The Book of Human Skin (36 page)

She seemed grievously altered; it was more than the years that had passed. Her fire was damped. Something had shattered her confidence, leaving a bruised wariness in its place. Even on San Servolo, the rumours had reached us: that Cecilia had been worsted in a love affair with an English poet. I wanted to put my arm around her and comfort her, yet I was afraid to pity her. No doubt she would hate me for it.

She said bluntly, ‘I know what happened to you. All of it. Marcella, all those months in my studio, when I was as open as a window with you,
you never told me the truth about your brother. Then, after Piero died, you never once wrote to me to tell me what was happening to you. How could you be so cruel to a friend? Yes,
cruel
, Marcella. People who love you should be allowed to help you. They should be allowed to choose what sacrifices they make.’

I looked at her wordlessly.

‘And to accept help – that does not reduce you to a Poor Thing. Yet who could not pity you here?’ She gestured at the asylum walls, which must have seemed fearsome to her who so hated to be constrained in anything.

Outright compassion from Cecilia Cornaro was a thing hard to bear. I reached for her damaged hand, and held it up to the light. It was concealed inside a black mitten, but the sunlight silhouetted two fingers welded together. Anna had told me that Cecilia Cornaro bore this wound because of me, because she had once tried to help me and so incurred my brother’s wrath.

And how should I reply to her?
Now you have seen exactly how my brother will act against anyone to whom I confide my trust, anyone to whom I lament my bad treatment by him. Does that not give you an understanding of my situation and my silence?

Or should I talk toughly as she would?
Yes, you can help. And now you have a damage of your own on the outside, and some hideous pain as well you try to hide inside – perhaps you can see mine more clearly. Can I be your pet Deformity? You can be mine. Can you help, you ask? It would certainly help if you would take me to live with you. For even if I escape from here, Minguillo will leave me penniless. I can mix your colours . . . If you will let Santo-Spirito come to visit me sometime
. . .

Cecilia’s voice roused me from my fantasies. It appeared she had reviewed them all herself before coming here: ‘I have no need of a daughter or an assistant, or another creature under my feet in my studio. You are not of age: your brother could yet intervene in any such plan. But Piero’s face keeps coming into my mind, and I know that it will not go away until I do something for you.’

‘Perhaps Piero haunts you because my brother murdered him. The duelling sword was poisoned,’ I explained flatly. ‘You may ask the attending surgeon.’

‘Would that be the same attending surgeon who came to my studio to beg me to come here?’

‘Santo,’ I whispered.

‘The same. Do you know that he . . . ? Are you? But he has nothing. He has no power to release you from here anyway. He has chivvied me here, I believe, in the hope that the sight of me will stir you from your self-absorbed and excluding misery. Perhaps he also thought our reunion might have the same effect upon myself.’

‘Will it?’ I looked into her green eyes and saw actual flecks of pain in there.

But Cecilia was musing, ‘There must be a solution for this. It is like finding the right colour for the shadowing of an eye socket; sometimes it is not the obvious thing. It can take something surprising, a yellow or a green. I’ll be back, trust me. Now, the good Padre Portalupi is recovering his composure. I need to reduce him again. Excuse me.’

‘We may not have much time,’ I whispered. ‘Minguillo will use . . . what happened . . . against me. As soon as he calculates his best advantage out of it.’

‘Indeed. Marcella, have you ever wondered why your brother hates you so?’

‘I haven’t. It has been a fact of my life since before I had thoughts of my own.’

Cecilia Cornaro made a sharp snort of derision. ‘Do you know Tiziano’s painting of Marsyas?’

I nodded.

‘When he’s upside down, trussed up like a goat for the flaying, Marsyas has his mouth open. That is not simply to scream. It’s because he’s asking, “Why are you stripping me from myself ?” That would be the intelligent thing, to
ask
why your brother insists on treating you much the same way. You might meet Minguillo’s hatred halfway and parley with it, if you knew whence it sprang. Did you offend him in some way in your childhood?’

‘Before or after he crippled me?’

Cecilia barked, ‘Do not whine. Who told you to cooperate with his tortures? You have a tricksy bladder. It does not have you. You have a poorly leg. Ditto. A sick man pretending to be a doctor abused you. He did not even rape you. You have a mad brother. Yet who told you to go hand in glove with those who want to oppress or pity you – by being as passive and silent as you please in the midst of vivisection? You think
you are brave, because you do not cry to others to help you, but no one,’ and here her voice broke down to a whisper, ‘no one can withstand cruelty on their own. It is vain to think you can do so. There are times when it is a kind and courageous act to cry out, to tell the world what is happening, to warn other victims . . . What of your poor sister-in-law, for example?’

I looked away.

‘And you have inspired adoring love, which proves . . .’

Here, she bit her lip and succumbed to dolorous memories of her own for a moment. Then Cecilia spoke to herself, as if forgetting my presence, ‘Now I am commissioned to go to Vienna for some portraits of the royal family. While I paint them, I shall think what is to be done by Marcella Fasan. And by the loving friends whose help she has so far preferred to spurn.’

I wanted very much to strike her with my crutch.

‘Apparently the Viennese royals are not very brilliant conversationalists, so I shall not be distracted. Now you are protected here, even from your brother, I believe. You have your Santo about you. For the moment, there is no better place in the world for you to be.’

She embraced me hard and quickly, so that I choked on mouthfuls of hair, and strode off, Padre Portalupi trotting nervously behind her. After she left, I sat on my own under the trees, thinking for a long time.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

Cecilia Cornaro’s visit provoked a strange reaction in Marcella. At first, after Flangini’s attack, Marcella had been sunk into herself. It was clear that she felt defiled, reduced. Yet now she began to show a physical resilience I had not seen in her before. More and more often she appeared without her crutch. She held her head up. She asked questions. Her radiant skin spoke the same language as her mouth. Her smile, enchantingly, reappeared, and then her irresistible laugh. The other
Tranquils were unnerved by her new, strong presence. They persisted in bringing her the crutch, as if she had forgotten it.

Meanwhile, Flangini had been flung off the island in disgrace and had disappeared from society. Padre Portalupi had believed not a word the lecher said, preferring the truth of his own witnessing – a chorus of once-Tranquil ladies all reduced to a state of piteous misery. Flangini was the worst kind of criminal, the kind who take their pleasure from inflicting mental pain. I supposed we should be grateful that he did not force an actual congress upon any of his victims. He simply confined, groped and spoke filthily, making them feel unworthy even of inspiring lust.

Of course I wondered if Minguillo had sent Flangini. Yet the man had been indiscriminate in his brutalities. There were a dozen female patients who had suffered as Marcella had. That was too clumsy for Minguillo, who cared not at all about incidental damages, but who was cunning enough to anticipate the awkward investigations that would result from such a scandal.

In fact, Flangini was his own man, just another Minguillo, just another character that you would not believe in if you met him in a novel but who nevertheless stalks this earth, hurting those in his path. In Flangini’s case, it would not be for long, I consoled myself: a bluish tint of his lips and fingers indicated an advanced structural disease of the heart.

Now Padre Portalupi was saying, ‘We really must let Marcella Fasan go away from this place. She has never been out of her senses, though the sweet sensibility of her nature has caused her to share the lives of the truly afflicted with an affectionate empathy. But I fear that the memories of Flangini, and of how we left her vulnerable, might indeed provoke a fissure in her equilibrium. I shall write to her brother and tell him so. I’ll take this opportunity to declare her officially
risanata
. That would release her from the order from the
Sanità
that confined her here.’

Joy cudgelled the breath out of my lungs. If Marcella was officially sane, then I could marry her. But the timing would be crucial.

‘She would be released into her brother’s care?’

‘Sadly, she is not of age,’ Padre Portalupi confirmed.

How could I extract her? Images rained into my mind, of an intercepted gondola, a priest standing by, Marcella cloaked beside me at the altar of an obscure church.

Padre Portalupi’s face had clouded. ‘Her brother is what makes me hesitate. Sometimes I think it is the brother we should have admitted two years ago. Yet I shall write to him once more.’

Sor Loreta

At last I felt a hope stirring. I was rewarded one night with a vision in which the crucified Jesus beckoned me with His great eyes to climb up to His side on the cross. With His own hand, He gently cupped my head and drew it to the wound in His side.

‘Drink, dearest Daughter,’ he said in His rich, soft voice. ‘Here is something to slake your thirst in ways that the human world cannot provide.’

And so, like Santa Catalina herself, I fixed my lips upon His holy wound and suckled, tasting sweet manna that refreshed all the members of my body until I felt as if I was possessed of a superhuman strength. So the Most High succours His chosen ones, feeding them with the greatness to accomplish stupendous and mysterious acts.

And therefore I was not surprised when Sor Sofia was shortly fetched away to Heaven or Hell, according to God’s design. This is the Way of the Lord.

Gianni delle Boccole

Minguillo were up to summing new. Twere clear from the smile on his face n the way he hummed in the courtyard. He liked to go sit in the place where Conte Piero had died, and smell the poisonous blue flowers there. Also, from that vipery he could see all the comings n goings o the whole house, and find buckets o scuses for a trimming or a punishing. We all trod in fear. Running along corridors, walking too slow along corridors, being in corridors – all sich could bring on a slap, or worser – ten minits of his foul tong.

Come a day when I sorpresed Minguillo in his office. I creepled in silent as gilt. He were crouched by the bookshelf, looking jist like one on them orang-utang apes, and he were running his pimpled nose long a row o books on the next-to-bottom shelf. Course he needed to be that close, I knowed now. He couldn’t see scut from far way. He tookt deep breaths. Twere as if each one on them books were sented with diffrint perfume.

Books was allus arriving for him, of course, wrapt in cloth and delivert in the hands of booksellers who lookt like men what boil horses’ bones for glue.

Minguillo haint seed me yet, so I peered oer his shoulder at them little darlins of his. Then it struck me: pinkish brown with a fine grain to the leather – them covers was jist like that repungent book of humane skin he had got from Peru.

That’s what he were collecting. Not jist poor old Tupac Amaru, but dozens of em. Books of humane leather. That’s what he were spending Marcella’s inhairitance on.

Brute God!

Anger n fear whipped through me. I were dizzy with feelins. Pity for the poor creechers bound round them books. Shakin with the old bull-horrors at Minguillo’s happy hunting em down. Sick-bitter that Minguillo were safe here in his study spending his filthy looter on them dredful murderin goolish books while Marcella were confined on an island as a lunatick. Gilty that I, in the end, had permitted this to appen on account of my wafering oer the true will n then loosing it.

I must of huffed out loud, for Minguillo turned round n seed me.

He leaped up. But twere too late for him to hide his grin nor the things what were spred on his desk.

Twere maps of South Hamerica isnt it.

Part Four

Minguillo Fasan

Yet again the disposal of my sister preoccupied me. For the second time, I thought that God, or at least nuns, would help me. Napoleon had slammed the doors on my original intentions. But in Arequipa, in the faltering Viceroyship of Peru, I had heard there was a Dominican nunnery that would take only girls of rich Spanish blood.

Rich Spanish blood
, that had a nice ring to it. And what had our family, if not blood and richness with a heaped spoonful of Spaniard stirred into it? An admixture of Venetian could only enhance the
limpieza de sangre
, the purity of bloodline that so obsessed the Spanish of the New World, threatened as they were with miscegenation of many hues at every bedpost.

The Dominicans, I thought, they would do nicely, with their Spanish and New World connections.
Domini Cani
– Dogs of God, they called themselves. Peru’s own demented Santa Rosa of Lima was a creature of their order. ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ – soon to be relaunched on an eager market – would pay my sister’s dowry. The Orderly Reader shall acknowledge the perfect symmetry of it all, and be pleased by it.

In any case it was well past time for me to sort my father’s affairs in Arequipa. Months after he died, I received a threadbare document to say that he had been pronounced
ab intestato
, at which I had smiled wryly. My father was far from intestate. In fact, he had at least two wills. It now occurred to me that in Arequipa there was a mansion and a warehouse for me to claim, that might be turned into funds for more books of human skin and other diversions of mine.