The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  Finally I got it out, ‘A nephew is forthcoming.’

  Padre Portalupi accepted my parting handshake, yet I saw doubts on his face.

  The medico-religioso would be more tractable, I divined. I went home to write him a confidential letter.After that, there would be no more need for me to make upsetting personal visits to San Servolo.

  I sealed the letter and nestled deep in my father’s chair.

  And so comfortable was I in that moment that I experienced a visceral, almost venereal itch to write down my triumph, an account starting with the delightful ploy of the confected letter to my wife from the little doctor Santo, who might never more return to Venice to plague us with his ineffectual seductions.

  I was so absorbed in this cheerful work, dwelling on my masterful timing and subtle touches, that I did not notice my simpleton of a valet hovering close behind me with a silver tray on which reposed a midnight-blue velvet toque, the latest masterpiece by my tailor.

  ‘Was it not ingenious?’ I finished with a flourish, reiterating and summing up in a few simple words designed to help the Duller of my Readers comprehend such an artfully complex tale.

  Then I felt Gianni’s breathing on my neck.

  I turned around to see him staring vaguely like a goat in a field.

  Marcella Fasan

  My diary from that time makes disquieting reading. I remember little of those months myself. I still worked in the print-shop but gradually the languor of the other Tranquil Lunatics invaded my own soul and I ceased to be as I was; rather I became a floating, faded self, only loosely tethered to what I used to be. Here is an extract of what I wrote, that good Padre Portalupi kept for me all these years. The words were accompanied by many a pencilled sketch of fairylike and somnolent beings in a bowery island world.

  ‘High windows slash light all over our faces, down to our chins, but below that we are in darkness. We bodiless phantoms steal about, lowering our heads until only our foreheads are illuminated and our brains, those diseased things, the wrongness of which had brought us here, are shown as the only living part of our bodies.

  ‘Shadows of door handles frighten us.

  ‘Those corridors burn up summer light like flues. And at the end of them, all who interpose themselves between us and the light turn into blurred spiders, their bulbous thoraxes and debatable quantities of limbs a terror to us. The floors are tesserated like rich honeycomb, yet broken like a derelict hive. My friends Marta and Fabrizia fear bees. This is their kingdom . . .

  ‘. . . The mad are often pigeon-toed, and they hang their heads and sometimes reach into their small-clothes, looking for consolation. We will put our heads down anywhere, these heads are so heavy, against tabletops, architraves, anything to take the weight of the heads. On bad days, we slump to the floor and let our knees take the weight of these heads. Rare visitors will often see two heads bending together to hold up the mutual weight – what mad cyclopses we are at San Servolo, these years!

  ‘I speak of the Tranquil Lunatics now, like Marta and Fabrizia and Stella, who are allowed to work at their old trades and live in dormitories, which is regarded as a promotion and a sign of getting better. When they are bad, lunatics live differently.

  ‘In their netted cages the violent lunatics roar, or poke a delicate finger out, like Hansel in the story. But we are safe from these clamorosi, inquieti, pericolosi and turbolenti. They must be isolated from us. We do not even know their names. Their enclosure allows out only their noises and one finger at a time.

  ‘Sometimes we go to a secret place where we can watch them ripping their curtains, screaming and whistling and making themselves naked.

  ‘They take off their clothes and they fling their private parts about for all to see, amusing those who have collected enough wits to be amused with for a temporary spell. And another one is down, on the floor, his hands up as if he is pushing a barrow . . .

  ‘. . . This week Stella and Fabrizia are milked by the visiting French doctors of our anecdotes. How those men love to hear the Venetian lunatics raving! Stella tells me, “When we make them happy, we are given extra wine by the servants who have been bribed by the surgeons.” The kind Fatebenefratelli cannot supervise every transaction on the island. Some of the most important ones are hidden from them in the workshops, in the haystacks, in the curtained part of the chapel.

  ‘The French doctors follow us while we work. Mad people must work or our brains will devour us. Men who were farmers grow food for us. Seamstresses like Marta mend our torn costumes. Cobblers make our leather restraints. I myself colour etchings in the print-shop. When we do good work, quietly and steadily, then we are given good things from the kitchen, so we can learn the merit of giving of ourselves without fussing and displays . . .

  ‘. . . My hands are raw with soap and water today. The mad people clean everything all of the time. We whitewash the walls, we scrub the floors, we change the straw pallets of the beds. I myself am not forced to do these things, for I am somehow different from the others, they tell me. But I do, for I know that these activities keep us clean in spirit and in flesh. All this cleanliness stops us from growing black like dirt inside and killing ourselves in dirty ways.

  ‘I am growing flesh. They feed us at the exact same time each day, for regular habits, they say, will break our mad inner indiscipline. The refectory is under the special supervision of the priests, who are kind and always tell us to eat calmly and quietly. The clamorosi are denied the benefit of eating in company. They must eat in their cells so no one is upset when they use their bowls as chamber pots or paint the walls with porridge . . .

  ‘. . . Fabrizia and I love to lie in the sun, when it comes, to drink the heat into our empty middles. When one of us lies in the sun, it puts it in all our minds to align ourselves to its caressing rays, and we behave madly, forming clusters of mad sunners, looking worse for our multiplicity.

  ‘It is an airy place, San Servolo. The windiness of the island does not please everybody. When the scirocco comes, it comes hard, and the exhalations of the sea on certain days make Stella uneasy under her skin, especially at night. Marta and Fabrizia and Celia are affected by the winds known as the bora or the levante or the tramontana. On San Servolo we soon learn who howls in each wind, and who revels in it . . .

  ‘. . . By night the dormitories are lit with oil lamps high up on the walls. Two nurses sleep in each dormitory, while four wakened ones pass the dark hours walking around and tending to every need, and exploring every little noise from the beds. The medico-religioso visits us all each night, even me, who sleeps high up in my dozzinante bedchamber. Marta says he is looking for new lunatics to chop up for his experiments. He likes to examine our skin for lesions, for we lunatics are very prone to diseases of our surfaces. By touching our spots and rashes, the hard-faced doctor with the blood on his apron reads our maladies like sheet music. All the girls put their heads under the blankets when he passes by. But we like the other priests who come, for they hold our hands and whisper gentle things in our ears that help us sleep . . .

  ‘. . . Now it is the winter and so we are woken at six-and-a-half in the morning, and made to wash ourselves and then go out into the fresh air. We wear woollen stockings and cloth jackets, with a copetto di bambace, woolly waistcoat under our cloth coats. And berets over the tops of our poor heads. Then we are sent to do whatever work we are capable of, and the medico-religioso and his men do their rounds among us, looking for anyone who needs a special bath . . .

  ‘. . . Now it is the spring again and they begin to rouse us at five. We wear canvas shirts, stockings, shoes and canvas jackets of mixed colours, each with a kerchief.

  ‘There is a new girl called Lussieta who pulls her head under her clothes, leaving a wound of a neck in an empty collar and a clenched hand holding her cloth roof together with an elbow planted on a tablecloth embroidered like a field of flowers. We are all fine mathematicians at San Servolo

  – for lack of other employment sometimes we co
unt those flowers on the tablecloths, the shiny tiles, the kicked and beaten skirting boards, the arched windows.

  ‘We stare at people the way children do just before someone admonishes them severely. Marta’s hair is rampant like haystacks in the wind but then we all hang our heads down, down, looking towards Hell.

  ‘Lussieta has a dolly and she defends her with fists. If we were allowed, we would button ourselves into ten concentric shirts in case someone comes to diminish us. That way we would always have another layer of protection against what they wish to expose.

  ‘When we eat, we put our faces too close to our bowls, for we are too anxious. If we drop our food, we will seem mad, so we eat in a mad way instead in order to assure our keepers that we are sane . . .

  ‘. . . Cross-hatched by the shadows of bars, the man who says he knows more than me, one day leads me away with a firm hand on the upper arm. The elbow is for polite society. Fortunately a tall nurse catches us before we get to the back of the carpentry workshop. There are sharp things there, the nurse tells us kindly, and we must not be there alone . . .

  ‘. . . We love corners and we show it by kissing them. We skim the walls like creatures at the bottom of the ocean – even we find that comical so we grin, and they say “Look, what a lunatic grin!” and it is all confirmed.

  ‘We can furrow our brows like a field ploughed by diamond blades, and some days we like a few of our buttons undone; it means that we are only temporarily mad and could soon be buttoned up again.

  ‘We sit low in front of our keepers, so their eyes are safely above our heads.

  ‘We mostly sit and look at our hands, or straight ahead, or at the floor. Not at each other, because we do not trust lunatics any more than you would.

  ‘We like to place our eyes against little slots for a long time. Keyholes. Box lids. Saucepan lids.

  ‘You will see us crouched with our knees up around our necks more than anything else and if made to sit on a chair then we will form the perfect “S”, our backs hard against the chairback, our heads bent lower than our chests, our legs splaying out and backwards.

  ‘If there are two chairs side by side, we like to sit on the floor in the space between the two.

  ‘We run to fat and thin yet we are mostly appallingly ordinary. Those who suffer with the Pellagra may be known by their smell like bread that has gone to the mould. In fact the doctors say that the insane have a particular fetor, like fermenting henbane, which can be discovered on entering their rooms first thing in the morning, when it is strongest. The French doctors declare that the breath of maniacal persons is tale-tellingly unpleasant and others compare it to stinking fish. We cannot smell ourselves, however, perhaps because we are too mad even in our noses.

  ‘We hold our own hands nearly all the time, it is frightening to be among the smelly lunatics like this.

  ‘We undo each other’s clothing like monkeys and we cry a lot when we see the bits of the other lunatics spilling out. We are curious but not that curious.

  ‘Marta and Fabrizia, who have the Pellagra, look up to the left and the right at the same time, as if two people are calling them at once.

  ‘We show everyone everything that occurs to us – our toenails and a leaf on the tree are often demonstrated to visitors. We would like to retain some privacy as to our bowel movements, and even to hoard them inside us, yet our keepers are most attentive on that matter, administering purgatives at the least opportunity. And they will give us vomits too, if they can.

  ‘On our bad days, purged and vomited, you will afterwards see us in postures as if gunpowder had blown us in the air and dropped us from a great height . . .

  ‘. . . Sometimes we are here because we are ugly. Marta’s hairline stoops, Fabrizia’s ears jut, Celia’s nose grows like industry, there is one girl – Marta says her mouth must have been ripped off a monkey’s phizog – sometimes I feel my hands are too big for my little body. Some of us are dry where we should be moist or wet where we should be dry. We frighten people. We must be put away somewhere for our own good, so that those poor frightened people cannot hit us, which is a natural reaction, because we are so ugly or strange, and we upset them because they worry the same thing could befall them.

  ‘They keep mirrors away from us as the sight of our mad selves will rot our brains even faster.

  ‘Most of my friends do not talk very much. Even with Marta and Fabrizia, I do not speak. Talk has brought us all trouble. Talk will give the cutting priest an excuse to cut.

  ‘This silence is what befalls those who are not loved, what befalls the humbler and less delicious meat, to whom others are preferred.’

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Now that I finely knowed by what dirty trick Minguillo ud divvyded them, I bethought I could put em back together.

  I ud been an asp. In all that time I niver bethought of Santo bein akshual handy, insted of pining way to a flake o skin for love o her or rushin back to Venice to get himself murdered all useless. But Santo of all people would have a scuse to go to the island, with all his doctoring scills isn’t it. A plan begun to unroll in my head.

  I knowed where he were, at a small monastery near Treviso, working for a pittance and splintin up his own cracked heart. After he got chased out o Venice, he n me ud writed to one another, in an empty kind o way, to keep Marcella alive in our thoughts. But he had no consoling for me, and I had no good news for him, for Marcella never wanted to hear his name. So the letters ud traled way like his hopes.

  By the time Marcella were took to San Servolo, the letters from Santo had deceased coming altogether. Mine to him was sumtimes returned, unopened.

  But all ovva suddenly Santo ud writed to me agin. Turned out that in fact Santo had betook hisself far beyont my letters, and joined the Grond Armay in Russia. O that, he writed little.

  There were a new voice in his writing. He dint just ask bout Marcella, he demanded to know bout her. He were waiting on a risposte.

  I took out the dred quill and ink. I told him what had appened. About the false letter, Marcella’s mad-seeming staring at the wall, the shaved eyebrows, San Servolo n all. I knowed he would come a-running. I also knowed he would be feroshus angry at me for holdin back the true story all this time.

  Course twere still nowise safe for him to come home to Venice. Not as himself. Yet. But I had a plan for that continency too. Twere so bold n clever! I were sure as pigs goes into pots that twould straitway placket Santo’s rage with me. And the beauty of it were – I ud seen Minguillo write in his own hand that he ud no need to visit San Servolo any more.

  And yes, Santo grasped it in a minit. I dint have to put the wheedle on him, oh no. He were determined to give my plan a try and he had extra imbellishments for it too, what made it een better.

  And so twere that them priests on San Servolo got thereselves a letter from a young lay-doctor by the name o Spirito, of unpeckable credenshals, who wisht to work among the Venetian lunatics and speshally to treat the flictions of there skins. He were give a most positive risposte, and in days Santo – I mean Spirito – were on his way back to Venice.

  Ha! I bethought. Minguillo will be foiled at last, this’ll put some pepper in his gravy.

  And as for Santo, why, when I went for to meet him at Mestre, I found a different creecher in the altogether from the pale boy Minguillo ud sent packing. The war in Russia ud markt him. He lookt taller, more sustanshal, n een the timber o his voice had more pith to it, tho allus gentle like a dove. And there were summing more, too. He what had niver afore knowed the love ovva mother or a sister, had known at last what tis to adoor a woman, and to love her threw n threw, not jist to study her skin and cure its ills. So far Love haint did im any favours, but I bethought the new Santo had it in him to be Love’s footsoldier like they say in poitry.

  ‘I should knock you down, Gianni,’ he growled at me. ‘You had no right to decide what I should know about Marcella. Or not know.’

  He advanced on me and I bethought I were in for a pa
sting. But all ovva suddenly Santo hogged me close, hard n strong. Then he laffed, a good strong laff, full of daring do.

  I held my breath and hopt, Dear Good Little God.

  Sor Loreta

  Then a terrible thing happened. Because I had drawn attention to Sor Sofia, others began to show a special interest in her. At first this was certainly designed specially to irritate and hurt me, who was strictly forbidden intercourse with her. But quickly others began to actually see the unique beauty of Sor Sofia’s soul that previously I alone had detected.

  Sor Sofia was starting to attract a mob of admirers, drawn by the curve of her downturned eyelid and the pretty gestures of her tiny white hands.

  It was God’s design for me to keep a watch on Sor Sofia – from a distance – for I now suspected in her the stirrings of another Sor Andreola, another vain hypocrite set on her own cult. And sure enough, it was not long before others were comparing Sofia with the departed Sor Andreola, and favourably, and it got so that some of the novices knelt down as she passed, and made other blasphemous gestures of idolatry. When I myself passed by, some of the light nuns took to crossing themselves, as if Satan were among them.

  Marcella Fasan

  Anna came with a basket of pies and such news. I found her eyes very shiny. I tried to pull my thoughts back together. I did not start well, for it was such a long time since I had spoken aloud.

  ‘Are you a lunatic come to join us?’ is what came out of my mouth, and it was not what I meant at all. She flinched away.