The Book of Human Skin (66 page)

Does the Reader think me simple?

Who taught the artist the art of epistolary murder by Small-Pox scab?

Who taught
him
the Spanish that got him to Arequipa?

Who made sure that the book reached my very hands?

And who had hoarded and finally dragged into the light the will that has now wrenched my adored Palazzo Espagnol out of my bedraggled grasp?

And in whose name did all the foregoing company conduct their outrages upon me?

Once, many chapters back, I totted up the list of my enemies and lamented the weak showing. I do so again, with the same dismal result augmented only in numbers – a female artist, a Scottish trader in little frilly nothings, a Spanish madam who, I now discover, had supplementary skills in language instruction.A valet who stole wills. Not very impressive, is it? Yet they somehow contrived to pitch their petty little hatreds and their small talents together, in order to bring down the Colossus.

It eats inches out of my heart by the hour – that if my enemies are shamefully pathetic, my downfall’s also freighted with the dead weight of allies distinguished only by their incompetence. The ugly
vicaria
planned to do me the unconscious favour of killing my sister, and yet her fanatical stupidity left her exposed. Now she is shut up for murder.They say that in her cell they found hidden the heart and tongue of two different bishops, stolen from the convent’s treasury, among piles of damp empty paper that she claimed was ‘The Life of a Great Saint penned by a Forthcoming Angel’. And that when she was confronted with her theft, she crucified her own tongue with two twigs tied by pieces of cotton unpicked from a flour sack.

The Spanish madam in Cannaregio has been to the magistrates with tales repeated by whores with whom I passed delirious minutes many years ago. I totally repudiate all charges against me in the matter of Riva Fasan, Conte Piero Zen of facetious memory and even my wife Amalia, who remains stubbornly alive. (Yesterday evening I received a missive from Venice requesting my attendance to answer charges on those matters, as well as the kidnap and false incarceration of my sister. Never has Valparaiso looked so beautiful as this morning.)

My own fat quack, who should have been making me rich in Venice – doubly important now that the old will has been dragged into the light – has spilled the secret of the formula for ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’, staking it in a card game, his fatal weakness. Now he too languishes in prison in Venice – and worse, he’s gone down with
my
reputation firmly nailed to his concoction. That ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ contains not the weeping of nuns but instead deadly acetate of white lead is a fact known universally now and likely to stay
fresh in the public’s memory for some time. My quack’s alembic and our bottles have been pitched into the Grand Canal by servants preparing the Palazzo Espagnol for its returning mistress and her circus retinue. My wife’s already deserted. My mother and my daughters shall probably die of shock, which would be convenient, as they would be a sorry drain on my depleted purse just now. More likely, they shall be put out on the street.

For now I am actually, literally, miserably poor, exsanguinated by greedy booksellers, all blood-feeders on what’s left of my fortune. My post consists only of letters from creditors wishing to draw attention to enclosed accounts which have no doubt escaped my attention, and who shall be glad if I can favour them with settlement at my earliest convenience and oblige etcetera and so forth.

Yet how my desires effloresce even as my prospects congeal!

My heart is ripped when I think on all the items I can no longer afford, particularly the latest English novelty,
Frankenstein
, written by the woman of the English poet Shelley. She is called Mary. One of her mother’s books, some nonsense about the rights of ladies, is already in my collection bound in a bit of a lady. How apposite that the strident bluestocking’s own flesh should join her there on my bookshelf! From what I hear, this
Frankenstein
, about an evil creature brought to life from a corpse, cries out to be covered in human skin and added to my collection – and what will happen to
that
when Marcella returns, and the little doctor Santo takes possession of my library? At least Tupac Amaru, my first and best beloved, lives with me in this exile, which is for him, of course, a kind of homecoming.

I won’t embarrass myself by thanking the Reader now for His continued attendance. We both know that I am better than that. Yet I have one last morsel for Him to chew on before I close.

I invite the Reader to place His face within the glimpse of a mirror. I challenge Him now:
Tell me that you did not love what I wrote
.

‘Gentle Reader . . .’ coaxes the lady novelist, flatteringly.
My
Reader’s interest was not fattened and flavoured on milky pap like that! Do you see any Gentle Readers around here? Your actual Gentle Reader would have thrown down my words in disgust in the early minutes of perusal.

When you started to read this tale, you took into your home a cur dog from the street, enjoying his fangs bared, riding on his power when he made little girls cry just to look at him.You pretended you were shocked by me. You loved to be shocked and you craved more. Do not tell me you did not flick through the pages, eager to be revolted.And do not tell me that I failed to provide a vividness to console you for the pale commonplace of your own real life.

Did I not take you, as promised, on a long walk in the dark, and did you not choose me as your guide, by reading on? Is not the act of reading a congress as intimate as any carried on between lovers: with only these two parties, the Reader and the Writer, behind the closed doors of the binding, alone and raptly conjoined? You must own how deeply I burrowed my way into your affections with my picturesque atrocities, because you were first entertained by them, and then embraced them.

And so, Dear Reader, my crimes became yours.

The Reprobate Reader would like some conclusive remarks, I am sure, and I make haste to satisfy Him.

I would quote from the wise, that is, from the Venetians who once had wit enough to manufacture such sayings:
Dio ha mandà l’om per castigar l’om
.

God created man to shame man.

This is all I designed to say in this tale. Shall we now declare a truce in this war of compliments?

What? What’s that? The Reader has more questions? That’s fighting talk!

The Reader has but to wait.The previous issue of this book having been so rapidly exhausted, the author wishes to inform the Nobility, Gentry and Public generally that he is now at work on a new edition, all revisions calculated to enhance its value and utility. Early each morning, before the scorpions are stirring, I scratch out a little more of the tale.

I know this information is going to be uncomfortable for you.

Historical Notes

The Fasan family and other characters

The noble Fasan family of Venice is this author’s invention, as much as Minguillo’s use of the title ‘
Conte
’, not infrequently assumed on spurious grounds by Italian patricians.

A purely Venetian family would not have been allowed to own silver mines in Peru, as Spanish colonial trade policies were notably restrictive. But I have taken the liberty of presuming that the Spanish blood of my Fasan family would have facilitated trade in Peru, even if through local
factores
, or agents. Peru was a rich source of silver, particularly from the mines of Potosí, where the precious metal was first discovered as far back as 1547. However, by the eighteenth century Mexico was proving even more productive.

The invented characters: Gianni, Cristina, Anna, Amalia, Santo, Piero Zen, Marcella, Minguillo, Donata and Fernando Fasan, Hamish Gilfeather, Beatriz Villafuerte and her son, Sor Loreta, Rafaela, Josefa and the other servants and slaves of Santa Catalina. However, the names of the sisters recited by Sor Loreta (when she dismisses them from Marcella’s cell) are those of nuns who really were at the convent of Santa Catalina in this period. For these beautiful names, I am indebted to the Arequipan historian Dante Zegarra.

Cecilia Cornaro has appeared in two previous novels of mine,
Carnevale
and
The Remedy
. In this one, she is true to her invented life: a feisty painter of portraits who endured a painful love affair with Lord Byron after a joyous one with Casanova.

Padre Portalupi and the Rossini-loving
priora
were real people, though their actual words are invented. A Pío Tristán really was one of the richest and most influential citizens of Arequipa during the time when this novel is set. The unfortunate Bishop Chávez de la Rosa was also a real historical character, as was his successor. M. Dominga Somocursio’s name appears above the cell I chose for Marcella but her biography is invented.

One Matteo Casal did indeed attempt to crucify himself in Venice in the early 1800s.

Venetian curiosities

The Palazzo Espagnol does not exist, under that name at least. There is an exquisite little Palazzo Contarini-Fasan on the Grand Canal opposite the church of Santa Maria della Salute. The Palazzo Contarini Corfù has a tower rather like the one described in this book and rambles in rather the same way as the Palazzo Espagnol.

The Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo was commissioned in 1740 to paint Santa Catalina of Siena and Santa Rosa of Lima, together with Sant’ Agnese of Montepulciano, at the church of Santa Maria del Rosario (known as ‘Gesuati’) on the Zattere, finishing the work in 1748. In the painting, the three saints are shown worshipping the baby Jesus as the Virgin Mary appears to them.

Nuns and convents

It is true that many of Venice’s nuns were forced into convents against their will, installed there for the sake of financial expediency (a nun’s dowry was a fraction of what was required for a noble match). Not surprisingly, these unwilling nuns were sometimes inclined to licentious behaviour. The walls of some Venetian convents were notoriously permeable for nuns who wished to conduct romances. Sor Loreta correctly cites the case of the
abate
Galogero, who was dismissed from the convent of Santa Chiara in 1758 for issuing the nuns with duplicate keys to the gate.

Not all nuns were unwilling. Marriage to a mortal man at the time of this story could turn even a noblewoman into a kind of serf. Some women genuinely preferred to take the veil than subject themselves to the domination of a husband. Parents, particularly in the more dangerous outposts of the Catholic world, might sincerely believe the convent to be a safe repository for daughters spinstered by a scarcity of suitable men. And some women, of course, entered convents with a true vocation; some even with a religious fervour.

The Nun
, a remarkable novella by Denis Diderot (1713–84), tells the story of Suzanne Simonin, a strong-minded girl forcibly incarcerated in a series of convents and subjected to sadistic treatment and sexual abuse.

Suzanne is trampled by the other nuns as they come out of church – just as Sor Loreta craves to be at the end of this book.

The Nun
was typical of a body of literature that captured the public’s imagination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sensationalizing the cruelty of powerful clerics and the essential unhealthiness of one-sex confinement. Diderot’s book, published in 1796, is a searing indictment not of the Catholic religion – for Suzanne remains devout throughout – but of the system of confining women in segregated communities where power was easily corrupted and the weak and innocent were especially vulnerable. Suzanne asserts: ‘It is a certain fact, Sir, that out of every hundred nuns who die before fifty there are exactly a hundred damned, and that taking no account of the ones who in the meantime lose their reason, get feeble-minded or go raving mad.’

What happened to the nuns when Napoleon disbanded the convents of Europe

In the early stages of the French Revolution, it became fashionable to think of nuns as the victims of oppression. Later, the nuns and monks were regarded with suspicion as forces of conservatism and potential royalists.

For information about the demonization and executions of nuns in France I am indebted to Mita Choudhury’s excellent book
Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture
(2004).

There were at least several thousand nuns in Venice by the time Napoleon began to disband the city’s convents in 1806. Records show that dowries totalling three million ducats had been paid into the Venetian convents during the second half of the eighteenth century alone.

That bounty was probably not far from Napoleon’s mind when he went to war against Venice’s religious institutions. By 1810 he had closed thirty-two of the forty parish churches, closely followed by the convents and monasteries, confiscating their buildings and turning them into barracks, hospitals, warehouses and museums. Some churches and convents were pulled down. Many more had their fates sealed by Napoleon, for the abandoned ecclesiastical edifices soon degraded into an irreparable state, and were later demolished. The Austrians continued with the process of militarizing the lagoon’s religious architecture or letting it rot away. It was only in 1965, when the Italian army finally gave up its hold on the lagoon islands, that it was possible to see what a tragic and far-reaching disaster Napoleon had visited on the built environment of Venice.