The Book of Human Skin (64 page)

Amish Gillyfether admitted that he haint askt Cecilia what were in the packet he were to take to Minguillo – ‘I did not want to know, I suppose now, lest it stop me from making the delivery. I showed a pathetic amount of courage, for I rather hoped it would be something that would upset the fellow a great deal,’ he sayed quietly. ‘I see my guilt now clearly, in that I did not tell you, when I first arrived, that I had already delivered a parcel for Minguillo, did I?’

Then we all lookt down. Fernando offert, ‘We did not ask either . . .’

But twere no good. The more they deducted of the way things ud run, the more each o them hated on thereselves, completely missin the point that anythin that hurted Minguillo were all to the good for
them
.

Amish Gillyfether moaned, ‘And most of all I blame myself for letting my sweet Cecilia take the burden of all our ill wishes, and acting on them.’

Marcella sayed nothin, but lookt like a sorry ghost, one hand in Santo’s. Josefa sat by me, givin me the snuggle-up. I sayed nothin too.

My betters was looking like morners. Yet I burned to shout this – that Cecilia Cornaro had did what all t’others wanted in there secret hearts to see did, but would of scroopilled to do, out of goodness. Which niver got anyone anywheres with Minguillo Fasan.

Cecilia Cornaro, with her unfearing hate, had sent Minguillo a pestilents, that were in its doings very like them callus acts that he ud visited upon evryone he knowed in this world.

Een now, my quill refuses to shed one tear of ink oer Minguillo Fasan!

Brava Cecilia Cornaro
, says I. She is a grate lady, for she knows how to hate proper on who should be hated on proper. She should be famoused for all prosperity.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

Josefa brought us more detailed news of how my brother-in-law had lost his fingers. It was nothing to do with the Small-Pox, of course. He had fallen to a medical misfortune that was new to me in all my years of doctoring: in leafing through the guilty book he had cut his fingers. The paper cuts had admitted dirt that ushered in a gangrene that devoured those rifling digits one by one.

While his hands now showed him for the monster that he was, Minguillo would not die of lack of fingers. But the Small-Pox, now that was a different matter.

I had ministered to Small-Pox patients often enough.

In the usual course of the disease, in its more rabid
Variola confluens
strain, the incubative period lasts up to twelve days from the reception of the poison. The primary stage has all the symptoms of an inflammatory fever.These include chills, burning skin, a frequent pulse, a thickly furred white tongue. Blood drawn from the veins has an effervescent quality.
The patient complains of thirst, headache and a feeling of bruised pain all over the body, especially in the back and loins. His appetite declines. Just before the first eruption, there is generally nausea and vomiting. The breath smells peculiarly disagreeable at this point, the looks are heavy and sometimes one or both cheeks of the face will glow with a sudden colour.

Some patients are attacked by a harassing cough and defluxion. Fever increases at night. On the third or the fourth day, the unmistakable lesions begin to appear upon the face, and subsequently upon the extremities. Initially, they are red and hard, as if there are fragments of shot under the skin. So Minguillo might not notice them at first, given that all his adult life he had continued to suffer from an unfortunate adolescent complexion well supplied with pimples that resembled the macules, papules and vesicles of Small-Pox.

The next evening there is generally a paroxysm, followed by more pimples, which become painful and inflamed. The face begins to swell, and there commences a suppuration of the sores into pustules that spread universally, even joining up in masses. The contents begin as watery and clear but gradually change to a yellow matter. It is at this point that a vile odour sometimes begins to emanate from the patient’s entire body. A secondary fever attacks as the pustules ripen.

If the patient is to survive, then the pustules dry and fall off in the same order in which they made their appearance. By the twelfth or fourteenth day, the patient is well again, though disfigured, initially by purple stains and later by indelible depressed scars, called vulgarly ‘pits’.

Naturally I did not attend Minguillo Fasan. Yet as the days passed, I
thought
him through the primary, eruptive, suppurative and
confluens
stage.

On the thirteenth day we heard that Surgeon Sardon was presently pricking all the pustules on his patient’s face with a needle dipped in carbolic acid to reduce pitting.Then news came that Minguillo had been smeared in olive oil and glycerine, and painted with a thick paste of cream and flour to prevent light acting on the pustules to deepen their colour.

Marcella Fasan

Santo and Gianni and I stayed indoors. Josefa, whose cousin was a
samba
at the
chichería
, brought us daily news of Minguillo’s travails. At first it seemed that he could not survive the gangrene, the amputations and then the Small-Pox. On two occasions a priest was called to his room.

The fingers had been cut off one at a time. Minguillo would not allow the surgeon to do a clean job. He clung to each one until it was black. Finally my brother was left with just one digit on each hand, the little finger of the left and the thumb of his right. By that time he was too deep in the Small-Pox fever to know what had happened to him.

I wished that I could sink into the same state of delirium. Josefa could not understand my misery: ‘Why you sad, mistress? Is bad all through, your brother, is better he die horrible death. So?’ Josefa flicked her fingers, ‘Simple easy, he get boil in big black pot in Hell.’

Santo understood; we said nothing, yet I read my own thoughts in his agonized face.

We are not killers
, our eyes appealed to one another,
we did not kill Minguillo
.

But
, our eyes answered,
we feed on carrion, if Minguillo dies
.

I remembered how, on my journey to Arequipa, I had promised the peons that I would pray for them, lest they should hunt Minguillo down and hurt him.

I prayed now. For Minguillo.

I prayed not because I loved him, or because I wished him better, but because I was terrified that his death would cast a dirty shadow over our joy.

Gianni delle Boccole

Finely Josefa’s cuzzin let it be knowed that in Minguillo’s room there were sich a stink that the Fiend in Hell would cower in a corner if he got hisself a whiff of it. And that Minguillo coughed up his innards hour by hour.

‘
La tosse xe ‘l tamburo de la morte
,’ I exsalted. ‘The cough is the drum of death.’

Then I were sorry, not for Minguillo but because I could see that Santo n Marcella were torned up in peaces. I were not so pure of heart as they. I osculated back n forth: some days I hoped his death would be quick, and other days hoped it would be long. Main thing was, he had one hoof in the coffin alredy. I were only on tender hooks for the end. Then I hoped they would leave his corps out in the hot sun for the aunts to dine on.

Amish Gillyfether were sad too, because he bethought hisself an assassin. He also bethought hisself a fool. He were dissolute at the idea that Cecilia Cornaro dint love him, that she had courted him for his uses, made a murderin porter out o him.

‘Women!’ I told him at the tavern. ‘They turn ye oer.’

Tis true, there is times when women is the devil, een when ye love em to affinity. Josefa ud took agin me the night afore when I wunt swallow a ginny pig did up in its own gore what she had cooked speshal for me. Eyes, nose, little whiskers still there, dripping on the plate, breaking yer heart. Would ye put sich a thing in your mouth, I ask ye?

I threated her with Anna’s squid in black ink back in Venice, and all ovva suddenly poor Anna’s painted as my fancywoman – long with evry thing else that daggled a pettycote in Venice. I kickt myself for it, but I een ust Anna’s scar to hexplain why there wernt niver nothing romantical atwixt us. But Josefa were in an umbrage and wunt listen. Then she set to wondering what got into her eyes and blinded her the night she agreed to be with me.

‘
Imbécil!
’ she shouted. I wernt sure if she were reefering to herself or me. I dint know if she had any love hid inside her beautiful chest for me still. All my sartinties slipt way, like I were falling through the branches of a big tree. Till that hour I haint een bethought on the so many years atwixt our ages, for they ud melted away in the throws o pashon as ye mite say. But now I felt two seprit pains – one, that I ud waited too long for love, like a
cacca
fruit what drops n splodes on the forist floor the very moment tis perfeck ripe. And second, that for all my forty year, and my heducation and my travails round the world, I were still not wise nuff to catch the preshous fruit safe in my hands.

Amish Gillyfether’s big craggy face were full o pain too. ‘If you let them, Gianni, women will turn your life right way up or upside down.’

‘To the laydies!’ I razed my glass, full of oirony and pisco, the local drink to which I had took quite a pleasant fancy. ‘And to Minguillo Fasan bein tuckt up by a spade!’

Amish were fond of a Chinese proverbial, and he give me one then. He sighed, ‘Do not beat a drowning dog, not for the sake of the dog, but for the sake of the soul of the beater.’

Marcella Fasan

At last, when it seemed too late, I was doing as Cecilia Cornaro had bid me. I was trying to understand why Minguillo hated me, why he had tried to strip me from myself. The will – which he must have known about all along – did not explain it all.

Now I forced myself to think back. What I found was this: no one had ever liked or loved Minguillo, not his parents, not his wife, not his daughters, not his servants. He was therefore not constrained to avoid hurting or disappointing or shocking anyone.

It is deforming to the soul to be the object of odium. Perhaps it disinfects the sense of good or bad? I remembered the hollow, hateful misery in my ribs when I used to sit at the most obscure part of the table, shunned by my family. Santo remembered the nuns who had raised him with whips, and sharper still, slighting looks and cutting words.

Gianni was in a raw mood, for he and Josefa had just proved their love by a first quarrel. Blackly, he insisted that Minguillo was always ‘rotting’, even as an infant.

‘Was he treated badly?’ I asked Gianni. ‘Were my parents cruel?’

‘They jist wanted to keep out of his way, like any sensible folk isn’t it,’ replied Gianni. ‘Where is your thoughts going, Marcella? Ye cannot be repining for him. He never wanted
you
safe, nor happy, nor well, nor even alive. He’s been a-murderin ye for years.’

Gianni hoped to kindly bluster me out of what he called my ‘Stew of Despond’. He could not. Minguillo had fixed himself at the core of all my thoughts. This was perhaps his last evil act against me: he had succeeded in one cruelty he never managed before: to make me hate myself.

For I could not forget my childish desire to have him dead.

All those years, I’d repeated stoutly to myself, ‘There is only one just penalty for Minguillo’s crimes: his putting-to-death.’

I had fervently wished it. I had been coolly ‘a-murderin’ Minguillo in my mind for years. I had infected Santo with the same desire. And Cecilia. And Hamish. And now, while I did not wish to be the actual authoress of my brother’s death, nor did I in truth wish him to continue blighting this world with his existence. I would have to learn to live with this knowledge about myself.

Hamish came to see me, his eyes full of leaving. I waved to Arce waiting below with the buggy to take him to Islay and the coast.

I hugged Hamish hard and long, telling him, ‘And Cecilia loves you too. I am sure of it.’

‘I am going to her now, to find out,’ he said.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

Typically, Minguillo thought himself recovering, when really he was still failing. He had advanced to the cosmetic treatments well before his pustules ceased seeping, thereby infecting them anew. He drank copious quantities of brandy and smoked cigars to hide his own stink from himself. His lungs collapsed under such a barrage of cruelty.

The
samba
told Josefa that his arms wore flour-cream paste like gloves up to his elbows, except where the finger-parts were cut off.

‘Looks like
monstruo
,’ Josefa reported, ‘like somefing borned wrong.’

On his chest he insisted on keeping the book of human skin that Cecilia Cornaro had sent him.

Josefa said, ‘The surgeon after him to burn he book, he hats, he clothes, for he must of bringed the Small-Pox to Arequipa with. He refuse, however.
Imbécil!
’

At the word ‘
imbécil
’, she threw an imploring look at Gianni, and received a melting one in return.

Ah
, I thought,
soon healed
. Already Gianni and Josefa can no more live without one another than can Marcella and myself. I made a note to include in my book a paragraph about the perdurability of love even when its skin is scribbled over with angry scars.

There came a knocking at the door. It was Minguillo’s surgeon, Sardon. He desired to consult the great Italian doctor about his unruly patient. I had expected and dreaded this summons.

I helped Sardon save himself. I suggested that sea air would be beneficial for his patient. In fact, what I implied was that, as death was probably imminent, it would be better for the surgeon himself if Minguillo were out of Arequipa and upon the ocean when it happened. Then the death could not be blamed on his doctor. In fact, the very absence of his doctor might be seen to have caused the death, which would give the surgeon’s reputation a fillip among the credulous Arequipans. Sardon gave me an anxious, knowing frown, and rushed away.