‘Women!’ I told him at the tavern. ‘They turn ye oer.’
Tis true, there is times when women is the devil, een when ye love em to affinity. Josefa ud took agin me the night afore when I wunt swallow a ginny pig did up in its own gore what she had cooked speshal for me. Eyes, nose, little whiskers still there, dripping on the plate, breaking yer heart. Would ye put sich a thing in your mouth, I ask ye?
I threated her with Anna’s squid in black ink back in Venice, and all ovva suddenly poor Anna’s painted as my fancywoman – long with evry thing else that daggled a pettycote in Venice. I kickt myself for it, but I een ust Anna’s scar to hexplain why there wernt niver nothing romantical atwixt us. But Josefa were in an umbrage and wunt listen. Then she set to wondering what got into her eyes and blinded her the night she agreed to be with me.
‘Imbécil!’ she shouted. I wernt sure if she were reefering to herself or me. I dint know if she had any love hid inside her beautiful chest for me still. All my sartinties slipt way, like I were falling through the branches of a big tree. Till that hour I haint een bethought on the so many years atwixt our ages, for they ud melted away in the throws o pashon as ye mite say. But now I felt two seprit pains – one, that I ud waited too long for love, like a cacca fruit what drops n splodes on the forist floor the very moment tis perfeck ripe. And second, that for all my forty year, and my heducation and my travails round the world, I were still not wise nuff to catch the preshous fruit safe in my hands.
Amish Gillyfether’s big craggy face were full o pain too. ‘If you let them, Gianni, women will turn your life right way up or upside down.’
‘To the laydies!’ I razed my glass, full of oirony and pisco, the local drink to which I had took quite a pleasant fancy. ‘And to Minguillo Fasan bein tuckt up by a spade!’
Amish were fond of a Chinese proverbial, and he give me one then. He sighed, ‘Do not beat a drowning dog, not for the sake of the dog, but for the sake of the soul of the beater.’
Marcella Fasan
At last, when it seemed too late, I was doing as Cecilia Cornaro had bid me. I was trying to understand why Minguillo hated me, why he had tried to strip me from myself. The will – which he must have known about all along – did not explain it all.
Now I forced myself to think back. What I found was this: no one had ever liked or loved Minguillo, not his parents, not his wife, not his daughters, not his servants. He was therefore not constrained to avoid hurting or disappointing or shocking anyone.
It is deforming to the soul to be the object of odium. Perhaps it disinfects the sense of good or bad? I remembered the hollow, hateful misery in my ribs when I used to sit at the most obscure part of the table, shunned by my family. Santo remembered the nuns who had raised him with whips, and sharper still, slighting looks and cutting words.
Gianni was in a raw mood, for he and Josefa had just proved their love by a first quarrel. Blackly, he insisted that Minguillo was always ‘rotting’, even as an infant.
‘Was he treated badly?’ I asked Gianni. ‘Were my parents cruel?’
‘They jist wanted to keep out of his way, like any sensible folk isn’t it,’ replied Gianni. ‘Where is your thoughts going, Marcella? Ye cannot be repining for him. He never wanted you safe, nor happy, nor well, nor even alive. He’s been a-murderin ye for years.’
Gianni hoped to kindly bluster me out of what he called my ‘Stew of Despond’. He could not. Minguillo had fixed himself at the core of all my thoughts. This was perhaps his last evil act against me: he had succeeded in one cruelty he never managed before: to make me hate myself.
For I could not forget my childish desire to have him dead.
All those years, I’d repeated stoutly to myself, ‘There is only one just penalty for Minguillo’s crimes: his putting-to-death.’
I had fervently wished it. I had been coolly ‘a-murderin’ Minguillo in my mind for years. I had infected Santo with the same desire. And Cecilia. And Hamish. And now, while I did not wish to be the actual authoress of my brother’s death, nor did I in truth wish him to continue blighting this world with his existence. I would have to learn to live with this knowledge about myself.
Hamish came to see me, his eyes full of leaving. I waved to Arce waiting below with the buggy to take him to Islay and the coast.
I hugged Hamish hard and long, telling him, ‘And Cecilia loves you too. I am sure of it.’
‘I am going to her now, to find out,’ he said.
Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
Typically, Minguillo thought himself recovering, when really he was still failing. He had advanced to the cosmetic treatments well before his pustules ceased seeping, thereby infecting them anew. He drank copious quantities of brandy and smoked cigars to hide his own stink from himself. His lungs collapsed under such a barrage of cruelty.
The samba told Josefa that his arms wore flour-cream paste like gloves up to his elbows, except where the finger-parts were cut off.
‘Looks like monstruo,’ Josefa reported, ‘like somefing borned wrong.’
On his chest he insisted on keeping the book of human skin that Cecilia Cornaro had sent him.
Josefa said, ‘The surgeon after him to burn he book, he hats, he clothes, for he must of bringed the Small-Pox to Arequipa with. He refuse, however. Imbécil!’
At the word ‘imbécil’, she threw an imploring look at Gianni, and received a melting one in return.
Ah, I thought, soon healed. Already Gianni and Josefa can no more live without one another than can Marcella and myself. I made a note to include in my book a paragraph about the perdurability of love even when its skin is scribbled over with angry scars.
There came a knocking at the door. It was Minguillo’s surgeon, Sardon. He desired to consult the great Italian doctor about his unruly patient. I had expected and dreaded this summons.
I helped Sardon save himself. I suggested that sea air would be beneficial for his patient. In fact, what I implied was that, as death was probably imminent, it would be better for the surgeon himself if Minguillo were out of Arequipa and upon the ocean when it happened. Then the death could not be blamed on his doctor. In fact, the very absence of his doctor might be seen to have caused the death, which would give the surgeon’s reputation a fillip among the credulous Arequipans. Sardon gave me an anxious, knowing frown, and rushed away.
So Minguillo was carried on a stretcher to the coast. The cool, fresh air of the mountains seems to have been his salvation. By the time he was at Islay, he was sitting upright. A brig was leaving for Valparaiso the same afternoon. Minguillo walked aboard on his own two feet, hooking his remaining fingers over the ropes above the plank.
Sardon had accompanied Minguillo to Islay, and indeed escorted his patient all the way to the ship, not from affectionate concern, but because he feared losing his fee that showed no sign of being paid. Finally he had to bargain for his wages, using as his currency some information I had provided. For I had asked Surgeon Sardon to convey the probable provenance of his disease to his patient. I was afraid that Cecilia Cornaro’s book of human skin would infect others in the close confines of shipboard life. My dream of revenge had already created too much reality.
Surgeon Sardon told me afterwards that Minguillo had listened, pulled the book from his pocket, and cried out, ‘Cecilia Cornaro!’
And he muttered, ‘So they’re all like me, after all.’
Then he threw the book into the sea, shouting, ‘I too am cured. Like leather!’
Marcella Fasan
Minguillo was right. Like the men and women who gave their skins to cover his beloved, hateful books, we are all cured but in a different way. I am cured of being a Poor Thing with a Defiant Thing secretly festering beneath her skin. And I am cured of hiding pain inside me, when others, who love me, take it as a gift to help me.
Santo is cured of being an orphan, and of despising people just because they are noble or rich. Gianni is cured of being a secret thief. The torments of prevarication and
self-hatred have all been flushed out of him too, with the triumphant revelation of the will. Fernando and Beatriz are cured of being a second and a secret family. Josefa is cured of being a slave.
Minguillo, however, was wrong about one thing. He is not cured of being Minguillo. He is just less capable of being Minguillo than before. And his unwitting accomplice, Sor Loreta – she is not cured either. She has the fanatic’s impermeability: she will never change, not in this life, anyway.
We have sent letters to Hamish and Cecilia, assuming they are together, to tell them that like us they are cured of blood-guilt: Minguillo has survived.
And now we speak to Josefa only the Italian tongue and we are teaching her Venetian as fast as she can absorb it, which is very fast indeed. For the quarrel between her and Gianni has been cured with kisses, and soon she will be on the boat with us to Venice, where she will reign like Nature’s royalty that she is. Anna and the other servants will make her welcome. And I smile to think of my mother’s hairdresser confronted with those magnificent black curls. That smile weakens a little at the thought of my mother, and with what little enthusiasm she will greet her returned daughter. But I have ambitions in her regard. I wish to take her into our affection, and to let her be my mother, as she used to be in those days when I was a child, when Minguillo stayed away in Valparaiso and we shared an idyllic summer with Piero Zen.
We shall not need to live as exiles in Cecilia’s house, after all. The Palazzo Espagnol awaits us. Amalia’s mother, the Contessa Foscarini, has relented. Amalia has fled the place where Minguillo tormented her and gone to live in an apartment of her parents’ vast home. She has taken an assistant husband, by coincidence a member of the Zen family. I wish her well. Her mother, the Contessa Foscarini, did not permit her to take Minguillo’s daughters with her. I hope that she will allow us to raise them as our own, and that it is not too late to give them a childhood. My greatest fear is that Minguillo will summon the poor little creatures to him in Valparaiso, and maim their lives for ever.
Fernando and Santo have become brothers in every sense. They feed each other information, like two little boys trying to piece the world together. Fernando’s knowledge of the human foot is more detailed than any doctor’s. He has decided to establish a small hospital, giving free treatment to the poor Indians of Arequipa. He will make shoes that correct limps caused by rickets, mine accidents and birth deformities. Meanwhile, Santo has imparted to him every bit of knowledge about skin conditions that affect the human foot and legs, from the little growths that creep up between the toes, to rashes that signify a more serious malady.
And Beatriz too has her part to contribute: she now visits the poor of the city, among whom she dwelled for so many months. In her fine yet simple clothes, she goes not as Lady Bountiful, but as a friend. Perhaps she happens to leave a basket of food by the door in the poorest houses, or a good dress of the exact right size where a young woman despairs of finding a husband. Women and men of every hue, from limpieza completa de sangre to the darkest negro, are welcome in the Casa Fasan. I wonder what my father would have made of it? I like to believe he would have thought well of his house full of Arequipan laughter and smiles. After all, he came to Arequipa and made a son here.
And I? Well, I hardly dare say it yet.
But one thing is certain: when we are back in Venice I shall gather all my secret, scattered selves – the pages kept by my dear Anna, by Padre Portalupi and those dusty heaps behind the armoire in Minguillo’s room. And I shall put them all together so that Santo can one day read the undivided truth. Even the thought of that cleans my feelings, like a confession.
Why are we all doing our best to become angels? It is perhaps because we shall always have something shadowy in our consciences, even though Minguillo has lived, well, partially lived.
Sor Loreta
I overheard the light nuns gossiping outside the grain store. And so I learned how the wicked brother of Sor Constanza has been afflicted with both the gangrene and the Small-Pox. He has been sent out to sea to die. It is God’s design that Minguillo Fasan does poorly, for he sent his sister the Venetian Cripple to destroy all My great works at Santa Catalina.
It is known that many devout people live wretched and lonely lives in this world while, in contrast, evil villains enjoy much honour and great comforts. Yet sometimes the situation is reversed and the true Daughter of God trumps Her enemies.
Therefore, any good Christian who reads this document should know that I, Doña Isabel Rosa López de Tapia, known as Sor Loreta, swear by the holy cross that all that is written here is true, for I saw it and it happened to Me, and I write it, albeit in colourless white spirit-of-vinegar, to the honour and glory of My Lord Jesus Christ.
Outside My cell, which abuts the street, I hear the Indians talking. They speak of bad things, of revolution and bloodshed and of throwing off the Holy Mother Church for ever. I am glad that I shall be martyred before this happens. The pain of My death will exceed even the torment planned for herself by Margherita of Cortona. That saint’s Confessor prevented her from cutting off her nose and lips at the last minute, but I shall not quail in My purpose.
In preparation, I broke My blue spectacles and used the shards to sharpen two twigs that God left for Me on the window ledge of My prison, by the agency of an innocent sparrow. I have used pieces of blue glass to line the hardwood plank that serves as My sleeping place, for thus did Santa Rosa lie in a bed of excruciation in the last weeks of her life. I have unpicked some threads from the flour sack to which I am tied. I have all the tools I need. The priora will suffer the most exquisite torments when she discovers that I have followed to the letter the cruel instructions she once gave Me, and shall die of them.
Meanwhile, I have purified this dirty room by breathing in it. I am now more Spirit than Flesh. It is so long since I have eaten that I have ceased to have bodily functions at all. As I approach the longed-for flowery bed of My Sweet Spouse, My Virgin body, weightless and incorruptible like that of Teresa of Avila, gives off a scent of lilies. This is God’s seal of approval on My spiritual and moral perfection – He allows even Me to smell the beautiful blooms of My glorious Eternity in anticipation. I have a sense that I am hovering above the ground, ready for My flight into His Arms. There shall be no agony of death for Me, nor the flames of Purgatory. I shall fly direct to His Embrace. And those poor sinners left behind Me on earth will one day travel leagues to venerate My cradle and My grave.
These quiet days, when no one comes to see Me, My head is full of memories of the death of Tupac Amaru II, all those years ago in Cuzco when I was a child.
Gianni delle Boccole
Josefa loves me agin, Sweet God! I finely talkt my way back into the middle o her heart, after dying days on the outside edge of it.
Twere Venice that done it, all my tales o the lacy stone palaces n the emerald-green canals bestrid by bridges, and the slender gondolas flying greaseful oer the waves. Perhap I were carried too high on the wings o poitry, for she wanted to know when was the breeding season for the gondolas and how many eggs they layed.
Arequipa is a fine place, swear tis a vegetable paradise in many ways. I wunt say it haint growed on me. Jist to breathe here gives a hunnerd pleasures – the air in Peru pisses on the air in Venice for purity!
But tis also true I can hardly wait to get back home. Jist telling Josefa bout Venice made a homesick hole in my heart. I think of sittin with Josefa n Anna in the window seat o the kitchen, watching the days shortening and the old Canalazzo growing vilet n green in the evening shadow. I want to sleep in my own bed with Josefa in my arms. I help her pack the trunks, and re-joys each time we seal one shut. Santo has gathered many good Peruvian erbs, specially the chinchona bark, to help people in Venice. No more ‘Tears of Santa Rosa’ to rut there guts!
Anyway, Marcella n Santo is expectin, and there child must be borned in Venice, must it not? The Palazzo Espagnol needs a son. The old one wunt be coming back. It haint nuff to be dispossest
o the Devil. Ye need to put summing good in the hole what Beelzebub left for to make good the damidge. And far as I can see tis jam on both sides, for my Josefa will be the key to the turning out o all the tapeworm hants n huncles n nevvies n kneeses what has been a-parasitin on the rooms o the poor old ouse for sentries past. They couldn’t stomach to share a roof with a black girl – they dunt give nothing to the world, but they still thinks they is above it. Josefa will be the powful emetic to flush out the festering – and then, slowly by slowly, we can bring the Palazzo Espagnol to rights agin.
First thing we’ll do is pull apart Minguillo’s study and bedchamber too, and raise their insides to the ground. Their paper n traps have breathed his bad air all these years. Marcella has told us that ahind the wardrobe in his bedchamber are her diries n drawings that allus so mistificatingly dispeared. How clever she were! All them years I hunted the will of Fernando Fasan, and I niver bethought of anything so smart as that!
Meanwhiles I have told Marcella n Santo evrything bout Minguillo’s own direy and bout the dozens on dozens of orrid n orrible books of humane leather that Minguillo collected with her himbezzled inhairitance and finely put up in the tower. I hoped twould help there poor sore consciences to know of that high corner o Hell in our home, for in what wise did Minguillo deserve to live, in the light of that? They was both quite feint with shock when they heared the numbers o books and the kinds o titles and there skins.
When he could talk agin, Santo spoke ovva Greek satire called Marsy-ass who set himself up as better n a god. That satire were punisht by havin the skin flayed oft his body. ‘I was writing of it only today,’ Santo whispered, ‘in my own book.’
‘Well, Minguillo set himself up as better than God,’ I sayed stornshly, ‘and so he has got himself riotously skinned for it.’
The Book of Human Skin Page 49