The Book of Human Skin (14 page)

There would be hose made of dog-skin and shoes with leaden soles to force the leg out of its protective crippled clench. The thigh and calf would be washed in stinking Oil of Worms, roughly frictioned with Oil of Lilies, poulticed in the leaves and roots of marshmallows and the whole leg bathed in boiling tripe broth and then run under freezing
cold water to contract the ligaments. A roasted salt herring might be placed on the abused leg then, to draw out the humours. All this prior to binding with paste-board, splints of wood and small plates of iron.

I looked in the mirror by the bookshelf – was I yet well-fleshed and handsome enough to go to Venice, and attend the daughter of one of the city’s richest merchants?

The answer was an unequivocal no.

Minguillo Fasan

Back at the Palazzo Espagnol, my father called me into his study. ‘You’re not ever going to be up to much,’ he stated matter-of-factly, with a kind of deadness in his voice. He was not angry with me. Ludicrously, he acted as if I was some kind of lunatic. He spoke slowly, as to a foreign person.

‘Every family has its bad seed,’ my father said flatly. I noticed then how lustreless his eyes were, and how steeply his shoulders stooped. ‘Piero is right . . . it’s the duty of the parents to bury that seed where it shall not grow.’

The Reader shall be marking Piero Zen’s name in His daybook for future attention.

My father roused himself to announce with a faintly contemptuous finality, ‘So I’ll not be sending you to the university in Padua, as I had once hoped . . . You’ll be a house-boy. I suppose I’ll be working to keep you in idleness until the end of my days.’

I did not dignify this with an answer, but my silent thoughts were busy.
In what way can this be a surprise to you, Papà? And why should I work?
You
have worked: surely that is enough embarrassment in the family. And how could you think
– except that you understand nothing of me – that I might ever want to live away from my darling Palazzo Espagnol?

He sighed, ‘My first son shall be like Venice, a thing kept alive for hypocritical reasons, but of no utility.’

My first son?
Was he planning other sons? My eye flew to the drawer where his will was kept. I cursed my ill luck. I had reasonably expected that my sister’s literally diminished being would force him to re-make the will in my favour. It seemed that part of my plan had gone severely awry.

Rather like my sister’s limb. The shot leg twisted inwards, as if shy of presenting its wronged self to a curious world. Nutrition of the lower limb was compromised. It soon dwindled to a twig-like frailty.To compensate, her sound right foot turned otherways to an unnatural angle and commenced to swell, so that Marcella had the appearance of a club foot, and a limp that she would never lose.

A newfangled French surgeon moved his traps into the nursery, which soon smelled like a fish market. Once I passed by Marcella’s room to see her lying on her couch with a large roast herring sizzling on her damaged leg. I would have got closer, but the valet Gianni appeared from nowhere with some stupid questions about my evening attire.

When Marcella was allowed out of her chamber of tortures, she simply carried them with her.The French surgeon confined her leg in leather equipment heavy with buckles and straps, which surrounded the lower part of her pelvis in a brutal ligature. In order to carry all this around, she needed a crutch.

Ah well, ’twas all to my purpose.With apologies to God, of course, for rearranging his design of my sister’s body. Clanking like a suit of armour, Marcella could not hurry to the necessary house to relieve her bladder. She could not hurry anywhere. The chamber pots she requested did not always arrive in time: sometimes the servants were delayed in the corridors running errands for her brother. Marcella still struggled not to embarrass herself, yet that was no longer always possible.And so she descended a rung lower in the scale of human function.

Meanwhile, I was not daunted in my pursuit of Thomas Day’s theories. In fact, I conquered and surpassed them, inventing new training methods far more vigorous than his own, especially efficacious now that Marcella could not run away from me. I supplemented my readings with the work of Pinel on the treatment of French female lunatics. Interesting, very interesting. There were other days when I walked in the tracks of the medical charlatans and their gigantic promises.

After months of apparently good behaviour on my part, even the servants slackened slightly in their vigilance.They had their own pelts to take care of, after all.There were a few times of the day and night when my parents were not there to intervene in my treatments. But my greatest ally was my sister herself. Marcella, it seemed, still would not give me away. I had told her that I would shoot her properly if she did.

I taught her to fall down into a faint at the sound of my voice: ‘Die, Marcella!’

And she would lie there until I gave her permission to live again.

They might hate me, but Marcella protected me with her silence. As did the death – under cloudy circumstances – of that pedantic magistrate who had once decreed that I might go forth only under supervision. As far as I was concerned his edict died with him, melting in the froth bubbling out of his blue lips. No one at the Palazzo Espagnol challenged me. It was almost as if they were happy when I left the house.

I did not care when I found offerings in my room.

Who’s afraid of a pig’s heart stuck with thorns and nails tied to the fireplace?

Sor Loreta

Sor Sofia never laughed at me, but instead sympathized with all my travails. She picked apple pits out of my veil and beetles out of my water when the other sisters put them there. We passed many hours of silent prayer together. Sometimes we prayed so late that I told her to stay with me in my bed, so as not to catch cold on the way back to her own cell.

Sor Sofia’s was a purer beauty than that of Sor Andreola. My friend’s little white face seemed to me like a flower. God made flowers for our pleasure, and so I enjoyed her. When she came into the room I always felt a constriction in my heart as when I was in the rapture of prayer.

Sor Sofia was becomingly quiet, yet her looks said much. I felt that she
supported me in every thought and deed. Once she exclaimed, ‘Sor Loreta, if you had been a man, how far you would have gone in the world!’

‘Hush, child,’ I told her. ‘There are ways in which a bride of Christ may shine brighter than any man.’

I believe she replied, ‘You are so brave to scourge and fast as you do. Death itself holds no sting for you! With your courage, you might have gone to war! Who could have resisted your strength? You would have swept all before you.’

‘I must fight God’s war here in Santa Catalina, even though the world knows nothing of my sacrifices.’

‘Yet one day your sacrifices will be known – is that what you think?’ she asked.

I cast my eyes down modestly then, to my volume about Santa Rosa, of which I knew every word by heart, but particularly the last pages, where, after her death, everyone in Peru was sorry for treating her badly and venerated her greatness.

‘Like Santa Rosa!’ breathed Sor Sofia, and without saying anything to confirm or deny her words, I embraced her.

At that moment Santa Rosa herself whispered in my ear, ‘Dearest Sor Loreta, everything You feel and do, however unusual it appears in the eyes of others, You shall do for the glory of God and Me.’

Part Two

Gianni delle Boccole

They brought her back to Venice a broke thing in her body.

The day they carrid Marcella indoors I seen summing I dint like one bit in her mother’s face. My Mistress Donata Fasan dint rush to her daughter’s side. She sayed to Anna, ‘Make her decent before I go to her.’

Decent? Then I unnerstood. In the mind o my Mistress, a cripplet daughter were a bit like our downfalled Venice, really. Marcella were layed out – still livin – in an open coffin where everyone might look at what remaned with horror while pretending pity.That were not tall the kind o daughter that ud serve a nobble lady in Venetian High Sausiety.

I myself were frit that Ide find Marcella a cringin thing, pologizin for what Minguillo done to her.

But Marcella’s spirit dint lie down n die.

She outright refust to be the sad heroin o some trudgical opera.

She askt for me n Anna soon as she were fairly in the ouse. We arrived to find Piero Zen alredy at her side. There was apples n cakes n books n paper n pastels spred out all oer the bed. Conte Piero ud filled the room with flowers.

And they was, without a single word bout the shot leg, laffing at what she drawed.

Soon we was too, tho I was cryin as well.

Marcella Fasan

I drew a cartoon of it, of how I had fallen through a trapdoor into invalidhood. My whole body had fallen on bad times; it was insolvent; it
was pillaged by gangs of doctors’ fingers; it had no respect from anyone any more, except of course from my lovely Piero, Anna and Gianni.

My parents summoned surgeons from as far away as Paris. There was always some bearded pomposity palpating my thigh or laying something sticky in a bag on my knee or lacing me into leather girdles that put an agonizing compression on my haunches. Worst were the culinary cures, by which the doctors tried to hot-baste me to wellness. I mitigated my humiliation by making satirical sketches of those preposterous torturers. And I soothed the burning pain by drawing the smoke rising from my leg and the Palazzo Espagnol cats deserting their comfortable perches in the kitchen to see what was cooking in the sickroom.

But flamboyant physicians with bottles of crushed millipedes – and still less my secret sketches of them – were never going to restore me to my parents’
perfettina
. The twisted limb was one thing, but the consequent exacerbation of my bladder’s bungling was what finally orphaned me in their hearts. It had always been nervous, but after I was crippled, my bladder became positively frantic. My previous problems seemed almost enviable now.

A cripple had got into their daughter’s body. It must have seemed an insult to the memory of their
perfettina
to transfer their love to this thing that had usurped her place, who huffed around in contraptions hoisted on ugly buckles like farm machinery. In Venice – the least barnyard-like of fairy tales! I overheard the Contessa Foscarini advising my mother to send me to a country cottage, where I might harmlessly shell peas on a stoop, or to one of those ramshackle tenements on the Lido where the rich hid their imbecile children.

‘Ah,’ I realized then, ‘deformity makes people like Chiara Foscarini think that you are stupid!’ I looked down at the drawing in my lap. Indeed, my pencilled self-portrait showed my nine-year-old self crammed into a tiny baby carriage. Even when she struggled out and proceeded boldly on to the next page, it was with the cripple’s buffoonish way of walking.

See, once again even I speak of Marcella the cripple in the third person, just as I drew her. For I too was at times able to distance myself from Marcella’s damaged body, and to watch the
perfettina
descend into the
povera creatura
. Like any fable, it had a satisfying, plummeting feeling about it, the kind best shown with long vertical lines in the background, all going in one direction.

Cripples are the Devil’s work, they say.

I, of course, was Minguillo’s. Those days I usually drew him as a hairless black dog, but from behind, without showing his face.

Only Piero dwelt on the facts of the matter, urging my mother to ‘put a rein on that boy’ and saying darkly, ‘Next time it may be worse.’

But my parents earnestly wished to forget
why
I was crippled, for what did it say of their negligent protection of me? Worse, popular wisdom decreed that no creature – not even a Minguillo – is conceived except of parents who carry all his defects in their own germ plasm. My mother and father could not confront such a gruesome thought. And so my parents gradually persuaded themselves, and never contradicted visitors who thought so, that I had been born with my deformity, and that being a cripple was an essential part of my nature.

My pencil began to reveal fear in people’s eyes when they beheld me – me, the slightest, least fearsome creature imaginable. Even my hair was soft like chicken-down. The very cartilage of my nose was translucent in the sunshine. But that, I was learning, is what frightens people: creatures who are weaker and rarer than themselves. I drew caricatures of elegant baboons, their eyes and tails askew with terror – fleeing from a tiny mouse – with my features – in a wheeled chair.

Alone in my room, I drew thrilling scenes of myself running away to the circus where I became a leading Artist of Deformity. In Venice, giants, dwarves and bearded ladies were a flourishing business. For these outrages of Nature, there was always repulsed fascination – and some coins. People will pay good money for a gratifying wave of disgust.

But to be mildly deformed – no, no, that, in reality, I was discovering, brings only ignominy and obscurity. My pencil ranged over the page with increasing fearlessness, but my life shrank. I was not much produced. Excursions in my wheeled chair were confined to the remote and poor parts of the city. My parents could not afford to be embarrassed by such a daughter as I had become. Mothers of my parents’ acquaintance had of course stopped grooming their sons to marry me the day the first doctor strapped me into the resplendently ugly regalia of crippledom.

Perhaps I was even then already halfway to being a nun in the eyes of other people; a sexless, shambling creature. Being deformed, I was discovering, eclipses every other difference – of gender, race or age. Deformity lives in another kingdom, dreaded and shunned as if misfortune were contagious.

Yet I did not quite become what my parents saw – a mild, accepting victim. They desired that in me, and so I gave the appearance of it to them as a gift. Mostly, I obliged by staying in my room, where I read my way through the Palazzo Espagnol library, and made copies of the portraits in the house, delivered to me one by one by kind Gianni. I wrote my diary. I drew, energetically and ambitiously, but secretly.