The Book of Human Skin (2 page)

Tupac Amaru had revolted against the Spanish rulers and the Holy Mother Church of Peru. This peasant defied even the Inca nobility, who denounced him for an upstart. With his murderous campaigns Tupac Amaru had denuded whole Spanish towns of the servants of God. So now they made a holy example of him.

He was made to watch his wife, his eldest son, his uncle and his brother-inlaw all tortured to death in the Plaza de Armas, a worse insult on account of that it was once the sacred square of the Incas themselves. Then the soldiers brought Tupac Amaru himself to the front of the wooden platform. The crowd roared, and me with them. A little Indian boy in front of us muttered, ‘
Chapetones pezuñentos!
’

Stink
-
hoofed Spaniards
, is what the brat said. For those who are in league with the Devil often use his filthy epithets upon the Holy Innocent.

First they cut out Tupac Amaru’s tongue.

I clapped my hands when I saw that. I had so many feelings crowding my breast that I cannot write them all down. For even then I knew that whoever suffers the greatest pain feels God’s sweetness the most.
Deo gratias
.

Then they harnessed four horses, one to each of Tupac Amaru’s limbs. The horses failed to pull him apart, so the soldiers hanged, drew and quartered him instead. Afterwards they cut off his head. This inspired intense prayers and much shouting. I myself did both things, kneeling upon the ground and crossing myself. My father looked away. My mother covered her eyes, and in that moment I suspected a horrid thing: that there might be a trickle of Indian blood in her veins. Her dark beauty was so different from my own sore thing of a face.

From that time, I had no mother. Once I began to doubt her
limpieza de sangre
I could no longer look into her eyes or accept her caresses.

Parts of Tupac Amaru were strung up as a warning to anyone else who might have thought of freeing the
sambos
and rousing up the Indians. His head was sent to Tinta, where he was born, and given its own private hanging. Then it was impaled upon a stake. His traitor arms and legs were sent to four different towns for the same treatment.
Deo gratias
.

Gianni delle Boccole

Scuse me but I am slightly on one this evenin, Chicken-shitting God!

Ask pardon, ask pardon, sirs, madams. I am playing the thing dredful fine. I know ye’ll think me wanting in the head.

Ye see. Twere one on them skinny slivers o Tupac Amaru as reached Venice all them years later wernt it? But by that time it had got isself bound round a book. Twere nowise one as would of been much injoyed by the original owner o the binding, savin his grease.

A filthy thing. That book were all kinds o evil. Ye wunt want it in the ouse. But my young Master Minguillo Fasan, with his bad blood and his desiccrating heart, he would jist love that book, wunt he? And he would get a feroshus plan for it and lead us all to Hell.

Yet back then in 1781 we still had a few good times left. Venice haint niver heared o Napoleon Bonypart, and Napoleon Bonypart haint yet dreamt o crushing ancient empires under his little foot. Kings’ and Doges’ heads was still resting stoutly on there shoulders without the least thought o falling blades.

The reverlushon in Peru were at last bloodily finishing and the Fasan silver mines was safe again, and the Fasan warehouse in Arequipa too. Here in Venice, the Palazzo Espagnol were tethert to the water like twernt going anywheres, but the sad truth were that a bad sea were arising.

From the inside.

Some few men like my old Master Fernando Fasan was still big on trade. But
they
had to float all the branchlets o there famlies with small doles n grate big partments. Whole hants-huncles-cuzzinsnevvies was borned, growed up n died, doing nought but stork the unearned ducat. Them parasites niver bethought thereselves on taking care o the partments what they had acquired without a drop o swet on there own part. No more than a tapeworm thinks o sprucing up its humane host. I had nightshirts with more backbone n sents of duty than them relatives o my Master Fernando Fasan.

So een at our Palazzo Espagnol, specious rooms that was onct proud n painted slowly by slowly slid into dismal grottoes. When a room finely died in blaze o mould, them nobble bedbugs jist shutted the door on it. More doors shut, intire floors was handed oer to the umidity. And so our whole city lay a-rutting, cankered with meanness and indolents.

We dint know it, only because we choosed not to know it.

There were no star to warn us; no signs nor wonders in the air to say: ‘Watch out, things is going to the bad on a buggy.’

To say, ‘Nothin, not happyness nor Venice, is for ever.’

The only thing we knowed were that my Mistress Donata Fasan were onct more with child and that her skin were irrupted with weals n wens like ye wunt believe. Swear it were the miserablest pregnancy. And Anna told us the strangest thing: the babe inside my Mistress were kickin that hard n cruel that her belly were black with bruises.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

The book of human skin is a large volume with many pages of villainy writ upon it.

There are people who are a disease, you know.

As I go my rounds, I still hear it said – even by their victims – that there are no truly evil persons born in the world: just misunderstood unfortunates. Some wrong done in early life has monstered such creatures quite against their will.

While I dress stab-wounds or roll poultices on beaten wives, I often wonder –
why
are we so lenient towards abominable human beings, yet we declare unequivocally against Cancer, for example, or the Small-Pox?
If we put out an illness, we rejoice. There is no lyric moment of regret for its passing.

Now your human villain stalks the world much the way the Small-Pox roams the blood and wrecks the body’s integument. He hurts. He disfigures. He kills. He’ll do it again, if not stopped. So why do we hesitate to ‘cure’ his evil? Do we try to understand the feelings of the Small-Pox scab? Do we perfume the stink of the Small-Pox pustule with excuses?

There are people who are a disease, and it is purely our indulgence that makes a plague out of them.

No one talks of things like this. But I have always liked to write them down and have them keep company with other musings of mine.

In Peru there are nuns who keep fleas in bottles for the companionship of something lively in their quiet cells. So did these written thoughts of mine serve me for many years. In the absence of mother, father, sister or brother, I was always grateful for the quill and the flutters of paper seeming alive under my fingers, especially in the lonely hours when there were no more patients to tend, and in the aching years when I was denied the company of she whose thoughts are my book and whose heart is my Host.

Sor Loreta

Our town of Cuzco was stacked high with the craggy follies of the Incas – forts and palaces dedicated to their barbarous gods. How those graceless offerings must have disgusted our true Creator!

With the death of Tupac Amaru II, a quietness began to fall in Peru. At first, little spasms of revolt still shuddered through the ignorant valleys, rather as a dead snake still moves, not understanding that God has wished it dead. But gradually everyone grew quiet, from the Indians, the mixed-blood
mestizos
, the African
sambos
to the real white Spanish like myself. Inca portraits, names, dances, clothes and their pagan funeral rites were outlawed, so that they might cease to be sorry for being conquered and instead grow to love the
gentle dominion of the Spanish and the Mother Church. But the Indians were too ill-bred to understand that it was all over with their gods. Secretly, some still clung to the old infidel ways.

It was not long after they cut up Tupac Amaru that I was taken by a little Indian servant girl to see her family hovel. No doubt she hoped to excite some charity by her poverty. However, she claimed she wanted to show me something particular. She was filled to the brim with excitement. Inside the house, she opened a cupboard under the stairs and my eyes fell upon a mummy with the skin still on and the teeth grinning through leather lips. He was sitting up on his haunches and dressed in splendid rags.

‘Is my great-grandpa,’ she declared, thumping his shoulder affectionately. A little lump of dried gristle fell off in a puff of sour air.

‘Why does your great-grandfather sit up like that when he is dead?’ I enquired innocently. ‘Should he not lie down in his grave like a Christian?’

The servant told me, ‘Because he comes to dinner by us when the dinner is good. All us grandpas do so.’

Then she picked up a seashell and blew a soft sad note through it. I shook my head because it was one of the forbidden
pututo
trumpets that the Indians used in their heathen mourning.

Mistaking my expression for awe, the servant girl next gave me a gruesome tale of the peasant daughters chosen for the honour of sacrifice. ‘Them girls was called
capacocha
,’ she breathed reverently through her gapped teeth. These
capacochas
were taken from their families at the age of four and sent to the priestesses to be raised.

She told me a scandalous thing then: the Inca house of the priestesses, who were called Virgins of the Sun, once stood in exactly the same place occupied by our own Christian convent of Santa Catalina! The two buildings, one heathen, one holy, shared the same foundations. Where pure young novices now fasted and scourged themselves for the glory of God, the pagan girls used to be fattened up for sacrifice with llama stew and maize.

My servant licked her lips, ‘They aten meat most every day!’

After that they cut their hair off, apparently, and took them on a long journey up a mountain to a shrine.

‘Then did they murder the little girls?’ I whispered.

‘Oh no, they girls did it of theyselves. They was give maize beer and coca leaves to make em feel sleep-sleep and byenbye they was left lone.’

‘So they starved to death?’

‘Some of em got sick before they died. So high up there, the
puna
, you know. Make everyone sick sometime. Like the old uns. They must clean big vomits off my great-grandpa when he did die,’ she observed, pointing to a dried green mess like lichen on the mummy’s sleeve.

I left that house with a horrible vision of the great-grandfather’s corpse at table with a napkin wrapped under his ragged chin while they poured soup through him on to the floor. But then I remembered that those people were too poor and vulgar to use a napkin.

Naturally the Holy Mother Church frowned on the Indians’ keeping and worshipping their ancestors in the house. The Christian
conquistadores
had hunted down nearly all those mummies hundreds of years ago, so it was exceedingly rare to find one now. I was happy in more ways than I can write down because I knew God had chosen me to specially extirpate this idolatry. Indeed, in my twelve-year-old eyes, my servant’s deceased great-grandfather personified to a nicety a Graven Image. I hastened to my Confessor and told him what I had seen.

The officers of God had a special way to treat those infidel mummies. They broke them. They bent them out of shape, they wrenched out the teeth, they made them look pitiable and defeated, so the Indians could not think highly enough of them to worship them any more. In the same way, when the Spanish took all the gold from the Inca temples, it was not at all motivated by a lust for treasure, but because our Holy Fathers wished to show the Andeans that those heathen deities were worthless.

The servant girl did not return to our house for one week. When she did, she showed a beaten face. She dared not look at me, but she sat outside my door and wept her story through the keyhole. Her father had raised his hand against her. This was because my Confessor and his officers had told him how they came by their information, before they thrashed the great-grandfather to clumps of bone and hair and dropped him into a chamber pot with the shards of the
pututo
shell that would never more utter its pagan moans.

‘I thought you was my friend,’ the servant girl moaned. ‘I took you to mine.’

So Satan tempts the righteous to pity the wrong. I knelt on my side of the door and poked my little finger through the keyhole right into her eye. She fell backwards and crawled away, sobbing humbly. I was pleased to see she had learned a little of the ways of Our Lord.

It was in those days that I began to read the life of Santa Rosa of Lima with more than simple fervour in my heart. Santa Rosa was the very first
saint of the New World. Unlike myself, she was cursed with physical beauty. They called her Rosa because her complexion was as petals, and her cheeks bloomed an adorable pink. Her lovely face carried the weight of her family’s earthly ambitions: she was supposed to marry a fortune.

Everyone loved her looks but Rosa despised them, for she did not wish to marry anyone except God.

She barely slept, constantly fasted, abjured all flesh. She mortified her delicate skin with continual floggings and a hair shirt. Her family chastised her and even tried to stop her with stern edicts. This only inspired Rosa to more ardent acts of worship.

One of her innovations was to rub lye into her hands, and pepper into her face. She cut off her flowing hair, thrusting a wreath of roses over her shorn head. Inside the flowers Rosa concealed a brace of iron spikes. Later, she dared to skewer her head with a long pin.

Finally, when she was twenty and her beauty was ruined, her family submitted to her will. She became a Dominican tertiary. Taking a vow of poverty, she left her comfortable bedchamber to live in a small grotto in the garden. There she undertook good deeds for the Christian poor and tended to the deserving sick with her own hands.