The Book of Human Skin (69 page)

Of course, all the convent slaves were female.

Mountains

In the late eighteenth century, mountains became fashionable in Europe. The romantic spirit was very appreciative of the agreeable frisson of terror inspired by the wild, frightful aspects of glacial, craggy peaks.

Until then, there had been a tendency to think mountains somewhat pagan and rather unseemly. There are records of travellers deliberately closing the blinds of their carriages so as not to be contaminated with the sight of the alpine savagery. This extract from Canto III of Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
is typical of the outpourings of his time:

All that expands the spirit, yet appals,
Gather around these summits, as to show
How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below.

In Peru, mountains were sacred to the Incas: as such, they were not places of tourism. They were inescapable, and life-shaping, in more than just an environmental sense. The mountain-shaped black hats so despised by Minguillo are still worn by the Peruvians and are known as
collahuas
. The flatter broad-brimmed hats are known as
cabanas
. The suggestive shape of the mountain was in earlier times mimicked by the Peruvians in a very unusual form of body-sculpting. Using stones bound tightly with fabric to the sides of the head, they stretched the skulls of certain people from infancy in order to create an elongated cranium that resembled a mountain.

Of course, mountains have always been a popular site for convents and monasteries too. As Hamish Gilfeather observed, there has been a long tradition of taking young girls up mountains to sacrifice them, in one way or another. The Museo Santuarios Andinos in Arequipa hosts the body of a young girl christened Juanita, who was found frozen on the slopes of Mount Ampato. The girl was between twelve and fourteen when she died, around 1440. Scientists have established that she fasted one day before her death, which was due to a violent blow to the head. It is believed that she was taken up the mountain and sacrificed to the mountain god Apus, rather than left to starve to death as Sor Loreta’s servant relates.

There was a preserved Peruvian woman on show at Savile House in London in 1828, as described by Hamish Gilfeather.

The white city of Arequipa

Beautiful, elegant Arequipa is a delectable surprise to the modern traveller, who might not expect to find a baroque square finer than San Marco in Venice, 7,500 feet above sea level and eighty miles from the ocean, surrounded by snow-topped volcanoes and yet verdant with flowers and palm trees.

At the time this novel is set, Arequipa was a two- or three-day journey from the port of Islay. Overland it was six days from Puno on Lake Titicaca, and ten days from Cuzco. In this period, the population of the city would have numbered something less than 30,000 people. Venice’s population was many multiples of that.

The name does mean ‘Yes, stay!’ in the local Quechua dialect. The colonial city was founded by García Manuel de Carvajal, a lieutenant of the Spanish
conquistador
Francisco Pizarro, on August 15th 1540.

When Cuzco revolted against the Spanish in 1814, there was some support from the Arequipans of the lower classes. The leader, Mateo Pumacahua, briefly occupied Arequipa. The intendant, José Gabriel Moscoso, was executed for failing to support the rebel cause. By this time it was not just the Indians who were no longer prepared to put up with a system, whereby the best of everything was claimed by the ‘white’ Spanish settlers and those of mixed blood were deprived of power and status: all the different castes and creeds were ready for a change, including many of the
criollos
, prosperous Spanish-blood citizens born in Peru, whose ambitions had been persistently thwarted over the centuries. Others were terrified of losing the stability that Spain’s protection brought: the Tupac Amaru revolt had shown what bloodshed might occur in the event of Spain losing control. In the end it was non-Peruvians who secured independence for the nation: Simón Bolívar and his general San Martín. By 1821, three years after the close of this novel, Peru was declared an independent nation.

One of the best accounts of the town in this period comes from Flora Tristan, whose father was from Arequipa. By the time she arrived in Peru, the country had been independent for over a decade. Flora Tristan’s account of Arequipa is flavoured with her personal issues. She had gone there to claim her father’s inheritance from her uncle, and was disappointed in that. Her father’s brother was too canny for her. He was in fact the wealthy Juan Pío de Tristán y Moscoso mentioned in this novel. He served as intendant between 1814 and 1817 in Arequipa, after the murder of José Gabriel Moscoso. Given his wily ways with Flora, I felt it reasonable to assume that he would be expert in matters of wills.

Flora took a somewhat chary, superior attitude towards Arequipa, always comparing it rather unfavourably to Paris. She admitted to the beauty of the town, and recorded many details like the gutters that ran down the centre of the streets. She also commented that the women of the town barely walked because they had a superstition that it would make their feet larger. The only place that truly charmed Flora was the convent of Santa Catalina, where she stayed for some time, and where she was greeted with delight by the nuns, just as Marcella is in this book.

The Arequipan writer and politician Mario Vargas Llosa novelized Flora’s life, and that of her grandson, the painter Paul Gauguin, in
El paraíso en la otra esquina
(2003). Vargas Llosa has described the city of his birth as being well known for its ‘clerical and religious spirit, its lawyers and volcanoes, its clear sky . . .’ Indeed, in Arequipa there is sunshine at least 360 days a year. But Vargas Llosa also admits to a certain kind of personality ‘disorder’ among the locals, who suffer from
la nevada
, or ‘snowfall’ – a bad mood brought on during the few days when the snow in the mountains sends black clouds over the town. The cloudiness, allied to an increase in static electricity, can make Arequipans behave wildly, broodily or violently. It usually happens in February, March or April. The writer also claims that his townspeople have always been the butt of jokes by other Peruvians: they are seen as arrogant and even mad. Vargas Llosa diagnoses these criticisms as ‘the result of jealousy’, citing the marvels of the town’s architecture, rich history and naturally beautiful setting.

Earthquakes have changed the landscape of Arequipa several times. The damage of the 1784 quake is still visible in the convent of Santa Catalina. There were serious quakes in 1958, 1960 and 2001. The last caused the loss of one of the magnificent cathedral’s twin towers. It has now been restored.

A note regarding Arequipa’s cemeteries: in the early 1800s a Bourbon decree prescribed that tombs should no longer be inside church buildings and that citizens should be buried in land on the outskirts of the city – for example in the Miraflores cemetery, situated on a pampa, which is now a housing estate with shops. Some rich citizens continued to bury their dead stone tombs inside the churches, and in small cemeteries behind them: I have claimed this right for Fernando Fasan senior.

Arequipa was granted World Heritage status in 2000. Visitors can see a number of houses belonging to rich families – including the Tristán and Goyeneche dynasties. The Casa Fasan is of course invented.

The convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa

When the Spanish
conquistadores
colonized the New World, they were quick to re-create the institutions of the Old World there. Among the earliest institutions were churches, and with those came monasteries and convents.

The Dominicans were the first to bring the Catholic religion to Arequipa. The Jesuits followed. Santa Catalina was founded in 1579 by a rich widow, María de Guzmán. The convent thrived, and soon occupied two city blocks. Inside its golden walls wind streets and cloisters in vivid colours, as described in the novel: yet another surprise for the modern traveller.

Like all the convents in Peru, Santa Catalina housed the daughters of the conquering Spanish, and performed the same social function as convents in Europe – solving the problem of permanent protection for daughters for whom acceptable husbands could not be found, or for whom secular dowries would be too expensive. The convents also accommodated laywomen, often wealthy widows, who wished to live the monastic existence without taking vows, and who paid for the protection of the convent walls, agreeing to respect its rules of behaviour. Girl boarders were sent to convents to be taught by the nuns. Given that most of the nuns came from rich families, the young women were accustomed to servants: these were supplied inside the convent too. Slaves were often part of the dowry paid to the Church for the admittance of a novice. The noble novices usually progressed to being ‘choir nuns’ or ‘professed nuns’. At this point they adopted black veils to symbolize the fact that they were dead to the world, and that the world was dead to them. There was a second echelon of ‘
velo blanco
’ or white-veiled nuns, who were often from a lower social class, or of mixed blood. They undertook the humbler duties of the convent, and could not rise to high office.

I am indebted for the descriptions of monastic life at Arequipa to the excellent book
Santa Catalina, el monasterio de Arequipa
(2005), edited by Cecilia Raffo, Isabel Olivares and Alonso Ruiz Rosas, and to Isabel and Carmen Olivares personally for sparing the time to talk to me about the convent’s history and answer my many questions.

Marcella’s description of the daily routine of the nuns is based on a letter written by the
priora
Sor Paula Francisca del Tránsito to Bishop Chávez de la Rosa on April 1st 1791, which is published in the above book. The regime at Santa Catalina was kind, and nuns had a certain amount of freedom in their choice of mystic path to heaven. A series of paintings of Santa Catalina might inspire them to mortify their bodies with prolonged fasts and scourging, and to deprive themselves of sleep. Equally, they might choose to live comfortably in their luxurious surroundings.

Arequipa’s Santa Catalina, like most convents, offered able and active women professional prospects that were not available to their sisters outside in the world, where marriage remained the only acceptable career for the high-born. At Santa Catalina the following positions could be achieved by ambitious nuns:
priora
, her assistant the
vicaria
, mistress of the laywomen, mistress of the novices, choir mistress, sacristan, gatekeeper, grate-keeper, treasurer, procuress (of goods), chief nurse, pharmacist, wardrobe mistress and secretary. A woman with a competitive streak might possibly turn into a bully or a fanatic like Sor Loreta: closed convent society might shelter cruelty with privacy, as in Diderot’s novel.

There is no record of a nun like Sor Loreta at Santa Catalina, but Luis Martín, in his
Daughters of the Conquistadores
(1983), recounts an episode of a homicidal Peruvian nun in the seventeenth century. At the convent of La Encarnación in Lima, a fiery and unstable nun called Doña Ana de Frías stabbed a fellow nun to death, and wounded another. The Pope himself intervened and she was judged mentally unfit. Condemned to six years in the prison cell of the nunnery, she died before her sentence was completed.

Marcella’s escape is based on that of the nun Dominga Gutiérrez Cossío in 1831, not from Santa Catalina, but from the nearby convent of Santa Teresa, inhabited by the Discalced Carmelites. This is vividly described by Flora Tristan in
Peregrinations of a Pariah
(1838), although Flora alters the story – for example, saying that Dominga (a cousin of hers) was incarcerated at the very severe convent of Santa Rosa. This is possibly because Flora visited Santa Rosa herself and was able to conjure a moving description of its austerities. Compared to Santa Catalina’s free-form beauty and sense of personal freedom, Santa Rosa indeed seemed a cold prison, with the nuns sleeping in black-curtained tombs in dormitories, and social snobbery rampant.

With the kind and enthusiastic help of Santa Catalina’s excellent guide, Laura Salazar García, I identified a route by which Marcella might have conducted her escape from the cell we chose as hers. Today there are several entrances to the convent, each with an inner courtyard of ‘debatable land’, where men might enter to make deliveries without actually penetrating convent grounds. Both these areas feature the ‘
torneras
’ – two-tiered wheels on which money and goods were brought into the convent without ocular contact.

The annals of Santa Catalina do include one anecdote of an escaped nun. She left the convent through a dry irrigation channel – out of curiosity, to have a look around the town. When she tried to return she found that the channel was full of water. She went to the bishop. He came to Santa Catalina and said that he had heard that a nun had escaped. He ordered all the nuns into their cells, where they had to stay with the doors shut. The escapee was brought back and told to do the same. The bishop then told the
priora
that everyone was accounted for and that the story of the escaped nun was a false rumour.