With the Conte’s head craydelled on his lap, Doctor Santo lookt up n around our courtyard, as if to unnerstand what kind o place could host sich wickedness. I saw him take it in, that there were money here, and so secrets n shelter for highborned inabitants who committed bad acts jist as they pleased within them walls. His glance falled on Minguillo’s little potted plantashon of monkshood and foxglove, and jolted his head.
Save us, that’s when I saw it appen. I saw his gentle brown eyes flitter oer the trees n the vines and up to the window where Marcella stood, aghasted, leaking tears like milk agin the pane.
She ud witnesst the whole thing.
And I saw it, that first meeting of there gazes, that sting of knowing, jist knowing, while Conte Piero’s last breaths rattled in his ribs.
Twere naught for the naked eye to see. But if a foaming challis ud been carrid in procession and delivert to the young man, it could not of been clearer to me, watching with abated breath. Piero Zen, to my mind, had jist handed oer the protecting of Marcella Fasan to this young doctor Santo Aldobrandini.
And Marcella – why she set the house on fire for him! The boy were ravaged at the sight of her. I bethought, Please God, yer man Santo will rise from his sackcloth n ashes, and he will be the one to save her n sweep her oft her feet.
Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
There was nothing to be done with poor Conte Zen. I gave him the tenderness of gentle hands upon him as he flailed out of this world and a kind voice uttering the sweet nursery wisdoms (or so I assumed, never having known them) such as ‘there now’ and ‘all shall be well’.
Piero Zen struggled against his death. His was the kind of wound that makes it a cruelty to own a human skin. The poison literally ate his flesh from the inside. It would have been a mercy for the life to ebb out of him on a fast tide, yet he seemed unwilling to depart. His dimming eyes kept staring up towards the second noble floor, where the bedchambers were.There was someone in the Palazzo Espagnol he cared for too much to leave.
I did the last good service a doctor can perform for a patient. I told him that it was honourable to die now, that he had no more need to battle heroically against death. He looked into my eyes, gazed upwards one last time, and his body fell slack. As I closed his eyes, and held my hand over them for a moment, my own travelled up to the place his gaze had sought.
There, in the window, was the same girl with the skin that had made me lose all sense in the frescoed hall of the villa by the Brenta Canal. Her hair hung dishevelled around that face with the luminous sheen to it. The years had carved more beauty out of her cheekbones, lifted her eyebrows delicately, filled her lips. My tongue hung drily in my mouth with shock, for that face had never left my heart.
Marcella Fasan
There was a young doctor who came to attend to Piero. When I saw that youth, there came into my breast that same soft commotion that you feel when a bird takes flight very close to you.
Then I saw the blood darkening the flagstones under Piero’s shoulders. A Dominican priest scuttled into the courtyard. I thought he had come to minister to Piero, yet he hurried past my friend’s body with the merest grimace, and into the palazzo. I heard Minguillo shout a happy greeting.
I slumped down on the floor, where I stayed until Anna and Gianni came to find me. I was lost in bitter self-recriminations. As the last seconds of Piero’s life sped away, I had gabbled ineffectually about Cecilia Cornaro. I could have opened a drawer and flourished my precocious sketches of my mother’s face as tangible evidence. I could have sent Gianni running to fetch Cecilia. I could have screamed and wept, perhaps delaying Minguillo’s plans long enough for Piero to be got safely out of the Palazzo Espagnol. I could have thrown my body in front of Piero’s. Surely even Minguillo would not have dared to run me through in front of all the servants?
But I had done none of those things. And now my dearest friend was dead.
Anna put her arms around me and crushed me to her breast. Gianni mumbled comforting lies into my hair about ‘dint feel a thing’ and ‘twas that quick’.
I gently pushed both of them away from me.
Minguillo had killed more than Piero. I had just seen what might happen to a person to whom I gave my full confidence, and who defended me: Minguillo had made it fatal. Now I would need to divide myself even in the presence of Anna and Gianni, to protect them from my brother’s interested eye.
Sor Loreta
The doctor made me look towards a bright light and describe my angels.
He sighed and turned to the priora, as if it was not worth talking to me, ‘We call them Muscae volitantes, sun-spots. The appearance of floating Muscae indicates a morbid sensibility of the retina, often caused by insufficient sleep and deranged digestion. From her wasted state, I presume the sister has been fasting? A normal person barely notices the phenomenon. However, a hypochondriacal or hysterical patient, having once detected the Muscae, takes such frequent notice of them that they become the subject of great anxiety.’
‘But I love them! They are my angels!’ I interjected.
‘They are not angels, do you not understand?’ hissed the priora.
The doctor said, ‘These ocular spectres are real enough to the sister. In order to prevent further distress I shall send a pair of blue glass spectacles that she must wear during all the hours of brightness.’
The priora muttered, ‘She’ll love that, another thing to mark her out!’
In my blue spectacles, the world was suffused with the azure of God’s Heaven specially for me. There were bad days, however, when it seemed to me as if God had sent a second flood to drown the worldly sins of Santa Catalina.
There were more and more bad days, for the priora betrayed my trust in a most outrageous manner. Even though I agreed to take food and drink, the presence of Sor Sofia continued to be denied to me. I glimpsed her only at the far end of the church or in the distance. Her eyes were always lowered. Sor Andreola fluttered around her, touching her every now and then, quite unnecessarily, with her flat white hands.
In my hornacina I kept a plaster statue of Our Lord as an infant in the manger. By God’s design I was powerfully attracted to it, feeling great desire to hold it and kiss it, especially since I no longer had Sor Sofia to come to my cell. The Lord Himself graciously requested me to follow my desires. One night, after I had scourged myself and lay prostrate and bleeding upon the floor, I heard His words in my right ear. He spoke in a little lisping child’s voice. ‘My most beloved Daughter, I am but a Babe for you to tend. You must love Me and suckle Me on your love.’
Christina the Astonishing had been able to squeeze milk from her virgin breast. And when Veronica Giuliani had put an icon of the Madonna and Child to her bosom, the painted Baby Jesus had turned his mouth towards her, choosing the saint to suck upon instead of His own Mother.
So I took my little Jesus out of His crib and undid my habit and laid Him on my naked breast to drink of my love. The cool lips of the Infant had no sooner touched my skin than I began to feel a fire coursing through me. All the members of my body tingled with delight and the taste of warm honey flooded into my mouth. I was filled up with His Love for me, for He urged me to partake of His divine essence, just as He partook of mine. I knew then that I had the most potent Grace in the Lord God.
I cried out, ‘Blessed are the teats that give You suck, oh Lord!’
Yet as I lay with God at my bosom, and my soul transported to another place, an impudent criada, without knocking, burst open the door to my cell on the pretext of delivering my clean habit for the next day. She observed Jesus at my naked breast and clapped her hands over her mouth.
Gianni delle Boccole
I found the convent contracked on his desk, sittin there out loud for anyone to read it. There were a little chit aside it what froze my heart. It sayed ‘Dowry paid, date of admission to be named.’
Minguillo ud promist Marcella to the dogfaced Dominicans, and the most remote n nastiest convent, Corpus Domini, right a
t the nethers o the town.
Marcella, marrid to God?
As I unnerstands it, all nuns is marrid to Jesus who is the sacrifishal Lamb. There’s a little bit of Lamb in each communion waver n in evry drop of conserkrated wine. It aint in there till the priest mumbles oer the wavers n wine. Tis jist reglar provender. Then all ovva suddenly tis the bodynblood o God.
The nuns fast so that they eat there husband the Lamb n nought else. Some on them beat on thereselves with whips.
Then I dunt recall no partickeler moment in the Bible when Jesus beated on hisself. As for eating, seems to me Our Lord were allus having suppers round bout and een congering extra food out o nothing so there were plenty o good eating for all isn’t it.
My poor head went a-spinnin like the empty toy tis. It allus come back to the same dredful thing. If I haint lossed the will, this would niver be appening. And now, with Piero Zen dead, and my Mistress a puppet on the son’s strings, there wernt no one to tell anyways.
At leastwise, I bethought, Marcella dint know what her brother were up to with Jesus n the Lamb. There were a tiny mercy in that. She mite stay at piece a little longer.
Marcella Fasan
That night I wrote in my diary, ‘There is only one reason why Piero is dead. He’s been sacrificed. Minguillo means to put me in a convent. By his successful slander of myself and Piero, he has won my mother’s complicity in anything he does. He has met with the priest. He will bury me alive, for I have stubbornly refused all these years to die.’
Just weeks before, I had heard Cecilia Cornaro speak disparagingly of nuns to our Scots friend Hamish Gilfeather, who had visited us on a daily basis during the several weeks he spent in Venice. He was not turned away. He was still trying to persuade Cecilia to go to Scotland and she was still enjoying that. Meanwhile, Piero and Mr Gilfeather had taken to one another in a warm instant. How the kind Scot would grieve to hear what had passed when he next returned to Venice. My mind winced away from the thought and back to that happy paint-flecked day in the studio.
‘Nuns! I don’t paint ’em,’ Cecilia had frowned. ‘You’re not supposed to, not till they’re dead. Yet how does anyone tell the difference? We inhabit a world of superb variety. No two flowers are identical. Nor should they be. But in the convent, all things are mashed into a forced sameness. The women are made to live together, dress the same, eat the same, crop their hair the same. It’s against nature, and who can be surprised when misery and unnatural practices result?’
‘Cecilia!’ Piero gave a warning look in my direction.
Hamish Gilfeather had added his mellifluous growl, ‘How can a wee girlie be the bride of Christ? He is her daddy too! Christ has no sex, or he is all sexes. How does that work, practically speaking? His brides are innumerable, yet I hear no one denouncing the fellow for bigamy or incest. ’Tis surely a cruel hoax to marry innocent little females off to an incestuous hermaphrodite, a perversion of everything that should be associated wi pure young lasses!’
‘How we shall miss you, Hamish,’ Cecilia had declared when she stopped laughing. ‘Must you really leave?’
‘If you continue to refuse to paint my Sarah, I must go and glut myself upon her lovely living image.’
‘Godspeed,’ Piero had bid him gently. ‘You leave tomorrow?’
‘Aye.’
I wept at my memory of the two men embracing, and Cecilia’s unusually soft eye wishing Hamish well. I scribbled bitterly in my diary, ‘God is surely more wicked than anything Piero was dishonestly accused of .’
My mother would not enter my room, so I asked Anna to take a note to her.
‘Please let me explain, Mamma,’ I pleaded. ‘It is not at all as you think.’
That note went unanswered.
I could guess how Minguillo had worked upon my mother’s credulity, scraped at her vanity and poured acidulous insinuation into cavities where it was most likely to corrode. She probably believed that Piero would have survived the duel if he had been truly innocent. And if Piero was not innocent in her eyes – then neither was I. My mother was Minguillo’s creature through and through now.
I sent another note. If she could not bring herself to see me, I begged her to call on the artist herself. ‘Cecilia will explain, Mamma, I promise!’
But my mother refused to be contaminated by the world that had seemingly betrayed her. Piero had been convicted of unsuitable relations not just with me but with Cecilia Cornaro herself. I could not deny it, when my mother appeared in my doorway to ask just one barbed question in a tight voice: whether the artist and the cicisbeo had been ‘close friends’.
My quiet ‘yes’ was enough for her. It was a trap. For Cecilia Cornaro’s florid reputation sealed Piero’s in dishonour.
‘Please, Mamma,’ I repeated, ‘if you will not go to her, then ask Cecilia to come to the Palazzo Espagnol.’
My mother shook her head silently, and gave a warning look to Anna. ‘That name shall not be uttered in this house,’ she pronounced with uncharacteristic firmness. ‘Your brother has decreed it.’
Minguillo appeared, grinning, at her side. I guessed he had been listening to the whole exchange.
‘Dear Mamma!’ he simpered, and kissed her hand. They disappeared down the corridor together.
Cecilia Cornaro, I agonized, must have heard of Piero’s death, officially described as an unusual colonial malady that had overleapt the quarantines around Venice to claim a solitary victim. Anna told me that all the servants at the Palazzo Espagnol had been subjected to the most violent and true-seeming threats from Minguillo, to ensure they did not gainsay that story.
Of course I hoped that Cecilia Cornaro would miss me, make enquiries about me; that she would come in search of me, even. When she did not, I told myself that perhaps she would not wish to lay eyes on me, because I would remind her painfully of her lost friend Piero? Perhaps, I tormented myself, she believed me somehow implicated in his death? That my family had contaminated him with some disease imported from their holdings in Peru? That I might limp back into her studio with the same sickness as my returning gift?
A sad insight asserted itself. Better she does not know the truth. If she came here to take up my part, she would get hurt. As Anna was hurt. As Piero was hurt.
What I did not know then was that Cecilia had already left Venice on an expedition to the Low Countries. Her departure had been abrupt, within a day of Piero’s murder. She had always boasted that she did not maintain ties of amity or gossip with Venice when she undertook one of her expeditions to foreign parts.
So she would hear nothing of what was to happen to me next.
Sor Loreta
The story of the Baby Jesus at my bare breast was spread around the convent by the impudent criada. For weeks afterwards, nuns passing outside my window made loud sucking sounds followed by snorts of vulgar laughter. They laughed uproariously when I entered the refectory. Sniggers followed me down all the little streets of the convent, and into the confessional and waited for me outside it. I knew it then: God’s will would not be done until all the wickedly irreverent hilarity at Santa Catalina had been put an end to.
It soon pleased the Lord to reward my suffering. As if in answer to the disrespecting nuns, He sent a new challenge for me to contend with, to prove my purity and my perfect faith.
There was one priest who turned a lecherous eye on me, notwithstanding my damaged face, my blue spectacles and my walk made ungainly by the blisters of my penances. Indeed, perhaps it was my body so deeply marked by its devotions that inspired him to try to steal Christ’s most worthy bride. This wicked priest made every effort to find me alone at my worship on the church floor, and to draw me out into unwise speech about myself, about the light nuns, about my scourging, about the death of Tupac Amaru II, but most especially about Sor Sofia.
My own pure state had given me a special gift to detect and excoriate impurity in others. As I described my pure love of Sor Sofia and the things we used to do together, the priest’s breathing qui
ckened and he began to shift his position on the pew. He asked eagerly, ‘So with Sor Sofia you studied and practised all the arts of how best to please your Bridegroom on your wedding night in Heaven?’
God sent a scorpion to walk across the stone flags just in front of my nose then. So I became aware of this priest’s foul intentions and the lust in his heart. I feared for my virginity. And so I refused to give him obedience, ignoring the tiny penances he set for me and choosing my own superior ones.
In the rapture of communion the next Sunday, I had a vision (behind my closed eyes) of this priest holding the Host with bloodied hands and poking a black tongue out of his mouth at the effigy of the Lord. Beside him Sor Andreola, fat and naked, writhed like a bacchante. The chalice that held the communion wine foamed over with green liquid.
I was jubilant. My gifts had enabled me to distinguish a false Host from a real one. Just such a miracle – of detecting a false Host – had previously befallen several saints, including Lidwina of Schiedam, Margherita of Cortona and Joan the Meatless of Norwich, who had fasted for fifteen years. So I knew myself to be especially holy, to have received this vision after just fifteen days of my most recent fast!
I started to my feet in the middle of the service and cried out: ‘Do not drink from the chalice! This man has contaminated the Host with his corrupt hands! Have you not seen how he gnashes his teeth at the mention of Our Saviour’s name?’ until I fainted away, but not before I had pointed at the priest and cried out, ‘He wished to defile me!’
I nearly forgot to mention that my actual last words were, ‘Sor Andreola! See how she dances lasciviously with the Devil!’
Afterwards an investigation was made and it was discovered that this priest had in fact lured many young girls of his parish into sin, and he was dismissed from the service of the Lord and excommunicated. I was called to an interview with two priests in the priora’s oficina. They told me that as a result of my holy vision (and the five young pregnant girls of Arequipa who confirmed its truth) the nuns’ wishes were for once to be overruled and I was to be made not just a council member but the vicaria, second only in power to the priora herself. Behind the priests, the priora’s eyes flashed with ungodly hatred for me and for them. I heard her growl, ‘This is madness.’
The Book of Human Skin Page 17
