The Book of Human Skin (28 page)

‘Yer brother! Yer playing into yer brother’s hands,’ I told her, bold as a child, for I was affrighted at this change in her. ‘How can ye think
he
is looking out for ye? Now Santo . . . he’s more n willing . . .’

I could not find the words, damn my clotted tong, to do the Cupid. I bethought I would jist need to throw a little rope, and that the bridge atwixt them would be built from all them feelins nussed so strong n secret all this time. But Marcella dint hold out her hand for the rope, and I wernt ready not to be helped by her.

Marcella lookt at that wall, like it was the tablet o the Ten Commandments, and each one of em was carved in ice and sayed ‘Thou Shalt Not Be Loved’.

Then Anna put her poor scarred head round the door and baconed me with her hand.

Outside she wailed, ‘Minguillo has just put out such a dreadful story to the Mistress!’

Minguillo Fasan

We call it the Archipelago delle Malattie, the Archipelago of Maladies, the cluster of islands that curves around Venice like a shield. It is, in fact, a shield, which keeps the city pure of taint, bodily and spiritual.There is Santa Maria
della Grazia for infectious diseases, San Lazzaro for Leprosy, the Lazzaretti, Nuovo and Vecchio, for the Plague. And finally, San Servolo, the island of the Mad.

Fortunately for me, the island of San Servolo had a faintly Iberian history that mirrored my own. Its denizens were lately
i reduci
, soldiers who were less than they were, having given a limb or two for their country. They were cared for by the
Fatebenefratelli
, the doing-good-Brothers, originally from Portugal. The Brothers were great herbalists, and respectful friends of our family. My father had cannily endowed the elegant new pharmacy on the island in 1790, so he might keep it supplied with the Bark of Peru. By then the island already had its own bloodstained operating slab, its bottled brains and marinated foetuses. San Servolo enjoyed the gruesome honour of being second only to Paris as a surgery for the amputation of limbs and the treatment of syphilis.

There were other patients. Even before Napoleon came to craze us, San Servolo had started to accept certain bad seeds from noble families, sons and daughters whose behaviour might bring down a scandal. The mists of the lagoon closed over these blue-blooded gibberers, the ‘
dozzinanti
’, forgivingly and forgettingly.

The island was large; the accommodations generous. San Servolo flourished as a lunatickery. Soon even
pazzi
of the plebeian classes were swallowed up into its gardens and corridors. The ‘furious’ lunatics were confined where no one in town could hear them screaming. San Servolo came to be the home of everything that Venice did not wish to hear, smell or see – the epileptics, the congenital idiots, the raving lunatics, the deficients, the feeble-minded, the moral defectives and the women.

Of course, the Informed Reader knows that all women are potentially mad because of the rambunctious organ in their bodies most conveniently reached by the wound between their legs. For the women who defied their husbands or indulged in sexual over-enthusiasm there had bloomed a picturesque vocabulary –
ninfomania, erotomania, furore in utero, dissolutezza
et pretty cetera and so sweetly forth. Ladies of these uterine persuasions were quickly and discreetly dispatched across the water to San Servolo.

There was another motive to scoop the cocksmitten lady lunatics out of Venice. The great thing was to stop them copulating and breeding, and passing on their vileness. A madwoman contaminates everyone, even her own offspring, who feed on her mad blood in the womb, and who drink her mad milk from the teat.

The Reader taxes me with the sin of garrulity? Requests a change of subject more pertaining to our plot? Why so very much information on lunatics, all written so very sanely?

The Reader’s opinion on the matter passes me by as does the idle wind.

For there was a good reason why I knew so much about San Servolo. The Retentive Reader will be bristling importantly now because
He’
s just recollected that moment, years ago, when I intercepted a letter from my father, proposing to send me exactly there for an examination of the brain. In later letters, I discovered he had even considered having me confined on the island, and had conducted researches into the process. But my mother, it appeared, had always dissuaded him.

Before Boney, disposal of an afflicted relative would have taken a little subtle business with my father’s noble peers on the Council of Ten. But ‘
Il Regno
’ had smashed that up. Now gentlemen could no longer simply confine wives or sisters at will. Petty officers of citizen class might dip their lugubrious noses into our matters, and even prevent us. Damnably, I needed to research all the excruciating detail of all the new paperwork created by the shifting sands of state.

Gianni delle Boccole

I rusht from one t’other for some days, trying to prop the failing hopes of Santo, trying to open up the closed n bitter one-words of Marcella.

‘What makes her all ovva suddenly believe the brother? What wunt tell the truth to save his life from dying?’ I lamented to Anna. ‘But not the folks she has trusted her hole life?’

I wernt halfway to workin out this mistery when Minguillo acted on his threat agin Santo. The Magistrate of the Sanity, or leastwise there blue-blood patrons, had growed awares of Santo and not in a good way. One of there number come to Santo’s rooms with a pair o thugs, and ordered the boy to quit Venice, ‘Or it will not go well for ye.’

The thugs staid ahind to tell Santo, ‘If it comes to our tension that yer spreading slanders bout a skin liquor called “The Tears of Santa Rosa”, no matter where ye are, we shall find ye and put yer head in a bucket of it for a very long time.’

I found Santo staring miserably at his shabby bag like it held a bad secret. He talkt wildly o stayin and defyin Minguillo, but when he told me of his visitors and there threatenings, I sayed sternly, ‘Twould be sartin death for ye to stay,’ for I knowed them partikeler thugs from his describing. Santo must assolutely get out o Venice now them dogs ud got thesselves a sniff of him. Anyways the Sanity wunt let im practise his trade no more in the town.

‘Where will ye go?’

‘To one of the monasteries where they still practise medicine. I can learn and help with their patients. Padua, perhaps. Treviso. Somewhere beyond the influence of Conte Fasan, I hope.’

‘And my young Mistress?’ I pleaded.

‘Does she think kindly on me again? How does she look when you mention my name?’

I had to shake my head. ‘But Santo, for why let Minguillo Fasan
win
eh?’

‘The brother started this devilment, but it is Marcella who now distrusts and despises me. It is Marcella who is hurt. How can I force . . . myself upon her when her confidence in me is shattered? I must find a way to prove my . . . feelings to her. And anyway, even if she could believe in me again . . . I have nothing to offer her except my devotion.’

He used that dry word ‘devotion’ yet what he meaned was ‘adooring love’.

I longed to tell Santo about the bonified will then. But how could I? Would of lookt as if I was using Marcella’s riotous fortune to tempt him to stay in Venice where he would sure as Sunday get killt. To dangle the will in front o him now, well, it would of insalted him, would of been tantymound to callin him a fortune-hunter. And then o course there were the small matter of I still dint know zackly persay where it twas.

I went to Marcella again. She were looking at the wall. Alredy she seemed thinner than a new moon agin.

‘Santo swears ’tis a lie. Swears.’

She lookt at me with one small spark of hope flowring in her eyes. Then it died in front o me. There were summing fearful inprinted in her memmary that were stronger than my poor words. She hogged me close n hard for a second, and pushed me away, saying, ‘Leave, Gianni, you should not be found here.’

I dint know what Ide sayed wrong, but then there were nought but silents and a heaving breast.

I warned, ‘Do not do this, Miss Marcella. Dear Sweet God, it give yer brother scuses.’

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

I had vowed I would not let Minguillo Fasan visit any more damage on the incomparable skin of his sister. But how could I treat her or look after her as long as she refused outright to see me or to hear my name?

For the second time, I had been told that I was not good enough to stay in Venice. I retraced my steps out of the city, leaving behind me everything I loved.

Minguillo Fasan

People who live in madhouses need few possessions.They need no trappings to define themselves: their empire is already prescribed.A fee to the keeper, and a few inexpensive treats sent in a basket on her saint’s day, that’s all a family might decently be expected to do for a mad daughter or sister.

On San Servolo Marcella would have no use for the fortune that my misguided father had planned to leave to her. Even if the real will were produced, the law stated that a madwoman was incapable of disposing her material goods in a sane fashion. In such a case, those goods would certainly revert to her entirely sane brother. This was neater than marrying her to God. Moreover, even Boney was not likely to close down our madhouses and foist our lunatics back upon their unhappy families!

Soon after the little doctor was dispatched, there appeared all the signs that Marcella’s bladder had returned to its mischievous courses, as it always did when its owner was in distress. She refused to speak even to her own brother. She kept her head turned to the wall, she ate erratically and her colour drained away like melting snow from a barren quarry. These, I assured my wife and mother, were all sure signs of an advanced
furore in utero
.

My mother whimpered a bit, recanted for about half a tricksome hour, and claimed that Marcella
could
be cared for at home. I went to the nursery and plucked my daughter warm from her crib, and brought her back to my mother’s parlour. I emptied the child on to her lap.The hairdresser cooed, pronouncing the baby the most perfect baby in the world. She was as yet on the bald side, but my daughter would one day be a customer.

‘Is this innocence not a beautiful thing?’ I demanded. ‘Would you have it compromised, Mamma? Marcella has no control over her desires. Twice you’ve seen that already. Would she scruple at debauching a tender young niece? Can we have such a horror in our home?’

‘Of course not,’ whispered Mamma, holding the baby a little away from her, as if the child had already succumbed to Marcella’s taint.

Outside my mother’s room I palmed Signor Fauno the usual coin for his trouble. I held up my hand. ‘By the way, “The Tears of Santa Rosa” – I’ve decided it would be advantageous to retire it for a period.’

‘It is our best-selling item . . .’ he protested.

‘There are some rumours that need nipping in the bud. A little shortage now will be immensely stimulating for sales when we return it to the market, with a raised price on account of its scarcity.Tell all the hairdressers to cease at once. Sell off all the stock cheaply’ – inspiration struck me then – ‘to the Spanish madam in Cannaregio, and advise triple doses.’

Signora Sazia would be out of business in a week if she did not realize what caused all the retching in her livestock!

‘But my noble customers?’ the Perfumed and Curled One havered. ‘They do not like to be denied.They are not used to it either.’

‘We shall say that the nuns in Peru have ceased weeping in the bottles on account of some desiccating local pestilence.’

‘Even better,’ he gloated.

Now I had been cultivating the good Brothers of San Servolo like the tender shoots of plants, drawing them towards the light by virtue of their natural inclinations.

In my first letter to the priests, I confessed that a certain imbalance could be found in our family. I profited from my father’s tentative researches into committing my own self. In that letter I told the Brothers that many, many years ago their predecessors might have received some correspondence from my dear father about a problem with a child.That child, I wrote, had now grown into a problematic young woman whose condition threatened the happiness of our whole family. Sadly, my father was no longer among us. So I wished to do as he would have done – consult our family’s esteemed friends, the
Fatebenefratelli
, about the nature of my sister’s illness. For if there was something to be done with the poor creature, the sainted Brothers would surely know the best course.

I caught their interest.Years had indeed passed. Any priests who could remember my father must have been retired or dead. Napoleon had pillaged
all the city’s and the Church’s archives thoroughly. I trusted no one would look for or find the actual correspondence.Yet the Fasan name still figured largely in their account books, given our assiduous supply of chinchona and other Peruvian pharmaceutical delicacies. A certain Padre Portalupi wrote back, politely asking what he could do to help me.

I made a show of hesitation then. I thanked him effusively, but demurred ‘
Perhaps I have revealed too much. Some secrets are too dark to be let out. Doubtless it is better to leave things as they are
.’

‘
Dear son
,’ Padre Portalupi reassured me, ‘
we do God’s work here.Your family’s private sorrows are perfectly secure with us
.’

Given that assurance, I was most candid, probably more so than the doing-good Brother bargained for. I refined Marcella’s condition for my purpose. I worked it this way: it is well known that cripples, like housemaids and governesses, have a tendency to madness. And like all cripples, my sister suffered from a mental distortion that reflected her physical state. I flirted coyly with Padre Portalupi’s compassion, hinting that there were other matters too gross to raise before him.