The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  There was an equally long list of forbidden items on a separate page, down which I glanced with interest.

  The human part of the dowry could be supplied locally. The priora explained, ‘We shall train a slave or servant in our community for when your sister takes the veil. I have my eye on a samba called Josefa for her.The girl is strong and willing; also clever and quick with languages.’

  The vicaria huffed audibly at that. The priora continued smoothly, ‘How many other servants shall your sister require? On the understanding that servants stay in the convent as our, as it were, property, even if the nun herself passes on.’

  ‘One will be more than ample,’ I replied.

  The priora raised an eyebrow. ‘Many of our girls have four or more.’

  I enquired, ‘And I don’t suppose the Venetian goods will be returned in the case of my sister herself not surviving the journey, or her stay among you?’

  The vicaria intoned, ‘Just as a wife hands over the dominio of her worldly goods to her husband, so does each Bride of Christ donate her marriage portion to her Bridegroom.’

  With the grace to look embarrassed, the priora asked kindly, ‘Now tell us something of your sister, Conte Fasan.’

  Away from Venice, there was no limit on my invention. I nestled comfortably in my chair and began. ‘I’ll not deceive you,’ I lied, ‘she is a frail creature. I have always maintained she was defrauded of her whole health by our mother, who gave way to an indulgence for tobacco and secretly smoked a pipe in her confinement. My sister’s debility, and doctors have confirmed this, was formed of the smoke she breathed in the womb.’

  I was gratified to see a slightly shifty look in the priora’s eyes.

  The vicaria demanded baldly, ‘What kind of debility?’

  ‘She is a congenital cripple,’ I embroidered rapidly, ‘with all the attendant cerebral difficulties of the species.’

  A ready tenderness immediately softened the face of the priora. The vicaria appeared lost in thought.

  ‘That aside, my sister has in fact conspired to use her weak health as a cover for . . . certain mischiefs. A true Christian would have accepted her ills, and grown even saintlier on them. However, my sister used her apparent debility as a veil for . . . a double guilt because she worked on our compassion, inspiring our pity and our leniency, just at the moment when she most deserved our most stringent observation. By a miracle, I intervened before it was too late.

  ‘A brother must sometimes fight duels to protect his sister’s good name. I have made sure at least that her name and her body are untainted, or naturally I would not have brought her here to you.’

  This long and mysterious speech appeared to stupefy both the Peruvian nuns, and certainly blockaded any further questions. And thereafter I distracted them with descriptions, gravid with luxury, of the gilded coffee service that would soon be on its way up El Misti mountain.

  My next visit was to the humble new home of my father’s mistress, to inspect my half-brother.The problem was this: if the boy was born later than myself and before Marcella, then he might well qualify as the missing will’s ‘nextborn child’.And he was male.

  The once-proud Beatriz Villafuerte was now reduced to some rented rooms in a commercial courtyard served by a common bathhouse and latrine. When I say I went to see my half-brother, I mean I went to take a secret look, bribing an ostler to let me watch him from a spyhole in the stable that gave on to the bathhouse.

  On first sight, I swore under my breath for he was indeed a decade-anda-half younger than myself, junior even to Marcella. I would have given him fifteen years at most. I saw he was my father’s son, which meant another possible contender, should the accursed true will come forth after Marcella was neatly tucked away in Santa Catalina. He was damnably good-looking, deer-eyed, slender, if you like that sort of thing.

  ‘What is he called?’ I hissed to the ostler, who kept watch for me outside.

  ‘Fernando. He’s a fine boy . . .’

  Fernando! My father had bestowed his own name on his Peruvian bastard, denying it to me, his legitimate heir! Or had the luscious Beatriz Villafuerte stolen the name, with intent . . . ?

  But more likely, given his coldness towards me, my father himself had offered his name freely to his Arequipan spawn. He was not ashamed of this son. Inside the bathhouse my half-brother emerged from the water. His body was full of grace and ease. Such ugly thoughts ran through my mind that my mouth filled with a bitter flavour.

  My saliva did not grow sweet again until I went to my father’s grave in the little cemetery behind Santa Catalina and poured poison into the earth beneath the abundant fresh flowers I found here. I wanted that poison to go right down to his coffin, to saturate it, and to shrivel the body beneath. Then I dined copiously, as if I was trying to eat Arequipa. I had such a desire to consume the place. A dish of guinea pig splayed and battered is a thing seldom to be met with beyond Peru, and so I took the opportunity to pillage the hutches. I ate alpaca, and mountain rabbit and woodpecker, crunching on bones like a dragon on a virgin, and I would have eaten condor if they had not failed to shoot me one of the great black birds. And when I had had my fill of Arequipa, I hurried out of town, feeling queasy in every possible way. I went back to the coast, to the next ship.

  I left just in time. I was barely out of the country when a new little revolution befell Peru, shaking the place even more than the earthquake of my natal year 1784. Indian rebels under a leader who called himself Pumacahua raised their standards and some Cuzco outlaws occupied Arequipa, proclaiming independence.The noblewomen of the town and the male cowards retired to the convents for safety.

  But by the time I was back in Venice the little revolt was over, and its followers had gone to their grim rewards. The convents had not been troubled by so much as a broken window.There was no possible reason why Marcella should not be dispatched to Arequipa immediately.

  At the Palazzo Espagnol, a letter awaited me from Padre Portalupi, as I had expected. Marcella had been issued with the papers that declared her ready to return to the world. He felt the need to remind me, ‘. . . And there shall be absolutely no need for the extremity of the restraining equipment you showed me. In fact, it would be a crime to use such devices upon your sister when she has been declared risanata.’

  Ready to return to the world? Grinning, I set about assembling her dowry. I kept the mounting pile in a warehouse by the docks.The Prudent Reader will understand that I did not want anyone to get wind of my plans until the moment of their execution.

  When skimming the documents I had signed, it had not escaped me that the image of San Sebastiano was forbidden at Santa Catalina, in case his nearly naked form aroused thoughts of the flesh among God’s brides. It occurred to me that Marcella would find some empathetical chime in her soul for the helpless man beset by a hundred arrows. So for her saint I commissioned a sculpture of a very fine and masculine San Sebastiano, less clothed than most, but well appointed with arrows. As an afterthought, I threw in our small family Mantegna of the same saint. I had never liked that picture – the saint is too serene. A man suffering like that should show his pain much more for people to enjoy and profit from seeing it.

  I booked Marcella’s passage on a merchant packet. Ever thoughtful of her needs, I enquired about ablutionary matters. Marcella was always very nice as to cleanliness, especially given her little problem.

  ‘The pot is emptied every week,’ I was assured by the purser. ‘Not more than three to a pot, even in the aft cabins. Unless,’ he added meaningfully, his hand twitching in his pocket.

  ‘My sister’s wants consist in nothing in particular,’ I told the fellow, which sent him cross-eyed with perplexity.

  Whistling, I turned on my heel, and felt his hungry gaze burning my back. I had a bookseller waiting in a tavern at Sant’ Antonin with a promise of a volume bound in the skin of a very young woman said to have been taken from her while yet living. I was sure that I would know, on touching it, if this tal
e was genuine. For the bookseller had vouched that this little erotic work was bound in the breasts of the girl, and that one opened the cover by grasping a nipple.

  A few hundred of my finest francs and that dainty was mine. It cost more than sending a sister half a world away. My fingers were seldom far from that book while I awaited the documents confirming Marcella’s transportation to the beyond.

  When all was accomplished, notarized, paid for and receipted, my mother and wife tersely informed, I went to Marcella on San Servolo and announced what would be happening to her next. I dropped in her lap a rollicking Life of Santa Catalina, including all the good details of how the lady fasted, disfigured her flesh, sucked the pus out of sick women, drank from a wound in God’s side and married Jesus, who gave her his circumcised foreskin as a wedding ring.A long voyage is a grateful time for good reading matter. So.

  The Alert Reader will be unsurprised to hear how I commenced that interview.

  Of course, I said, ‘This is going to be a little uncomfortable.’

  Marcella Fasan

  Minguillo’s long absence abroad – we neither cared nor knew where – had given us one more season to know each other, softly, safely. My diary had become an illustrated love letter. I stood straighter to be able to see Santo from further off. My eyesight sharpened because at any time Santo might come into view. My hearing grew keen enough to hear him smile on the other side of the island.

  We did not have much, but we thought we had time.

  And then Minguillo came back with his new masterpiece for wrecking my happiness.

  ‘Minguillo is planning a slow murder,’ I told a white-faced Padre Portalupi, ‘by the hands of others, of course.’

  It was our one fully honest interview, this dry-eyed conversation in which I recounted all Minguillo’s abuses since my childhood, the assassinations of Riva and Piero and the ruin of my own leg.

  ‘Why did you stay silent all this time?’ asked Padre Portalupi. He was a man broken in two. In an instant, he had taken on the full burden of his unwitting collaboration. I thought of what Cecilia had said to me, and I knew that I had wronged this man, who would have loved to help me. Now at last I would show him the trust that he had earned.

  ‘I did not stay silent. Will you take care of these for me?’ I handed him the pages of the diary I had kept on the island. He opened the first page, began to read, began to weep. He turned a page, discovering a fond likeness of himself. He turned one more sheet, and came across a portrait of Santo.

  He asked me gently, ‘Our doctor Spirito is your doctor Santo?’

  I nodded. ‘But Santo has never once been alone with me on this island.’

  ‘That does not need to be said. The young man’s honour would not allow it. Unlike your brother’s. I will put a stop to this,’ he insisted.

  I told him that he could not help me. ‘Minguillo will destroy you if you try. Why should you be sacrificed too?’

  I explained how Minguillo had already tampered with him, divorced him from his natural goodness by lies, and then interrupted his supervision of San Servolo with the use of repeated summonings to the Magistrato alla Sanità. To make trouble for Minguillo, I told Padre Portalupi, would risk losing him his place.

  ‘You stand between the poor patients here and all the fashionable theories from Paris, and the surgeons, you know that. Marta, Fabrizia – all my friends: they need you to protect them. And you must think of your own situation. An exile and a beggar cannot help others.’

  For Padre Portalupi was like a nun, bound in poverty to his vocation. If Minguillo had him dismissed, stirring up some manufactured scandal as an excuse, no one would want a disgraced monk as a doctor, laying his corrupted hands on their sick flesh.

  ‘Is there no one else who can help you, Marcella?’ he urged.

  ‘The deed is done. I am not of age. I have no money for a lawyer. My brother has already signed me over to the nuns in Arequipa. He tells me that even my trunks are full and sealed.’

  ‘Your artist friend, the one with the . . . strong opinions? Ce . . . ce . . . Cecilia Cornaro?’ he stammered. Her name alone still inspired alarm in him.

  ‘Cecilia Cornaro is in Vienna. I suppose this fact also entered into Minguillo’s calculations. There is no time for anyone to help me. My brother tells me that my departure shall be tomorrow at dawn. And that I shall be taken directly from San Servolo to the boat that shall carry me to South America.’

  Padre Portalupi stumbled up from his desk, his face compressed with pain. He rambled around the shelves of his office, murmuring to himself. He pressed herbs into my hands, ‘For the journey. Dwarf thwostle – Menta pulegium – for seasickness, also good for ache of loin or buttock and sore of thigh. For long periods on the back of a horse.’

  Then he met my eyes, ‘But Marcella, this is not the kind of medicine you really need, is it? Please wait here in my office. I am sending Spirito to talk to you. A private colloquy cannot do any harm at this moment. I believe he can help you more than I can. I shall make sure you are not disturbed, for a little time.’

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  The first kiss, the last kiss, who could tell what that was.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  It ud appened at last. But the timing were spektackolar bad, Godthe-Murderer!

  Santo ud finely at last made his dekkerashun. And Marcella had shone willing. From what I could gather, save us, there had been a kiss.

  ‘Baso no fa buso, ma xe scala per andar suso,’ I told him, for my own heart were dancing with happiness. ‘A kiss dunt make a hole, yet it’s a ladder to get where ye want, as ye mite say.’

  Then I were sorry, for Santo blusht like an August sunset, and told me that jist when evrything was seeming to be goin pretty the real news were bad n worser. So much for the ladder. That partickeler kiss, as it turned out, led nowheres. Marcella ud been kissed, only to be wisked oft to some battlement up a mounting in Peru. She were alredy on the boat by the time Santo runned into the ostaria to give me the news, Pig ovva God.

  She had not een been hallowed home one night to take leave on her Mamma, or on them what truely loved her. As usual Minguillo ud wrongfooted us like a general. There ud been nothing in his study – not a sliver o paper een – to give me a hint o his fowl plan all these weeks – jist his assence from it on misterious excursions to the docks.

  Santo were convolsed with the idea that he would become a ship’s surgeon on the next brig out o Venice and work his passage to Peru.

  I hated for to be a damp squid but someone had to be the voice o reasoning: ‘What will ye do when ye get there? She’ll be shutted up in the convent and ye wunt be hallowed in by no matter o means. Ye isn’t famly, and ye can’t speak Span-yard.’

  Marcella Fasan

  All the way to South America I breathed on that kiss.

  I felt Santo’s lips on mine like an anchor dragging back through the oceans we ploughed.

  I did not think about storms, or rowdy whales or ambushing pumas on mountain paths, or what awaited me behind the walls at Santa Catalina. I thought of Santo. When I looked into the rheumy mirror in my cabin, I saw his face. When I closed my eyes and touched my mouth, I felt his lips on mine.

  The passage was tempest-strewn. Now that I had been kissed by Santo, I was afraid to die before I had got all the goodness out of that kiss. And that was my only fear every time the sea sent up jagged shards of white-tipped green and sucked them back under the boat.

  I spoke to no one. I was reluctant to interrupt my contemplation of the kiss. Then, among the passengers, I was astonished to see my old friend Hamish Gilfeather, but only faintly so, as my full power of thought and feeling was still entirely fixed on the kiss.

  I had not nearly finished with the kiss when Hamish Gilfeather renewed his kind interest in me. At first, enveloped in the kiss, I heard his voice as if it was echoing across a misty valley. But gradually I began to listen, for the listening was good.

  Hamish Gilfeather refused to be
discouraged by my abstracted silence. He chatted to me until he drew words and then gradually conversations out of my mouth. Once he had me talking, he never ceased to attend to me. In his kindness he reminded me sweetly of Piero, whose death we both flinched from mentioning in those first days. Physically, he did not, for where Piero was a delicate insect, Hamish Gilfeather was a robust warhorse of a man. Mr Gilfeather was expert at manoeuvring the wheeled chair I used for rough days on deck, and knew just when to take my arm when I faltered on my crutch.

  Mr Gilfeather, who had business in Montevideo, had been told by our captain that I was on my way to a Peruvian nunnery. In his fury, he felt moved to relate to me stories of the Inca girls found frozen to death or battered on the head in mountain shrines, well fattened with meat and maize, their hair shorn off, their families far away.

  ‘The Spanish lassies fare no better for all their pure blood,’ he ranted. ‘The nuns in their enclosures must wait longer for their deaths, to be sure, but ’tis certainly no life,’ he declared with pity. Then he opened his rain-coloured eyes wide and enquired, ‘Unless it is a true vocation you’re suddenly having, Miss Marcella, that will make the whole thing a joy to you? I don’t recall any such notion when ye were working on your paintings in Cecilia Cornaro’s studio.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I do not wish to be tactless, y’know,’ he continued, ‘yet I travel the world and I have seen my share of barbarities, and this forcing innocent little girls up mountains is the one that really sticks in my craw and wobbles the wet of my eyes. The little dearrrs! Why, I have seen displayed at Savile House in London a Peruvian lassie left to starve up in the Andes five centuries ago and so thoroughly preserved by the ice, so perfect as in life, that ye might offer her hot chocolate and hope to revive her . . . To me, any nun is just as sad a business.’