The Book of Human Skin

  Rosita answered pertly, ‘We already knew that he shot you and crippled you. That he had locked you up in a madhouse. And that the madhouse would not have you, as you were patently not mad, so he sent you here, hoping you would die on the way. But we did not know about your Santo until you told us.’

  ‘How . . . ?’

  ‘There was a letter. An anonymous, illiterate letter that was sent to the priora. In Italian, but a rough kind.’

  Rafaela reminded me, ‘Rosita has Italian, because of the Rossini.’

  Rosita herself took up the story, ‘I was waiting in the oficina to play the pianoforte. The priora was delayed. The letter was right in front of me. Where was I to put my eyes? Can you guess who wrote it?’

  I could.

  ‘The writer – he did not think to give an address or a name so the priora could write back to him. He seemed a dear creature, and most certainly he loved you like his own child. But he was upset and disorganized. Or perhaps he was frightened of discovery?’

  ‘With reason.’

  ‘But now Fernando can write to him!’

  It was as if someone had led me to a well, and that well went right through the earth to the other side, where Venice lay shimmering.

  I brought the outlines of my feet to Fernando as he asked. The priora allowed me to pass the sheets of paper through the grate. Waiving the normal rules, she also permitted my brother to return just two days later. Through the grate, he showed me a pair of boots. The one that would house my club foot, he explained, had been built up in the heel, a fact subtly disguised by the leatherwork. The other would support my wasted leg.

  ‘I believe that these will help you to walk,’ Fernando said as he demonstrated his work. ‘Please try them for a few days and then bring them back to me for any adjustment that might be needed. It usually takes several fittings to perfect such boots.’

  The priora nodded, and Fernando fed the boots through the torneras one by one. Back in my room I discovered that the boots were lined with paper. When I pulled it out, I saw words addressed to myself. Fernando had written, ‘I hope very much that the boots fit you, dear sister, but it would be more useful if they did not. For then you can bring them back to me. I, in turn, shall hope to find something inside of interest . . .’

  I pulled the boots on and took an experimental step. Fernando was a genius! My limp was perforce eliminated. I ran across the room and flung my crutch through the door to the courtyard. Josefa emerged from the kitchen with a questioning face, and then, when I read the letter out to her, she snapped her fingers with joy. She ran out to retrieve the crutch, and handed it to me: ‘Now you must pretend limp.’

  Three days later I was back at the locutorio, crutch under my arm, shaking my head and handing one boot over to Fernando in the dim light of the alabaster window.

  ‘I need you to look inside, brother,’ I tried to sound plaintive. ‘There is a portion that jars the tender arch of my foot in there. Could I trouble you to scrape away a little at what is inside?’

  My letters and my loving sketch of him and his mother crackled audibly as Fernando took the boot in his hand with a smile.

  ‘My love to your Mamma,’ I said softly.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Then I did hear summing. A letter for me come from, believe this! – the half-brother in Arequipa!

  He hisself finely writed me, the boy, Fernando. Save us, but een his handwritin were zackly like his father’s. His letter were full o sweet feckshon. And his Italian were that good, with many little words n turns of frase that was jist like my old Master Fernando Fasan.

  ‘I have not yet met you, dear Gianni, but I feel that you are one of us,’ this new Fernando Fasan writed.

  My old Master must of taught his Peruvian son our tong. In doing that, he had give him more time than he ever give Minguillo. I blessed my old Master’s good judgingment. He knowed his Venetian son to be a bad lot. He knowed to content hisself with the good one in Peru.

  But I have runned way with myself. The reason I heard from Young Fernando were that he had seed Marcella, and talkt to her! She had talkt sweet n loving on me! My letter to the priora had been safe delivert, and read, and evryone knowed bout it, een Marcella. The priora ud saved it and give it to Fernando to read, een!

  Marcella had askt Fernando to write me, to tell me n Anna that she were doing well. That Santa Catalina was not tall a beastly place, that she had friends, and she had the protection ovva good priora.

  Fernando writed, ‘She says you must believe Santa Catalina is nothing like the Venetian convents. There is no cruelty to the sisters, no cruel penances. The nuns are kindness itself, except for one mad one, and my sister is well treated, and even permitted to use her talent for painting. She has made a dear friend called Rafaela, with whom she paints. This Rafaela takes care of her like a sister. What else can I tell you of Marcella? I know you will be hungry for news. Her physical condition is good. She asks after her friends, Gianni and Anna, and a Doctor Santo, and the artist Cecilia Cornaro, in Venice.’

  That made me start up in my chair. Twere time to go and tell Cecilia Cornaro what were appening. After some time – in Scotland, they sayed – she were jist arrived in Venice and working on a poortret of her lover, Lord Byron. That were the gossip. Better still, I decided, Santo should go to her. I were a little nervous. Ide heard she were increasing on the wildcat side o nature. And there was no hairs on that one’s tong, as ye mite say, to stop the rudeness fallin out o her mouth.

  Fernando ended his letter with the name of a street in Arequipa. ‘You may write to me here, and the contents of the letters shall be faithfully transmitted to Marcella. We have found a way . . . She in turn longs for news of you and all whom she loves in Venice.’

  All whom she loves. Swear that I were in charity with the whole world that day. Anna n I hogged and danced in circles like creeking old toys, Sweet God!

  I ran to Cannaregio and pulled Santo out o his room.

  ‘She is not lone,’ I raved, hoggin him close. ‘She is safe!’

  In that, as in all things, I were wrong.

  Marcella Fasan

  Rafaela was beside herself with joy for me, and perhaps her irrepressible high spirits at my adventure made her now take a risk that was outrageous even for her.

  All the nuns at Santa Catalina nursed a tender place in their hearts for the priora’s shocking reproach to Sor Loreta, ‘Why don’t you crucify your own tongue?’

  News of the insult had spread on breathless wings, had roosted comfortably in Sor Loreta’s legend, and it was often muttered in her wake. It was on the first day of the shoes that Rafaela sketched a picture that made me lose two heartbeats with shock. It was an unmistakable portrait of Sor Loreta, her mouth grotesquely stretched by a crucifix holding it open. In this picture, the vicaria’s cheeks were fat as those of a hog, and her neck bulged with three plump chins. Into the aperture of her lips, she was throwing roast chickens, spicy sausages, polvorones and wild potatoes.

  ‘Destroy it!’ I urged Rafaela. ‘It would be very dangerous if anyone else ever saw it. Or someone told Sor Loreta about it.’

  ‘Not much point now, lovely. I would have to destroy the copy I pinned in the refectory. And the one I nailed inside Sor Loreta’s favourite confessional. And the one I stuck between the shutters of her cell.’

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  An irascible woman is a shoreless ocean, as we say in Venice, and Cecilia Cornaro’s reputation for raillery went far beyond the horizon.

  But Gianni urged me, ‘Go and see her before she takes off again to another place.’

  A ball of oil-soaked rag hit my shoulder as I entered the room. I noticed full trunks labelled ‘Cadiz’. I had caught her just in time, it seemed.

  ‘I am . . . the friend of . . . Marcella Fasan,’ I stammered, at the end of Cecilia Cornaro’s long tirade on my birth (entirely true), my clumsiness, my irrelevance and my timing. Then she looked at my face.

  ‘Indeed,’ the a
rtist observed, wiping her brush on a filthy rag and walking around me as if I were the prey and she were the hunter.

  ‘Ah yes,’ she pronounced, ‘I remember you.’

  As I explained our news of Marcella, I caught a glimpse of Cecilia Cornaro’s naked left hand. Last time I had seen her, when I fetched her to Marcella on San Servolo, the damage had been concealed inside a black mitten. Now I saw the truth: a fine webbing had fused the two burned digits.

  ‘Then you will remember that I am a doctor,’ I said.

  ‘And this concerns me how?’ she asked tartly.

  ‘I think I could do something for your hand.’

  She flushed and snatched it behind her back. ‘What makes you think I need your services?’

  ‘The way you hide the deformity. Your face as you speak of it.’

  ‘What could you do anyway?’ She attempted to preserve a casual tone.

  ‘It will hurt a great deal, but I believe I can separate your fingers, if you’ll let me. Marcella would want me to at least try.’

  She fell silent. I feared she would turn me away. It would be natural. She had grown used to her injury; no one, or few, are used to surgical pain.

  Then she spoke: ‘I have a sitting now. Come back this hour tomorrow with your instruments of torture. I’ll supply the brandy and the swearing.’

  I returned with my little case the next day. Cecilia Cornaro had already medicated herself with spirits, and swayed towards me with a vague expression. I sat her at the cleanest table, washed the paint off her hand and bathed the fingers in carbolic acid and olive oil. To put her at her ease, I tried to talk to her. ‘I heard there was a fire in your studio. But why did you get burned? Did it happen while you were asleep?’

  I pointed to the divano. Its yellow silk coverlet was torn and slightly blackened. It was partly covered by a blanket of Scottish plaid, well sprinkled with cat fur. The beast himself stretched out asleep on top of it.

  ‘I do sleep here sometimes, when I work late at night and there seems little point in walking back to my house at Miracoli. I was asleep when the men broke in.’

  ‘It is true then, that the fire was started deliberately?’

  ‘Only in that they deliberately broke my door, they deliberately tied me up, they deliberately poured oil over my paintings and deliberately set a taper to them.’

  ‘And you knew who they were, and who sent them?’

  ‘Persons unknown in pantaloons wearing masks,’ she slurred on her sarcasm. ‘Nothing to pin anything on anyone. They imagined, or their capo did, that I would die.’

  ‘But you managed to untie yourself ?’

  ‘I work with my hands. I am dextrous. After the men left, I got the ropes off.’

  ‘So how is it that you got burned?’

  ‘I did not leave immediately.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I had people to save.’ She gestured at the paintings and sketches that were pinned all around the walls, some still singed.

  ‘Paintings to save, instead of your own life?’

  ‘I managed a few. But I stayed a moment too long. I was trying to save Lord Ponsonby for his wife. The man had cancer, which she knew not. The portrait was to keep her company after his death.’

  My surprise at this compassion must have shown in my face. She growled, ‘I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. I’m not kind. I dream of revenge.’

  I made my first cut then, and she sighed rather than cried out. I drew my knife along the webbing, gently cleaving it in two, right down to the fork of her fingers. The blood emptied thinly into the basin I had placed on the table. Cecilia Cornaro looked down, muttering, ‘I must have cochineal beetles inside me – look at that colour, that is what I call a proper red . . .’

  Then she fainted.

  I brought her round with salts, but only after I had bandaged and splinted her fingers, and cleaned the floor of her blood. The webbing had been so fine that it would soon dry out and fall off. I wrapped the Scottish blanket around her shoulders and propped her up against her divano.

  Cecilia Cornaro started talking as if we had not been interrupted. ‘I dream of revenge, I told you,’ she said, with no mention of the surgery she had just endured. With her good hand she reached for a sketchbook on the floor and flicked it open.

  ‘This is what I’ve drawn at night, since it happened.’

  Minguillo’s face appeared again and again on the page: in profile, in three-quarter view, a glimpse of his cheek from over a shoulder. Each likeness was perfect, the madness bristling out of him, and the badness inscribed in his features like the pits of the pimples in his skin.

  ‘If I could forget how much I hate him, then these pictures would remind me,’ I exclaimed. ‘You have caught his nastiness exactly.’

  ‘Then you too dream of revenge?’ Cecilia Cornaro examined her bandaged fingers, running a thumb down the newly created vacancy between them.The pain must have been hideous, yet her mind remained focussed upon her enemy.

  I confessed, ‘I have a particular voluntary dream that soothes me. It is quite complicated.’

  ‘I enjoy complications.’

  Her green eyes met mine, drawing the words out. ‘When I was training to be a doctor, my Master was a surgeon who had an obsessive interest in warfare by disease. And secret ways of spreading it.’

  ‘You mean, like the Plague?’

  ‘The Plague is all but gone from us. Yet we still have the Small-Pox. Diseases of the skin are my special field, you see.And I take an interest in the history of them. The Small-Pox helped the Spanish conquistadores suppress the Incas.’

  ‘You have taken a particular interest in South American matters recently, I imagine.’ She smiled the way a cat yawns, but there was warmth in it too.

  ‘An intense interest,’ I acknowledged, ‘so I can tell you that there have been two great Small-Pox epidemics in the Americas, in 1775 and 1782. In Arequipa, free vaccinations are given now. Marcella is safe from that, at least.’

  Cecilia Cornaro possessed formidable powers of intuition. She asked, ‘But you, I mean your imagination, remains interested in the Small-Pox as an agent of revenge? How does that function?’

  ‘The Small-Pox diffuses itself from person to person in tiny fragments of dead skin – that is, in flakes of the scabs from the sores that are the most visible symptom of the disease. My former Master, Surgeon Ruggiero, was obsessed with an idea carried out by Sir Jeffery Amherst, a British general. Fifty years ago, Amherst wished to kill off the Ottawa Indians of Pennsylvania. He set off a Small-Pox epidemic among them, by causing their supplies to be dusted with a few powdered scabs from

  Small-Pox victims.’

  ‘So only a small amount of the Small-Pox is required?’

  ‘Almost invisibly small, if we speak of the Variola confluens strain, which is the most fatal. The unusual thing about the Small-Pox is that it may be transmitted by paper – between pages of a letter, for example. Lovers have been known to end their romances involuntarily, by sealing up a fragment of the Small-Pox in their love letters.’

  ‘How intensely fascinating,’ breathed Cecilia Cornaro. ‘But how in the civilized world does one get one’s hands’ – and here she held her repaired one out – ‘on an invisibly small amount of the Small-Pox?’

  ‘Ruggiero made a habit of shearing the scabs off his Small-Pox patients, drying them in peat smoke. He stored the pieces in camphor underground. Against a difficult day. He was an ill-tempered man with enemies of his own . . .’

  ‘I see the direction of your so-called voluntary dream. It involves a pestilential brute – Minguillo Fasan, for example – receiving a particularly dusty letter . . . Ah, one does not have to be a poet to love poetic justice!’

  I thought she pronounced the word ‘poet’ with bitterness.

  ‘But I am a doctor. I have sworn an oath. Anyway, to carry this idea out, well, then I would be like him.’

  ‘We are all like him to a certain extent.’

 
‘The difference is that we do not act upon that tendency in ourselves.’

  Cecilia Cornaro let me know that I was dismissed.

  But as I left, she enquired casually, ‘Your old Master, Surgeon Ruggiero – did he have his portrait painted ever?’

  Marcella Fasan

  The priora must have guessed what was going on, for a shoemaker of Fernando’s reputation could never have contrived so many mistakes. However, she tolerated without comment the exchange of boots – though I was soon on my eighth, then twelfth pair. Even though I no longer needed it, I kept using my crutch as supporting evidence for my continued need for refinements in the construction of my boots.

  Or perhaps it was not deliberate blindness: it could have been her ill health that caused the priora to overlook our transactions. On two occasions she had fainted in the refectory. She barely ate, and her skin had lost its healthy lustre. I was sorry to see dear Priora Mónica unwell, but I was busy with my own rejoicing.

  Via the boots, I learned that Santo was nearly fluent in Spanish now, and working every way he could to find a passage to South America. What he would do here was not yet clear, but I grew delirious with happiness merely to think of us breathing the same air.

  Hope had fledged in me: hope, with which I had barely been acquainted in my life. I developed a friendship with that cheerful stranger. I began to nourish vague but vivid dreams.

  Until the morning Josefa arrived in my cell, her smooth black cheeks polished with tears.

  ‘Rafaela is no more,’ she told me.

  Part Five

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  I should never have breathed my reprehensible fantasies aloud. After my conversation with Cecilia Cornaro, I was drowning in guilt.

  Death by drowning occurs when fluid enters the air cells of the lung, thus preventing the due oxygenation of the blood.