The Book of Human Skin Read online

  I called in the next, yet-living patient, but my mind dwelled sadly on the horror of the little victim’s lingering death.

  Some people see skin simply as a texture, that holds in place all the important organs, as a sack holds a squirming haul of fish. Few know what a strong lens reveals of that sack: a tendinous, membranous, vascular and nervous intermixture of fibres. The colour of skin, like a biographer, betrays the secrets of the inner constitution.The Sanguine of character show themselves in a vermilion epidermis. Those of a Bilious personality will be dry-skinned with a yellow cast to their complexion. The Melancholicks are leaden of hue. The Phlegmaticks are soft and white. In sickness, the skin peacocks its colours: livid, fiery, bluish, pale, purpureous.

  Then there’s what happens to us: also tattooed upon our faces. The skin’s an anxious entity, even in the nicer touches of pleasure. Its eruptions are our souls’ troubles and delights made visible to all in blushes, blanchings and gooseflesh. I suppose this is why fanatics mutilate their own flesh. I am reminded of one such I personally encountered but a short time ago. Her scourged and mutilated skin was her signpost. The striated lettering advertised: ‘God loves me. I am specially marked out for His favour.’

  But was it God’s favour that my little mummified girl wore on her tortured body? I attended her burial, alone with the priest and the grave-digger in the windswept Chavela cemetery. Her final grave is marked only in my memory. I threw a winter rose and a sugared cake into the pit that swallowed her. For a moment I imagined those skeletal fingers clamouring around the sweetmeat, and my own skin hunched away from my bones, feeling terror and dreadfulness, and worst of all, an emptiness in the heart of the world.

  Yet I also knew even then that there is a God, and that He is good.

  Because of Marcella Fasan’s laughter, and her skin.

  Minguillo Fasan

  I trust the page-turning finger of My Reader stays in supple condition? And that His Mercenary Soul remains requited by the sheer worth of paper between the skins of this book? Excellent. Every good dog deserves a bone.

  Now the vulgar generality of Readers, I find, craves particulars of parentage, provisioning, points-in-time, et dreary cetera and prosaically so forth. For that vulgar generality, I furnish the following, quite unwilling.

  I was born in a palazzo on the Grand Canal. That is, our palazzo in our city of Venice, some years before that latter lady’s death. Her executioner: Napoleon; his minions: the Venetians themselves; her judges: my own Kind Reader (many warm hellos to Him again!) and all posterity.

  People called it the Palazzo Espagnol, the Spanish Palace. Golden-Book Venetians, we had married into Spanish silver back when the Spaniards were first richly picking the New World. Fat on silver, my ancestors had commissioned a Tiepolo to paint the New World’s oldest and most futile saint, Rosa of Lima, for the Gesuati church on the Zattere. Our family dealt in silver, we had silver in our veins and we spoke Spanish as easily as Venetian inside our home. Until Boney came upon us – patience, I pray you! – Spanish-ness gave our family pleasure and distinction, if you can call it that.The Cultivated Reader shall of course know this, that to straddle two languages, to have a tongue in the ear of two tongues, what a very good and superior feeling that imparts.

  In those days the treasure-house of Spanish silver was in the pitted belly of Peru.The Spaniards kept a greedy grip on their colonies, but my father, with his Spanish blood, found ways of dealing there, especially since he began to trade also in the red bark of the fever tree, that was indispensable to the Venetian quacks for their electuaries, balsams and expectorants. Also in The Milk of the Candelabra Cactus, efficacious against no disease but, in the utterance, so delightful on the anxious ear. My father’s customers were the finest apothecaries in Venice, for those New World drugs had a specially profitable ring to them, as in ‘new’, meaning not yet proven to be from-top-to-bottom useless.

  But look, the midwife and the surgeon are hastening to my birth-chamber!

  My mother Donata Fasan shuddered me out on the thirteenth of May 1784. She nearly died of it, I am told.The clock had not long struck midday when my little face first appeared, the wrong way round and awkward with it. My mother screamed and fainted away with the pain.The Reader should take note: even at this evanescent glimmering of our tale, my mother’s weakness was such that it might have withered me and this story inside her. However, the attendant physician dragged me out of that red womb into this drab-coloured world.And there you have it, our adventure begun.

  If the Reader hungers for pathetical fallacies in the natural world to conflate His literary pleasure, let Him look no further.There are times when literary devices truly seem superfluous! For the unvarnished fact is that the world verily shook in the minute I was born: far away across the ocean, at noon on that same thirteenth of May, an earthquake tumbled down ten cities in Peru. Imagine: mountains decrusting themselves, the earth grinning open in chasms to swallow little black apostrophes of people! Yes, Dear Reader, let us mark it one more time for general satisfaction, the earth’s skin as well as my mother’s was fissured the day I was born, and both would bear the scars of it for ever.

  The news from Peru was not all bad. Indeed, what some might call a disaster was soon proving profitable for me and my fortunes.The earthquake, you see, opened up free, gratis, three deep, new veins of silver in my father’s mines in the South Americas.

  Already, all around my cradle were silver rattles, silver cups and silver reflections from the Grand Canal. My sister Riva shook silver earrings above my head to make me cry.

  She would be sorry later.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Weasly little mincer he were from the start. The son o the house were borned and yet there were very little rejoysing, on account of how he had near split my Mistress in half, Brute God! At first there was poorish few hopes o Donata Fasan’s life. Then she rallyed a little and we should of felt reliefed. Yet we did not. We dint know nothin of all them lives lossed in Peru, but we still felt desprit sad at the Palazzo Espagnol them days, for reasons we couldn’t fathom of ourselves.

  The babe hisself ailed and puled. However, he were quite clearly set on livin, whether his Mamma perisht or no.

  Now his sister Riva were a notable pretty infant. But he weren’t nothin nice to look on, this first son o my Master Fernando Fasan. There were not a devil’s mark on him, nothin ye could point a finger at an remark ‘orrible!’ Not yet. Yet

  Nose, eyes, privities all in the right places as ye mite say. Maybe the eyes a little close together. He had that kind o weak repungent face that people fall into staring at, can’t help thereselves, drawn down like into a deep drownin well. There was things about that babe what made evryone stand on there nerves. People would approach the cradle smiling, and draw back, confust n unhappy. Swear that butterflies dropt dead if they flewed oer him.

  That little Minguillo give oft summing dark into the air. It seems ridikilus to say it, when we talk ovva little infant here. Yet the facts is, no matter how Anna scrubbed him, he let loose a kind o fog what smelt like a blacksmiths. They put popery in evry corner of the bedchamber but that smell niver went way. It felt on yer skin zackly like a hot grinding kind o hate.

  My Master and my Mistress was that upset by it. They lookt crossways at each other, sif to ask, ‘What did we make?’

  Now I wernt sittin on the bedpost, but I believe that was the end of all doings atwixt em, sept perhap the onct, by which Marcella were made.

  Only little Riva dint seem to feel nor smell the black fog of her baby brother. She jist laffed and shook her silver earrings at him.

  Poor sweet darlin little fool. Pig ovva God!

  Sor Loreta

  Throughout the ten-day journey from Cuzco to Arequipa I looked with a reproving eye upon the world from which I would shortly be removed. I saw not one thing that I regretted to leave, not the mountains, nor the lambs, nor the fields of vulgar asparagus. And certainly not the ignorant curiosity of strangers’ fa
ces turned towards the raw shipwreck of mine.

  I had eschewed mirrors as the Devil’s trinkets since well before I plunged my face into the boiling water. Now my fingers told me that the cooked skin had settled into meaty furrows and that a nostril had fused in melting to the left cheek. One eye would not open evermore. Even from my blind side, however, I could feel them staring at me, those shallow people who had never heard of God’s Grace, who would spend a leisurely time in Purgatory. Fortunately I could not hear half their taunts as the long pin had left me profoundly deaf in my right ear.

  We were two days from Arequipa when three peaks rose insolently against the azure sky.

  ‘El Misti,’ the arriero told me, ‘Chachani. And that is Pichupichu.’

  Below them the countryside was starkly divided into grey slabs of desert butting up to the snaking terraces favoured by the Indians, who had diverted God’s natural streams to colour these steppes a vicious, unnatural green.

  ‘Like the hanging gardens of Babylon,’ I observed under my breath. ‘This does not feel like a Godly place.’

  As always, my instincts were to prove correct.

  It was on May 13th 1784 that I first heard the bells of Arequipa striking midday in the distance.

  We were approaching the outskirts shortly after, when the bells began to ring again, but crazily, as if beaten with sticks by children. Even as the air shook, the earth began to shudder, throwing the men off their horses. My buggy tipped me on to the grass. I fell straight to my knees and commenced to pray with my one eye wide open so I could see God’s great work in progress. A rumbling convulsion threw a whole mountain down, ingulfing flocks in the field.

  I knew that God had chosen me to witness his Uncreation for a reason.

  The spectacle lasted as long as a psalm. Then silence fell. The outlines of the town were blurred with dust.

  A few hours later, our party was edging through streets rent by great chasms. The sun shone down on the dismemberment of indigo-blue, red and ochre-painted stones. Arequipa had collapsed as a flower dies, with its dropped petals spread out in a bright nimbus of colour.

  ‘Even in His destructions, God makes beauty for the sinless to enjoy,’ I marvelled.

  The men who accompanied me were silent, disbelieving. Occasionally they roused themselves to tell me the names of the areas we passed through, ‘San Lázaro’ – steep labyrinths populated by Indians, ‘Santa Marta’ – where they showed me the episcopal palace and two convents, Santa Teresa and Santa Rosa, hooded under vast walls. All were branded with God’s displeasure in the form of gaping holes and collapsed walls. A grand warehouse stood unroofed and windowless. The arriero told me, ‘Belongs to Fernando Fasan, Venetian merchant.’

  Venetians in Arequipa! Ambassadors from Sodom and Gomorrah!

  Worse and worse, I thought. I felt a shudder running through me like a premonition, for even then I was prescient and alert to evil where duller souls saw only facts.

  ‘Why?’ the townspeople moaned everywhere, pulling limp and bloody bundles out of the rubble. The women were clad in the ruins of frivolous dresses. Under their flowery skirts I saw torn red stockings running into buckled black slippers. There were vents in their fitted jackets from which the lace spilled out. And yet these women, got up as harlots, sported crucifixes at their breasts! I was surprised at the paleness of their skins. The thicker taint of Indian blood made the citizens of my old home Cuzco much darker.

  But there must be blackness in the Arequipan soul.

  ‘Why?’ indeed! It seemed that I alone understood that when the Almighty wishes to punish the wickedness of mankind, He sends forth messages in earthly manifestations. They must be crude, as humanity’s understanding is just so.

  I myself understood this earthquake of May 13th 1784 as a sign to show that my new mission was to strenuously break the rocks of ignorance that had confounded Arequipa for too long. I, frail creature that I was, would be the Minister of His wrath. From my virgin breasts would flow the milk of His righteousness.

  For the purest and simplest creatures are ever made the instruments of His will. Even flies and lice have been harnessed as messengers of Divine Justice, and have taught wicked people many a stern lesson.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  As the self-appointed scribe of that great storyteller, skin, I work nightly on my manuscript. There is a certain joyful urgency for its delivery.

  I naturally begin the tale with the earliest afflictions. The physician can identify neglected babies by their rashes. Folds of their own skin rub together; the friction chafes. Sometimes a fluid is exuded, acrid enough to inflame the local mischief. Presently a raw, hurting surface is produced.

  Babies afflicted in this way are prone to fits of angry crying, which can make them unpopular, and leads to further neglect, and worse rashes. A little washing in tepid water, and the application of a calendula lotion will soothe. Yet more than anything it is the loving touch of a feminine hand that cures Intertrigo. In some cultures the mother’s adoring gaze is believed to physic and fatten a baby more than her milk. Not having known such a thing myself, and being persistently lean, I’ve always suspected some truth in this folk-wisdom. And I have sworn that the first baby of mine shall be gazed and smiled at until his whole skin lights up like a candle; or hers. No child shall ever be fed such ocular love!

  But, to return to purely medical matters: infants must be allowed a regular access of fresh air to the integument. Confined babies are also prone to Red-gum, or Tooth-rash, pearly white pimples that appear over the face, neck and arms.

  Uncared-for babies suffer more often than loved ones from Branny Tetter, in which the skin falls off in pale cereal-like scales. Neglected, the condition advances to small nutty lumps and weeping fissures under the hair. It’s simply cured by a little glycerine-of-borax.

  Yet someone must notice it and care about the shedding skin enough to apply the medicine, and to cradle the child in their arms while it cries as the cold salve is smeared on the little hurting head.

  Minguillo Fasan

  My commiserations to the Erudite Reader: this part of the story’s prattled out by a little baby in a crib, so what can He expect by way of pleasantly sophisticated atrocity? Feeble infant concerns shall be the Reader’s concerns for a little while yet.

  Milk, for example, features much at this point.

  No wet-nurse would take me, so I clamped my jaws on the maternal breast and sucked.

  The first of my mother’s crimes, for which she would in time be punished, was this: she tried not to look at me, even when I bit. As for the milk, I swear it tasted unwilling. She let her eyes rest lovingly upon my sister Riva, dancing her dolly in a corner of the room. I had to feed on second-hand sweetness, intercepting my mean portion of mother-love by stealth.

  The Compassionate Reader cries out in pity for the poor Venetian bambino, whose mamma begrudged him even the tender liquid of life. Whose mamma never once dropped a kiss on his face, never diddled a little finger of his between her own.

  ‘How did that feel?’ the Reader asks tenderly.

  It felt stinking.

  It felt shameful, and it tasted of iron, for my toothless gums champed so hard on my mother’s flinching teats that I drew blood.

  And still she looked away, handing me to a nursemaid with a bottle and never once asking for me back. My father, call him forty years old then, did not ask it of her. How could he? – he did not come into the nursery, even.

  Look at my parents, turning their backs on me. It was not good, and soon it would not be safe.The Old-fashioned Reader will smell the milk curdling; see a new slant to the story starting here, a story with a bad end. I am sure I hope so myself.

  I glanced around my cot, which fewer and fewer people visited. And my eye settled in that corner, on my sister Riva, she whom my mother preferred to me.

  Sor Loreta

  It took us the best part of a day to pick our way through the broken town to the convent of Santa Catalina.
r />   At the heart of the city, we discovered that God had of course spared His cathedral all but the most minor marks of His displeasure. Yet rumours were relayed to us that Santa Catalina had lost many cells, and that a part of the novices’ quarters had collapsed. I was not slow to draw my conclusions from that.

  Indeed. From the first, my reception at the convent was lacking in respect. The whole place was in undignified disarray, with the earthquake cited universally as the excuse. But the earthquake had not painted the cloisters those lurid blues and fleshly terracottas! The earthquake had not grown those heathen flowers and fruits in the courtyard where a bare crucifix would have sufficed! Not was it an excuse for the smells of sumptuous and fatty foods floating out of every cell.

  The priora did not take the trouble to greet me personally, on the pretext of tending to the injured. Men with wheelbarrows walked among the fallen stones, and brazenly eyed the chattering nuns. I sensed a deeper disorder in the undisciplined staring and giggling that met my own appearance at the convent gate and ushered me all the way to a cell where the air was still rich with falling dust.

  The earthquake soon settled into memory. Its scars were sewn up with ribbons of new-laid stone. Months passed, yet I myself could not settle into my new life.

  For in the very cloisters of Santa Catalina, I found myself exposed to a place more godless than the streets of Cuzco. Imagine my disappointment to discover that the souls of the sisters of Santa Catalina were light as feathers and that those nuns shirked all spiritual duties in their pursuit of the sensual pleasures of the table and the music-room.

  Loneliness is the curse of the righteous. I had fondly imagined that to enter a convent would bring my soul every consolation it had so long sought. But my life at Santa Catalina was from the first burdened down with heartache and insult, for there was no sister in that whole convent who recognized a special creature when she saw one in me, nor greeted her with joy. In fact, the feathery nuns did not fail to goad me in a thousand vexatiously pricking ways. And when they were not tormenting me, my company was shunned by everyone, as always happens to those whom God has chosen, for the Ignorant are legion, and this shall continue until the very Last Day.