The Book of Human Skin (70 page)

Flora spoke of the nuns of Santa Catalina wearing a pleated veil, which seems not to have been true. She spoke of the cells as miniature country houses and the nuns living in a great deal of openness and relaxation, keeping chickens in their own courtyards, growing flowers, and enjoying an intimate, gossipy social life more like a girls’ boarding school than a convent. The
priora
at Flora’s time was a cousin of the Tristán family – as was her severe counterpart at Santa Rosa. Santa Catalina’s portrait of Manuela de San Francisco Xavier y Rivero shows a woman with a high forehead and a mouth that seems to express a subtle irony. Mismatched brows suggest an inner complexity. It was she who loved Rossini and imported the expensive piano.

The
priora
of Santa Catalina changed every three years, but she could be re-elected many times, serving on the council in the ‘fallow’ period. The nuns were tended by two chaplains. Around four aspirants or novices were accepted every year.

Marcella enters Santa Catalina in 1816. The
priora
at Santa Catalina at that time was Sor Fátima de Nuestra Señora del Carmen y Araníbar, who was succeeded in 1817 by Manuela de Santa Cruz y León. However, I have used instead the name Mónica. The personality of my
priora
is confected from the portrait painted by Flora of her relative, and, of course, from the imperatives of the story.

The process of admission would involve an interview with the
priora
and then an agreement on the dowry, as explained in the novel. The contract would be signed by the father who consigned the nun – she would only sign it herself if she was over twenty-five years old. Girls were admitted at the age of fourteen or fifteen usually, and remained novices until they were allowed to profess at the age of eighteen. The act of profession was deliberately theatrical, like a wedding, as described in the novel.

In theory, the nuns were supposed to enter the convent of their own accord, but there would have been a certain amount of family pressure. In the revolution-torn unstable times of the early nineteenth century, Spanish fathers would consider that they had delivered their daughters into safety if they consigned them to a convent. And there is, of course, a certain amount of self-interest in a family entrusting a daughter to a convent: given that the nuns were supposed to pray continuously for the souls of their family members, in order to lessen their time in Purgatory.

At this time there were around fifty-three of the
velo negro
(black-veiled professed nuns), twenty-eight of the
velo blanco
(white-veiled serving nuns), twelve laywomen who had invested their fortune in a retired life and sixty-two lay people working in and around the convent for its maintenance. There were seventy servants and slaves of every variation of blood:
mestizas, negras, mulatas, sambas
and others.

As previously mentioned, some real names are used in the book. The nuns came mostly from Arequipa and the surrounding areas. But Dante Zegarra’s list of nuns who entered Santa Catalina between 1810 and 1820 includes a Sor Juana Francisca from Lampa, a Sor María from Cuzco and a Sor Manuela from Lima. One
velo blanco
nun is listed as
hija natural
(illegitimate daughter). The
velo negro
nuns were generally of pure Spanish blood, though born in Peru. There is a record of a nun born in Spain being admitted to Santa Catalina in 1964.

The dowries were tailored to the fortunes of the families of the nuns. Many girls brought as dowry pieces of land that were rented out to lay farmers. The convent sometimes traded dowry objects and even slave girls to keep the convent fed, warm and supplied. The dowry letter Minguillo signs in the
oficina
is based on a document that is still preserved in the museum at Santa Catalina.

I have taken the names of some of my nuns from the friends that Flora made, even though my story takes place almost fifteen years earlier. For example, a Margarita from Bolivia was thirty-three in 1834 when Flora was there. She had been at Santa Catalina since she was two.

As described in the novel, visitors were allowed by permission of the
priora
. They would be escorted to the
locutorio
(
parlatorio
in Venice) which was inside the first courtyard. The nuns would arrive at the narrow chamber via the second courtyard. Facing them were five grates. All conversations were supervised by the
priora
, whose office had a grate into the
locutorio
, or by another nun.

It is true that a real cult of the baby Jesus arose among enclosed nuns in the New World and the Old. In some convents, the nuns were even allowed ‘baby Jesus’ dolls to cradle and dress up. This does not appear to have been the case at Santa Catalina, but the cult of
El Niño Jesús
was certainly strong there. I have invented the excess to which Sor Loreta takes this matter, though Veronica Giuliani recorded a similar phenomenon, in her case with a painted icon of the Madonna and Child.

It appears that certain pets were allowed, and it is true that at Santa Catalina some nuns kept fleas in bottles, partly to show their devotion to all living things. A beautiful green flea bottle (
pulguero
) is displayed in the convent’s museum.

There was no lunatic asylum in Arequipa at the time this novel is set, and nor was there a medical school. Sick nuns were attended by doctors and blood-letters in the
oficina
of the
priora
, or cared for in the convent’s own infirmary.

Sor Loreta’s accounts of the trials of Bishop Chávez de la Rosa reflect the historical facts. The noble nuns were very active in claiming and maintaining their rights. For example, they later also demanded and upheld the right to have their sisters buried within the convent walls, even when this was challenged on health grounds. Now they are buried in a crypt in the grounds. The relatively luxurious existence so deplored by Sor Loreta at Santa Catalina continued until strict reforms were imposed in 1859, bringing the lifestyles of the nuns more into line with those in European convents.

Santa Catalina was declared a National Historic Monument in 1944, which saved it from some radical and destructive rebuilding plans proposed in the 1930s.

In the 1970s, a far-ranging programme of careful restoration and building work took the convent back to its original structure, with a new area provided for the modern nuns, which meant that tourists could be permitted to visit the older parts of the convent during certain hours. The colours of the convent were carefully restored to the lowest stratum of paint found during the repair works. It was at this point that the internal streets of the convent were given their names: these were not in use at the time this book is set.

The convent opened its doors to the public on August 15th 1970, the 430th anniversary of the founding of Arequipa. The visitor may now wander through two hectares of winding alleys, cells and cloisters. Some cells are fitted out with furniture from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At a café near the back gate (through which Marcella escapes) visitors can eat biscuits and cakes cooked by the nuns. A wonderful recent innovation is to allow candlelit visits by night, a truly chilling and moving experience, when the convent seems to plunge back through four centuries of history.

The
sala de profundis
, used for wakes, still contains thirteen portraits of dead nuns, painted between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Most are painted with their eyes shut, though one shows Sor Juana Arias with her eyes open, as they were when she was found dead in her cell. Many nuns are crowned with flowers, particularly roses, like Santa Rosa of Lima. The historians Dante Zegarra and Alejandro Málaga Núñez-Zeballos concur that nuns were not painted in their lifetimes during this period.

In other parts of the New World, for example in colonial Mexico, portraits of nuns, both alive and dead, were actually very popular. The paintings of
monjas coronadas
reached quite extravagant heights, with the nuns shown in exuberant jewelled crowns and towering headdresses of multi-coloured roses.

Marcella’s faked self-immolation would have been regarded with horror. The Catholic Church relaxed its dictate against cremation only in the 1960s.

The treasure of the convent, in the form of valuables from the nuns’ dowries, is now displayed in the old infirmary, in the arches that used to protect the beds of the sick from earthquakes. It includes beautiful china, paintings, lamps, statues and silver. A wonderful collection of art hangs in the former dormitories of the serving nuns, with many examples of the so-called Cuzco School of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Christian imagery subtly adapted to local tastes by indigenous artists. Compared with contemporary ecclesiastical art in the Old World, these New World Christs were darker-skinned and wore Peruvian clothes. The Madonnas wore pyramidal robes that very much recall mountains. These paintings were often bordered with patterns of South American flowers and birds.

Today, a part of Santa Catalina still functions as an enclosed convent. But since 1985 nuns have been permitted to go out into the city, if accompanied, for specific tasks. They still occupy themselves with needlework, and examples can be purchased in the convent’s shop. Pope John Paul II visited Arequipa in 1985, and beatified one of the convent’s most beloved nuns, Sor Ana de los Ángeles Monteagudo (1602–86).

Gioachino Rossini

Rossini’s first operatic success took place in Venice and he harboured a lifelong affection for the city. The famous
Duetto buffo di due gatti
– funny duet for two cats – is attributed to Rossini, but it appears to have been compiled from fragments of his opera
Otello
(1816) by another musician about ten years later.

Remedies

The fox pasting given to Marcella in the country and the recipe used by Minguillo to conceive a male child come from Sextus Placitus’
Medicina de Quadrupedibus
, which suggests all kinds of cures using animal parts.

The folk medicines stocked at Minguillo’s
Novo Mondo
apothecary were among the items given much popular credibility as cures and prophylactics in the early nineteenth century.

All the books quoted by Santo are real, and can be found in the British Library or the Wellcome Library at London’s Wellcome Collection. Santo would have loved the great works on dermatology published by Robert Willan,
On Cutaneous Diseases
(1808), and Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert,
Description des maladies de la peau
(1806), but he would not have been able to afford them. Monkshood or aconite is indeed a deadly poison, and the flowers, and the effects of ingesting them, are as described. There is no known cure for a serious poisoning.

‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ is an invention of the author’s.

Disinfection of mail, and transmission of smallpox by paper

Smoking, perfuming and dousing in vinegar were supposed to purge letters of yellow fever, leprosy and plague . . . which, as it turned out, could
not
be transferred by paper. The only killer disease that can be transferred by paper is smallpox. To destroy it requires an intense heat treatment, such as the determined application of a very hot iron.

V. Denis Vandervelde, founder of the Disinfected Mail Study Circle, writes:

While disinfection was practised against half a dozen infectious diseases in the early nineteenth century it was quite ineffective against almost all of them. Smallpox was so widespread that it was not normally a cause for disinfecting mail, but it
could
have been conveyed on dry paper at this time in Arequipa. We have reliable records of smallpox in Chile from 1554 and in Peru from 1802. The Spanish authorities in Latin America were keenly promoting Jennerian vaccine against it from the first years of the nineteenth century.

In the year 1804–5 there was a worldwide alarm about yellow fever and it is likely that travellers from the New World would have been detained in a Venetian lazzaretto, and any mail would probably have been ‘perfumed’ (in a box with sweet-smelling herbs). More serious treatment, including scorching, was reserved for plague mail.

There was much less concern then until 1814–16, when there were outbreaks of plague in the Kingdom of Naples, the Ionian Isles and Malta. Yellow fever was much less of a threat until 1819, when the Spanish and Portuguese resumed splashing suspect mail with vinegar.

Smallpox is remarkably resilient. Spores kept at room temperature can survive for years. Frozen samples of the virus can be revived decades later. A British doctor records scabs dried in peat smoke and stored in camphor being viable for inoculation procedures eight years later.