The Book of Human Skin (31 page)

She growled, ‘If Marcella stays too long in there, she’ll become one of them, at least in the eyes of everyone else.’

At which I smiled widely. ‘I know,’ I parried. ‘It’s notorious.’

For the first time Cecilia Cornaro stopped talking. Look at the colour draining out of her face! Look at the slender fingers clenching up – yes, especially look at those! She whispered, ‘Marcella, why did you not tell me about your brother? Was I so . . . ?’

I had her shown out with scant ceremony. I told the servants that admittance to the Palazzo Espagnol was thereafter strictly denied to the immoral artist Cecilia Cornaro.Then I summoned certain men I knew from the Arsenale, men with bellies tautened by irregular employment. It did not cost much.

For what they did I never had any reproaches from her. She had learned something of how one deals with Minguillo Fasan.

Gianni delle Boccole

It were all oer Venice, that rotting busyness with Cecilia Cornaro’s studio, n the burning of her hand. I went myself across the canal to the studio, to say sorry, for I were the one who had drawed her into this trouble.

The courtyard still had a feint smell of burning, and black ashes floated down from the beams from time to time. Peaces of faces, I guest, hornting the place. The vandals ud killed a hunnerd portraits alredy did, they sayed.

Up at her studio, there were a note stuck on the door saying, ‘Gone painting in foreign parts. Cat will be hungry. Feed the brute.’

There were no need. A pile o chicken bones lay bout the floor, keeping company with fish head n fresh lamb chops, n a plate o coin left by them who haint had time to shop for the puss. So very many people ud alredy come a-seeking Cecilia Cornaro, as she would of known that they would: the cat hisself lay fat n greasy on the stoop, licking his nethers. I moved to go but the cat detained me with a paw cross my path. I dropt a coin what he batted expert into the plate, and nodded.

It were sayed about the town them days that Cecilia Cornaro ud left Venice for ever because she dint feel herself or her paintings was safe mong us. Twere a matter o shame for the city, to drive that genius woman way. So many Venetian faces lossed, because Cecilia Cornaro wunt record them now. What would appen to all them nobble famlies without faces now? How would they find rich furriners to get marrid to without there faces to send out for to advertise the bargain?

Marcella’s bastert brother were heared to curse from attic to skirtin board when he could not have a Cecilia Cornaro likeness of his wife.

But I saw summing smug sneak across his face as he done so, Dog ovva God.

Minguillo Fasan

The
Fatebenefratelli
sent me irritating little despatches about Marcella.They had misunderstood their role. The saintly doing-good Brothers wished to believe that they might cure my sister, thereby doing good by the spadeful. Padre Portalupi waxed enthusiastic about how quickly she might
come home to her family
. My crest drooped considerably when I belatedly realized that this was the desired outcome of all their treatments.

And damn her bladder too but did it not start to behave itself on the island? The especially-good Brother Portalupi boasted of the
farmacia
’s contra-diuretic potions and a diet excluding such foods as watermelon and asparagus. She was treated to warm baths instead of the twelve-hour cold ones I had so revelled in picturing.

Next Padre Portalupi wrote, under the impression that it would please me, that he had obtained excellent results in her damaged limb from the
Herbarium
of Apuleis Platonicus. He drivelled on about wherwhet for soreness of the sinews and foot disease, hockleaf for irritation of the bladder, henbane for swelling of the privities and elder for water sickness and non-retention of the urine.

Also, the verdant peace of the island appeared to suit Marcella. I recalled now with bitterness how she had always liked gardens and greenery, until I terminated her lyrical country rambles decisively when she was nine.

At the time there were not more than fifty other lunatics domiciled at San Servolo. Marcella was kept separately from the violent ones and the poor ones.As a
dozzinante
, or paid-for lodger, she occupied a pleasant high-
ceilinged room above the reception area, looking over towards the islands of La Grazia and San Clemente: a view that rivalled my own from the windows of the Palazzo Espagnol. As if that were not luxury enough, I was soon pestered by Padre Portalupi for an allowance that Marcella might purchase books to read and paper to write and draw upon.

I refused the book and paper money: ‘
It is my opinion, knowing her from an infant, that books would be injurious to my sister. Her brain is not to be taxed. Her animal economy will be deranged or even destroyed by too much intellectual strain. In the meanwhile, I have been reading about some very interesting new treatments of leeches applied to the pubis and thighs in cases very like my sister’s
. . .’

Padre Portalupi wrote back that, while he respected my opinion, and accepted that I would not defray expenses for new books, he had decided to open the library to my sister, under supervision, that she might read history, science, languages and other improving subjects.

‘
Paper
,’ he declared, ‘
is never denied to our patients, no more than water or air
.’

His quiet defiance, and the between-the-lines implication of my meanness, filled my mouth with acid. I wanted to write and insist upon those leeches, but I dared not provoke an argument at this stage. The stamping and verifying of documents for Marcella’s official committal dragged on and on, which meant that I as yet relied on informal boarding arrangements with the Brothers to keep her on San Servolo.

I received one note after another on her excellent progress.

‘
Interestingly, her eyebrows have grown back to a shape of perfect symmetry
.’

‘
She is no longer afraid when her door opens, but smiles tranquilly on every nurse. She has mastered some gymnastic exercises and grows stronger daily.’

‘She follows our regime without question. Her courses are regular. She takes her medicine without protest.’

I countered, ‘
But has she confessed her sins, and undergone a
moral
cure?
’

‘
Your sister
,’ Padre Portalupi replied, ‘
does not speak, as you know. Yet she has given us to understand by the civility and gentility of her behaviour that she is morally cured. Indeed, sometimes I worry that she grows almost too docile
. . .’

I strode up and down my study in a fury. Morally cured? Was that enough to send her home? Marcella had played her silent card well. No respect to
the Gracious Reader, but can He conjure sufficient disgust for this priest’s weak mind?

I supposed that I must add Padre Portalupi to my little stock of enemies, now including Doctor Santo, Cecilia Cornaro, the Spanish madam and the will-thief, all but the latter firmly and finally dealt with.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

I found work and a bed in a monastery near Treviso where the sick were taken in. I wrote to tell Gianni where I was, and to ask for news. For the longest time, he did not answer me. So I knew there was nothing good to tell. Marcella, I understood, still believed that I loved Minguillo’s wife.

Meanwhile, after ignoring me for several years, Napoleon again took an interest in my career. If he ever needed surgeons, it would be in his new war against the Tsar of Russia.

By the spring of 1812, I was caught up in the flotsam of the thirty-two thousand Italian soldiers dragged by the currents of fate towards the Russian front with criminally few provisions to feed us. Come September, the starving Grande Armée was walking down the empty streets of Moscow, looking for bread and beds. Our resentful campfires soon burned the wooden city down. By October, we had caught sight of our true enemies: cold and the ineptitude of those who failed to keep us fed and clothed. On November 5th, the first snow fell. After that all I remember is hunger, and whiteness, and my scalpel tapping on frozen flesh.

The image of Marcella’s face imprinted itself on the snow. I saw her features in the drifts, as my hands busied themselves amputating frostbitten digits. During the retreat from Moscow I learned everything I would ever need to know about the effect of cold on human skin.

It was at this time that Napoleon ceased to be my textbook. He no longer seemed indestructible. I did not see it as Napoleon losing, but as his diseases winning. My patient was failing: next it would be the turn
of the priest. Only a very sick man would have spent a whole Grande Armée upon a mad delusion of snowbound empire.

I raised my head the day we limped back into Italy. For months it had slumped down with my defeats – for I counted each man I lost to the cold a grievous, wrenching failure – or hunched between my shoulders against the ice and the winds that blew from Siberia.

But that day I thought I could smell the sea, or at least a small lagoon in the crook of the Adriatic. Nothing belonged to me in that place, but I belonged there. Marcella was there. I had now seen the invincible Napoleon in mortal retreat: nothing was impossible. I no longer believed that anything could keep me from her. And I was no longer interested in reasons why I should keep away.

I returned to the monastery at Treviso and began to make plans for my return to Venice. After all those silent months, I took up my pen and wrote once more to Gianni.

Sor Loreta

There was one day when a sudden recurrence of my brain fever caused me to slap the smirking face of Rafaela, who appeared at my cell to take her sister back to her own. Perhaps I pulled her hair a little, too. They claimed I tried to gouge her eyes in my passion, yet these must be slanders for I remember nothing of it.

After that I saw Sor Sofia not at all. Madre Mónica forbade her to come to me. I was not allowed to go to her.

‘You are dead to Sor Sofia,’ the
priora
told me. ‘I have permitted you to exploit the poor child’s gentle nature for too long. This time your separation from her is final,
vicaria
or no
vicaria
.’

I had a sensation as if I was being stripped of my own skin, more painful than any scourge I had ever employed on myself. When I opened my mouth to protest, the
priora
said spitefully, ‘You have your Jackals to play with now.’

It was never God’s design that things should turn out this way, so I decided instead to mourn Sor Sofia as if
she
were dead.

I announced that I was fasting to save the soul of Sor Sofia from centuries in Purgatory. I used my allowance to have masses said for her. I wrote her name on the walls of my cell, picking out the letters in my own pure blood.

Sor Narcisa and Sor Arabel came to me, and offered to scourge themselves on Sor Sofia’s behalf, but I sent them away with hard words. ‘You never loved Sor Sofia as you should,’ I told them. ‘You were jealous of her.’

I lay on my bed with my body rigid in the shape of the cross. The rosary could not be pried from my hand. In that time I drank only gall mixed with bitter herbs, and, like Clare of Pisa, I allowed no solid food to pass my mouth unless it was mixed with ashes. They took away the ashes from my hearth. Then, like the Holy Virgin Mechtild of Magdeburg, I would eat only the Eucharist, and always experienced rapture and the taste of pure honey in my mouth when I did so. Back in my cell, I wept copious tears into a lachrymatory bottle, which I placed as an offering in front of my
hornacina
.

In spite of all my fasting and my flagellation, when I took my bath I could not help noticing that my body had remained as white as snow and that even though I approached my forty-third year I still seemed like a very young girl in physical appearance. I was strong as an Amazon, yet without a morsel of sinewy bulk: my strength came entirely from my soul. My breasts were almost non-existent, and my flanks were free from womanly curves. Since I began to fast, I had rarely suffered the indignity of the monthly courses that weaken ordinary women. From this I knew how much my purity had pleased my Celestial Spouse: an uncorrupted body is one of the sure signs of sanctity. This is proved in the story of Jacinta di Atondo, who had a boil removed by a sceptical surgeon, a nonbeliever. Instinctively feeling her holiness, he kept that boil. Twenty years later it was still as fresh and undecayed as the day he removed it. Jacinta di Atondo’s boil won that surgeon over to our true God.

The
priora
came to my cell and showed her complete incomprehension of the ways of God by speaking to me severely. She tried to tell me that my feelings for Sor Sofia were unwholesome, and a symptom of my brain fever returning.

‘This fever is not of earthly origin,’ I told her. ‘Look,’ I affirmed, ‘God will not allow me to eat.’

And I took up a piece of bread that lay beside my bed, and put it into my mouth. But immediately my jaws clamped on it, a great wave of nausea
surged through me. The bread, against my will, was ejected from my mouth along with a jet of bile straight on to the
priora
’s habit.

I declared, ‘So you must acknowledge that it is a superior force that prevents me from taking food. I can swallow only the Body and Blood of Christ. Alpaïs of Cudot lived for forty years on the Eucharist alone, and took food into her mouth only to suck the juices, spitting out the pulp. Indeed’ – and I looked at the stain on her habit significantly – ‘a piece of fish spat out by Alpaïs of Cudot was saved as a holy relic by one of her enlightened company.’

‘True virtue is free of pride and ambition, Sister,’ snarled the
priora
, wiping the bread and bile off her clothing with a disgusted look on her face. ‘And why must you always talk of food? Why must I and everyone else around you always talk of what you do not eat?’