The Book of Human Skin Read online

  ‘You can speak!’ she cried, when she recovered herself. ‘They told me you don’t talk.’

  ‘There are bad doctors here. Cutting doctors with blood on their aprons. It is not safe to show them what we think. But I talk with you, Anna. I always talked with you, did I not? With you and Gianni?’

  I tried to remember how it had been between her and me, before I came here and became one of the folk of this village. This meant swimming to the surface of my mind, where the waves crashed. It was more tranquil and more slow down there below in the calm white emptiness, where I had been living with my friends for some time now.

  Anna’s face kept forcing me to leave the still deep, and to break the skin of my element. It hurt. It hurt. Memories surged back into my head. My heart darkened when I recalled how Santo, while all the time ministering to me in the tenderest ways, had in fact fallen in love with my beautiful sister-in-law and used his visits to me as a cover for stealing glimpses of her. I had seen the letter myself. I pulled my eyelids down to erase the remembered sight of it.

  I did not want to think about these things any more. I wanted to be in a corner, with Fabrizia or Marta warm and quiet beside me, and to let my head slowly fill again with warm whiteness.

  But Anna insisted on speaking of Santo. With that name in my ears, I could not keep my inner self white and soft and impervious to everything. It was as if someone had cast a line down into the deep where I had gone and dragged me back up, swooping and undulating, back to the cruel place where I had to remember that Santo loved my sister-in-law and desired her, and only pretended to care for me.

  Yet now Anna, stumbling over delicacy, was telling me something new. She was telling me that it was not true, what I had believed for so long. She explained that Minguillo had seen how Santo looked at me. And how I looked at him. Then my brother had used his wife’s famous fascinations as a means to his end. In short, Minguillo had written that hurting letter himself and left it for me to find.

  ‘Gianni saw your brother writing the whole story down. He was boasting about it! That is how we found out.’

  So Santo had never loved my sister-in-law? Had never written those cruel words?

  I must revolt my hands and eyes

  So many months of misery could not simply be wiped away by Anna’s words. Perhaps this was an elaborate fiction sent to tempt me back to life on the surface? No, I could not yet think the surface a safe place.

  ‘Stop,’ I told her. ‘No more.’

  But she continued to speak, moving on to one more new thing, which was that Santo would soon come to the island, under a false name, to work as a doctor.

  ‘All so he can be close to you, whom he adores!’ Anna insisted, for my face was still frozen. ‘You must understand, Miss Marcella. Why else would he do this, except for love of you? He is in love to his bones, that boy!’

  ‘But my brother . . . ?’

  ‘Minguillo wrote that he doesn’t need to come to San Servolo any more. He thinks his work is done here.’

  Belief stole up on me then, like a shutter opening on a sunrise. My hands prickled. Suddenly I knew it was true, everything that Anna had said. Had I ever seen Santo’s handwriting before the day I found that letter? I had not. I had fallen into Minguillo’s trap like a foolish mouse. Worse, I myself had rejected and hurt Santo – by Minguillo’s design. My closed-tight heart burst into fragments.

  One fragment was grey and sharp. Gianni and Anna, good-hearted as they were, had not seen the dangers of their beautiful plan. If the ones in authority found out that Santo was on the island for love of me, it would render apparently true everything that had got me incarcerated here. My alleged ninfomania would be confirmed by my seeming to lure the very man here. Then Santo, Anna and Gianni would be punished, and Padre Portalupi too, for allowing it to happen.

  ‘Tell him not to come,’ I shouted at Anna. ‘It’s a trap!’

  I must have frightened her, using some of the ways I had learned with my fellow lunatics, rocking side to side for comfort. She backed out of the room and I heard her feet pattering fast through the corridors back to whence she had come.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Anna come home lamentin n ringin her hands.

  ‘She says “No”,’ Anna telled me flatly.

  Save us, I were that exascerbated that I screamed, ‘But what of Santo? What of the plan? For why does she say no? Has she truely unnerstood? Did ye tell it to her right?’

  ‘Is it a plan, Gianni? He just wants to be with her. He hasn’t thought it through properly, has he? He is not her guardian. She is not of age. He cannot sign for her release and he cannot marry her. She’ll get no portion of a dowry, and he has no money to keep her.’

  My tong burned with the memmary o the lossed will.

  I risposted, ‘He can watch oer her there on the island. Where we cannot.’

  ‘And will he keep to that simple thing? No man will watch without touching if he can touch.’

  ‘I niver touched you, Anna. But I allus watches out for you.’

  ‘That is nothing but pity. Who would want to touch this scar?’ she pointed to her face what Minguillo ud disfiggered.

  ‘I dunt een see that any more, Anna. I see you jist like Marcella ust to draw you.’

  She snifft, and lookt halfway pleased a minute. But she were carpin on agin direckly: ‘What’s the good of Santo going to the madhouse?’

  ‘Santo will see Marcella every day and he will make sure they dunt hurt her, dunt drown her in the cold bath, dunt . . . Twill set the cart among the pigeons, at the very leastwise.’

  Marcella Fasan

  Anna came to me once more, looking frightened. I found an old sane smile to give her. I said, ‘I understand now, Anna.’

  She clasped both my hands and stared into my eyes, as if looking for something inside me. She seemed to find it, for joy broke out over her face, crinkling up her scar. She hugged me and I breathed happily on her smell of ironed linen. From the depths of that embrace, I told her: ‘Santo may come but he must never be alone with me. That would be too dangerous for all of us.’

  After two years of calm whiteness, my life was suddenly colourful like a kaleidoscope. For Padre Portalupi informed me that Cecilia Cornaro had returned to Venice and had come straight to the island. I laughed when he said that she had spoken indelicately. The Brothers had sent her away for fear of upsetting me with her wild talk.

  ‘I wanted her to stay,’ he said, ‘I could see that she loves you. And I confess that the smell of brimstone on her was strangely enthralling. I detect that it comes not from her soul, but her tongue.’

  At this I smiled yet again, a smile reborn from a long time past, a smile from before the madhouse, from before even Santo: a fond, remembering smile from Piero’s time with me, from those days in the studio with Cecilia, from when Anna hugged me ten times a day to her linen-scented breast. I pressed my lips to take the sane goodness of that smile on to my fingers and then I pressed my fingers to my forehead.

  Padre Portalupi leaned over to me eagerly and took my fingers in his.

  ‘Marcella,’ he began. I knew he wanted me to speak to him candidly and fully. I knew he could be trusted and that he wanted to help me. I would have loved to pay him the compliment of manifest trust. But if Padre Portalupi began to defend my sanity, he would draw Minguillo’s attention to himself, and how could I let him be exposed to the danger of that? Besides, Minguillo’s interested eye was the very last thing I wanted on San Servolo just at that moment.

  Minguillo Fasan

  I received a brief note from the medico-religioso that the island was to receive some new lay doctors trained on the mainland in certain modern methods. ‘Among them is even a doctor expert in the conditions of the skin that so often affect our lunatics,’ he added proudly.

  ‘What can it hurt?’ I thought. ‘Let them leech her and scrape her and marinate her to their hearts’ content.’

  ‘As some of these new methods are experimental,’ the sur
geon had written, ‘we shall not pass on the expenses to you.’

  Don’t mind if I do. For, apart from my expensive obedience to the vagaries of Madame Fashion, I had an even more costly pastime to subsidize: my swelling shelves of books bound in human skin.The Acquisitive Reader will know the satisfaction of a collection that shall not see its rival in any acquaintance’s salon, of an assemblage that grows slowly as a mountain on account of the rarity of the sought object.

  Nor was I the passive kind of collector who sits waiting for largesse to fall into his well-padded lap. I was indefatigable in my researches. On hearing of a book of human leather upon the wrong coast of Italy, I would be in a carriage rattling towards it in less than a day.

  Slowly, over the years, more and more rectangular, embossed soul-cages had come to be in my possession. Murderers’ biographies rubbed shoulders with Compleat Physicians. I even had the German novelty, Kinder und Hausmärchen, a little book of fairy tales, bound in the flesh of a small girl from Kassel, where the authors, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, had hunted down their stories.

  I was no stranger to dismembering and exalting ordinary books. Sometimes a good text and a good piece of skin just begged to be united by my wit. In pioneering spirit, I had rebound to order an English novel ‘by a Lady’, called Pride and Prejudice. A slice of thigh from the cadaver of a woman dead of puerperal fever became available to me at the same time as the novel was delivered to the Palazzo Espagnol. The original first edition of Pride and Prejudice was put out at a price of eighteen English shillings, but mine, rebound ‘in a Lady’, cost me a hundred times the price.

  In general I did not read them. But I had an intimate relation with my human-skinned books. I experienced certain sensations when I touched them. I ordered and re-ordered them, sometimes according to size, sometimes according to hue or provenance: senility salaciously juxtaposed with juvenilia; philosopher elbowing priest; prim pastoral poet up against thrilling highwayman. I dusted their crevices with tiny squirrel-fur brushes I had got from an artist’s studio.

  I ornamented some of my soul-cages with additional rivets and fearful metal clasps. In close confinement with such bad company, my human bindings suffered new lacerations, as when a shark scrapes alongside an innocent dolphin.

  Pain never finishes, does it?

  Marcella Fasan

  A lunatic asylum is like a village. There are enemies, friends, gossip and a thread that joins all, be they nurse, warder, doctor or patient. Sane or insane, on San Servolo we were all imprisoned by the madness of some of us. For the nurses might not leave us when they wished to, but only when they were allowed to. The Brothers and the surgeon-Fathers were bound to us by taking responsibility for our care.

  Isolated on San Servolo, our village was as clannish and closed as any island community in the Venetian lagoon. Indeed, some of the patients, when cured, stayed on and became warders themselves. As my drawings showed, life inside such a village is a kind of caricature of the wider life outside, with everything just a little bit distorted, as in a mirror with a fault in the glass. There are hierarchies inside a village, of both power and affection; there are winners and losers. Everything is dramatized. Everything is condensed.

  Into our village came a golden-haired angel called Spirito. He had changed beyond measure in the two years that I had not seen him: more than the new substantialness of his frame, there was the deeper voice and the new quiet force in him, something stronger than muscle or bone.

  Everyone loved him: the male patients, the female, the Furious and the Tranquil Lunatics, the nurses, the herb-gardeners, the bakers, the apothecaries and the cooks. The chief medico-religioso was the only one who failed to be captivated. Santo-Spirito was never tired; he fed everyone’s need with compassionate attention. Santo-Spirito’s brown eyes drew pain out of people and disposed of it kindly.

  His manner was respectful, even with the self-soiled and self-tattered lunatics, the ones who needed to show him the holes in their small-clothes, the ones who craved to tell him of how they could walk on water, the ones who wanted just to hold his hand and feel his sanity and goodness through his skin. Padre Portalupi soon regarded Santo-Spirito as a son and a disciple, for they were in perfect accord on the correct and kindest methods of helping the mad. The two of them could be seen together often, walking the grounds, deep in conversation.

  At first I was terrified. Yet Santo-Spirito observed to the letter my demand that he should never be alone with me. Indeed, such a thing would have been hard to contrive. My private quarters were forbidden to unaccompanied male staff, and when I was outside of them it was always in the plentiful company of other Tranquil Lunatics.

  Nor did we talk together, for when I was in public I did not speak. Anna had made Santo-Spirito understand that he must allow me to stay mute, for safety’s sake.

  But Santo-Spirito would come to my side for lingering moments, and talk gently with the cluster of my friends, and I could almost feel the warmth of his body aligned with mine. I could hear birdsong and fountains in his voice, without listening to the words. And when his eyes fell on mine for a discreet second, I felt as if he were breathing on my eyelids softly and specifically. I had the full joy of inhaling wisps of his warm breath when my friends detained him for long minutes among us with innocent questions and lengthy replies to his own, for a well-treated lunatic is seldom anything but leisurely in the explanation of his or her condition, wrongs and tragedies.

  I never knew when I might see him with his loving patients around him: in the refectory, in the garden outside the church, at the door to the operating theatre, by the pharmacy. I only knew that I would see him each day, and so it was worth awakening every morning.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Satdays Santo came to the ostaria and give me news of Marcella.

  He were learnin bout her, more evry day – the way the blue of her eyes changed colour a hunnerd times with the light, the bits o food she liked, what winds wayed on her spirit, and what ones lifted it.

  ‘If this isn’t Heaven,’ he gloted, ‘it is close to it.’

  Yet twere a sore oirony that keeped him livin so in armony n prossimity with Marcella. He hexplained, with the smile goin a bit on the lopped side, ‘We cannot marry, not while she is written up as insane. A madwoman may not sign the marriage register. Yet, as long as she stays officially mad, I can be with her every day.’

  Then he went on to tell me more bout the gold of her hairs when tussled by a passin breeze, and the way she lookt in profile agin a sunset, lichening Marcella’s skin to the petals o roses, and other sich gossimer stuff what is the perogertive of happy lovers.

  Sor Loreta

  In my vision I saw a beautiful woman very like myself in stature who watered a rose. She watered and watered that rose till it balled up and grew sickly white and clammy. Eventually the petals fell away, leaving a black bud.

  Everyone in the convent came and wept with inexpressible sorrow at the passing of the lovely rose with petals as white as the skin of Sor Sofia. Only I (for it was me, in fact) remained composed, with the watering can in my hand, to show that I was the author of what had happened. With great authority, I stood over the rose till even the withered bud dropped off its stem. I told the weeping nuns, ‘Understand from this parable – you must sacrifice everything you love in this transitory world, for the sake of salvation in eternity.’

  But all the sensual sisters, Rafaela most of all, cast scorn on me for killing the rose. I stayed pale and silent while they abused me, soaking up their insults just as the rose had taken in the water.

  Sor Sofia was nowhere to be seen in this dream. It was as if she was dead. I woke awash in more drops of sweat than I can write down.

  Marcella Fasan

  But then, into our village, came a bully. Later it would come out that he was a dissembling villain who had come to San Servolo with the express desire of hurting lady lunatics. Padre Portalupi was attending at another Fatebenefratelli hospital when this Doctor Flangini w
as recruited privately by the medico-religioso. And Santo had no chance to detect Flangini’s wickedness nor to protect us from it, for it erupted before anyone had time to grow suspicious.

  On his very first day among us, Doctor Flangini dismissed our nurses and lined up all the Tranquil lady patients. He walked up and down the line, striking on the arm all of us who were under thirty years of age. At the end of the line, he stood with his back to us for a moment. His shoulders were shaking. When he turned I saw the traces of laughter on his flat face.

  The man is an impostor, I realized. The Flangini are a respectable family. He is none of that. And Padre Portalupi’s away. Where is Santo?

  For the first time I had an inkling of danger. I felt it in a twinge of my bladder and a prickling of pins in the backs of my hands.

  ‘Those whom I have touched,’ he bellowed suddenly, ‘take one step forward.’

  He ordered us to follow him to the records office. ‘Line up,’ he ordered peremptorily.

  ‘One at a time,’ he cautioned, disappearing inside.

  Marta came out of that room shortly afterwards staring straight ahead. Fabrizia emerged blushing on fire, Lussieta in tears. We clustered around them, put our hands upon them to comfort them, yet they would tell us nothing. They were sealed up in unspeakable distress.

  I started to stumble away to fetch help.

  Where was Santo? I guessed that he must have been on duty far away in the operating room. Even if he were not using his surgical skills, he was often especially requested to hold the hands and soothe patients who must undergo painful cutting and bleeding.

  In that moment I was prepared to confront even the medico-religioso, whose office was close by. But then the door of the records office squawked open and my collar was seized from behind, choking me. Doctor Flangini dragged me inside. I was discomforted to see no nurse in the room, such as normally accompanied the doctors in their private interviews with female patients.