The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  No one was laughing at me now. The faces of the other nuns were mutinous and fierce when they beheld me. For, also as a result of my vision, their favourite Sor Andreola was to be sent away to the stricter convent of Santa Rosa, where the nuns slept in tombs to remind them of their fate. Those light nuns of Santa Catalina no longer had their silky white girl to idolatrously worship, and Sor Sofia would no longer be subject to Sor Andreola’s caresses.

  My little Sor Sofia, so long kept apart from me, I ordered to come into my cell now. Even if they had known, no one would have dared to oppose me. Blushing and lowering her long lashes, Sor Sofia humbly congratulated me on my rise in estate.

  And now Sor Sofia admitted that by night I levitated above my bed in my sleep like Douceline of Marseilles. And Sor Sofia agreed that she too saw my stigmata burning on my skin. She was submissive to my every wish, and I caused her to make me happy in more ways than I can write down.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  The valet Gianni from the Palazzo Espagnol saluted me sadly in the street a few months after I tended to the dying Piero Zen.

  I had been outraged but not much surprised to see that the Fasans had successfully suppressed the truth about his death. I had seen enough dynastic poisoning in the great country villas. I knew how these things worked among the noble families: Napoleon might humiliate and rob them, but he would never penetrate their secret codes and their ways of intimidating their servants.

  I longed to ask Gianni what had happened to the girl with the beautiful skin. I hoped that time would erase the piteous image of her murdered friend. I wondered how the childhood injury to her leg had healed, for I had not seen below her waist when my eyes met hers at the window. I wanted to say all that.

  But in what way might a youth barely off the streets ask after a young noble lady in a palazzo? She was no longer a child. I was afraid of impertinent enquiries tumbling incontinently out of my mouth. My face fired up red. Gianni must have thought me a foolish country ass.

  Although I dared not say her name aloud to Gianni, I had been thinking of her constantly, as a naturalist thinks on a new species he has glimpsed. My mind’s doting eye hovered over her, cherished and privileged, living inside that great palazzo.

  I muttered an incoherent greeting to Gianni and rushed off, leaving him mystified in mid-sentence. Only in retrospect did I realize that he had seemed very eager to talk to me, as if there was also something on his mind.

  Minguillo Fasan

  My enemies had grown in ranks like the hairs on an old woman’s wart.

  Yet, like the hairs on an old woman’s wart, they were nothing to keep a body awake at night. The Spanish madam in Cannaregio forbade me her fleabitten girls. So? The family of Piero Zen cut me dead in the street.That was the worst they would dare.They did not want a scandal any more than I did.The servants of the Palazzo Espagnol hated me. Bless their dull little heads. My mother was utterly compliant, depending on my every direction, her maternal love quite divorced from the daughter who had betrayed her. Only the will-thief worried me, and that far less since I had concluded negotiations with the convent of Corpus Domini.

  But now I was about to take on an enemy any man would have to respect: Napoleon Bonaparte himself. A little enemy, to be sure, yet in the case of Napoleon Bonaparte, a little goes a long way.

  As the Retentive Reader will remember, in January 1806, Boney had annexed Venice into his new Kingdom of Italy. It was then that he really stuck his tax tooth into us, rummaging for gold to feed his troops and men to feed the cemeteries of his battlefields in Spain and Portugal.

  The Perceptive Reader will easily imagine how much askance our family’s Spanish connections were regarded at that time. I was forced to come to many adroit accommodations with customers who disdained to buy our Bark of Peru, except at a ‘conscientious’ discount.The tide would turn one day: I noted their names in my records for future conscientious treatments of my own. My prosperity was assured, however. ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ continued to sell in vast quantities, distributed through a discreet network of hairdressers, who were, of course, much in demand, given the anxious times. Publicly, I dissociated myself from the preparation. A nobleman cannot be seen in intimate proximity with his source of pocket money.

  In November 1807, Boney his great self had graced our city for a couple of weeks.We put on a tattered show for him, a regata or two, a stagey arch built over the Canalazzo. The little man was not much interested in the pretty stuff. Napoleon looked at Venice and saw not her caparison of romance and legend but a plate of food from which he had to flick back the frivolous garnish in order to get to the meat.

  Anything that sounded like a secret was anathema to Napoleon. Small men always feel left out, I suppose, forever craning their necks to hear what the big chaps are on about.To Boney, our patrician scuole, which raised cash for art and charity, were a threat.Their doings smacked of clandestine meetings. The well-meaning scuole were dismantled, their paintings and archives carried away. Napoleon spent his time with engineers and builders. He did not soirée or fête the city’s noblest sons, like myself. I supposed that he feared our breeding and elegance would highlight his own congenital inferiority.

  God was another rival that Napoleon would not tolerate. Napoleon found over a hundred churches in Venice and left half as many. (The Reader’s eyebrow twitches with disbelief? We are speaking here of a man who would soon arrest the Pope.) Dismantling our churches, even demolishing them, did not cause little Boney a moment’s reflection. But his last act in Venice was the one that caused me personally the most crucial problem. Boney began to close down the city’s convents. God knows what foments he imagined going on in there to his detriment. But of course, it was Napoleon’s never-ending thirst for liquid assets that truly fuelled their downfall. The cloisters were slowly stripped of every portable valuable: four hundred million francs’ worth, as it turned out.

  When I say ‘valuable’, the women inside those convents were not included in the booty.They were worth nothing.Their families had paid their dowries to God, and Napoleon was now tapping on the stained-glass windows.

  ‘Hand it over, God,’ shrilled little Napoleon. And God knew what was good for him.

  At Corpus Domini the priest turned deaf ears on me when I went to set the date for Marcella’s admission. ‘With the situation so uncertain,’ he said, ‘it would be for the best if you kept your sister safe at home a while longer.’

  I riposted, ‘Then suppose you let me have the dowry back, so that it can also stay safe at home for the interval?’

  The priest peered at me, ‘My son, you’re not looking well. Have you tried a remedy called “The Tears of Santa Rosa”? I’ve heard it cures troubles like your face.’

  Then he jerked a cord and a curtain fell between us. By the time I had fought my way through the waxy yellow silk, he had disappeared.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  As Bonypart begun to put down the convents, I got feroshus excite. Marcella mite yet be saved from the fate Minguillo were desining for her. Evry time another convent closed, I toasted Napoleon down in the kitchen and waited with abated breath for the next one.

  Twere a race to the death. Marcella lookt to be fadin fast. The death of Conte Piero had curved her tiny appetite.With her appetite had gone the funning sketches. And with the funning sketches had gone the laffter. N nearly all the words.

  Not that I knowed what was in her heart them sad days. Since Conte Piero died Marcella ud been shutted up inside herself. She were kind n sweet as ever, but there were summing bout her what seemed to say, ‘Do ye not come too close to me.’

  She dint een look pleased to see me half the time.

  Marcella Fasan

  The hands that had briefly tingled with pastels and oils in Cecilia Cornaro’s studio – they now lay idle. In the months after Piero died, I did not have the heart to draw. I even gave up my diary. I pretended to eat, for Anna and Gianni’s sake, but the skin that the artist had once rejoiced
in soon stretched over my skull like an Egyptian mummy’s. The wits Cecilia had teased, however, remained keen as ever, well hidden behind my downcast eyes and bent neck.

  Minguillo, I had divined, was waiting for Napoleon to go away so he could put me in the convent. My freedom was now staked on Napoleon winning against my brother.

  It was Napoleon’s sweeping cheekbones that rescued me from my apathy: I could not keep my hands still when I thought about them. Finally I reached for my paper and pencil, and began to draw: not just Napoleon, but myself. I drew endings for my story that were different from Minguillo’s plans.

  I had endless privacy for my art. My mother kept sternly away. Anna and Gianni came to me whenever they could, but I gently sent them away on errands that would detain them a long time. It would not be good for them if Minguillo looked in and found them at my side. I would not even confide my fears in them: it was my gift to them to keep their peace of mind safe from such wretched speculations.

  Minguillo Fasan

  The Empathetical Reader can feel my frustration and disgust: how little I liked to be pinched between the ambitions of Boney and the priests, both of whom wanted my money, and neither of whom wanted my sister any more than I did.

  But now two consuming matters called my attention away from this ugly dilemma. One was a dose of a love-disease. The other was my impending marriage.

  La vogia de cagar e de maridarse la vien tuta in t’un momento, we say in Venice: the desire to shit and to marry come upon you suddenly.

  The Startled Reader asks: has yours truly fallen in love?

  Love? Don’t think I don’t know about such things! I had podded my share of females and I was currently in full fling with three girls in Venice, separated by sestieri: always safer.The Indulgent Reader will excuse my mentioning it: I had taken coals in the nethers from one of them, godnobble her, and so the world of so-called love was one I held in odium at that moment.

  Meanwhile, forced to endure a period of chastity until my visible infection healed over, I scratched my itches with my eyes. By which, the Reader shall understand, I set myself to look for a wife by whom I could print the family face on the next generation. If Boney was to do his worst and close Corpus Domini, there had better be a male heir of mine squalling in his cradle to defend the Palazzo Espagnol against Marcella and whomever had stolen the real will.

  I wanted something fat, noble and stupid in the wife line, talented in the smallest of talk and dancing. My thrifty heart longed for a fat and stupid dowry too, to swell my charnel-house of books. And to repair my poor dry-rotting, teetering, creaking Palazzo Espagnol, lumps of which dropped off under my caressing fingers with increasing frequency. (Perhaps the Doting Reader has known this hard love, by which the more you touch, the more you lose? The afflictions of my home’s skin were a torture to me.)

  So. A wife.

  Look at yours truly bent over the parchment! Dipping his quill in the rose-scented ink. While I waited for my scabs to drop off, I set myself up for the romance business, copying out reams of love letters from literature with a space at the top for my bride’s name to be filled in. I commissioned a wooden box for love letters, its lid painted with a flaming heart. It would be my first gift to my new fidanzata.A heart is an overrated piece of equipment in a man, yet even I’ll admit its utility when it comes to yanking a young woman in a useful direction. Not for nothing is this organ shaped like a squeezed handful of blood.

  I commissioned my tailor to exceed all previous amazements. Violet taffeta is regarded with prejudice by many, perhaps because it is cheap. But when one knows how to wear clothes, well, even violet taffeta, eked out with scarlet ribbon, can be sculpted to a cutaway frock-coat that sets off an embroidered waistcoat like a charm. As for myself, I cultivated a great felicity of sideburns, though their reddish hue contrasted with my dark hair, among which I had Signor Fauno conjure me some of those tousled curls that were the acme of fashion at that moment.

  And I consulted my book of human skin for the best potion to get a chosen bride enamoured, and a future wife docile and fertile.

  I cast my eyes around the noble damsels of the city, imagining myself at itch-buttock with each candidate. As it turned out, I did not have to seek far at all for the fortunate recipient of my letters and my drugs. My perfect bride had been growing up all along in the Foscarini palazzo, not far from our own.

  I looked forward to being a married man, I truly did. There’s another amusing little Venetian proverb, perhaps the Reader knows it?

  A bastonar la so dona, se delibara le anime dal purgatorio.

  Beating one’s own wife frees souls in purgatory.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  The poor girl, Amalia Foscarini, she had no idea what were comin to her. In her malignorance she tookt jist six weeks to fall under the barrage of woos what Minguillo pitcht at her. Twere as if she was drugged, she fell that quick.

  Her Ma were a friend of my Mistress Donata Fasan, who neer sayed a word to warn the Contessa Foscarini that she were feedin her daughter to the wolf. But by then my Mistress were thick as sieves with Minguillo, and acted his bidding like she too were havin summing droppered in her soup.

  That Amalia Foscarini, she were handsome – bionda, bianca e grassottella – as we like to say in Venice – blonde, fair n fat, n she were in the money. A pink heart ovva face, with the dearest little double chin, fair brows archin up and eyes almost Slav-like in blueness n upwardturningness. Mozzafiata, breathtaking. More to the point, her sister had jist delivert her fourth, so motherhood runned in the famly as ye mite say.

  And she was stoooooooooopid, Dear Good Little God! Five years at Madame Carlina’s school had left her quite bare o brain. Lovely dancer, tho.

  Our household loved a wedding, jist like evry palazzo. My Mistress tookt her chance to show how fine she mite look and Minguillo corraged her to make a show o herself in moray emrald silk that would sartinly outshine Contessa Foscarini’s well-knowed pink satin.

  But downstairs in the kitchen, as we turned the capons in garlic and crusted the lamb in rosemary-bredcrumb for the betrothal feast, our hearts wernt in it. Felt like twere the bride we was turning on the spit.

  The wedding were a quiet one on account of as Minguillo’s famly were much depleted. By him. The tapeworm hants n huncles of the Palazzo Espagnol dint make an peerance on account o not bein invited. Marcella were still disgreased in her room. She dint een come downstairs, knowin she wernt welcome and would be like the speckter at the feast.

  The bride’s famly was grim-faced. The contrackeds was all signed, but at the last minute some botherin stories had reacht them. We servants had made sure o that. But we ud been too sottile n too late, not darin to be otherwise.

  We have a proverb in Venice:

  La dona che se marida bisogna che la gh’abia do cose:

  boca da porçelo e schena d’asenelo.

  The woman who marries needs two things:

  the mouth ovva pig n the back ovva mule.

  Dint say nothing about the skin ovvan elefant. Should of, for Amalia.

  The bridle night were paneful for the bride, that much were obvious. I saw Minguillo trottin oft towards the bedchamber with that horrid book of humane skin stickin out o his pocket. I could of sworn I saw dents like its corners in the new Contessa’s arm the next day.

  There werent no wedding journey. Minguillo dint have no use for romantic notions like that, and anyway twere more commodius for the begetting busyness to have a wife an yer own bed vailable at all hours. The Contessa’s views dint come into it tall. A week after the wedding the bride alredy had her feelins crusted with the scabs of old wounds. There was hard words atwixt her and her Mamma in the shanozzeree drawing-room, that rang through the whole house. The daughter wanted to quit the Palazzo Espagnol n her obstropilous new usband, n run home to her famly. The Mamma were having none of it.

  ‘You belong to him now,’ Contessa Foscarini screecht. ‘You do what he does. You think what he does. You act as h
e does. What did you think marriage meant? Courtship under the same roof ? Perhaps he’ll go to Peru and die of fever like his father. That’s the only thing to hope for . . . you’ll not come trailing back home to embarrass us!’

  You could see at onct why Chiara Foscarini and Donata Fasan was best friends isn’t it.

  Young Contessa Amalia’s womb were the bit of her what reeked revenge. For she made only daughters in there, to her usband’s spleenful fury. When the first one were delivert he lookt like a weasel eating briars.

  He muckled her looks for that daughter. She could not go out for weeks.

  After that first botched baby, Minguillo made Contessa Amalia eat a hare’s belly dried, and cut into shives, the best his quack could offer for kindling a male child. She retcht on the sour meat. So he had the quack rub the hare bellies to dust for dissolving in drink. Minguillo would go evry night with this glass o dark brown juice to her bedchamber, and the whole house heared her weep each time he opent the door.

  When he were out of the room, she allus reefered to her usband as ‘the Churl’. It wunt oironickle at all. Contessa Amalia dint have that in her. Swear she haint a grain o humour. Twere simple deep-seeded fact, that er usband were a churl, and the girl were too dim to disguise it. If Minguillo heared it, he dint nip it in the butt, but were probly proud of it, for it shone that she were hurting.

  Minguillo Fasan