. The little boy danced around me, possessed, slapping at my privates. I began to be aroused. Suddenly there was a silence and a shudder as the little boy pointed, saying “Look! A bubo!” The crowd fell away from me then, and Maria Sabina pulled her robe across her breasts, decently, turning away, and the little boy became a golden-haired child with a wooden begging bowl. Silence everywhere until the cat let out a long shriek of pain and terror and I turned to her, both of us naked, and rammed my head into her belly while she clawed and tore at my scalp and the sweat poured down my back and the blood poured down my face and the pounding in my brain went on and on until I woke and felt a cold cloth on my forehead and a young monk whispered, “Jesus mercy,” and I fell asleep.

In the long silence I lay suspended between sleep and waking. My cell collapsed to the size of my cot. The ceiling descended on me. I could not draw a breath. This is the fever, I told myself, this is the pestis atra. Soon it will be over and I can die. I will be bundled in a sack and thrown in a grave with lime on me to hasten corruption and I will rest. But the ceiling pressed on me and the breath was crushed out of me and I tried to cry out but there was no sound. And then I was back at the fair and once more they had nailed the cat to a post and I was to batter it with my shaven skull. “I cannot,” I said. “I will not do it.” But as I looked about, the cat had become a woman. It was Maria Sabina, naked, waiting on what I would decide to do. “How could it be a sin?” she said, and smiled, beckoning. “I cannot,” I said, and as I said it, I shed my cowl and my robe. All my clothes fell away and I kissed her breasts and lay her down in the center of the crowd and embraced her. The crowd shouted their delight. A little boy sprinkled us with rose petals from a wooden bowl and danced around us while I labored at my pleasure, and labored on until my loins seemed about to burst and finally there was release. I was alone then on my cot. The walls had withdrawn and the ceiling had ascended. Someone held a cup of water to my mouth and I swallowed greedily until the water ran down my face onto my chest. It was cool and fresh and I was still alive. Father Alfonso sat on the stool by my cot and ran his hand across my brow. “A nightmare only,” he said. “Misere Domine.”

Time had ceased to have any meaning. Day and night were the same, with darkness at noon and blinding light in the deep hours. The nightmares returned, never quite the same, but always painful, hysterical crying, people calling out for water, a terrible stench, suppurating black filth, and the sound of feet running. Water drunk down greedily, pouring out of the side of the mouth, cracked lips, sunken eyes, black and purple smudges on the chest and arms. The clank of the cart sent out to collect the dead. Prayers sung for the funeral procession, the flickering candles, strangers cleaning up the poisoned blood, the vomit, the yellow shit.

It was this way for seven days and on the eighth the fever broke as the bubo ruptured. Black pus mixed with blood sprang from the wound in my groin and ran down my legs. The cot was soaked with it. The stench was unbearable. A young monk, a novice from the main Friary of Saint Francis, made the sign of the cross and with a clean rag mopped at my groin and leg. He turned aside to vomit—he could not help himself—and then came back to his filthy task. He prayed while he worked, drawing off the black matter and pressing gently on the thigh to force out more of the infected blood, and when it seemed there could be no more, he stopped and looked at me.

“You have survived the pestilence,” he said. “You are very blessed by God.”

He had a bucket of water beside the cot, and he bathed the wound and put on it a poultice of rosemary, cumin, long grass, and pig dung to kill the infection and induce healing. “You have survived,” he said again, and sat on the stool beside my cot and told his beads. When he was done, he bathed my forehead with cool water, slowly, lingering, and before he left, he kissed me on the lips. He was being Saint Francis, of course, kissing the leper. He was a dedicated novice.

I fell asleep and dreamed an angel had come to my cot and breathed life back into me when I was dead. I awoke with Father Alfonso by my side.

“They are all dead,” he said. “Our Brothers in Christ.”

I could not understand.

“You and I have survived, useless and sinful as we are. All the others are gone. God’s ways are indeed mysterious.”

He was silent for a long while.

“You have brought the pestilence among us, Brother Luca,” he said. “It was God’s will that our Brothers should suffer and die this terrible death. It was God’s will that you and I, sinners, should survive. But it is God’s will too that you should leave the Order of Friars Minor.”

I made no response to this. How could I, dazed still from seven days of fever and guilty for the foul death I had brought among the Brothers who were my care and duty?

“When the pestilence is at an end and it is once more safe to go into the city, you must leave here. God has his plans for you. Whatever they may be, they do not lie among us.”

“Yes,” I said.

He fell silent, then he said, “Maria Sabina. She too is dead.” He looked at me for a long time. “May God have mercy on your soul,” he said.