Which of my faithful booksellers, my slave-traders, my rind-pimps, I wondered, had dug up this little dainty of anthropodermic bibliopegy?
The cover was golden brown, tessellated like a snake’s back and much beset with delicate gilding. Inside, my anonymous correspondent had inserted a slip of paper on which was written: ‘The doctor who owned this book had it rebound in the skin of a female patient. He thought it “congruent”. She was a white woman, yet the doctor had it tanned to a darker colour using sumac, presumably to extend his joke.This seems to us to be your kind of a joke.’
I was already smiling when I read that, and then a shiver took hold of my body. How could this person – no, these persons, for they had written ‘seems to us’ – know exactly what would amuse me?
Yet how incompetent were my correspondents! Did they not know the rules of the chase? Before handing over such an item, all my usual booksellers would have tempted me by an account in writing, teasing up my fantasies to entice my purse wide open. I swelled with my sixth sense – that of getting a bargain. I would beat them to the ground for this item.
Then an involuntary tremor fluted up and down my spine. I looked around me.Was I observed? Was someone enjoying the spectacle of me at work with my hands on a book of human skin? Were there other messages for me?
I leafed through that dusty old book so fast that it promptly and unkindly cut me right across the palps of my fingers on both hands. A paper cut is notoriously more painful than a sword injury! I sucked my wounded fingers and looked at the diagrams of female reproductive organs, speculating. I tasted the dust of the street suspended in my own sweet blood, and it brought back a memory.
All those years ago, in our country house in Venice, I had damaged my fingers when I shot Marcella’s knee. Dirt had invaded a trifling wound.That was how I lost my favourite finger. Here in filthy South America, might I not be tempting fate to suck on bleeding digits after touching a book that had travelled the world unwashed? I pulled those affectioned pieces of myself out of my mouth with a plop and stared at them as if they were friends who had just revealed themselves as enemies.
Too late I sniffed at the linen and the paper in which my taking-away gift had been enclosed. I only throw it out to the Investigative Reader, this strange and simple fact: those wrappings smelled of oil paint.
Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
When Hamish Gilfeather walked through our door, I was speechless with surprise.
Not so Marcella, who threw herself upon him with a delighted shriek that made him drop his parcels. For one moment I was pierced by a salty little stab of jealousy. To know Marcella was to love her. Hamish had known her long years. They had voyaged together – I had not yet had that privilege with my wife. Drawing back a little, I watched to detect clinical symptoms of sentimental guilt or complicity. I can plead only this to excuse my unreasonable and unbecoming jealousy: I had not yet grown accustomed to the safety of love.
The Scotsman held her back from him a moment, and ordered, ‘Do that thing again, lassie.’
She ran back to where she had been sitting, then leaped out of her chair and into his arms again.
‘Where’s yon limp of yours, child?’
‘Shoes. Magic shoes. My brother Fernando . . .’
‘Shoes and a wee something else, I would say,’ Hamish Gilfeather smiled hugely. ‘You have resolved to allow others to help you, I see.’
And I must allow Marcella to love, I reminded myself. It is what she is made of. Now I too embraced Hamish Gilfeather with heartfelt warmth, exclaiming, ‘How? Why?’
‘I received a letter from the good Gianni. So I knew Minguillo Fasan was on his way here, and I feared that could mean no good for Marcella. He said that you, Santo, were here already, and well, I thought it was time for all those wi’ a soft spot in their hearts for young Marcella to bide a while together and see what could be contrived for her good.’
He looked at our thin silver rings, and our transparent happiness, and said, ‘I see that the very best thing has already been contrived. It was worth ten stormy voyages to see this done.’
He kissed the top of Marcella’s head and gathered up his scattered parcels. ‘I bear gifts,’ he murmured, ‘from Cecilia and myself.’
‘Cecilia and yourself,’ I repeated meaningfully – and here he flushed a little.
‘Aye, I met wi’ her in Cadiz on my way here. She is making portraits of the local Bourbons, ye know. She entrusted me with a few errands in Arequipa – deliveries and shopping, ye know women. She has a yen to grind some Andean lapis lazuli into her blue paint . . .’
‘Deliveries?’ I asked sharply. ‘Do you have a letter for me?’
I dreaded a confession, that she had been to my old Master, Doctor Ruggiero in Stra, that she had embarrassed me with a foolish attempt to make use of my Small-Poxed dream of revenge.
‘No letter for you, Doctor Santo, just her best regards,’ and he winked. I did not like the mischievous look of that wink.Was it Cecilia Cornaro’s wink, duly transmitted, or his own? Was he intimate enough with the artist to have been treated to an account of the shaming thoughts I had revealed?
But what could I say to shake all the secrets out of that wink? In retrospect, I could have said many things, and acted decisively, and prevented . . . but I did not. I was too ashamed to expose my filthy fantasy to Marcella and Hamish Gilfeather when such a thing seemed in that joy-filled moment quite unnecessary.
The merchant was opening a large packet. ‘This is for Marcella, from Cecilia,’ and he unfurled a roll of linen with two dozen pockets, each plump with a bladder of oil paint or a pair of squirrel-fur paintbrushes. I breathed a sigh of undeserved relief. Cecilia Cornaro might spit fire like a dragon, but she had simple kindness in her heart.
Hamish Gilfeather embraced us one last time and turned to the door, shaking another of his packets so it gurgled like an empty stomach. ‘Now where is that young villain Gianni? I have a grand desire to tip a dram of some scurrilous Scotch whisky down his throat, and put the wobbling boots on the chap. I have brought the necessary particularly for that purpose.’
Minguillo Fasan
One day after Hamish Gilfeather made his delivery, I had more than a memory of gangrene. Morning punched me in the face with unbearable illumination: those paper cuts festered and that ominous tingling began again just as it had when I was a young man fresh from shooting his sister. From my skin arose that luminescence that announces the disease: just such a luminescence, I recollected, as was promised by my ‘Tears of Santa Rosa’. Before nightfall the Spanish surgeon Sardon was climbing the stairs with his imperfectly serrated saw and a belated bottle of carbolic acid to stop the putrefaction.
After the first surgery, I burned with a fever and my throat and face grew fat with putrid liquors.The very soles of my feet crisped as if on hot coals. I quacked myself with brandy, letting it suck on my pain. And, as I closed up the hatches of my skin and curled in a ball, I noticed a new patch of red spots rising out of the black hairs on my abdomen.
I drank my dinner alone that night, for my buffle-headed valet had deserted. Gianni sent me an illiterate kind of note – turned out he could write after all! – to say that he ‘risined’ from my service.Then I realized that he had never really been in it, had he? He was Marcella’s creature, right from the start.They all were.
I had travelled to Arequipa with him at my side, I had paid his passage, fed him and watered him: and all the while he must have been carrying my father’s real will in his shirt. I tortured myself with wondering how he had found it: perhaps even in one of the searches I commissioned myself ?
Outside in the street I heard some Indians muttering ‘chapetones pezuñentos!’ Stink-hoofed Spaniards. It seemed that another little revolution was brewing in Arequipa, one of those slow-boiling ones that end up with the cauldron turned over in the fire and all destroyed.The old city seemed destined to mirror the great events of my own life with its upheavals.
I began to scratch
the hillocks on my torso, which felt like pieces of shot under my skin.Then, unwillingly, I looked at my face in the mirror. I leave the Reader to supply suggestions for the curses I employed upon myself now for refusing the Small-Pox inoculation on my first visit to Arequipa, only insisting that the epithets are vicious and profane. My whole belly suddenly heaved and I was left looking at sour stars of ill-assimilated food on the floor.
I felt the grave’s maggots tickling under my skin.
This was going to be a little uncomfortable.
Gianni delle Boccole
Josefa come rolling in to the tavern where I were taking my luncheon of beans and bread. ‘The Minguillo is took ill.’
‘Ill how?’ I askt happily.
‘With the spotty swelly smelly sickness. Plus, his fingers is rotted and bein cutted off.’
‘The Small-Pox? Do that make your fingers rot I dunt think? But there haint no Small-Pox in Arequipa. I bethought ye was all innokulerated agin it here.’
‘He got it by a present from Venice, Santo says. From a dirty dirty book with pus crusts on its inside. I don’t know passably why, but Santo is verrrrrry upsetted about it. And here is a letter for you from Cadiz too. Has took its time to come. Three months.’
I ripped oft the seal and scanned the contens. It were a fairy’s writin, a fairy with a hysterkal habit of the drink, Ide say. It tookt me a minute to unnerstand that this were the hand o the artist Cecilia Cornaro.
She writed, ‘For safety, I send this letter separately from the item of our mutual revenge, and in anticipation of it, so that if anyone thinks I am wrong to do this thing, there is yet time to intercept Hamish Gilfeather and have the item destroyed.’
I jumpt near out o my skin. By an oirony, this letter ud been held up in a quaranty, allowing its plaguey friend to arrive before it, Grate Rascal ovva God!
We sat round the table that night, workin the story back to the bone. Santo ud give Cecilia Cornaro the idea, he admitted it, the day he split her fingers what Minguillo’s thugs had soldered together with the fire.
‘And if I were to go to her studio now, I know I would see the portrait of the doctor from Stra, the one who collects Small-Pox scabs, and I would know how he paid for it, and that this transaction was brokered by me.’
Marcella clutched his hand. He bowed his head.
‘Would that be one Doctor Ruggiero?’ I askt, partly to cover the bowel howls that come from all them beans what we ate.
Santo nodded and lookt down.
Next to him,Amish Gillyfether put his head in his hands. ‘Cecilia!’ he moaned. ‘She told me that her cat liked me. The trouble was I like her a great deal more than the little beast could know. With Sarah gone, I was . . . I could not keep away from Cecilia.’
Amish Gillyfether admitted that he haint askt Cecilia what were in the packet he were to take to Minguillo – ‘I did not want to know, I suppose now, lest it stop me from making the delivery. I showed a pathetic amount of courage, for I rather hoped it would be something that would upset the fellow a great deal,’ he sayed quietly. ‘I see my guilt now clearly, in that I did not tell you, when I first arrived, that I had already delivered a parcel for Minguillo, did I?’
Then we all lookt down. Fernando offert, ‘We did not ask either . . .’
But twere no good. The more they deducted of the way things ud run, the more each o them hated on thereselves, completely missin the point that anythin that hurted Minguillo were all to the good for them.
Amish Gillyfether moaned, ‘And most of all I blame myself for letting my sweet Cecilia take the burden of all our ill wishes, and acting on them.’
Marcella sayed nothin, but lookt like a sorry ghost, one hand in Santo’s. Josefa sat by me, givin me the snuggle-up. I sayed nothin too.
My betters was looking like morners. Yet I burned to shout this – that Cecilia Cornaro had did what all t’others wanted in there secret hearts to see did, but would of scroopilled to do, out of goodness. Which niver got anyone anywheres with Minguillo Fasan.
Cecilia Cornaro, with her unfearing hate, had sent Minguillo a pestilents, that were in its doings very like them callus acts that he ud visited upon evryone he knowed in this world.
Een now, my quill refuses to shed one tear of ink oer Minguillo Fasan!
Brava Cecilia Cornaro, says I. She is a grate lady, for she knows how to hate proper on who should be hated on proper. She should be famoused for all prosperity.
Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
Josefa brought us more detailed news of how my brother-in-law had lost his fingers. It was nothing to do with the Small-Pox, of course. He had fallen to a medical misfortune that was new to me in all my years of doctoring: in leafing through the guilty book he had cut his fingers. The paper cuts had admitted dirt that ushered in a gangrene that devoured those rifling digits one by one.
While his hands now showed him for the monster that he was, Minguillo would not die of lack of fingers. But the Small-Pox, now that was a different matter.
I had ministered to Small-Pox patients often enough.
In the usual course of the disease, in its more rabid Variola confluens strain, the incubative period lasts up to twelve days from the reception of the poison. The primary stage has all the symptoms of an inflammatory fever.These include chills, burning skin, a frequent pulse, a thickly furred white tongue. Blood drawn from the veins has an effervescent quality. The patient complains of thirst, headache and a feeling of bruised pain all over the body, especially in the back and loins. His appetite declines. Just before the first eruption, there is generally nausea and vomiting. The breath smells peculiarly disagreeable at this point, the looks are heavy and sometimes one or both cheeks of the face will glow with a sudden colour.
Some patients are attacked by a harassing cough and defluxion. Fever increases at night. On the third or the fourth day, the unmistakable lesions begin to appear upon the face, and subsequently upon the extremities. Initially, they are red and hard, as if there are fragments of shot under the skin. So Minguillo might not notice them at first, given that all his adult life he had continued to suffer from an unfortunate adolescent complexion well supplied with pimples that resembled the macules, papules and vesicles of Small-Pox.
The next evening there is generally a paroxysm, followed by more pimples, which become painful and inflamed. The face begins to swell, and there commences a suppuration of the sores into pustules that spread universally, even joining up in masses. The contents begin as watery and clear but gradually change to a yellow matter. It is at this point that a vile odour sometimes begins to emanate from the patient’s entire body. A secondary fever attacks as the pustules ripen.
If the patient is to survive, then the pustules dry and fall off in the same order in which they made their appearance. By the twelfth or fourteenth day, the patient is well again, though disfigured, initially by purple stains and later by indelible depressed scars, called vulgarly ‘pits’.
Naturally I did not attend Minguillo Fasan. Yet as the days passed, I thought him through the primary, eruptive, suppurative and confluens stage.
On the thirteenth day we heard that Surgeon Sardon was presently pricking all the pustules on his patient’s face with a needle dipped in carbolic acid to reduce pitting.Then news came that Minguillo had been smeared in olive oil and glycerine, and painted with a thick paste of cream and flour to prevent light acting on the pustules to deepen their colour.
Marcella Fasan
Santo and Gianni and I stayed indoors. Josefa, whose cousin was a samba at the chichería, brought us daily news of Minguillo’s travails. At first it seemed that he could not survive the gangrene, the amputations and then the Small-Pox. On two occasions a priest was called to his room.
The fingers had been cut off one at a time. Minguillo would not allow the surgeon to do a clean job. He clung to each one until it was black. Finally my brother was left with just one digit on each hand, the little finger of the left and the thumb of his right. By that time h
e was too deep in the Small-Pox fever to know what had happened to him.
I wished that I could sink into the same state of delirium. Josefa could not understand my misery: ‘Why you sad, mistress? Is bad all through, your brother, is better he die horrible death. So?’ Josefa flicked her fingers, ‘Simple easy, he get boil in big black pot in Hell.’
Santo understood; we said nothing, yet I read my own thoughts in his agonized face.
We are not killers, our eyes appealed to one another, we did not kill Minguillo.
But, our eyes answered, we feed on carrion, if Minguillo dies.
I remembered how, on my journey to Arequipa, I had promised the peons that I would pray for them, lest they should hunt Minguillo down and hurt him.
I prayed now. For Minguillo.
I prayed not because I loved him, or because I wished him better, but because I was terrified that his death would cast a dirty shadow over our joy.
Gianni delle Boccole
Finely Josefa’s cuzzin let it be knowed that in Minguillo’s room there were sich a stink that the Fiend in Hell would cower in a corner if he got hisself a whiff of it. And that Minguillo coughed up his innards hour by hour.
‘La tosse xe ‘l tamburo de la morte,’ I exsalted. ‘The cough is the drum of death.’
Then I were sorry, not for Minguillo but because I could see that Santo n Marcella were torned up in peaces. I were not so pure of heart as they. I osculated back n forth: some days I hoped his death would be quick, and other days hoped it would be long. Main thing was, he had one hoof in the coffin alredy. I were only on tender hooks for the end. Then I hoped they would leave his corps out in the hot sun for the aunts to dine on.
Amish Gillyfether were sad too, because he bethought hisself an assassin. He also bethought hisself a fool. He were dissolute at the idea that Cecilia Cornaro dint love him, that she had courted him for his uses, made a murderin porter out o him.
The Book of Human Skin Page 48
