The Book of Human Skin Read online

  There are people who are a disease, and it is purely our indulgence that makes a plague out of them.

  No one talks of things like this. But I have always liked to write them down and have them keep company with other musings of mine.

  In Peru there are nuns who keep fleas in bottles for the companionship of something lively in their quiet cells. So did these written thoughts of mine serve me for many years. In the absence of mother, father, sister or brother, I was always grateful for the quill and the flutters of paper seeming alive under my fingers, especially in the lonely hours when there were no more patients to tend, and in the aching years when I was denied the company of she whose thoughts are my book and whose heart is my Host.

  Sor Loreta

  Our town of Cuzco was stacked high with the craggy follies of the Incas – forts and palaces dedicated to their barbarous gods. How those graceless offerings must have disgusted our true Creator!

  With the death of Tupac Amaru II, a quietness began to fall in Peru. At first, little spasms of revolt still shuddered through the ignorant valleys, rather as a dead snake still moves, not understanding that God has wished it dead. But gradually everyone grew quiet, from the Indians, the mixed-blood mestizos, the African sambos to the real white Spanish like myself. Inca portraits, names, dances, clothes and their pagan funeral rites were outlawed, so that they might cease to be sorry for being conquered and instead grow to love the gentle dominion of the Spanish and the Mother Church. But the Indians were too ill-bred to understand that it was all over with their gods. Secretly, some still clung to the old infidel ways.

  It was not long after they cut up Tupac Amaru that I was taken by a little Indian servant girl to see her family hovel. No doubt she hoped to excite some charity by her poverty. However, she claimed she wanted to show me something particular. She was filled to the brim with excitement. Inside the house, she opened a cupboard under the stairs and my eyes fell upon a mummy with the skin still on and the teeth grinning through leather lips. He was sitting up on his haunches and dressed in splendid rags.

  ‘Is my great-grandpa,’ she declared, thumping his shoulder affectionately. A little lump of dried gristle fell off in a puff of sour air.

  ‘Why does your great-grandfather sit up like that when he is dead?’ I enquired innocently. ‘Should he not lie down in his grave like a Christian?’

  The servant told me, ‘Because he comes to dinner by us when the dinner is good. All us grandpas do so.’

  Then she picked up a seashell and blew a soft sad note through it. I shook my head because it was one of the forbidden pututo trumpets that the Indians used in their heathen mourning.

  Mistaking my expression for awe, the servant girl next gave me a gruesome tale of the peasant daughters chosen for the honour of sacrifice. ‘Them girls was called capacocha,’ she breathed reverently through her gapped teeth. These capacochas were taken from their families at the age of four and sent to the priestesses to be raised.

  She told me a scandalous thing then: the Inca house of the priestesses, who were called Virgins of the Sun, once stood in exactly the same place occupied by our own Christian convent of Santa Catalina! The two buildings, one heathen, one holy, shared the same foundations. Where pure young novices now fasted and scourged themselves for the glory of God, the pagan girls used to be fattened up for sacrifice with llama stew and maize.

  My servant licked her lips, ‘They aten meat most every day!’

  After that they cut their hair off, apparently, and took them on a long journey up a mountain to a shrine.

  ‘Then did they murder the little girls?’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh no, they girls did it of theyselves. They was give maize beer and coca leaves to make em feel sleep-sleep and byenbye they was left lone.’

  ‘So they starved to death?’

  ‘Some of em got sick before they died. So high up there, the puna, you know. Make everyone sick sometime. Like the old uns. They must clean big vomits off my great-grandpa when he did die,’ she observed, pointing to a dried green mess like lichen on the mummy’s sleeve.

  I left that house with a horrible vision of the great-grandfather’s corpse at table with a napkin wrapped under his ragged chin while they poured soup through him on to the floor. But then I remembered that those people were too poor and vulgar to use a napkin.

  Naturally the Holy Mother Church frowned on the Indians’ keeping and worshipping their ancestors in the house. The Christian conquistadores had hunted down nearly all those mummies hundreds of years ago, so it was exceedingly rare to find one now. I was happy in more ways than I can write down because I knew God had chosen me to specially extirpate this idolatry. Indeed, in my twelve-year-old eyes, my servant’s deceased great-grandfather personified to a nicety a Graven Image. I hastened to my Confessor and told him what I had seen.

  The officers of God had a special way to treat those infidel mummies. They broke them. They bent them out of shape, they wrenched out the teeth, they made them look pitiable and defeated, so the Indians could not think highly enough of them to worship them any more. In the same way, when the Spanish took all the gold from the Inca temples, it was not at all motivated by a lust for treasure, but because our Holy Fathers wished to show the Andeans that those heathen deities were worthless.

  The servant girl did not return to our house for one week. When she did, she showed a beaten face. She dared not look at me, but she sat outside my door and wept her story through the keyhole. Her father had raised his hand against her. This was because my Confessor and his officers had told him how they came by their information, before they thrashed the great-grandfather to clumps of bone and hair and dropped him into a chamber pot with the shards of the pututo shell that would never more utter its pagan moans.

  ‘I thought you was my friend,’ the servant girl moaned. ‘I took you to mine.’

  So Satan tempts the righteous to pity the wrong. I knelt on my side of the door and poked my little finger through the keyhole right into her eye. She fell backwards and crawled away, sobbing humbly. I was pleased to see she had learned a little of the ways of Our Lord.

  It was in those days that I began to read the life of Santa Rosa of Lima with more than simple fervour in my heart. Santa Rosa was the very first saint of the New World. Unlike myself, she was cursed with physical beauty. They called her Rosa because her complexion was as petals, and her cheeks bloomed an adorable pink. Her lovely face carried the weight of her family’s earthly ambitions: she was supposed to marry a fortune.

  Everyone loved her looks but Rosa despised them, for she did not wish to marry anyone except God.

  She barely slept, constantly fasted, abjured all flesh. She mortified her delicate skin with continual floggings and a hair shirt. Her family chastised her and even tried to stop her with stern edicts. This only inspired Rosa to more ardent acts of worship.

  One of her innovations was to rub lye into her hands, and pepper into her face. She cut off her flowing hair, thrusting a wreath of roses over her shorn head. Inside the flowers Rosa concealed a brace of iron spikes. Later, she dared to skewer her head with a long pin.

  Finally, when she was twenty and her beauty was ruined, her family submitted to her will. She became a Dominican tertiary. Taking a vow of poverty, she left her comfortable bedchamber to live in a small grotto in the garden. There she undertook good deeds for the Christian poor and tended to the deserving sick with her own hands.

  She rarely ate or drank, except for a draught of gall infused with bitter herbs that deadened every sensation in her mouth. Even as she raked her flowers, or made lace to sell for the destitute, she dragged around a heavy wooden cross fastened to her back. Soon she began to tell of visions, divine visitations and voices in her head. Once, when she gazed for hours in rapture at a painting of Christ, she caused His face to grow wet with perspiration.

  People laughed at her. Her own family denounced her behaviour as a form of madness. Even this she endured with fortitude, gladly taking
on the ridicule of the world as another penance to bring her closer to her Holy Bridegroom.

  Eventually Rosa could no longer walk or even stand upright. In her last weeks she took to a marriage bed she had designed herself, consisting of stones, sharp shards of broken pottery, jagged pieces of glass and thorns.

  God permitted her to use herself like this until she was thirty-one, when He finally rendered His most devout Virgin unto Himself. The people of Lima immediately regretted their nasty hilarity about Rosa and rushed to behold her pure, shattered body. So many people crowded the Cathedral that it took days to get her corpse to burial. Before long, those same people who had mocked her began to comprehend the miracle of Rosa’s life. She was canonized the patron saint of Lima, of Peru, of gardeners and florists, and all people who are derided for their religious fervour. She became famous all over the world, and her painted image was hung in great churches everywhere, even as far away as that wickedest of cities, Venice.

  For so the immoral always lust after the beauty of true goodness, even in the midst of their most flagrant iniquity.

  In the top drawer of my bureau I assembled lye, pepper and a long pin for my thin hair.

  The death of Tupac Amaru continued to live in my heart. I rehearsed the scene again and again in my mind: the knife dropping through his tongue, the messengers carrying ragged pieces of him in five directions. I got a little length of chain from the blacksmith and I hit myself with it when I thought about Tupac Amaru, but only in the secret places of my body. For I did not yet want anyone to know that I would be a nun and scourge myself for the rest of my life.

  When I was nearly thirteen years old, and my mother presented my trousseau chest, I judged it timely to announce my decision.

  My mother and father were surprised. My father’s textile mill flourished. My fine dowry was often spoken of. My mother exclaimed, ‘Isabel Rosa!’ – for that was my name in those days – ‘You will hate to be sealed up in a cloister.’

  And I declared loudly, ‘I would like it above all things, to be enclosed in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ.’

  I changed my tone to a persuasive one: ‘I shall pray all day and into the night to lessen your time in Purgatory.’

  They exchanged glances muddied with guilt. My parents were imperfect in their pious observances. I had more than once confessed on their behalf.

  My mother, to whom fashion was religion, protested, ‘You will own nothing. Everything will be the property of the convent. Even your clothing will come from the common wardrobe.’

  ‘I shall not notice what I wear. I shall be like a child at its mother’s breast without the slightest care or thought for mundane things. All shall be provided.’

  ‘You may one day have . . . longings that would be fatally repressed in such an atmosphere,’ my mother coughed delicately, tinkling her bracelets.

  I answered, ‘The sweet Lord loves me so much that He will never allow me to serve and be subject to men, concerning myself with base matters like housekeeping and cooking. He does not wish my body riven by childbirth. He wants me joined to no one but Himself.’

  ‘Come child, you are not so ugly that you shall not find a husband in Cuzco eventually,’ my father told me. ‘We shall see to it, somehow.’

  ‘You profane the pure spirit of the Lord,’ I admonished them. ‘Our most Holy Father adores all His creatures, even the plainest in His sight.’

  ‘The nuns may be unkind to you,’ my father stated baldly. ‘Yours is not an easy face to love, Isabel.’

  I said, ‘It is most likely that they will envy me for God’s mark on my face. The Scriptures have shown that the holiest souls have always been assailed by the Devil’s wickedness in the form of envy. Yet those who are persecuted are ever gloriously sustained by our Beloved Father, and indeed chosen for His Favourites.’

  My parents remained in terrible anguish for they did not want to lose a child. They had no other. My own feelings suffered vexing pricks for I wished all the pain to be on my part only.

  My mother came to me cajolingly, and asked once more, ‘Would you not like to be married, Isabel? And have children to love you?’

  And I replied, ‘To me marriage would be like the martyrdom that the ancient tyrants inflicted upon the Holy Ones – by tying them to putrid corpses until the horror, melting corruption and frightful stink brought about a slow, dreadful death.’

  I refused to study such sinful subjects as French and arithmetic, and read only my Bible and my Life of Santa Rosa. I demanded to confess every day and announced all my defects scrupulously. I rejoiced in the penance for my every lapse. I was so steeped in obedience to our most Holy God that if my Confessor had commanded ‘Put your hand in the fire!’, I would have rushed to do so and left it there until the last cinder dropped off the stub of my wrist. Indeed, I regretted that my Confessor put me to such pallid penances as he did.

  I dragged my mattress away and slept on a bare plank. I ate little more than the communion wafer. I found it disgusting to abandon prayer in order to take bodily food. I would eat only at the direct order of my Confessor, and even then reluctantly. People in the street stared at the jutting bones of my face, perhaps already aware that they were beholding the most spiritual virgin in Cuzco, if not all Peru. My pangs of hunger were like church bells tolling in my stomach: I exulted in them and my mastery over them.

  I felt distant from other human beings, as if I already occupied a higher region. When other people spoke to me I saw white puffs of air come out of their mouths, like cotton. I could not hear them properly unless they spoke to me of God. I continued to scourge myself, and spent many hours in a state of oblivious ecstasy.

  Then my bloodied linen was discovered by the servant girl, who took it to my parents.

  The next day my Confessor told me, ‘You must go easy and temper your great fervour.’

  He asked me to bring him my whips and chains. When I did so he was dumbfounded at how many they were, and how cruel was their construction. He ordered that I might not scourge myself without permission from him. I stated God’s truth: ‘There is prejudice in the minds of ignorant people against these devout practices, but I had not expected to find it in a priest.’

  He locked my whips and chains in his cupboard and sent me home. My parents spoke to me then in grave, reproving tones, and I saw that my Confessor had acted in collusion with them.

  I grew sad and vague for some time after that betrayal. I had so many miseries that I could not write them all down. I was shocked to realize that all these people less devout than myself were in fact envious of my special gifts.

  I woke in the night and twisted and kneaded my skin as hard as I could without making myself gasp – for the little Indian servant had been put to sleep in my room with instructions to raise an alarm if I began to scourge myself. That girl told my parents that she had seen me touching myself under my blankets. They gave orders that at night I was to be trussed up like a roasting bird, with my four limbs tied to the bedheads just as if I was Tupac Amaru with the horses. My Life of Santa Rosa was taken away from me.

  I contented myself with Santa Catalina. She knew she was married to Christ, for she received a vision in which she wore as a wedding ring the Holy Prepuce that was circumcised from His body. When she was just a child she threw herself into the boiling waters of a spring near her house in order to burn the skin of her face and body and so discourage human suitors. She ate almost nothing and barely slept. So respected was this virgin, unlike myself, that she ended up telling Popes what to do.

  When they took my Santa Catalina away too, my soul rebelled inside my body. I scrubbed my face with the pepper and lye that I had hidden in my bureau drawer. With my head on fire, I ran into the kitchen and plunged my face in a caldera of boiling water, at the same time sticking the long pin into my right ear. I fainted before I could see what I had done.

  The first thing I remember after that is a little hand reaching under the covers of my bed. It belonged to the Indian serva
nt girl.

  ‘Lemme look at you,’ she said, lifting the sheet to see my face.

  ‘Dunt see nuffink different,’ she observed. ‘You was always ugly right through like a hole in the ground.’

  But the damage must have been considerable, for even my mother could not bear to look at me any more. God had marked me out, and my mother’s soul was too weak to behold the miracle. My parents now acceded to my wishes. I was taken away from Cuzco and sent, under the protection of a reliable arriero, to the convent of Santa Catalina in the fabled white city of Arequipa.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  Perhaps this is why I have always loved the skin: because it is both the story and the storyteller. My own book shall be prefaced with a touching paradigm.

  Most days I deal with the living, but once, in Peru, I was brought the body of a little girl found up on the higher reaches of El Misti mountain. The magistrates wished me to pronounce on the manner of her death before they buried her. An apprentice surgeon panted to anatomize her, for there was no medical school in Arequipa at that time and the doctors had to learn their trades in wet ways.

  I laid the little girl out on my bench. I had read of such cases, yet it still shocked me to see a child so mistreated.

  A death from starvation manifests as follows: a shrivelled integument coated with a brown, bad-smelling excretion. Beneath the paper-like epidermis, surgeon’s fingers will locate muscles in a state of atrophy. Without even cutting, the surgeon knows that he shall find the gallbladder bloated with bile but the liver under-sized. The heart and lungs will be bloodless, sunken; the empty stomach collapsed and ulcerated. The bowel, if extracted, shall show itself void, shrivelled and translucent.

  I could not bear to think of the girl’s body being ransacked now.

  ‘The child was sacrificed to a local god,’ I told the apprentice surgeon. ‘Pray do not cut her. You shall gain nothing by anatomizing her, for the death took place at least three centuries past.’