The Book of Human Skin (3 page)

She rarely ate or drank, except for a draught of gall infused with bitter herbs that deadened every sensation in her mouth. Even as she raked her flowers, or made lace to sell for the destitute, she dragged around a heavy wooden cross fastened to her back. Soon she began to tell of visions, divine visitations and voices in her head. Once, when she gazed for hours in rapture at a painting of Christ, she caused His face to grow wet with perspiration.

People laughed at her. Her own family denounced her behaviour as a form of madness. Even this she endured with fortitude, gladly taking on the ridicule of the world as another penance to bring her closer to her Holy Bridegroom.

Eventually Rosa could no longer walk or even stand upright. In her last weeks she took to a marriage bed she had designed herself, consisting of stones, sharp shards of broken pottery, jagged pieces of glass and thorns.

God permitted her to use herself like this until she was thirty-one, when He finally rendered His most devout Virgin unto Himself. The people of Lima immediately regretted their nasty hilarity about Rosa and rushed to behold her pure, shattered body. So many people crowded the Cathedral that it took days to get her corpse to burial. Before long, those same people who had mocked her began to comprehend the miracle of Rosa’s life. She was canonized the
patron saint of Lima, of Peru, of gardeners and florists, and all people who are derided for their religious fervour. She became famous all over the world, and her painted image was hung in great churches everywhere, even as far away as that wickedest of cities, Venice.

For so the immoral always lust after the beauty of true goodness, even in the midst of their most flagrant iniquity.

In the top drawer of my bureau I assembled lye, pepper and a long pin for my thin hair.

The death of Tupac Amaru continued to live in my heart. I rehearsed the scene again and again in my mind: the knife dropping through his tongue, the messengers carrying ragged pieces of him in five directions. I got a little length of chain from the blacksmith and I hit myself with it when I thought about Tupac Amaru, but only in the secret places of my body. For I did not yet want anyone to know that I would be a nun and scourge myself for the rest of my life.

When I was nearly thirteen years old, and my mother presented my trousseau chest, I judged it timely to announce my decision.

My mother and father were surprised. My father’s textile mill flourished. My fine dowry was often spoken of. My mother exclaimed, ‘Isabel Rosa!’ – for that was my name in those days – ‘You will hate to be sealed up in a cloister.’

And I declared loudly, ‘I would like it above all things, to be enclosed in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ.’

I changed my tone to a persuasive one: ‘I shall pray all day and into the night to lessen
your
time in Purgatory.’

They exchanged glances muddied with guilt. My parents were imperfect in their pious observances. I had more than once confessed on their behalf.

My mother, to whom fashion was religion, protested, ‘You will own nothing. Everything will be the property of the convent. Even your clothing will come from the common wardrobe.’

‘I shall not notice what I wear. I shall be like a child at its mother’s breast without the slightest care or thought for mundane things. All shall be provided.’

‘You may one day have . . . longings that would be fatally repressed in such an atmosphere,’ my mother coughed delicately, tinkling her bracelets.

I answered, ‘The sweet Lord loves me so much that He will never allow me to serve and be subject to men, concerning myself with base matters like housekeeping and cooking. He does not wish my body riven by childbirth. He wants me joined to no one but Himself.’

‘Come child, you are not so ugly that you shall not find a husband in Cuzco eventually,’ my father told me. ‘We shall see to it, somehow.’

‘You profane the pure spirit of the Lord,’ I admonished them. ‘Our most Holy Father adores all His creatures, even the plainest in His sight.’

‘The nuns may be unkind to you,’ my father stated baldly. ‘Yours is not an easy face to love, Isabel.’

I said, ‘It is most likely that they will envy me for God’s mark on my face. The Scriptures have shown that the holiest souls have always been assailed by the Devil’s wickedness in the form of envy. Yet those who are persecuted are ever gloriously sustained by our Beloved Father, and indeed chosen for His Favourites.’

My parents remained in terrible anguish for they did not want to lose a child. They had no other. My own feelings suffered vexing pricks for I wished all the pain to be on my part only.

My mother came to me cajolingly, and asked once more, ‘Would you not like to be married, Isabel? And have children to love you?’

And I replied, ‘To me marriage would be like the martyrdom that the ancient tyrants inflicted upon the Holy Ones – by tying them to putrid corpses until the horror, melting corruption and frightful stink brought about a slow, dreadful death.’

I refused to study such sinful subjects as French and arithmetic, and read only my Bible and my Life of Santa Rosa. I demanded to confess every day and announced all my defects scrupulously. I rejoiced in the penance for my every lapse. I was so steeped in obedience to our most Holy God that if my Confessor had commanded ‘Put your hand in the fire!’, I would have rushed to do so and left it there until the last cinder dropped off the stub of my wrist. Indeed, I regretted that my Confessor put me to such pallid penances as he did.

I dragged my mattress away and slept on a bare plank. I ate little more than the communion wafer. I found it disgusting to abandon prayer in order to take bodily food. I would eat only at the direct order of my Confessor, and even then reluctantly. People in the street stared at the jutting bones of my face, perhaps already aware that they were beholding the most spiritual virgin in Cuzco, if not all Peru. My pangs of hunger were like church bells tolling in my stomach: I exulted in them and my mastery over them.

I felt distant from other human beings, as if I already occupied a higher region. When other people spoke to me I saw white puffs of air come out of their mouths, like cotton. I could not hear them properly unless they spoke to
me of God. I continued to scourge myself, and spent many hours in a state of oblivious ecstasy.

Then my bloodied linen was discovered by the servant girl, who took it to my parents.

The next day my Confessor told me, ‘You must go easy and temper your great fervour.’

He asked me to bring him my whips and chains. When I did so he was dumbfounded at how many they were, and how cruel was their construction. He ordered that I might not scourge myself without permission from him. I stated God’s truth: ‘There is prejudice in the minds of ignorant people against these devout practices, but I had not expected to find it in a priest.’

He locked my whips and chains in his cupboard and sent me home. My parents spoke to me then in grave, reproving tones, and I saw that my Confessor had acted in collusion with them.

I grew sad and vague for some time after that betrayal. I had so many miseries that I could not write them all down. I was shocked to realize that all these people less devout than myself were in fact
envious
of my special gifts.

I woke in the night and twisted and kneaded my skin as hard as I could without making myself gasp – for the little Indian servant had been put to sleep in my room with instructions to raise an alarm if I began to scourge myself. That girl told my parents that she had seen me touching myself under my blankets. They gave orders that at night I was to be trussed up like a roasting bird, with my four limbs tied to the bedheads just as if I was Tupac Amaru with the horses. My Life of Santa Rosa was taken away from me.

I contented myself with Santa Catalina. She knew she was married to Christ, for she received a vision in which she wore as a wedding ring the Holy Prepuce that was circumcised from His body. When she was just a child she threw herself into the boiling waters of a spring near her house in order to burn the skin of her face and body and so discourage human suitors. She ate almost nothing and barely slept. So respected was this virgin, unlike myself, that she ended up telling Popes what to do.

When they took my Santa Catalina away too, my soul rebelled inside my body. I scrubbed my face with the pepper and lye that I had hidden in my bureau drawer. With my head on fire, I ran into the kitchen and plunged my face in a
caldera
of boiling water, at the same time sticking the long pin into my right ear. I fainted before I could see what I had done.

The first thing I remember after that is a little hand reaching under the covers of my bed. It belonged to the Indian servant girl.

‘Lemme look at you,’ she said, lifting the sheet to see my face.

‘Dunt see nuffink different,’ she observed. ‘You was always ugly right through like a hole in the ground.’

But the damage must have been considerable, for even my mother could not bear to look at me any more. God had marked me out, and my mother’s soul was too weak to behold the miracle. My parents now acceded to my wishes. I was taken away from Cuzco and sent, under the protection of a reliable
arriero
, to the convent of Santa Catalina in the fabled white city of Arequipa.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

Perhaps this is why I have always loved the skin: because it is both the story and the storyteller. My own book shall be prefaced with a touching paradigm.

Most days I deal with the living, but once, in Peru, I was brought the body of a little girl found up on the higher reaches of El Misti mountain. The magistrates wished me to pronounce on the manner of her death before they buried her. An apprentice surgeon panted to anatomize her, for there was no medical school in Arequipa at that time and the doctors had to learn their trades in wet ways.

I laid the little girl out on my bench. I had read of such cases, yet it still shocked me to see a child so mistreated.

A death from starvation manifests as follows: a shrivelled integument coated with a brown, bad-smelling excretion. Beneath the paper-like epidermis, surgeon’s fingers will locate muscles in a state of atrophy. Without even cutting, the surgeon knows that he shall find the gallbladder bloated with bile but the liver under-sized. The heart and lungs will be bloodless, sunken; the empty stomach collapsed and ulcerated. The bowel, if extracted, shall show itself void, shrivelled and translucent.

I could not bear to think of the girl’s body being ransacked now.

‘The child was sacrificed to a local god,’ I told the apprentice surgeon. ‘Pray do not cut her. You shall gain nothing by anatomizing her, for the death took place at least three centuries past.’

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.