The Book of Human Skin (57 page)

‘To get one alive girl out, I happy take one dead girl in that place.’ he smiled. ‘And that one, your one, she is very alive, I think!’

I watched the cart lurch down the street towards Santa Catalina.

Sor Loreta

The holy man had sent a messenger to say that he would be honoured to attend Me. He hoped I would find an evening appointment convenient as ‘
our days are mutually though separately beset with precious cares God obliges us to discharge. As to the precise evening, I am afraid it must be dictated by the exigencies of my patients
’.

I wrote back, ‘
You need not advertise your arrival in advance, Doctor. At any hour of the night you shall find Me doing God’s work
.’

When the bell rang outside the gate just after supper the next evening, I knew it could only be the holy man from Rome. I quickly rubbed a little pepper into the points of My stigmata, only to make them easier to see in the candlelight. Then I rushed into the courtyard in time to forfend the
portera
. There was disappointment in her face when I told her that I would answer the gate Myself.

‘Stifle your vulgar curiosity,’ I ordered, ‘or your work will be given to a sister more deserving of the honour.’

She shrank away, trembling visibly. Her reaction was so exaggerated that it gave Me pause for thought. I wondered: what did Sor Rosita have to hide? As I hurried towards the gate I resolved to look into the matter.

He fell on his knees when he saw Me, and clasped his hands together – right there out in the dirty street. Then he exclaimed in a Spanish with a strong Vatican accent to it, ‘The stigmata! I had heard there was a holy one between these walls. It was worth a journey over oceans just to see such a thing with my own eyes!’

I lowered My own eyelids modestly and begged him to rise and enter Santa Catalina as My guest. He followed Me into the
oficina
.

When I finally looked up at him, I noted straightaway that the holy one was of a troubling boyish demeanour. His face was slick with sweat as he looked at Me. His impatience and his nervousness spoke to Me of some unresolved longing in his spirit. Of course, I could read his afflictions with a clarity and acuity that is denied to those who live their lives in a dulling cloud of sensual satisfaction.

I locked the door from the inside so that We might talk undisturbed by light nuns who were anyway that evening rioting at their latest feast. That night I had chosen not to reprove those foolish girls running around wild with the smell of meat and the constant tinny tinkle of Rossini, which they all hoped, in their shallow way, would penetrate the sleeping ears of their
priora
and bring comfort to her bed of pain.

‘Let Us kneel,’ I told the young man, gathering My skirts. ‘Before you go to attend to the
priora
, We two should pray together. And let Us take communion. I have here the holy wine prepared for you.’

I was so exalted by the moment that I neglected to drink My own wine, but Doctor Santo swallowed obediently from the chalice when I held it to his lips.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

Her painted stigmata glowed hotly with a recent application of some corrosive. Yet worse were the melted nose and the striated skin of the unexpectedly powerful hand with which she gripped mine, and the voice, deep like a man’s. The tight grin of mania stretched her face to odd angles.

I tried to calm myself by consulting my medical memory of the annals of self-harm. Self-mutilation is the joy of the self-obsessed. That encyclopaedia of maladies, Napoleon, tumbled into my mind immediately. Once, I recalled, he nearly infected himself with Bubonic Plague, just to prove a point. His troops stumbled into it at Jaffa in March 1799. Napoleon decreed that buboed groins were nothing more
than a sign of moral feebleness. Therefore his own brave soldiers could not possibly catch the Plague by mere contact with the sick. Napoleon inspected a mosque that had been turned into a hospital. He even handled a corpse and touched a bubo.

And what if a fragment of contaminated dust exhaled by the dead man’s cooling body had made the leap and bedded itself in one of the many small fingernailed rips in Napoleon’s own itching integument? Just imagine – Marcella would still be in Venice, or, more likely, dead at Minguillo’s hand. And the Old World would have been at peace these last fifteen years.

Sor Loreta sighed a little impatiently, drawing my mind back to the present with her foul breath, characteristic of fasters. Then a ripple of incomprehension rumpled her ecstatic expression for a moment. I hoped I had not overheated my little pantomime of ‘recognizing’ her stigmata. It seemed to have gone down well. She told me in a confidential tone that there was much that we could do together.

Indeed
, I thought. For I must engage her in fascinating conversation long enough to allow the secret delivery of the Indian girl’s body, and then I had to persuade her to take me to the
priora
, so that I might save the woman’s life.

I allowed myself to indulge in a brief vision of Marcella, Marcella herself in person, just yards from me, somewhere beyond the wall of the
oficina
. I sipped the
vicaria
’s proffered communion wine without thinking. It was only the bitter aftertaste that reminded me that I was sharing the goblet with a poisoner. The effect was instantaneous – numbness and tingling of my lips and limbs, retching convulsions in my stomach, and froth forming in my mouth. She had used monkshood.

I knew that I should put a finger down my throat to induce a vomit, but I was already experiencing difficulty in breathing. I had emetics in my bag, but no longer the power even to focus my eyes on the clasp. As I began to feel drowsy, she hurried me out of her office, her forceful arm clenched on my elbow to keep me upright. I had a sensation of swimming through seaweeds at the bottom of the ocean. My rippling skin burned hot and cold.

We arrived at a cell of great beauty and complexity, at least, it seemed so to my blurred eyes. Sor Loreta’s intention was apparently the same as my own: to have me at the
priora
’s bed.

‘The Doctor Santo, make way,’ she hissed at the cluster of nuns who guarded the entrance.

The nuns looked at me hopefully – I dimly understood, through the miasma that was enveloping my senses, that these were Marcella’s trusted friends, trying to help me play my part that night. I was powerless to speak – the monkshood had frozen my tongue. The nuns must have thought that I was still an active part of the plan.And I was unable to tell them that this plan had been kidnapped and run away with.

Marcella Fasan

As Santo was approaching the main gate, Josefa was to be slipping out the back. She was going to meet Arce, the peon who had saved my life on the mountain, who would bring the poor dead Indian woman.

I could not help with the delivery. It was essential to the plan that I should be highly visible elsewhere at that moment. So I had been making an unaccustomed fiesta towards the end of supper in the refectory, talking loudly and laughing immoderately. And so I had succeeded in getting my face slapped by the
vicaria
as she hurried back to her office. She had shown no surprise at my presence, and had given no appearance whatsoever of remembering that she had so recently tried to poison me.

‘Good, good,’ I had muttered, clutching my burning cheek. I thought,
She will enjoy remembering that. She will remember that the clock was striking the halfway point of the ninth hour when she punished me. She will remember that was the last time she saw me alive.

A few minutes later Rosita, via Javiera, reported the Vixen approaching the
priora
’s office. It was one quarter before nine. Santo, I knew, was due there very soon, and she would want to scourge herself savagely before receiving him. I walked with dragging steps to my cell to start the most strenuous and grim part of the evening. Josefa was waiting, her eyes glittering, her breast heaving and sweat shining on her brow.

The corpse must be heavy
, I thought, fearfully.
Of course, she had been with child
.

‘Is it done?’ I asked Josefa.

‘Yes, is there, in the pumpkin vines,’ she whispered.

‘Thank you,’ I breathed. ‘And Santo?’

‘Rosita has telled Javiera, has telled Hermengilda, has telled me, is gone to the
vicaria
, is all as planned. Now, madam, we remember us through this part one time more?’

‘Just the part for . . . after what happens here,’ I whispered. What I was about to do I could not bear to hear in words.

The
samba
said, ‘When you is finished your . . . business, madam, you go up to back gate. The
portera
Rosita leave it open for fifteen after ten of the night. She dare not leave it longer.
Vicaria
come to see doors and keys four times each evening. Close you the door behind you, for the sake of
portera
, she beg you, and slip the key under where she can find and return to its place quick-easy.

‘When you leave the gate . . . turn you to your right, madam, walk swift but not run. You don’t run good, draw attention. Steady-steady walking, in two minutes you reach Plaza de Armas. Fernando he be there, he be wait in sedan chair by cathedral. And the doctor Santo, he be wait by statue of Tuturutú. The peon Arce, he hide-hide under tree in case of trouble. When you see Santo and Fernando, run, madam, run. To the doctor Santo, will help you to the chair. If you is followed, then the peon Arce make distracting. You still run to sedan chair.’

I listened respectfully, all the while thinking, ‘Santo is in the convent.’

If the plan went awry at this stage, the presence of an unidentified corpse in my cell would be impossible to explain in any decent way. We might both be accused of murder. The
priora
lay dying in her cell, while a dead woman lay in the pumpkin vines. If my courage failed now, I would imperil Priora Mónica, Josefa, Rosita, Margarita, Fernando, Beatriz and Santo too.

Santo was in the convent.

‘Come, madam,’ urged Josefa. ‘Now we have a little somefing-somefing we must do together. It is now.’

I looped a heavy blanket over one of her arms and took the other, picked up my crutch and crept out of my courtyard to begin our task.

Sor Loreta

As I led him towards the
priora
’s bed, I watched him. His pale face was innocent like an angel surrounded by a golden halo of hair. So had Sor Andreola’s been. So had Sor Sofia’s been once.

Into the young man’s eyes came a faraway look – a look of the Flesh and the Devil, just as I had suspected when I first laid eyes on him.

His mouth was forming words that did not emerge.

But the young Fiend refused to quail. He refused to give up. Though he looked so fragile, Satan’s power in him was stronger than anything I had ever seen. So the Devil’s power becomes most shockingly manifest in the last living moments of those possessed by Him.

Marcella Fasan

I did not even know her name.

One arm on my crutch, I tried to drag her upper body out of the bushes, with Josefa tugging at her feet. We made no impression on the woman’s dead weight. I hid my crutch in the vines and dropped to my knees. Using both arms, I succeeding in sliding the shoulders and head over the heavy blanket we had laid out on the cobbles. Josefa swung the lower body into place.

Out of the shadows, the moon lit up the corpse with a pale, searching light. I closed the folds of the blanket over it, covering the blank face in the patterned wool. She was my own age, pretty, with a broad nose and delicate brows. She was slighter even than myself, otherwise we should never have managed to move her an inch.

Josefa took one corner of the blanket, grunting, ‘Now – now, madam!’

Using every atom of my strength, I pulled on my corner. Finally, the body, like a vast seed-pod, began to slide through the courtyard, and to the right, into the main part of the convent. Pain swept through my damaged leg, making me sway.

I am sorry
, I thought, as I jerked the girl’s head over the threshold,
I do not even know your name. You were so pretty. What were you going to call your baby?

The streets of the convent were empty. In cells all around us, the festivities raged. We saw no one and no one saw us. I wept silently, for the dreadful thing I was doing, for the pain in my legs, for the danger of discovery, for the poor dead girl and her lost child.

The riskiest part of all was in front of the
priora
’s own cell, which lay yards from me at the conjunction of Calles Granada, Burgos and Sevilla. For, if the plan was working, both the
vicaria
and Santo were in there now. Santo would be trying to save the
priora
’s life with all the skills in him. The
vicaria
would be trying to stop him, with all the evil in her.

It was then that I realized what I had forgotten to tell Santo. I had neglected to warn him about the bizarre physical strength Sor Loreta harboured in her skeletal form. I stopped dead, overcome with fear, but Josefa urged me on.

There was a hum of voices and darting candlelight at the window of the
priora
’s apartments. I yearned for it, but I did not hear Santo’s voice.
He must be at his work
, I thought.
Let him save Madre Mónica. He shall do it, if anyone can
.

We dragged our seed-pod past the
priora
’s room and to the first pair of steps, where it thumped fruitily, then ten paces to the next pair of steps followed by three more pairs before we could propel it into my courtyard, where we allowed ourselves the luxury of stopping and catching our breath.

We pulled the woman into my room and up over the dais to my bed, where I laid her down with her head on my pillow.

Josefa threw herself into my arms, and we held each other for a few moments, each absorbing the long shudders and gasps of the other. I rested my chin on the top of her head, and forced myself to look at the Indian woman on the bed. The blanket had fallen open.