The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  As I climbed with difficulty out of the cart, I supposed, this is the last cart I shall ride in, until I am dead and my corpse is taken to the communal grave.

  Goodbye cart, I thought. Then goodbyes fell on me like a net over a lion in the jungle. I farewelled all the things I might never see again: canal reflections playing under the ribs of a bridge, a ball-dress, a little boy, a shop, a party, a rabbit, a haystack, a regatta, a silvery fish swimming under water, a young doctor giving me a look that reached inside me and gently handled my soul.

  And the things I could never hear now: a Venetian folksong, a lullaby, a minuet, the cry of the fishmongers, the abuse of the gondoliers, a salty argument in the street, running feet, my own voice laughing (for I knew that to speak light thoughts in a convent was considered a kind of unchastity), the voice of a young man telling me he loved me.

  Then the arriero was pulling a bell-cord, and a door opened promptly under an arch that bore a relief of Santa Catalina herself painted in sun-struck colours. From a crack in the door, a black-clad nun peered out at us through blue spectacles. Her face was brutally disfigured, a part of her nose melted against a cheek. I lowered my eyes, sensing it would be unwise to stare. Her own eyes were unreadable behind the thick blue glass.

  ‘The Venetian Cripple?’ she asked and the lower half of her face, the part capable of expression, showed a vicious delight. It was not so much her stagnant breath, nor the hard words, but her way of saying them that sent my heart plummeting. My brow prickled with nervous perspiration.

  ‘We have managed to save her for you,’ the arriero declared proudly, ‘though twice she nearly died of cold and the puna and from her own weaknesses. However, our strenuous efforts have delivered her safely.’

  ‘God has chosen to preserve her ’til this time,’ replied the nun smoothly. ‘Your interventions, however strenuously you might describe them, had little or no bearing in the matter. We do not pay gratuities for deliveries, if this is what you are hinting at.’

  At that word ‘deliveries’ I began to tremble.

  I stood with my eyes downcast, desperate for the necessary room but determined that my first words in my new home would be of a higher order than ‘Dónde están los . . .’

  ‘Vicaria, why do you keep the poor child fainting on the doorstep?’ A new voice, low and intelligent, issued through the doorway.

  A black-clad arm now reached out of the convent wall and drew me to a comfortable breast.

  ‘You are welcome, Marcella Fasan,’ said the clever voice warmly, and in Italian. In another second I was on the threshold of a vaulted receiving room, cosy with carpets and flowers and brimming with lamplight.

  The vicaria tutted and turned her back, busying herself with barking orders to the men who carried my dowry across the threshold into Santa Catalina. Impatiently, she herself lifted a vast box from the cart and heaved it into the courtyard. The men stared: the grotesque woman was emaciated and diminutive in stature, yet she had more strength than any of them.

  The arriero nodded at me encouragingly, and the other men smiled and waved fondly. But Arce crossed himself.

  Sor Loreta

  It would be harder than I thought. In His divine wisdom God had sent Me a She-Devil with a sweet face and a pitiful, limping form. She was artfully put together to glean compassion and tenderness from the weak-willed.

  I alone knew the Devil in all his guises and I was not taken in.

  I shuddered to imagine what transactions the Venetian Cripple had combined with the arriero and the men. I saw by the amorous looks they gave her that she had fanned their desires with her expert seductions. Now Priora Mónica was also seduced.

  Remembering Sor Andreola’s milky softness, and Sor Sofia’s flower-like face, I guessed that the Venetian Cripple would set out on Satan’s path with an outward display of modesty and quietness in all her actions. Like them, she would dissemble devoutness with skill and guile.

  How was I to wrestle with the Devil in the soul of such a subtle enemy?

  Marcella Fasan

  The priora was kind and soft as a feather bed. Her first thoughts were all for my comfort: I was quickly shown a necessary room, thereafter plied with refreshing drinks, punctuated by warm hugs. Her Italian was strongly accented but grammatically correct. She said that she loved me already because I came from the country where Rossini was born. She purred, ‘I know that our dear Rossini cherishes a great affection for Venice. For the Venetians first recognized his genius.’

  Then she looked at me with a quivering lip, ‘Have you not seen Rossini on the stage at the theatre of San Moisè in Venice? Imagine, the maestro was but a youth of eighteen when his Cambiale di Matrimonio was first performed in your blessed city in 1810!’

  I shook my head sadly, and she shook her head too, as if to shake away the disappointment. I decided not to tell her that girls confined to their rooms or on island lunatic asylums were not allowed out even to hear the genius of the young Rossini. Perhaps she did not know about my time on San Servolo; perhaps it would be better if she did not.

  She pulled a velvet cover off a shining ebony object. It was an English piano brought from London at the cost of 4,000 francs, she told me gleefully, ‘So that we may play Rossini.’

  ‘You speak excellent Italian, Madre Priora,’ I observed lamely.

  ‘Of course I must speak the language of our dear Rossini! But how you must be tired! We must smuggle you into your room before the other nuns become overexcited about your arrival! Imagine! A Venetian here among us! For them, it is like a fairy tale.’

  There was a tap on the door. I started to see a man of middle years enter the room, to be greeted with smiles from the priora.

  ‘Do not fear, child,’ she told me. ‘Surgeon Sardon must examine you before we allow you to mingle with the other nuns, lest you have brought any contagious disease. And he will give you a vaccination for the Small-Pox. We are proud to have rid Arequipa of this affliction by God’s miracle of modern medicine.’

  The doctor’s examinations were brief and discreet. Finally he made me walk a few steps without my crutch and administered the vaccine to my arm from a little bottle topped by a long needle.

  ‘Fit to serve God,’ he smiled. ‘Though you shall feel unwell temporarily on account of the serum.’

  With a smile, he cautioned the priora, ‘Let her have a restful day. No dramaticals.’

  The priora summoned a velo blanco – a white-veiled serving nun – to take me to my cell. ‘A little something to eat will be brought to you there directly,’ she told me. My possessions, she explained, had been carried there in the meanwhile, and the dowry boxes would be opened in my presence before the precious contents were stored in the cajas de depósito of the convent.

  My arm bandaged, I followed the velo blanco down past the entrance offices. My farewell to colour proved premature. We made our way down through an orange courtyard with a red oleander gleaming under a bitingly blue sky. That orange fanfared like cinnabar and saffron yellow and rose madder all fighting on the palette for dominance. Such a riot of strong colour I had not seen since I was a child, looking down from the minstrel’s gallery at a sumptuous spun-sugar dessert served at a ball in the Palazzo Espagnol while the French still ruled us. We passed down to another bitter-orange courtyard luminous with figs and geraniums.

  I reproved myself for my surprise. Venetians do not own colour, though we sometimes think we do.

  Cecilia Cornaro would be in ecstasies here, I thought.

  Yet then again, Cecilia Cornaro, if she came here, could walk out again.

  The velo blanco pointed ahead to the novices’ quarters and my own cell. ‘First, let me show you our cloisters! I should not really,’ she giggled, ‘but otherwise you might not see them till . . . maybe till you profess. Quick quick!’

  She guided me into a courtyard whose thrumming intensity of blue could only have been created by a fusion of hyacinthine and pavonated cobalt exalted by lapis. This hot blue kingdom was plant
ed with orange trees heavy with fruit. The upper walls were frescoed with tales of divine love. The art was cheerfully bad, yet vividly full of stories: a sea angular and viscous at once, as only land-bound people paint it; a drunken fool had a black-and-white cat peering quizzically from his shoulder-bag; blindfolded angels romped clumsily; the soul lurched towards God, improbably encased in a child’s wheeled walking frame.

  A breath of cold air made me shiver. Like a wound in young skin, an unexpected doorway gashed one sweet, sun-rich wall. It opened into a curious dark hall with two biers like cribs, one of which held the dead body of a withered nun in full habit and holding a pastor’s hook. I uttered a cry of dismay.

  The velo blanco explained that the nun had died peacefully of old age. She would spend a day in state while her sisters celebrated her ascension to heaven. There were paintings of other dead nuns lining the walls, all with their eyes shut and their mouths a little slack. Each held the pastor’s hook in a tight fist, as if it were a truncheon. Some sported a fine growth of moustache on their pale faces; others had eyebrows that rushed to join together. There were bridal flowers about their temples and a festive look to their coiffure. I leaned closer into the paintings to look at the brushwork. To be in this convent, all these women must have been of pure Spanish blood, yet the local artists had given them the exoticism of South America. How was it done? Cecilia would have diagnosed the exact shade of . . .

  The velo blanco hurried me out of the blue courtyard and back down to the cloister of the novices. As we arrived there I saw another nun with a tray of food approaching my new cell. She paused outside the door and peered into the gloom. She saw something inside there that clearly frightened her: she placed the tray on the bench outside the cell, grimaced and ran away without another word. When I turned to ask my velo blanco why her sister was so afraid, she too had already disappeared.

  Sor Loreta

  The demon who possessed Judas and Jezebel had entered this girl from Venice, making her more powerful than the weak sisters of Santa Catalina.

  And there was only Myself to keep vigilant. It was My duty to keep our foolish Virgins pure from contamination for they hovered ever on the chasm of impurity.

  Perhaps I might forfend the Venetian Cripple’s attack before it was launched?

  These were My thoughts as I hurried through the courtyards down to the novitiate where I was to preside over the opening of the Venetian Cripple’s dowry trunks. My angels flitted urgently around the walls.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I told them. ‘I shall render this daughter of Satan unto Our Lord.’

  The brother of the daughter of Satan, I now discovered, had furnished Me with all the tools that I needed. So God’s design unfailingly reveals Itself to the Enlightened.

  Marcella Fasan

  I hesitated on the threshold. My arm ached where the doctor had punctured it. My head was heavy. There was the sound of frantic activity inside my cell: as if Venetian rats scurried and gnawed in there. I peered through the window and saw the top of one of my dowry trunks open and a veiled head bent over it. I remembered the wry embarrassment with which the priora explained, ‘We must account for your dowry, my dear. It is a sordid business but our chaplain directs us so.’

  And they had a sordid nun for doing the business too. It was the vicaria, she who had already given me such a cruel salutation at the gate, who was presently engaged in turning my trunks inside out.

  She had removed the blue spectacles and I saw that one eye was glued shut. Her face was pitted and scored. Later I would learn that when she was just a child she had plunged her face into boiling water in the hope that the scars would deter any potential husband. Yet those features of hers must have been ugly already. Her eyes were too small and too close together; her chin jowled and jutted, and her nose could not have been scourged into its hooked shape.

  She thrust her mannish hands deep inside one of my dowry chests. Then she snatched them out, bleeding from fragments of the Murano glass that had shattered on the mountain. And her ankle was bleeding too, on to my stone floor – she must have been wearing the cilice around her thigh.

  As soon as I walked in she rose and slapped me hard across the face. I felt a tiny shard of glass slicing my cheek and blood trickling down towards my collar.

  ‘I suspected as much. A Venetian here! I was against you from the start. But they voted me down, out of a squalid curiosity to see one like you. You shall come straight to the bathhouse and immerse for two hours to start the cure for your calor. Look at that vulgar sweat on your face!’

  Calor? In Venice we said ‘in calore ’ when a cat was in need of a husband.

  I stared down the trajectory of her bloodstained jabbing finger, and discovered that it was, of course, my dowry that had got me accused of indecency. My brother had chosen San Sebastiano as my personal saint. The vicaria was glaring at my handsome statue of him, and the gloriously serene image painted by Mantegna.

  ‘Obscene things!’ she hissed. ‘It is as I warned them, you have come to corrupt our young sisters. They would not listen.’

  Minguillo must have got wind of the fact that for some reason San Sebastiano was held in extreme ill-repute here at Santa Catalina. I had been indifferent to the booty in my trunks, just as a slave feels little interest in his price. I had not suspected that even in my dowry Minguillo might find a new way to damage me.

  ‘My brother . . .’ I faltered, and then stopped. Minguillo had been here and met with them. He would have found a companionable soul in this vicaria. Was the apparently sympathetic priora also party to his machinations? I felt the full force of my isolation then. Longingly, I pictured Anna’s and Gianni’s faces turned towards me with loving expressions. And Santo in the garden at San Servolo, looking over the heads of the lady Tranquils to meet my eyes.

  ‘What are we going to put in your hornacina?’ the vicaria demanded, slapping me again, and pointing to an arched alcove apparently designed to serve as a little altar inside my room. It had been decorated around its borders with naïve paintings of flowers and leaves.

  ‘This sacrilegious Venetian filth,’ she pointed in disgust at San Sebastiano, ‘will go directly into the vaults and never be seen again by decent women. If it were my choice, it would be put to the flame. Now it is God’s design that you learn a lesson you’ll not forget.’

  She seized my ear and pulled me out of my cell – tumbling the tray of food to the ground in our wake. She jostled me along myriad little streets – not a soul appearing – to a low chamber where a stone tub the size of a large carriage was filled with water that did not look as if it knew the breath of a coal fire to warm it.

  ‘Behind the screen,’ she ordered curtly. ‘Take off your clothes.’

  The Small-Pox vaccination was coursing palpably through my body, making me slow and dull. I fumbled at my travelling clothes until they had all dropped away. I hesitated behind the blue wooden screen, unwilling to expose my naked self to her hating eye.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘Come out this minute.’

  I emerged timidly. In the goose-pimpling cool of that stone chamber, my leg scars blazed lividly, as if I had flagellated myself where it most hurt. I caught sight of a severe-looking John the Baptist in an altar above the bath. I supposed that the nuns regarded their baths as a kind of baptism. As I looked bleakly at the saint, I heard a sharp intake of breath, a rustle of indignant wool. The vicaria hastened around the rim of the bath and slapped my face again, so hard that I staggered to the very rim of the pool, teetering there.

  ‘Where is your chemise, lecher?’ she shrieked at me, her eyes feasting on my wounds, the fetor of her breath hot on my body.

  ‘You said . . .’ I tried to cover myself with my inadequate hands.

  Reeling from yet another slap, I crouched inside the shelter of the screen and pulled my chemise back on.

  ‘Now, get in there!’ she pushed me so I toppled into the wintry water, hitting my head on the stone side a
s I went down. I plunged deep, hit the slimy bottom with crumpled hands and rode the splashing water back up to the surface inside the clinging bubble of my shift. I struggled to right myself, grasping the side for safety. Warm blood fell down the iced rictus of my face. Through that red curtain, I searched out my enemy.

  She had not finished with me.

  She was pinioning one of my hands with a booted foot. I had a glimpse of her face. All humanity had departed from it. A mask of rapture stiffened her features. It was as if she was no longer conscious.

  Then she leaned over and pushed my head under the water and kept it there.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  What I needed was money, if I was to be with my love.

  Money. Such a little, sordid thing, that would not buy a clean, loving heart. A dirty thing, handed around among strangers. Yet for me, who did not have it, what a monstrous proportion money now assumed in my life.

  All my days I had proudly discounted it, feeling superior to the rich noblemen whose self-indulgence I despised.

  On San Servolo I had earned little, for I had offered my services cheaply in order to be sure of a place near Marcella. Though I had eaten poorly and dressed worse, I had saved nothing.

  In Venice my name had been blackened by Minguillo, so I could not earn my living as a surgeon to the wealthy. (Of course, to get myself to Marcella, I would have attended even spoiled patricians.) I practised on the poor and on the prostitutes of the town, for the Spanish madam advertised my utility to her friends. I charged poor rates to poor patients. How could I do anything else? Slowly, slowly, I began to collect funds.

  It was not enough, and it was not fast enough. I had a sense of my breathing impaired, because impatience made me lean forward, always looking for new ways to get money. I became mercantile, calculating. I inscribed myself to an apothecary, concocting his electuaries. I became bold in demanding my share of the profits. I looked for other opportunities. I took in sewing, pretending that I had a seamstress for a mother: I could stitch up a shirt as well as a wound. I swung wooden crates at the docks.