The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘Arrange yourself there,’ she told me neutrally, the one tone that could have spared me an agony of embarrassment. The strangest thing was that, with the opportunity ever available, my bladder simply forgot its inconvenient imperative. I never once needed to make use of that chamber pot, not in all the months I spent in that studio. It was only as Piero and I swayed in the gondola towards home that I felt the soaky tickle and clenched up anxiously. Then I remembered that Minguillo was still away in South America, and I forgot every disagreeable sensation.

  I kept no diary in those succeeding weeks, because I was living life instead of watching it. In the studio I was able to forget even Minguillo himself. Or, if I thought of him, it was as a thing to be valued very low. I had a new pleasure in those days. Inside my head I played out imagined encounters between Cecilia Cornaro and Minguillo, in which the artist sliced through my brother in crisp syllables.

  In contrast, I felt myself honoured as the object of the artist’s fierce attention. By the day of my first official visit, Cecilia Cornaro had already decided every detail of the portrait. The curtained chair was disposed in a corner by a Grand Canal window. I tried not to tremble as she advanced on me and wrapped my hair in a turban of white linen.

  ‘The Devil in heaven, those bones!’ she murmured.

  ‘What bones?’

  ‘Ignorante come una talpa,’ she muttered in response. Ignorant as a mole.

  I wanted to explain to her that I had been kept like a mole, on account of my condition, yet somehow my whole soul rebelled against acting the unfortunate in front of Cecilia Cornaro.

  I had read that portrait painters liked to know the essence of their sitters. Nervously, I offered, ‘Shall I tell you about myself ?’

  ‘No,’ she replied without apparent malice, ‘I am not interested in you because you are not yet very interesting. It will be more interesting for you to hear about art.’

  While Cecilia sketched and then painted me, she explained how the colours were made – what insect, plant or mineral had offered up its essence to make each of those swarthy reds, browns and crystalline whites that went into mimicking my skin. I blushed when she placed a little tray of yellows in front of me – that I might see and comprehend that yellow was a rainbow in itself.

  ‘Ictherine,’ she said, ‘yellow or marked with yellow. Luteous, golden yellow. Meline, canary yellow. Ochroleucous, yellowish white. Vitellary, bright yellow. Aurulent, gold-coloured. Citreous, lemon-coloured . . .’

  Did Cecilia Cornaro take me for an idiot-incontinent at whose expense she might enjoy a little malicious joke about the colour of urine? No, I prefer to think she wanted, as no one had ever done, to strengthen me, to make me unflinching in the face of less subtle and more protracted unkindness. The next time, she tested me unexpectedly, wanting to know what I had retained of her lecture on the nature of colour, I surprised her by proving a most sedulous pupil. Then, and ever after, I remembered every colour and its source, and not just the yellows.

  ‘You might as well make yourself useful,’ she told me on the third visit, placing a mortar and pestle in my lap. Inside was a blue-green stone vividly grained with grey and white. ‘Malachite from Peru,’ she told me. ‘Make me some colour for your eyes.’

  Our sessions never seemed long enough, because Piero could credibly keep me away from home for only a few hours at a time. After three weeks, when I had ground all the colours in her palette, Cecilia Cornaro gave me a tray with a piece of paper and a lozenge of powdery blackness. ‘Draw a circle,’ she commanded.

  For days on end I drew circles, until I could summon the perfect sphere without hesitation. Then it was straight lines. Then a shadow behind a circle with the light coming from different points. The charcoal wore away to nubs and still I did nothing more than nursery geometry. It was only back at the Palazzo Espagnol that I dared to make my own sketches of the great artist Cecilia Cornaro at work in the studio. I depicted her as a clever wildcat of unreliable temper, dextrously wielding a paintbrush in a blue forked tongue.

  Meanwhile, the artist’s portrait of me had ripened into a startling likeness, and been abandoned for a more ‘theoretical’ work, in which my face was part of an allegory. Then she started a third portrait. Cecilia Cornaro was not keeping to her end of the bargain or was at least stretching it beyond Piero’s price.

  Piero took my corner as ever. ‘Enough geometry lessons, Cecilia,’ he insisted. ‘Let Marcella show you what she can do!’

  She turned to me, ‘So does poor old Piero have to fight all your battles, Miss?’

  Gianni delle Boccole

  Twere the happiest summer of our lives and it seemed to want to go on for ever.

  Then one day the blue sky dropt into a black bucket. Grate white gashes opened up in the skin o the night.We cowered inside the Palazzo Espagnol as if there was beasts outside approaching for the kill. My poorly hand, the one Minguillo ud buried the knife in, give me pain, Sainted God! No one slept that night because we was all frit of dreaming.

  We aughter been affrighted o summing else.

  Marcella Fasan

  Cecilia Cornaro pointed to a table on which I saw a white sheet stretched over a frame and a box of mutilated pastels, the dog-ends of her own instruments.

  ‘I think paint is too wet for you,’ she remarked cruelly and Piero stood up, ready to remonstrate.

  Cecilia seemed to repent then, though she did not apologize. She at least did not re-open the wound of her joke against my now vanished incontinence. She just looked a bit rueful, as if she had eaten something that turned out to be bitter. I guessed she was quite often forced to wear that expression. Then she changed the subject. ‘You may begin a portrait of your own. Your times here are so brief that it is hardly worth it to mix the oil colours that will dry up in your absence. So, pastels. Best thing for human skin and ermine, the most stupid animals in the world, about which you must draw your own conclusions, Marcella. Now, who shall you portray first?’

  The medicinal smell of the pastels rose up from the box on my lap. I hesitated, feeling contempt quicken in her stare.

  Piero offered, ‘I’ll sit for Marcella, O sweet-tempered one, if that helps.’

  Cecilia Cornaro jeered, ‘Piero, you weren’t even worth painting when you were young. All your gifts are from your spirit. Bring some chocolate cake next time. At least it won’t be a wasted visit then.’

  She turned a tall mirror towards me, and I blushed to see my strained, eager face in its silvery trap.

  ‘Paint that,’ she commanded. ‘There cannot but be a good result, even for a ...’

  Piero interrupted, ‘I am sure the word that escapes you is “beginner”, Cecilia.Though in fact Marcella has . . .’

  It was as if he had not spoken. ‘And depending on the result, I will find some clients for the girl.’

  I bent my head lest a whinny of joy escape my mouth. That I might find my way in the world, earn a living, do something that would cause people to look at what I did, and not what I was! A prospect opened up in front of me like a door into a garden. I saw myself painting alongside Cecilia, listening to her abusing her clients; perhaps even joining in with some banter of my own.

  Cripples may not be witty aloud – it comes out as bitterness. Cripples must be sweetly cheerful to protect the full-bodied who do not wish to be cast down and made miserable by our crippledom. But an artist? An artist is licensed to scintillate in wickedness, wit and wonderfulness alike!

  Cecilia was perfectly aware of her generosity, and took pains to dampen the effect immediately. ‘Are you prepared to actually work, for the first time in your life?’

  No one speaks like that to a cripple! They speak like that to a person expected to rise to a challenge.This realization opened my own unmitigated mouth: my thoughts and words had no need to go separate ways in that studio. I observed, ‘Yes, whores wanting to be painted as Allegories of Innocence, mothers wanting to be painted as Allegories of Vigilance, fathers wanting to be painted as Allegorie
s of Eloquence . . .’

  Cecilia was smirking and Piero stood up, distended to full height and almost to some width by pride. Was this why he had brought me here? I wondered – not just for the art but for the provocation?

  I continued, ‘And of course the armies of Venetians for sale . . . I mean the young men and women who want portraits to sell themselves as husbands and wives. It takes a sweeter nature than yours, Cecilia Cornaro, to flatter them and raise their price.’

  We laughed uproariously then, the three of us, and Piero put his arm around me for a quick hug. When he let go of me, I saw he had fastened a row of pearls around my neck. Cecilia’s cat rolled over to show us his spotted belly. Cecilia launched into an indiscreet tale of a noble client and we returned to work without any agreement to do so, as if her scurrilous commentary was the natural accompaniment to the thing. Piero went back to gazing at us both with adoration. My life seemed to give off that perfume that comes when you open the waxed paper inside a box of marzipan cakes.

  Yet when I returned home that day, the good times were already starting to be over.Anna met me at the water-gate with the imprint of a hand red on her face. I knew that imprint. He had chosen to slap the side that was already wounded. She was holding out my leather harness in a shaking hand.

  Without any warning, Minguillo was back, and slaps were being distributed like largesse among the servants.

  On the same day arrived a letter from Peru which had made my mother look queasy under her tight helmet of curls.

  Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

  It was just as my patient Napoleon was starting to be less than he was that I had my first personal encounter with a medicine quickly grown huge in popularity.

  Ruggiero sent me to examine a Venetian countess who was too ill to return to the city at the end of the summer villeggiatura.

  I found a feeble hand, a quick pulse, a startling anaemia. The lady, who professed to thirty of her fifty years, complained of colic, cramps in the limbs, optic neuritis, a metallic taste in the mouth, constipation and scant rose-coloured urine. While she talked, I observed the blue line along her gums. That line told me, more eloquently than she could, that her health had been devastated by white lead.

  ‘What preparations have you been using?’ I asked.

  She pointed to a squat purple bottle. A sniff of its violently floral contents confirmed my diagnosis. The label showed a nun weeping into a bottle of exactly the same shape, with a tall mountain behind her.

  My patient clutched her belly. Pitiable creature: any prospect of a long life had been darkened by her desire to look more luminous.

  Within weeks, more noble patients were presenting the same symptoms. The same bottle was to be found beside each canopied bed. I made it my business to find out more about ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’.

  It was distributed by a notorious Venetian quack who styled himself ‘Doctor Inca Tuparu’. He boasted of training at a famous botica in deepest Chile-Peru. He claimed that ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’, liberally applied to outer parts, solved all noxious problems of the vitals and the glands.Yet most of all, and this was what was making the doctor’s patron rich, the colourless fluid was supposed to impart the lustrous whiteness of pearls to the skin.

  My Master Ruggiero preferred his Small-Pox scabs, and did not possess the necessary charm for quack doctoring. But that did not stop him being jealous of ‘Doctor Inca Tuparu’, or at least the quack’s raging commercial success.

  The surgeon showed me a florid handbill in which Doctor Inca swore the secret to his formula had been found hidden in a mysterious book bound in human leather. The proud quack also proclaimed that Napoleon himself doused his handkerchief in a bottle of Rosa’s Tears every morning.

  Ruggiero sniggered, ‘Well, that will explain little Bonaparte’s failure to thrive then!’

  Sor Loreta

  Then our own church of Santa Catalina was stained with a terrible deed. The Holy Fathers consented to hold a requiem mass for the Venetian merchant Fernando Fasan. His mistress paid the alms and offices from her ill-gotten gains. All the nuns except myself attended and sang hymns for that immoral man from behind the grate.

  I still lay in my bed, refusing all food and all drink except vinegar.

  For brevity’s sake, I shall not describe my agonies of thirst. My body shrivelled to its sinews. I was stripped of nearly every sensation. When I lay in bed at night, my hip bone ground painfully into the pallet. I had grown so insubstantial that I had a sense of floating above my mattress. I lost the clarity of vision in my one good eye, and there were times when my breath came in tearing sobs.

  The priora remonstrated, ‘I must inform your parents of this course you have taken.’

  I turned my head to the wall, on which I had painted many crucifixes in vinegar, though I did not remember doing that thing.

  My mother wrote, ‘Daughter, do not kill yourself with these absurd, exaggerated acts. You must eat and drink, or you shall die. Suicide is a sin.’

  From what seemed certain to be my deathbed, I weakly dictated a reply, happy that at last my words would be recorded for posterity: ‘Mother, it grieves me that I must explain the ways of God to you, treating you as if you were my own ignorant child. But I shall do so, for the sake of your soul.

  ‘Mother, I must warn you against your well-known love of fine clothes and food. Sumptuous eating heats up the body, makes it sleepy and puts it in calores. Fasting clamps the spark of concupiscence and keeps the soul awake for all-night vigils. Instead of arrogantly telling me not to fast, you should take up this holy practice yourself.

  ‘You must understand that Christ Himself is fed by my fasting. Sensuous gorging upon the forbidden apple was what caused Adam and Eve to be expelled from Paradise. Christ was forced to die on the Cross for our sins, to win our redemption and re-admission to Paradise. Now we dine on His blood and body at communion. That is all a Holy One needs to consume. Like Mechtild of Magdeburg, I desire to eat only God.

  ‘If you should hear presently that I have died of my penances, you should be proud and feel the highest joy to be the mother of a martyr. I am going to my wedding with my beloved Bridegroom, and I rejoice to do so.’

  My voice grew tired and faded away. Then I was horrified to see that the nun to whom I was dictating had stopped writing, and had let the paper drop negligently to the floor while she stared out the window with a bored expression on her face.

  ‘Where is Sor Sofia?’ I screamed. ‘Why do you keep her from me?’

  Then all went red in front of my eyes, and soon afterwards black.

  When I woke again, the priora was looking down on me. She stated, ‘Sister Loreta, you have suffered a crisis of the brain for several days.’

  ‘God sends fever to those who burn hottest with piety,’ I answered.

  ‘Indeed,’ she smiled, in a way that seemed to me to be satirical.

  ‘Did my body levitate above the bed like that of Teresa of Avila as I lay unconscious?’ I asked. ‘Did my sisters try without success to restrain my flight?’

  She laughed out loud. Of course, only the blessed can see such miracles.

  ‘I am quite well now,’ I told her. ‘Please let me prove it. Give me a step to scrub or an altar to burnish or better still a chain to scourge myself with. And let me see my dear Sor Sofia, for her presence will surely soothe my fever.’

  ‘You may not,’ said the priora cruelly, ‘see Sor Sofia unless you renounce this foolish fast and choose to exercise modest self-control like a woman of God. Think on how Sor Andreola carries herself with dignity! We have assigned Sor Sofia to her supervision.’

  She opened the shutter and bright light flooded into the room. That was when I saw my first angel: a thin, filmy creature with wings iridescent like those of a fly.

  Minguillo Fasan

  When the news arrived that my father had died in Arequipa, I danced a little minuet around his desk and vaulted over two velvet chairs in jubilation. At last I could destroy the wrongfu
l will.The possibility of his return had been the only thing keeping that will safe until now.

  I sat in his chair, and surveyed the mahogany desk, the fireplace of tortured leonine marble, the trefoiled window that cupped our prospect of the Grand Canal.All these things were mine now, to do with as I wished. In my pocket nestled the new will I had carefully prepared for this moment. I had left it in a box with a mouse to die on it, lending it an appearance of some antiquity.

  Outside rain snivelled down the guttering and coughed into the canal in yellowing gouts. My own heart’s blood, meanwhile, flowed rich and treaclesome with satisfaction. I would never more suffer my father’s disapproving face looking down on me, judging me, thinking me mad, making me smaller than I was. In one minute I would destroy that heinous will and all would be at rights again. My beloved Palazzo Espagnol could not be taken from me.There would be fundage for freedom, travel, fashion, pleasure and power without end.

  There would be no more stint on all my pet projects! I’d be flounced, frogged and pearl-buttoned to my heart’s content. I would raise my sights in terms of whores and collect all the books of human skin that had been made in the world, and I would beget new ones to commission. Tracts on childhood bound in the hides of the children of my enemies, if I liked. And I probably would like!

  Pieraccio would be disposed of, and.And.

  No respect to the Gracious Reader, but I doubt if He can imagine how perfectly, roundly, exquisitely happy I was in that moment.

  Until I searched the desk that I had monitored all these years, to look for that sore document I had opened and read a hundred times, each time more bitterly.