The Book of Human Skin (46 page)

And I had to bear in mind that this same God was also the idol of a creature as crazed as Sor Loreta, who single-handedly did more to promote profane thoughts among us, simply by her frightful example, than could the Devil himself.

Divided from myself again, I took refuge in paper, as I had done as a girl. My single-leafed diary found a safe home at the back of my candle cupboard.

Sor Loreta

By day, I sent Sor Narcisa and Sor Arabel out to gather information on the Venetian Cripple. Those girls had footsteps that weighed nothing.

I Myself walked around at night, listening, watching. I heard it whispered in the refectory that the convent had a ghost, who haunted the narrow alleyways in the early hours. The silly little girls in the novitiate had claimed that a goblin pressed his face against their windows in the early hours.

Marcella Fasan

But by night, what a difference! What a primitive place was Santa Catalina! With the bats swooping, the candles and ovens glowing inside tenebrous rooms, the Moorish domes and archways reared up in phantasmagoric silhouette.

It was at night that the darker histories of the convent soaked through to the surface of things. The very dew seemed thickened with the grim dust of the past. Suddenly I was aware that so many items that I touched, even my very bed, had once belonged to women who
had been declared dead to the world when still on the edge of girlhood, and who had lived as brief phantoms in this vibrant place, only to die in obscurity.

Back, back, back in time the night took us. I was terrified by Santa Catalina after nightfall. Our ladylike community seemed to descend into primaeval times, more a tribal village than a convent, the fires burning like little red hells in the blackness.

Inside and outside became debatable. The colour was gone and fearsome shadows crept in. Suddenly the convent seemed so vulnerable, so tentative, like a mere graze in the earth, a fragile settlement in the wilderness where powerful and malevolent beasts lurked all around.

I wrote in my diary: ‘
All is not well in Santa Catalina. By night, I can feel it
.’

Minguillo Fasan

The Deriding Reader deceives Himself if He interprets my recent silence on the missing will as a sign of weakness or defeat. By no means.

Once Marcella was dispatched, I began investigations anew into the identity of the will-thief. Many years had passed since I found the chicken head in its place. I was tired of living with a dim worry raking up discomfort at the back of my mind. I wanted the thief found and hurt.

I set out to interview everyone who had lived in the Palazzo Espagnol, from the last occasion when I saw the real will until the time I discovered its theft. Servants, priests, pensioners, boatmen and gardeners left my study dazed and afraid: of course I was not able to ask the one real question that needed answering, so I tortured them with vague accusations, watching closely for any sign of guilt.

In my wildest hopes, the thief was already dead. But even the wildest hopes have their sagging corners. If the thief was deceased, where had he stowed his document, that is to say, mine?

Perhaps whoever had the will aspired to torment me slowly to madness? Vain hope! And what individual of such diabolical cleverness had crossed my path? I was surrounded by halfwits at every turn.

Speaking of which, I remarked to my valet Gianni, ‘Do we know anyone who means me ill? I mean someone from the old days, when my father was still alive?’

If the fellow had only known what I was talking about, how he would have stood up straight and stared, instead of giving me his usual look of a fish boiling in a pan. He was the only servant I trusted to dust my study.There I strewed my private papers around with tranquil ease. For Gianni, whose head looked like the bole of a squat palm tree with a tuft of hair at the top, was illiterate and incurious as wood.

Marcella Fasan

Colour-dazed and sun-dazzled, I performed the duties of my novitiate faultlessly. I learned the stories painted on the walls. My Spanish took on an Arequipan accent and I acquired the special words that defined the place:
sillar
, the white stone that cradled us;
mestiza
, mixed blood;
criada
, servant;
esclava
, slave.

I had a new name, Sor Constanza. And a new hairstyle: a few curls clinging to my head under my white veil.

Despite that, Venetian glamour still attached to me. Novices would still take every opportunity to cross-examine me on Venetian fashions and scandals. They wished to assume that I had been at the very summit of high society, for it aggrandized them all to have a great Venetian lady among them. They could never understand why I had come to Arequipa, when I could have lived by San Marco Square and had the Grand Canal for my liquid garden. And a Venetian nobleman for my lover.

Marcella Fasan kept silent. It was Sor Constanza who smiled and asked, ‘What could be more beautiful than Santa Catalina?’

The mistress of the novices purred in agreement and kissed my dissembling cheek.

Sor Loreta

The Venetian Cripple tried to keep herself away from Me, but I did not let her escape My vigilance. I did not consider that I had done My daily duty unless I had encountered her at least once and looked deeply into her eyes. I hoped to discover the precise nature of her sin.

The
priora
noticed that I paid special attention to the Venetian Cripple. She harangued Me like a Pharisee, ‘Were you sent to destroy the peace of this convent? I rue the day the Fathers were so blind as to admit you. You should have been put in a madhouse, not allowed to drive other women out of their senses! Do not turn Sor Constanza into another Sor Sofia. You must learn to leave the younger nuns alone.’

‘I do what I do in the love of God, and there will be harvest.’

The
priora
put on a wheedling voice, as if talking to an unreasonable child, ‘Sor Constanza is terrified of you since you nearly drowned her the day she arrived here. She behaves perfectly, but I fear it is too perfectly. Do you consider this, that you drive the poor girl’s thoughts
away
from God? That she is suffused not with piety, but with fear of what you will do to her next?’

‘Her conscience is not pure – for she hides sin behind that meek face – so naturally she will be frightened of an incorruptible soul. How should it be otherwise?’

The
priora
sighed and tried to dismiss Me. I pointed My deaf right ear at her and let the insults rain down inside it uncomprehended. I stayed, for there was an angel hovering over her left shoulder urging Me to remain in her presence until she had drunk the hot chocolate I had brought her.

Gianni delle Boccole

Marcella ud been gone a year, and there were preshous little news of her. And I would know, wunt I. Because I read evry one o Minguillo’s letters, allus hopin to find a sottile refrunce to my own, what I had sent anonimousely, with another merchant and a hunnerd of cash scrapt together by the servants, to the
priora
of Santa Catalina. I hopt that the
priora
might write to Minguillo with some hard questions after that. But she did not.

Minguillo aughter been happy, for he had suckseeded. No more need to go creeplin about, doing secret harm to his poor sister. But ye can’t take the slither out ovva snake. He were still restless. Still puzzlin about the old will what had been took, saucespishus of evryone.

By an oirony he used
me
as his eyes, to espy on t’other members o the household. I give him hunnerds o insent details, and telled him a sack o small lies to keep him busy wonderin. And I ust the cover o his investigerations to be making my own. Evry time Minguillo interfewed another suspeck, I stood stiffly ahind him, listenin, learnin n crossin off one more possible from my own list o will-thieves.

Marcella Fasan

Within a year, I was deemed ready to take my vows. I could find no argument that was convincing as to why I should not now be promoted to a professed nun, a
velo negro
, a black veil, which conferred the right to vote in the three-yearly elections. As a professed nun, I would have a
larger cell, servants, and – the only thing I cared about – more privacy. I had no ambitions, but I knew it would cause a scandal if I refused the veil, and I had no wish to draw attention to myself.

If anyone looked at me too closely, I was afraid that they might see Marcella Fasan under Sor Constanza’s skin. Docile Sor Constanza did not show any desire for the life beyond the walls of Santa Catalina. But Marcella Fasan’s vivid existence continued on paper. Behind the candles in my cupboard were the pages on which I truly lived. In those pages, Santo was like the lining of my heart, indivisible from me. I did not wonder if he still loved me. I knew that he did.

So when I professed myself betrothed to God, I did so in a provisional way, committing myself to Him only until I might be married to Santo, even though there presently seemed no practical possibility of ever seeing him again.

At the height of the special mass I laid my body on the floor in the shape of a cross and recited the words that bound me to the order. Then I knelt before the smiling
priora
and pronounced my flimsy promises. Through the window of the choir, the priest handed me the black veil. Other nuns helped me draw it on, patting it down to perfection. A bride must be beautiful for her husband.

Only when my wedding ring was drawn over my finger did I flinch away from the priest, drawing a gasp from the watching public.

I held out my hand, telling myself,
It is a rehearsal, for my real wedding
.

Then I was crowned with roses, and led in triumph back into the cloisters for a fiesta that was scarcely spiritual, given the number of cakes consumed by us all; except for the
vicaria
, of course, who was in the tenth day of one of her lengthy fasts.

I turned the ring around on my finger. On the way back to my cell I plucked a blade of grass, which I curled up and inserted between the gold band and my finger. The ring did not quite touch my skin.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

Gianni had found a letter from the
priora
at Santa Catalina on Minguillo’s desk. The occasion for her writing was to inform him that another part of the dowry had fallen due because Marcella had become a professed nun.

I stumbled out of the
ostaria
, sick at heart. I leaned against a wall, the coins in my back pocket sharp as knives against my thigh. Married to God? That meant she had married someone else but me.

Why had she not contrived to stay a novice, or to become a tertiary, a lay sister?

Gianni followed me out, otherwise preoccupied. ‘Now,’ he mouthed gloomily, ‘Minguillo says that she gets a slave of her own. He has to pay. How can them Peruvian servants understand her like Anna and me?’

‘Why did she do it?’ I agonized. ‘How could she take the veil when she knows I . . . ?’

Gianni thumped my back, ‘Maybe she crossed her fingers behind her when she vowed? Maybe ’tis all a big imposture! Maybe’ – and his voice darkened – ‘they drugged her.’

Maybe they beat her
, we both thought.
Maybe they locked her up and tried to drive her mad
.We had no reason then to think that Santa Catalina was any kinder than the cruellest convent in Venice. After all, Minguillo had chosen it.

I had never seen Marcella dressed in black. How pale must her skin look against its harshness. Doctors attending nuns will notice that the black colour of their habits gives nuns special cutaneous problems, their murky costumes swallowing up the rays of the sun while impeding the healthy transmission of heat away from the body. Particles of disease and unhealthy accumulations are more readily absorbed by dark clothes. The metaphor applies to the stifling of the whole bodily economy: for to be a nun is surely a kind of dying? Dead to the world, the nun’s body quietly decomposes unseen by loving eyes.

Meanwhile I had been right about Napoleon: it had not proved so easy to stifle his itch. My old patient had risen from his own ashes and stormed off Elba. Soon he was back in Paris, planning to take back everything he had lost, except his youth and health, already irretrievably spent.

At that moment I wished that Napoleon might leave off scratching his itches with Old World corpses, commandeer a ship and take up his rampages in Peru. For then there would be call for doctors by the hundred to amputate and sew up his victims. And all the convents in South America would be forced to release their poor hostages from their grim cells, and divorce them from their heavenly Bridegroom.

Marcella Fasan

A week after I married God, I was led from my old cell to the new one. A sturdy
velo blanco
carried my possessions, except for the little sheaf of diary pages I had hidden in a shawl and insisted on carrying myself. The
velo blanco
walked ahead to show me the way, for I was now to live in a part of the convent that I, as a novice, had never before been permitted to visit.

We crossed the blue courtyard diagonally and entered a cluster of buildings with the air of an ancient village. We passed Calle Cordoba, with its white walls decked with red geraniums. At the end it thinned down into Calle Toledo, a canyon of terracotta buildings, flat and simple. On our right were shattered and mutilated walls slanting out of the ground like a mouthful of rotten teeth.

‘The earthquake in 1784,’ said the
velo blanco
briefly. ‘Sor Loreta arrived on the same day. We have never been able to fully recover from that catastrophe.’

She guided me to a sudden right turn into the Calle Sevilla, lined with walls red as meat, and rising up in white steps towards the entrance of an old church surmounted by a bell.