The Book of Human Skin Page 11

  After months of apparently good behaviour on my part, even the servants slackened slightly in their vigilance.They had their own pelts to take care of, after all.There were a few times of the day and night when my parents were not there to intervene in my treatments. But my greatest ally was my sister herself. Marcella, it seemed, still would not give me away. I had told her that I would shoot her properly if she did.

  I taught her to fall down into a faint at the sound of my voice: ‘Die, Marcella!’

  And she would lie there until I gave her permission to live again.

  They might hate me, but Marcella protected me with her silence. As did the death – under cloudy circumstances – of that pedantic magistrate who had once decreed that I might go forth only under supervision. As far as I was concerned his edict died with him, melting in the froth bubbling out of his blue lips. No one at the Palazzo Espagnol challenged me. It was almost as if they were happy when I left the house.

  I did not care when I found offerings in my room.

  Who’s afraid of a pig’s heart stuck with thorns and nails tied to the fireplace?

  Sor Loreta

  Sor Sofia never laughed at me, but instead sympathized with all my travails. She picked apple pits out of my veil and beetles out of my water when the other sisters put them there. We passed many hours of silent prayer together. Sometimes we prayed so late that I told her to stay with me in my bed, so as not to catch cold on the way back to her own cell.

  Sor Sofia’s was a purer beauty than that of Sor Andreola. My friend’s little white face seemed to me like a flower. God made flowers for our pleasure, and so I enjoyed her. When she came into the room I always felt a constriction in my heart as when I was in the rapture of prayer.

  Sor Sofia was becomingly quiet, yet her looks said much. I felt that she supported me in every thought and deed. Once she exclaimed, ‘Sor Loreta, if you had been a man, how far you would have gone in the world!’

  ‘Hush, child,’ I told her. ‘There are ways in which a bride of Christ may shine brighter than any man.’

  I believe she replied, ‘You are so brave to scourge and fast as you do. Death itself holds no sting for you! With your courage, you might have gone to war! Who could have resisted your strength? You would have swept all before you.’

  ‘I must fight God’s war here in Santa Catalina, even though the world knows nothing of my sacrifices.’

  ‘Yet one day your sacrifices will be known – is that what you think?’ she asked.

  I cast my eyes down modestly then, to my volume about Santa Rosa, of which I knew every word by heart, but particularly the last pages, where, after her death, everyone in Peru was sorry for treating her badly and venerated her greatness.

  ‘Like Santa Rosa!’ breathed Sor Sofia, and without saying anything to confirm or deny her words, I embraced her.

  At that moment Santa Rosa herself whispered in my ear, ‘Dearest Sor Loreta, everything You feel and do, however unusual it appears in the eyes of others, You shall do for the glory of God and Me.’

  Part Two

  Gianni delle Boccole

  They brought her back to Venice a broke thing in her body.

  The day they carrid Marcella indoors I seen summing I dint like one bit in her mother’s face. My Mistress Donata Fasan dint rush to her daughter’s side. She sayed to Anna, ‘Make her decent before I go to her.’

  Decent? Then I unnerstood. In the mind o my Mistress, a cripplet daughter were a bit like our downfalled Venice, really. Marcella were layed out – still livin – in an open coffin where everyone might look at what remaned with horror while pretending pity.That were not tall the kind o daughter that ud serve a nobble lady in Venetian High Sausiety.

  I myself were frit that Ide find Marcella a cringin thing, pologizin for what Minguillo done to her.

  But Marcella’s spirit dint lie down n die.

  She outright refust to be the sad heroin o some trudgical opera.

  She askt for me n Anna soon as she were fairly in the ouse. We arrived to find Piero Zen alredy at her side. There was apples n cakes n books n paper n pastels spred out all oer the bed. Conte Piero ud filled the room with flowers.

  And they was, without a single word bout the shot leg, laffing at what she drawed.

  Soon we was too, tho I was cryin as well.

  Marcella Fasan

  I drew a cartoon of it, of how I had fallen through a trapdoor into invalidhood. My whole body had fallen on bad times; it was insolvent; it was pillaged by gangs of doctors’ fingers; it had no respect from anyone any more, except of course from my lovely Piero, Anna and Gianni.

  My parents summoned surgeons from as far away as Paris. There was always some bearded pomposity palpating my thigh or laying something sticky in a bag on my knee or lacing me into leather girdles that put an agonizing compression on my haunches. Worst were the culinary cures, by which the doctors tried to hot-baste me to wellness. I mitigated my humiliation by making satirical sketches of those preposterous torturers. And I soothed the burning pain by drawing the smoke rising from my leg and the Palazzo Espagnol cats deserting their comfortable perches in the kitchen to see what was cooking in the sickroom.

  But flamboyant physicians with bottles of crushed millipedes – and still less my secret sketches of them – were never going to restore me to my parents’ perfettina. The twisted limb was one thing, but the consequent exacerbation of my bladder’s bungling was what finally orphaned me in their hearts. It had always been nervous, but after I was crippled, my bladder became positively frantic. My previous problems seemed almost enviable now.

  A cripple had got into their daughter’s body. It must have seemed an insult to the memory of their perfettina to transfer their love to this thing that had usurped her place, who huffed around in contraptions hoisted on ugly buckles like farm machinery. In Venice – the least barnyard-like of fairy tales! I overheard the Contessa Foscarini advising my mother to send me to a country cottage, where I might harmlessly shell peas on a stoop, or to one of those ramshackle tenements on the Lido where the rich hid their imbecile children.

  ‘Ah,’ I realized then, ‘deformity makes people like Chiara Foscarini think that you are stupid!’ I looked down at the drawing in my lap. Indeed, my pencilled self-portrait showed my nine-year-old self crammed into a tiny baby carriage. Even when she struggled out and proceeded boldly on to the next page, it was with the cripple’s buffoonish way of walking.

  See, once again even I speak of Marcella the cripple in the third person, just as I drew her. For I too was at times able to distance myself from Marcella’s damaged body, and to watch the perfettina descend into the povera creatura. Like any fable, it had a satisfying, plummeting feeling about it, the kind best shown with long vertical lines in the background, all going in one direction.

  Cripples are the Devil’s work, they say.

  I, of course, was Minguillo’s. Those days I usually drew him as a hairless black dog, but from behind, without showing his face.

  Only Piero dwelt on the facts of the matter, urging my mother to ‘put a rein on that boy’ and saying darkly, ‘Next time it may be worse.’

  But my parents earnestly wished to forget why I was crippled, for what did it say of their negligent protection of me? Worse, popular wisdom decreed that no creature – not even a Minguillo – is conceived except of parents who carry all his defects in their own germ plasm. My mother and father could not confront such a gruesome thought. And so my parents gradually persuaded themselves, and never contradicted visitors who thought so, that I had been born with my deformity, and that being a cripple was an essential part of my nature.

  My pencil began to reveal fear in people’s eyes when they beheld me – me, the slightest, least fearsome creature imaginable. Even my hair was soft like chicken-down. The very cartilage of my nose was translucent in the sunshine. But that, I was learning, is what frightens people: creatures who are weaker and rarer than themselves. I drew caricatures of elegant baboons, their eye
s and tails askew with terror – fleeing from a tiny mouse – with my features – in a wheeled chair.

  Alone in my room, I drew thrilling scenes of myself running away to the circus where I became a leading Artist of Deformity. In Venice, giants, dwarves and bearded ladies were a flourishing business. For these outrages of Nature, there was always repulsed fascination – and some coins. People will pay good money for a gratifying wave of disgust.

  But to be mildly deformed – no, no, that, in reality, I was discovering, brings only ignominy and obscurity. My pencil ranged over the page with increasing fearlessness, but my life shrank. I was not much produced. Excursions in my wheeled chair were confined to the remote and poor parts of the city. My parents could not afford to be embarrassed by such a daughter as I had become. Mothers of my parents’ acquaintance had of course stopped grooming their sons to marry me the day the first doctor strapped me into the resplendently ugly regalia of crippledom.

  Perhaps I was even then already halfway to being a nun in the eyes of other people; a sexless, shambling creature. Being deformed, I was discovering, eclipses every other difference – of gender, race or age. Deformity lives in another kingdom, dreaded and shunned as if misfortune were contagious.

  Yet I did not quite become what my parents saw – a mild, accepting victim. They desired that in me, and so I gave the appearance of it to them as a gift. Mostly, I obliged by staying in my room, where I read my way through the Palazzo Espagnol library, and made copies of the portraits in the house, delivered to me one by one by kind Gianni. I wrote my diary. I drew, energetically and ambitiously, but secretly.

  And in comporting myself so I completed the process my parents had started: I forked myself in two. Outwardly I was meek as a novice. Inside me, silently, grew a defiant creature who had not accommodated her reduced prospects in any way whatsoever. The more passive I seemed, the more determined I grew to re-shape not my body, for that seemed impossible, but my situation.

  Minguillo watched my visible descent with lucid satisfaction.

  But Minguillo had no more insight than a hairless dog drawn from behind.

  Oh yes, he knew when I hurt, when I burst, and when the iron teeth of the leather harness bit into my skin. Such primitive things dogs can know about other dogs.

  I, on the other hand, was doubly endowed with insight. It was meat and salt for me that I had thoughts of my own, and that Minguillo could not penetrate them.

  I was not my parents’ perfettina any more: and they were not my parents as they had once been. Instead, I had Piero. I had Anna and Gianni.

  And I would have that other kind of love too. It would one day circle and land in my heart and take me away from the cruelty. I was, against all the odds, even then quite sure of it.

  Minguillo Fasan

  Now, if it isn’t asking too much of the Kind Reader to concentrate a little . . . please. If the style and temper of my effusions have not at first seduced, pray be assured that their charms shall soon steal over you. I am sure I hope so myself.

  Not long after Marcella’s accident, my father set sail again for Arequipa (which means, by not unhumorous coincidence, ‘Yes, stay’ in the local Quechua dialect).

  My mother thereafter explained that if he attempted to return, my father would be promptly clapped inside the elegant halls of the priora’s house on the Lazzaretto Vecchio with its wistful view of Venice, for weeks of quarantine against whatever pox was currently crusting the shores of the Mediterranean.

  ‘And of course he’s needed in Arequipa. Everyone knows the Spanish factores cannot be trusted,’ my mother told her friends, subtly fingering a silver picture frame. Yet certain rumours were winging down the Grand Canal.

  What’s that? The Reader’s eyebrow lifts a little? He would like to know if my mother was stupid, or absurdly innocent? Yes, both, but in this case I believe my mother simply chose not to suspect.Anyway, the woman was not deprived of husbands.

  My mother’s cicisbeo Piero Zen ate at our table each evening. His daily bouquet arrived with a sugary sonnet tucked among the petals. He excelled in his duty of holding up a mirror to my mother for others to read. That mirror declared, ‘Behold my lovely mistress, the delightful object of my affections.’

  The cicisbeo’s function was ornamental, rather like his flowers. I was head of the household in my father’s absence. My duties were minimal. I did what any noble young man in Venice did. I annoyed my father’s clerks on the mezzanine floor of the Palazzo Espagnol. I rifled the petty cash. No one dared force a chaperone upon me nowadays. I went where I pleased and did same. I held forth on lewd subjects at Florian, until the owner of the caffè requested me to take my business, if you can call it that, elsewhere. I gondola’d to a Spanish brothel in Cannaregio where the whores sold me the use of their hides. I supervised my little sister as and when I could find her.

  I waited for my father to come home, in order to settle the matter of his will.There was a confrontation brewing between us. Before I found the will, I had only his distant disdain to tolerate.True, I had not loved noticing how other men treated their sons to manly embraces and lingering looks of pride when they brought them to our home. But I had entertained no particularly strong feelings against my father.

  Regular inspections of the hiding place revealed the will unchanged over the years: my father was allowing a paltry matter to become a serious one. His every hour – ‘Yes, stay’! – lingering in Arequipa, and even the risky nature of the journey back, imperilled my prospects. I now cultivated a poisonous asperity in my father’s regard, slowly petting it into industrious hatred.

  Meanwhile, I was developing a distracting interest in fashion that mirrored my mother’s, though of course I went deeper and harder into the thing than she did.The Elegant Reader will have observed for Himself that not for nothing are we humans the only creatures not fully satisfied with the snug vestments we’re born in. I was less satisfied than most. And soon people began to talk of my clothes in tones usually reserved for acts of God. Not everyone could bring off my cravats, frock-coats and waistcoats.Yet I captured and held the attention of people who might otherwise have treated me peremptorily or hurried away from me.

  I developed other ways of increasing my stock. I made people wait for me. I took an extraordinarily long time to tie my cloak on leaving for an appointment, while all the servants stood by. I was always the last into the gondola, watching out of windows for signs of impatience and rumbles of contempt before I let myself be seen. Then I descended with majestic slowness, drinking up the hate.

  Sor Loreta

  Even with Sor Sofia’s sweet prayers added to mine, our Heavenly Father did not fulfil my great desire for an early death. I began to believe that the priests who governed Santa Catalina were also my enemies, for each time I confessed to them some new transgression by one of the light sisters, they thanked me, and tantalised me with hints of a rise in my estate, only to cast me down when the next election brought me no closer to a position on the council of nuns.

  I was called to an interview with the Chaplain, who continually wiped his forehead as he pronounced, ‘Sor Loreta, you must moderate the fury of your scourges. Indeed, the Devil may enter into the scourge and cause it to perversely delight the flesh, in which case to scourge is to behave impurely. Which is not to be God’s true servant, is it now?’

  I turned my deaf right ear to these words. I returned to my cell, where Sor Sofia was waiting for me.

  There were times when I thought I could not live without Sor Sofia by my side. I worried about her day and night for she was subject to a weak stomach and frequently confined to the infirmary. Since the incident with the sores, I was no longer permitted to enter in there. Instead, like Lidwina of Schiedam, I made a point of going to stand very close to anyone who suffered from a headache or toothache, so their suffering would become mine. I did this in church so that they could not move away from me.

  At those times when Sor Sofia was forced away, I suffered a loneliness that sen
t me to lie on the stone floor of the church for hours on end. Only in Sor Sofia did I find that humility, love and gentleness with which I had always desired to surround myself.

  Yet the vicious light nuns of Santa Catalina were not content to leave us alone in our mutual devotion. Some whistled like men in a chichería when they saw me walking down the Calle Sevilla with Sor Sofia. Little drawings were pushed under my door, showing myself and Sor Sofia naked and embracing in obscene positions. Others mocked my renowned physical strength, showing me lifting the delicate Sor Sofia in one hand.

  So evil minds will seek to extract some kind of impurity from even a perfect love.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  An ouse without a proper Master soon runs downhill. At the Palazzo Espagnol, we was going that way, not slowly by slowly, but feroshus fast. Minguillo weren’t truely Master of imself let lone anyone else. Least that’s what I besot to tell myself in them days, that Minguillo were more wackaloon than devil-in-pantaloons as ye mite say.

  Now I pause to cross myself for I am thinking on his face.

  Twere at this junkshure that he started to look rampin mad. He gangled round loose in his joints as a hyena. The pimples, they was a-sworming. His hair were greased back like a rat what had swum up a drain, or least that’s how I allus saw im after Marcella made a sketch o same, a wet rat sittin on the head ovva airless dog all shone from ahind. But twernt funning really. It rot fear in the soul. His eyes had that pinpoint stare. The colour had emptied out of em. They had no more n a shadow o blue, like turned milk. He had only to fasten his two eyes on a body, and that body would be took with the shakes, Swine ovva God!