Everyone assumed that because I was a cripple I had never known love. But the thought of Santo’s kiss, and the memory of the silent promise he had whispered into my mouth on San Servolo, undermined the faith I might have cultivated at Santa Catalina. As every prayer ‘from this untouched virgin of Christ’ crossed my lips, it pained me that God seemed to collude blandly in the fraud. What kind of God was this to trust as my eternal Bridegroom? Who accepted hollow vows from unwilling novices, who allowed brothers to stow inconvenient sisters in what Cecilia Cornaro had once called His harem?
And I had to bear in mind that this same God was also the idol of a creature as crazed as Sor Loreta, who single-handedly did more to promote profane thoughts among us, simply by her frightful example, than could the Devil himself.
Divided from myself again, I took refuge in paper, as I had done as a girl. My single-leafed diary found a safe home at the back of my candle cupboard.
Sor Loreta
By day, I sent Sor Narcisa and Sor Arabel out to gather information on the Venetian Cripple. Those girls had footsteps that weighed nothing.
I Myself walked around at night, listening, watching. I heard it whispered in the refectory that the convent had a ghost, who haunted the narrow alleyways in the early hours. The silly little girls in the novitiate had claimed that a goblin pressed his face against their windows in the early hours.
Marcella Fasan
But by night, what a difference! What a primitive place was Santa Catalina! With the bats swooping, the candles and ovens glowing inside tenebrous rooms, the Moorish domes and archways reared up in phantasmagoric silhouette.
It was at night that the darker histories of the convent soaked through to the surface of things. The very dew seemed thickened with the grim dust of the past. Suddenly I was aware that so many items that I touched, even my very bed, had once belonged to women who had been declared dead to the world when still on the edge of girlhood, and who had lived as brief phantoms in this vibrant place, only to die in obscurity.
Back, back, back in time the night took us. I was terrified by Santa Catalina after nightfall. Our ladylike community seemed to descend into primaeval times, more a tribal village than a convent, the fires burning like little red hells in the blackness.
Inside and outside became debatable. The colour was gone and fearsome shadows crept in. Suddenly the convent seemed so vulnerable, so tentative, like a mere graze in the earth, a fragile settlement in the wilderness where powerful and malevolent beasts lurked all around.
I wrote in my diary: ‘All is not well in Santa Catalina. By night, I can feel it.’
Minguillo Fasan
The Deriding Reader deceives Himself if He interprets my recent silence on the missing will as a sign of weakness or defeat. By no means.
Once Marcella was dispatched, I began investigations anew into the identity of the will-thief. Many years had passed since I found the chicken head in its place. I was tired of living with a dim worry raking up discomfort at the back of my mind. I wanted the thief found and hurt.
I set out to interview everyone who had lived in the Palazzo Espagnol, from the last occasion when I saw the real will until the time I discovered its theft. Servants, priests, pensioners, boatmen and gardeners left my study dazed and afraid: of course I was not able to ask the one real question that needed answering, so I tortured them with vague accusations, watching closely for any sign of guilt.
In my wildest hopes, the thief was already dead. But even the wildest hopes have their sagging corners. If the thief was deceased, where had he stowed his document, that is to say, mine?
Perhaps whoever had the will aspired to torment me slowly to madness? Vain hope! And what individual of such diabolical cleverness had crossed my path? I was surrounded by halfwits at every turn.
Speaking of which, I remarked to my valet Gianni, ‘Do we know anyone who means me ill? I mean someone from the old days, when my father was still alive?’
If the fellow had only known what I was talking about, how he would have stood up straight and stared, instead of giving me his usual look of a fish boiling in a pan. He was the only servant I trusted to dust my study.There I strewed my private papers around with tranquil ease. For Gianni, whose head looked like the bole of a squat palm tree with a tuft of hair at the top, was illiterate and incurious as wood.
Marcella Fasan
Colour-dazed and sun-dazzled, I performed the duties of my novitiate faultlessly. I learned the stories painted on the walls. My Spanish took on an Arequipan accent and I acquired the special words that defined the place: sillar, the white stone that cradled us; mestiza, mixed blood; criada, servant; esclava, slave.
I had a new name, Sor Constanza. And a new hairstyle: a few curls clinging to my head under my white veil.
Despite that, Venetian glamour still attached to me. Novices would still take every opportunity to cross-examine me on Venetian fashions and scandals. They wished to assume that I had been at the very summit of high society, for it aggrandized them all to have a great Venetian lady among them. They could never understand why I had come to Arequipa, when I could have lived by San Marco Square and had the Grand Canal for my liquid garden. And a Venetian nobleman for my lover.
Marcella Fasan kept silent. It was Sor Constanza who smiled and asked, ‘What could be more beautiful than Santa Catalina?’
The mistress of the novices purred in agreement and kissed my dissembling cheek.
Sor Loreta
The Venetian Cripple tried to keep herself away from Me, but I did not let her escape My vigilance. I did not consider that I had done My daily duty unless I had encountered her at least once and looked deeply into her eyes. I hoped to discover the precise nature of her sin.
The priora noticed that I paid special attention to the Venetian Cripple. She harangued Me like a Pharisee, ‘Were you sent to destroy the peace of this convent? I rue the day the Fathers were so blind as to admit you. You should have been put in a madhouse, not allowed to drive other women out of their senses! Do not turn Sor Constanza into another Sor Sofia. You must learn to leave the younger nuns alone.’
‘I do what I do in the love of God, and there will be harvest.’
The priora put on a wheedling voice, as if talking to an unreasonable child, ‘Sor Constanza is terrified of you since you nearly drowned her the day she arrived here. She behaves perfectly, but I fear it is too perfectly. Do you consider this, that you drive the poor girl’s thoughts away from God? That she is suffused not with piety, but with fear of what you will do to her next?’
‘Her conscience is not pure – for she hides sin behind that meek face – so naturally she will be frightened of an incorruptible soul. How should it be otherwise?’
The priora sighed and tried to dismiss Me. I pointed My deaf right ear at her and let the insults rain down inside it uncomprehended. I stayed, for there was an angel hovering over her left shoulder urging Me to remain in her presence until she had drunk the hot chocolate I had brought her.
Gianni delle Boccole
Marcella ud been gone a year, and there were preshous little news of her. And I would know, wunt I. Because I read evry one o Minguillo’s letters, allus hopin to find a sottile refrunce to my own, what I had sent anonimousely, with another merchant and a hunnerd of cash scrapt together by the servants, to the priora of Santa Catalina. I hopt that the priora might write to Minguillo with some hard questions after that. But she did not.
Minguillo aughter been happy, for he had suckseeded. No more need to go creeplin about, doing secret harm to his poor sister. But ye can’t take the slither out ovva snake. He were still restless. Still puzzlin about the old will what had been took, saucespishus of evryone.
By an oirony he used me as his eyes, to espy on t’other members o the household. I give him hunnerds o insent details, and telled him a sack o small lies to keep him busy wonderin. And I ust the cover o his investigerations to be making my own. Evry time Minguillo interfewed another suspeck, I stood
stiffly ahind him, listenin, learnin n crossin off one more possible from my own list o will-thieves.
Marcella Fasan
Within a year, I was deemed ready to take my vows. I could find no argument that was convincing as to why I should not now be promoted to a professed nun, a velo negro, a black veil, which conferred the right to vote in the three-yearly elections. As a professed nun, I would have a larger cell, servants, and – the only thing I cared about – more privacy. I had no ambitions, but I knew it would cause a scandal if I refused the veil, and I had no wish to draw attention to myself.
If anyone looked at me too closely, I was afraid that they might see Marcella Fasan under Sor Constanza’s skin. Docile Sor Constanza did not show any desire for the life beyond the walls of Santa Catalina. But Marcella Fasan’s vivid existence continued on paper. Behind the candles in my cupboard were the pages on which I truly lived. In those pages, Santo was like the lining of my heart, indivisible from me. I did not wonder if he still loved me. I knew that he did.
So when I professed myself betrothed to God, I did so in a provisional way, committing myself to Him only until I might be married to Santo, even though there presently seemed no practical possibility of ever seeing him again.
At the height of the special mass I laid my body on the floor in the shape of a cross and recited the words that bound me to the order. Then I knelt before the smiling priora and pronounced my flimsy promises. Through the window of the choir, the priest handed me the black veil. Other nuns helped me draw it on, patting it down to perfection. A bride must be beautiful for her husband.
Only when my wedding ring was drawn over my finger did I flinch away from the priest, drawing a gasp from the watching public.
I held out my hand, telling myself, It is a rehearsal, for my real wedding.
Then I was crowned with roses, and led in triumph back into the cloisters for a fiesta that was scarcely spiritual, given the number of cakes consumed by us all; except for the vicaria, of course, who was in the tenth day of one of her lengthy fasts.
I turned the ring around on my finger. On the way back to my cell I plucked a blade of grass, which I curled up and inserted between the gold band and my finger. The ring did not quite touch my skin.
Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
Gianni had found a letter from the priora at Santa Catalina on Minguillo’s desk. The occasion for her writing was to inform him that another part of the dowry had fallen due because Marcella had become a professed nun.
I stumbled out of the ostaria, sick at heart. I leaned against a wall, the coins in my back pocket sharp as knives against my thigh. Married to God? That meant she had married someone else but me.
Why had she not contrived to stay a novice, or to become a tertiary, a lay sister?
Gianni followed me out, otherwise preoccupied. ‘Now,’ he mouthed gloomily, ‘Minguillo says that she gets a slave of her own. He has to pay. How can them Peruvian servants understand her like Anna and me?’
‘Why did she do it?’ I agonized. ‘How could she take the veil when she knows I . . . ?’
Gianni thumped my back, ‘Maybe she crossed her fingers behind her when she vowed? Maybe ’tis all a big imposture! Maybe’ – and his voice darkened – ‘they drugged her.’
Maybe they beat her, we both thought. Maybe they locked her up and tried to drive her mad.We had no reason then to think that Santa Catalina was any kinder than the cruellest convent in Venice. After all, Minguillo had chosen it.
I had never seen Marcella dressed in black. How pale must her skin look against its harshness. Doctors attending nuns will notice that the black colour of their habits gives nuns special cutaneous problems, their murky costumes swallowing up the rays of the sun while impeding the healthy transmission of heat away from the body. Particles of disease and unhealthy accumulations are more readily absorbed by dark clothes. The metaphor applies to the stifling of the whole bodily economy: for to be a nun is surely a kind of dying? Dead to the world, the nun’s body quietly decomposes unseen by loving eyes.
Meanwhile I had been right about Napoleon: it had not proved so easy to stifle his itch. My old patient had risen from his own ashes and stormed off Elba. Soon he was back in Paris, planning to take back everything he had lost, except his youth and health, already irretrievably spent.
At that moment I wished that Napoleon might leave off scratching his itches with Old World corpses, commandeer a ship and take up his rampages in Peru. For then there would be call for doctors by the hundred to amputate and sew up his victims. And all the convents in South America would be forced to release their poor hostages from their grim cells, and divorce them from their heavenly Bridegroom.
Marcella Fasan
A week after I married God, I was led from my old cell to the new one. A sturdy velo blanco carried my possessions, except for the little sheaf of diary pages I had hidden in a shawl and insisted on carrying myself. The velo blanco walked ahead to show me the way, for I was now to live in a part of the convent that I, as a novice, had never before been permitted to visit.
We crossed the blue courtyard diagonally and entered a cluster of buildings with the air of an ancient village. We passed Calle Cordoba, with its white walls decked with red geraniums. At the end it thinned down into Calle Toledo, a canyon of terracotta buildings, flat and simple. On our right were shattered and mutilated walls slanting out of the ground like a mouthful of rotten teeth.
‘The earthquake in 1784,’ said the velo blanco briefly. ‘Sor Loreta arrived on the same day. We have never been able to fully recover from that catastrophe.’
She guided me to a sudden right turn into the Calle Sevilla, lined with walls red as meat, and rising up in white steps towards the entrance of an old church surmounted by a bell.
‘Here,’ the nun pushed me gently through the first doorway on the left. ‘This is where you shall live now, Sor Constanza.’
I entered my courtyard through a pair of low wooden doors, each hewn out of a single mellow plank with the sheen of roasted butter. Above the door was inscribed the name of a previous occupant, M. Dominga Somocursio.
‘What happened to Sor Dominga?’ I enquired.
‘She is with Our Father and Husband,’ I was told. ‘The Small-Pox. She was afraid of the needle and refused the vaccination. Her parents ordered the cell sold and the proceeds used for masses for her soul. Now your brother has bought it for you.’
My brick-paved courtyard was painted a vivid cobalt blue. Three long stone seats lined the walls, and there was a small flowerbed in the centre. The kitchen opened off to the left and my bedchamber straight ahead, with a pot of geraniums foaming white at either side of the door. How fortunate I was, I thought, to have a beautiful courtyard of my own. Later I would discover that all the professed nuns’ quarters boasted private gardens, some far grander than mine.
The courtyard seemed steeped not in Christian elementals but the flavour of the East: the graceful arch over the door, the low golden stone pocketing the sky.
‘Earthquakes,’ commented the nun, following my eyes.
I smiled to myself. I’d already drawn cartoons of the proud white Arequipans who did not like to admit to the Arabic influence from the Moorish conquest of Spain. Earthquakes were invariably blamed for the oriental shapes of their buildings. Here in this far-flung colony, outnumbered by native people and seared by foreign light, the white Spanish treasured their pure blood and their Catholic religion more than the citizens of the places where such things went unquestioned – except by the risen-again Napoleon Bonaparte.
I followed the velo blanco inside a large airy room. Its terracotta floor had been cleaned in readiness for the silk carpet that was part of my dowry. It had a vaulted ceiling with little windows and alcoves, and a creamy, detailed architrave. And a compact black girl, who curtseyed to me.
‘What is your name?’ I asked.
‘Josefa,’ she replied and curtseyed again. ‘I am your servant cook maid slave.’
�
�You have just one,’ observed the velo blanco condescendingly. ‘Most of the professed nuns have three at least. Margarita the pharmacist has twelve!’
Josefa observed sturdily, ‘I can do a leetle somefing-somefing for my mistress, though.’
‘Then show her the new quarters,’ ordered the velo blanco. My belongings were deposited on the divan and the serving nun departed.
Josefa stared at me unblinking. ‘So,’ she announced, ‘here tis your new house. Here tis this, and this, and this’ – she pointed at the fireplace, the chimney, the bed, with studied formality.
Then, when the footsteps of the velo blanco had faded, Josefa’s face opened up into a delicious grin. Hands on her hips, she said, ‘The other servants talk. They say you be good mistress. In that case I be good servant, and perhaps slowly by slowly I shall love you. I think is passable.’
‘I very much hope so,’ I smiled, ‘I already feel quite fond of you.’
‘Sgood then,’ said Josefa. ‘You look-look some. I put your fings in order.’
My new hornacina was already inhabited by the unpleasant statue of Santa Rosa. Her ragged red face looked down on her luxurious new accommodation dismissively, as if to say, ‘All things on earth are the same for me. I live for the world beyond this one.’
‘Ugly cow, she,’ observed Josefa.
‘And dismal with it,’ I concurred. Josefa yelped with mirth.
Below Santa Rosa was a cupboard for candles, already well stocked. My diary would be safe behind the wall of wax. Encloistered opposite was a large cupboard with four doors and two deep shelves. I was amazed at this capacity – what personal possessions might a nun accumulate to fill such a space? Hidden behind some curtains on the opposite wall I found my bed. As in the novitiate quarters, it was in an arched alcove, to protect me from earth tremors. A stark cross hung above the bedhead. There was a space where I supposed my desk and chair would go. The divan was plumped up with cushions. The large kitchen could be approached both from my room and the courtyard. It was furnished with a capacious oven on which Josefa was already stirring something fragrant.
The Book of Human Skin Page 35
