The Book of Human Skin Read online

  Furtive and roundabout ways worked best in the convent: to state my desire to be a doctor would have brought down punishments on my head for arrogance. There would be sarcastic questions as to who would pay for the training of a worthless orphan like myself. So I kept my eyes down in the classroom, never visibly distinguishing myself, never writing all I learned on my little slate.

  As soon as I had mastered my letters, I began to haunt the infirmary. I befriended the old nun who worked there. Her eyes were failing: she let me read out the pharmacy receipts for her. Each one I read, I memorized. And every day I stole a little sugar or a little salt. In this way I kept alive when many of my companions did not. Sometimes I emptied some herbs into my pocket as I ground up a prescription for a sick child. Eventually I ignored the pharmacy nun’s instructions, for I knew better than she what saved and what exterminated the convent’s inmates, who comprised both children and fallen, destitute women.

  The medical records of the foundlings and their mothers were kept in the infirmary. The lock was not too stubborn for a scalpel. I learned that my own unwed mother had died of puerperal sepsis in that very room, due to ‘miasma’ in the air. I sniffed the air of the infirmary archives. The dust of ages and the effluent of the drains filled up my nostrils.

  The old nun was persuaded to reminisce about my birth. A medical student had delivered me, arriving hotfoot from assisting at an autopsy, his hands still wet with necrotic gore. One soul, mine, had come into the world by that red hand; another, my mother’s, had left it.

  My father was unknown and would stay that way.

  Sor Loreta

  There came to us more news from Europe of the dreadful doings of the revolutionists who hated the Holy Mother Church, her priests, and even her nuns, and persecuted them like the Christian martyrs of old.

  Merchants delivered foreign newspapers to the Tristáns: this rich Arequipan family had connections in Paris. One of the Tristán sambas brought in a well-thumbed page to Santa Catalina and the nuns crowded round while one of my sisters who was sinfully fluent in French translated for us. Some evil-doer had drawn a cartoon of nuns being driven out of their convent.

  The Godless revolutionists used laughter just as the Devil plies his pitchfork. They sneered that the convents were like bastilles. They drew the Church as a lamprey, sucking good out of the world without giving anything back. The heathens declared that praying for the wretched was lazy and worthless. They insisted that the nuns were not too good for housework and cooking: they should work for the poor and sick. Nor should nuns think themselves too fine for human husbands. They should go out and marry and procreate for the state.

  ‘God does not make anything celibate,’ one blasphemer urged.

  As if those poor nuns were not already married to God! What kind of state was this, that proposed bigamy for the pure brides of Christ? Some noble nuns were even accused of subverting the revolution, because they refused to cuckold God and lived on in their communities in a blameless manner. It was not until All Saints that news of the notorious event arrived in Arequipa, an event that made all good Christians gasp: on July 17th 1794, sixteen Carmelite sisters from Compiègne had been led to the guillotine and their heads had been cut off.

  In Santa Catalina our nuns were swooning with gratitude that such things could never happen here. Yet my heart was torn in my breast, for those nuns from Compiègne had been allowed God’s greatest honour of martyrdom. Deo gratias. I wondered if there was a way to obtain some of the dirt from beneath the guillotine. The earth that had drunk the blood of the martyrs must be a most precious relic, I thought, and I wished with all my heart to have some.

  And now there was talk of a long-haired Corsican. With every passing month the merchants brought more tales of his depredations. An ocean did not seem vast enough to keep that dangerous madman Napoleon Bonaparte away from us.

  Minguillo Fasan

  Marcella, more lately Sister Constanza, was born twelve years after myself.

  The Reader sighs, ‘At last!’ – was this event not promised in the very first pages of my tale? And yet so much verbiage has intervened. Can all of it be relevant? No. But if the Tetchy Reader desires an argument, I defy Him to deny that He’s been royally entertained along the way.

  What? What’s that? The birth of my sister Marcella? Why not immediately resume that interesting subject? Ah, let us not rush at it. We shall arrive there roundaboutly with more pleasure. I am sure I hope so myself.

  There’s a proverb quoted at the parturition of every Venetian woman, ‘A lord is born in the world’, which rang very hollowly that fearful year of 1796, with the French and Austrians kicking up tufts of the Veneto and Napoleon swearing quotably as ever ‘I shall be an Attila to the state of Venice’. Bitter Venetians were saying even at noble births, or perhaps especially at those, ‘Ah, a slave is born to the world.There will be no more Venetian lords now.’All the gladness slunk out of our city, and into its place crept shame.

  Marcella was born under an azure sky unmolested by the pesk of a cloud. I lingered in the courtyard, savouring my mother’s birth cries, so much lustier than those of the kitten I had that morning dispatched with a rusty nail. I had left it impaled on our street door. I thought it a suitable emblem to inform passers-by that ours was that day a house of suffering, not to mention our city dying on her legs at the same time as my mother retched and ripped on her bed.

  My mother’s screams echoed through the corridors of the Palazzo Espagnol and flowed out of the windows down the Grand Canal. My father was of course away in Arequipa. While everyone else fussed around my mother that day, I, as the owner-in-waiting, had felt entitled to sit at my father’s desk, dip his pen in his inkwell, and open all his drawers with the key he kept hidden in a notch up the chimney. I had passed the sweet hours of the afternoon picking at the yellow meat of the pimples on my chin while looking at his private documents.

  Nothing detained my interest for long – until I found a document signed just before his latest voyage to the Spanish colonies.

  It began, ‘I, Conte Fernando Fasan, of the Palazzo Espagnol, residing in this city of Venice, being unaffected in my intellect, but knowing death a certainty yet its hour unknown, do hereby order and execute this my last will and testament in the following manner . . .’

  I looked for the words ‘bequeathe my entire estate’ shortly followed by ‘my son Minguillo Fasan’. Then I sat up and spat. It seemed that my papà had been thrown into a flummox by my experiment on the chickens in our courtyard garden. I had explained it to them all quite patiently.The French Revolution had lately separated a number of beings from their heads in a novel way, including nuns and priests. It gave a boy ideas, made him curious. And why should skill not be involved?

  My foot started drumming on the floor when I read the following statement in his will: ‘My son, Minguillo, being incapacitated with a mental disorder, is not fit to inherit.Therefore I leave my possessions to my next-born child upon that child reaching its majority.’

  That next-born child was just that minute making its way into my world. My father was a bestial idiot! This will was an impossible deed! What if it was a daughter, the thing dividing my mother’s bowels as I read? In our world, daughters did not inherit except where there were no viable sons. Yet I was feeling very fine and healthy indeed, what’s more well engorged with living anger.

  So, even before she was halfway into this world, I began to hate the thing that would be Marcella.

  Footsteps and shouts echoed in the corridor. I divined that my mother was nearing her time. Perhaps the infant was suffocating in the womb? Then it occurred to me that, in the event of the demise of this being-born child, before achieving a majority, there would be no one to take the Palazzo Espagnol away from me.

  I had just finished locking the ludicrous will away when I heard my mother’s final piteous cry, and a faint, lamb-like bleat. I strode into the bedchamber without knocking. It smelled sweet, of blood and tears.A sheet was offering u
p scarlet spirals in a basin of milk.The servants scurried about, patting down clean linen, dabbing my mother’s forehead.They knew better than to meet my eyes.

  My mother looked up from the bed, with that expression of fret and uncertainty that she always wore when she had dealings with me. She was whiter than her pillow, and shuddered from time to time, as if her body still rehearsed the birth.The nurse held a cup of water to her lips. Some trickled down her chin into her breasts, which must ache in the stretching now, I thought. Like the below.Which must excruciate.

  ‘Did it hurt tremendously, Mamma?’

  She nodded, warily.

  ‘Was it like a red-hot iron rod being poked up into you? Was it like when you hit something’s eye with a splintery stick?’

  The maids hissed quietly to each other. I heard the words ‘kitten’, ‘misera bestia’ and ‘diavolo incarnato’. My mother blurred a feeble stop with her white hand.

  ‘What have we got?’ I enquired, glancing at the whimpering scrag they were swabbing down. It was bald and pink. A pink sea-creature, shelled. There was an absence between the legs.

  ‘Is that all?’ I asked. ‘Will it live?’

  ‘Perfettina,’ the young maid called Anna murmured tenderly, discreetly throwing me the worst look she dared.

  ‘A perfect little girl,’ my mother whispered, ‘a sister.You will be kind to her, won’t you, Minguillo?’

  I passed the hairdresser Signor Fauno on the way out. My mother’s birth-turbulent coiffure was to be rebuilt on the instant. Beneath her hair, worries swam in aimless panic, like fish in a barrel. (Did the Jovial Reader ever shoot fish in a barrel? I recommend it as a most amusing pastime.) My mother’s fish blew bubbles inside her tired head. Her husband was absent and Napoleon was at the gates, with his long lank locks bedraggling down his excavated cheekbones.The crows of war were cruaaacing and cruaccing above us. Send for the hairdresser!

  Gianni delle Boccole

  There was more hairdressers than boat-builders n soldiers in Venice at that moment, jist when boat-builders n soldiers mite o been the salivation of us. The nobbles ud stopped bothering with the Grate Council. The cares o public office was way too onerous for them.When our last Doge, Manin, were told of his elekshon, he had to be helped, weeping, to his bed, God-on-a-stick! Napoleon Bonypart were on his way, and that’s what we had to fight him with.

  Venice believt she were a beautiful courtesan to be bargaint with for her favours. Bony saw her as a wasted old hag greased n painted up, and he valued her at half-a-sequin. He dint even pity her, that’s how little he bethought of her.

  It give me the Viles to remember it.

  Send for the hairdressers! That’s what the nobbles allus cryed when there were trouble afoot. The hairdressers ud come busslin in with there lotions n potions for the face, hair n hands. They would curl yer wig, do a parrucca alla delfina, dolphin style with a bag for the hair at the nape, or a groppi, with yer real curls cluttert all oer like honeycome.

  That’s what her ancestors left for our darling little Marcella, who were borned like a holy insent into her city’s dying days. A plague o hairdressers, Napoleon Bonypart, and a brother ye would want to watch oer yer shoulder. Desprit.

  The funning thing were, Marcella herself would of probly found summing bout it all to make her laff, spite of evrything, and a way to make ye feel better as well.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  My saddened city of Venice was in those days caught between Napoleon’s

  haemorrhoids and his bladder.

  Both were in an irritable state.

  We Venetians should have seen what was coming to us when Napoleon took up the terraferma cities of the Veneto. Just at the moment those cities began to foment a little rebellion, Bonaparte’s usual complaints were exacerbated by a searing itch all over his body. He scratched until he drew blood, opening a vent for his peccant humours.

  In other words, he declared war on the former owner of those cities: my own Venice.

  Irritation with the Venetians must have caused Napoleon to clench on his sensitive rectal tissue. Riding horseback with Venetian-induced piles could not have endeared Venice to Napoleon Bonaparte. His bladder and his anus were on fire, and the Veneto was burning as a result.

  Doctors more eminent than myself would one day ruminate upon the strong streak of automania in the Frenchman. But even then, well before I grew to the Corsican’s own small height, I knew a symptom when I heard of it.

  There were sniggers and whispers in the dormitory that the general’s genitals were notoriously infantile in form. Such a deficiency might easily breed in his glands a desire for conquests. In my secret little empire of cures at the convent, I began to suspect that Napoleon’s cutaneous issues were related to his restless desire for dominance. Perhaps it was the raw pain between his legs, or perhaps it was the very passivity of Venice that aroused Napoleon to take her.

  When Napoleon threatened my city, he also forced himself upon me. He made himself my muse: the discomforts of his skin would become the opening pages of my medical textbook, while throughout my youth the Corsican’s integumental disorders would scar the very epidermis of my world. Napoleon was my patient, I suppose, in that my life was thenceforward in forced fealty to his, just as if I had sworn an oath to attend personally to his ills.

  Minguillo Fasan

  ‘We are not safe in our own beds,’ whimpered my second cousin, our last Doge Ludovico Manin. And your man laid down the ducal berretto without a fight. Faced with Boney’s cool ultimatum, the Great Council voted itself into extinction and scuttled out of the Doges’ Palace. A few days later, three thousand Frenchmen marched through the city.Venice was no more a glorious Republic but a shabby little ‘Democratic Municipality’.

  It was a bungled suicide, not an honourable death.Venice was dying like a fool. Boney nailed a French cockade to her stupid, dead forehead.

  The only people who fussed at all were the poor, who were losing precisely nothing. Brooding at the window of the Palazzo Espagnol, I drank up their shouts of pain. In their palazzi, it was rumoured, my brother aristocrats were busy turning out their treasures to sell or hide.And writing their wills, as if that would do any good when Napoleon, the biggest fortune-hunter in the world, was standing on the doorstep, with extremely itchy palms.

  As soon as she was his, Napoleon took to pimping our trinket city. He sold Venice to his enemies the Austrians in exchange for something he really wanted, the little grey bandbox of Belgium. On his way out, he helped himself to our Bellinis, our Tizianos, our Veroneses. He kidnapped them not because he loved the art, but because he did not want the Habsburgs to have them.

  Dark days they were for me, after the little pink creature Marcella was born and began immediately to become a person loved at no one’s expense but my own.That baby had more followers than the infant Jesus; they were always cluttering up the nursery and gazing on her with adoration. I had to look over the tops of their heads and could no way get near her. Servants attending her simply did not hear my voice commanding them to step aside.

  And the Palazzo Espagnol, my beloved, unwavering parent: even that seemed under siege now. There were stories that our new masters would billet their sordid soldiers in the best of accommodations, throwing noble families on the street with special pleasure.Then there were rumours that the Austrians planned to raze our rambling palaces and build right-angled boxes of barracks.Then the French would . . .

  As the Reader observes, I passed from child to man, as Venice passed from hand to hand. If Venice was my sister, I would have considered her rifled and dishonoured. I would have been disgusted by her. And I would have wanted to punish her, hard, for what she had taken from me.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  A boy of nine thin years, I joined the crowds rustling like a plague of moths through the dim corridors of the newly occupied city, which to me, even then, resembled the fascinations of a many-chambered hospital. The poor were visibly pellagrous, those of citizen cla
ss were often poxed, and the nobles bore their special, inherited or expensively acquired ills.

  The day the French arrived, I followed a black-robed senator, whose neck-goitre interested me. How gauche I was! The nuns had taught me nothing of how to parley with my superiors. As the nobleman paused to read a new edict nailed to a wall, I knew no better than to put my hand on his arm and ask if I might examine the swelling at his throat. I hoped to be able to suggest a cure: I had confected a poultice that had worked well on a similar condition in a fallen woman at the convent. Naturally, however, the senator shook me off and hastened away, muttering.

  Staring after him, a thought struck me. A nobody from Corsica now owned the fate of my city. So a nobody fathered by Dishonour on Fornication could also choose his own destiny, might he not?

  I ran away from the orphanage. I lived on the streets. I crept into hospitals, only to help. I scoured noisome pharmacy vessels in exchange for lessons. I weeded herb gardens. I ran errands for sellers of medical

  tracts.

  And, like my muse Napoleon, I stole.

  The only things I stole were books about the human body and its ills. If I could steal something that dealt with conditions of the skin I was happiest of all, for that was where my thirst for knowledge was now tipping into an outright passion.

  After two years on the streets, I made the rounds of all the surgeons in Venice, offering my services as an apprentice. No one wanted me, and few would even listen to me.

  I could not understand it. By then I had spent time helping the Fatebenefratelli at the hospital, I had read my Galen, my Avicenna, my tracts on all the diseases of dampness that commonly afflicted Venetians and soldiers. My pockets were full of useful herbs; my head was bursting with useful detail.Yet even on the rare occasions when someone allowed me to spout my knowledge, they just sighed regretfully. One surgeon went so far as to say, ‘If only . . .’ before he dismissed me.