The Book of Human Skin (58 page)

Santo has tended to this woman
, I thought.
His hands have touched her
. Gently disengaging myself from Josefa’s embrace, I walked over to the
woman, raised one of her hands and kissed it. I twisted off the ring of my betrothal to God and slid it on to her limp finger. My own finger was still stained green with the blade of grass I always wore between myself and that ring.

‘Madam . . .’ Josefa was holding out a hymnbook for me. She had a Bible in her other hand. We busied ourselves tearing them up. We ruckled each page and tucked them between the Indian woman’s legs, her arms and her body, around her neck. Flowers of paper bloomed around her as if she was on her bier. I would need to set fire to many parts of her at once so that she would burn quickly.

‘Now Josefa,’ I said firmly, ‘your work is over for a little while.’

‘Madam, I could still . . .’

‘It has been agreed, Josefa. If we are discovered now, it is best that you are not seen to be part of it.’

‘But, madam . . .’

I shook my head. Josefa lifted to her lips a little green bottle that Margarita had provided. It was a sleeping draught that I would later be accused of administering so that Josefa would not interrupt me at my task. Margarita had promised me that it would cause no lasting damage.

Josefa’s bright eyes clouded over. I kissed her and led her to her bed in the kitchen of the cell, and settled her on her pallet. She was already asleep. Stroking her hair from her forehead, I almost envied her. She would not even have to see what I was about to do.

I went out to the drain outside my courtyard, and pulled the string to lift up the flat bottle of brandy that Margarita had procured for me from the pharmacy. Returning to my room, I poured the brown liquid over the woman.

Had she enjoyed spirits in her short life?

Her face did not change as the fumes of alcohol reached her face. Over her head I now placed a rag soaked in brandy.

I told her, ‘I am sorry.’

When I set fire to her torso, I turned my back immediately, but not fast enough to miss her body contracting with the flames, as if she danced, grotesquely, on her back. Her bones creaked as they snapped into a simulation of life. Her chemise burned away, revealing a neat trail of black stitches where Santo must have sewn up the incision he made in trying to save her from the infection of the dead baby inside her. Then the stitches themselves caught fire.

I ran to the door, desperate to flee this scene. Yet I forced myself to stand with my hand on the frame. I had to wait until she had burned properly and was truly unrecognizable. And I had work to do in the meantime. I reached to the back of my candle cupboard and pulled out a rolled-up portrait of myself, painted with the help of Rafaela’s sliver of mirror. I stretched it on four prepared pieces of wood, and set it in the stone
hornacina
in the furthest corner of my bare second room, where the flames would not reach as there was no fuel for them. I looked at my painted face, spectral in the candlelight. Josefa had gasped when she saw the portrait, saying, ‘Madam, ’tis you to last hair.’

The portrait and the smell of burning reminded me of Cecilia Cornaro. She would damn my work, out of habit, but it was infected with her skill. I had painted myself lively, and loving. My expression was the one I would have worn if I had been looking into Santo’s face.

I had not dared to prepare a bag before I committed the deed. Who knew when the
vicaria
might take it into her head to enter my cell abruptly in the hope of finding punishable mischief ? But I had visualized my list and the order of gathering my belongings. In minutes I had brought the sketch in my mind to life: my diaries, my drawn evidence of Rafaela’s murdered face, a change of clothes, some coins and a pair of Fernando’s wonderful shoes all crammed inside a sack. The very last item I added was Rafaela’s heart in its silver casket.

‘Your heart is to get your heart’s desire,’ I told her tenderly, ‘to leave this place.’

I forced myself to return to the burning bed, which crackled and fumed merrily, releasing a smell horribly like roasting guinea pig. I had counted on that. For guinea pig was the dish of the evening, and in cells all over our convent the nuns’
criadas
and
sambas
, having fed their mistresses, were still turning the little beasts in rich gravy and licking their lips at the thought of their own suppers.

I little wanted to take a closer look at the burning girl, but I needed to see if the fire had done its work properly. I edged near, holding my head as far back on my neck as I could and looking gingerly down my cheekbones. My Indian sister was but half-eaten by flames. The cloth across her face was just ashes now. I raked them aside – the features had melted away like wax, like the
vicaria
’s. For the first time, I thought of
the pain the madwoman had inflicted on herself when she was just a child. She had been mad, even then.

The Indian woman felt nothing, of course. Hot blood suddenly trickled down through the void where her eyes had been. I retched. I forced myself to check the legs and arms. I did not want any traces of her vivid skin visible. Tatters of flesh still clung to her limbs.

The bottle of brandy was empty. Despairingly, I stared around the room, and then seized the lamp. I emptied its oil over the woman’s torso and dropped a piece of paper over each leg. The fire took hold with renewed vigour. I could trust it now. I did not want to raise a huge conflagration, for Josefa lay sleeping in the next room, and I could not bear the risk of her being harmed.

Santo was in the convent, keeping the
vicaria
occupied and saving the
priora
. In minutes, perhaps, I would see him.

I tore off my habit and spread it over the flaming bones. From under Josefa’s mattress I pulled out a thin street-dress with a flowered skirt. Fernando’s boots were not hidden by it, I worried. Nor did my skirt quite cover the thinness of my deformed leg. We had not thought of everything. My self-portrait gazed at me trustingly. I stared back for a moment. Then I whispered, ‘Goodbye, Sor Constanza.’ I kissed the sleeping Josefa one last time.

Santo was in the convent. Soon, soon, both of us would be outside it.

Climbing the steps back up to the conjunction of Granada, Sevilla and Burgos, I pattered through the courtyard and up to the gate.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

To my inexpressible horror, the
vicaria
dismissed all the other nuns. Unfortunately, they had been reassured by my presence and agreed to leave their beloved Mother in my care. How could they know that I was numbed and dying of monkshood?

A deathbed is a place for the quietest words. Perhaps they thought I swayed with feigned religious fervour as I stood over the
priora
’s still
form, mumbling with scant breath. Only one nun gave me long looks, and edged closer to observe me better. Her intelligent face swam in front of my eyes.

‘Bless you, Father,’ she whispered.

Of course, Fernando had thought it prudent to have the whole town think that I was truly a man of God. Those poor women saw what they wanted to see, a saviour, not a drugged man struggling to breathe.

Then I thought of Marcella, with her wasted leg, dragging the remains of the Indian girl down to her cell with only Josefa to help her. Did they have the strength? I had lifted the woman in my own arms to my bench – her dead weight was considerable. Josefa had told us that the body must pass the
priora
’s cell to reach Marcella’s. Was she passing even now? Had she passed? Or was she too failing?

I sniffed the air for burning. Yes, the smell of roasting flesh – guinea pig – flooded through every door and window of the convent, sending a vivid wave of nausea undulating through my stomach.

The
vicaria
’s face loomed close to mine. Her eyes were empty of recognition. Her expression was devoid of humanity. The woman had slipped into a rapture and no longer knew what she did.

Yet I understood what Sor Loreta was about to do: perhaps her poison caused my thoughts to run dementedly parallel with her own. In the privacy my presence had sanctified, the
vicaria
was now going to kill the
priora
. Afterwards, when she came to her senses, she would denounce me as the incompetent agent of her victim’s death. She would tell the world I had attended the convent in an intoxicated state. And that in my drunkenness I administered erroneous, fatal drugs to the suffering
priora
.

Doctors are required to cure, not kill. There’s little mercy to be expected for one who lets a helpless woman of God die under his criminally careless fingers. Sor Loreta had the confidence of the priests. I was a foreigner, with a secret that would soon be exposed. How would I defend myself?

Then I realized that I would not have to. There would be two corpses found in this cell tonight: the
priora
’s and my own.

Sor Loreta would not need to find an explanation for that fact. By the time our bodies were found, she would be back in the
oficina
. She would be able to truthfully manifest complete surprise at the two
terrible deaths at Santa Catalina, for she was not really in this room at all. Whatever had taken over her mind was stronger than sense and it was certainly stronger than a dying man.

Marcella might escape to the outside, but she would find herself there without me.

Marcella Fasan

It was nearly three years since I had seen outside the walls of Santa Catalina. Yet Arequipa had burned an impression into my brain that day I first arrived, when the
arriero
and his peons had allowed me one last turn around the main square before they delivered me.

I pushed the door open and slid outside, flattening myself in the shadow of the wall. The street was empty. I closed the door behind me and locked it, sliding the key back underneath.

‘Be safe, Rosita,’ I whispered.

‘Turn you right,’ Josefa had said. But to my right a pair of soldiers were now approaching, and they were already peering in my direction. Left was empty, and so I edged along the wall in that direction. I could hear the soldiers whistling and swearing.

One slurred, ‘Sthat a woman? By the convent wall?’

‘If it is, she is too skinny for
me
. Go on, help yourself.’

Their pace quickened. But the beer made their legs as incompetent as my own and one stumbled into the gutter. They fell into incoherent argument.

I fled up an alley, keeping in mind that I was parallel to the square, that I must turn right to find my way back. I limped and lurched. I could not find a passageway to my right.

My thoughts pounded in my head.

What if the
vicaria
worked out what had really happened? I feared that Josefa, slow with drugs, might be maltreated in the process of Sor Loreta’s investigations. She might not be able to escape.

‘Tuturutú,’ Josefa had told me. ‘Santo will meet you under the statue of Tuturutú.’

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

I sank to my knees. The nausea had invaded all my senses; even my hearing sickened so that my head was invaded by a sound like bees swarming. I think now that this must have been Sor Loreta singing to herself. Sharp pains racked my stomach, as if my intestines were wrapping around my liver. Strange fluid forms swam across my vision. Death craved my complicity, welcoming me with a promise of relief.

I turned my back on death. I crawled away from it. I took hold of the hem of Sor Loreta’s habit and dragged her down to the floor. I threw my body over hers, grinding my torso over the part of her skin that was most fragile, her thighs, wrecked by the cilice. I punched the section of her thorax that housed her gall-bladder, which her fasting would have filled with bile. She grunted.

An intense, sensual joy filled her face. Her pain seemed somehow to feed her sinews and her lungs. She shrugged me off, stabbed my belly with her knife of an elbow, and shuffled on her knees back to the bed. The
vicaria
bent over the
priora
, her hands outstretched above her neck. I raised my head and saw all the signs of imminent death on the sick woman’s face. The
vicaria
had but to apply a simple pressure to that wasted throat and the thing would be done.

My arms had knotted in a solid contraction, but my right leg retained some sensation. I kicked the knees from under the
vicaria
. I heard her head smack against the bedpost. She lay still on the floor.

Then she surged up like a dark wave, reaching her emaciated, trembling hand towards the bed again.

The
priora
opened her eyes.

In a clear voice she asked Sor Loreta, ‘So you intend to murder me, then? Let all our sisters witness the act.’

From under the covers she dragged a bell and rang it. Suddenly the room was full of nuns, who cried out in one voice at the sight of the
vicaria
’s hands being snatched away from the
priora
’s neck.

The nuns surrounded the Vixen. One of them, who seemed to be in authority, called out, ‘Remember our plan!’

In the midst of the shouting and screaming, another nun ran to me and tipped a bottle of castor oil to my lips. I felt it rush down my throat. Next she dosed me from a bottle of black suspension. Then she pulled me outside, me crawling like an animal. In the garden, she hoisted me to my knees, gently holding my head as I alternately swigged on the powdered charcoal in water and vomited copiously into the grass.

‘Keep on, Doctor Santo,’ she said encouragingly. ‘I’m the pharmacist Margarita,’ she explained, ‘Marcella’s friend. One of the other pharmacy nuns told me about the froth on your mouth and how you seemed to be retching and shivering. I guessed the symptoms of monkshood poisoning. It’s one of the Vixen’s favourites. Her garden is full of
Aconitum nepallus
. And other poisons too – cardinal flower or
Lobelia cardinalis
, and crown of thorns,
Euphorbia milli
.