The Book of Human Skin (18 page)

‘
This is not a good time for your notions, son
,’ my father wrote. His handwriting wandered uncertainly over the page.

The querulous letter was enough to make me book my passage straight home to Venice from Lima, with no stopping at Islay after all. I would not be harangued and lectured like a little boy, not by a man who had secretly disinherited me, and lacked the valour to confront me with his heinousness.

I whistled on the deck as we passed Islay and its mules, waiting to take obedient sons over the mountains to their Papàs. I gave the place the shine of my teeth, and a wave of my lace-ruffled wrist. I doubted if my father would
give chase. So I never got to see Arequipa that time, which was a shame in some ways: in Lima I had heard well of it and its small-footed, white-skinned ladies, who never walked anywhere for fear of growing large hoofs.

Fondling Tupac Amaru in my pocket, I thought,
What do I care for Arequipa when I have seen Valparaiso?

I was in a hurry to get back to Venice: my ‘Tears of Santa Rosa’ was about to storm a market parched of beautifying novelties, all the more craved because Napoleon’s insults to Venice were beginning to seem personal.

I had no idea that before too long I would be back and climbing El Misti mountain on my own account. I did not know about the Yellow Fever gnawing through Papà’s parts at its leisure.

The fact was that I had narrowly missed my chance to see my father’s disappointed face one last time.

Marcella Fasan

‘You, you with the face on you, don’t cringe in the corner. Come here in

the light.’

‘She is called Marcella,’ Piero said patiently.

My diary records that in response Cecilia Cornaro dispatched a glance ‘
that would have withered a nail
’.

I limped over to her, watching the expressions fleeting across her face: irritation, pleasure, calculation. She took my chin in her hand and turned it none too gently from side to side.

‘From the left, first time,’ she pronounced.

No, she never was kind to me, Cecilia Cornaro. That first day in the studio she was peremptory as only she knew how. I do not believe the word ‘please’ was ever a part of her vocabulary. She swore like a porter. Objects flew across the room. I was grateful to see that, like Piero, she acknowledged my condition yet she treated it as she would a fly in the room; noted the annoyance of the thing and then put it in its puny place and got on with more interesting matters.

At the time I met Cecilia Cornaro I was just beginning to grow towards adulthood, and grappling with the disappointment that grew with my every inch. I mean the disappointment of others in me. It is the natural condition of a little child to be helpless, and to be loved for it. But a helpless adolescent or adult, now that is something different. No one smiles indulgently, no one ruffles hair or coddles, when a grown person limps into a room or rolls in on a wheeled chair.

Cecilia Cornaro simply did not interest herself in charity, forced or otherwise. On my arrival she pointed me towards a chair with a hole in its seat. Beneath its curtained legs was a chamber pot. I blushed to imagine the conversation that must have taken place between her and Piero in order to secure this item. Then I told myself that Piero would have handled it all with ease and delicacy, and that here, after all, was an elegant solution.

‘Arrange yourself there,’ she told me neutrally, the one tone that could have spared me an agony of embarrassment. The strangest thing was that, with the opportunity ever available, my bladder simply forgot its inconvenient imperative. I never once needed to make use of that chamber pot, not in all the months I spent in that studio. It was only as Piero and I swayed in the gondola towards home that I felt the soaky tickle and clenched up anxiously. Then I remembered that Minguillo was still away in South America, and I forgot every disagreeable sensation.

I kept no diary in those succeeding weeks, because I was living life instead of watching it. In the studio I was able to forget even Minguillo himself. Or, if I thought of him, it was as a thing to be valued very low. I had a new pleasure in those days. Inside my head I played out imagined encounters between Cecilia Cornaro and Minguillo, in which the artist sliced through my brother in crisp syllables.

In contrast, I felt myself honoured as the object of the artist’s fierce attention. By the day of my first official visit, Cecilia Cornaro had already decided every detail of the portrait. The curtained chair was disposed in a corner by a Grand Canal window. I tried not to tremble as she advanced on me and wrapped my hair in a turban of white linen.

‘The Devil in heaven, those bones!’ she murmured.

‘What bones?’

‘
Ignorante come una talpa
,’ she muttered in response.
Ignorant as a mole
.

I wanted to explain to her that I had been kept like a mole, on account of my condition, yet somehow my whole soul rebelled against acting the unfortunate in front of Cecilia Cornaro.

I had read that portrait painters liked to know the essence of their sitters. Nervously, I offered, ‘Shall I tell you about myself ?’

‘No,’ she replied without apparent malice, ‘I am not interested in you because you are not yet very interesting. It will be more interesting for
you
to hear about art.’

While Cecilia sketched and then painted me, she explained how the colours were made – what insect, plant or mineral had offered up its essence to make each of those swarthy reds, browns and crystalline whites that went into mimicking my skin. I blushed when she placed a little tray of yellows in front of me – that I might see and comprehend that yellow was a rainbow in itself.

‘Ictherine,’ she said, ‘yellow or marked with yellow. Luteous, golden yellow. Meline, canary yellow. Ochroleucous, yellowish white. Vitellary, bright yellow. Aurulent, gold-coloured. Citreous, lemon-coloured . . .’

Did Cecilia Cornaro take me for an idiot-incontinent at whose expense she might enjoy a little malicious joke about the colour of urine? No, I prefer to think she wanted, as no one had ever done, to strengthen me, to make me unflinching in the face of less subtle and more protracted unkindness. The next time, she tested me unexpectedly, wanting to know what I had retained of her lecture on the nature of colour, I surprised her by proving a most sedulous pupil. Then, and ever after, I remembered every colour and its source, and not just the yellows.

‘You might as well make yourself useful,’ she told me on the third visit, placing a mortar and pestle in my lap. Inside was a blue-green stone vividly grained with grey and white. ‘Malachite from Peru,’ she told me. ‘Make me some colour for your eyes.’

Our sessions never seemed long enough, because Piero could credibly keep me away from home for only a few hours at a time. After three weeks, when I had ground all the colours in her palette, Cecilia Cornaro gave me a tray with a piece of paper and a lozenge of powdery blackness. ‘Draw a circle,’ she commanded.

For days on end I drew circles, until I could summon the perfect sphere without hesitation. Then it was straight lines. Then a shadow behind a circle with the light coming from different points. The charcoal wore away to nubs
and still I did nothing more than nursery geometry. It was only back at the Palazzo Espagnol that I dared to make my own sketches of the great artist Cecilia Cornaro at work in the studio. I depicted her as a clever wildcat of unreliable temper, dextrously wielding a paintbrush in a blue forked tongue.

Meanwhile, the artist’s portrait of me had ripened into a startling likeness, and been abandoned for a more ‘theoretical’ work, in which my face was part of an allegory. Then she started a third portrait. Cecilia Cornaro was not keeping to her end of the bargain or was at least stretching it beyond Piero’s price.

Piero took my corner as ever. ‘Enough geometry lessons, Cecilia,’ he insisted. ‘Let Marcella show you what she can do!’

She turned to me, ‘So does poor old Piero have to fight all your battles, Miss?’

Gianni delle Boccole

Twere the happiest summer of our lives and it seemed to want to go on for ever.

Then one day the blue sky dropt into a black bucket. Grate white gashes opened up in the skin o the night.We cowered inside the Palazzo Espagnol as if there was beasts outside approaching for the kill. My poorly hand, the one Minguillo ud buried the knife in, give me pain, Sainted God! No one slept that night because we was all frit of dreaming.

We aughter been affrighted o summing else.

Marcella Fasan

Cecilia Cornaro pointed to a table on which I saw a white sheet stretched over a frame and a box of mutilated pastels, the dog-ends of her own instruments.

‘I think paint is too wet for you,’ she remarked cruelly and Piero stood up, ready to remonstrate.

Cecilia seemed to repent then, though she did not apologize. She at least did not re-open the wound of her joke against my now vanished incontinence. She just looked a bit rueful, as if she had eaten something that turned out to be bitter. I guessed she was quite often forced to wear that expression. Then she changed the subject. ‘You may begin a portrait of your own. Your times here are so brief that it is hardly worth it to mix the oil colours that will dry up in your absence. So, pastels. Best thing for human skin and ermine, the most stupid animals in the world, about which you must draw your own conclusions, Marcella. Now, who shall you portray first?’

The medicinal smell of the pastels rose up from the box on my lap. I hesitated, feeling contempt quicken in her stare.

Piero offered, ‘I’ll sit for Marcella, O sweet-tempered one, if that helps.’

Cecilia Cornaro jeered, ‘Piero, you weren’t even worth painting when you were young. All your gifts are from your spirit. Bring some chocolate cake next time. At least it won’t be a wasted visit then.’

She turned a tall mirror towards me, and I blushed to see my strained, eager face in its silvery trap.

‘Paint that,’ she commanded. ‘There cannot but be a good result, even for a ...’

Piero interrupted, ‘I am sure the word that escapes you is “beginner”, Cecilia.Though in fact Marcella has . . .’

It was as if he had not spoken. ‘And depending on the result, I will find some clients for the girl.’

I bent my head lest a whinny of joy escape my mouth. That I might find my way in the world, earn a living, do something that would cause people to look at what I did, and not what I was! A prospect opened up in front of me like a door into a garden. I saw myself painting alongside Cecilia, listening to her abusing her clients; perhaps even joining in with some banter of my own.

Cripples may not be witty aloud – it comes out as bitterness. Cripples must be sweetly cheerful to protect the full-bodied who do not wish to be cast down and made miserable by our crippledom. But an artist? An artist is licensed to scintillate in wickedness, wit and wonderfulness alike!

Cecilia was perfectly aware of her generosity, and took pains to dampen the effect immediately. ‘Are you prepared to actually work, for the first time in your life?’

No one speaks like that to a cripple! They speak like that to a person expected to rise to a challenge.This realization opened my own unmitigated mouth: my thoughts and words had no need to go separate ways in that studio. I observed, ‘Yes, whores wanting to be painted as Allegories of Innocence, mothers wanting to be painted as Allegories of Vigilance, fathers wanting to be painted as Allegories of Eloquence . . .’

Cecilia was smirking and Piero stood up, distended to full height and almost to some width by pride. Was this why he had brought me here? I wondered – not just for the art but for the provocation?

I continued, ‘And of course the armies of Venetians for sale . . . I mean the young men and women who want portraits to sell themselves as husbands and wives. It takes a sweeter nature than yours, Cecilia Cornaro, to flatter them and raise their price.’

We laughed uproariously then, the three of us, and Piero put his arm around me for a quick hug. When he let go of me, I saw he had fastened a row of pearls around my neck. Cecilia’s cat rolled over to show us his spotted belly. Cecilia launched into an indiscreet tale of a noble client and we returned to work without any agreement to do so, as if her scurrilous commentary was the natural accompaniment to the thing. Piero went back to gazing at us both with adoration. My life seemed to give off that perfume that comes when you open the waxed paper inside a box of marzipan cakes.

Yet when I returned home that day, the good times were already starting to be over.Anna met me at the water-gate with the imprint of a hand red on her face. I knew that imprint. He had chosen to slap the side that was already wounded. She was holding out my leather harness in a shaking hand.

Without any warning, Minguillo was back, and slaps were being distributed like largesse among the servants.

On the same day arrived a letter from Peru which had made my mother look queasy under her tight helmet of curls.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

It was just as my patient Napoleon was starting to be less than he was that I had my first personal encounter with a medicine quickly grown huge in popularity.

Ruggiero sent me to examine a Venetian countess who was too ill to return to the city at the end of the summer
villeggiatura
.

I found a feeble hand, a quick pulse, a startling anaemia. The lady, who professed to thirty of her fifty years, complained of colic, cramps in the limbs, optic neuritis, a metallic taste in the mouth, constipation and scant rose-coloured urine. While she talked, I observed the blue line along her gums. That line told me, more eloquently than she could, that her health had been devastated by white lead.

‘What preparations have you been using?’ I asked.

She pointed to a squat purple bottle. A sniff of its violently floral contents confirmed my diagnosis. The label showed a nun weeping into a bottle of exactly the same shape, with a tall mountain behind her.