The Book of Human Skin (6 page)

It felt as if all our blood ud flowed out o the cracks in the walls of the Palazzo Espagnol, for we was left weak and wondering, like the babiest kittens isn’t it.

Minguillo Fasan

As I remarked latterly, the Reader has now embarked upon a long walk in the dark with this voice of mine. Given that He’ll not be hearing from the other, oblivious protagonists of this tale, I must do the necessary to keep Him by my side.

Yet not as some voices do, laying a little white hand on the Reader’s heart and trembling its wet eyelashes: the Chivalrous Reader must read on, just as a Knight must save his Lady! There’s no pleasing everyone. One Reader loves the confidential whisper; it makes Him feel magnificent as a confessor in his black booth. Another fixes His lectatory mandibles upon some voyeur’s observations of the more interesting lives of others. Then there’s the bird’s-eye view, the writer serving as invisible air beneath the Reader’s soaring wings. Wheedling and flattery are popular. So is a comical, ranting tone.

What? What’s that? The Reader requests that I cease holding up long-winded and unflattering mirrors? Insists I provide instead a sensible account of my maturing childhood, with explanations tending to subsequent events etcetera and so forth?

Pazienza
. I would not willingly infuriate, but there’s little of note to tell. My sister Riva’s death made everyone long-nosed as parsnips for a while.That was tedious, as treats and outings were thin upon the ground.The Venetian Republic played out its last days of gold-leafed and spun-sugar magnificence. The oil portraits of a girl artist called Cecilia Cornaro became our city’s sole object of trading value. Speaking of faces, my own countenance began
to take on the features that would carry it through to the end of this story, if you can call it that.

The stairs of the Palazzo Espagnol grew smaller; I became familiar with the servants’ knees, thighs, bellies and eventually their faces, not that anyone turned theirs my way voluntarily. I attended briefly at an academy for young noblemen. I was sent back. Call that another story. I submitted to a priest’s tutoring at home. The Reader will be gratified to know that my expensive education was not wasted on me. I had a gift for languages, as He knows already. I also grew into a great lover of books, though my tastes were most particular and possibly a little strong for the stomach of the Fastidious Reader.

When I say that I loved books, I mean that I loved not just the souls of my books but their bodies. Even before I could read, I was a fanatic for bindings, affectioned to the intimate protection and adornment jointly embodied in their snug fittings. I adored the shapeliness and firmness of books. I enjoyed their intransigent corners, their rich smells and the way they opened and lay down flat in front of me on the merest suggestion of my fingers.Then, when I learned to read, I was happy in a whole new way: in a house where everyone avoided me, the books in our library exposed their tender insides and submitted to my attentions whenever and however I wanted.

Call it a liking that I also nourished for Cristina, the plump little daughter of our former loose-legged cook. (Does the Reader not think it shows a nice side of my nature, to be attached to a human skin that was not attached to my own body? I am sure I hope so myself.)

I took my first kiss from the said Cristina, as a prelude to easing the virginity off the two of us. She spat and shook me off, ‘You are not nice, Minguillo.’

‘What am I then?’ I enquired, my hand warm and busy down her bodice.

‘You are . . . the other thing,’ she stammered.

Her little brother’s employment, I mentioned, hung in the balance.They were bastard orphans, the pair of them, and she grasped the thing directly. But she screamed when I twisted a little bud of a nipple to see if it would come off. I had always wondered. My researches were interrupted by the arrival of the nightsoilman. After that I did not find the cook’s daughter alone again until – another episode of this account, some months later.

What? It is provoking to hint in this way? Really, I despair of the Reader who still insists on a story delivered in neat pellets like a rosary. He must learn to bear with the vagaries of a tale told the way a cat coughs, unexpectedly, and learn to like it.

My childhood withered. I suppose I was in my way content. Even though my mother avoided me and my father regarded me as he would the scab of a Small-Pox sore – with fear and distaste – I was the only son of that great house so I strode about it masterfully, slamming doors with my head held high. I celebrated my twelfth birthday (for no one else did) with a solitary re-enactment of recent events in France, deploying some chickens to interpret the roles of the French King and Queen, and a hatchet on a string to simulate
la belle dame
Madame Guillotine.

Then occurred a thing I had not seen coming. After all those years my mother was suddenly fat with child, begotten, the Reader may suppose, during one of my father’s increasingly rare appearances. I watched her breasts grow lumpen with the milk. Rankling memories arose, of how she had decided to withhold those breasts from my own teeth. For six months I observed them fill and droop inside her clothes.

Another child in the house? I did not think so, I really did not.

Sor Loreta

There was a tradition at Santa Catalina that on Good Friday three nuns would be fastened to the crosses in
el santuario
as a tribute to what Our Lord suffered on our behalf. It was a great honour to be chosen for this duty, and I was diligent in my efforts to make sure that I would be among the three for my first Holy Week at the convent.

I tried so hard to be worthy of this honour that I involuntarily caused a miracle. Just like Santa Rosa, I gazed for hours with love on a painting of Christ’s Passion in the church. Eventually the face of Our Lord began to look misty, and then damp, so that perspiration appeared on His brow and cheeks. I
called loudly for witnesses and the
priora
came running. However, the woman was unable to see the miracle I had wrought.

‘Sor Loreta,’ she sighed, ‘the painting is perfectly dry.’

She added, ‘But I’ll not deny you’ve the power to make a body’s flesh creep. I declare I feel quite clammy and uncomfortable myself when I look at you.’

I was highly gratified, for exactly in this way had the naysayers mocked the very same miracle when it was performed by Santa Rosa herself.

But after the incident with the painting, I was denied the privilege of standing on the cross for Our Lord that Easter. Naturally Sor Andreola was chosen, and she selected her two most slavish followers to join her.

Meanwhile, it pleased God to test me and to send upon me mischievous jokes and insults, like a living worm in my bread and a black cat left locked up in my cell.

Four years went by in this way. I was never chosen for the Good Friday cross. My sufferings were always made more painful by the sight of nuns offering acts of veneration to Sor Andreola wherever she walked. Some even profanely fell to their knees, kissing the ground where she had passed.

But at that time, it being 1788, God sent a pious man at last to Arequipa, and I was convinced that he would prove my salvation, by which I mean the salvation of the sinful convent of Santa Catalina. Bishop Pedro José Chávez de la Rosa had come all the way from Spain to lay waste to the lax morals of Arequipa. He started immediately at our convent.

Like any good Christian, he was shocked at the luxurious cells of the rich nuns, who used their
peculios
, their private allowances, to surround themselves with comforts, including slaves and servants. My
peculios
, of course, I put into the missionary-box: I refused to buy myself treats while there were heathens in the world without Bibles of their own. I preferred to use the serving nuns for my menial work rather than to own a slave. The only ornaments in
my
cell were a small human skull and a Baby Jesus rendered in pure plaster.

The Bishop saw that the nuns’ slaves and servants were a vice, being the eyes and ears and purses of the nuns, going forth on to the streets at will, and bringing back the taint of the outside world on their tongues and in their shopping baskets. It was as if the convent walls did not exist for those girls. Bishop Chávez de la Rosa was also dismayed to see the private kitchens of the rich nuns and the costly delicacies that were served to them on damask cloths set with silver plates while they lolled on their cut-velvet cushions like courtesans in a seraglio. He ordered all the nuns to return to the godly
simplicity of communal dining. He closed the bakery that produced the opulent bread and
polvorón
cakes for which the convent was famous.

Now I of course valued the world as something merely worthless and I had never been one tiny part jealous to see the sisters flaunting their jewelled silver crosses and Sèvres teacups. Nor had I envied them their slaves, or their pernicious affection for each other, shown in wanton kisses and hugs. But I agreed wholeheartedly with Bishop Chávez de la Rosa that their wicked ways must be put to an end. Therefore I wanted to make sure that he was fully informed of the many additional sins that the nuns were trying to conceal from him.

Those days that the Bishop made his investigations among us, I spent prostrate in prayer upon the icy stone floor of the church. He was obliged to step over my suffering form several times on his way to the altar. And so my own piety, the only true faith in the whole convent of Santa Catalina, was finally noticed by Bishop Chávez de la Rosa.

‘What is your name, child?’ he asked me.

I kept my face down on the floor. I did not wish him to be distracted by it. ‘I am no one,
Ilustrísimo
,’ I declared. ‘I am a humble messenger.’

With my head muffled by stone, I recounted all the secret wrongdoings of the light nuns and the
priora
. I told him of my deeds of penance, my fasting, and what I had suffered in the way of scorn. I left out no detail.

He knelt down beside me and listened in silence. Then he picked up one of my wrists and turned it over in his hand.

‘Poor child,’ he pronounced finally, rising to his feet. ‘We must see what can be done for you.’

By this, I naturally understood that I would shortly rise to a position of great authority, and preside over all those sinful ones who had sought to bring me down.

Gianni delle Boccole

Until he had eleven year, if ye dint know him intimid, twere jist possible, with yer head on one side n yer fingers crosst, to think on Minguillo as a tearing-way kind ovva lad, with a morbid maginashon n a bad temper.

He dint grow any prettier. Swear that the eyes lookt closer to by the year and the mouth on im were like summing pulled in on a hook with mackerel guts. The skin stretcht oer his face so ye could see the scull underneath, trying to affright ye, ugly as a gargle, Great Toad ovva God!

At eleven he grewed the worst crop o pimples as ever bedivilled a humane skin. The repungent kind what waxes yellow, then black, what run around in colonies, settling n spreding there seed, finely digging pits in the face. Twere as if his wickedness got up evry night while he lay sleeping and writed more of his gilt on that face o his.

And that were the year that he were found tyin up my poor sister Cristina in the
limonaia
. He ud made a little wooden cross for her, and she were bound hand n foot like Jesus pon it. There were an apple in her mouth. He, in cool blood, were sharpening the knife on a grindstone. Thank the Lord. On account of as it were the shrieks n sparks o the knife what caused a passin footman to investigerate.

The Papà Fernando Fasan were of natural course way in Arequipa agin. I rusht down to the
limonaia
to see my Cristina trusst up and the fish-gutting knife a-glinting in Minguillo’s hand. Twere me that restled the thing out o his fist. He dint nowise wunt to give it up, and the look he give me burnt into the back of my brain. At the last minute he twisted the blade so it went deep into my hand. None o t’other servants dared to help me. The knife stood there in the fat o my palm, uprite like a soldier.

Dint I ache to nuck im one up the bracket jist then? But Minguillo were the young Master, he were intitled. He dint bash an eyelid. I caught his eye and quickly turned back into my idiot-drooling self, the abstruse one that twere safest to be round him.

‘Don’t pertain to me,’ he dekklared, swaggering oft. All the servants, there blood up, sayed slurs at him like they would niver ornery dare, tho naturally they waited till he were almost out o hearing.

Cristina finely spat the apple out o her mouth and begun to wail at the blood squirting out o my wound.

Anna stitched n dressed my hand, using a burned needle n a clean cloth, so there were no longlastin damidge. Except that wheniver after I saw the young Master, a stab o pain went through my palm. Sumtimes it doed that too, when he wernt there, but were up to evil elsewheres. And Cristina were taken away by kind Piero Zen, my Mistress Donata Fasan’s assistant husband, to live n work in his homonymouse
palazzo
. He knew twere not safe for her no more at the Palazzo Espagnol. Anna n I messed her sorely. That were one more peace of good gone out of all our lives on count of Minguillo Fasan.

My Mistress were in her fifth month so she were spared the story o the croosyfied Cristina. For Conte Piero were worrit it mite bring on the birthing pains too early isn’t it.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

Skin’s drama will usually make its first eruption in early adolescence.

I feel a special compassion for my pimpled patients, who often come to me at that tender age when appearance is all, and all is blighted. They feel they are dying, not of disease, but shame. For the person whose face is marked in ignominy must always be conscious of the disgust of those with whom he stands at close quarters. At best, his companions pity the distempered blood they read on the raddled skin; at worst, they wonder what moral corruption is embossed in the cutaneous putrescence.