The Book of Human Skin (16 page)

It burned that Pieraccio might know about the perverted will, and feel smug at my expense, for of course he could not guess that I had secretly read it. His persistent, cloying interventions in my sister’s life were not to be tolerated. He made personal comments about my special clothes, sly ones. Which was why in the end I found a way to bring them both down together.

If the Reader cannot divine from the foregoing what I had in mind, I would not have Him suffer a sleepless night over it. Soon enough, He shall hear it, soon enough. I am sure I hope so myself.

Marcella Fasan

My diary from those times is full of Piero.

When he leaned to pick me up, Piero made it seem as if it was a spontaneous embrace and not a service that he offered. He did not avoid the subject of my crippled state. Unlike my parents, Piero could bring himself to ask directly, ‘Is your leg hurting you today with this cold wind?’

What was more, he cared about the answer. For if it was yes, the leg hurt, then he had a plan for my sedentary diversion. If the
answer was no, then he had another plan, involving an excursion or a treat.

Piero looked me in the eye when he spoke to me. Most people avoided that kind of fusion since the accident. When I was alone with Piero, my answers were boldly my own, not the passive murmurs of the congenital Poor Thing that my parents had settled upon for my career.

And Piero was not content to let me merely watch. It was Piero, a noted connoisseur and collector of art, who took me to meet Cecilia Cornaro in her studio at San Vio. It was Piero who commissioned her to paint me. The portrait, he told me, was to be a surprise gift for my parents. There’s lovely Piero again: wise and subtle. For we both knew that a painting of my head and shoulders, cutting off all that was unacceptable below, could not fail to please even my mother.

Of course I knew all about Cecilia Cornaro before Piero took me to her. Cecilia Cornaro was a tremendously, perilously fascinating woman. No other noblewoman in Venice had made a career of any kind, let alone in the louche field of portrait painting. She had crept out of her parents’
palazzo
by Miracoli at the age of thirteen to become the lover of Giacomo Casanova and only-rumour-knew who else. Painting, she had learned at the hand of one of our last great masters. She quickly surpassed him. She was naturally the author of that portrait of my late sister Riva that made our servants smile and weep.

Cecilia Cornaro had painted kings and princes, had even travelled to the courts of the Habsburgs. She spoke languages as she used colour – learning everything by instinct from the skin of her clients. She was most famous for skin. Her portraits had a dewy quality about them, as if her sitters had just risen from a tousled, happy bed. If you were to believe everything that was said about Cecilia Cornaro, she had quite possibly personally tousled the bed with them, if only to extract a more lovely painting. Cecilia Cornaro’s fame was such that she was no longer required to be respectable.

Piero told me that it was probably better for our visit to her studio to remain a secret between us, at least initially. ‘If it turns out as I hope, many things shall change,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘though of course, that depends entirely upon how you two ladies take to one another.’

As our gondola shot across the Grand Canal towards San Vio, it occurred to me that there was one thing that I had never heard about
Cecilia Cornaro: that she kept a female friend. Her intimates and her yet more cherished enemies were all men. The nub of it was this: Cecilia Cornaro’s tongue was notoriously barbed. The salons and
conversazioni
of Venice – those few that had survived Napoleon – crackled with reports of her insolence towards those more accustomed to fawning. Senators, diplomats and foreign lords had quailed under her raillery. Women were terrified of her frank, personal observations. So what amusement would the fork-tongued Cecilia Cornaro take at the expense of a malfunctioning young girl? I felt a Poor Thing posture gripping my spine with slimy fingers.

We arrived at the Palazzo Balbi Valier, where three Istrian-stone arches framed a great courtyard inhabited by bloated white statues and a large striped cat, who looked at us with reserve. With his usual lack of fuss, Piero carried me out of the boat and up the stairs. The cat followed us, sniffing delicately at the heel of one of Piero’s shoes.

Piero said kindly, ‘Marcella, I’ll warn you – initially, Cecilia may be a little . . . raw . . . in her manner.’

The door was open, and my first impression was of a room bursting with human life. Faces in oil and pastel lined the walls in no particular order, like people thrown together at a party that has surpassed everyone’s expectations of intimacy and hilarity. Immediately I understood why people waxed lyrical about Cecilia Cornaro’s painted skin. Every face was rampantly alive, each mouth seemed about to speak a tasty secret. Each pair of eyes looked at me with an expression sweetened by satisfaction.

‘What vermin have you dragged in this time, cat?’

A green-eyed woman with a cloud of tumbled hair had advanced upon us while we were still trapped in the gaze of the portraits. She stood wiping her hands on a rag. A mouth-watering smell of oils and medicinal herbs charged the air. The cat ran over to her, climbed nimbly up her skirts and to her shoulder, from which vantage point he nuzzled her ear, and miaowed into it. She nodded. Her eyes travelled from Piero’s face to my own, at which point the artist smiled enthusiastically, then clapped her hands as she peered closer.

It was the strangest thing – she was staring frankly at me, yet at the same time she had no recognition of me at all. This was different from the usual looks that slid quickly over me in my wheeled chair. Cecilia Cornaro was – avidly – taking in the lineaments and colouring of my face.
Myself as a person, my character, my likes and dislikes, my strengths and weaknesses, all those parts of me could wait, and indeed might never come into the orbit of her interest at all.

‘Ah, I see what you mean, Piero. Much more interesting than the sister! Yes, this absolutely must be painted.’

‘What did I tell you, Cecilia?’ Piero set me down on a chair and gently turned my face towards the light. The artist paced around me, swooping in for a closer look from different angles. Cecilia Cornaro had a cat’s insolence. Her clothes looked as if they might fall off with the next shrug. You would never want to stop looking at her.

Now Piero was saying something that astounded me, ‘Cecilia, don’t eat the girl up. And the face does not come free of charge, you know. I told you: I have come to trade it.’

‘And I told
you
, I don’t take pupils. And if I did,’ her eyes narrowed, ‘I would choose ’em myself, for their talent, if any, and not for their faces.’

My face sweltered like a hot red plum. Pupils? This was Piero’s plan? To apprentice me to the greatest artist in Venice? He had always encouraged my drawing, praised my every scratch on paper.
Dear, dear Piero
, I thought,
only your fondness could make you exaggerate my skills so! I can catch a likeness, and make you laugh, but I know nothing of colour. Cecilia Cornaro is rightfully insulted that you think I might approach the hem of her dress as an artist.

Indeed, Cecilia had turned her back on us and was rifling through the contents of a bathtub crammed with paintings and large brushes.

‘Marcella, my love,’ said Piero kindly, ‘I am afraid that we have had a wasted visit. However, I am glad that you have met with the paintings, and their perpetrator.’

He bowed to Cecila Cornaro, who now stood fuming by her bath. He took me in his arms again and turned so that my face was in her full view, paused for a moment, then set off down the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs he paused.

‘Wait!’ Cecilia Cornaro called down. Her heart-shaped face appeared over the banisters. With his back still to her, Piero winked at me.

‘Piero, you old
scroccone
, you very well know I cannot bear to be constrained,’ she grumbled.

‘No one is constraining you,’ replied Piero mildly, turning around to face her. ‘This is not a forced sale. If you don’t like the price, you do not have to take the face.’

‘
Ghe sbòro!
’ she expostulated. My skin goose-pimpled with pleasurable shock at the worst obscenity of the gondoliers.

Piero laughed. ‘Your pretty ways, Cecilia!’

He took a step towards our gondola. Cecilia Cornaro uttered a frustrated little mew under her breath. Then she sighed, ‘I might as well try it, though I’ll not vouch for any success. The girl will not expect me to be
kind
to her just because she is a cripple, I hope.’

I spoke for the first time, and it was as myself, unmitigated: ‘I should be very unhappy if you were.’

She grinned, ‘That’s very well, because I don’t have a kind bone in my body.’

Minguillo Fasan

The Reader will understand that it is now necessary for Him to digest a little more history before He may fall with relish upon my personal tale once again.

Napoleon had changed his mind. In January 1806 he annexed Venice back into his new masterpiece
Il Regno d’Italia
.

The Austrians marched out, the French slouched back in, and Venice had a whole new paper identity. Now we Venetians were citizens, apparently, all equal in a new Italian kingdom. Equal to the peasants on the plains of the Veneto. Equal to the grape-treaders of Bassano.The whole idea stuck in our lordly craws.Yet we did not let ourselves dwell upon it.
Va bene
, shrugged the noble Venetians. Let Boney’s minions print their laborious little bills and decrees. We’ll still go about having our hair dressed, strutting in full fig, intermarrying with other Golden-Book families and putting our unwanted women into convents. Of which interesting subject, more anon.

I was gradually taking over the family business. My father had lost his vital spark of interest in it. I believe that his spirit finally snapped when he heard that Napoleon had returned. After Boney proclaimed
Il Regno d’Italia
my father wrote to me that I could do as I wished. He no doubt thought I would not understand his concluding sigh, ‘
The whole world is mad, who am I to confine the madness?
’

Now he washed his hands of Venice, which included me.

The silver that had made us rich glittered dully in my imagination. Once I dreamed of the holds of boats heavy with the gleanings of the Potosí mines, and of seeing our worked candlesticks in the salons of important
palazzi
. But since 1792 the vulgar new Americans had been minting their plebeian dollars from silver – and it had entirely lost its mystery for me. And so I set about quietly dismantling Father’s network of silver agencies.

What attracted me now was less heavy and more exotic. I concentrated on our fever business, that is, brokering on the happy marriage of two inseparable but disparate items: the bitter bark of the fever tree,
Chinchona calisaya
, and the malarial miasmas of Venice. My family supplied Venice with the one, and Venice supplied us with the Sweating Sickness and therefore customers.

I set up my own quack and apothecary in an exclusive business. Inspired by my weeping agricultural girl, I had him conjure up a skin preparation – ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ – that very soon became a fashionable appendage to every noble toilette table on account of its ridiculous cost, its eye-opening perfume and its proud boast to give the user skin ‘with the stainless whiteness and lustre of a pearl’. Our literature implied that the precious liquid had been wept by Peruvian nuns fed only on the fruit of the candelabra cactus in the high Andes. Sometimes we embellished the tale with assertions that these virgin brides of Christ were also blind.

Our shop was in populous San Luca. It was handsomely equipped with bottles of two-headed salamanders for those simple folk who thought they could buy good omens; we also sold spent bullets and bundles of leather flayed from black dogs for use against the evil eye, and silk ribbons for binding around warts. I called my emporium ‘Novo Mondo’ and my quack’s name was masterpieced from old maps: ‘Doctor Inca Tuparu, of Valparaiso, Chile-Peru, the noted pyretologist or fever-doctor’. Congenitally plump, he browned up nice and greasy in tinted cocoa-butter. I groomed his Spanish
accent myself, by the expedient of a naily collar that I tweaked whenever he failed to lisp.

Part of his exotic title had the extra joy of a little truth to it: his New World provenance. For at last, with my father too dispirited to shackle me, I had begun to travel beyond Venice. I found it much to my liking. I travelled like a king, and was treated accordingly.At the beginning I ventured only as far as Seville and then Praia in the Cape Verde Islands. But soon I was fitting myself out for my first proper journey – all the way to Valparaiso.And it was there that I had bought my quack, one red-ruptured dawn, over a table of cards.

The turkey-hipped little Roman had been washed up on the shores of Chile by a tide of debts at home.And when I encountered him in Valparaiso he was up to his dankly-feathered wrinkle in debt once more, but this time with the Chilean card sharks. He was seated around a table with five of their most scintillatingly dangerous number. That night his creditors were ready to take their money in his blood, for they had realized – with my help, for I had casually unmasked his faked title of ‘Marchese’ – that there was no hope of any other satisfaction.The sharks were in that final happy stage before violence breaks out, that state of extreme and jovial amity towards the victim. He was their dearest, truest friend in those luscious anticipatory moments. So do born murderers refresh their spirits.And I dipped into the joy of the occasion, exhilarated by the fumes of fear and sweat.

The Travelled Reader knows about nights like these: the air smoking over the salty port, the boats creaking on their ropes, the old women’s limbs creaking behind their rancid aprons, the bedsprings creaking under the industrious whores. Candlelight and gutted glasses, and men with knives by their thighs seated round a table, drawing their business to its inevitable conclusion.