The Book of Human Skin (45 page)

‘Yes! You know she does! We were told . . .’

‘The Venetian Cripple!’ giggled one, but she was sternly shushed by the
priora
. ‘Her soul is perfect in the eyes of God,’ she reminded them comfortably, ‘and in ours too, therefore.’

A dozen gentle hands lifted my sheets and looked at my chemise, ran their fingers along the Burano lace and the satin ribbon of the collar. They exclaimed with delight at my linen, now neatly folded upon my shelves, and then fell on the little heap of my travel clothes that lay on the floor. One of them picked up my drawers – and danced them round the room, humming to an aria from Rossini. It was clear that my new companions knew that the
priora
would be indulgent to any little lightheartedness so long as it came with the appropriate musical accompaniment.

‘Divided drawers!’ It seemed such a thing had never been known among these girls. Another picked up my silk skirt and held it against herself, and they all gasped. ‘
Venetian
fashion,’ they sighed.

I thought wryly:
Yes, Venetian fashion from perhaps ten years past. Minguillo did not waste money on keeping my clothes abreast of the times
.

The
priora
, instead of reproving them, allowed full reign to their joyful curiosity. I had the strangest feeling that she wished to allow them to see more of me, that she wanted me to be known for more than
my twisted leg. Indeed, my crippled state was quite forgotten by them, and they were now consumed with asking me questions about
Carnevale
in Venice, and the manners of the gentlemen, and the looks of the gondoliers.

A shadow fell inside the room then, and the
vicaria
’s harsh voice cut in, ‘This creature has evidently been chosen to bear the worst scourges by God. Envy her, sisters, for she has her penances already written on her flesh.’

Suddenly my lame limb was once again the biggest part of my body. The girls who were holding my underclothes let them drop to the floor. One dark-eyed novice ran a sympathetic hand briefly over my leg. Everyone else stayed motionless.

‘This is not to say,’ the
vicaria
continued, walking up to my bed, ‘that
she
should claim more than a small share of the world’s pity. She does not merit that. Does she, Sor Juana Francisca del Santísimo Sacramento? Does she, Sor Manuela de Nuestra Madre Santa Catalina? Does she, Sor Josefa del Corazón de Jesús? Does she, Sor Rafaela del Dulce? Does she, Sor María Rosa del Costado de Cristo?’

As each of the girls was named, her face drained of colour and she took a step backwards. Finally, the
vicaria
’s voice sent the young nuns scattering back to their cells: a patter of light feet like raindrops, and a sharp anxiety in the air too.

The
priora
faced the
vicaria
across the emptied room. ‘Was that entirely necessary, Sor Loreta?’

‘Venice’s filth must not be allowed to dirty our convent. I am surprised that you allowed them to indulge their fantasies and behave indecently with the Venetian Cripple’s undergarments.’

‘You were spying from the outside, as usual? An unfortunate habit of yours, Sor Loreta. I wanted to create an informal welcome for our new sister. A freezing bath was not the greeting I intended. However, I need not justify my actions to you. I am yet
priora
and have been elected to that post twice by the wish of our sisters, unlike yourself.’

The
vicaria
’s single eye blazed and then fell blank.

On recovering from my near-drowning, my first duty was to attend the church. My father must have cut a great figure among them, for on my first day’s attendance the church of Santa Catalina was thronged with
people curious to see
la Veneciana
. This I knew from the
vicaria
’s own lips. She stared at the crowd, mumbling bitterly.

From the other side of a screen, I glimpsed an exotic congregation – women in flowered frocks and black mantillas of lace, an officer from the Peruvian army flashing golden earrings.

We nuns filed into our part of the church, constructed in a tunnel shape – ‘against earthquakes’ someone whispered to me – and decorated inside in buttermilk and gold. The nuns’ sweet voices floated up and through the grate into the ears of kin. I saw from the faces of the congregation how the singing flowed into their hearts and made their imaginations soft and wistful.

The grate was made of wood on our side and from iron on the side of the public, as if to suggest that ours was the more fragile prison: our confinement was supposed to be of our free will.

The
priora
had told me that my father worshipped here when he was in Arequipa. My memories of him were affectionate but sparse. What would he think, to see me here? What, if any, had been his plans for me? I covertly examined all the Arequipan fathers and brothers who had put their daughters and sisters here. Once a week at least they had to come to this church and face what they had done. When they saw their womenfolk behind the turned wooden struts, I wondered, did they remember their trusting baby faces as first seen through the spindles of their cots?

I kept my own lids lowered, for the
vicaria
hovered near my side; too near, for my comfort. I heard her laboured breathing in my ear, and it reminded me of my childhood, when Minguillo used to stand outside my bedchamber, breathing through the keyhole to frighten me until I learned to lodge a pencil in there every night.

Minguillo Fasan

Conscience is like tickling. Some are susceptible; some are not.

The Scrupled Reader will find, to His distress, that much of modish literature tends to emasculate that tender organ, the conscience. Take as an example the present tale, of an incorrigible character for whom crime pays, and abundantly. If only my account were to close at this juncture, one would think the world well matured and rotted in infamies that ever go unavenged.

Just at that moment, why, everything I touched prospered! My old enemy Napoleon – a dismal failure! My sister banished! Money flowed in from my innovations in quackery. My little collection of books of human skin stretched across
three
shelves of my study. I rearranged my dainties daily, shuffling the male and female books as a skilful madam redeploys her regular girls among her regular customers for fresh pleasures.

When books of human skin were thin on the market, then I diversified, commissioning my own special additions to the library. I begot a book on hunting bound in fox-skin, a natural history of songbirds bound in a patchwork of larks, and a treatise on the Great Cats tooled in the shaved skin of one of the Palazzo Espagnol felines, whose mysterious absence was much remarked upon by the fond maids and much rejoiced in by our rats. And if anyone crossed me, the Reader will understand, it became my pleasant pastime to imagine which text would best be bound in
his
skin for the most exquisite appropriateness.

It was at this palmy time that I probably indulged most in the peccadillo of smugness. How could I not? My sister was at last beyond the reach of her aspiring lover, even if he had the least idea where she had gone. So. As for him taking Marcella to wife:
well
, I thought comfortably,
pigs shall fly in formation before that happens, and I’ve not heard of any wings sprouting in the sties
.

No respect to the Gracious Reader, but has He?

Marcella Fasan

Despite my offence with San Sebastiano, the
priora
informed me that I would proceed directly to the first step in my betrothal to God and become a novice. ‘Your journey here has been so long,’ she said kindly, ‘we shall hasten the final stages for you.’

I speculated as to the battle the
priora
must have fought with the
vicaria
to win this privilege for me. I continued to wonder what lies Minguillo had told them about my life to date. He would have had a free hand. I watched and listened. From the way they treated me, it was clear everyone around me thought my chronicle and therefore my character to be as pathetically tangible and as simple as my crippled leg, and indeed that I, Marcella, had been created by this congenital defect, wearing its damage in mind, body and soul.

For the occasion of my novitiate I was re-dressed in my own clothes and conducted to the church by my black- and white-veiled sisters. At the climactic moment, a curtain was drawn across the grate for a few moments. Hands snatched at me, tearing off my clothes, swaddling me in crisp linen and wool robes. I simply did as I was told, kept my hands above my head, moving to the left or to the right as directed by whispers. When the curtain opened again, I was revealed to the audience in my white novice’s habit, kneeling, and holding a lighted candle, with a dazed expression on my face that must have looked like beatitude to anyone who wished to see it that way.

The novices’ quarters consisted of our cells, our own exquisite little oratory, a chapel, a common room and a small library of religious tomes. I was at least five years older than the other girls, and felt more than a century their senior. They were little princesses from noble Arequipan families, who had known nothing but a pampered and sheltered existence. And yet they took me to their hearts, sharing their childish gossip and confidences as if I were one of them.

We were under the dominion of the mistress of the novices, who was a sworn enemy of Sor Loreta and therefore inclined to be kind as spring
sunlight. Then again, it was her duty to entice the young girls in her charge so that they would eventually profess themselves to God without rebellion or regret. Her other role, which she fulfilled to perfection, was to keep the novices well briefed as to the horrors of the outside world.

There was no murder, no rape, no wife-beating, no death in childbirth, not just in Peru but in the whole Spanish dominion, that was not fully relayed to us in our comfortable quarters. If anything, the mistress rather exceeded her permission to make the outside world seem ghastly and obnoxious. By her account, uncloistered young girls were soon worn away to old hags by the chores and burdens of married life. Their lives were one continual shattering round of provisioning, cleaning, birthing, suckling and turning the other cheek until they died, much younger than most nuns. Our bedtime stories were of wives who found marriage an unsupportable burden and committed horrid suicides, often taking their infants with them to Hell, for the babies died before they could even make confession and receive absolution! Then there were the husbands who ran rapiers through their wives’ silk dresses, not much caring if the wives were inside them or not, and who stole all their jewellery and spent it on whores. Such stories always ended in apparently spontaneous prayers to God to thank him for delivering his little nuns from such unsavoury and dangerous fates.

And yes, given my experiences, there was much to be said for a place of refuge, especially one so far away from my brother.

Minguillo’s interview with the
priora
must have taken place in her
oficina
just inside the gates. The featureless outer courtyard gave no hint of the inner nature of the convent. He must have imagined Santa Catalina as a grey, silent tomb. Of this I was certain, because if Minguillo had realized how it really was inside Santa Catalina, he would never have sent me there. If it was in my fate to be a lifelong prisoner at my brother’s pleasure, then it seemed a small triumph of my own that my latest and final prison should be in such a faultlessly beautiful place.

Santa Catalina was like a kingdom in an Arabian fairy tale. Breezes crisp with mountain freshness swarmed gently around flowered courtyards, winding lanes and fountains. Instead of banishing them, the convent fed the joy of all the senses. Mr Rossini’s music jaunted out of the
priora
’s office. Caged birds warbled by the altar, sweetening the choir’s voices.
Pleasures crowded in the perfume of the roses, the downy flesh of ripening fruit, the long fingers of dry sunlight touching our faces each morning.

Most particularly there was at Santa Catalina an unashamed and happy greed for rich food. Each of the professed nuns’ apartments had its own kitchen. Hot wafts of intermingled stews and roasting guinea pigs filled the evening air. The next morning it would be the smell of pastries and hot chocolate, in the forenoon of marzipan, and, in the late afternoon, spiced bread. If you knelt down to sniff a flower in the gardens you would surely find it coated with a perfume of sugar and vanilla from the delicious
polvorones
.

To be a nun at Santa Catalina was like living in an exquisite doll’s house. The colours were too simple for the real world. There were no sophisticated shades or tints, only intense pure colour.

Then there was El Misti. In Arequipo, I could not but be affected by a sensation that only a thin veil separated Earth from Heaven. The mountain’s summit floated so high above the landlocked mist, so far separated from any credible land, that it seemed nothing more or less than a glittering heavenly kingdom among the clouds, a myth in itself. The
vicaria
had tried to stop nuns from looking at it, but Sor Loreta could not exterminate the mountain, however. Even if you did not stare at it, El Misti stared at you. I myself felt the mountain’s presence as I would a white ermine cloak – light and delicate and luxurious and, most of all, protective. Minguillo was on the other side of that mountain, as well as across an ocean and two seas.

In this loving atmosphere, a sincere belief might actually have thrived in me. The comforts of faith might have started to sop my losses; I might even have defeated Minguillo’s hopes of my utter misery by discovering a joyful vocation. Yet one thing held me back, and kept me divided from my apparently devout and submissive self.

Everyone assumed that because I was a cripple I had never known love. But the thought of Santo’s kiss, and the memory of the silent promise he had whispered into my mouth on San Servolo, undermined the faith I might have cultivated at Santa Catalina. As every prayer ‘from this untouched virgin of Christ’ crossed my lips, it pained me that God seemed to collude blandly in the fraud. What kind of God was this to trust as my eternal Bridegroom? Who accepted hollow vows from
unwilling novices, who allowed brothers to stow inconvenient sisters in what Cecilia Cornaro had once called His harem?