The turkey-hipped little Roman had been washed up on the shores of Chile by a tide of debts at home.And when I encountered him in Valparaiso he was up to his dankly-feathered wrinkle in debt once more, but this time with the Chilean card sharks. He was seated around a table with five of their most scintillatingly dangerous number. That night his creditors were ready to take their money in his blood, for they had realized – with my help, for I had casually unmasked his faked title of ‘Marchese’ – that there was no hope of any other satisfaction.The sharks were in that final happy stage before violence breaks out, that state of extreme and jovial amity towards the victim. He was their dearest, truest friend in those luscious anticipatory moments. So do born murderers refresh their spirits.And I dipped into the joy of the occasion, exhilarated by the fumes of fear and sweat.
The Travelled Reader knows about nights like these: the air smoking over the salty port, the boats creaking on their ropes, the old women’s limbs creaking behind their rancid aprons, the bedsprings creaking under the industrious whores. Candlelight and gutted glasses, and men with knives by their thighs seated round a table, drawing their business to its inevitable conclusion.
I could have simply enjoyed the show. The murderers’ pleasure was contagious.Yet something made me change the condemned Roman’s destiny, that is to say, give him one.When I noticed a blade ripening inside a nearby pocket, I threw a purse across the table.
‘He’s mine now,’ I said in that free and easy way I have. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’
They took my cash indifferently. I had never bought a man before, and I liked it extremely. I passed the next few weeks in the agreeable pastime of training him up for his new role in Venice.
The man had marsh fever in his blood, like all Romans. Subject to the headache, the loose bowels, the vomiting, the stark fits, he was never going to win at cards or life.The disease had shrivelled him and turned his skin a New Worldish yellow that was very much to my purpose. Usefully, his fever was conjured up by the stressful nature of his educational regime, which I’ll admit lacked incentives and was more built on the principle of pain. In addition, I administered certain drugs that excited watery stools and brisk, unexpected purges.
‘This is going to be a little uncomfortable,’ I told him, tipping another acidulous expectorant down his throat. In fever, he dreamed and raved, and told me many interesting items about his past that would serve as useful blackmailing tools later. By the end of our joint stay in Valparaiso his new-minted Spanish accent was subject to only occasional lapses that hurt him more than they hurt me.
It came into my mind that I should set him up with some kind of talismanic object, exclusive to him – all the best Venetian quacks had one. It was at this moment I first heard whispers of a book bound in human skin that had been salvaged from a shipwreck at Arica. It was said to have been made from a piece of the hide of Tupac Amaru II, the last Inca rebel, whose executed parts had been divided some twenty-five years before, and then displayed in every crevice of his country as a warning to other troublemakers.
For twenty of my finest ducats the book was mine. My factor in Arica brought it down to Valparaiso swaddled in linen, barely concealing his distaste. Feigning indifference, I waited till I was alone before I ran a thrilling finger over its grey-pink binding, feeling for any hidden slivers of pain. It was cool and hard, revealing nothing. Still.
As a child, I had devoured all the journal reports of Tupac Amaru’s death, and the torture of his wife, and had dreamed of setting up a similar fate for a rabbit during our villeggiatura.They had tried to tear the rebel apart with four horses whipped in different directions – an idea that had inspired in me a very natural desire to experiment. However, I had not been allowed near the valuable horses since I had nailed one of them to the stable floor – so this plan had come to nothing.
I did not dwell on my old bitternesses. I was a happy man that day. I had in my hands that lovely thing that so well combined form and function.
Inside was sewn a cautionary tract about the sorry end of the binding’s owner. I now overpasted the pages with my recipes for the drugs we would make with all the splendid poisons of Peru. On the journey home, I kept the book by me at all times, and frequently laid my hand on it while I talked to people, who surely would have hated to know that they were on parlaying terms with a man who owned a book of human skin.
I changed ships in Ancona on the way back to Venice, to avoid a tedious pause at the lazzaretto and to protect my book from the vinegar and smoky perfumes of the quarantines. I declared myself returned from ‘just a short trip to Puglia’. My father had never thought to be so subtle.
The book of human skin and I were safely home.The juice and grease of my own fingers had already softened that grey-pink binding.
Sor Loreta
After the priora told me that I might not see Sor Sofia any more, I was not quite myself for a period. When I awoke, I was told that I had called out many unsuitable things and spoken blasphemies, as if a demon had been placed inside my body by my enemies.
For some days I floated between barest consciousness and a stupor like death. I felt that the Devil was fighting for my soul with his long green tongue in my ear and his claws touching every part of my body, but from the inside. When I was strong enough, I tried to beat him out.
I damaged my back and thighs so badly that they took away my whip and my cilice. Then, like Speranda of Cingoli, I donned the hide of a pig with the hard bristles turned in against the skin of my waist, until the priora had that removed from my body. So instead I wore a goatskin bound with horsehair cords like Umiliana de’ Cerchi.
Though I begged to be allowed to starve quietly to death, I was ordered to attend the refectory, where I was made to eat a diet of white food that was thought good for cooling heated brains. The nuns around me glutted on bright pimentos, and colourful stews and red apples like the one Eve took from the serpent. They sniggered at my plate of white rice, white bread and a soup of strained breast of chicken. Sor Sofia had been ordered to dine alone in her cell, so as to avoid being seen by me.
I took my chipped bowl (for I still insisted on the humblest vessels) and knelt beneath the table and prayed, ‘Lord, thank You for all the good things you have done for wretched me, deserving only of pity.’
‘Deserving of a good kick,’ laughed Rafaela, the chief of my persecutors, about whom there will be many more grievous things to tell. Rafaela then pushed her foot against my rear under the table. I fell forward into the breast-of-chicken soup with a splash.
Now before I was taken to Santa Catalina, I was entirely naïve. The world’s lust for honours was entirely unknown to me, as was the duplicity of those who profess godliness in order to win themselves glory on earth. Just such evil was manifested at that moment, when Sor Andreola’s voice could be heard above the table saying, ‘Rafaela, pray do not show unkindness to our troubled sister.’
Without my telling them to do so, my teeth sprang into a snarl like a wild animal. For to be saved by Sor Andreola was the worst degradation except for one thing – which was that by a terrible irony the godless Rafaela was the older sister of my own beloved Sor Sofia. As a symbol of her rebellion against God’s design, for Rafaela thought herself too good to be His bride, that girl had refused to take her nun’s title of Sor Águeda, and was universally addressed and spoken of in her old, secular name.
To be mistreated by Sor Sofia’s sister and patronized by Sor Andreola was too much for me. Suddenly the world seemed too cruel a place even for one born to suffer like myself. It was at that moment that I publicly announced a penance that would surely prove fatal. The soup in my nose made my voice sound like bees humming when I told the nuns dining above me: ‘The Lord suffered on the cross without nutritious and refreshing drinks for my sake, and so I do not desire to take any either. Out of reverence for the sponge that was put to His lips, I hereby renounce all liquid except vinegar.’
‘Vinegar face! Suits you!’ Rafaela had no Chri
stian virtue in her, being at all times worldly and irreverent. ‘Do you ever ask yourself, Sor Loreta, what kind of God wants in his marriage bed a grown woman who’s starved herself to look like a spindly child?’
And she took a great bite of alpaca stew, smacking her lips noisily. This cruel mockery was uttered while I maintained the most joyous expression on my soaked face, becoming to one who has seen her way to glory in the arms of God.
Sor Andreola lifted up the tablecloth and peered down at me with a false expression of concern painted on her face. ‘Are you sure, Sor Loreta?’ she asked me. ‘I would be sorry to see you suffer like that. Please take a little water. It will help you think more clearly, I dare say.’
The truth was of course that she would never think of such a good penance. Sor Andreola had not the martyr’s courageous spirit in her. Compared to my own rigour, she was merely flaccid in her faith.
After that I would take no drinks: not tea, tisana or chocolate or soup. I would allow enough water into my mouth to unparch my tongue for prayers and that was all. I sipped the communion wine. Otherwise I drank only vinegar.
Just such a fast had brought several saints to their marriage bed with Christ in less than thirty days.
Gianni delle Boccole
When Minguillo went way the first time, what a joy fell on the ouse, what an idol. My Mistress Donata Fasan, she begun to sing in the mornings. Piero Zen were with us the hole time it seemed, almost niver going back to his homonymouse palazzo. Marcella’s laffter rang out all day long. Twere akshually like a famly, the three o them together round the dinner table. It doed ye a grate big good to see it.
Simple stuff. A smile here, a laff there. Famly love, cheap as dirt, good as gold. And evry day Conte Piero tookt Marcella out in the gondola for a few hours. I dint know scut bout where they went. All I cared were that Marcella returned with roses in her cheeks, with n honest appetite beside.
Marcella’s little personal complaint finely faded way. With the brother gone, we took her out of the leather gear and let her midrift n her twisted leg breathe a space. She jist needed a little crutch for when she were tired. Twere a pleasure to watch her straying bout the courtyard picking flowers. She would make pretty poortrets of our favrit blooms for us servants with our own faces at the heart of each flower. We had to keep reminding her to keep wary of Minguillo’s nasty little patch o poisonus monkshood n foxglove shootin up there blue heads in tericotta pots.
In them balmy days, summing motherly at last woked up inside the breast o the Mamma, what had pratically held a funeral for Marcella as the sweet little girl she formally was. With Minguillo way, with Conte Piero to courage her, I ad hopes o my Mistress Donata Fasan at last. I saw her kiss the top o Marcella’s head onct, and it were like seeing a beautiful sunrise. I was undid.
‘Yes,’ I breathed, ‘learn to love her. Do it so it stays did this time.’
They’s still in a drawer at the Palazzo Espagnol, the drawings Marcella made of her mother them weeks. It were the face she drew for onct, not the more notable hair, and she got her Mamma to the very life.
Minguillo stayed n stayed way. And stayed some more. Bliss, twere. I got to wear my own face all day long, not the stupid one I keeped special for him.
Me, I preyed evry night for a shipwreck or a nice Leprosy or a nasty robber in Chile-Peru. Or a whore with a short temper and a knife under her pillow. There must be one among them, I was thinking, with a bit o gameness to her. Who jist wunt take it no more, Great Cuckold ovva God.
Val-par-eye-ee-so, that’s how ye says it, Valparaiso.
Minguillo Fasan
Ah, lovely Valparaiso, where the girls were poor enough to do anything without whining. Ah, what memories of the rain beating down on tin roofs and walls while I beat down on the flesh of delicious mesdames! Adorable Valparaiso, that might at any moment be shook down by an earthquake, and all eighteen thousand souls living stacked up on her steep quebradas in danger of their lives without cease. The prospect of the deadly temblores put an excitement on everyone at all times. So every wretched hovel was tingling with defiant life.
I had taken up my abode at the house of a Mr French, or so he chose to style himself, where hard-worked beds with haggard curtains were offered behind a baby-pink tin facade.And it was Mr French himself who introduced me to certain Valparaisan ladies, if you can call them that, who could be induced to wear spurs and smoke cigars.Who sat astride on horseback and smelled like low tide after granting me the enjoyment of their persons.
I was sad to leave Valparaiso, yet with my quack trained up in the town’s most famous botica, and the book of human skin in my pocket, my duty lay further north in Arequipa, where my father was expecting me. But my curiosity dragged me north even of that.
So instead of proceeding straight to Arequipa, I purchased a passage on the merchant brig Orpheus, bound for Lima. Landing at Callao, I traversed the miserable nine miles to the capital, where I was enchanted by the local fashion of the saya, a skirt so tight it left nothing and everything to the imagination, and even more so by the manto, a veil tied around the waist and then drawn over the head to expose only one roving eye. It was rampantly the most provocative thing I had ever seen. In Venice, our ladies of the ‘popular’ class wrapped their attractions in their nizioletto, which performed a similar function, but even the Venetians had never been so depraved as to show just one eye.
At first when I saw these one-eyed ladies in their regiments, for they walked about everywhere, I was unbearably excited, thinking that they had been deliberately maimed like this and that the de-eyeing of ladies was an actual profession in Lima, where poverty and humidity kept the cauldron of violence at a constant boil. I was faintly disappointed to unwrap one girl as soon as possible and find the other eye round as a pebble and bright as the sun. Savagely disappointed, so that the girl, though she knew it not, stood in danger of losing that eye on a permanent basis. But I stayed my hand, for her pimp was outside, and larger than myself.
I roamed the Calle de la Cascarilla, Bark Street, spying on the wares of the pharmacies there, taking note of the prices and the purity of the chinchona they were famous for. I negotiated a regular shipment for a sum that I would multiply thirty times when it reached the streets of Venice, though I would be losing ten per cent to the King of Spain, and one per cent to the port, and a greedy tithe to the church when each boat docked at Cadiz.
I was enjoying myself so heartily and profitably that I successfully forgot I was supposed to have stopped first at Islay, and to have made my way to Arequipa, to meet with my father. But while I tarried with my one-eyed honeys in Lima, I received a reproachful letter from the man himself. My father had finally roused himself to show a little interest in the family business, and he was not pleased to hear about my severance from silver. He wanted me to desist from all my new and imaginative apothecary activities. I was ordered straight to Arequipa to account for myself and to stop causing scandals in the ports.
‘This is not a good time for your notions, son,’ my father wrote. His handwriting wandered uncertainly over the page.
The querulous letter was enough to make me book my passage straight home to Venice from Lima, with no stopping at Islay after all. I would not be harangued and lectured like a little boy, not by a man who had secretly disinherited me, and lacked the valour to confront me with his heinousness.
I whistled on the deck as we passed Islay and its mules, waiting to take obedient sons over the mountains to their Papàs. I gave the place the shine of my teeth, and a wave of my lace-ruffled wrist. I doubted if my father would give chase. So I never got to see Arequipa that time, which was a shame in some ways: in Lima I had heard well of it and its small-footed, white-skinned ladies, who never walked anywhere for fear of growing large hoofs.
Fondling Tupac Amaru in my pocket, I thought, What do I care for Arequipa when I have seen Valparaiso?
I was in a hurry to get back to Venice: my ‘Tears of Santa Rosa’ was about to storm a market parched of
beautifying novelties, all the more craved because Napoleon’s insults to Venice were beginning to seem personal.
I had no idea that before too long I would be back and climbing El Misti mountain on my own account. I did not know about the Yellow Fever gnawing through Papà’s parts at its leisure.
The fact was that I had narrowly missed my chance to see my father’s disappointed face one last time.
Marcella Fasan
‘You, you with the face on you, don’t cringe in the corner. Come here in
the light.’
‘She is called Marcella,’ Piero said patiently.
My diary records that in response Cecilia Cornaro dispatched a glance ‘that would have withered a nail ’.
I limped over to her, watching the expressions fleeting across her face: irritation, pleasure, calculation. She took my chin in her hand and turned it none too gently from side to side.
‘From the left, first time,’ she pronounced.
No, she never was kind to me, Cecilia Cornaro. That first day in the studio she was peremptory as only she knew how. I do not believe the word ‘please’ was ever a part of her vocabulary. She swore like a porter. Objects flew across the room. I was grateful to see that, like Piero, she acknowledged my condition yet she treated it as she would a fly in the room; noted the annoyance of the thing and then put it in its puny place and got on with more interesting matters.
At the time I met Cecilia Cornaro I was just beginning to grow towards adulthood, and grappling with the disappointment that grew with my every inch. I mean the disappointment of others in me. It is the natural condition of a little child to be helpless, and to be loved for it. But a helpless adolescent or adult, now that is something different. No one smiles indulgently, no one ruffles hair or coddles, when a grown person limps into a room or rolls in on a wheeled chair.
Cecilia Cornaro simply did not interest herself in charity, forced or otherwise. On my arrival she pointed me towards a chair with a hole in its seat. Beneath its curtained legs was a chamber pot. I blushed to imagine the conversation that must have taken place between her and Piero in order to secure this item. Then I told myself that Piero would have handled it all with ease and delicacy, and that here, after all, was an elegant solution.
The Book of Human Skin Page 13
