‘Smell good, yes?’ she asked.
I nodded. ‘Where do you sleep?’
She pointed to a pallet bed beside the oven. ‘Hot-hot like Africa.’
I could positively ramble through my new world. It was more like a miniature country house than a cell. Noticing a door near the hornacina, I poked my head through it, discovering yet another room that was nearly as large again as my new parlour-sleeping-chamber.
I called Josefa, ‘What is this other room for?’
‘For what you likes, madam,’ came the answer.
There came into my mind’s eye the image of Santo writing at a table in that room, looking up to smile at me, reaching out his hand.
Sunshine washed in from the courtyard and a barred tall window that looked down into the innumerable little streets. There was no glass, just wooden shutters.
So this would be my kingdom and my cage. As yet, it seemed a cage as wide as the world and full of pleasant possibilities.
With even a whole room for ‘what you likes’.
Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
I imagined Marcella looking up at the walls of the convent of Santa Catalina, gazing towards the snow-topped mountains. I felt her shivering in the thin Andean air. She had promised to be married to those walls: she had promised that she would never more leave that place. The promise went beyond her death, for I knew that nuns were destined to be buried within their cloisters when they died.
I could not evict that image from my mind’s eye: Marcella, with God’s ring on her slender finger, gazing up from her stone cage high in the sky of the New World.
Did she think of me? Of the ring I did not give her before she was sent away?
With whom did she talk? Did the nuns force cruel penances on her? Would they hate her for a foreigner, despise her for a cripple?
And the servants? Perhaps Gianni was right to worry. Why should the servants in Arequipa love Marcella? More masters and mistresses are poisoned by their servants than is realized by people outside the medical profession. I have seen plump noblewomen reduced to skeletal children by slow and gradual administration of arsenic, or swiftly dispatched by aconite.
My Spanish madam pronounced herself delighted with my progress in her language. There was no part of my body I could not name, no rash or spot for which I lacked the Spanish word. But would I ever use my knowledge now?
Marcella – or Sor Constanza, as Gianni told me – was married to God. Would she consider bigamy?
Marcella Fasan
At first the daily life of a professed nun proved little different from my existence in the novitiate. We were woken by a wooden rattle just before five in the morning and we made our way promptly to the central fountain in Plaza Zocodober, all the while reciting our rosaries. We would observe the morning’s canonical hours and attend one chief mass. After that we would go to our cells to take rest, and to recite psalms, counting off the anniversaries of important saints and using psalters to remember any of our number who had recently died. At eleven-thirty, we dined, usually in the refectory, after which we returned to our cells.
In the afternoon we were back in the choir for vísperas and completas and the silent recitation of the rosary. The rest of the day passed in alternating periods of prayer, reading of the Bible and Lives of the saints. The peons had been partly right. We were expected to pray specifically to save the souls of our loved ones from the endless tortures of Purgatory. I murmured my prayers audibly, for the vicaria was known to prowl the streets, listening under our windows.
Minguillo’s name did not cross my chanting lips. Piero’s, yes: I devoted my prayer hours to him. Gianni, Anna, and even my mother and nieces figured in my devotions. Nor did I forget my promise to send up the required prayers for the peons and especially Arce.
As for Santo, the thought of him was a prayer of its own kind.
While my lips were busy with prayer, I sketched: Josefa busy in the kitchen; the other nuns bent over their hymnals in the church; my vivid little garden. I longed for colour pastels and paint. But I dared not ask for them.
Food, in profusion or deprivation, marked out our hours and days. Unlike women married to mortal husbands, we did not concern ourselves at all with provisioning, cooking, serving or clearing away. We were served just like men. Our relationship with food was therefore more spiritual, or so the sermons said.
We ‘fasted’ every Friday, which meant eating only potatoes and cereals or fish. This was too greedy for Sor Loreta, who would berate us for our luxuries, and who frequently reminded us that ‘the infant Catherine of Sweden consented to suckle at the breast of her mother only on days when there had been no conjugal relations between her parents’. Another of her favourites was San Nicola. Even when he was a baby, San Nicola was so holy that he took just one breast on Fridays.
‘While you gorge your gullets,’ sniffed the vicaria, ‘I myself will feast only on Christ’s Body and Blood at communion.’
‘Cannibal Princess!’ someone observed, and I craned my head to see who so dared, but all the nuns’ faces appeared smooth and guiltless.
Our staple was locro, a stew of lamb, beef, peppers and potatoes. On Thursdays we would be given our rations of manjar blanco, a milky dessert, and a chicken stew, wine and fruit. Between Ash Wednesday and Forgiveness Week, we were given a dish of chickpeas cooked in honey. On Sundays we had two pastries, rice pudding, two different fish dishes and potatoes. During Holy Week we fed on two honeyed desserts with peaches and quinces.
We were expected to make a daily attendance at one of the confessionals off the main cloister. We climbed up four steps to a tiny cupboard with a door we closed behind us, so we sat in airless darkness to confess ourselves. The grates were cut directly into the wall of the public part of the church: our voices floated through the holes into the place where our bodies were not allowed to go. After each confession – at which Marcella Fasan invented for Sor Constanza a repertoire of mild sins – I emerged blinking into the cloister with its red ochre arches and carmine geraniums.
We were permitted to look after our own gardens, growing flowers for our hornacinas. Our servants might go out of the convent to buy seeds and kitchen supplies for us. And of course they came back with ears full of town gossip, items of which were traded like cards in a highly staked game.
Friendships between the nuns could be managed, it seemed. I heard giggles and conversations from behind wooden shutters as I made my way down the Calle Toledo. Yet no one in those first few months of my professed life invited me into their cell, or sat beside me confidentially in the choir. I divined that the vicaria had made the other nuns afraid to talk to me.
Like many of the nuns, I made a pet of a living flea in a green glass flask. Indeed, his antics were companionable during the long hours of prayer. The convent fleas seemed much delighted by the limpieza de sangre, the purity of the blood that they sucked from the nuns at Santa Catalina.
Josefa would pick them out of my bedlinen with iron forceps and line up the corpses on my hornacina as an offering to my ugly Santa Rosa, observing, ‘Shame they can’t bite her. She like that, eh?’
Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
When the Waterloo’d Napoleon was transported down to the island of St Helena in the South Pacific, I had the strangest revelation. Marcella was now physically closer to Bonaparte than she was to me.
While I marked out all my days of loss, I began to feel a bizarre kinship with my old patient in his last decline. Did he, like me, quite fail to kill the hope that his life might be given back to him? Did he dream of release, just as I dreamed of rescuing Marcella? Did his mind trace the waves pleating under his ship’s prow, all the way back to his finest hour on the battlefield, just as I remembered my finest second, that in which my lips had been joined to Marcella’s?
Unbeknownst to the generals who had fought and feared him, Napoleon was all along nursing inside his own belly the enemy that would be his nemesis. A prepyloric ulcer was carving out a long niche that wo
uld eventually be occupied by a cancerous tumour.
By the time Napoleon was confined on St Helena, the tumour was already on its invisible march north, south, east and west inside him. To mitigate his intestinal cramps, his doctors set about killing him slowly with colonic irrigations and vomits induced by antimony potassium tartrate. Repeated doses left him with the flow of blood to his brain interrupted by scattered bursts of heartbeats, like gunfire in battle.
Napoleon had no friends on St Helena. In his circumstances, a doctor, however constant his attendance at your side, is not a friend. That doctor is the person who will document your death, ache by ache, gasp by gasp.
Did Marcella gasp on the mountain air? Or was she nourished by its purity? Did they allow her paper to keep her diary? To draw on? Did she have a doctor? I found myself searingly jealous of the unknown Arequipan surgeon who would have the privilege of touching Marcella’s leg, and standing in such proximity to her luminous skin that his own astonished face would be bathed in light.
Marcella Fasan
Josefa gave me to understand that she would scrutinize my behaviour for a provisional period before allowing herself too many familiarities.
‘Noble girls strange,’ she said. ‘Seem nice, then sudden mean and stuck up.’
‘I would never . . .’ I protested.
‘I spose not,’ she acknowledged. ‘But I just wait a leetle-leetle.’
Josefa was still the only person, apart from my confessor, with whom I spoke. Chatter in the convent byways was quickly silenced by the vicaria, who seemed omnipresent, gliding from corners or breaking away unexpectedly from a still silhouette on a stone escarpment. On catching a nun alone, she would destroy her with personal criticisms. I suffered many such humiliations, and overheard many more outside my window. So assiduous was Sor Loreta in discerning imperfections, it was as if we were all hollowed gourds held up to the light. Yet how wrong she was too, accusing quiet girls of garrulity and thin girls of vanity. The vicaria loved my limp as a living parable of my undoubted sins, urging other nuns to imitate my penance by putting sharp stones into their shoes. Here again, Sor Loreta was deluded, for of course it was not God but my brother who was the author of my mutilation.
Returning from my confession on the first day of Lent, I was horrified to see the vicaria walking towards me in close colloquy with her two fawning retainers, Sor Narcisa and Sor Arabel, in front of whom she rejoiced in humiliating the other nuns. She had not yet seen me, so I had time to steal into the nearest doorway. Still I heard her voice grating closer, and so I withdrew deeper into the unknown room, backing over the narrow stone threshold until I could find a place out of sight.
My eyes were squeezed closed with terror. My back pushed through curtains and into a room that smelled deliciously of cigar smoke, wine, flowers and linseed oil. I felt for a moment that I was back in Cecilia Cornaro’s studio in Venice.
When I opened my eyes, they fell on a girl lying negligently on an elegant divan. I knew that face. I had glimpsed it in the refectory. Otherwise I would never have thought her a nun. She was smoking a cigar with an expression of highly focussed bliss. Instead of her habit, a morning gown was carelessly tied around her waist, half open and showing a petticoat that was none of the cleanest. A silk shawl was dripping off her shoulders. Her hair hung down her back in two supple brown tails and her feet were encased in splendidly dirty silk stockings, one of which was loitering down towards the ankle. Utterly unruffled by my unexpected appearance, she grinned, ‘Ah, la Veneciana! Do shut the doors, be a lovely.’
I pushed a hand through the curtain and grasped the handle, pulling it shut. Then I turned back to her just as she enquired, in a casual drawl, ‘So would you like to see a dirty picture?’
And she pulled from her bosom some dozen little cards, on each of which was painted a nearly naked San Sebastiano.
Minguillo Fasan
My perfectly methodical investigations had failed to reveal a will-thief.With this conclusion of my probing, I felt a kind of relief. I had subjected my entire household to an empire of fear, and nothing had emerged. I was able to reassure myself that the thief was no more, and that his opportunity to hurt me was buried with him.
Yet still I was afflicted with discontent. My wife Amalia was the new object of my opprobium. She had failed to produce a son.
This was getting to be a little uncomfortable. I wanted a baby boy to sit on my knee, to dress in miniature imitation of me, to teach how to shoot as well as me, to show every corner of the Palazzo Espagnol. My boy-baby hunger struck me every time I saw a squalling infant in the street. It put me in a fever, made me feel a temporary inmate in my own home, made me walk into low taverns and hold cool bottles against my hot forehead.
Like Adam, I blamed my wife.
The Excitable Reader asks why I mention this posture of affairs?
The Reader should calm Himself, and put away any suspicions.
If there’s anything a writer should not be doing and ought to be snubbed for, it is laying a red herring. It tends to get a writer disliked.
Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
The one thing I would not do for Signora Sazia was to kill babies in the wombs of her girls. I saw the mothers to term, and I brought those infants into the world as kindly as I could. I tried to find homes for them among other patients, those who longed in vain for a child. I would not permit a single baby I had midwived to go to the orphanages run by former nuns. Rather, I would walk the streets with an infant under my arm until I found someone who would take a baby for love alone.
Great and opulent families are more inclined to sterility and are more often disappointed in the gender of the offspring if it proves female. So there is hardly a prosperous quack-midwife who does not boast herself able to foretell a boy or a girl child. Hippocrates states that a woman who is to bear a boy will have a good colour to her skin, and be merry all through her pregnancy. The male foetus, he adds, prefers to lie on the right side of the womb, while the female cleaves to the left. So the son-bearing mother shows a heavier, firmer right breast and favours her right foot. Others claim to tell the gender of the foetus by the preternatural cravings for particular foods on the part of the mother. An English midwife, Mistress Jane Sharp, has happily recorded that ‘Some Women with Child have longed to bite on a piece of their Husband’s Buttocks’, a sure indication of a boy child fattening inside.
I do all I can to discourage such talk among my patients. There is danger in this foolishness, for both mother and child. There are those fathers who insist on a boy child, who will go so far as to procure the death of the unborn baby, through violence or poison, if these falsely painted signs point to an unwanted girl child forthcoming.
A steady flow of coins now conjured up a smile in my back pocket. I went to the docks to make enquiries about a passage to Peru. A few months more of drudgery and starving economy, and that passage would be within my grasp.
Marcella Fasan
This girl with the pictures of San Sebastiano was none other than the famous Rafaela, universally admired and adored as the wickedest nun in the convent.
‘Where did you . . . ? Were you allowed . . . ?’
‘No, lovely! No one is allowed. I happen to know that you have been punished enough to understand that already.’
‘Where did you . . . ?’
‘I did not get them. I made them.’
‘You painted these?’
‘And I would value the opinion of a former citizen-ess of the City of Art on my brush skills, if you please.’
I glanced over my shoulder, trembling. Just to be there, talking to this scandalous girl, was all kinds of wrong. To look at her San Sebastianos was surely a capital offence. The vicaria would nose me out any moment. This cell was perilously close to the bathhouse, where she might even now be punishing some poor novice.
The girl seemed to know exactly whom I feared. ‘The Vixen won’t be showing that thing she calls a face in here. We’ve got an understanding.’<
br />
As she uttered those words, her face filled with an indescribable bitterness. Then she shook herself like a cat, grinned, and demanded, ‘Now seriously, do tell what you think of my little daubs.’
She laid them out on a table in front of the hornacina, which was beautifully painted but held only a simple iron cross. Her cell was luxuriously appointed, with the finest Turkey carpet underfoot and a pyramid of cakes from the best bakery in town, still in their waxy wrappers, fragrant on the window sill.
Her folded arms and set mouth gave me no freedom to refuse her request. Nor did I wish to limp out of that cell straight into the arms of the vicaria. So I fanned out the little cards on her table.
The paintings were fine, truly fine work. I told her so.
‘But . . . they let you paint?’ I asked.
She pointed to an easel. Displayed was a saint so pallid and deeply etched with suffering that it would gladden even the heart of the vicaria. The detail was realistic, the chiaroscuro perfectly balanced. The sfumatura of the complexion was as good as anything Cecilia Cornaro might have done.
‘Now turn it over,’ she ordered, ‘and lift the first layer of canvas. All my paintings are doubles.’
On the back was a perfect San Sebastiano, handsome as the sun. The most abbreviated shade of a meagre fig-leaf drew attention to his thighs rather than concealing them.
The Book of Human Skin Page 36
