In the novel, the manuscript is Alessandra’s work: she wrote it so that it would only answer to someone who never manages to master it. And the novel begins at a spa in 1416. That is why, of the whole book, this is the part we look at most.
f. 75r · The bathers. A green stream runs down from the top of the page, from a kind of flower-shaped fountain, and in it are naked women, one after another. Below, the water opens into a pool; further down there is another, with a group of women holding hands. No section of the manuscript has been talked about more. Some have seen thermal baths in it; others, a treatise on the body as a system of channels; others, allegories. The text around the figures, like the rest, cannot be read.
f. 78r · Figures in water. Two green pools joined by a pipe, each holding a group of women in the water. It is the image at the top of the novel’s website.
f. 80v · Figures in the bath. A page dense with text, with figures in the margins and, at the bottom, a band of blue water with women in it.
f. 81v · The pool. At the top, the page is text: two paragraphs. Below, a green pool with a drawn rim, and in it sixteen naked women, in two rows of eight, in the water. A green channel runs down the left side and reaches the pool at its upper corner; at the bottom right another, thinner one leaves it. Here the women are not in a row along a stream, as on 75r: they are together in the same pool, and they look very much alike.
In the novel, Alessandra spends thirteen years measuring the water of a spa: the heat of each pool, at elbow height. She puts it like this:
«With these hands I measured thirteen years.»