The Book of Human Skin Read online

  One morning, alone in the church, a vision of Christ came to me: He took the form of a lovely little child hovering just above the communion chalice. I cried out so loudly that everyone in the convent heard me and came running to behold the sight of my most extraordinary piety. After that my lips grew dry with longing every time I contemplated the Host and I licked them repeatedly so as to be able to continue with my prayers. Rather than falling to their knees, those light sisters merely snorted with laughter every time they saw my blessed gesture. And instead of being honoured, I was jeered at when I appeared with the blood-drops of my scourging trailing behind my habit.

  My faith could not be weakened by their ignorance. I busied myself with good works. With just one good eye, I could still see the smallest piece of dirt or corruption. Even though I barely ate or slept, the strength of my soul was marvellous. So I would get up and sweep the byways of the entire convent while everyone else lay asleep. And the amazing thing was that it never rained when I was about my work – that happened only in the few hours when I rested or read my Lives of the saints. With such small miracles, the Creator marks out those who are to live in His inner chamber of love.

  I allowed my face to be filled with the pure illumination of rapture when emptying the heavy slop buckets and scrubbing the stoop in front of the confessionals. At table, I refused all the nicest food and took the tiniest portions only of what was completely burned or bad to show that I was unworthy of any good thing. And I would offer half of my meagre rations to other nuns, who, bloated with delicacies, rejected it mockingly. Without finishing my food, I would rise and fetch a basin to wash the feet of other nuns in the refectory, just as Columba of Rieti had done before me. But my light sisters kicked me away, or giggled, ‘It tickles!’ and I was forced to desist.

  Any good Christian reading this will naturally be amazed to learn that soon after my arrival the priora herself spoke to me disrespectfully at the Chapter of Offences, the weekly meeting to discipline poor behaviour among the nuns. I was stupefied to hear the priora say to me, ‘Beware of pride, Sor Loreta,’ – for this was to be my new name – ‘that you take too much pleasure in humbling yourself.’

  ‘I am worthless in God’s eyes,’ I murmured. Someone stifled a laugh.

  ‘Your manner,’ the priora continued sternly, ‘shows you think yourself far from worthless, Sor Loreta. The sisters complain that you are arrogant and that you look down on them. You cannot be surprised that they find ways to make themselves feel better. You must have seen them imitating the way you keep licking your lips when you see the Host. That is an affectation I order you to leave off from.’

  I turned my deaf right ear towards her, and let her speak the nonsense that was in her heart harmlessly, thus avoiding two sins – hers in uttering it, and mine in hearing it.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Swear my old Master Fernando give the boy babe one long look and betook imself to the furthest corner o the world. He were that shamed to be the author o sich an abdomenashun as Minguillo Fasan, Great Canary ovva God!

  A brace o weeks after the boy were borned come the news o the devasterating of Arequipa. My Master Fernando claimed that he must see to his warehouse n mines all ripped by the earthquake. And scarce were he back but he were oft agin, under the horsepiss of ‘busyness’, braving all the quarantys agin the Small-Pox n the Yellow Fever. And so twent on.

  We dint know scut bout it at the time, but much later twould come out that he had another reason to keep hurryin to Arequipa dint he.

  Minguillo Fasan

  Soon the sight of my father’s face was to my infant eyes more a memory than a habit.

  See how gravely he humiliated my mother by his repeated absences. Her female friends tittered, ‘And is Fernando returning soon?’

  ‘The damage . . .’ my mother mouthed vaguely.

  Yes, the damage. The earthquake in Arequipa might easily shoulder the blame for a number of sad deaths that the Methodical Reader shall shortly be recording in His daybook.

  The Suspicious Reader cocks an interrogative eyebrow. If my father had abridged his times abroad, for example, would Riva have lived to kindle the corridors and congeries of our home with giggles and pas-de-deux?

  In fact, I suppose not.

  The truth is that even if he had stayed in Venice, my father would have done little to regulate my behaviour. In those rare times when he was among us, he could barely bring himself to speak to me. He issued no instructions for my handling. My mother showed even less interest. I was left to crawl around the palazzo, to eat whatever I snatched up from tray or table, and learn my manners from our guard-dogs, my scruples from our mosquitoes, and to infect the whole place with my curiosity.

  The servants followed the lead of my parents. Nobody in that whole place nourished a drop of respectful liking for me.They looked the other way if they saw me. Or they did what was needful and rushed off, not liking to be

  alone in my company.

  The Reader asks: did I care?

  I did not, and nor did I fail to thrive.

  Though my own mother had pushed me out of her belly and out of her heart, I still lived inside the grandest mamma a boy could ask: the Palazzo Espagnol. And was it any wonder that from my infancy I adored my home? That I loved that great Gothic pile like I loved nightfall and meat? The Palazzo Espagnol had become dam and sire to me, and I grew like the place: tall, narrow, impenetrable, with a constitution of stone. I took my first steps, unapplauded, across its courtyard. I spoke my first words, unheard, in its limonaia.There was not an inch of it I did not know.

  To the rest of our household the Palazzo Espagnol was a leaky battleship in which they served, sweltered and shivered as it trickled to pieces around them, for there is no cure for water and Venetians do not seek one. My family and servants did not know the joy of the tiny locked chamber by the water-gate or the cobwebbed window in our private tower from which, if you climbed one hundred and seventy-five vertiginous steps, you could see planets, and own all Venice with your eyes.

  They did not guess what secret tribute lay at the bottom of the well or buried under the rosebushes.They did not understand how the stairs smelled in the morning, or what feathery scabs you might find tucked into the toes of hundred-year-old slippers in travel trunks in the remotest ripostiglio. No, nobody loved the Palazzo Espagnol as I did.

  Most of all I loved to know that one day it would be mine.

  Even my seven-year-old sister Riva did not know the hidden place in the wine-store where black bottles perched on shelves like vultures, and what the drink inside those bottles could do to your insides, when mixed with sugar and ground-up glass.

  I was only four years old when I taught her what she did not know how.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Twere as if my brain was ate by bears. How could I of knowed to

  save her?

  I am wiser now, but then, who would of bethought it?

  I only got but a little money to put into the hero busyness, n as for

  I git on a bad bust from

  I know as much as a tin box bout what appened to our little angel Riva. Damn it all to Hell, it will nowise come out. Them sparkling black eyes, them sturdy little legs. She were alredy a darling ovva dancer. The coffin no bigger than a hatbox on four men’s shoulders

  in the funeral gondola

  I wunt

  Buggering God

  Sor Loreta

  Then I had to contend with one Sor Andreola, who had set herself up as the most devout nun in the convent, without even mortifying her flesh so that you would notice it. She merely did smallish good works in a mightily showy way. She was clever with a needle and produced a cloak for a statue of the Virgin that the priora decreed worth six hundred Ave Marias, four hundred Salves and fifteen days of fasting. I nearly forgot to mention the fact that Sor Andreola’s skin was supposed to shine with some kind of clear light – like pearls, they claimed – though I could never see it myself. Sor Andreola was only ha
lf a year my senior, and already a professed nun.

  The other sisters spoke of her with awe. When Sor Andreola fell into one of her famous raptures the novices clustered around and imitated her. That was how much they loved Sor Andreola, who sought the admiration of foolish nuns the way the Devil seeks disciples. And this burned worse than any lye or pepper on my skin. Why was Sor Andreola an object of admiration, and I, far thinner and more devout, a vehicle for sniggering ridicule?

  I reminded myself that the Apostle Peter prophesied that in the weeks before the Last Day there would appear on earth many naysayers and mockers. They shall be the first to be struck down. And I comforted myself that Jesus, by subjecting me to the martyrdom of scorn, had called me to be more intimately united with Him than any other sister at Santa Catalina, and particularly more than Sor Andreola.

  Renewed in my resolve, I went to the infirmary. But I was not allowed to tend to the sick women as they said that the sight of my ruined face troubled them and gave them bad dreams, and that the smell of my breath made them retch.

  Sor Andreola never went to the infirmary except to hold the hands of the sick or sit by them while she embroidered her interminable chasubles and stolas, spinning silks in her fingers like a white spider. Yet for those visits she was praised and almost worshipped by the other nuns, and her presence was constantly requested.

  The infirmary sisters were blind to God’s design, ignorant of the fact that to look on my face was to be blessed. Not wishing them to persist in their delusions, I pressed my request upon them with strong words. I was refused with hysterical curses. So instead I washed all the infirmary filth, even the bandages and garments of two sisters who were sick with enormous stinking sores.

  Secretly in the night I went to those sick sisters and kissed them on the mouth and kissed each of their sores even though they tried to kick me away with their feeble limbs. I told them that I loved their souls so much that nothing would stop me from saving them. They wept. I informed them that, like Colette of Corbie, I could effect cures by putting food I had chewed between their lips, and by spitting over their faces some water I had held in my mouth. Yet they moaned when I did this. Then, like Santa Catalina herself, I drank the very water with which I had washed away their pus, which also tasted sweeter on my tongue than communion wine. The result was that I contracted their fever and was laid out for many days.

  In my rapt state I saw many visions and foretold many great events. In my visions there appeared a beautiful woman of my stature dressed in gold with many jewelled shawls up to her cheeks. If all my visions had been recorded by the other sisters, then they would have made a large book. Yet my sisters neglected to do so.

  As for the aforementioned infirmary nuns who had refused me access to the sick, not much time passed before one of them came down with a tumour in her breast, another fell ill to the dropsy, the third was apparently killed by a tile falling from a roof damaged by the earthquake and the fourth and most discourteous of them succumbed to a swift pneumonia after a solitary cold bath: so it was that the four of them soon expired in the most pitiful circumstances.

  No one can resist the wisdom and will of our great God.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  No one could pin nothin on the young Master. Nothin. Not the doctors. And not the officers of the law, what was summoned because Riva’s passing were so vilent n all-of-a-sudden.The Palazzo Espagnol drained there eyes. Them yahooties took in the tapestries n marbles, and fell to bows n scrapes, dropping there brains out o there breeches. They forgot to ask yer most alimentary question. What zackly were Minguillo doin with young Riva when she died?

  ‘Don’t pertain to me,’ the boy deklared, if anyone dared ask, playin with his lower lip.

  Banditing God!

  It broked my Master Fernando Fasan’s heart, it broked all our hearts. The maid Anna and my sister Cristina was inconsolibble. I held them two in my arms and let em each cry a canal on my shoulder, poor ones.

  Without een pretending not to sob, my Master Fernando Fasan askt Cristina to fold way all Riva’s little dresses in a coffer, and straitway offert my sister a new post as chambermaid.

  ‘I don’t want to stay here no more,’ wept Cristina, but not so’s my Master could hear, of course.

  It felt as if all our blood ud flowed out o the cracks in the walls of the Palazzo Espagnol, for we was left weak and wondering, like the babiest kittens isn’t it.

  Minguillo Fasan

  As I remarked latterly, the Reader has now embarked upon a long walk in the dark with this voice of mine. Given that He’ll not be hearing from the other, oblivious protagonists of this tale, I must do the necessary to keep Him by my side.

  Yet not as some voices do, laying a little white hand on the Reader’s heart and trembling its wet eyelashes: the Chivalrous Reader must read on, just as a Knight must save his Lady! There’s no pleasing everyone. One Reader loves the confidential whisper; it makes Him feel magnificent as a confessor in his black booth. Another fixes His lectatory mandibles upon some voyeur’s observations of the more interesting lives of others. Then there’s the bird’s-eye view, the writer serving as invisible air beneath the Reader’s soaring wings. Wheedling and flattery are popular. So is a comical, ranting tone.

  What? What’s that? The Reader requests that I cease holding up long-winded and unflattering mirrors? Insists I provide instead a sensible account of my maturing childhood, with explanations tending to subsequent events etcetera and so forth?

  Pazienza. I would not willingly infuriate, but there’s little of note to tell. My sister Riva’s death made everyone long-nosed as parsnips for a while.That was tedious, as treats and outings were thin upon the ground.The Venetian Republic played out its last days of gold-leafed and spun-sugar magnificence. The oil portraits of a girl artist called Cecilia Cornaro became our city’s sole object of trading value. Speaking of faces, my own countenance began to take on the features that would carry it through to the end of this story, if you can call it that.

  The stairs of the Palazzo Espagnol grew smaller; I became familiar with the servants’ knees, thighs, bellies and eventually their faces, not that anyone turned theirs my way voluntarily. I attended briefly at an academy for young noblemen. I was sent back. Call that another story. I submitted to a priest’s tutoring at home. The Reader will be gratified to know that my expensive education was not wasted on me. I had a gift for languages, as He knows already. I also grew into a great lover of books, though my tastes were most particular and possibly a little strong for the stomach of the Fastidious Reader.

  When I say that I loved books, I mean that I loved not just the souls of my books but their bodies. Even before I could read, I was a fanatic for bindings, affectioned to the intimate protection and adornment jointly embodied in their snug fittings. I adored the shapeliness and firmness of books. I enjoyed their intransigent corners, their rich smells and the way they opened and lay down flat in front of me on the merest suggestion of my fingers.Then, when I learned to read, I was happy in a whole new way: in a house where everyone avoided me, the books in our library exposed their tender insides and submitted to my attentions whenever and however I wanted.

  Call it a liking that I also nourished for Cristina, the plump little daughter of our former loose-legged cook. (Does the Reader not think it shows a nice side of my nature, to be attached to a human skin that was not attached to my own body? I am sure I hope so myself.)

  I took my first kiss from the said Cristina, as a prelude to easing the virginity off the two of us. She spat and shook me off, ‘You are not nice, Minguillo.’

  ‘What am I then?’ I enquired, my hand warm and busy down her bodice.

  ‘You are . . . the other thing,’ she stammered.

  Her little brother’s employment, I mentioned, hung in the balance.They were bastard orphans, the pair of them, and she grasped the thing directly. But she screamed when I twisted a little bud of a nipple to see if it would come off. I had always wondered. My researche
s were interrupted by the arrival of the nightsoilman. After that I did not find the cook’s daughter alone again until – another episode of this account, some months later.

  What? It is provoking to hint in this way? Really, I despair of the Reader who still insists on a story delivered in neat pellets like a rosary. He must learn to bear with the vagaries of a tale told the way a cat coughs, unexpectedly, and learn to like it.

  My childhood withered. I suppose I was in my way content. Even though my mother avoided me and my father regarded me as he would the scab of a Small-Pox sore – with fear and distaste – I was the only son of that great house so I strode about it masterfully, slamming doors with my head held high. I celebrated my twelfth birthday (for no one else did) with a solitary re-enactment of recent events in France, deploying some chickens to interpret the roles of the French King and Queen, and a hatchet on a string to simulate la belle dame Madame Guillotine.

  Then occurred a thing I had not seen coming. After all those years my mother was suddenly fat with child, begotten, the Reader may suppose, during one of my father’s increasingly rare appearances. I watched her breasts grow lumpen with the milk. Rankling memories arose, of how she had decided to withhold those breasts from my own teeth. For six months I observed them fill and droop inside her clothes.

  Another child in the house? I did not think so, I really did not.