The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘Take her back to her room on the instant,’ I thundered.

  Then I had the puzzled doctor footman-ed from the empty parlour to my study, whereupon I pulled together a very choice specimen of a righteous rage.

  ‘How dare you?’ I hissed. ‘A beggar at my door, practically.’

  I told his confused and frightened face that I had caught him looking at my wife.

  ‘Nobody likes a lecher, and a parasitic lecher is very upsetting for everyone. It ill behoves you to take my food and money if you’re actually after something more substantial,’ I told him, indicating overflowing feminine breasts and hips with economic movements of my hands. ‘You shame yourself with vain delusions.You spit on my hospitality. And as a doctor, you are a complete fraud. I detect no improvement in my poor sister’s condition, which is not surprising, given your attention is evidently elsewhere.’

  The doctor stuttered, ‘This is a fantasy, you lose the run of yourself, sir . . .’

  I had a bowl of sausage stew on my desk that I had ordered up especially for this moment. I threw it over him. ‘My food does not look so appetizing when you’re wearing it on your shirt, does it?’

  He gasped, giving me the disbelieving look of a beaten dog who had thought himself in good domestic odour.

  ‘Begone from my household.You shall also depart from Venice altogether. I shall be having words with the Magistrato alla Sanità.You and your shoddy services shall not be welcome anywhere in good society now.’

  He flushed to the roots of his baby-fine angel-blond hair and continued to stammer in an agitated manner. ‘Your wife is nothing to me! And you must stop with the production of “The Tears of Santa Rosa”. People will get sick.’

  At this I admit I was taken aback. How did he know that I was the source of the Tears? And how did he know how bad it was? The safest course was to return to the high moral ground. ‘You contradict me? You dare to deny what the whole world knows, having seen you devouring my wife with your eyes?’

  ‘You are an . . . an evil person,’ he whispered.

  Within a day of finding the letter, Marcella had turned her head against the wall and started playing dead. She stopped eating. She did not speak. Her breathing was so slight as to be undetectable.

  Remarkably few die of disappointed love, however, so there was still work to be done. I marched into her room without knocking.

  ‘This moping and starving and staring at the wall,’ I remarked in that free and easy way I have, ‘this is the behaviour of a madwoman.’

  Marcella Fasan

  I buried the hurt deep in my heart like a dagger blade. It would take years for that dagger to be pulled out, and for me to live again without a sear of grief that cut me with each breath.

  I refused to drag Gianni or Anna into that abyss with me. I would not put them in danger of knowing the truth of what I had felt for Santo, and nor would I burden their loving compassion with my anguish.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Santo were very shook-looking when he come out o Minguillo’s study. He were still dripping with stew. At first, I bethought he had been poisont, and vomited on hisself. Then I recognized the stew, as we ud had it for luncheon downstairs. I was reliefed for it had been holesome.

  I fetcht a damp rag and expunged the worst oft, tender as a nussmaid. He stood still, shockt like a little child betraid.

  He told me, ‘I’ve been tricked, but I don’t know how.’

  He could not meet my eyes. I bethought, Also umiliated, and made to see the side of Minguillo Fasan that would chill a walrus to the bone, Great Beast ovva God!

  He told me his story, and I filled in the missing parts.

  He moaned, ‘The worst of it is . . . he’s sure to have told Marcella. She will think horribly of me. She will think me a goat . . .’

  I told him I would hexplain the terrible lie, I would smooth it out with Marcella.

  ‘If she believes you. Even if she does, I cannot enter this place again. Conte Fasan has forbidden me.’

  ‘Then we’ll jist make Marcella well nuff to leave!’

  Until this moment I haint niver spoke o the feelins atwixt them. Twere summing too delicate to bring to the light. Summing that nestled in the soft darkness, bit by bit growing stronger, though not yet ready to fly.

  Scant years back, that Santo were o the street and that Marcella o the highest birth would of been a problem to confront. But Napoleon ud dug up the trenches atwixt the nobbles and the common people and had his eyes set on the space atwixt man n God now! – And anyway this was desprit times at the Palazzo Espagnol. So I sayed, ‘I believe if ye want it, she will finely come to ye. And if she does, ye will have to look after her. Her brother will not take her back.’

  Santo started like an affrighted moth. Yet I saw hope in his face. I pressed his nice-shaped hand. There wernt no more to be sayed, Dear Good Little God.

  Minguillo Fasan

  ‘You know, my sister is demented? Her religious obsession was merely a veil for her true malady – the ninfomania. She should not be permitted to dwell among decent, sane people.’

  That very afternoon I rehearsed this opinion on my wife, who barely raised her lovely blank eyes from the card table. I saw a rare understanding there. I touched the silk of her dress, a moss green with sleeves puffed up like cats’ heads. She recoiled and murmured like the dove of a wife she had better be, ‘Whatever you think best, dearest.’

  I thought, There are emeralds in this for you, my dove.

  I went to my mother’s room. And I proceeded to inform her about Marcella’s lamentable love affair, using my imagination and my vocabulary to their fullest extents, which is to say much. I portrayed the affair as a logical continuation of the youthful depravity spawned and enjoyed by Piero. My mother quivered at my plain speech. She flinched at the commonness of the young doctor, at his presuming to lust after my own wife while goading Marcella’s weakness into a new outbreak of obscenity.Then she lowered her gaze modestly, as she always did when she sacrificed Marcella, and told me that I was the head of the household now.

  ‘Ninfomania,’ I sighed loudly. ‘The shame of it.’

  All this time Signor Fauno the hairdresser had his head bent over my mother’s curls, his great ear swallowing up all this information on a direct route to his great loose mouth. My sister’s descent into the most sordid form of madness would be disseminated in every noble household on the Grand Canal by the next day’s evening.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Twere one thing to tell Santo that I knowed how things lay atwixt em. With Marcella I had to walk een more light. Since Conte Zen were took from us, I had volenteert to carry her upndown the stairs wheniver twere needed. On the way down to dinner that sore day, I wispered into her neck, ‘Miss Marcella, ye dunt have to stay here. If ye dunt mind not to live in splendour with grand fixins, n I think ye would not mind not to, then ye has a choice.’

  She turned a confust face to me. There were summing gone from her eyes.

  ‘Doctor Santo – I appen to know . . .’ I besot.

  ‘I cannot eat tonight.’ Her two eyes froze in misery – that were her response to my menshon o Santo’s name.

  ‘Gianni, please take me back to my room,’ she askt.

  She sayed nothing more while I returned up the stairs. I layed her gently on the bed. She lookt at the wall with a face white as if carved out of whacks. I tried agin, ‘Taint true, what you think bout Santo, ye is under a mistake. Santo would do anything for ye, Miss Marcella. Anything.’

  Her voice were cold like the grey water at the bottom ovva well, ‘My brother says I am to have a new kind of treatment.’

  ‘Yer brother! Yer playing into yer brother’s hands,’ I told her, bold as a child, for I was affrighted at this change in her. ‘How can ye think he is looking out for ye? Now Santo . . . he’s more n willing . . .’

  I could not find the words, damn my clotted tong, to do the Cupid. I bethought I would jist need to throw a little rope, and that the br
idge atwixt them would be built from all them feelins nussed so strong n secret all this time. But Marcella dint hold out her hand for the rope, and I wernt ready not to be helped by her.

  Marcella lookt at that wall, like it was the tablet o the Ten Commandments, and each one of em was carved in ice and sayed ‘Thou Shalt Not Be Loved’.

  Then Anna put her poor scarred head round the door and baconed me with her hand.

  Outside she wailed, ‘Minguillo has just put out such a dreadful story to the Mistress!’

  Minguillo Fasan

  We call it the Archipelago delle Malattie, the Archipelago of Maladies, the cluster of islands that curves around Venice like a shield. It is, in fact, a shield, which keeps the city pure of taint, bodily and spiritual.There is Santa Maria della Grazia for infectious diseases, San Lazzaro for Leprosy, the Lazzaretti, Nuovo and Vecchio, for the Plague. And finally, San Servolo, the island of the Mad.

  Fortunately for me, the island of San Servolo had a faintly Iberian history that mirrored my own. Its denizens were lately i reduci, soldiers who were less than they were, having given a limb or two for their country. They were cared for by the Fatebenefratelli, the doing-good-Brothers, originally from Portugal. The Brothers were great herbalists, and respectful friends of our family. My father had cannily endowed the elegant new pharmacy on the island in 1790, so he might keep it supplied with the Bark of Peru. By then the island already had its own bloodstained operating slab, its bottled brains and marinated foetuses. San Servolo enjoyed the gruesome honour of being second only to Paris as a surgery for the amputation of limbs and the treatment of syphilis.

  There were other patients. Even before Napoleon came to craze us, San Servolo had started to accept certain bad seeds from noble families, sons and daughters whose behaviour might bring down a scandal. The mists of the lagoon closed over these blue-blooded gibberers, the ‘dozzinanti’, forgivingly and forgettingly.

  The island was large; the accommodations generous. San Servolo flourished as a lunatickery. Soon even pazzi of the plebeian classes were swallowed up into its gardens and corridors. The ‘furious’ lunatics were confined where no one in town could hear them screaming. San Servolo came to be the home of everything that Venice did not wish to hear, smell or see – the epileptics, the congenital idiots, the raving lunatics, the deficients, the feeble-minded, the moral defectives and the women.

  Of course, the Informed Reader knows that all women are potentially mad because of the rambunctious organ in their bodies most conveniently reached by the wound between their legs. For the women who defied their husbands or indulged in sexual over-enthusiasm there had bloomed a picturesque vocabulary – ninfomania, erotomania, furore in utero, dissolutezza et pretty cetera and so sweetly forth. Ladies of these uterine persuasions were quickly and discreetly dispatched across the water to San Servolo.

  There was another motive to scoop the cocksmitten lady lunatics out of Venice. The great thing was to stop them copulating and breeding, and passing on their vileness. A madwoman contaminates everyone, even her own offspring, who feed on her mad blood in the womb, and who drink her mad milk from the teat.

  The Reader taxes me with the sin of garrulity? Requests a change of subject more pertaining to our plot? Why so very much information on lunatics, all written so very sanely?

  The Reader’s opinion on the matter passes me by as does the idle wind.

  For there was a good reason why I knew so much about San Servolo. The Retentive Reader will be bristling importantly now because He’s just recollected that moment, years ago, when I intercepted a letter from my father, proposing to send me exactly there for an examination of the brain. In later letters, I discovered he had even considered having me confined on the island, and had conducted researches into the process. But my mother, it appeared, had always dissuaded him.

  Before Boney, disposal of an afflicted relative would have taken a little subtle business with my father’s noble peers on the Council of Ten. But ‘Il Regno’ had smashed that up. Now gentlemen could no longer simply confine wives or sisters at will. Petty officers of citizen class might dip their lugubrious noses into our matters, and even prevent us. Damnably, I needed to research all the excruciating detail of all the new paperwork created by the shifting sands of state.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  I rusht from one t’other for some days, trying to prop the failing hopes of Santo, trying to open up the closed n bitter one-words of Marcella.

  ‘What makes her all ovva suddenly believe the brother? What wunt tell the truth to save his life from dying?’ I lamented to Anna. ‘But not the folks she has trusted her hole life?’

  I wernt halfway to workin out this mistery when Minguillo acted on his threat agin Santo. The Magistrate of the Sanity, or leastwise there blue-blood patrons, had growed awares of Santo and not in a good way. One of there number come to Santo’s rooms with a pair o thugs, and ordered the boy to quit Venice, ‘Or it will not go well for ye.’

  The thugs staid ahind to tell Santo, ‘If it comes to our tension that yer spreading slanders bout a skin liquor called “The Tears of Santa Rosa”, no matter where ye are, we shall find ye and put yer head in a bucket of it for a very long time.’

  I found Santo staring miserably at his shabby bag like it held a bad secret. He talkt wildly o stayin and defyin Minguillo, but when he told me of his visitors and there threatenings, I sayed sternly, ‘Twould be sartin death for ye to stay,’ for I knowed them partikeler thugs from his describing. Santo must assolutely get out o Venice now them dogs ud got thesselves a sniff of him. Anyways the Sanity wunt let im practise his trade no more in the town.

  ‘Where will ye go?’

  ‘To one of the monasteries where they still practise medicine. I can learn and help with their patients. Padua, perhaps. Treviso. Somewhere beyond the influence of Conte Fasan, I hope.’

  ‘And my young Mistress?’ I pleaded.

  ‘Does she think kindly on me again? How does she look when you mention my name?’

  I had to shake my head. ‘But Santo, for why let Minguillo Fasan win eh?’

  ‘The brother started this devilment, but it is Marcella who now distrusts and despises me. It is Marcella who is hurt. How can I force . . . myself upon her when her confidence in me is shattered? I must find a way to prove my . . . feelings to her. And anyway, even if she could believe in me again . . . I have nothing to offer her except my devotion.’

  He used that dry word ‘devotion’ yet what he meaned was ‘adooring love’.

  I longed to tell Santo about the bonified will then. But how could I? Would of lookt as if I was using Marcella’s riotous fortune to tempt him to stay in Venice where he would sure as Sunday get killt. To dangle the will in front o him now, well, it would of insalted him, would of been tantymound to callin him a fortune-hunter. And then o course there were the small matter of I still dint know zackly persay where it twas.

  I went to Marcella again. She were looking at the wall. Alredy she seemed thinner than a new moon agin.

  ‘Santo swears ’tis a lie. Swears.’

  She lookt at me with one small spark of hope flowring in her eyes. Then it died in front o me. There were summing fearful inprinted in her memmary that were stronger than my poor words. She hogged me close n hard for a second, and pushed me away, saying, ‘Leave, Gianni, you should not be found here.’

  I dint know what Ide sayed wrong, but then there were nought but silents and a heaving breast.

  I warned, ‘Do not do this, Miss Marcella. Dear Sweet God, it give yer brother scuses.’

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  I had vowed I would not let Minguillo Fasan visit any more damage on the incomparable skin of his sister. But how could I treat her or look after her as long as she refused outright to see me or to hear my name?

  For the second time, I had been told that I was not good enough to stay in Venice. I retraced my steps out of the city, leaving behind me everything I loved.

  Minguillo Fasanr />
  People who live in madhouses need few possessions.They need no trappings to define themselves: their empire is already prescribed.A fee to the keeper, and a few inexpensive treats sent in a basket on her saint’s day, that’s all a family might decently be expected to do for a mad daughter or sister.

  On San Servolo Marcella would have no use for the fortune that my misguided father had planned to leave to her. Even if the real will were produced, the law stated that a madwoman was incapable of disposing her material goods in a sane fashion. In such a case, those goods would certainly revert to her entirely sane brother. This was neater than marrying her to God. Moreover, even Boney was not likely to close down our madhouses and foist our lunatics back upon their unhappy families!

  Soon after the little doctor was dispatched, there appeared all the signs that Marcella’s bladder had returned to its mischievous courses, as it always did when its owner was in distress. She refused to speak even to her own brother. She kept her head turned to the wall, she ate erratically and her colour drained away like melting snow from a barren quarry. These, I assured my wife and mother, were all sure signs of an advanced furore in utero.

  My mother whimpered a bit, recanted for about half a tricksome hour, and claimed that Marcella could be cared for at home. I went to the nursery and plucked my daughter warm from her crib, and brought her back to my mother’s parlour. I emptied the child on to her lap.The hairdresser cooed, pronouncing the baby the most perfect baby in the world. She was as yet on the bald side, but my daughter would one day be a customer.

  ‘Is this innocence not a beautiful thing?’ I demanded. ‘Would you have it compromised, Mamma? Marcella has no control over her desires. Twice you’ve seen that already. Would she scruple at debauching a tender young niece? Can we have such a horror in our home?’