The Book of Human Skin (38 page)

The churches were frankly bizarre: their facades were carved with what appeared to be a conglomeration of paganistic symbols – snakes, pumas and strange creatures in feathered headdresses. I rather enjoyed them. No Venetian is more than a little Christian, after all. And myself less than most. Also like Venice, there were almost no carriages. People walked or went by sedan chair. Mules carried mountainous loads, the notoriously temperamental alpacas light ones.A few carts rattled by.

We passed a row of dead dogs laid out in lines. ‘The governor has them exterminated, because of the Rabies,’ my
arriero
explained. ‘We have vaccine against the Small-Pox too.You should . . .’

I waved him aside, remembering my father’s unfortunate brush with the newfangled vaccination methods.

I lodged myself at a noisy inn in the palmy Plaza de Armas for the first night. I sent a note to the ‘housekeeper’ at my father’s mansion to announce my presence in Arequipa. Until this moment, I had kept the lovely Beatriz Villafuerte in ignorance of my imminent arrival. I wanted her to have just so much time but no more. I had written that I would arrive in the late afternoon of the next day, and that I expected the house to be emptied by then of any elements that might prove undesirable to the eyes of the legitimate son of the Conte Fernando Fasan.That’s how I put it. I thought it had a nice ring to it. She would be up all night looting, I hoped. Much good would it do her, though.

I made short work of lodging my father’s will, that is, my edition of it, with the town clerk to copy overnight. I thoughtfully provided a Spanish translation that named his first-born son Minguillo as the rightful heir to all Fernando Fasan’s possessions in the Old World and the New.

When the citizens lit the resin lamps outside their houses, I took myself back to the
tambo
, and found myself a nice little bargain in flesh. I fell asleep, my fists closed up ready for my forthcoming war on my father’s mistress and her bastard.

In the morning, I suffered myself to be educated by the night’s whore. My
arriero
had boasted that the ‘White City of Arequipa’ was famous for its
limpieza de sangre
, pure, European blood.Yet down in the
tambo
Indians of all hues, and slaves, diluted the proud paleness of the citizenry. Leaning over the balcony, how many pages of the book of human skin I leafed through that first dawn, guided by my exhausted harlot.

More than half the people who passed under my window could have been rich Venetians or citizens of Madrid, if you but looked at their white hides. These were the thoroughbred Spaniards, born in Spain proper.Then there were those whose complexion was irreproachably milky but who had a tinge of the New World about their bearing – these, I was told, were the
criollos
, born of Spanish parents here.Then came the tawny
mestizos
, the offspring of Spanish fathers dallying with native women. The pure Indian people were the most appetising – delectably sculpted in rich terracotta.Then there were slaves of various hues, ranging from coffee-coloured
mulatas
and the
moriscas
, their children fathered by white men, to the half-Indian, half-African
sambas
and the deep-black
negros
and
negras
.

‘What’s that?’ I demanded of my whore, each time a girl of a slightly different shade passed by. She cast an expert eye and her answers enchanted me.

‘
Media asambada
,’ she would say, ‘half
samba
’, of a gingerbread-coloured maid. Or ‘
cuarterona
’, one quarter black. And ‘
mestiza media chola
’, or ‘
india acholada
’.

The whites had their gradations too, of which my favourite was ‘
de color trigueño
’ – wheat-coloured.

I rubbed my hands and slapped my whore back to bed.Yes, the book of human skin had many pages in Arequipa, and the Expectant Reader need not doubt I planned to run my finger down all of them.And if I imagined some of those sun-warmed integuments segmented, sumac’d, tooled, lightly gilded and bound around volumes, what Book-loving Reader would blame me?

Our scene is the Casa Fasan. I took care to arrive at the house not in the afternoon, as advertised, but at eleven in the morning, and just in time to see my father’s weeping mistress Beatriz being helped into a sedan chair. She was a beauty indeed, even with her face swollen and discoloured by tears. There was no sign of the brat. A train of mules loaded with fine furniture
and carpets waited in the street. I told the muleteer: ‘Let me help you to avoid a charge of assisting in a theft. Unload these stolen goods and take them back into the house where they belong.’

At this moment, a woman, the actual housekeeper apparently, erupted into the courtyard, her face, too, disfigured with weeping. ‘Conte Fasan!’ she whined. ‘It is not what it looks like.These things were
gifts
, sir . . .’

‘And are there notarized documents to prove that?’

‘For gifts of love there are no documents, sir. I beg you, the lady will be destitute.’

‘The
lady
, as you so generously style her, has parasited long enough on our family.’

I held out my purse to the muleteer.Wearily, he untied the burdens of the first beast, and his lackeys did likewise, and the treasure proceeded back into the house.That is, my house.

I strolled around appreciatively. The building was a fine specimen of colonial grandeur – three courtyards enclosed by low buildings, all in the white
sillar
stone, richly ornamented with architraves and friezes in a joyous miscegenating orgy of Doric, Ionian and Corinthian styles. The walls of the first courtyard were painted in an accommodating shade of buttermilk yellow. The next courtyard was a throbbing cobalt blue, the last a russet-red richer than anything in Venice. The intense colours bullied into stark highlight all the carved details of pure white
sillar
gargoyles, cornices and pilasters. Nothing could try harder to please than the decorative cobbles, the shady arbours and the riot of flowers against this crisp backwash of paint and stone.The Casa Fasan was not the Palazzo Espagnol, yet it was not shabby either. I suddenly resented all the generations of geraniums that had bloomed in those pots for the eyes of my father’s mistress and her bastard, and not for my own.Why had I left it so long to claim what was mine? By rights I should have extracted some rents since the day my father died, since the day Beatriz Villafuerte ceased to serve in his bed.

‘Is my chamber ready?’ I asked the housekeeper. She led me to the room where my father had so extravagantly betrayed my mother and myself. It still smelled of the perfume of my father’s mistress, and the bed dipped slightly where Beatriz Villafuerte had lain with him all those illicit years. I lay on that
bed listening while below me in the courtyard tears were wept and teeth were gnashed and my own name was called out in rage and disgust. I felt at home already.

I did not repair immediately to the nunnery of Santa Catalina.The Travelled Reader will easily comprehend that so fine a thing as a Venetian gentleman could not be received in Arequipa without a great deal of noticing. I made sure news of my grandeur got to the convent ahead of me, with a few struts around the main square in full fig. I dressed in a cerulean piqué waistcoat and an apple-green frock-coat to attend a private duel of two bulls on a farm outside the town, an event patronized by many elegant gentlemen and ladies of Arequipa. All eyed me curiously. In that free and easy way of mine, I let it be known that I had come to set up my sister in the nun business in town.

Bishop José Sebastián de Goyeneche y Barreda received me in honour of my father, who had been his friend.The letter from my book-loving cardinal in Rome lay on his desk, the papal seal prominently exposed. I saw surprise and doubt on his face after an hour’s conversation with me, but the Bishop did not refuse my request to send a
bigliettino
to the
priora
at Santa Catalina, with a recommendation to accept my sister as a novice. A certain amount of jiggery-pokery had to be contrived, he implied, but all objections to my sister’s Venetian birth would be swept aside by the fact that my father had been to all intents and purposes a citizen of Arequipa for so many years.

‘Where do I sign,
Ilustrísimo
?’ I asked. ‘How much do I pay?’

He looked at me with unmistakable distaste. ‘The municipal clerk will draw up the document for you, and it will be verified by the
síndico
and the
procurador
of Santa Catalina. It shall be waiting at the convent’s
oficina
when you go there.’

On my whore’s advice I next betook myself to Calle Guañamarca’s taverns, where the evening’s hilarity was sharpened by the sombre silhouettes of the convents of Santa Rosa and Santa Teresa, of which I heard many delightful stories about nuns made to sleep in tombs with black curtains, of cruel penances and poor rations. After sampling the
chicha
in a dozen establishments, including
El Infierno
– ‘Hell’ – and
El Mundo al Revés
– ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ – I wandered east and north through
the night, taking in the Indian quarters of Santa Marta and Miraflores.Then I followed the stream of shoulders tight with hope to the gambling parlours of Callejón de Loredo, where I deprived a few children of their inheritances and came away with the smell of their tears in my hair.

Finally I found a
chichería
called
El Veneno
– ‘Poison’ – and drank enough fermented corn to grow a field in my nethers. I finished my night back at the
tambo
with my whore, making her make good on her promissory morning kisses, stumbling home to the Casa Fasan late the next morning, to refresh myself for my appointment at the
oficina
at Santa Catalina.

I dressed in duck trousers, a taffeta cravat and a frogged jacket, with my violet velvet toque at a rakish angle. I practised regretful expressions in the mirror.Then I strode along the walls of Santa Catalina, which reared above the street in golden crescents as if carved out of Saharan sand. Over the gate, a painted stone image of Santa Catalina herself clutched a crucified Jesus like a baby doll.The door was studded with Moorish pinions. I rapped sharply on a metal nipple with my cane.

It was only when I belatedly pulled a discreet cord that a lay-porter appeared and opened the gate into a courtyard of bland aspect. I craned my neck but could detect no aspect of nunly life. I saw the wheel at the end of the courtyard, the two-tiered contraption by which goods and money were exchanged while retaining the nuns’ invisibility. Where I stood was the debatable land inside the convent, where men might deliver, or parley with the
priora
. I cursed under my breath: that showy front gate was a false one. The real gate to Santa Catalina’s enclosure was at the far end of this courtyard. I would not have the satisfaction of a comprehensive inspection of the grim bastion that would encase my sister.That was a thousand pities for I had counted on taking home some nourishing memories of its dark walls and glowering cloisters: something to tuck into my imagination, for later, when I thought of Marcella and the troubles she had cost me.

‘Sir,’ a cool, intensely feminine voice saluted me. I was ushered into the vaulted stone office of the
priora
, fragrant with the mingled scents of wax and soap. Behind a desk, I glimpsed the
locutorio
that housed the grate through which Arequipan families might make small-talk with the daughters and sisters they had buried alive inside the convent.

Beside the
priora
sat her deputy, the very ugliest specimen of a woman to have ever slimed out of a womb. I am sure I hope so myself.

She wore blue spectacles that she removed as the door closed behind me and the room settled into soft gloom. I was sorry that she had, for then I had to look at her eyes, one of which was glued shut by folds of scarified skin. She made my flesh wrinkle into tiny crevices of discomfort.When I looked at her, I swear the sweat started to pour down my brow.

The office was well appointed with excellent furniture and paintings. I smiled to notice a vase of monkshood flowers on the smaller desk. The foolish women doubtless had no idea that it was deadly poisonous. They probably thought the deep blue resembled the robe of the Virgin, or some such nonsense!

The
priora
, however, soon revealed herself as a specimen of more intelligence than I like to see in a woman. I was pleased to discover that her repulsive assistant, the
vicaria
, was a thoroughly stupid fanatic. Her habit was ridged with various penitential garments beneath. Her neck was raw.There was blood around her right ankle: she must have been wearing the cilice. Your woman obviously considered herself among Heaven’s royalty, with all that suffering. I wondered if that sucked-orange face of hers was her own creation.

The
vicaria
scowled – or perhaps, with the melted features, she just looked that way at all times – while the
priora
informed me that the council and the chapter of the convent had approved my application on Marcella’s behalf.

‘Does your sister speak our tongue?’ demanded the Melted One. The smell of her rotten, starved breath floated unwelcomely over the desk.

Marcella’s Spanish, I testified, was fluent as my own. The educational requirements of a convent in Peru would present no difficulty. I mentioned a crisis that had obliged a recent sequestration in what I delicately called ‘a special refuge’. I did not mention the term ‘lunatic asylum’ lest it raise their price or give them qualms.

‘Marcella longed all her life to be a nun,’ I told them. ‘So imagine the shock of Bonaparte closing all the convents in Venice, just as she was about to take up her vocation! It affected her painfully. I would go as far as to
say it was too much for her. As a loving brother, I found that I could not in conscience deny her heart’s desire: an enclosed life in a house of God.’