The Book of Human Skin Read online

  And therefore I was not surprised when Sor Sofia was shortly fetched away to Heaven or Hell, according to God’s design. This is the Way of the Lord.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Minguillo were up to summing new. Twere clear from the smile on his face n the way he hummed in the courtyard. He liked to go sit in the place where Conte Piero had died, and smell the poisonous blue flowers there. Also, from that vipery he could see all the comings n goings o the whole house, and find buckets o scuses for a trimming or a punishing. We all trod in fear. Running along corridors, walking too slow along corridors, being in corridors – all sich could bring on a slap, or worser – ten minits of his foul tong.

  Come a day when I sorpresed Minguillo in his office. I creepled in silent as gilt. He were crouched by the bookshelf, looking jist like one on them orang-utang apes, and he were running his pimpled nose long a row o books on the next-to-bottom shelf. Course he needed to be that close, I knowed now. He couldn’t see scut from far way. He tookt deep breaths. Twere as if each one on them books were sented with diffrint perfume.

  Books was allus arriving for him, of course, wrapt in cloth and delivert in the hands of booksellers who lookt like men what boil horses’ bones for glue.

  Minguillo haint seed me yet, so I peered oer his shoulder at them little darlins of his. Then it struck me: pinkish brown with a fine grain to the leather – them covers was jist like that repungent book of humane skin he had got from Peru.

  That’s what he were collecting. Not jist poor old Tupac Amaru, but dozens of em. Books of humane leather. That’s what he were spending Marcella’s inhairitance on.

  Brute God!

  Anger n fear whipped through me. I were dizzy with feelins. Pity for the poor creechers bound round them books. Shakin with the old bull-horrors at Minguillo’s happy hunting em down. Sick-bitter that Minguillo were safe here in his study spending his filthy looter on them dredful murderin goolish books while Marcella were confined on an island as a lunatick. Gilty that I, in the end, had permitted this to appen on account of my wafering oer the true will n then loosing it.

  I must of huffed out loud, for Minguillo turned round n seed me.

  He leaped up. But twere too late for him to hide his grin nor the things what were spred on his desk.

  Twere maps of South Hamerica isnt it.

  Part Four

  Minguillo Fasan

  Yet again the disposal of my sister preoccupied me. For the second time, I thought that God, or at least nuns, would help me. Napoleon had slammed the doors on my original intentions. But in Arequipa, in the faltering Viceroyship of Peru, I had heard there was a Dominican nunnery that would take only girls of rich Spanish blood.

  Rich Spanish blood, that had a nice ring to it. And what had our family, if not blood and richness with a heaped spoonful of Spaniard stirred into it? An admixture of Venetian could only enhance the limpieza de sangre, the purity of bloodline that so obsessed the Spanish of the New World, threatened as they were with miscegenation of many hues at every bedpost.

  The Dominicans, I thought, they would do nicely, with their Spanish and New World connections. Domini Cani – Dogs of God, they called themselves. Peru’s own demented Santa Rosa of Lima was a creature of their order. ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ – soon to be relaunched on an eager market – would pay my sister’s dowry. The Orderly Reader shall acknowledge the perfect symmetry of it all, and be pleased by it.

  In any case it was well past time for me to sort my father’s affairs in Arequipa. Months after he died, I received a threadbare document to say that he had been pronounced ab intestato, at which I had smiled wryly. My father was far from intestate. In fact, he had at least two wills. It now occurred to me that in Arequipa there was a mansion and a warehouse for me to claim, that might be turned into funds for more books of human skin and other diversions of mine.

  The little matter of allowing a Venetian-born girl to enter a Spanish convent I solved easily. Among the fraternity of human-skin bibliophiles was a certain powerful cardinal in Rome, a very epicure in creature books. Within days of my sending a highly suggestive letter, I had a document with a papal seal on my desk, ready to send in advance to Santa Catalina and frighten all the humble colonial clerics into convulsions.

  Meanwhile, I persuaded the Fatebenefratelli that it was the decent thing to do, to keep Marcella for a little longer, until I could find a way to accommodate her, without disrupting the lives of my own delicate wife and beloved little ones. I reminded Padre Portalupi that my womenfolk had been accustomed to think my sister a dangerous madwoman, and that they had not seen her for years. I could not ask them to accept her in the house without my mediating presence.The problem, as I put it, was that I myself was committed just at that moment to a business excursion. I did not mention my South American plans. I reported merely that I was going to Cadiz, which was true, as it was on the way to my real destination.

  Portalupi responded that naturally Marcella was welcome until I might personally welcome her back into the bosom of our family.The fellow’s tone seemed somewhat ironic, so I arranged to have him taken into the Magistrato alla Sanità for some more stern questioning while I was away.

  I embarked on the Star on January 3rd 1813, to call in at Cadiz, Falmouth, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, on my way to Chile. I clutched my Biglietto di Sanità.That told the world that I was fuori d’ogni sospetto di Peste – free from any suspicion of disease. And of course, outside of Venice I was also free of any suspicion of bad character. I travelled light and happy.

  At least I did so until we reached the open sea. My first sea passage to the New World had been gently uneventful. But this time – the winds they did blow, and soon blew the smile right off my face and Signor Fauno’s artful tousle straight out of my hair.The Kind Reader will at this point save us both a deal of trouble: He will consult His memories of squalid sea passages done on the page by Messrs Smollett, Polo and their ilk, and put them all together with their every screeching timber, add extra vomit, stir well, and He’ll have some idea of the journey now endured by myself, and shortly to be endured by my little sister.

  As we approached land, the storms were fetched away to plague other less deserving voyagers. I was still churning in the belly: the thorny coasts of Argentina had no allure for me, but when we rounded the lower point of that wild continent, then I began to feel something like pleasure in the journey again. The Chilean archipelago, the lounging sea-lions and the glaciers snouting into the sea: now that was what I remembered. Chewing on the sinewy air, and watching the seam of our wake cleave the azure waters, I understood afresh why my father had loved this journey, and why he had spent so much time here.

  The clean air made me drunk.The high skies rolled my soul over. I began to believe in the New World as I had never believed in God, if you can call Him that.The skin of Tupac Amaru seemed to thrill under my fingers, as if he too was happy to be back in his native continent, where indeed his own spirit of revolution was abroad once more.The clatter of gunfire sometimes travelled across the shores to us on the Star, and we saw pyres of smoke that could only be towns ablaze. The excitement was contagious. It lay on my skin all the way up the coast.

  When the cranes of Valparaiso came loping over the water to meet me once again, I felt like the king of two worlds, of which the new one was the greater – and I said aloud, ‘Yes, this is where I’ll put her, if she survives the journey.’

  Sor Loreta

  After Sor Sofia passed from this miserable life, everyone gave Me hateful looks.

  Sor Arabel and Sor Narcisa, when questioned by the priora as to Our whereabouts, swore that We had been praying together at the time Sor Sofia must have drowned in the bath. It was true. We had prayed the whole evening. Never once did We pause in Our praying.

  There was no more laughter. There was a frenzy of sobbing prayers for the soul of the departed nun. I saw only sad faces, or others that appeared ugly with fright. My sisters unfairly chose to victimize Me for the pai
n they felt at the loss of their favourite, Sor Sofia. Dung was served to Me on a platter in the refectory. I entered My cell one night to find it dripping with foul-smelling liquid, and My blue spectacles trampled to tiny splinters. Instead of hunting down the offenders, Priora Mónica reproached Me for carelessness, as the convent was obliged to pay for a second pair.

  Meanwhile, the heathens of Peru were once more fermenting a great wickedness. The Holy Mother Church was threatened on all sides by new rebellions. The nuns cowered within the walls of Santa Catalina, where sometimes even the women and children of the town took refuge.

  God sends afflictions to the truly faithful, that they may uniquely feel the warmth of His love by finding new ways to serve His will. Just at that moment He came to Me with a fresh sign of His favour. The sign He sent was unmistakable: a heretic. The prospect of waging God’s war against this new enemy renewed My ardour.

  It had come out that Santa Catalina was supposed to welcome in charity a girl from Venice! That Venetian girl’s father, a merchant, had already stained this white town of Arequipa with illegitimate seed. All these many years, his mistress, Beatriz Villafuerte, and her bastard boy too, had shown the impudence to attend the church of Santa Catalina every Sunday alongside devout Christians.

  So now the deceased Fernando Fasan was sending us another rotten fruit of his loins. This daughter of his was supposed to be a purest virgin of clean blood, yet how far was any Venetian ever advanced in the duty of God?

  These things I know, by God’s design.

  There are those among the Venetians who have gone nine years without confessing. Their churches are thieves’ caves. Napoleon rightly laid waste to them. The Venetians are hypocritical even to build a church. Sodom and Gomorrah were more wholesome places than Venice. This is proved by the fact that Venetians have chosen to live on the murk of mud and water, forsaking the solid rock of Our most Holy Church.

  When I explained these matters to the council, there was such an uproar in the room that from the outside it must have sounded as if the sisters were hacking each other to pieces with the sharp edges of their Bibles. The worst eruption occurred when I suggested a new wall to separate the areas where the Venetian might walk and where the nuns of Arequipa might roam without fear of corruption.

  I was forced to raise My voice above their screams: ‘Everyone knows that the private lives of the Venetian clergy would detain a hundred Confessors for a year! The churches are ballrooms and brothels! There is a sensational laxity in the convents of Venice. Do you not know the story of the abate Galogero who issued all the nuns in his convent with duplicate keys?’

  Someone hissed at Me, ‘Sor Loreta, no one wishes to hear your voice, or see you.’

  ‘Particularly see you,’ sneered someone else.

  And so the wolves persuaded the lambs to allow the Venetian she-wolf into the House of God. It turned out that the brother of the she-wolf was already on his way to Peru: he had been so arrogant as to assume a positive outcome from the start. He was expected at Santa Catalina at any moment.

  Of course Priora Mónica preened herself on gaining an Italian nun, and a Venetian one at that. Instead of the devotions due to her Bridegroom in Heaven, the priora’s head was full of amateur dramaticals and little exclusive salons in her chambers for the most light girls, at which Rossini’s music would be played until they fell into a sensual delirium. Naturally I was never invited, though of course I would have shunned such a bacchanalia if I was.

  I scourged Myself on behalf of all of them, as it was ever God’s design that I should suffer for everyone. Only Sor Narcisa and Sor Arabel joined Me in My penances. Both were flaccid in their flagellation, for which I reproached them many times, perhaps a little unkindly.

  Minguillo Fasan

  In Valparaiso I revisited my former haunts with twice as much pleasure, for a mouth-watering nostalgia sharpened my old appetites. My fine new wardrobe of shot silk and satin waistcoats drew eyes stupefied with admiration.There were those in Venice who looked down on my looks, but in Chile-Peru I was always a god. I did a little business in Chilean lapis lazuli, for I had an idea to stopper special bottles of ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ with a carved spigot of blue stone when I brought it back on the market.

  Then I sailed north through waters crusted with salty foam, until a rocky promontory hooked us into the grinning white bay of Islay. I hired the least noisome arriero on the dock. His peons put me and my traps on to donkeys, and for three days I jolted up mountains and across plains to Arequipa, with El Misti lifting his white snowy hat to us all the way.A little asymmetrical in the slanting light, the mountain reminded me somewhat of the old Doge’s berretto.

  Hats and mountains, heads and hills.The Peruvians of this zone, men and women alike, wore black hats that made them look as if they carried a tray bearing a miniature mountain on their heads. My arriero told me that the head-wear was indeed an homage to El Misti. And it did not stop with hats. We stopped briefly at a shrine where I saw the mummified heads of Indian ancestors – their crania had been stretched with binding and stones since babyhood, so that their very bones had grown elongated like olives, with foreheads like snowy peaks.

  ‘There is positively no accounting for human stupidity,’ I told the arriero. And the thought of stupidity reminded me pleasantly of Santa Catalina, the eponymous heroine of the convent I was about to visit.That blessed lady had contrived many and more jolly tortures to wreck her own body than these natives had inflicted on their babies’ skulls.

  Too late, I noticed that the arriero had misliked my words. His head jerked sharply away. I had heard that these arrieros could be wickedly temperamental. Losing his services at that remote spot would leave me in no small amount of trouble. He said reproachfully, ‘I knew your father, Conte Fasan. I worked for him in the mines of Caylloma. He was a great man.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I remarked. ‘Dear old Papà. How I miss him!’

  After that, I knew the arriero would serve me. He began to serve immediately, dispensing useful information about my father’s ‘wife’ in Arequipa, one Beatriz Villafuerte.The woman still inhabited my father’s, that is, my house, as the authorities had respected her claim as his common-law wife. A grand example of local beauty, this Beatriz, apparently, and fervent churchgoer. When he died, she had paid for a mighty requiem mass in his honour at Santa Catalina. She still tended his grave with many tears.

  In Venice, my father had referred to the creature as his ‘housekeeper’. I made a great show of pretending that I knew all about the saintly Beatriz and that in cosmopolitan Venice such things were little thought of.

  Yet it caught me off guard, indeed whipped the breath out of my throat, to hear that there was a son by her, too.

  Arequipa dawned on me white as a sunstruck diamond, carved out of El Misti’s foothills.

  ‘Sillar,’ explained my arriero, ‘is white. And so are the people. More Spanish here than anywhere.White skin.’

  He explained that sillar was a kind of volcanic tuff shrugged off by the mountains in tremors that had several times decimated the population.The city had busily renewed itself in this virgin tuff since the terrible earthquake of 1784, and was now, he claimed, more beautiful than ever.White Arequipa was burrowed in a plump elbow of the River Chili, that lay in the shadow of three snow-scabbed mountains.The arriero pointed: ‘Chachani, the one that looks like a bride, Pichu-Pichu, that looks like a sleeping cat. Miau! And of course El Misti.’ He nodded to it deferentially.

  I gazed on the crumpled peak and imagined it erupting like a ripe pimple on the day of my birth.

  ‘How many killed,’ I asked fondly, though I knew the answer, ‘in 1784?’

  We approached the city via the Puente Real, where a soldier stopped our party and demanded our names. When I announced myself as ‘Minguillo Fasan, son of Fernando Fasan’, his jaw dropped. He scribbled something hastily on a piece of paper ‘for the Intendencia, my apologies, noble sir’, and waved us graciously into the city.


  We passed through an area my arriero described as the tambo, a rats’ nest of stinking tanneries and leather-crafters, chicherías selling corn beer, all establishments topped by the unmistakably inviting balconies of the town’s prostitutes. Evil smells, unfamiliar accents and exciting blasphemies clamoured richly in my ears: the Travelled Reader shall of course recall that poor sanitary conditions are ever conducive to the production of the most delightful and colourful vernacular.

  We climbed a shallow hill into the centre of the metropolis. Immediately I could see why my father had taken this city to his sentimental heart.Arequipa was a little albino Venice, a pearl uncontaminated by failure and fall. The main square, the Plaza de Armas, was a veritable San Marco, enclosed in three towering stone loggias and a cathedral of far nobler proportions than the sideshow that masqueraded as our basilica in Venice.A fountain gurgled richly in the middle of the square.

  ‘Tuturutú,’ my arriero pointed to the bronze statue of a man with a trumpet at its frothing centre.Around him crowded market traders, rowdy as Rialto. Under the galleries of the square, just as in San Marco, gaudy shops flashed glistening glass eyes on their wares.

  The churches were frankly bizarre: their facades were carved with what appeared to be a conglomeration of paganistic symbols – snakes, pumas and strange creatures in feathered headdresses. I rather enjoyed them. No Venetian is more than a little Christian, after all. And myself less than most. Also like Venice, there were almost no carriages. People walked or went by sedan chair. Mules carried mountainous loads, the notoriously temperamental alpacas light ones.A few carts rattled by.

  We passed a row of dead dogs laid out in lines. ‘The governor has them exterminated, because of the Rabies,’ my arriero explained. ‘We have vaccine against the Small-Pox too.You should . . .’