The Book of Human Skin (49 page)

‘That is a whole other subject,’ she said. ‘I cannot come to it cold. I let my slaves sleep in my sister’s room. I enjoy their company.’

She smiled, and suddenly looked more like Cecilia Cornaro than it was easy for me to bear.

Her
samba
Hermenegilda and
criada
Javiera were devoted to her. I saw
that in their shining, smiling faces when Rafaela presented them. I was sure it was not common practice at Santa Catalina for a high-born nun to introduce her slaves, especially by name and with a fond arm around their shoulders.

Rafaela’s cell became even more complicated at the back. Her blue courtyard led to, of all luxuries, a private necessary room, laid out with her washing things. And then there was the kitchen, amply equipped with pots for boiling water. Rafaela told me that her slaves always had a hot basin ready for the moment when she had to do her penitential bath.

‘My sister . . .’ Rafaela choked on some inaudible words.

‘How did she die?’ I ventured, for it seemed Rafaela had opened the door to that question, and there was no staying on the outside.

Rafaela eyed me starkly, ‘Well, I suppose it is for the best that I tell you sooner rather than later. If you are to be my collaborator and friend, you must share my fortunes. My sister Juana – Sor Sofia – died from a forced bath. I heard you were welcomed to Santa Catalina the same way.’

‘The cold bath? Did your sister misbehave?’

‘No, she was an angel. The opposite of me. She actually had a vocation. The day our parents brought us to Santa Catalina was the best of her life, the worst of mine. She asked even
me
to call her Sor Sofia – she was happy to give up her real name. I had to get used to it. She always told me we were lucky to be here, safe from the horrors of the world. That’s the bitterest irony of all. The worst horror of the world lives in Santa Catalina.’

‘You mean the
vicaria
?’

Looking at Rafaela’s
déshabillée
, the cigar dangling from her finger, it was not hard to see why the
vicaria
might have singled her out for punishment; but why her angelic sister?

Rafaela kicked the wall savagely. ‘The
vicaria
had a passion for Sofia. My poor sister always told me that we must show understanding to the woman, and that when she was at her most vile – that was when
we
should be most kind and gentle with her. But the
vicaria
’s passion for Sofia was not kind or gentle. It was hideous, devouring, dangerous! And when it was thwarted – she was forbidden to see or speak to my sister – then it turned to hate.’

Her voice cracked, ‘In the end my sister died of it. The
vicaria
– and I claim the honour of coining the title “Vixen” by the way – waited until my sister was laid low with a stomach upset. Sofia had a weakness in that part. As far as I can trace the events, my sister was walking back from the infirmary that night. She never arrived here.’ Rafaela’s words were swallowed by a tearing sob, ‘What a beast I am!’

I wanted to put an arm around her, yet I did not know if she would welcome it. I murmured, ‘It is surely not you who is the beast.’

Rafaela flung the tears off her cheeks with a violent shaking of her head. ‘Wait! You do not know. I can never forgive myself that I let it happen. Hermenegilda came running to tell me that Sofia was in the bathhouse with the Vixen. The evil thing is that I thought for a moment
good!
for this meant that the Vixen had broken the rule of keeping away from my sister. So at last there would be an excuse for the
priora
to forcibly sequester her and remove her from office.

‘I thought,
this will end it, once and for all
. For all these years Sor Loreta had been following my sister, lurking in wait for her around corners, contriving to have “accidental” meetings. When she could not see Sofia, Sor Loreta spent all her time praying for my sister’s soul, which she claimed had been taken by the Devil. My sister was a gentle creature, not vengeful, and she did not even hate Sor Loreta for this oppression. She always said simply, “The poor woman is mad. We must be compassionate.”

‘I was thinking about the madness of Sor Loreta, as Sofia described it – which I saw simply as badness – and I was pacing the cell, counting the minutes Sofia had been in there with her. Suddenly I knew it was too long. We’ve all had the Vixen’s baptisms. She makes us sing hymns until she pushes us under the water. I opened my door and leaned out. I could hear Sofia singing across the pathway, her voice growing weaker and weaker. Then I think – oh, I have played this over so many times in my head! – that I heard the splash.

‘I began to count again, but then I could bear it no more and I ran out of my cell and over to the bathhouse. Why did I wait? I as good as colluded . . .’

Rafaela turned to the wall, as if she could not bear to be witnessed in recounting the last part of the story. I knew the comforts of a wall to stare at, so I sat patiently. Over her shoulder, she told me, ‘It was already
too late. Sofia was floating face-down in the water. I leaped into the bath. When I turned her over, I saw her lips were cut and bleeding. There was no breath. Her eyes were half-closed and her tongue appeared between her teeth. I held her in my arms and tried to breathe life into her with my own lips. I turned her around and began to squeeze water out of her chest. The Vixen just looked down on me and smiled. She was in a state of rapture, gone from this world. She did not even look human. She did not know who I was. That demented, brutal smile must have been the last thing my sister ever saw.’

Rafaela faced me again. ‘There was a bottle floating on the surface of the water, broken at its mouth. There was a story that the Vixen used a lachrymatory bottle to store the tears she wept for Sofia’s soul. She must have forced Sofia to drink those tears before she drowned her. That’s why my sister’s lips were bleeding.’

Rafaela fell silent, overtaken by memories. When I judged that she could speak again, I asked, ‘Why has the Vixen still a place among us? Should she not be in prison?’

‘That is what I thought at first, of course,’ Rafaela continued, ‘but when I shook off the stupor of grief, I did some thinking, for once: thinking that I should have done much beforehand.
Thinking
would have saved Sofia. I bear guilt, for I did more than anyone to drive the Vixen mad. I laughed at her, I made others laugh at her. I thought she was a joke for my personal entertainment. I hate to be confined, so I made her the butt of my frustration. And I underestimated her madness, jabbed at her feelings constantly . . .’

‘Even if that is true, why should you not tell the
priora
what happened? No one would blame you as you blame yourself.’

‘If you had seen the Vixen’s face that night, you would know why. Her soul had left her body. I am perfectly sure she remembers nothing of the deed: she has buried it in an unvisited part of that mind of hers that is so distorted by starvation and flagellation. She would be able to put her hand on the Bible and swear she knew nothing.

‘Also, there were no witnesses. Sofia is not the first girl to die of cold baths here. There have been cases of genuine pneumonia and heart failure in the winter. Sofia was always delicate in her health. Even if the
priora
believed
me
– a known troublemaker with a history of mocking Sor Loreta – I doubted if the
vicaria
would be punished properly. The only
punishment suitable for what she did is a hanging. The
priora
would not wish to deliver a nun – even this one – to the world outside for a murder trial and a public execution.

‘Santa Catalina would never survive the shame if the whole story came out. Monseñor José Sebastián de Goyeneche y Barreda would close us down and send us all to Santa Rosa, where we would have to sleep in tombs. We would each of us be as dead as my sister, who would never be avenged. And the only person who would be happy would be Sor Loreta, who would be ecstatic at the martyrdom of a violent death. She would be in
calores
on the scaffold! At last the whole world would see how starved and mutilated she is! Why should I make her that gift she desires above all others?

‘I decided to keep quiet and use the information I had to my own advantage. The first thing it did was to confound the Vixen. Perhaps it has confounded you too?’

‘No, I perfectly understand!’ I whispered. ‘You
had
to be silent.’

Just as I, as a little girl, had known that my parents would never deliver the punishment that Minguillo deserved, and had therefore resolved on a dignified, mystifying silence that also protected those who loved me. Yet had that only provoked Minguillo to worse outrages? And Cecilia Cornaro had told me that I was cruel to withhold the truth from those who loved me, and that it was vanity to suppose I could manage without their help.

I asked how the
vicaria
had responded to Rafaela’s own silence.

‘All through Sofia’s lying-in at the
sala de profundis
, I felt her eye on me, confused. She is mad – she does not understand anything or remember anything. But she instinctively feels that I know something to her detriment. Ever since Sofia died, she ignores all my transgressions, never enters my cell to search it, never addresses a word to me, let alone a hard word. She leaves me alone and persecutes other girls, though she dares not go too far now. I have made sure that my friends Rosita and Margarita know what happened to my sister too – so if the
vicaria
tried the same with me, they would go straight to the
priora
. Now,
Veneciana
, I have you, too, to help me.’

‘Yes,’ I replied eagerly, ‘you have.’

I did not yet feel ready to confide it in her, but I had already decided that Rafaela’s story would be recorded in Marcella Fasan’s illustrated diary, alongside my chronicles of Minguillo.

As I slipped out, I noted that Rafaela’s cell was well positioned for what she happily described as her ‘life of crime’. It looked on to the Zocodober fountain, all carved with Moorish patterns, around which the servants conducted their ‘souk’, exchanging goods brought in from the outside world. With the babble of voices and the rushing of the water, it could have been the Rialto. Rafaela’s servants, she had told me, had special double-bottomed baskets, in which they secreted perfumes, cigars and other contraband items, the more secret exchanges taking place by the slaves’ latrine.

In the following days, when I discreetly and shyly asked other nuns about Rafaela, I heard it said that every company of women needs a naughty girl, to be brave for all the faint-hearted ones and enact the wildness in their hearts. The worst that was said was that such a spirited creature would likely meet a bad end. Yet even in those words there was certainly more regretful affection than malice. All expressed tearful sorrow for the loss of Rafaela’s sister, Sor Sofia.

From the time of our first acquaintance, I visited Rafaela almost every day during the afternoon hours that were free for contemplation and ‘spiritual activities’. I sat sketching and painting, all the while drinking in the sound of the stone fountain playing outside the window, with my Venetian ears that craved the music of water.

My new studio was Sofia’s room, where the slaves slept. Two doors and a right angle from the entrance, it was ideally placed for secrecy, should anyone take it upon themselves to spy. One of Rafaela’s loving servants was always posted in between, well rehearsed in delaying explanations.

Painting, as Rafaela had said, was not prohibited at Santa Catalina. It was only our secret subject matter that put us at risk. Our pictures were supposed to be of saints, and indeed we painted a great many of them, as a cover. We even painted in
mestizo
style, adding green parrots, flamingos and Peruvian
kantu
flowers to our backgrounds. We twisted feathers of birds-of-paradise and Inca ornaments into the hair of our lady saints and decked them with necklaces of Chilean malachite. The Peruvian Jesus was broad in the nose, dark-skinned and dark-eyed, had brown bowed legs and wore a lacy skirt – the traditional
mestizo
undergarment – instead of a loincloth.

Yet under cover of these legitimate arts, we also made secular
portraits for sale. Later I would discover that some of these pictures were smuggled out to the world, and sold with ‘artist unknown’ in the masculine form as the only signature. For the serving nuns of the convent, we made
mestizo
portraits of the baby Christ. For the pure Spanish nuns, we painted stern Santa Rosas and Santa Teresas, behind which we secreted San Sebastianos, sensual as pagan gods. We painted seductive girl-saints for those inclined that way, using the likeness of their reigning favourite.

‘And this is the wickedest thing of all,’ gloated Rafaela, ‘not only because of the Sapphism but . . .’

Cecilia Cornaro had told me why not. I finished the sentence, ‘Because a nun must never have her portrait painted unless she is dead.’

Minguillo Fasan

The Indulgent Reader will forgive me for returning to a subject that vexed me in that period.

Without noise, nosegays or notoriety, the Alert Reader will already have guessed what I, in my innocence, only now began to suspect. Amalia did not
want
to give me a son. It was her petty revenge for certain slights done to her. My lack of a son was, I told my quack, all the fault of my wife’s recalcitrant womb.Your woman might not have much by way of a mind, but her uterus was set on flouting me.

‘Dose her,’ the fat quack suggested, pointing down to my pretty garden.

If that womb were set on its girlish ways, then it was not a matter of heartbreaking consequence if it would bear no more.

Any stick will do to beat a dog
, I thought.

‘My dove,’ I said that evening, ‘drink this.’

Sor Loreta

The convent gossiped about petty thefts, which were surely just a case of careless light nuns displacing things by accident. Meanwhile, from outside the walls I heard continual news of Satan’s work in Arequipa. There was a very shocking incident in the town. Two women brawled, and one of them held the other down and lifted her rival’s skirts and threatened to introduce hot peppers into her private parts. I thought on this often, and it in turn made Me think of the sinner Rafaela and the Venetian Cripple, and whatever they were contriving by way of obscenity and devilment. My own purity caused Me to be extraordinarily sensitive to the vibrations of sin, and now I felt them coming most powerfully from the cell of Rafaela.