The Book of Human Skin (43 page)

‘
Aquí hay mucha puna
,’ Arce agreed, stepping out of the way of my watery projectiles. ‘Here is much altitude illness. But you should see Pariacaca,’ he told me. ‘There you would vomit out your own knees! Here is good
puna
. There is very bad.’

‘Is Pariacaca on our way?’ I asked anxiously.

‘If the lady would like to see it . . .’ the
arriero
joked.

When we reached the topmost point of our travels, the peons indulged in a wild neighing, just like the mules. I gathered this was the traditional way of expressing relief and joy. In the mêlée a trunk tumbled off one of the mules, and I heard the ominous tinkle of glass.

From that hill I first saw a white town glittering in front of us like a model of a city proffered in a saint’s hand. As we descended, my strength grew. With mittened fingers I drew portraits of each of the peons, which they accepted with much bowing. At their request, I sketched the floating palaces of Venice and the basilica of San Marco, in neither of which they quite believed, even after handing my drawings around with solemn care.

That night, when their snores announced I was virtually alone, I drew myself a pencil portrait of Santo and fell asleep with my cheek resting on his face.

‘Your brother?’ Arce awoke me with coca tea.

‘Not brother,’ he read my face. Gently, he took the picture from me. ‘I keep safe for you, girl. Not good take to convent.’

Three days later, we crossed into Arequipa over a bridge that they called ‘Bolognesi’. The current rushed beneath us in dizzying spirals that slammed against the shore and snarled around pocked stones big as cottages.

I heard Arce whisper to his friends, ‘What say? Show the poor one a bit of the town before bung her up for good? Let her see Venice not only city with churches.’

So they turned sharply right and around and I beheld at once two strange sights. One was a square every piece as elegant as our San Marco, and a size or two bigger. A violent wave of homesickness swept through me. Just as in Venice, there were graceful arcades on three sides and a vast cathedral on the fourth. And in one corner stood a building as foreign and pagan as anything I had ever seen in books. It was crawling with lizards
and leopards and tropical insects all rendered in a pink stone that seemed alive as human flesh.

‘Now
that
what we call church in Arequipa,’ Arce told me.

Gianni delle Boccole

If Marcella ud survived the mountings, she would be in that Santa Catalina by now with the Peruvian priests forcing holy wavers through her lips and accusing her of evry vernal sin, pickin on her jist because she were furrin and not one on em. Poor girl, not knowing a soul in that far-oft place. If she ud survived.

Humane company I were powless to provide. Insted, I done the most hardest thing in the world for me. I writed a letter. To the
priora
at Santa Catalina. I counted on that she would have some Italian from all the Latin litergees.

I told her evrything what Minguillo had did to his sister, from the start. In my one-word way, I made a list from garden to attic. If that
priora
bethought me wanting in the head, there wernt nothing I could do bout it.

I ended, ‘
For all I know, what is little, your convent is a good place. How I hope so. It would be God’s work indeed if ye could look after our Marcella because God knows she is nowise safe in Venice.
’

I signatcherd it, ‘a friend’.

Marcella Fasan

After one mule-promenade around the square, I was handed over to the nuns.

The afternoon sun was burning holes in the sky when we arrived at the door. The convent seemed dug out of golden sand, the towering creation
of a dogged child at the seaside. In the road just behind me, all Arequipa whistled, trotted and gossiped past. I knew that I stood for a precious moment between two worlds, and that soon I would be lost to this living one and delivered into the infinite silence and solemnity beyond. I craned my neck, taking in the street of pale stone houses, trellised and balconied with self-confidence that belied their lowly stature. Bougainvillea blazed cardinal red, not Venetian purple, against the white stone. A peasant woman walked past, her skirt a-fidget with poppy-scarlet flowers printed on indigo cotton. I gazed on each colour greedily. All colour, all life, I thought, would now be stifled to black and white inside the convent walls.

As I climbed with difficulty out of the cart, I supposed,
this is the last cart I shall ride in, until I am dead and my corpse is taken to the communal grave
.

Goodbye cart
, I thought. Then goodbyes fell on me like a net over a lion in the jungle. I farewelled all the things I might never see again: canal reflections playing under the ribs of a bridge, a ball-dress, a little boy, a shop, a party, a rabbit, a haystack, a regatta, a silvery fish swimming under water, a young doctor giving me a look that reached inside me and gently handled my soul.

And the things I could never hear now: a Venetian folksong, a lullaby, a minuet, the cry of the fishmongers, the abuse of the gondoliers, a salty argument in the street, running feet, my own voice laughing (for I knew that to speak light thoughts in a convent was considered a kind of unchastity), the voice of a young man telling me he loved me.

Then the
arriero
was pulling a bell-cord, and a door opened promptly under an arch that bore a relief of Santa Catalina herself painted in sun-struck colours. From a crack in the door, a black-clad nun peered out at us through blue spectacles. Her face was brutally disfigured, a part of her nose melted against a cheek. I lowered my eyes, sensing it would be unwise to stare. Her own eyes were unreadable behind the thick blue glass.

‘The Venetian Cripple?’ she asked and the lower half of her face, the part capable of expression, showed a vicious delight. It was not so much her stagnant breath, nor the hard words, but her way of saying them that sent my heart plummeting. My brow prickled with nervous perspiration.

‘We have managed to save her for you,’ the
arriero
declared proudly, ‘though twice she nearly died of cold and the
puna
and from her own weaknesses. However, our strenuous efforts have delivered her safely.’

‘God has chosen to preserve her ’til this time,’ replied the nun smoothly.
‘Your interventions, however strenuously you might describe them, had little or no bearing in the matter. We do not pay gratuities for deliveries, if this is what you are hinting at.’

At that word ‘deliveries’ I began to tremble.

I stood with my eyes downcast, desperate for the necessary room but determined that my first words in my new home would be of a higher order than ‘
Dónde están los
. . .’

‘
Vicaria
, why do you keep the poor child fainting on the doorstep?’ A new voice, low and intelligent, issued through the doorway.

A black-clad arm now reached out of the convent wall and drew me to a comfortable breast.

‘You are welcome, Marcella Fasan,’ said the clever voice warmly, and in Italian. In another second I was on the threshold of a vaulted receiving room, cosy with carpets and flowers and brimming with lamplight.

The
vicaria
tutted and turned her back, busying herself with barking orders to the men who carried my dowry across the threshold into Santa Catalina. Impatiently, she herself lifted a vast box from the cart and heaved it into the courtyard. The men stared: the grotesque woman was emaciated and diminutive in stature, yet she had more strength than any of them.

The
arriero
nodded at me encouragingly, and the other men smiled and waved fondly. But Arce crossed himself.

Sor Loreta

It would be harder than I thought. In His divine wisdom God had sent Me a She-Devil with a sweet face and a pitiful, limping form. She was artfully put together to glean compassion and tenderness from the weak-willed.

I alone knew the Devil in all his guises and I was not taken in.

I shuddered to imagine what transactions the Venetian Cripple had combined with the
arriero
and the men. I saw by the amorous looks they gave her that she had fanned their desires with her expert seductions. Now Priora Mónica was also seduced.

Remembering Sor Andreola’s milky softness, and Sor Sofia’s flower-like
face, I guessed that the Venetian Cripple would set out on Satan’s path with an outward display of modesty and quietness in all her actions. Like them, she would dissemble devoutness with skill and guile.

How was I to wrestle with the Devil in the soul of such a subtle enemy?

Marcella Fasan

The
priora
was kind and soft as a feather bed. Her first thoughts were all for my comfort: I was quickly shown a necessary room, thereafter plied with refreshing drinks, punctuated by warm hugs. Her Italian was strongly accented but grammatically correct. She said that she loved me already because I came from the country where Rossini was born. She purred, ‘I know that our dear Rossini cherishes a great affection for Venice. For the Venetians first recognized his genius.’

Then she looked at me with a quivering lip, ‘Have you not seen Rossini on the stage at the theatre of San Moisè in Venice? Imagine, the maestro was but a youth of eighteen when his
Cambiale di Matrimonio
was first performed in your blessed city in 1810!’

I shook my head sadly, and she shook her head too, as if to shake away the disappointment. I decided not to tell her that girls confined to their rooms or on island lunatic asylums were not allowed out even to hear the genius of the young Rossini. Perhaps she did not know about my time on San Servolo; perhaps it would be better if she did not.

She pulled a velvet cover off a shining ebony object. It was an English piano brought from London at the cost of 4,000 francs, she told me gleefully, ‘So that we may play Rossini.’

‘You speak excellent Italian,
Madre Priora
,’ I observed lamely.

‘Of course I must speak the language of our dear Rossini! But how you must be tired! We must smuggle you into your room before the other nuns become overexcited about your arrival! Imagine! A Venetian here among us! For them, it is like a fairy tale.’

There was a tap on the door. I started to see a man of middle years enter the room, to be greeted with smiles from the
priora
.

‘Do not fear, child,’ she told me. ‘Surgeon Sardon must examine you before we allow you to mingle with the other nuns, lest you have brought any contagious disease. And he will give you a vaccination for the Small-Pox. We are proud to have rid Arequipa of this affliction by God’s miracle of modern medicine.’

The doctor’s examinations were brief and discreet. Finally he made me walk a few steps without my crutch and administered the vaccine to my arm from a little bottle topped by a long needle.

‘Fit to serve God,’ he smiled. ‘Though you shall feel unwell temporarily on account of the serum.’

With a smile, he cautioned the
priora
, ‘Let her have a restful day. No dramaticals.’

The
priora
summoned a
velo blanco
– a white-veiled serving nun – to take me to my cell. ‘A little something to eat will be brought to you there directly,’ she told me. My possessions, she explained, had been carried there in the meanwhile, and the dowry boxes would be opened in my presence before the precious contents were stored in the
cajas de depósito
of the convent.

My arm bandaged, I followed the
velo blanco
down past the entrance offices. My farewell to colour proved premature. We made our way down through an orange courtyard with a red oleander gleaming under a bitingly blue sky. That orange fanfared like cinnabar and saffron yellow and rose madder all fighting on the palette for dominance. Such a riot of strong colour I had not seen since I was a child, looking down from the minstrel’s gallery at a sumptuous spun-sugar dessert served at a ball in the Palazzo Espagnol while the French still ruled us. We passed down to another bitter-orange courtyard luminous with figs and geraniums.

I reproved myself for my surprise. Venetians do not
own
colour, though we sometimes think we do.

Cecilia Cornaro would be in ecstasies here
, I thought.

Yet then again, Cecilia Cornaro, if she came here, could walk out again.

The
velo blanco
pointed ahead to the novices’ quarters and my own cell. ‘First, let me show you our cloisters! I should not really,’ she giggled, ‘but otherwise you might not see them till . . . maybe till you profess. Quick quick!’

She guided me into a courtyard whose thrumming intensity of blue
could only have been created by a fusion of hyacinthine and pavonated cobalt exalted by lapis. This hot blue kingdom was planted with orange trees heavy with fruit. The upper walls were frescoed with tales of divine love. The art was cheerfully bad, yet vividly full of stories: a sea angular and viscous at once, as only land-bound people paint it; a drunken fool had a black-and-white cat peering quizzically from his shoulder-bag; blindfolded angels romped clumsily; the soul lurched towards God, improbably encased in a child’s wheeled walking frame.

A breath of cold air made me shiver. Like a wound in young skin, an unexpected doorway gashed one sweet, sun-rich wall. It opened into a curious dark hall with two biers like cribs, one of which held the dead body of a withered nun in full habit and holding a pastor’s hook. I uttered a cry of dismay.

The
velo blanco
explained that the nun had died peacefully of old age. She would spend a day in state while her sisters celebrated her ascension to heaven. There were paintings of other dead nuns lining the walls, all with their eyes shut and their mouths a little slack. Each held the pastor’s hook in a tight fist, as if it were a truncheon. Some sported a fine growth of moustache on their pale faces; others had eyebrows that rushed to join together. There were bridal flowers about their temples and a festive look to their coiffure. I leaned closer into the paintings to look at the brushwork. To be in this convent, all these women must have been of pure Spanish blood, yet the local artists had given them the exoticism of South America. How was it done? Cecilia would have diagnosed the exact shade of . . .