The Book of Human Skin (7 page)

The poor sufferer runs to the apothecary, oftentimes at his – or, more likely, her – peril. In my time in Venice there were many skin preparations on the market. All promised to alchemize an ugly outbreak into silken skin with the lustre of pearls. Most were harmless waters drugged with alcohol and sugar. A picturesque name usually conjured some exotic provenance: the Grand Sultan’s Elixir, The Maiden’s Dew, The Milk of the Candelabra Cactus, and so on. Venetians love entertainment: such names alone charmed the gold out of the pockets of the rich. That these hypocritical juices were bought by the poor instead of solid food was the quacks’ true crime.

I do not rant or preach. I would judge most of the cheaper preparations worth the few
soldi
they cost for a sense of feeling better and a mood actually lightened by the wine. Some, like Bezoar Stone (manufactured in the belly of the Peruvian llama), might in fact speed an infertile woman towards conception. And the Bark of Peru, from the chinchona tree, is known to treat the symptoms of the Sweating Sickness most effectively, though none of the above have the least effect upon the skin.

Yet for every quack that peddles pretty water, there is one who murders drop by drop. A few of these Venetian skin preparations were actually dangerous, containing poisons and corrosives that might weaken a victim for ever, or even kill at high dosage. The worst I would ever come across was also the costliest. It went by the name of ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’, and was all the rage in Venice when I was a young man just setting out on my career in skin.

Whichever pharmaceutical criminal had conjured it, he aimed his sights on the rich. The nastier the taste or smell and the higher the price, the more effective such people believed a medicine must be. They adored the double sacrifice of hurting their purse and disgusting their mouth or nose: the cure would be more exquisitely imagined in this way.

Despite its rankly oversweet odour, the affluent Venetians would be constitutionally unable to resist ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’. For the hairdressers who disseminated it gave out such a picturesque tale of its provenance. They claimed that it was composed of the tears of Peruvian nuns wept into lachrymatory bottles in the snowcapped peaks of the Andes, and that a kind and infallible physician had brought it all the way across the ocean for the beautifying of Venice.

Sor Loreta

I waited for my rightful elevation in vain.

Instead, a few hours after my interview with the Bishop, I was taken to the infirmary and force-fed a meal of fatty soup, thick porridge and pieces of oil-
soaked bread. My head was bound in rags soaked in herbs and I was tied to the bed.

‘Bishop Chávez de la Rosa will punish you when he hears what you have done to me!’ I warned through a gap in the bandages.

‘Who do you think suggested this treatment for you?’ The pharmacy nun Margarita, a Bolivian, grinned at me in a vulgar fashion. ‘Open your mouth, there’s cake for you.’

Suddenly I understood that of course the Bishop had wanted to keep me safe while he went about his work. In the busy infirmary, moreover, I was in the society of other nuns and overheard more of what was going on than I would have done in my habitual isolation. And it was God’s design that I should know the daily happenings at Santa Catalina and beyond, because one day I would need to right all the wrongs that were about to take place.

For it went badly for poor Bishop Chávez de la Rosa. His righteous remonstrances to the nuns of Santa Catalina were treated with disrespect. The high-born nuns acted as if they were superior to the Bishop and frustrated his holy plans in more ways than I can write down. This must have included his plans for me, for they came to nothing.

The Bishop never came to see me in the infirmary, so he could not have known about the cruel ways in which they forced me to eat. Of course, I quickly realized why he did not visit me: if the other nuns had seen how he favoured me, they would have found even more ways to torture me. Instead, Sor Andreola came floating in, and sat beside me, sewing and whispering to me in a voice of pretended kindness. I let her stay, because I wanted to examine her at close quarters. I found nothing spiritual in her. She was definitely plumper than me. She had an insipid kind of prettiness and a bleached-looking complexion. I did not see anything that resembled the lustre of pearls on her skin.

I told her: ‘I pity you from the depths of my heart, Sor Andreola.’

While I lay in the infirmary, Bishop Chávez de la Rosa fought and lost a war against the high-born nuns. When he saw how proud and disobedient they were, the Bishop suspended elections for the next
priora
and installed one of his own choice (I myself being still in the infirmary at that time). But the luxury-loving nuns rebelled and sent secret letters to powerful figures in the Church, many of whom were their uncles.

Discovering their subterfuge, the Bishop imposed harsh penances on the leaders and even denied the five most sinning sisters the Eucharist. They responded by asking their uncles to take their case all the way to the
audiencia
in Lima. The uncles obliged and the High Court and even the King humiliated the Bishop. The nuns of Santa Catalina won the right to govern themselves free of his influence.

After that, Bishop Chávez de la Rosa, abashed and sorrowing, gave up on Santa Catalina. He lifted his eyes over the convent wall and found many things to reform in the town of Arequipa. As I had done on the day of my arrival, he saw ladies clothed like harlots, and harlots done up like ladies. Bishop Chávez de la Rosa tried to make the females of Arequipa dress decently for their worship in our churches. But the women would not give up their high-hooped skirts and lewd necklines.

His attempts to rid Arequipa of its vicious
fiestas
fell on stony ground, just like the heads of the poor French King and Queen rolling on the sawdust in Paris. How could the people of Arequipa not see the parallels? Yet it seemed that the Most High chose to illuminate only the soul of His most humble daughter with this insight.

The Bishop found men and women openly cohabiting without the blessing of God, claiming that weddings were priced too high by the clerics of Arequipa. As if
this
were the reason that all the richest citizens of the town, including a Venetian nobleman named Fernando Fasan – he whose warehouse had been righteously destroyed by the earthquake of 1784 – lived in open concubinage with their mistresses.

Next Bishop Chávez de la Rosa campaigned against the number of children born out of holy wedlock in Arequipa. He soon had a thousand children, the spawn of immoral unions, safely sequestered from decent society in his new Foundling Home. The high mortality rate among the bastard offspring reflected the wicked nature of their begetting.

Little babies were buried every day, and the light nuns at Santa Catalina loved to say sentimental prayers for their souls. ‘A baby mass!’ was the constant cry among them, and of course Sor Andreola of the white skin must sit in the middle of everyone holding a baby doll, and soaking up their adoration as if she were the Virgin herself.

I had been allowed out of the infirmary by then. But I refused to attend the crowded baby masses. I preferred to worship my own plaster image of the Baby Jesus in the strictest seclusion. I was not sure in my heart if those flesh-and-blood foundling babies could be sinless, as everyone said they were. It was my suspicion that their feckless parents had transmitted something bad in the blood.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

I never knew my parents. The nuns told me that I was the child of fornication and dishonour. For some time I thought that Fornication was my mother’s name and Dishonour was my father’s. Then that foolish idea was beaten out of me too.

I was often told that I was fortunate to be an orphan in a Foundling Home in Venice, and not some infidel child left exposed on a mountain in a pagan wilderness. There were many ugly moments when I disagreed.

By the time I was eight the skin on my back was pleated with the trails of old whippings.The other side of me was concave – I had never known a full belly. But I had clear eyes and a brain that refused to be incurious about the workings of the human body, and had only the mildest interest in what the nuns called my soul. For, as far as I could see, my lively soul was the thing they were trying to whip unconscious.

The human body, though! Now there was a thing. I lay in bed at night listening to the blood ticking through my veins, working out its ways. I performed a dismal analysis upon the orchestra of coughs emitted by the other children in my dormitory. I soon came to know which coughs would fade away, and which would end with a blanket over the poor child’s head and a curt prayer for his passage to the afterlife.

What I liked best was skin. Any sign of sores or rash and you would find me by the side of the suffering child. You might call it pity – but who was I to pity anyone? For me, it felt more like fondness. The nuns had done everything possible to harden my heart, yet it still opened up at the sight of a poor creature afflicted in the skin. To this day, it does that. I am still known to follow a stranger in the street, and press an ointment or a balm into his or her surprised hand: whatever is needed to cure his rash or Impetigo.

Even as a little boy, I had a way with cutaneous maladies. I could pound a poultice from the poorest ingredients scraped up from the
corners of the convent, and apply it secretly under a bandage torn from my own shirt. I was beaten for ruining my clothes, but my little patients prospered; they brought me more patients with newer conditions. I did not know what these illnesses were called, yet I knew how to palliate them, it seemed by instinct, unless it was the Small-Pox that took hold. When Tommaso from my dormitory succumbed, I could do nothing more than hold his hand until he died. I held that hand so fiercely that it was white when they forced me to let go.

Furtive and roundabout ways worked best in the convent: to state my desire to be a doctor would have brought down punishments on my head for arrogance. There would be sarcastic questions as to who would pay for the training of a worthless orphan like myself. So I kept my eyes down in the classroom, never visibly distinguishing myself, never writing all I learned on my little slate.

As soon as I had mastered my letters, I began to haunt the infirmary. I befriended the old nun who worked there. Her eyes were failing: she let me read out the pharmacy receipts for her. Each one I read, I memorized. And every day I stole a little sugar or a little salt. In this way I kept alive when many of my companions did not. Sometimes I emptied some herbs into my pocket as I ground up a prescription for a sick child. Eventually I ignored the pharmacy nun’s instructions, for I knew better than she what saved and what exterminated the convent’s inmates, who comprised both children and fallen, destitute women.

The medical records of the foundlings and their mothers were kept in the infirmary. The lock was not too stubborn for a scalpel. I learned that my own unwed mother had died of puerperal sepsis in that very room, due to ‘miasma’ in the air. I sniffed the air of the infirmary archives. The dust of ages and the effluent of the drains filled up my nostrils.

The old nun was persuaded to reminisce about my birth. A medical student had delivered me, arriving hotfoot from assisting at an autopsy, his hands still wet with necrotic gore. One soul, mine, had come into the world by that red hand; another, my mother’s, had left it.

My father was unknown and would stay that way.

Sor Loreta

There came to us more news from Europe of the dreadful doings of the revolutionists who hated the Holy Mother Church, her priests, and even her nuns, and persecuted them like the Christian martyrs of old.

Merchants delivered foreign newspapers to the Tristáns: this rich Arequipan family had connections in Paris. One of the Tristán
sambas
brought in a well-thumbed page to Santa Catalina and the nuns crowded round while one of my sisters who was sinfully fluent in French translated for us. Some evil-doer had drawn a cartoon of nuns being driven out of their convent.

The Godless revolutionists used laughter just as the Devil plies his pitchfork. They sneered that the convents were like bastilles. They drew the Church as a lamprey, sucking good out of the world without giving anything back. The heathens declared that
praying
for the wretched was lazy and worthless. They insisted that the nuns were not too good for housework and cooking: they should
work
for the poor and sick. Nor should nuns think themselves too fine for human husbands. They should go out and marry and procreate for the state.

‘God does not make anything celibate,’ one blasphemer urged.

As if those poor nuns were not already married to God! What kind of state was this, that proposed bigamy for the pure brides of Christ? Some noble nuns were even accused of subverting the revolution, because they refused to cuckold God and lived on in their communities in a blameless manner. It was not until All Saints that news of the notorious event arrived in Arequipa, an event that made all good Christians gasp: on July 17th 1794, sixteen Carmelite sisters from Compiègne had been led to the guillotine and their heads had been cut off.

In Santa Catalina our nuns were swooning with gratitude that such things could never happen here. Yet my heart was torn in my breast, for those nuns from Compiègne had been allowed God’s greatest honour of martyrdom.
Deo gratias
. I wondered if there was a way to obtain some of the dirt from beneath the guillotine. The earth that had drunk the blood of the martyrs must be a most precious relic, I thought, and I wished with all my heart to have some.

And now there was talk of a long-haired Corsican. With every passing month the merchants brought more tales of his depredations. An ocean did not seem vast enough to keep that dangerous madman Napoleon Bonaparte away from us.

Minguillo Fasan