The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  I curst myself summing feroshus as a plate-licking cur, an anchovy and a coward. For things was gitting worse. With evry month Minguillo were more wild, less humane. One day the eyes in Riva’s portreet caught me and followt me down the hall. That night, with little Riva’s breath on the back o my neck, I forced the words out on paper. Like pellets, twere.

  I sent the letter with a brandy-merchant that I met in an ostaria at Rialto. He were going to Arequipa where he had some agents, what he called factores, to git round the Spanish trade interdicks. The pits n pocks on his face spelled it out, ‘I had evry fever alredy.’ Anyway it were no problem to leave Venice – it were the coming back that were prevented.

  The servants got together and give me money for the letter’s passage. Twere all we had, I told Mister Pocksy Merchantman, handing him the leather purse and our faith.

  I companied him to the boat and waved him and my letter godspeed to South Hamerica.

  In that letter I finely hexplained all what Minguillo doed with Marcella, how the servants was too fraid to say scut, the girl herself strange silent too, and – most difficult of all – how the lady o the house shone a hopeless fatality bout her son. The sworm o tapeworm-hants and huncles in there dikrepitating partments wernt een worth a menshon, of course. They would stay quieter n a mouse pissin on Peruvian cotton jist to keep in Minguillo’s good books, as he were the hair parent and held the keys to all there ouses.

  I got flustered in the detail, rattled on like a gibbermonkey, yet a man with half a blind brain could of read the amount o desprit I were, and unnerstood that there were serius pause for concern bout his little daughter.

  After all, he had askt me to write.

  If that letter dint bring my Master Fernando Fasan back from Arequipa, quaranty or no quaranty, then he dint nowise diserve to be the father ovva livin angel like Marcella Fasan.

  Minguillo Fasan

  My father’s letter to my mother arrived four months after his sending it.

  The delay was explained by the red seal with a head of San Marco’s lion and a large ‘S’ for Sanità.The letter had been spurgata in quarantine, passing the last part of its journey on the island of the Lazzaretto Vecchio, where it was slit open and purified by smoke. The stamp indicated that the letter was considered by the authorities to be pure of Yellow Fever, Plague and Leprosy. Unfortunately for me, my father’s handwriting was none decayed by its treatment.

  More fortunately I intercepted the letter before it reached my mother’s breakfast tray. On reading it, my every rib of hair stood up to attention and my foot drummed uncontrollably on the marble floor under the desk.

  My father instructed his wife that their son Minguillo was to be subjected to certain medical examinations by the priest-surgeons on the lunatics’ island of San Servolo.

  ‘Some recent events have been brought to my notice. He is clearly not sane, Donata,’ my father had written. ‘This must be dealt with, for the safety of the household. His conscience has not developed in the way of a normal person’s.’

  I had barely finished scanning it when a fictitious gust of wind carried it out of the window and away down the Grand Canal before any inquisitive monkey might count his toes. Oh dear, etcetera and so forth.

  From the smoke-scented letter, I gathered that my father had somehow got wind of my little games with Marcella.This meant spies and betrayers in the house.And that meant – investigations.

  I started with my Mamma, whom I subjected to a close scrutiny. She was not my woman. I discovered no reason to suspect trouble from our priest or Marcella’s pretty and pompous doctors.The servants were illiterate. So how could my father have heard about my activities in far-off Peru? There had been certain details. I could not touch Piero Zen, but I suspected him.

  With the Yellow Fever and its quarantines providing a fine excuse, my father continued to dally in Peru. Of course, he must have thought the letter had discharged his responsibilities towards me and my alleged madness. He did not know that his instructions were floating with the discharges of a thousand privies down the Grand Canal.

  Untroubled months passed. My anxieties relaxed. Watermelon was my new project.Watermelon, that engorged my sister’s bladder, that I fed her night after night, assuring her that the rude red slices were the very thing she needed to keep her continent. And in her draughty bedchamber, by my order, only the tiny scaldino glowed with a pitiful few coals, so she was never warm about the kidney.

  ‘’Sgood for her,’ I said commandingly, and waved a handsome leather book when the servants protested. They did not know that it was the admirable Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, by the esteemed (at least by me) Marquis de Sade.

  Even if the servants hated me, books loved me and passed me on to their friends. Sade took me by the hand to Rousseau who led me to one interesting fellow,Thomas Day.This enterprising Englishman had adopted a foundling girl to bring up as a wife. His Sabrina had then been subjected to a number of imaginative disciplinary methods. For example, she was obliged to learn stoicism through having hot wax dripped on her arms. She acquired composure by allowing her tutor to shoot between her petticoats.

  It was not hard for me to find a gun, but more difficult to find the privacy to practise with it. A whole summer long I thought on it, imagining the bullet passing through the linen, like a little black rabbit jumping out of a snowy burrow.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  After five bloodied years on battlefields and in field hospitals, my Master Doctor Ruggiero was himself gouged in the side by a stray bullet. Some said it came from one of our own soldiers whom he had affronted with his surly tongue. Ruggiero wanted attendance on his way home to the Veneto, so he brought me back with him. The war was over for me awhile, at least Napoleon’s war.

  I was still at war with the hurts and ills of human skin, however. Now I treated patients not in shattered platoons but in the solitude of their own suffering beds, be they in hovels or villas. I was moved by the way the poor ones constantly apologized to me for the mundanity of their illnesses, ‘after all you’ve seen on the battlefield, Doctor’. And I was appalled by the rich, who, untouched by war, revelled in the most minor symptom and expected me to furnish a picturesque title for it, and still more picturesque remedies, as if for them illness was just another diversion. It was rarely the head of the household I attended. Such men were not often ill: they were too busy. It was their dependent children, cousins and nephews who languished under their cut-velvet coverlets. Like tapeworms, these lesser creatures hovered in the homes of their great host, ruthlessly extracting the nutrients up until the moment of his death, when they would show a rare burst of energy in locating a new, vigorous victim to fix their simpering mandibles upon. Poisoning was not beyond these sons, daughters, cousins and nephews, nor sly stranglings.

  It seems likely that my famous patient, Napoleon, had also been infected by a parasite as he lay in one of his long baths back during his Egyptian campaign of 1798–9. Worn out and filthy after massacring two thousand Marmalukes at the foot of the Sphinx, the Corsican took himself to the tub.

  It was my diagnosis that larvae from some microscopic creature lurking in that warm water then entered his integument and coursed into his bloodstream, by which way they congregated in his rectum and bladder. In those hospitable places they would have laid their own eggs and founded colonies of sons, daughters, cousins and nephews that would survive as many generations as their host lived human years.

  Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor in 1804. He was thirty-six, the prime of life. Or he would have been so, had the parasites inside him not been industriously devouring his vitals, and, with them, his vitality. Within four years he would nurse a pallid little paunch, lose the vigorous growth of his hair and worst of all, his famed ability to do without sleep. He would grow garrulous where he had once been terrifyingly silent. His ability to make a lightning decision and follow it through – that would now evaporate, possibly sucked out of him by a hundred little mouths b
usy down below.

  That next year, 1805, was the one I would always remember – firstly, because it was the year I was called to attend to the suppurating wounds of one Matteo Casal, a madman who had attempted to crucify himself.

  And also because it was the year I first came face to face with the young Marcella Fasan.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  My guts shrivvelled inside me wheniver I watcht the bastert brother fondling his gun. With that gun in his hand he were a different person, purposed, but with the soul completely gone from the body. He were fixin to do summing bad, we all knowed it.

  Trudgical to say, nothin had appened as a result of that letter I so struggled oer. My old Master Fernando Fasan ud eventually come back from Peru for a brief spell, but he niver menshoned it to me. Perhap my letter got lossed? Perhap my writin were ineligible? Perhap he ud not believt me and decided to hignore it? Or ud not wanted to believe me? He treated me with the same kindness as in the old days, just a bit sadder n more disdrackted than before. My old Master were depresst in his spirits. Twere clear his heart were sore, or, the servants gossiped, elsewheres.

  Wherever his heart were, his eyes was sartin not on his boy. He niver tookt the necessary steps. Niver tookt his son by the scuff of his neck and shook a partickle o the Fear-o-God into him.

  We tried to keep an open eye on the little girl, but we was not allus there. When the famly goed to there country villa on the Brenta, they had there country servants. They wernt none too vigilant, them bumpkins, and they dint know scut bout nothin.

  Do ye know what they done for her poor little problem? I heared about it later, after . . . They give her a fox pasting, they did. Some country remedy, some old wise tale, for women’s troubles in there inward places as ye mite say. And ye can be sartin that Marcella, not to offend, jist smiled thank ye when the maid worked up a salve ovva fox’s limbs and his grease, with old oil n tar. Marcella would of let her apply the fox paste to her woman’s parts and put up with the smell for the sake o not hurting the girl’s feelins no dout. That would be Marcella. And maybe she had some hopes of it too, for in them days the girl still wanted allus to believe the best.

  A fox pasting! But what they should of did, the waggots, was simply keep an eye on her at all times.

  Where, for why n what the hell were they bout when he finely got her?

  ‘Tell me,’ I ordered the country footman when I got ahold of him, ‘or Ile give ye a Peruvian Pander, which is kin to a Chinese Burn but with more burn to it.’

  Bednaw have that appen to ye, I tell ye.

  Minguillo Fasan

  We Venetians left our latest rulers, the Austrians, a task they must have loved deep in their efficient souls, that of turning our magnificent Republic into a minor department.

  The fiddly little matter of government was taken out of our fine white hands and placed in the ink-spotted fingers of petty officers who rejoiced in the minutiae of forms and pettifogging statutes. We shrugged and went about our business, that is, our pleasures, as before. We had got used to being ashamed of ourselves. Sitting in a warm bath of our own filth, we ceased to smell our disgrace.

  The Yellow Fever abated. My father returned from Arequipa after a mild case of the Small-Pox. He had tried one of the newfangled vaccinations. But instead of passing through him with a quick salutation, the malady had briefly taken hold. He was weaker, and older in his face. By contrast, I felt vigour surge through me whenever I saw his stooped outline at the water-gate.

  He never mentioned the letter that he had sent, the one asking for the surgeons to examine my brains and blood for the spores of madness. He could not have been too suspicious about what happened to it: many letters went astray or arrived so smeared with vinegar or smoke from the quarantines as to be unreadable. If he spoke of it to my mother, it was in a place where I could not eavesdrop. In any case, I knew she would set herself vehemently against such a project. My father might run off to the South Americas whenever he pleased, but she would have to stay in Venice and endure the shame of a son locked up in an attic or with the lunatics on San Servolo. Her dear friend the Contessa Foscarini would never have let her forget it.

  Life took on a semblance of its old normality. In the spring and winter I was taken daily by gondola to the Collegio di San Cipriano on Murano for my lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic, French, English and Latin.

  A little setback occurred when an impertinent magistrate of the Sanità sent a curt letter to my parents, insisting that I might no longer roam around Venice ‘without a responsible escort’. I know not which of my spicy little pranks brought this on, but the Reader may be sure it was one of many.

  From June to October our family still went to our villa on the mainland set in its garden planted all’inglese with shaped bushes and pink roses. The villeggiatura passed in furious employment for me, as I was permitted without reproach to trap songbirds on limed twigs and do with them what I wished, so long as Cook might have the corpses later to turn on sticks of rosemary. Marcella, as the Sentimental Reader would expect, entertained a drivelling love of all things Green. She adored to ramble about the grounds with a pencil and a piece of paper to draw trees, flowers and our very picturesque dovecote with its cooing inhabitants.

  The Lascivious Reader may at this point wish to loosen His clothing.

  The summer of 1805, Marcella was nine. I was twenty-one and knew the intimate company of a maid for the first time, a great fine agricultural lump of a girl, thickly furred in the thigh and arm.The Germans say ‘where there is hair there is pleasure’: I traced the hairs all the way to where they coarsened, and had my fill of prodding her little shame-slit and her little shame-tongue while she stared up at me, scarcely crying at all. For a few coins, all summer long I jottled in her petticoats twice in the morning and three times at night.

  The Inquisitive Reader enquires: why did I wait so long to get on top of a girl? I’ll disarm Him by admitting I had a little difficulty in managing the thing, the first hundred or so times I tried it.The Venetian whores had laughed at me diminishingly. The Palazzo Espagnol maids were too quick and clever to find themselves alone with me. It was only in the agricultural girl that I found the satisfactory blend of compulsion and submission that enabled me. Once launched, however, there was to be no stopping my career in venery.After that, all the rooms of my imagination were lined with soft human skin. My own may not have been pretty, but I was comfortable in it, and now even more comfortable inside someone else’s.

  That fine hot season flew faster than some days do. I was caught out and put out when the first caccia of the autumn delivered a fine bloodied stag to our door, which meant it was time to go back to Venice.

  That year a little less of Marcella returned to our palazzo than had gone out to the villa.

  Sor Loreta

  I continued to be surprised that Bishop Chávez de la Rosa did not come to seek me out in the convent.

  Then one morning at breakfast I saw a vision in a pale ingot of butter on the trestle. In it, a greasy yellow Bishop Chávez de la Rosa writhed in mortal combat with a bird that looked like a dove. What churning and pecking and strangling I saw taking place in that butter!

  Afterwards, when I recovered my senses, I was troubled. Why should the Bishop fight with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove? Perhaps I had been wrong to support his endeavours to reform Arequipa? Perhaps his failure to promote me was in fact a sign of some secret turpitude? Had that prevented him from carrying out his plans? Had God punished him, nipped and pecked at his ambitions?

  It seemed that my vision was correct. For the talk was all of Bishop Chávez de la Rosa leaving town with none of his reforms accomplished. There was more concubinage and fornication in Arequipa than ever. Why, even the aforementioned Venetian Fernando Fasan had fathered an illegitimate child on his Arequipan mistress Beatriz Villafuerte. That woman and her growing bastard continued to live in luxury and attended mass at Santa Catalina every Sunday. Beatriz Villafuerte insisted on displaying
herself in a Venetian shawl of deepest red. Bishop Chávez de la Rosa allowed her and the boy communion as if they were decent Christians.

  Subtly, I ceased to mention the Bishop’s name. Obsessed with their light pleasures, not one of my sisters at Santa Catalina noticed my change of heart.

  Minguillo Fasan

  The world knows – because I’ve informed it so – that I meant only to test her nerves, as Thomas Day prescribed, but she twitched and screamed, and there you are, a leg shot through the knee and ever after useless to her.

  This much I’ll let drop: on the day itself the process was not entirely scientific. It was true that I was up to the armpits exasperated with that tiny oh-so-demanding bladder, which forced every family excursion out of shape, and I had seized that gun in vexation rather than in the spirit of education. I was out of sorts, contemplating the prospect of our return to Venice, of leaving all those dives in the dark I had so enjoyed on the hirsute maid, of resuming grey city life with its dull restrictions and the doughy presence of the Austrians to remind us odiously of our fall.

  The more I thought about it, the more I reasoned that Marcella’s weakness had become my personal cross to bear. Because of her, I could not go about the town, to take even the gaudy ghosts of pleasures remaining to Venetians of our mortified age. So many times Marcella’s bladder had stopped a good excursion in its tracks. If Marcella might not go somewhere, then it had become the iniquitous case that I might not go either. For, as the Reader will remember, thanks to that pedantic magistrate, I was not permitted out unsupervised in public.There was no servant who could be bribed or threatened to take me out on his own, so all excursions were to be conducted in famiglia. I might not even go alone to the marionette theatre in San Moise, where I so loved to watch the wooden husbands beat their cloth wives with hammers.