The Book of Human Skin (48 page)

‘I would never . . .’ I protested.

‘I spose not,’ she acknowledged. ‘But I just wait a leetle-leetle.’

Josefa was still the only person, apart from my confessor, with whom I spoke. Chatter in the convent byways was quickly silenced by the
vicaria
, who seemed omnipresent, gliding from corners or breaking away unexpectedly from a still silhouette on a stone escarpment. On catching a nun alone, she would destroy her with personal criticisms. I suffered many such humiliations, and overheard many more outside my window. So assiduous was Sor Loreta in discerning imperfections, it was as if we were all hollowed gourds held up to the light. Yet how wrong she was too, accusing quiet girls of garrulity and thin girls of vanity. The
vicaria
loved my limp as a living parable of my undoubted sins, urging other nuns to imitate my penance by putting sharp stones into their shoes. Here again, Sor Loreta was deluded, for of course it was not God but my brother who was the author of my mutilation.

Returning from my confession on the first day of Lent, I was horrified to see the
vicaria
walking towards me in close colloquy with her two fawning retainers, Sor Narcisa and Sor Arabel, in front of whom she rejoiced in humiliating the other nuns. She had not yet seen me, so I had time to steal into the nearest doorway. Still I heard her voice grating closer, and so I withdrew deeper into the unknown room, backing over the narrow stone threshold until I could find a place out of sight.

My eyes were squeezed closed with terror. My back pushed through curtains and into a room that smelled deliciously of cigar smoke, wine, flowers and linseed oil. I felt for a moment that I was back in Cecilia Cornaro’s studio in Venice.

When I opened my eyes, they fell on a girl lying negligently on an elegant divan. I knew that face. I had glimpsed it in the refectory. Otherwise I would never have thought her a nun. She was smoking a cigar with an expression of highly focussed bliss. Instead of her habit, a morning gown was carelessly tied around her waist, half open and showing a petticoat that was none of the cleanest. A silk shawl was dripping off her shoulders. Her hair hung down her back in two supple brown tails and her feet were encased in splendidly dirty silk stockings, one of which was loitering down towards the ankle. Utterly unruffled by my unexpected appearance, she grinned, ‘Ah,
la Veneciana
! Do shut the doors, be a lovely.’

I pushed a hand through the curtain and grasped the handle, pulling it shut. Then I turned back to her just as she enquired, in a casual drawl, ‘So would you like to see a dirty picture?’

And she pulled from her bosom some dozen little cards, on each of which was painted a nearly naked San Sebastiano.

Minguillo Fasan

My perfectly methodical investigations had failed to reveal a will-thief.With this conclusion of my probing, I felt a kind of relief. I had subjected my entire household to an empire of fear, and nothing had emerged. I was able to reassure myself that the thief was no more, and that his opportunity to hurt me was buried with him.

Yet still I was afflicted with discontent. My wife Amalia was the new object of my opprobium. She had failed to produce a son.

This was getting to be a little uncomfortable. I wanted a baby boy to sit on my knee, to dress in miniature imitation of me, to teach how to shoot as well as me, to show every corner of the Palazzo Espagnol. My boy-baby hunger struck me every time I saw a squalling infant in the street. It put me in a fever, made me feel a temporary inmate in my own home, made me walk into low taverns and hold cool bottles against my hot forehead.

Like Adam, I blamed my wife.

The Excitable Reader asks why I mention this posture of affairs?

The Reader should calm Himself, and put away any suspicions.

If there’s anything a writer should not be doing and ought to be snubbed for, it is laying a red herring. It tends to get a writer disliked.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

The one thing I would not do for Signora Sazia was to kill babies in the wombs of her girls. I saw the mothers to term, and I brought those infants into the world as kindly as I could. I tried to find homes for them
among other patients, those who longed in vain for a child. I would not permit a single baby I had midwived to go to the orphanages run by former nuns. Rather, I would walk the streets with an infant under my arm until I found someone who would take a baby for love alone.

Great and opulent families are more inclined to sterility and are more often disappointed in the gender of the offspring if it proves female. So there is hardly a prosperous quack-midwife who does not boast herself able to foretell a boy or a girl child. Hippocrates states that a woman who is to bear a boy will have a good colour to her skin, and be merry all through her pregnancy. The male foetus, he adds, prefers to lie on the right side of the womb, while the female cleaves to the left. So the son-bearing mother shows a heavier, firmer right breast and favours her right foot. Others claim to tell the gender of the foetus by the preternatural cravings for particular foods on the part of the mother. An English midwife, Mistress Jane Sharp, has happily recorded that ‘Some Women with Child have longed to bite on a piece of their Husband’s Buttocks’, a sure indication of a boy child fattening inside.

I do all I can to discourage such talk among my patients. There is danger in this foolishness, for both mother and child. There are those fathers who insist on a boy child, who will go so far as to procure the death of the unborn baby, through violence or poison, if these falsely painted signs point to an unwanted girl child forthcoming.

A steady flow of coins now conjured up a smile in my back pocket. I went to the docks to make enquiries about a passage to Peru. A few months more of drudgery and starving economy, and that passage would be within my grasp.

Marcella Fasan

This girl with the pictures of San Sebastiano was none other than the famous Rafaela, universally admired and adored as the wickedest nun in the convent.

‘Where did you . . . ? Were you allowed . . . ?’

‘No, lovely! No one is
allowed
. I happen to know that you have been punished enough to understand that already.’

‘Where did you . . . ?’

‘I did not get them. I made them.’

‘You painted these?’

‘And I would value the opinion of a former citizen-ess of the City of Art on my brush skills, if you please.’

I glanced over my shoulder, trembling. Just to be there, talking to this scandalous girl, was all kinds of wrong. To look at her San Sebastianos was surely a capital offence. The
vicaria
would nose me out any moment. This cell was perilously close to the bathhouse, where she might even now be punishing some poor novice.

The girl seemed to know exactly whom I feared. ‘The Vixen won’t be showing that thing she calls a face in here. We’ve got an understanding.’

As she uttered those words, her face filled with an indescribable bitterness. Then she shook herself like a cat, grinned, and demanded, ‘Now seriously, do tell what you think of my little daubs.’

She laid them out on a table in front of the
hornacina
, which was beautifully painted but held only a simple iron cross. Her cell was luxuriously appointed, with the finest Turkey carpet underfoot and a pyramid of cakes from the best bakery in town, still in their waxy wrappers, fragrant on the window sill.

Her folded arms and set mouth gave me no freedom to refuse her request. Nor did I wish to limp out of that cell straight into the arms of the
vicaria
. So I fanned out the little cards on her table.

The paintings were fine, truly fine work. I told her so.

‘But . . . they
let
you paint?’ I asked.

She pointed to an easel. Displayed was a saint so pallid and deeply etched with suffering that it would gladden even the heart of the
vicaria
. The detail was realistic, the
chiaroscuro
perfectly balanced. The
sfumatura
of the complexion was as good as anything Cecilia Cornaro might have done.

‘Now turn it over,’ she ordered, ‘and lift the first layer of canvas. All my paintings are doubles.’

On the back was a perfect San Sebastiano, handsome as the sun. The most abbreviated shade of a meagre fig-leaf drew attention to his thighs rather than concealing them.

‘Dear God!’ I whispered.

‘I work to commission,’ she said proudly. ‘The other nuns want San Sebastiáns mostly. Or babies. You’ve no idea how much pale pink paint we run to here!’

She pointed to a particularly hideous Santa Rosa of Lima, drying in the sun on her window sill. I lifted it up and carefully prised off the second skin of canvas at the back. There was a perfect pink cherub of a baby, holding out his hands and almost audibly gurgling with his rosebud mouth.

Given my physical difficulties, I had never raised my ambitions to motherhood, not even when I fed on Santo’s kiss; or perhaps just momentarily. Mere normal function had always seemed a thing above rubies. But, looking at Rafaela’s baby, I could suddenly understand what the nuns in here, and the nuns everywhere, had been deprived of. What a cruel irony was imposed on the poor girls! They were made to worship the image of a baby, as the desire and joy and salvation of the whole race: a little pink, perfect baby with fat hands and wise eyes. And yet a real baby was the one thing that they would never be allowed to have or even hold.

Rafaela seemed to read my thoughts. ‘Cruel, aint it? And nuns aint supposed to be
jealous
of the Madonna, but to venerate her. It’s a bloody wonder that Marys the world over are not regularly defaced in convents, aint it? Most of the time she looks such a prig. So smug. “Look what I’ve got! My own little fat pink saviour.
And
I get to stay my own woman with no man to treat me like a serf and get me pregnant every year!” ’

Rafaela cradled an imaginary baby Jesus with her cheeks puffed out satirically. Then she growled, ‘I’ve been itching to add a moustache or a beard to a couple of pompous virgins around here myself!’

I wanted to ask her if she spoke of living or painted virgins, but then a quiet step outside Rafaela’s door drew the blood from my face. I rushed to cover the painting.

The footstep passed on and we smiled at one another.

‘I . . . I paint a little too,’ I offered.

‘Really?’ Rafaela drawled. I had offended her. Perhaps she believed I wanted to compete?

‘Have you heard of the artist Cecilia Cornaro from Venice?’

‘Who has not? Did she not have doings with Lord Byron and Casanova too? Did the English milord not break her on the wheel . . . and what a painter!’

‘Well, she is my friend. And she taught me a little . . .’

By now the nun had leaped to her feet. ‘Cecilia Cornaro! You gem! You diamond! You softest part of a cat!’

She shuttered her window quickly and in a practised motion set a wooden pail of mossy slime from the fountain in front of the door, so that anyone opening it would stumble. She took me by the shoulders – I smelled vetiver perfume on her skin – and sat me down in front of the easel. She put a paintbrush in my hand, and a small square of clean canvas in front of me. ‘Show me what you can do.’

The stem of the paintbrush remembered my fingers like a living thing. How good it felt to dance the quiff of fur in the soft pigment! I rapidly sketched Rafaela’s face, adding some colour and shade to it.

She whipped the canvas from my hands and pulled out a sliver of prohibited mirror from under her mattress. She compared the painted and the reflected images, then danced around the cell with my picture so that the wet paint sprayed coloured tears down the white walls.

‘It’s true! We shall paint together! Sor Constanza . . . are you not really named Marcella?’

‘Yes.’

‘Marcella and Rafaela. We’re sisters now.’

At the word ‘sisters’, Rafaela’s welcoming smile suddenly closed down in grief. She said more quietly, ‘Welcome to the family business.’

She thrust the paintbrush back in my hand. With its tip dipped quickly in black, I sketched another image of Rafaela. I still have it: she’s shown as a mischievous little mountain hare stretched out in a shaft of sunshine, and winking at me.

Sor Loreta

There was fresh sin in Santa Catalina. I could smell it as clearly as if someone had thrown a dead mouse behind My bed, a thing that had happened to Me more than once, as it was God’s design to rain testing misfortunes down upon his Most Devout Daughter.

Of all things I feared, the worst had happened. The Venetian Cripple had allied herself with the depraved Rafaela, the one nun I might not touch with My discipline, for reasons that God does not choose to reveal.

This Rafaela might say with impunity outside My window, ‘Pray do not disturb Sor Loreta. She is having a nap. Sorry, I slander her. Sor Loreta has of course taken to bed with the weight of her own insupportable holiness.’

‘May your tongue cleave in your mouth for saying that!’ lisped someone else, in a perfect imitation of the voice of Sor Arabel.

And Rafaela’s retainers giggled like sparrows chirruping over stolen bread rolls.

With Rafaela and the Venetian Cripple at Satan’s work together, I knew that it would not be long before I was obliged to carry out God’s work again.

In the meantime, I took comfort In My little garden, where I planted My special seeds in faith, flowed anointing blood upon them, and awaited My harvest. Monkshood must surely be a holy plant, given its name and its powers and its beautiful blue colour.

There was a saying at Santa Catalina:
cada flor es una monja
, every flower is a nun. Like San Francesco, I spoke to My speechless little sisters, the flowers, and I told them of My great plans. My blue flowers came up like the Virgin’s Robe, like the colour of Heaven, like San Francisco’s own cowl, drenched in a deep pious blue.

Marcella Fasan

Rafaela’s sprawling cell was designed for two. She said that she had originally shared it with her younger sister, who had died. About her death, Rafaela was at first tight-lipped.