The Book of Human Skin Page 29

  I waved him aside, remembering my father’s unfortunate brush with the newfangled vaccination methods.

  I lodged myself at a noisy inn in the palmy Plaza de Armas for the first night. I sent a note to the ‘housekeeper’ at my father’s mansion to announce my presence in Arequipa. Until this moment, I had kept the lovely Beatriz Villafuerte in ignorance of my imminent arrival. I wanted her to have just so much time but no more. I had written that I would arrive in the late afternoon of the next day, and that I expected the house to be emptied by then of any elements that might prove undesirable to the eyes of the legitimate son of the Conte Fernando Fasan.That’s how I put it. I thought it had a nice ring to it. She would be up all night looting, I hoped. Much good would it do her, though.

  I made short work of lodging my father’s will, that is, my edition of it, with the town clerk to copy overnight. I thoughtfully provided a Spanish translation that named his first-born son Minguillo as the rightful heir to all Fernando Fasan’s possessions in the Old World and the New.

  When the citizens lit the resin lamps outside their houses, I took myself back to the tambo, and found myself a nice little bargain in flesh. I fell asleep, my fists closed up ready for my forthcoming war on my father’s mistress and her bastard.

  In the morning, I suffered myself to be educated by the night’s whore. My arriero had boasted that the ‘White City of Arequipa’ was famous for its limpieza de sangre, pure, European blood.Yet down in the tambo Indians of all hues, and slaves, diluted the proud paleness of the citizenry. Leaning over the balcony, how many pages of the book of human skin I leafed through that first dawn, guided by my exhausted harlot.

  More than half the people who passed under my window could have been rich Venetians or citizens of Madrid, if you but looked at their white hides. These were the thoroughbred Spaniards, born in Spain proper.Then there were those whose complexion was irreproachably milky but who had a tinge of the New World about their bearing – these, I was told, were the criollos, born of Spanish parents here.Then came the tawny mestizos, the offspring of Spanish fathers dallying with native women. The pure Indian people were the most appetising – delectably sculpted in rich terracotta.Then there were slaves of various hues, ranging from coffee-coloured mulatas and the moriscas, their children fathered by white men, to the half-Indian, half-African sambas and the deep-black negros and negras.

  ‘What’s that?’ I demanded of my whore, each time a girl of a slightly different shade passed by. She cast an expert eye and her answers enchanted me.

  ‘Media asambada,’ she would say, ‘half samba’, of a gingerbread-coloured maid. Or ‘cuarterona’, one quarter black. And ‘mestiza media chola’, or ‘india acholada’.

  The whites had their gradations too, of which my favourite was ‘de color trigueño’ – wheat-coloured.

  I rubbed my hands and slapped my whore back to bed.Yes, the book of human skin had many pages in Arequipa, and the Expectant Reader need not doubt I planned to run my finger down all of them.And if I imagined some of those sun-warmed integuments segmented, sumac’d, tooled, lightly gilded and bound around volumes, what Book-loving Reader would blame me?

  Our scene is the Casa Fasan. I took care to arrive at the house not in the afternoon, as advertised, but at eleven in the morning, and just in time to see my father’s weeping mistress Beatriz being helped into a sedan chair. She was a beauty indeed, even with her face swollen and discoloured by tears. There was no sign of the brat. A train of mules loaded with fine furniture and carpets waited in the street. I told the muleteer: ‘Let me help you to avoid a charge of assisting in a theft. Unload these stolen goods and take them back into the house where they belong.’

  At this moment, a woman, the actual housekeeper apparently, erupted into the courtyard, her face, too, disfigured with weeping. ‘Conte Fasan!’ she whined. ‘It is not what it looks like.These things were gifts, sir . . .’

  ‘And are there notarized documents to prove that?’

  ‘For gifts of love there are no documents, sir. I beg you, the lady will be destitute.’

  ‘The lady, as you so generously style her, has parasited long enough on our family.’

  I held out my purse to the muleteer.Wearily, he untied the burdens of the first beast, and his lackeys did likewise, and the treasure proceeded back into the house.That is, my house.

  I strolled around appreciatively. The building was a fine specimen of colonial grandeur – three courtyards enclosed by low buildings, all in the white sillar stone, richly ornamented with architraves and friezes in a joyous miscegenating orgy of Doric, Ionian and Corinthian styles. The walls of the first courtyard were painted in an accommodating shade of buttermilk yellow. The next courtyard was a throbbing cobalt blue, the last a russet-red richer than anything in Venice. The intense colours bullied into stark highlight all the carved details of pure white sillar gargoyles, cornices and pilasters. Nothing could try harder to please than the decorative cobbles, the shady arbours and the riot of flowers against this crisp backwash of paint and stone.The Casa Fasan was not the Palazzo Espagnol, yet it was not shabby either. I suddenly resented all the generations of geraniums that had bloomed in those pots for the eyes of my father’s mistress and her bastard, and not for my own.Why had I left it so long to claim what was mine? By rights I should have extracted some rents since the day my father died, since the day Beatriz Villafuerte ceased to serve in his bed.

  ‘Is my chamber ready?’ I asked the housekeeper. She led me to the room where my father had so extravagantly betrayed my mother and myself. It still smelled of the perfume of my father’s mistress, and the bed dipped slightly where Beatriz Villafuerte had lain with him all those illicit years. I lay on that bed listening while below me in the courtyard tears were wept and teeth were gnashed and my own name was called out in rage and disgust. I felt at home already.

  I did not repair immediately to the nunnery of Santa Catalina.The Travelled Reader will easily comprehend that so fine a thing as a Venetian gentleman could not be received in Arequipa without a great deal of noticing. I made sure news of my grandeur got to the convent ahead of me, with a few struts around the main square in full fig. I dressed in a cerulean piqué waistcoat and an apple-green frock-coat to attend a private duel of two bulls on a farm outside the town, an event patronized by many elegant gentlemen and ladies of Arequipa. All eyed me curiously. In that free and easy way of mine, I let it be known that I had come to set up my sister in the nun business in town.

  Bishop José Sebastián de Goyeneche y Barreda received me in honour of my father, who had been his friend.The letter from my book-loving cardinal in Rome lay on his desk, the papal seal prominently exposed. I saw surprise and doubt on his face after an hour’s conversation with me, but the Bishop did not refuse my request to send a bigliettino to the priora at Santa Catalina, with a recommendation to accept my sister as a novice. A certain amount of jiggery-pokery had to be contrived, he implied, but all objections to my sister’s Venetian birth would be swept aside by the fact that my father had been to all intents and purposes a citizen of Arequipa for so many years.

  ‘Where do I sign, Ilustrísimo?’ I asked. ‘How much do I pay?’

  He looked at me with unmistakable distaste. ‘The municipal clerk will draw up the document for you, and it will be verified by the síndico and the procurador of Santa Catalina. It shall be waiting at the convent’s oficina when you go there.’

  On my whore’s advice I next betook myself to Calle Guañamarca’s taverns, where the evening’s hilarity was sharpened by the sombre silhouettes of the convents of Santa Rosa and Santa Teresa, of which I heard many delightful stories about nuns made to sleep in tombs with black curtains, of cruel penances and poor rations. After sampling the chicha in a dozen establishments, including El Infierno – ‘Hell’ – and El Mundo al Revés – ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ – I wandered east and north through the night, taking in the Indian quarters of Santa Marta and Miraflores.Then I followed the stream of sho
ulders tight with hope to the gambling parlours of Callejón de Loredo, where I deprived a few children of their inheritances and came away with the smell of their tears in my hair.

  Finally I found a chichería called El Veneno – ‘Poison’ – and drank enough fermented corn to grow a field in my nethers. I finished my night back at the tambo with my whore, making her make good on her promissory morning kisses, stumbling home to the Casa Fasan late the next morning, to refresh myself for my appointment at the oficina at Santa Catalina.

  I dressed in duck trousers, a taffeta cravat and a frogged jacket, with my violet velvet toque at a rakish angle. I practised regretful expressions in the mirror.Then I strode along the walls of Santa Catalina, which reared above the street in golden crescents as if carved out of Saharan sand. Over the gate, a painted stone image of Santa Catalina herself clutched a crucified Jesus like a baby doll.The door was studded with Moorish pinions. I rapped sharply on a metal nipple with my cane.

  It was only when I belatedly pulled a discreet cord that a lay-porter appeared and opened the gate into a courtyard of bland aspect. I craned my neck but could detect no aspect of nunly life. I saw the wheel at the end of the courtyard, the two-tiered contraption by which goods and money were exchanged while retaining the nuns’ invisibility. Where I stood was the debatable land inside the convent, where men might deliver, or parley with the priora. I cursed under my breath: that showy front gate was a false one. The real gate to Santa Catalina’s enclosure was at the far end of this courtyard. I would not have the satisfaction of a comprehensive inspection of the grim bastion that would encase my sister.That was a thousand pities for I had counted on taking home some nourishing memories of its dark walls and glowering cloisters: something to tuck into my imagination, for later, when I thought of Marcella and the troubles she had cost me.

  ‘Sir,’ a cool, intensely feminine voice saluted me. I was ushered into the vaulted stone office of the priora, fragrant with the mingled scents of wax and soap. Behind a desk, I glimpsed the locutorio that housed the grate through which Arequipan families might make small-talk with the daughters and sisters they had buried alive inside the convent.

  Beside the priora sat her deputy, the very ugliest specimen of a woman to have ever slimed out of a womb. I am sure I hope so myself.

  She wore blue spectacles that she removed as the door closed behind me and the room settled into soft gloom. I was sorry that she had, for then I had to look at her eyes, one of which was glued shut by folds of scarified skin. She made my flesh wrinkle into tiny crevices of discomfort.When I looked at her, I swear the sweat started to pour down my brow.

  The office was well appointed with excellent furniture and paintings. I smiled to notice a vase of monkshood flowers on the smaller desk. The foolish women doubtless had no idea that it was deadly poisonous. They probably thought the deep blue resembled the robe of the Virgin, or some such nonsense!

  The priora, however, soon revealed herself as a specimen of more intelligence than I like to see in a woman. I was pleased to discover that her repulsive assistant, the vicaria, was a thoroughly stupid fanatic. Her habit was ridged with various penitential garments beneath. Her neck was raw.There was blood around her right ankle: she must have been wearing the cilice. Your woman obviously considered herself among Heaven’s royalty, with all that suffering. I wondered if that sucked-orange face of hers was her own creation.

  The vicaria scowled – or perhaps, with the melted features, she just looked that way at all times – while the priora informed me that the council and the chapter of the convent had approved my application on Marcella’s behalf.

  ‘Does your sister speak our tongue?’ demanded the Melted One. The smell of her rotten, starved breath floated unwelcomely over the desk.

  Marcella’s Spanish, I testified, was fluent as my own. The educational requirements of a convent in Peru would present no difficulty. I mentioned a crisis that had obliged a recent sequestration in what I delicately called ‘a special refuge’. I did not mention the term ‘lunatic asylum’ lest it raise their price or give them qualms.

  ‘Marcella longed all her life to be a nun,’ I told them. ‘So imagine the shock of Bonaparte closing all the convents in Venice, just as she was about to take up her vocation! It affected her painfully. I would go as far as to say it was too much for her. As a loving brother, I found that I could not in conscience deny her heart’s desire: an enclosed life in a house of God.’

  ‘Why not a convent in Madrid or Seville?’ The Deformity’s cracked shrillness well fitted the ugly mouth from which it issued. ‘Given your family connections in Spain?’

  I let the priora answer. I noted that she used a tone of exaggerated patience with her colleague. ‘Napoleon’s conquests and convent closures have extended there too, Sor Loreta. The situation in Europe is still uncertain for those who seek a religious life.Are you not satisfied that the Pope’s own cardinal in Rome sent a letter to support this application?’

  That was when I saw the pure hatred between the two women, or at least on the part of the vicaria towards her superior. The priora continued, smugness enriching her voice, ‘And nor is the Conte Fasan a stranger among us. Of course, the Conte Fasan’s father made himself . . . a home in Arequipa as well.’

  So the scandal of my father’s second family had not escaped their attention. I smiled. ‘I have purified my father’s house. It is a respectable residence once more.’

  In fact, I had that morning moved my whore from the tambo in there, to her gaudy delight. I had left her eating a garlic breakfast in my father’s bed.

  The vicaria’s single eye met mine and held them for an unpleasant moment. God’s Breeches but that was an ugly woman! I nourish a hope that the Squeamish Reader shall never behold her like. I wiped the perspiration off my brow and passed to the meat of this conversation. ‘What are your arrangements to stop the men getting in?’

  The priora affected horror, but I was having none of it.They had a binding promise of my money now – I had the right to information.

  ‘Come, come, the situation in Venice is well known – convent walls built of veils etcetera and so forth.And here? Pregnancies? Love affairs? Escapes?’

  A triumphant smile played about the Deformity’s distorted lips.

  ‘We have nothing of that nature in this place.’ Now the priora looked me neatly in the eye.

  On the streets of Arequipa I had heard nothing to gainsay her, yet for all I knew, behind walls as thick as Santa Catalina’s they could be resurrecting virginities like wintered daffodils and no one but the buyers of maidenheads would know.

  ‘Can you prove that such things do not occur?’

  ‘I have never been asked such a question. It has not been necessary.Yes, that is your answer.’

  ‘So are all your nuns so ugly that no one comes after them?’

  The vicaria showed no sign of having understood me.The priora stubbornly said nothing. I persisted, ‘Are your doctrines so desolate that their minds are too dull for temptation?’

  ‘Our nuns are beautiful and noble and intelligent, and they are safe.The men of this town are our brothers, fathers and cousins, for whose souls the nuns pray all day long. Our nuns inspire not lust but veneration. As for foreigners – the feet of handsome and depraved strangers only rarely make their way up our mountain.’

  I looked closely at her face to see if she was flirting with me. She was not. The vicaria stared at me as if I was a snake in a bottle. Well, obviously, she would not be welcoming anything male into her cloister, that one. I let it drop. Marcella’s spindly former lover was hardly likely to make it across the ocean, up the hills of Islay and to the foothills of El Misti.

  The vicaria now held up the famous document for me to sign. It was elegantly penned on thick paper. The light streaming through the window revealed a handsome watermark of the best Almirall production.

  Apparently, I had seen fit to declare: ‘I therefore beseech your Excellency that my sister might be received in
the convent, for this would bring much happiness to my sister and grace and blessings to myself . . .’

  I skimmed its pompous verbiage until I found the part that concerned the dowry. I was stunned at their rapacity, to the extent of even being a little admiring of it. It seemed that ‘I, the brother of the sister mentioned, am disposed to give, pay and after counting relinquish 2,400 pieces of assayed silver, one quarter in advance and the rest when she passes from her novitiate into the stature of a professed nun . . .’

  It still rankled that I had paid Corpus Domini in full and in advance, yet never received a return of those thousand ducats when Napoleon closed the convent. A sweet thought occurred to me: if I was selling my sister’s maidenhead for a second time to God, this time I was selling God a potentially defective item.While I was sure that the little doctor Santo had not got a finger in anywhere, Padre Portalupi had refused to detail exactly what the estimable Flangini had done to Marcella on San Servolo. But she was certainly not untouched.

  Alongside the predictable list of scapulars, wimples and candles was a bizarre bazaar of merchandise: a cape, two burlap tunics, two doublets, two pairs of sandals, a wooden bedstead, bed-curtains, two mattresses, four sheets, two pillows, two blankets, a bedspread, a small table, a chair, a small coffer, a washbowl, a chamber pot, a candlestick, a stool, four pairs of boots and ten yards of cotton fabric.

  Another paragraph announced, ‘Special Supplementary Requirements for a nun issuing from Venice . . .’

  Marcella was also required to supply twenty-five items of luxury, including a painting of her patron saint, a statue of same, six cushions of Venetian cut velvet, a dozen gilded Murano glass goblets, three Turkey carpets, a full set of cooking equipment, a gilded coffee service, a dinner service of decorated silver, silk curtains, a field of ten acres outside Arequipa (they knew everything of my father’s fortune, clearly) and a Venetian processional lamp of at least two hundred years’ antiquity. Also at least one slave girl or a maid. The items of Venetian provenance were to be sent along with my sister, so that neither one arrived without the other.