If the Reader does not relish dismal accounts of Poor Things done in a pungent style, He should not read on.
My wife was instructed to treat Marcella like the eyesore she was, as the zero in the scale of inferiority in our domestic society. I did not have to say it more than once. My dove of a wife was pleasantly stupid yet not too stupid to realize her fortunes and mine lay very snugly alongside one another.
My sister had once been the prettiest thing in our house. Now my wife had taken up that role, filling it splendidly and expensively, to my enormous gratification. I did not go in for friends, but since my nuptials I had discovered the pleasures of ostentatious dinners in my home. There were plenty of noblemen on the watch for an opulent free supper in those reduced days. I was interested to see just how much rich food it took to sicken a spoilt Venetian. More than that, I loved to see the men round my table envying me the wife I had got myself, imagining me alone with her when they had all gone home to their thin spouses or to the women they had to pay for by the hour. I sat through entire dinners too smug to eat, throwing flowers to myself for my choice of a consort.
Look at Amalia’s eyes drifting over men’s faces like a pair of courting kingfishers! Men felt that soft blue glance feather-stroking their cheeks, even if they dared not gaze back. Look at Marcella, if she came to table at all, wasted and wordless, attracting only grimaces of pity. Like the evicted nuns, my sister these days created embarrassment in those who had to face her. Fashions had driven waists further upwards and necklines down lately, but I did not think it necessary to refresh her wardrobe. Her outmoded gowns showed it: what did she know of the world, and of pleasing fashionable chatter? The Modish Reader takes the quip right out of my mouth: not enough to make a snake weep. So my guests averted their eyes, and made speedy and vivacious conversation with their neighbour on the other side.
Marcella sat there, watching the men watching that fine gaudy thing, my wife, and Marcella’s pale face grew pointed and then pointed downwards.
I had not yet succeeded in making her a nun but she had a nun’s face now. All vitality had fled from it and a dim wax had replaced the living flesh of her complexion.
Sor Loreta
At first it was good to be vicaria, for the priora had fallen ill with the dropsy and did not trouble me with any remonstrations or letters to nuns’ uncles that might have me removed from my new position of authority. Instead of showing steadfastness in illness, she took to her bed, so that I became the priora in all but name and was able to start my great task of purification without her interference.
I made many changes to the regime of the convent to bring it back to holy ways. Laughter was no longer heard along the little streets of Santa Catalina. There was no more gossip in the courtyards. The luxurious and sensual sisters were accustomed to grow their hair long and to curl it with perfumed oils. In my first week as vicaria, I ordered all the nuns’ hair cut short, despite their protests. I had the curls made into new wigs for all our plaster and wooden saints.
Instead of tying nuns to the cross once a year on Good Friday, I decreed that it should be done every Friday. Those who had mocked and hurt me the most were the first to feel the midday sun on their faces in the sanctuary, for in disrespecting His most loving daughter they had profaned God Himself. And my sisters afflicted with the itching scabies took their turn next. For what more feeling penance could there be – as I explained to them – than to be prevented from lewd scratching by being tied at all four limbs to the Holy Cross?
And I decided that it was time to take steps against EI Misti, the mountain that impudently stared down on the convent. I had read that in Europe there were those who claimed that the crude lineaments of the mountains were indecent to look upon. I agreed. Therefore I decreed that any nun seen looking up at the mountain should be punished with a long cold bath, for to stare at those untamed crags was surely to indulge in calores.
My head vibrated with plans, particularly for my enemies, who now cowered in their cells, awaiting my judgments. It was only because she was Sor Sofia’s sister that I did not punish the wicked Rafaela hardest of all.
As vicaria, I still waged a ceaseless campaign to make the Holy Fathers see just how unclean was the laughing soul of this Rafaela. But it turned out that Rafaela’s father had endowed the convent with rich tracts of land. The gift was attached to a contract that specified its return if Rafaela were ever to be put out of the convent. To have written such a contract, the man must have known that his wife had lain with Satan to produce this older daughter of hers.
Rafaela drew around herself a tribe of light sisters, notably Margarita, the pharmacy nun, and Rosita, who kept the gate. Wherever Rafaela was, there was laughter and irreverence, most particularly towards myself. Even the priora had a weakness for Rafaela, who was therefore protected from all censure.
But the godless Rafaela had one weakness of her own: the little sister whom she adored, even as I adored her: Sor Sofia, my sweet angel in earthly form.
Gianni delle Boccole
That year 1810 Napoleon Bonypart closed down the convent of Corpus Domini what Minguillo had promist Marcella to. Twere not long afterwards the building were razed to the ground.
That same day Minguillo ordered me n Anna to move Marcella out o her room, for two weeks, he sayed.
‘Too long she has been closeted up in there,’ he hexplained, ‘I am having some men in to freshen it up.’
Then there were bangin n thumpin n the smell o dust n distemper for days on end.
I guest direckly for why Minguillo ud got them artesians in. He were searchin evry crevasse for the bonified will. I wore an oironical smile, for in the last two year Ide been oer evry inch of it alredy myself, lookin for the same thing, and I knowed all the places in the Palazzo Espagnol it twernt, hincludin that one.
Minguillo Fasan
I had no real contingency against the shipwreck of my plans. But, on the very day Napoleon finally kicked my hopes in the teeth, I conceived the seed of an idea, which I now watered with the tears of my mother.
‘Mamma, I fear,’ I opined experimentally one evening, ‘Marcella is not sound in her mind.’
‘No, Marcella has bad moments,’ protested my mother. ‘Sometimes I believe that she is not quite happy.’
‘No, the thing does not function like that. A person is either in or out of her senses.’
Having rubbed a few more subtle reminders of Piero’s alleged preferences in the salt of her wounded pride, I thrust on with, ‘Anyway, Marcella is at least weak-witted. Old Piero must have guessed it, and profited from it.’
My mother swallowed hard. I continued, ‘I have come to understand at last what ails her. Poor Marcella has secretly developed a religious mania. Perhaps it is in compensation for her sins with Piero? Have you observed how she lives a hermit’s life in our midst, as if pretending that the Palazzo Espagnol is a convent? She keeps her eyes downcast like a nun. She never smiles.And have you seen her room lately?’
By careful design my mother had hardly laid eyes upon Marcella or her room since Piero’s death.
‘Come with me,’ I urged.
My men had just finished their work. In Marcella’s room the pretty tapestries had been wrenched off walls that were now distempered white as a convent cell. No will had revealed itself in the process, yet by stripping the room I had been investing in my inheritance in a new way. I showed my mother the prayer stool I had installed, with its little row of sharp pebbles where the knees went. I pointed to the hurtfully thin Jesus crucified above Marcella’s bed. I pulled out the breviary I had placed under her pillow. And finally I leaned into the armoire and dragged out a leather whip laced with nails, which I laid in my mother’s flinching hands so that she might feel her daughter’s penchant.
‘She barely eats, you know?’
‘She is fasting?’ whispered my mother, adding disparagingly, ‘She is dreadfully thin. It really is quite deranged, to wreck what’s left of her looks like this.’
Gianni delle Boccole
It were at that time that Minguillo’s fat quack all ovva suddenly falled from grease. He were discovert at a card game where he had staked the book of his famous apothcry preperashons on a loosing streak.
Minguillo saved the book jist in time. The quack were sent way to the dredful town o Rovigo, ‘for to study and improve himself’, Minguillo telled us.
But Marcella’s health were broke and she needed attendin to. For the first time ever luck went on our side. Minguillo sayed, ‘Go get that doctor then, the cheap one who attended dear old Piero Zen.’
You could see him calkillating: Santo were poor, n so he would be tracterbull. I were oft faster than a ferrate. And Santo followt me like a bullet back to the house.
‘Whatever you see up there, tell me about it first,’ I warned him, pushing Doctor Santo towards the stairs. Minguillo were awaitin up there, so there weren’t time to hexplain nothing more.
Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
My first sight of Minguillo Fasan should have told me everything I needed to know about him. It was not just the lurid clothes or the little panniers of fat on his hips that spoke of a chronic glandular disorder.
Faccia punctata, maggot face, and a smell of iron filings around him.
A persistent inflammation of the sebaceous glands and hair follicles had produced on his face a permanent eruption of hard, conical elevations filled with suety matter.When squeezed out of the skin such matter is emitted in a cylindrical form with the appearance of a small grub or maggot.
Maggot face is caused by enervation, intemperance, sexual abuse and a character that devours itself from the inside, and feeds on all around it.
But Minguillo Fasan was not the patient I had been summoned to attend.
Marcella Fasan
My brother’s shadow fell over my bed. Then the painfully emphatic colours of his frock-coat filled my vision. Anna’s cringing face hovered nearby.
‘We’ve a new doctor for you,’ Minguillo announced. Hearing the light steps on the stairs, I decided that it was best to pretend passivity and a feeble comprehension until I saw what style of a man had been washed in. I had no great hopes, given he had been supplied by Minguillo. I kept my eyes downcast when the light footsteps arrived by my bed.
‘Why is she so thin?’ the doctor asked immediately. His voice was low and sweet, with a slight flavour of the street to it, for all its quiet cleverness. I was certain that he assumed me a servant girl, given my ugly plain chamber and my shabby clothes.
Minguillo said blandly, ‘The damage is self-administered. She is something of a religious fanatic. Young girls, you know how they can be. There’s no accounting . . .’
The young man spoke out unwisely. Even more sharply than for my own pain, I flinched for him when he asked, ‘How can you allow this poor girl to practise such cruelty upon herself ? I cannot believe . . .’
Minguillo’s lip jutted out, ‘Then you cannot be in our employ here, young man.’
I glanced up and saw the boy’s hunger then – his thin face, his fragile wrists, and the hair that hung in home-cut wisps around his face. And then I looked again, with a vein of fire racing from my fingertips to my head, because I knew this young man. This was the same kind youth who had cradled Piero’s head as he lay dying in the courtyard. I had been standing upstairs in the glassed corridor; the young man was a dozen yards below me in the courtyard. He had seen me then – our eyes had locked for a moment just as poor Piero died.
But that was when I was dressed in silk, still rosy from a season of happiness with Cecilia Cornaro. From down in the courtyard he could not have seen my withered leg, my club foot. Now it gave me a strange pain in the heart, like someone clenching a fist in there, to realize that a mere eighteen months later the young man could not possibly recognize that girl at the window in the thing I was now.
All I saw in his face as he examined me was impersonal pity and a professional kindness, overlaid with shock when he discovered the latest shackles and harnesses invented by Doctor Inca for my brother’s pleasure. He said evenly, ‘It is my duty to attend to even self-inflicted illness, of course.’
‘That’s right, young man,’ smiled Minguillo and he pulled a coin out of a crevice in the voluminous old-fashioned frock-coat he affected to hide the increasing oddities of his shape. It was a small coin, yet the young man took it eagerly.
‘May I return tomorrow at the same hour with some poultices and a tonic for her?’ the doctor asked deferentially. ‘I would propose a different treatment from the preceding doctor’s, which, as you can see, has hardly proved effective.’
‘For the second visit we pay one half,’ came the answer.
‘What is she named, my patient?’ the young man asked, acknowledging that the bargain was made.
‘Marcella Fasan,’ he was told.
At this the young man stopped short and his face grew milky-white. I watched him relive his own memory of Piero’s death in our courtyard at the Palazzo Espagnol. Now he lowered his eyes to my face, and traced its ruined outlines.
‘May I . . . May I speak to her mother?’ he asked Minguillo.
Oh, I thought, do not do that. Do not let him think that you care. It shall go badly for you if you do.
Gianni delle Boccole
The poor insent lad left the nobble floor of the Palazzo Espagnol mistificated – the Mamma so passive n disintrested, as if he talkt of someone else’s daughter, the brother unable to hold back a smile that struck Santo as obseen, all the while cadgin extra details of his sister’s poorliness. Twere as if Santo had brought him a present, Great Robber ovva God!
Santo traled down to the courtyard with a heavy burden on his thin shoulders. I think he alredy suspected that he shunt have shone his hand to Minguillo. But he dint nowise want to believe what his insides was telling him. Who would?
I were waiting for him under the portico, where they couldn’t of seed me from the nobble floor. I told him, ‘Ye aint did no good by makin a scene. Minguillo Fasan abdomenates do-gooders and ye’ve only drawn tension to yerself that could een be dangerous for ye.’
Then I finely told Santo zackly persay how Marcella had come bout her twisted leg – tho turned out o course that he knewed all bout that alredy. So I told him about the scene what had led to Piero Zen’s murder, what ud appened to Marcella’s poor sister Riva, and many other facts that dirted the histry o the Palazzo Espagnol.
‘Why do you not go to the magistrates?’ he askt, all wild bout the eyes.
‘Would t’other nobbles listen to a servant runnin tales agin his Master? More likely twould be the likes of us clapt in prison or the madhouse for slander.’
‘I’ll not abandon her,’ he swore. Then he worrit, ‘She’ll think I am with her brother, just another false doctor come to torture her. But there’s no help for it.’ He swallowed like a fish, and breathed in deeply. His poor thin neck was scarlet-red with caring.
Then a russle in the flowers made our hairs stand on there ends. Twere not safe to talk unristrained like this inside the Palazzo Espagnol where Minguillo mite come creeplin up pon us. We ranged to meet reglar at the ostaria in the Calle delle Boteghe, so that he could give me reports on Marcella’s progress. Twere easy to draw him out. The boy ate so little that he was mock-eyed and shaggy-tonged on a glass o rough red. Poor, he was, poor as pauper soup. Out o my own stipend I stood him a plate o food when I were able.
And so I learned his story, which were the sorryest kind. He had niver sat at a table with a famly to fill it. No mother, no father, no sister nor brother. No woman neither, for the boy had not yet loved. He perhaps loved his patients, skin by skin, but no one ud ever loved him back. He dint know how it were did, that.
He talkt o the poltisses n affusions he compost for Marcella, o the healthful flush on her
skin when he fed her some nowrishing broth. But course the reports that I truely gathert in the fuggy glum of that ostaria were about the progress of Santo’s newborned love for my little Mistress, how it had bloomed from its first moment o life, when their eyes met in the courtyard as poor Conte Piero died. And how it grewed now that he saw her evry day, and had it in his hands to make her live, tho the prospecked of her death were the chapel o her brother’s eye.
Marcella Fasan
My diaries recommenced. The first thing I wrote was this: ‘The doctor Santo Aldobrandini now attends me. I suppose Minguillo keeps him on because he is cheap and near.’
When Doctor Santo smiled for the first time, not just with his lips but with his brown eyes, I wrote that they were in fact ‘brunneous, burnet, castaneous, castory, sepia and sorrel, with a pure white highlight like the fleeting wing of an egret glimpsed in the evening waters of the lagoon ’.
Sor Loreta
The old priora passed from this miserable life. Given my many good works, I expected to be promoted to her post by the Fathers. But they did not intervene in my favour this time. I supposed that some uncles had been set to persuading them. A new priora was voted in by the wilful council of the nuns.
This new priora was the worst we had yet known. My quill is not able to describe her virtues because they were so few. Also, she was already of middling years. Those who grow old sinning have more evil-doing on their conscience than those who have not been in the world long enough to ripen in their wickedness. With the election of Madre Mónica there began a period of outrageous frivolity in our convent. All this sister cared for was the music of a godless Italian named Rossini.
That woman spent four thousand francs of convent funds on a piano and printed sheet music, so that this Rossini’s lewd melodies might reverberate among us and thrum on the tender strings of young girls’ hearts at all hours of the day and night. The morning the piano arrived the whole of Santa Catalina was plunged into an Italian bacchanalia. Under the windows of certain nuns, I smelled the fumes of cigarillos. I wept that our earthly Mother should lead the daughters of God’s house into luxury, vulgarity and even tobacco.
The Book of Human Skin Page 19
