The Book of Human Skin

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘Of course not,’ whispered Mamma, holding the baby a little away from her, as if the child had already succumbed to Marcella’s taint.

  Outside my mother’s room I palmed Signor Fauno the usual coin for his trouble. I held up my hand. ‘By the way, “The Tears of Santa Rosa” – I’ve decided it would be advantageous to retire it for a period.’

  ‘It is our best-selling item . . .’ he protested.

  ‘There are some rumours that need nipping in the bud. A little shortage now will be immensely stimulating for sales when we return it to the market, with a raised price on account of its scarcity.Tell all the hairdressers to cease at once. Sell off all the stock cheaply’ – inspiration struck me then – ‘to the Spanish madam in Cannaregio, and advise triple doses.’

  Signora Sazia would be out of business in a week if she did not realize what caused all the retching in her livestock!

  ‘But my noble customers?’ the Perfumed and Curled One havered. ‘They do not like to be denied.They are not used to it either.’

  ‘We shall say that the nuns in Peru have ceased weeping in the bottles on account of some desiccating local pestilence.’

  ‘Even better,’ he gloated.

  Now I had been cultivating the good Brothers of San Servolo like the tender shoots of plants, drawing them towards the light by virtue of their natural inclinations.

  In my first letter to the priests, I confessed that a certain imbalance could be found in our family. I profited from my father’s tentative researches into committing my own self. In that letter I told the Brothers that many, many years ago their predecessors might have received some correspondence from my dear father about a problem with a child.That child, I wrote, had now grown into a problematic young woman whose condition threatened the happiness of our whole family. Sadly, my father was no longer among us. So I wished to do as he would have done – consult our family’s esteemed friends, the Fatebenefratelli, about the nature of my sister’s illness. For if there was something to be done with the poor creature, the sainted Brothers would surely know the best course.

  I caught their interest.Years had indeed passed. Any priests who could remember my father must have been retired or dead. Napoleon had pillaged all the city’s and the Church’s archives thoroughly. I trusted no one would look for or find the actual correspondence.Yet the Fasan name still figured largely in their account books, given our assiduous supply of chinchona and other Peruvian pharmaceutical delicacies. A certain Padre Portalupi wrote back, politely asking what he could do to help me.

  I made a show of hesitation then. I thanked him effusively, but demurred ‘Perhaps I have revealed too much. Some secrets are too dark to be let out. Doubtless it is better to leave things as they are.’

  ‘Dear son,’ Padre Portalupi reassured me, ‘we do God’s work here.Your family’s private sorrows are perfectly secure with us.’

  Given that assurance, I was most candid, probably more so than the doing-good Brother bargained for. I refined Marcella’s condition for my purpose. I worked it this way: it is well known that cripples, like housemaids and governesses, have a tendency to madness. And like all cripples, my sister suffered from a mental distortion that reflected her physical state. I flirted coyly with Padre Portalupi’s compassion, hinting that there were other matters too gross to raise before him.

  And once more the priest wrote to me as I had hoped: ‘Nothing disgusts us here on San Servolo. Please tell me exactly what ails your sister, no matter how terrible, and I shall tell you if we can help her.’

  Marcella, I now confided ruefully, had developed a wilful bladder malfunction, deliberately soiling herself whenever she was denied anything she wanted. Originally I had hoped that austere and calming convent life would help her. But Napoleon had dismantled the convent, leaving my sister to fester unwillingly in our home. Our affectionate mother, I scribbled, had tried to indulge her, to treat the problem with kindness, yet Marcella – and her bladder – had become every day more imperative. It had become a mania with her. My hope was that perhaps the famous water treatments at San Servolo could help.

  Moreover, I told them, Marcella’s animal economy was developing in worrying ways: her eyebrows were sprouting asymmetrically, and her thighs were disproportionately plump in relation to her wasted body. Her eyes were not strong. Her forehead had broadened. I did not need to translate these manifestations into symptoms. The Fatebenefratelli kept abreast of current medical literature: such lineaments had recently been diagnosed as commonly manifest in women with a bent for uncontrollable lewdness.

  My presence was requested at the island. Our gondolier rowed me over on a sparkling day that seemed to favour all my plans, even laying emphasis on the pea-green brilliance of my slashed silk waistcoat. Not everyone could bring off that colour. The walls of the island loomed up with a fronding of trees above. A small aperture in the monolith of stone winked as our boat approached. I passed through an arched gate decorated with light-hearted ironmongery, was greeted with gratifying deference and led to a handsome parlour on the first floor. I faced a small group of men in priests’ garb. One wiped his hands on an apron stained with beautifully red blood. He must have come fresh from surgery: the medico-religioso.

  I took the lead. I spoke with expert knowledge and shining approval of the island’s fashionable regime of tranquillization by twelve-hour enforced baths and stimulation by powerful jets of cold water. In hopeful tones, I suggested that Marcella’s body, immune to medication, might be educated in that way. I concluded that I had perfect confidence in the good Brothers’ ability to charm the devil out of my sister’s bladder and make it a godly organ again.

  The Brothers exchanged glances, though some seemed fixed on my waistcoat. I took my chance. ‘There’s one other matter . . . too difficult to commit to writing.Yet I owe you a fuller explanation within the privacy of these walls. It is to be feared that the constant agitation of my sister’s bladder had given rise, as it were, to immoral sensations in that region,’ I spoke delicately.

  In the quickening crossfire of glances, I explained how Marcella was rising to the estate of woman, without being a real woman. Her body, so fragile, was suddenly wracked with the baser calls of Nature, which had drawn all her thoughts in the direction of her womb. In that super-sensitive vessel such desires had become super-dominant, and perverted her mind. It followed, as night after day, that there would be trouble – and there had been.

  ‘She developed an obsession for a young retainer’ – (so I styled him) – ‘who attended to her. Naturally he was repulsed by her lewd advances, and his affections were certainly never engaged. But he so far neglected his honour as to encourage her, solely for fortune-hunting motives.’

  Ergo, I continued, given her inability to judge between good and evil, it would be agreed by all reasonable souls, much as it would hurt me to lose her, that my sister must be confined to protect her against corruption and even a pregnancy that could be deliberatedly precipitated – as it were – by this unscrupulous retainer.

  ‘I do not want to turn my house into a prison for my sister, yet I must preserve her innocence. I worry that she has become too wild to live safely in the world.’

  The said villain, I concluded, would give up his pursuit of my sister’s fortune only if she was removed from his reach.

  ‘And this is not the first instance of my sister’s moral incontinence,’ I concluded sadly. ‘Even as a child, she seduced a much older friend of my mother’s.’

  Padre Portalupi obliged handsomely, declaring, ‘The fortune-hunter may not follow her here, and there will be nothing for him to seek. If your sister’s mind is unbalanced, she may not govern property.Any inheritance is held in annulment.That is the law.’

  I mimed thoughtful surprise.Then I pointed to the gardens glowing green at the end of the corridor. ‘Pinel,’ I suggested, naming their hero, ‘advised flowery groves, yes? Even for overdeveloped voluptuous leanings?’

  ‘You have read Pinel?’
/>   I patted the book that bulged visibly in my pocket. ‘Of course. Do you know that he trained for the Church before becoming a doctor? I read him as a concerned brother, and as a man whose mission it is to supply the apothecaries and priest-surgeons of Venice.’

  They nodded serially, swallowing that whole. It was fortunate that they did not ask to see the volume in my pocket, for it was my book of human skin, which would have taken some explaining.

  I touched lightly on Pinel’s cures for furore in utero. I knew that would send the red-aproned medico-religioso into a ferment, for whatever they did in Paris, they soon did on San Servolo too.The Italian surgeons were in close correspondence with the French, and the rivalry ran deep.

  ‘I understand that the womb’s hysteria often manifests in an excessive flow of saliva, yet may also in exceedingly rare cases show in tears or urine, as characterizes my sister’s symptoms. My humble hope is that this unusual occurrence will be of scientific interest to the scholars among you.’

  The surgeon’s eyes gleamed like those of a jaguar in the jungle.

  ‘Desperate remedies, you know. I hate to think on it, but if you have to cut her, for her own good, well then, you must.’

  At this morsel, the lips of the bloodstained surgeon curled into an irrepressible smile. No doubt he was aching to notch up more operations than his rivals in Paris. Padre Portalupi’s face tightened with anxiety; there was clearly dissent among them.

  The irony was not lost on me: the one thing that might really have helped Marcella was surgery, as there clearly existed a species of small mechanical failure in her bladder. However, if I was clever enough, they would operate upon the womb – on the principle that the hysteria, induced by the furious unemployment of that organ, was what had launched all her symptoms.And after its removal, there could never be any babies to challenge my ownership of the Palazzo Espagnol.

  San Servolo was ready to receive my sister.

  Finally, I re-instated my fat quack Doctor Inca, allowing him to restore himself to my good graces by several unspeakable acts of self-abasement about which the Reader need not intrigue or vex Himself. Let us just say I wanted the man back under my roof.

  On a night soon approaching, his services would be indispensable.

  Marcella Fasan

  I looked at my wall, which Minguillo had distempered white as a novice’s habit. I remembered how Santo’s graceful shadow had walked upon it, growing smaller as it approached me.

  Graceful as a snake, I thought now. Gianni told me Santo was forced out of Venice by Minguillo’s threats.

  So, I thought, it must be true that Santo loved Amalia, for why else would Minguillo menace him and chase him off ? Like a snake, Santo has shed his skin and wriggled away.

  ‘I must have been mad,’ I wrote in my diary. I must have been mad to have dared to believe that Santo felt something of tenderness towards me. My eager eyes had been deceived by his sweet looks. My very first sight of his handwriting – and what could be truer than that? – had informed me in cruel detail just how mad had been my fantasies, how mad my arrogance to think I might be preferred by any man to the exquisite Amalia.

  ‘I must revolt my hands and eyes with humbler and less delicious meat.’ That was what he had written.

  Only much later would I realize how mad I had been in those dwindling days to demonstrate my crushed hopes by my steadfast gazing at the wall, thus furnishing a perfect illustration of madness alike to all who tried to help or hurt me.

  Sor Loreta

  The Holy Fathers confirmed that I would continue to hold my position of vicaria indefinitely, even though sisters elected to office in the ordinary way must stand down after three years. My enemies, the light nuns, took their revenge in more acts of mockery and cruelty than I can write down.

  Like Santa Rosa of Lima, I had always taken refuge from ridicule by throwing myself into good works, such as the growing of herbs and vegetables for the poor. My little courtyard was a paradise of cucumbers and gourds.

  Santa Teresa of Avila explained that Our Heavenly Father loves the smell of flowers and refreshes His spirits upon them. So I grew flowers too.

  I would have nothing but carnations, which symbolize obedience and penitence, and divine blue monkshood, whose seeds I had ordered from Cadiz, using the little part of my peculios that I kept for myself. No other nun could charm the roots of plants into such fecundity as mine showed. Only I – and Sor Sofia – knew that this was because I watered my little plants with drops of my own pure blood. When she saw me open my vein in the garden one evening, she took my hand and begged me not to do it. I should have taken more notice of her words in that moment. For it was the very first time that Sor Sofia revealed an unenlightened side of her character.

  But I was distracted by the arrival of two new nuns from Puno on Lake Titicaca: Sor Narcisa and Sor Arabel. Both were red and raw from head to foot by their own hands. They had been sent away, I heard, because of the excesses of their penances, which had terrified the young novices of their former convent. They sought me out all hours of the day. They could not hear enough of my words and prayers. I knew that they had pledged themselves to me when I overheard the godless Rafaela refer to them as ‘Sor Loreta’s Jackals’.

  Sor Sofia was frightened of Sor Narcisa and Sor Arabel. I saw it in her face and her little white hands that trembled whenever those two sisters were near.

  Minguillo Fasan

  The Sentimental Reader gives a chilly response to exits hastily stage-managed, without proper goodbyes. So let us usher Marcella off to the garden paradise of San Servolo with a touching little scene.

  I went in to have one last look at my sister, who sat in her faded muslin morning dress with the everlasting white paper spread out luminous on her lap. But she had drawn nothing, and stared blankly ahead.

  As usual, she started on seeing me, and lowered her eyes and then raised them to the wall. She was rising sixteen, a woman, or so the maids had told me. Certainly old enough to be declared a lunatic.

  I asked her profile, ‘And what shall we do with you now, Marcella?’

  The wall remained the object of her fascination.

  Given the support of the Fatebenefratelli, it had not proved difficult or overly expensive to persuade the state surgeon to write the necessary letter ‘in nome della sovranità del popolo IL COMITATO DI SALUTE PUBBLICA . . .’

  To seal the bargain, I simply told him that in her state of badly saddened and frustrated erotomania Marcella had not only meditated upon but publicized a threat of self-destruction. That was enough. And indeed I am sure that Marcella would have wished to die, if she had known where she was going next.

  I sent the hairdresser to her late at night, when the servants were abed, with specific instructions as to how to deal with her eyebrows. I admire to idolatry the Reader who has already divined what kind of a diagram I had prepared for him.

  Part Three

  Marcella Fasan

  They came to take me in the dark hours.

  Later I would learn that admissions were usually by night and most especially by full moon. The theory was that poor souls carried across the waters would be too overawed by the sight of the moon to howl at it. The moon-mesmerized patients were landed at San Servolo, wrenched from the boat and hustled through the corridors to a bed in one of the tiny rooms off the observation corridor, where they might lie alone and absorb the facts of their new lives until cock-crow.

  My own journey to San Servolo was not so understated. It was necessary to uphold Minguillo’s declaration that I was a ‘turbolente’ and in need of stern confinement. At Minguillo’s urging, the Brothers had sent my new gaolers fully equipped to show me as mad as possible: the two men had brought with them a kind of leather muff. They entered my room in the middle of the night and flipped me expertly out of bed. Without an opportunity to wash or dress, my arms were deftly strapped into the muff, with my fingers intertwined inside. The cords were then fastened around my back, so I hugged myself.r />
  Struggling inside this equipment, I looked completely mad, of course. My sobs and screams were most convincing. Then there were my crazed eyebrows, courtesy of Minguillo’s hairdresser. The young orderlies of the Fatebenefratelli looked on me with grim determination, and when they discovered that I was not dry, with disgust. Of course, I could not know it then, but I had just demonstrated as true everything they had been told about me.

  The servants rushed down to the entrance hall in their nightshirts to protest.

  ‘What’s happened to her eyebrows?’ shrieked Anna.

  The San Servolites waved a white document headed with the stamp of the Regno d’Italia and its rampant rooster. This, I guessed, was Minguillo’s work, though my brother was nowhere to be seen that night. As if he could have slept through those shouted proceedings! My mother was also notable by her absence. It would be generous to suppose that Minguillo had drugged her supper.

  In the midst of all the servants’ wailing, Minguillo’s quack waddled from his lodging on our first floor. He added his voice to those of the men, ‘It is for the best. I have diagnosed her myself. The Conte Fasan has arranged it all.’

  At this, the household staff dissolved into tears and farewells and exhortations of gentleness to the San Servolite men. Dear Gianni pressed a coin from his own pocket into the hand of the taller man. But I am ashamed to say I almost hated Gianni in that moment when I should have been so grateful to him. The servants were too quick, I felt, to count me as one lost.

  Under the pretext of a last embrace with Anna, I whispered, ‘There are a few papers in my room. Will you take them and hide them somewhere good? And tell no one?’

  I wept silently all the way across the bacino. While we rocked and pulled through the inky water, I recalled the excited expression on Minguillo’s face at my bedchamber door earlier that evening. He must have been living this scene in happy anticipation. I felt his glad eyes from behind his own room’s curtains as the men carried me from our jetty to their boat.