The Book of Human Skin (27 page)

How glorious and useful a body the Reader is, allowing me a vent for every sore frustration! The Reader may take this as notice of forthcoming expostulations.

The Reader will sniff in a superior manner, and be right.
Yes
, I should have noticed the youth’s fervour when he spoke of my sister.Yet I did not. However, love and coughing, as they say, always reveal themselves.The first thing that alerted me to trouble was that my sister looked better and even began to thrive.All that time I had been sadly ignorant of what kind of cure she had been getting.

The love cure.

The hands of young Doctor Santo all over her. His healing touch! Finally I saw with my own eyes what was going on between them. It was one solitary laugh I caught, like a fly in a glass jar. But it was enough.

Marcella at the window, the little doctor down in the courtyard fussing with the broken catch on his dilapidated black bag.Then he looked up, their eyes met and held. Then she actually placed her little hand flat against the window pane, and laughed. Her laughter flew through the glass and caressed his cheek. I felt it on my own and in other parts of me as well.

I had not seen Marcella laugh since before Piero Zen met his end.

‘Oho,’ I said to myself. It all came to me in a stripe of lightning: how little the young doctor cost me, and yet how often he came. And Marcella, she had lately seemed sealed up like a walnut – for weeks I had had no way
of seeing into the red core of her pain.This was why. She had found a new Pieraccio to protect her. I had been blind. Now I was blind with fury.

A common surgeon! Who had been honoured to sit at my table! He was cheaper than the hairdresser. He lived in a dank hole. I should have divined that philanthropic gleam in his eye was lit by something else within. A memory stirred. Damn me – superfluous as that may be – if he was not also the same malnourished runt of a quacklet that my valet had summoned to officiate when Pieraccio met his putrid end!

My imagination seethed like acid eating nails inside a bottle. When and where had it started between them? Perhaps the ambitious doctor had bribed Gianni to be given the work of attending to her? Had the doting couple whispered little nothings to one another? Had they exchanged cooing
billetsdoux
? Had they contrived an actual congress under my own roof? Would her little rose-coloured particular be delicate eating after all the liquid that passed almost continuously from it? No doubt she would take her turn on her back as meekly as she had taken every turn I’d done her.And let herself get tasted docile as she would take a spoonful of Balm of Gilead.

My nerves wrapped themselves in ropes around my heart.

Then I calmed myself with a certain knowledge.
Nothing could have happened
. Marcella, as I knew to my cost, was never without her maid Anna or Gianni or some other servant to coddle her. They would never have let the little pretender get to her, not in person or by letter. The little doctor had the look of poverty all over him: the pittance I paid him would not have stretched to bribing my servants the way Piero Zen must have done.

So the romance must have been all off-stage for Marcella, conducted on the invisible tight-wire between their two longing pairs of eyes. Let the Dullest Reader imagine all the worst concoctions of the most fevered blue-stockinged ladies, whose virginity is ever preserved by their homeliness, and even then He shall hardly find Himself capable of imagining the vapid fantasy that was surely my sister’s affair of the heart, devoid of novelty or actual fulfilment. I resolved with difficulty not to soil my fists on the doctor’s carcass.There was a cleaner way to be done with this excrescence. One that pertained to my latest, as yet evanescent deliberations on Marcella’s future –
pazienza!
– nay, this plan might well beautifully expedite them!

What? What’s that? No, they
could not
be together. Not under any. The Sentimental Reader should evacuate that drivelling thought from His maudlin mind on the instant.And wash His hands after.

On his next visit, I contrived to have the doctor briefly separated from his old leather bag. Intercepting him in the hall, I jovially chaffed him for its shabbiness and offered the services of my valet Gianni to polish it while he attended to my sister. He seemed nervous at my solicitude, but he dared not refuse me. I then misdirected him to a small parlour where Marcella was not waiting for him, as I had already arranged for her to be carried to the dining-room by Gianni.

Bearing the bag to my studio, I quickly penned a letter. It pretended to come from Doctor Santo Aldobrandini. It was addressed to a certain woman. I did not think it possible that Marcella knew the doctor’s handwriting but, to be certain, I made a good attempt at scribal verisimilitude, using a chit for herbs I found in the bag. I gave the bag a little rub for luck and then took it to Marcella’s room where I laid it on its side, the contents spilling out. I arranged the letter carefully, gaping slightly and leaning precariously against the broken latch. It very clearly invited my sister to lift it up, whereupon it would fall fully open, inviting her to make absolutely certain that it had dropped from her doctor’s valise.Accidentally.

‘
Impossible Object of my Fervent Desire
,’ I had written, for I guessed the little doctor would go for high-flown and capitalized, ‘
I watch you at the table and I long for you to be mine.Yet I must revolt my hands and eyes with humbler and less delicious meat for my daily wage
.’

Only at the end of the letter did my little doctor reveal the name of the object of his desire. She was a woman whose physical perfection I had seen my sister’s eyes slide all over. Marcella, ignored by everyone, also stared at she whom everyone else watched and adored.

My wife.

When I had baited the doctor’s bag, I rang for Gianni. I berated him for leaving my dilapidated sister on display in the dining-room when elegant guests were due for luncheon. He knew better than to remind me I had ordered her carried there myself.

‘Take her back to her room on the instant,’ I thundered.

Then I had the puzzled doctor footman-ed from the empty parlour to my study, whereupon I pulled together a very choice specimen of a righteous rage.

‘How dare you?’ I hissed. ‘A beggar at my door, practically.’

I told his confused and frightened face that I had caught him looking at my wife.

‘Nobody likes a lecher, and a parasitic lecher is very upsetting for everyone. It ill behoves you to take my food and money if you’re actually after something more substantial,’ I told him, indicating overflowing feminine breasts and hips with economic movements of my hands. ‘You shame yourself with vain delusions.You spit on my hospitality. And as a doctor, you are a complete fraud. I detect no improvement in my poor sister’s condition, which is not surprising, given your attention is evidently elsewhere.’

The doctor stuttered, ‘This is a fantasy, you lose the run of yourself, sir . . .’

I had a bowl of sausage stew on my desk that I had ordered up especially for this moment. I threw it over him. ‘My food does not look so appetizing when you’re wearing it on your shirt, does it?’

He gasped, giving me the disbelieving look of a beaten dog who had thought himself in good domestic odour.

‘Begone from my household.You shall also depart from Venice altogether. I shall be having words with the
Magistrato alla Sanità
.You and your shoddy services shall not be welcome anywhere in good society now.’

He flushed to the roots of his baby-fine angel-blond hair and continued to stammer in an agitated manner. ‘Your wife is nothing to me! And you must stop with the production of “The Tears of Santa Rosa”. People will get sick.’

At this I admit I was taken aback. How did he know that I was the source of the Tears? And how did he know how bad it was? The safest course was to return to the high moral ground. ‘You contradict me? You dare to deny what the whole world knows, having seen you devouring my wife with your eyes?’

‘You are an . . . an evil person,’ he whispered.

Within a day of finding the letter, Marcella had turned her head against
the wall and started playing dead. She stopped eating. She did not speak. Her breathing was so slight as to be undetectable.

Remarkably few die of disappointed love, however, so there was still work to be done. I marched into her room without knocking.

‘This moping and starving and staring at the wall,’ I remarked in that free and easy way I have, ‘this is the behaviour of a madwoman.’

Marcella Fasan

I buried the hurt deep in my heart like a dagger blade. It would take years for that dagger to be pulled out, and for me to live again without a sear of grief that cut me with each breath.

I refused to drag Gianni or Anna into that abyss with me. I would not put them in danger of knowing the truth of what I had felt for Santo, and nor would I burden their loving compassion with my anguish.

Gianni delle Boccole

Santo were very shook-looking when he come out o Minguillo’s study. He were still dripping with stew. At first, I bethought he had been poisont, and vomited on hisself. Then I recognized the stew, as we ud had it for luncheon downstairs. I was reliefed for it had been holesome.

I fetcht a damp rag and expunged the worst oft, tender as a nussmaid.
He
stood still, shockt like a little child betraid.

He told me, ‘I’ve been tricked, but I don’t know how.’

He could not meet my eyes. I bethought,
Also umiliated, and made to see the side of Minguillo Fasan that would chill a walrus to the bone, Great Beast ovva God!

He told me his story, and I filled in the missing parts.

He moaned, ‘The worst of it is . . . he’s sure to have told Marcella. She will think horribly of me. She will think me a goat . . .’

I told him I would hexplain the terrible lie, I would smooth it out with Marcella.

‘If she believes you. Even if she does, I cannot enter this place again. Conte Fasan has forbidden me.’

‘Then we’ll jist make Marcella well nuff to leave!’

Until this moment I haint niver spoke o the feelins atwixt them. Twere summing too delicate to bring to the light. Summing that nestled in the soft darkness, bit by bit growing stronger, though not yet ready to fly.

Scant years back, that Santo were o the street and that Marcella o the highest birth would of been a problem to confront. But Napoleon ud dug up the trenches atwixt the nobbles and the common people and had his eyes set on the space atwixt man n God now! – And anyway this was desprit times at the Palazzo Espagnol. So I sayed, ‘I believe if ye want it, she will finely come to ye. And if she does, ye will have to look after her. Her brother will not take her back.’

Santo started like an affrighted moth. Yet I saw hope in his face. I pressed his nice-shaped hand. There wernt no more to be sayed, Dear Good Little God.

Minguillo Fasan

‘You know, my sister is demented? Her religious obsession was merely a veil for her true malady – the
ninfomania
. She should not be permitted to dwell among decent, sane people.’

That very afternoon I rehearsed this opinion on my wife, who barely raised her lovely blank eyes from the card table. I saw a rare understanding there. I touched the silk of her dress, a moss green with sleeves puffed up
like cats’ heads. She recoiled and murmured like the dove of a wife she had better be, ‘Whatever you think best, dearest.’

I thought,
There are emeralds in this for you, my dove
.

I went to my mother’s room. And I proceeded to inform her about Marcella’s lamentable love affair, using my imagination and my vocabulary to their fullest extents, which is to say much. I portrayed the affair as a logical continuation of the youthful depravity spawned and enjoyed by Piero. My mother quivered at my plain speech. She flinched at the commonness of the young doctor, at his presuming to lust after my own wife while goading Marcella’s weakness into a new outbreak of obscenity.Then she lowered her gaze modestly, as she always did when she sacrificed Marcella, and told me that I was the head of the household now.

‘
Ninfomania
,’ I sighed loudly. ‘The shame of it.’

All this time Signor Fauno the hairdresser had his head bent over my mother’s curls, his great ear swallowing up all this information on a direct route to his great loose mouth. My sister’s descent into the most sordid form of madness would be disseminated in every noble household on the Grand Canal by the next day’s evening.

Gianni delle Boccole

Twere one thing to tell Santo that I knowed how things lay atwixt em. With Marcella I had to walk een more light. Since Conte Zen were took from us, I had volenteert to carry her upndown the stairs wheniver twere needed. On the way down to dinner that sore day, I wispered into her neck, ‘Miss Marcella, ye dunt have to stay here. If ye dunt mind not to live in splendour with grand fixins, n I think ye would not mind not to, then ye has a choice.’

She turned a confust face to me. There were summing gone from her eyes.

‘Doctor Santo – I appen to know . . .’ I besot.

‘I cannot eat tonight.’ Her two eyes froze in misery – that were her response to my menshon o Santo’s name.

‘Gianni, please take me back to my room,’ she askt.

She sayed nothing more while I returned up the stairs. I layed her gently on the bed. She lookt at the wall with a face white as if carved out of whacks. I tried agin, ‘Taint true, what you think bout Santo, ye is under a mistake. Santo would do anything for ye, Miss Marcella. Anything.’

Her voice were cold like the grey water at the bottom ovva well, ‘My brother says I am to have a new kind of treatment.’