The Book of Human Skin (68 page)

Fasting women also took themselves beyond the authority of their families, their sister-superiors in the convent and male doctors by establishing that their relationship was directly with God. Claiming special honour in his sight, they felt empowered to overrule any human intermediary.

The female saints mentioned by Sor Loreta, and their painful food-oriented penances, are all as recorded in various hagiographies. In the early modern period, one of the main ways women could ‘prove’ an advanced spirituality was by demonstrating a supernatural amount of control over their own bodies, manifested in starvation, hyperactivity and flagellation. The cruelties these women practised on themselves from childhood or puberty more or less guaranteed that they would have short lives of constant pain: headaches, stomach aches, boils and difficulty in breathing. Mental disorientation and hallucinations were also likely symptoms.

Some female saints adulterated the food that they did consume with ashes or gall to ensure no sensual enjoyment. Some, like Angela of Foligno and Catalina of Siena, ate filth and pus, which they claimed tasted sweet to them. Angela tried even to eat the putrefied flesh of a leper that came away in the water when she was washing him (but choked it out). Caterina of Genoa boasted of eating lice as big as pearls. Several, including Teresa of Avila, deliberately induced vomiting. Perhaps the most extreme was Veronica Giuliani, who fasted assiduously. But if a plate of food arrived at her place in the refectory mysteriously spattered with cat vomit or adulterated with rodent parts or containing a whole leech – then Veronica would fall on it voraciously. On the orders of an abusive confessor, she also licked the spider webs and spiders off the walls of her cell.

In her magisterial work
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
(1987), Catherine Bynum explains food’s central role in both life and religious observance. Yet it was exclusively the women who devoted a great deal of their time to preparing or dealing with food. Even rich women at least supervised the production of food in the home. If they fell pregnant, they literally became food for the babies growing inside them. After giving birth, they fed babies from their breasts.

If food was women’s kingdom, sometimes it was also the only part of their lives over which they exercised authority. As Bynum points out, ‘human beings can renounce, or deny themselves, only that which they control . . . It was far more difficult to flee one’s family, to deny a father’s plans for one’s betrothal, or to refuse sexual relations to a husband than it was to stop eating.’

The onset of fasting was generally at puberty (though some, like Veronica Giuliani apparently, refused their mothers’ breasts on fast days even, in infancy). In mediaeval times, twelve or thirteen was the age when families began arranging husbands for their daughters. Some of the young would-be saints used fasting and other disfiguring methods to make themselves physically unmarriageable prospects. (For those who starve themselves do not merely become thin: they, like Sor Loreta, also develop foul breath, unpleasant symptoms of bloatedness, limp hair, dry and cracked skin. They also stop menstruating and are unable to conceive.) Others insisted on removing themselves from any possible contact with men, sometimes walling themselves up in small rooms.

Yet a rejection of burgeoning sexuality was surely not the fasters’ only motive. Nor does it seem likely that adolescent self-starving can be retroexplained satisfactorily by Freudian and post-Freudian theories about anorexia: those neatly summarized by Rudolph M. Bell in his excellent
Holy Anorexia
(1985) as ‘refusing an oral impregnation fantasy involving the father’s incorporated phallus’.

For many of these girls also rejected family life altogether, striking out for independence. Or they took refuge in a convent, where they would no longer be subject to domestic chores imposed by parents or husbands. Stories of some female saints show them in violent conflict with their parents, particularly their mothers. In extreme cases, mother–daughter rivalries would be conclusively settled by the death and sainthood of the younger woman.

Nuns, married to God, had different relationships with food from those of their sisters who were married to men. Firstly, fasting or eating special foods were part of a nun’s ritual and faith. The central, symbolically charged role of food would no doubt attract young girls to whom food – or the avoidance of it – had become something of an obsession. Some religious women devoted themselves to the poor, taking on motherly feeding responsibilities for them. And several female saints were credited with replicating or imitating Christ’s food-stretching miracles for the starving. Scarcely credible feats of energy were also attributed to these women in such pastoral activities. (Sor Loreta, born at Cuzco’s high altitude, would have been naturally endowed with a powerful heart and extremely large lungs.) Yet many saints who concerned themselves with feeding others paradoxically chose to starve themselves and deprived themselves of sleep, often in cruel and unusual ways. Benvenuta Bojani, for example, would bathe her eyes in vinegar to keep herself awake.

Given that dramatic food-orientated self-mutilations were really over by the mid-sixteenth century, I would argue that in the time when this novel is set, a propensity of young girls towards ecstatic visions and obsessive worship might also have been a sign of a lack of emotional maturity, fatally combined with a fierce pheromonal surge of competitiveness. And a convent could be a hothouse of all such feelings.

The end result of dramatic fasting, whether inside or outside the convent, was that the girls became dangerously thin. Some additionally flagellated themselves or invented other scarifying penances for their flesh, such as sleeping on bundles of thorns. The reason and desired outcome for all these tortures, according to the fasters, was to unite themselves with Christ, by sharing his torments. But there was another, more tangible result. Such dramatic self-torture drew attention to the sufferer. A saintly woman reduced to an asexual child’s proportions, perhaps mutilated at her own hand, might receive veneration for her piety.

There’s no doubt fasting captures the public’s imagination, now as then. Disempowered men have also used hunger-striking to make a point: the IRA and Gandhi, for example. Although fasting is no longer theologized in the Christian faith, it remains a way to draw attention – sometimes reproving, sometimes covertly admiring – to those who practise it. Today’s size-zero models and actresses are rewarded with massive publicity for their ability to abstain from food. The gossip columns also like to record which stick-like starlet partied ’til dawn: another echo of the saints who deprived themselves of sleep and yet showed frenetic energy.

There has been much discussion as to whether the chaste, self-harming, starving female saints were early sufferers from anorexia. However, mediaeval women were not under cultural pressure to look thin: emaciation was not thought beautiful. Dieting to reduce weight was unknown. In those days, breasts symbolized food and feeding: today the prevalent iconography is erotic.

True parallels cannot be drawn between the present and an age without anaesthesia of any kind, antisepsis or birth control. Today’s woman is offered products to make her thinner, to suppress any pain, to avoid conception. She is urged to eat a variety of aspirational food, such as (ironically) ‘extravirgin’ olive oil and organic products – whereas would-be saints like Santa Catalina desired to feed only from Christ, treating his wound as a breast, becoming joyfully inebriated with the blood that they drank.

Certainly, some of the female saints showed symptoms that we would today quickly label anorexia or bulimia. And it’s interesting to note that many of the fasters saw their not-eating as an illness – it was described so by the biographers of Colette of Corbie, Walburga, Joan the Meatless, Alpaïs of Cudot and Santa Catalina herself. There’s a superficial correspondence between saintly fasting and modern anorexia in the physical symptoms of starving: sleeplessness, dangerously low pulse, bad breath, light-headedness, tactile insensitivity, euphoria and depression. However, as Caroline Bynum explains, it is not possible to know if spiritually led fasts
caused
the symptoms we now know as anorectic, or whether fasting was a result of physical illness or any of the psychological manifestations that are currently ascribed to both the symptoms and the causes of anorexia: self-hatred, anger and masochism.

Sor Loreta’s feeling on marriage – that it would be like martyrdom by being tied to a rotting corpse – was actually proposed by the Spanish writer Pedro Galindo, in his
Excelencias de la castidad y virginidad
(1681).

Starving and chastity were not sure fast-tracks to sainthood. Failure to truly imitate Christ’s sufferings could result in a mystic being exposed as a fake. Fasters who retained the bloom of health were regarded with suspicion: perhaps the Devil was feeding them? Could it be that a familiar or incubus was providing devilish sustenance? Some non-eaters were accused of the sin of trying to commit suicide. Also taken into account against a supposed mystic were any bouts of mental illness, or a tendency to alienate people.

Some would-be saints countered accusations by insisting that they themselves were persecuted by demons. Veronica Giuliani was beset by head-slapping, flatulent demons who trashed her room and hissed like snakes. These demons were even said to impersonate Veronica, so that she was able to appear in two places at once.

Stephen Haliczer, in his fascinating book
Between Exaltation and Infamy
(2002), discusses the rise and fall of female Spanish mystics. During the Inquisition, a woman like Sor Loreta might have suffered one of two fates: to be allowed to martyr herself by penances, or to be denounced as a false saint. Interestingly, over seventy per cent of the women recognized for sanctity in Spain were of rich or noble families. Lower-class or poor women were more likely to be accused of being impostors.

Peru in the early nineteenth century

The death of Tupac Amaru II was as described. His revolt against colonial rule, however, was not nearly as simple as its depiction by Sor Loreta. Although the rebel claimed to speak for everyone who was not Spanish, the Inca nobility of Cuzco, for example, who were treated with relative respect by the Spaniards, did not support his pan-Andean ambitions. Meanwhile, Tupac Amaru II himself claimed the Spanish king’s support for his revolt.

Tupac Amaru II had renamed himself after an Incan ancestor beheaded in 1572. He was in reality a relatively prosperous member of the middle classes – not a peasant, as snobbish Sor Loreta sniffs. His letters and declarations speak of undoing unfair tax regimes and ridding Peru of bad government, but he never explicitly expressed a nationalist or independence agenda. The revolt did not end tidily with his death, but continued for several years.

While establishing Catholicism in Peru, the Spanish deliberately suppressed the Inca faith and the idolatry of mummies. The Spanish did what they could to break the old traditions, often humiliating the mummies in public, to make them unfit objects for worship.

By the late sixteenth century there would have been few mummies left to hunt out. The Indians had certainly learned to hide the ones that remained. So an eighteenth-century exposure of a mummy, as Sor Loreta describes, would have been a rarity.

Cuzco, the former Inca capital, is still rich in Inca relics and architecture. The foundations of many colonial buildings – secular and ecclesiastic – are indeed set atop monumental Inca stone blocks.

At that time, up to eighty ships a year sailed from Peru to Spain and the Old World, usually carrying at least some Jesuit’s bark. Silver from the famous Potosí mines would have been channelled out via Buenos Aires. Travel from the Old World to the New was often arduous. I used near-contemporary accounts for my itineraries. The French feminist Flora Tristan (1803–44) travelled to Arequipa from Bordeaux via Praia, Valparaiso and Islay. The inimitable Flora wouldn’t have been Flora without catastrophic contretemps to dramatize her account. So a journey that should have taken eighty days took her 133, due to storms and other setbacks. She found Islay closed because of typhoid. The modern port for boats is at nearby Matarani. From there the visitor travels the same land route that Flora (and Minguillo) took to Arequipa.

The New World offered many novelties to travellers from Europe. Charles Brand, in his
Journal of a Voyage to Peru
(1828), was shocked to see ladies in Callao wearing silver spurs, riding astride and smoking cigars. He was revolted by the one-eyed veils and tight skirts, observing that the women encased in the latter seemed like walking mummies. Minguillo, I was sure, would have had a different reaction.

The population of slaves or at least negros was very large in Peru. The viceroyalty recorded 89,000 slaves in 1812. These people would have been mostly third or fourth generation descendants of tribes kidnapped from Africa’s coasts and transported to America. The word ‘
sambo
’ (or
zambo
) was used in eighteenth-century Peru for anyone of pure or mixed African descent. There were various shades of
sambo
, from
negro
(the darkest) to
pardo
or
moreno
. Lima had the biggest population of
sambos
, but Arequipa too had its share of slaves.