The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  I wallowed morosely in the memory of the past Palm Sunday. I had been deprived of the parade by an eruption to Marcella’s health. She had developed a high fever and the house was in an uproar with three different quacks attending and Piero Zen quarrelling with them all. She was perfectly suited, tucked up in bed with one of her drawing blocks. I was the one in pain. Palm Sunday was one of my favourites. On that day, from the Basilica – its mosaics sunlit like an illuminated manuscript – a bounty of pigeons was released.The populace might capture them and do what they liked with them if the baying seagulls did not dismember the grey birds first. In the confusion, I always contrived to lose my guards for precious minutes. No one remarked on a noble youth with two or three pigeons stuffed under his armpits on his way to somewhere undisclosed.

  Yes, Marcella had picked a poor moment to cross my path, that golden autumn day on the Brenta. As she walked across the courtyard with the inevitable drawing block in her hand, said I to myself, ‘She’ll not get where she is going so smug so fast oh no.’

  The Comprehending Reader feels this too, of course – that there are moments when a body has to send the blood back to the heart. I started wondering how I could make my mark on that little white muzzle of hers.

  All summer long I had daydreamed of Thomas Day’s exercise with the petticoats and the musket. As I carried my fowling-piece into the garden of our villa, I was already framing my highly credible explanation. It went along these lines: by invoking the loud noise of the gun just as she went to relieve herself, I would teach Marcella’s bladder an involuntary fear of and aversion to emptying. I had already turned down the relevant page in Thomas Day’s book, ready to demonstrate my unwrinkled reasoning and good intentions.

  The Reader will also comprehend that my father’s mistaken will was still in my mind. He was already back in town on business, attended by my mother and her hairdresser. If a man takes his eyes off his family, he shall pay for it somehow.

  ‘This is going to be a little uncomfortable,’ I whispered to myself.

  The little black rabbit exploded with a beautiful nimbus of red out from among the snowy petticoats.

  The blood was not all hers.The gun jerked in my hands and a piece of the metal casing flew off, taking with it a large piece of my index finger.

  Servants came pouring out of the house like maggots out of a corpse. No one attended to my amputated fingertip. They clustered round Marcella, weeping and screaming. She lay silent, uncomplaining, and cried out only once, when they lifted her on to a pallet of wood to take her into the great hall. I trotted along behind.

  The servants knew no better than to staunch the bleeding with a dirty handkerchief. I took myself to the minstrels’ gallery for the best view of what would happen next.

  Surgeon Ruggiero arrived promptly with a young nobody of an apprentice. The hardbitten doctor parted the ways through the weeping servants, tutting and issuing peremptory instructions for boiled water and clean rags.Your man inspected the wound, and declaimed showily on same. My shot, it turned out, had penetrated her left knee at an awkward angle. The pellet of lead had torn into the structure, lacerating and shredding the tissue of the joint itself. Proudly, he flourished a pair of unusual forceps, with a hollow roundness forward and a few hooks curled in that part.

  ‘Can you hear me, child?’ he asked Marcella, who lay silent, unless you count the faint stutter of her blood falling on the flagstones. She was the only one not weeping apart from me, up in the minstrels’ gallery. I sucked on my finger-stub, while she lay on her back like a marble saint, her martyrdom painted red across her leg.

  Her open eyes sought me out up in the gallery. She held on to me with her eyes, until I felt nausea and fear lolloping in my belly. My skin felt too tight and my foot drummed on the floor. I did not love our country house as I loved the Palazzo Espagnol. It had not sired me. I could not feel so safe here as in Venice.

  But hush! The surgeon bends to whisper something to my sister.

  I imagined, as shall the Empathetical Reader, that Ruggiero was saying, ‘This is going to be a little uncomfortable.’

  She nodded. I leaned over the rails of the minstrels’ gallery to watch him arrange her body in the same position in which it had taken the bullet.Then he opened the joint and flushed out with hot salt the shot, the fragments of bone and cartilage, the blood clots and the debris of her petticoat. Finally he reached inside with the unusual forceps.

  Marcella’s drawing block dropped on the floor with a resounding slap. I guessed she had been clutching it against the pain.

  I was amused to see that the sound caused the surgeon’s young apprentice to turn to stone and make an utter casino of his duties. That wan stripling would never make a surgeon! Marcella’s concern was all for the youth and she begged the servants to bring him water.Then a piece of bone and a lump of shot fell in the surgeon’s bucket, and she too departed from consciousness.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  Ruggiero never lost an opportunity to use me for his foil, particularly in noble houses. He loved to pretend I was but a novice in surgery, needing to be taught everything, by which device he might, in comparison, highlight and aggrandize his own expertise. It also gave him an opening to dazzle his audience with a terrifying medical vocabulary. Where simple terms would have sufficed, and indeed served better for clarity, Surgeon Ruggiero resorted to pomposity and Latin. The frescoed hall of the Fasan villa was, of course, the theatre of his dreams.

  My Master quickly decided not to amputate. He cleaned, dressed and tourniqueted, applying a calendula lotion to arrest the haemorrhage. I was kept busy mixing our faithful battlefield balsam of terebinth and Peruvian, the linen pledgets dipped in oil of turpentine and our special buttons of tow, in which was wrapped vitriol, grossly pulverized.

  ‘See, boy,’ he instructed at frequent intervals, ‘like this.’

  The hall was fairly illuminated by the onlookers’ admiration. It was to be much regretted ( by Ruggiero) that the noble parents of our patient were away in Venice. For my part, I wondered at the Conte and Contessa leaving such a little girl under the supervision of the servants. I supposed there was some great ball in town.

  I had not yet seen the girl’s upper body, blocked from my view by the considerable bulk of my Master. But I noticed that her delicate little shoes – spattered with blood – were smaller than my hand.

  As we elevated her leg, a thick block of paper fell open on the floor. I glimpsed a pencil portrait of a male servant in livery. Skill and, it seemed, love, announced the man’s good heart over his homely features. It was at this point that I first raised my eyes above the girl’s knees: just as my

  Master buried our worn forceps in her leg.

  Then I disgraced myself.

  When Ruggiero barked ‘ligaturing needle!’ I was unable to move or speak. I stood staring dumbly at the girl’s face, and I heard my Master only dimly, as if a soft helmet had been pulled over my face. Ruggiero repeated his order, and yet still I was incapable of twitching a finger. In the end Ruggiero elbowed me aside, delving into our layette of knives and needles with his own brusque hand. I stumbled, kicking over the bucket of blood and bone in a wincing clatter.

  Now I had accompanied my Master to Napoleon’s battlefields before my voice broke, and I had seen men split from thigh to neck, and hip to hip. I myself had burrowed for bullets in writhing flesh without flinching. So why did I now lose my grip on my profession?

  It was not the mashed knee that lost me the use of my tongue and limbs. It was the face of the girl who had been mutilated. I had never seen such skin, its owner’s sweet nature so clearly legible upon it. I was only sixteen and I had not treated a noble girl before; or any girl of this age. Napoleon had not sent any our way. I was surprised by a feeling of tenderness I had not experienced since I treated my little companions in the convent. Since that time, I had not rehearsed in affections of the heart, not even in friendship. Two years on the streets and Ruggiero’s testy temper had see
n to that.

  One long look I had, while the sun fingered the villa’s frescoes and the soft hair of our patient. She met my gaze, and smiled. A silent moan escaped me. It was like offering a beautiful but empty Murano goblet to someone dying of thirst. The little girl could not have been more than nine years old, and yet I felt – and this is the strangest of it – mothered by her. I felt as if I had known her a long time, since before I was born, and that her tenderness and humour were things I might take for granted, as I had never taken anything for granted in my life.

  I did not lay eyes on the brother, not that day.

  By the time I came to my senses, the girl herself had mercifully fainted away. Ruggiero employed a footman to hold the injured parts in apposition while he ligatured the arteries, and joined the parted flesh first with plaster and then with thread. Seeing that I was no use, I crept out of the great hall, back to our trap, where I hid my ignominy behind the horse.

  Ruggiero beat me when we returned to his rooms. I had embarrassed him in the great house.

  And that was just the beginning of what I would suffer, and gladly, for Marcella Fasan.

  Minguillo Fasan

  For several days they despaired of the leg altogether, and at times her life hung in the balance. I thoughtfully sent a note to the local undertaker who came and looked over my sister with a proprietorial air and a measuring eye. That must have been discouraging for her.

  But for some reason Marcella warded off the gangrene.

  My agricultural girl told me, ‘Your sister’s too pure to rot, that’s what they’re saying in the servant hall.’

  She would not soon forget the slap she earned by that. Then I got her riding rantipole while her tears dropped on my face, which was, in fact, the way I conceived the dazzling idea for ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’, about which the Patient Reader shall hear a great deal more in due course.

  Unlike Marcella’s, my flesh proved insultingly mortal.The damaged finger turned yellow, then red and then black. I hid it as long as I could but the putrid smell attracted unkind comment. A frill of numbness was spreading towards my hand. In the end Surgeon Ruggiero unceremoniously lopped the digit off. I had lost my index finger, my pointing finger, my stabbing-on-thetable-to-prove-a-point finger, my eye-poking, shame-slitting finger. I kept it in a leather box until the worms found it.

  Meanwhile, Marcella continued to improve.The undertaker pouted and finally ceased his daily visits, unlike the servants, who never now left her alone for one minute. Now there was always someone hovering outside her door and at least one of them in with her, day and night, no matter what time I went there.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Some foible bout an accident, bout Marcella being in the way of his gun when he fired it! Some cheap story bout a speriment. Scuses lame as a tree!

  Minguillo come back to Venice a few days later looking disingenious like a clever ape. No dout, when he bethought on his poor sister what he had cripplet, he fetid hisself for a genius.

  ‘Now he’s for it,’ I bethought. But his Papà’s spirit were too broke to give the boy a proper dissiplin.

  I wondered tho, For why dint Minguillo jist kill her outright? When he could o, easy?

  Sor Loreta

  Bishop Chávez de la Rosa departed, leaving Arequipa to fulfil its destiny as the Sodom and Gomorrah of the South Americas. I did not grieve at his going. He had failed to distinguish the one pure soul at Santa Catalina, which proved that he had never been a blessed person.

  I alone truly understood the reasons for Bishop Chávez de la Rosa being driven out of Arequipa in disgrace. God wanted it that way. I realized now that He had brought the Bishop all the way to Arequipa only so that He might enlighten me. My Celestial Spouse had proved His special love for me once again, for He wished me to know that my visions were immaculate and that I should in future trust in them as lesser creatures did in the Holy Scriptures.

  Of course none of my light sisters shared this knowledge of my uplifting: none of them except one, who had recently joined our order. It seemed to me God’s design that Sor Sofia entered the convent the same day – October 21st 1805 – that the evil church-crusher Napoleon was defeated by the British at Cape Trafalgar, though of course we did not get news of that glad event at Santa Catalina until the year’s end.

  From the first moment I saw Sor Sofia across the refectory table, I knew that our lives would be intertwined. This was not because she was sweet and soft like a kitten but because my Celestial Spouse and Santa Rosa whispered clearly into my deaf ear that I must love this new sister with all my might for it was laid down on high that she and I should be together.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  The girl would live, but after my humiliating performance in the great house I was not allowed to see her.

  Ruggiero set me to drying the Small-Pox scabs he collected whenever he could. He had some eccentric theories about uses for the brown crusts. I hated to handle them, but I sweetened my labours with daydreams of the noble girl’s incomparable skin and uncomplaining amiability. Between blows, Ruggiero had told me that, when I had swooned, all her thoughts had been for my comfort!

  On the first day of winter my Master stumped back into the house in a frightful mood. Our cures had worked all too well, and the girl had been taken back to Venice for the fashionable town quacks to practise on.

  What would they do to her? In those days the French orthopaedists were the idols of the Venetian doctors. Discreetly I made my way to Ruggiero’s bookshelf, crowded with volumes on his obsession, the Small-Pox, and took down Nicolas Andry de Bois-Regard’s Orthopaedia: or, the art of correcting and preventing deformities in children. I groaned.

  There would be hose made of dog-skin and shoes with leaden soles to force the leg out of its protective crippled clench. The thigh and calf would be washed in stinking Oil of Worms, roughly frictioned with Oil of Lilies, poulticed in the leaves and roots of marshmallows and the whole leg bathed in boiling tripe broth and then run under freezing cold water to contract the ligaments. A roasted salt herring might be placed on the abused leg then, to draw out the humours. All this prior to binding with paste-board, splints of wood and small plates of iron.

  I looked in the mirror by the bookshelf – was I yet well-fleshed and handsome enough to go to Venice, and attend the daughter of one of the city’s richest merchants?

  The answer was an unequivocal no.

  Minguillo Fasan

  Back at the Palazzo Espagnol, my father called me into his study. ‘You’re not ever going to be up to much,’ he stated matter-of-factly, with a kind of deadness in his voice. He was not angry with me. Ludicrously, he acted as if I was some kind of lunatic. He spoke slowly, as to a foreign person.

  ‘Every family has its bad seed,’ my father said flatly. I noticed then how lustreless his eyes were, and how steeply his shoulders stooped. ‘Piero is right . . . it’s the duty of the parents to bury that seed where it shall not grow.’

  The Reader shall be marking Piero Zen’s name in His daybook for future attention.

  My father roused himself to announce with a faintly contemptuous finality, ‘So I’ll not be sending you to the university in Padua, as I had once hoped . . . You’ll be a house-boy. I suppose I’ll be working to keep you in idleness until the end of my days.’

  I did not dignify this with an answer, but my silent thoughts were busy. In what way can this be a surprise to you, Papà? And why should I work? You have worked: surely that is enough embarrassment in the family. And how could you think – except that you understand nothing of me – that I might ever want to live away from my darling Palazzo Espagnol?

  He sighed, ‘My first son shall be like Venice, a thing kept alive for hypocritical reasons, but of no utility.’

  My first son?Was he planning other sons? My eye flew to the drawer where his will was kept. I cursed my ill luck. I had reasonably expected that my sister’s literally diminished being would force him to re-make the will in my favour. It s
eemed that part of my plan had gone severely awry.

  Rather like my sister’s limb. The shot leg twisted inwards, as if shy of presenting its wronged self to a curious world. Nutrition of the lower limb was compromised. It soon dwindled to a twig-like frailty.To compensate, her sound right foot turned otherways to an unnatural angle and commenced to swell, so that Marcella had the appearance of a club foot, and a limp that she would never lose.

  A newfangled French surgeon moved his traps into the nursery, which soon smelled like a fish market. Once I passed by Marcella’s room to see her lying on her couch with a large roast herring sizzling on her damaged leg. I would have got closer, but the valet Gianni appeared from nowhere with some stupid questions about my evening attire.

  When Marcella was allowed out of her chamber of tortures, she simply carried them with her.The French surgeon confined her leg in leather equipment heavy with buckles and straps, which surrounded the lower part of her pelvis in a brutal ligature. In order to carry all this around, she needed a crutch.

  Ah well, ’twas all to my purpose.With apologies to God, of course, for rearranging his design of my sister’s body. Clanking like a suit of armour, Marcella could not hurry to the necessary house to relieve her bladder. She could not hurry anywhere. The chamber pots she requested did not always arrive in time: sometimes the servants were delayed in the corridors running errands for her brother. Marcella still struggled not to embarrass herself, yet that was no longer always possible.And so she descended a rung lower in the scale of human function.

  Meanwhile, I was not daunted in my pursuit of Thomas Day’s theories. In fact, I conquered and surpassed them, inventing new training methods far more vigorous than his own, especially efficacious now that Marcella could not run away from me. I supplemented my readings with the work of Pinel on the treatment of French female lunatics. Interesting, very interesting. There were other days when I walked in the tracks of the medical charlatans and their gigantic promises.