The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  I received one note after another on her excellent progress.

  ‘Interestingly, her eyebrows have grown back to a shape of perfect symmetry.’

  ‘She is no longer afraid when her door opens, but smiles tranquilly on every nurse. She has mastered some gymnastic exercises and grows stronger daily.’

  ‘She follows our regime without question. Her courses are regular. She takes her medicine without protest.’

  I countered, ‘But has she confessed her sins, and undergone a moral cure?’

  ‘Your sister,’ Padre Portalupi replied, ‘does not speak, as you know. Yet she has given us to understand by the civility and gentility of her behaviour that she is morally cured. Indeed, sometimes I worry that she grows almost too docile . . .’

  I strode up and down my study in a fury. Morally cured? Was that enough to send her home? Marcella had played her silent card well. No respect to the Gracious Reader, but can He conjure sufficient disgust for this priest’s weak mind?

  I supposed that I must add Padre Portalupi to my little stock of enemies, now including Doctor Santo, Cecilia Cornaro, the Spanish madam and the will-thief, all but the latter firmly and finally dealt with.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  I found work and a bed in a monastery near Treviso where the sick were taken in. I wrote to tell Gianni where I was, and to ask for news. For the longest time, he did not answer me. So I knew there was nothing good to tell. Marcella, I understood, still believed that I loved Minguillo’s wife.

  Meanwhile, after ignoring me for several years, Napoleon again took an interest in my career. If he ever needed surgeons, it would be in his new war against the Tsar of Russia.

  By the spring of 1812, I was caught up in the flotsam of the thirty-two thousand Italian soldiers dragged by the currents of fate towards the Russian front with criminally few provisions to feed us. Come September, the starving Grande Armée was walking down the empty streets of Moscow, looking for bread and beds. Our resentful campfires soon burned the wooden city down. By October, we had caught sight of our true enemies: cold and the ineptitude of those who failed to keep us fed and clothed. On November 5th, the first snow fell. After that all I remember is hunger, and whiteness, and my scalpel tapping on frozen flesh.

  The image of Marcella’s face imprinted itself on the snow. I saw her features in the drifts, as my hands busied themselves amputating frostbitten digits. During the retreat from Moscow I learned everything I would ever need to know about the effect of cold on human skin.

  It was at this time that Napoleon ceased to be my textbook. He no longer seemed indestructible. I did not see it as Napoleon losing, but as his diseases winning. My patient was failing: next it would be the turn of the priest. Only a very sick man would have spent a whole Grande Armée upon a mad delusion of snowbound empire.

  I raised my head the day we limped back into Italy. For months it had slumped down with my defeats – for I counted each man I lost to the cold a grievous, wrenching failure – or hunched between my shoulders against the ice and the winds that blew from Siberia.

  But that day I thought I could smell the sea, or at least a small lagoon in the crook of the Adriatic. Nothing belonged to me in that place, but I belonged there. Marcella was there. I had now seen the invincible Napoleon in mortal retreat: nothing was impossible. I no longer believed that anything could keep me from her. And I was no longer interested in reasons why I should keep away.

  I returned to the monastery at Treviso and began to make plans for my return to Venice. After all those silent months, I took up my pen and wrote once more to Gianni.

  Sor Loreta

  There was one day when a sudden recurrence of my brain fever caused me to slap the smirking face of Rafaela, who appeared at my cell to take her sister back to her own. Perhaps I pulled her hair a little, too. They claimed I tried to gouge her eyes in my passion, yet these must be slanders for I remember nothing of it.

  After that I saw Sor Sofia not at all. Madre Mónica forbade her to come to me. I was not allowed to go to her.

  ‘You are dead to Sor Sofia,’ the priora told me. ‘I have permitted you to exploit the poor child’s gentle nature for too long. This time your separation from her is final, vicaria or no vicaria.’

  I had a sensation as if I was being stripped of my own skin, more painful than any scourge I had ever employed on myself. When I opened my mouth to protest, the priora said spitefully, ‘You have your Jackals to play with now.’

  It was never God’s design that things should turn out this way, so I decided instead to mourn Sor Sofia as if she were dead.

  I announced that I was fasting to save the soul of Sor Sofia from centuries in Purgatory. I used my allowance to have masses said for her. I wrote her name on the walls of my cell, picking out the letters in my own pure blood.

  Sor Narcisa and Sor Arabel came to me, and offered to scourge themselves on Sor Sofia’s behalf, but I sent them away with hard words. ‘You never loved Sor Sofia as you should,’ I told them. ‘You were jealous of her.’

  I lay on my bed with my body rigid in the shape of the cross. The rosary could not be pried from my hand. In that time I drank only gall mixed with bitter herbs, and, like Clare of Pisa, I allowed no solid food to pass my mouth unless it was mixed with ashes. They took away the ashes from my hearth. Then, like the Holy Virgin Mechtild of Magdeburg, I would eat only the Eucharist, and always experienced rapture and the taste of pure honey in my mouth when I did so. Back in my cell, I wept copious tears into a lachrymatory bottle, which I placed as an offering in front of my hornacina.

  In spite of all my fasting and my flagellation, when I took my bath I could not help noticing that my body had remained as white as snow and that even though I approached my forty-third year I still seemed like a very young girl in physical appearance. I was strong as an Amazon, yet without a morsel of sinewy bulk: my strength came entirely from my soul. My breasts were almost non-existent, and my flanks were free from womanly curves. Since I began to fast, I had rarely suffered the indignity of the monthly courses that weaken ordinary women. From this I knew how much my purity had pleased my Celestial Spouse: an uncorrupted body is one of the sure signs of sanctity. This is proved in the story of Jacinta di Atondo, who had a boil removed by a sceptical surgeon, a nonbeliever. Instinctively feeling her holiness, he kept that boil. Twenty years later it was still as fresh and undecayed as the day he removed it. Jacinta di Atondo’s boil won that surgeon over to our true God.

  The priora came to my cell and showed her complete incomprehension of the ways of God by speaking to me severely. She tried to tell me that my feelings for Sor Sofia were unwholesome, and a symptom of my brain fever returning.

  ‘This fever is not of earthly origin,’ I told her. ‘Look,’ I affirmed, ‘God will not allow me to eat.’

  And I took up a piece of bread that lay beside my bed, and put it into my mouth. But immediately my jaws clamped on it, a great wave of nausea surged through me. The bread, against my will, was ejected from my mouth along with a jet of bile straight on to the priora’s habit.

  I declared, ‘So you must acknowledge that it is a superior force that prevents me from taking food. I can swallow only the Body and Blood of Christ. Alpaïs of Cudot lived for forty years on the Eucharist alone, and took food into her mouth only to suck the juices, spitting out the pulp. Indeed’ – and I looked at the stain on her habit significantly – ‘a piece of fish spat out by Alpaïs of Cudot was saved as a holy relic by one of her enlightened company.’

  ‘True virtue is free of pride and ambition, Sister,’ snarled the priora, wiping the bread and bile off her clothing with a disgusted look on her face. ‘And why must you always talk of food? Why must I and everyone else around you always talk of what you do not eat?’

  Then she spoke slowly and clearly, as if to someone deaf. ‘Sor Sofia is not dead, do you hear? The other nuns – and the poor child herself – find it sinister that you carry on so. This stupid hysterical ploy will no
t work, Sor Loreta. Cease this ostentatious fasting and live like a humble nun. That is all you are, don’t you understand? Humility of heart is what Jesus showed and asked.’

  She cried out in a frustrated way, ‘You have lived in God’s beautiful house for three decades without absorbing any of His insight. Your soul has not developed; even your fanatical acts are tediously repetitive. Stop these exaggerated virtuosities, these pretended prodigies! If you want to attract attention with a novelty, then you should crucify your tongue instead of subjecting us all to its pompous rants!’

  At this blasphemy she stopped herself short, looking ashamed. ‘For that last, I apologize profoundly. You made me lose control of myself, Sor Loreta. That was my weakness. I shall go to confess directly. Nevertheless, you have been warned. One more offence and I promise you that I shall have you stripped of the title of vicaria. I hate to bring them into convent affairs, but even the Holy Fathers, who elevated you beyond your capacity, will see sense if I explain to them this persecution of poor Sor Sofia. So you might as well eat. Otherwise, you will die a ridiculous, and, I promise you, obscure death.’

  It came to me then, the bitter realization, that only in the powerful position of vicaria could I save Sor Sofia’s soul: I could not do so as a despised humble nun without worldly position. So though my heart longed to see my body dead, I forced myself to give up my vigil, keep down a little stale and mouldy bread, and return to the world.

  Marcella Fasan

  How many lunatics’ tales does one read from their own pens? Their stories are missing, like their persons. Mad people are excluded from society. Others become the custodians of their stories. Those custodians name their conditions, as a writer names his characters.

  I did not fit tidily into any of the normal categories, frenosi pellagrosa, melanconia con stupore, monomania impulsiva, temperamento pazzesco, melanconia semplice, frenosi alcolica. I was neither a living skeleton, nor grossly fat nor cauliflower-eared. And yet I would pass two years among other souls whose stories were in custody. I shared their table, their bread, their purges. By day I lived with the lunatics, and as one of them. Only at night did I withdraw to my privileged private room, where I resumed my habits of autobiography and sketching, having found a convenient niche behind my chimney breast in which to hide my paper.

  Being a dozzinante, I was not required to work, but I went daily to the printing workshop and learned the science of etching. My colleagues knew nothing of my noble blood, and cared yet less. They were pleased with my nimble fingers and, when I showed that I knew colour, then they let me tint etchings for special editions by hand.

  Once I was set to cutting an etching of a portrait made by Cecilia Cornaro. On that day I broke down in tears and was subjected to a rare forced bath, Padre Portalupi being away and unable to save me from his zealous colleagues.

  Clearly, my brother hoped that by living with lunatics I would become one of their number. He thought that their taint would envelop me, and that I would breathe in their ravings and expel them through my own mouth eventually. And he knew, as I did, that the more time I passed at San Servolo, the more others would come to accept that I was mad.

  At first I struggled to be my sane self. But it was so achingly lonely to hold myself aloof from the society in which I found myself. The priests and surgeons plainly saw me as a patient. And the patients embraced me as one of them. Those without visible deformities of their own were sorry for my mutilated leg and even bent to kiss the air near it. They threaded flowers through the wheeled chair that was sometimes used to take me round the verdant gardens. Tentative hands appeared to guide me over broken steps. The white of the bread was placed reverently on my plate.

  Padre Portalupi was unfailingly kind. Only one person, apart from Piero, had ever been so gentle with me. And he – I had seen the evidence of how he had betrayed me with my sister-in-law. He had walked across my heart to get to her.

  Perhaps San Servolo was the right place for me, I thought: a place for people damaged by love and life. What was I if not distorted and harmed by both?

  I must revolt my hands and eyes

  There was comfort to be had in acceptance, and I, increasingly, took it.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Still, they wunt let us visit her. A month passed, another month. A summer. A year.

  I niver stopt hoping that Marcella would show her sound brain to the doctors and that they would send her back to us at the Palazzo Espagnol. She were nowise the rampin mad one in the family. I bethought, surely the doctors will see it clear. The Fattybenfratelli were good men, famoused healers. They would realize they ud been sold the wrong cut o meat. Wunt they? Wunt they?

  Each time I heared Minguillo tell the gondolier ‘San Servolo!’ I hoped, Save us, this is the time he is not coming back. They will exchange him for his sister and keep him there.

  Each time he come back, Robber-God!

  Ventually Minguillo deceased his visits. Insted Anna were hallowed to take Marcella some things ovva personal kind, and visit with her for a few short minutes.

  Anna come back with her apron soakt in tears. She told me, ‘Marcella is a dead woman walking. There is no light behind her eyes. She does not speak.’

  ‘Not speak?’

  ‘She gives out that she is mute. Why would she do that, Gianni?’

  ‘She must fear that they wunt believe her if she speaks.’

  ‘So she could stay there for ever, and let them think she is really mad? No! She is one of them now,’ she wept. ‘To see her like that!’

  But Anna were wrong: I were sartin on it. Marcella had not lossed her mind. She ud put it away somewhere for safe-keeping on San Servolo. When it were safe, Marcella would be sane agin. I were sure on it, Dear Little God.

  Minguillo Fasan

  Finally, I received one letter that worried me more than the rest – Portalupi told me that he feared that if she stayed too long on San Servolo, my sister might become ‘habituated’ and incapable of leaving the island to resume normal life.

  ‘She must leave,’ he wrote, ‘lest we do more harm than good.’

  ‘Habituated’ had such a good ring to it. A conclusive, excluding ring, the next best thing to the tolling of a funeral bell. In fact, the word had something of the cloister about it, with the cloister’s dulled finality.

  But Padre Portalupi did not agree. ‘Habituated’ was to be avoided at all costs, he insisted, and he already saw dangerous signs of it in Marcella’s behaviour.

  ‘It is necessary for the mother bird to push the baby out of the nest sometimes,’ he drivelled in his godly tight hand, ‘for the good of the little bird.’

  I ransacked my desk for a certain piece of paper and hurried to the island, thinking of the little birds I had impaled on sticks at our country estate. I was ushered upstairs to the office of Padre Portalupi.

  ‘Let me see her,’ I insisted, without preamble. ‘I would like to see what miracles you have performed on her. Because when I last saw her she was not ready to leave the nest, pushed or not.’

  Padre Portalupi did not hide his surprise at my abrupt arrival. ‘I could have saved you a trip, Conte Fasan. I am sorry to tell you that Marcella has specifically said that she does not wish to see you.’

  ‘She spoke?’

  ‘Yes, for the first time, when I told her that I considered her fit for an existence outside this place. She then said a few words, and they were all perfectly sensible.’

  My little lame dog of a sister had told him something to my detriment, I supposed. She was playing with me, using this doing-good Brother as her cat’s paw.

  ‘Then how can she come home? If she won’t see me?’

  That silenced him.

  ‘Given that I pay, and pay handsomely, to have her accommodated here, how is it that I have no rights to see my sister? You calmly tell me that her furious exacerbations are cured and you want to foist her back upon my household, without permitting me to see for myself if it is true! I would imagine that
the officers of the Magistrato alla Sanità would be interested to hear of such a case.’

  There dawned on Padre Portalupi’s face the beginnings of an understanding that it was not convenient for him to have. Fortunately, I had come prepared with an accessory to sway his thinking in the right direction. I opened, ‘Do not worry yourself unduly, Father. I could not conceive of doing anything to hurt poor Marcella. In fact, as you know, I have a strong interest in the salvation of lunatics. Researching establishments of this kind in foreign countries, I have discovered a most excellent English contraption to help Marcella when the fits of ninfomania come upon her, as they surely will, when she is exposed once more to the world. I have already commissioned one of these for her bedchamber.’

  I handed Padre Portalupi a sketch. It was a crude representation of my sister with a stout iron ring riveted about her neck. A short chain passed from that to an upright iron bar bolted to the wall.

  Padre Portalupi blanched. ‘Th . . . this is how you will keep Marcella if we send her home?’

  ‘For everyone’s safety, the best course, don’t you think? It can’t help resting her, feeling so secure. And remember, I have male servants and women and children in the house! The fortune-hunter might be lurking! Of course, as soon as she is ready to see me, I shall take her home to the bosom of her family. It will be nothing less than a celebration for us.Why, Marcella has a baby niece she has never yet met!’

  ‘And no nephews?’

  I thought I had him cowed, but the man was cruelly apt. Again, I had a shuddering inkling that Marcella was pulling his jaw-strings from some hidden apartment. I looked around for her cornflower eye at a knot-hole in the wall. I was certain that I was being secretly watched.That sensation undermined the working of my tongue and I stammered for a full minute without coming to the end of a single word. My foot drummed on the floor. Inside my tight skin, my heart too stuttered to a standstill and I heard a sick creaking in my soul, as when a mast splinters preparatory to shipwreck.