The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  Sor Loreta

  There was a tradition at Santa Catalina that on Good Friday three nuns would be fastened to the crosses in el santuario as a tribute to what Our Lord suffered on our behalf. It was a great honour to be chosen for this duty, and I was diligent in my efforts to make sure that I would be among the three for my first Holy Week at the convent.

  I tried so hard to be worthy of this honour that I involuntarily caused a miracle. Just like Santa Rosa, I gazed for hours with love on a painting of Christ’s Passion in the church. Eventually the face of Our Lord began to look misty, and then damp, so that perspiration appeared on His brow and cheeks. I called loudly for witnesses and the priora came running. However, the woman was unable to see the miracle I had wrought.

  ‘Sor Loreta,’ she sighed, ‘the painting is perfectly dry.’

  She added, ‘But I’ll not deny you’ve the power to make a body’s flesh creep. I declare I feel quite clammy and uncomfortable myself when I look at you.’

  I was highly gratified, for exactly in this way had the naysayers mocked the very same miracle when it was performed by Santa Rosa herself.

  But after the incident with the painting, I was denied the privilege of standing on the cross for Our Lord that Easter. Naturally Sor Andreola was chosen, and she selected her two most slavish followers to join her.

  Meanwhile, it pleased God to test me and to send upon me mischievous jokes and insults, like a living worm in my bread and a black cat left locked up in my cell.

  Four years went by in this way. I was never chosen for the Good Friday cross. My sufferings were always made more painful by the sight of nuns offering acts of veneration to Sor Andreola wherever she walked. Some even profanely fell to their knees, kissing the ground where she had passed.

  But at that time, it being 1788, God sent a pious man at last to Arequipa, and I was convinced that he would prove my salvation, by which I mean the salvation of the sinful convent of Santa Catalina. Bishop Pedro José Chávez de la Rosa had come all the way from Spain to lay waste to the lax morals of Arequipa. He started immediately at our convent.

  Like any good Christian, he was shocked at the luxurious cells of the rich nuns, who used their peculios, their private allowances, to surround themselves with comforts, including slaves and servants. My peculios, of course, I put into the missionary-box: I refused to buy myself treats while there were heathens in the world without Bibles of their own. I preferred to use the serving nuns for my menial work rather than to own a slave. The only ornaments in my cell were a small human skull and a Baby Jesus rendered in pure plaster.

  The Bishop saw that the nuns’ slaves and servants were a vice, being the eyes and ears and purses of the nuns, going forth on to the streets at will, and bringing back the taint of the outside world on their tongues and in their shopping baskets. It was as if the convent walls did not exist for those girls. Bishop Chávez de la Rosa was also dismayed to see the private kitchens of the rich nuns and the costly delicacies that were served to them on damask cloths set with silver plates while they lolled on their cut-velvet cushions like courtesans in a seraglio. He ordered all the nuns to return to the godly simplicity of communal dining. He closed the bakery that produced the opulent bread and polvorón cakes for which the convent was famous.

  Now I of course valued the world as something merely worthless and I had never been one tiny part jealous to see the sisters flaunting their jewelled silver crosses and Sèvres teacups. Nor had I envied them their slaves, or their pernicious affection for each other, shown in wanton kisses and hugs. But I agreed wholeheartedly with Bishop Chávez de la Rosa that their wicked ways must be put to an end. Therefore I wanted to make sure that he was fully informed of the many additional sins that the nuns were trying to conceal from him.

  Those days that the Bishop made his investigations among us, I spent prostrate in prayer upon the icy stone floor of the church. He was obliged to step over my suffering form several times on his way to the altar. And so my own piety, the only true faith in the whole convent of Santa Catalina, was finally noticed by Bishop Chávez de la Rosa.

  ‘What is your name, child?’ he asked me.

  I kept my face down on the floor. I did not wish him to be distracted by it. ‘I am no one, Ilustrísimo,’ I declared. ‘I am a humble messenger.’

  With my head muffled by stone, I recounted all the secret wrongdoings of the light nuns and the priora. I told him of my deeds of penance, my fasting, and what I had suffered in the way of scorn. I left out no detail.

  He knelt down beside me and listened in silence. Then he picked up one of my wrists and turned it over in his hand.

  ‘Poor child,’ he pronounced finally, rising to his feet. ‘We must see what can be done for you.’

  By this, I naturally understood that I would shortly rise to a position of great authority, and preside over all those sinful ones who had sought to bring me down.

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Until he had eleven year, if ye dint know him intimid, twere jist possible, with yer head on one side n yer fingers crosst, to think on Minguillo as a tearing-way kind ovva lad, with a morbid maginashon n a bad temper.

  He dint grow any prettier. Swear that the eyes lookt closer to by the year and the mouth on im were like summing pulled in on a hook with mackerel guts. The skin stretcht oer his face so ye could see the scull underneath, trying to affright ye, ugly as a gargle, Great Toad ovva God!

  At eleven he grewed the worst crop o pimples as ever bedivilled a humane skin. The repungent kind what waxes yellow, then black, what run around in colonies, settling n spreding there seed, finely digging pits in the face. Twere as if his wickedness got up evry night while he lay sleeping and writed more of his gilt on that face o his.

  And that were the year that he were found tyin up my poor sister Cristina in the limonaia. He ud made a little wooden cross for her, and she were bound hand n foot like Jesus pon it. There were an apple in her mouth. He, in cool blood, were sharpening the knife on a grindstone. Thank the Lord. On account of as it were the shrieks n sparks o the knife what caused a passin footman to investigerate.

  The Papà Fernando Fasan were of natural course way in Arequipa agin. I rusht down to the limonaia to see my Cristina trusst up and the fish-gutting knife a-glinting in Minguillo’s hand. Twere me that restled the thing out o his fist. He dint nowise wunt to give it up, and the look he give me burnt into the back of my brain. At the last minute he twisted the blade so it went deep into my hand. None o t’other servants dared to help me. The knife stood there in the fat o my palm, uprite like a soldier.

  Dint I ache to nuck im one up the bracket jist then? But Minguillo were the young Master, he were intitled. He dint bash an eyelid. I caught his eye and quickly turned back into my idiot-drooling self, the abstruse one that twere safest to be round him.

  ‘Don’t pertain to me,’ he dekklared, swaggering oft. All the servants, there blood up, sayed slurs at him like they would niver ornery dare, tho naturally they waited till he were almost out o hearing.

  Cristina finely spat the apple out o her mouth and begun to wail at the blood squirting out o my wound.

  Anna stitched n dressed my hand, using a burned needle n a clean cloth, so there were no longlastin damidge. Except that wheniver after I saw the young Master, a stab o pain went through my palm. Sumtimes it doed that too, when he wernt there, but were up to evil elsewheres. And Cristina were taken away by kind Piero Zen, my Mistress Donata Fasan’s assistant husband, to live n work in his homonymouse palazzo. He knew twere not safe for her no more at the Palazzo Espagnol. Anna n I messed her sorely. That were one more peace of good gone out of all our lives on count of Minguillo Fasan.

  My Mistress were in her fifth month so she were spared the story o the croosyfied Cristina. For Conte Piero were worrit it mite bring on the birthing pains too early isn’t it.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  Skin’s drama will usually make its first eruption in early adolescence.

&
nbsp; I feel a special compassion for my pimpled patients, who often come to me at that tender age when appearance is all, and all is blighted. They feel they are dying, not of disease, but shame. For the person whose face is marked in ignominy must always be conscious of the disgust of those with whom he stands at close quarters. At best, his companions pity the distempered blood they read on the raddled skin; at worst, they wonder what moral corruption is embossed in the cutaneous putrescence.

  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 orpha
n 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.