‘But what of the books?’ Marcella asked quietly.
Santo had a solushon, o course. He tookt my shoulder and sayed, ‘Gianni, we shall take them to church, each member of the household carrying a book in his or her arms, gently and kindly. And we shall have a mass said for their mutilated bodies, and set their souls free. And then we shall take the books to the new cemetery island that Napoleon made at San Michele, and we shall bury each book decently in the earth.’
Marcella lookt at him with pride n love, and he give her then the most oxorious kissing that can be had in the Old World or the New.
Minguillo Fasan
So they have finished me off.The phlegm’s ruttling in my pipes like waves shivering over stones and I’ll ever after be cursed with vegetarian whores who’ll not eat my meat at any price because of my Small-Pox pits and missing digits. I am the flayed man of whom nothing remains but a wound all over.
And I’ll never more see my Palazzo Espagnol – that I can also put on their account. How could I expose my fingerless, fortuneless self to the ridicule of the Venetians?
Valparaiso is my home now.
The loss of my fingers was actually perpetrated by the artist Cecilia Cornaro. I can almost respect your woman for the symmetry of her revenge. The portrait painter has painted my face irretrievably pitted, and more. I had burned her art and disfigured her own hand, as the Retentive Reader will remember.An eye for an eye, or rather eight fingers for two fingers, though perhaps, the surgeon tells me, it may not stop there. For today there’s a blackening at the base of my one remaining thumb.Without it, how shall I address my perpetual itches? My new itches and the old itches of a man who has lived his skin to its limit.The brute batterings of the stubs of my arms shall not suffice for relief.And as for turning pages of beloved books, I shall be resorting to tongue and teeth.
I’m told, as the Reader has no doubt heard, that Cecilia Cornaro acted alone.
Does the Reader think me simple?
Who taught the artist the art of epistolary murder by Small-Pox scab?
Who taught him the Spanish that got him to Arequipa?
Who made sure that the book reached my very hands?
And who had hoarded and finally dragged into the light the will that has now wrenched my adored Palazzo Espagnol out of my bedraggled grasp?
And in whose name did all the foregoing company conduct their outrages upon me?
Once, many chapters back, I totted up the list of my enemies and lamented the weak showing. I do so again, with the same dismal result augmented only in numbers – a female artist, a Scottish trader in little frilly nothings, a Spanish madam who, I now discover, had supplementary skills in language instruction.A valet who stole wills. Not very impressive, is it? Yet they somehow contrived to pitch their petty little hatreds and their small talents together, in order to bring down the Colossus.
It eats inches out of my heart by the hour – that if my enemies are shamefully pathetic, my downfall’s also freighted with the dead weight of allies distinguished only by their incompetence. The ugly vicaria planned to do me the unconscious favour of killing my sister, and yet her fanatical stupidity left her exposed. Now she is shut up for murder.They say that in her cell they found hidden the heart and tongue of two different bishops, stolen from the convent’s treasury, among piles of damp empty paper that she claimed was ‘The Life of a Great Saint penned by a Forthcoming Angel’. And that when she was confronted with her theft, she crucified her own tongue with two twigs tied by pieces of cotton unpicked from a flour sack.
The Spanish madam in Cannaregio has been to the magistrates with tales repeated by whores with whom I passed delirious minutes many years ago. I totally repudiate all charges against me in the matter of Riva Fasan, Conte Piero Zen of facetious memory and even my wife Amalia, who remains stubbornly alive. (Yesterday evening I received a missive from Venice requesting my attendance to answer charges on those matters, as well as the kidnap and false incarceration of my sister. Never has Valparaiso looked so beautiful as this morning.)
My own fat quack, who should have been making me rich in Venice – doubly important now that the old will has been dragged into the light – has spilled the secret of the formula for ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’, staking it in a card game, his fatal weakness. Now he too languishes in prison in Venice – and worse, he’s gone down with my reputation firmly nailed to his concoction. That ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ contains not the weeping of nuns but instead deadly acetate of white lead is a fact known universally now and likely to stay fresh in the public’s memory for some time. My quack’s alembic and our bottles have been pitched into the Grand Canal by servants preparing the Palazzo Espagnol for its returning mistress and her circus retinue. My wife’s already deserted. My mother and my daughters shall probably die of shock, which would be convenient, as they would be a sorry drain on my depleted purse just now. More likely, they shall be put out on the street.
For now I am actually, literally, miserably poor, exsanguinated by greedy booksellers, all blood-feeders on what’s left of my fortune. My post consists only of letters from creditors wishing to draw attention to enclosed accounts which have no doubt escaped my attention, and who shall be glad if I can favour them with settlement at my earliest convenience and oblige etcetera and so forth.
Yet how my desires effloresce even as my prospects congeal!
My heart is ripped when I think on all the items I can no longer afford, particularly the latest English novelty, Frankenstein, written by the woman of the English poet Shelley. She is called Mary. One of her mother’s books, some nonsense about the rights of ladies, is already in my collection bound in a bit of a lady. How apposite that the strident bluestocking’s own flesh should join her there on my bookshelf! From what I hear, this Frankenstein, about an evil creature brought to life from a corpse, cries out to be covered in human skin and added to my collection – and what will happen to that when Marcella returns, and the little doctor Santo takes possession of my library? At least Tupac Amaru, my first and best beloved, lives with me in this exile, which is for him, of course, a kind of homecoming.
I won’t embarrass myself by thanking the Reader now for His continued attendance. We both know that I am better than that. Yet I have one last morsel for Him to chew on before I close.
I invite the Reader to place His face within the glimpse of a mirror. I challenge Him now: Tell me that you did not love what I wrote.
‘Gentle Reader . . .’ coaxes the lady novelist, flatteringly. My Reader’s interest was not fattened and flavoured on milky pap like that! Do you see any Gentle Readers around here? Your actual Gentle Reader would have thrown down my words in disgust in the early minutes of perusal.
When you started to read this tale, you took into your home a cur dog from the street, enjoying his fangs bared, riding on his power when he made little girls cry just to look at him.You pretended you were shocked by me. You loved to be shocked and you craved more. Do not tell me you did not flick through the pages, eager to be revolted.And do not tell me that I failed to provide a vividness to console you for the pale commonplace of your own real life.
Did I not take you, as promised, on a long walk in the dark, and did you not choose me as your guide, by reading on? Is not the act of reading a congress as intimate as any carried on between lovers: with only these two parties, the Reader and the Writer, behind the closed doors of the binding, alone and raptly conjoined? You must own how deeply I burrowed my way into your affections with my picturesque atrocities, because you were first entertained by them, and then embraced them.
And so, Dear Reader, my crimes became yours.
The Reprobate Reader would like some conclusive remarks, I am sure, and I make haste to satisfy Him.
I would quote from the wise, that is, from the Venetians who once had wit enough to manufacture such sayings: Dio ha mandà l’om per castigar l’om.
God created man to shame man.
This is all I designed to say in t
his tale. Shall we now declare a truce in this war of compliments?
What? What’s that? The Reader has more questions? That’s fighting talk!
The Reader has but to wait.The previous issue of this book having been so rapidly exhausted, the author wishes to inform the Nobility, Gentry and Public generally that he is now at work on a new edition, all revisions calculated to enhance its value and utility. Early each morning, before the scorpions are stirring, I scratch out a little more of the tale.
I know this information is going to be uncomfortable for you.
Historical Notes
The Fasan family and other characters
The noble Fasan family of Venice is this author’s invention, as much as Minguillo’s use of the title ‘Conte’, not infrequently assumed on spurious grounds by Italian patricians.
A purely Venetian family would not have been allowed to own silver mines in Peru, as Spanish colonial trade policies were notably restrictive. But I have taken the liberty of presuming that the Spanish blood of my Fasan family would have facilitated trade in Peru, even if through local factores, or agents. Peru was a rich source of silver, particularly from the mines of Potosí, where the precious metal was first discovered as far back as 1547. However, by the eighteenth century Mexico was proving even more productive.
The invented characters: Gianni, Cristina, Anna, Amalia, Santo, Piero Zen, Marcella, Minguillo, Donata and Fernando Fasan, Hamish Gilfeather, Beatriz Villafuerte and her son, Sor Loreta, Rafaela, Josefa and the other servants and slaves of Santa Catalina. However, the names of the sisters recited by Sor Loreta (when she dismisses them from Marcella’s cell) are those of nuns who really were at the convent of Santa Catalina in this period. For these beautiful names, I am indebted to the Arequipan historian Dante Zegarra.
Cecilia Cornaro has appeared in two previous novels of mine, Carnevale and The Remedy. In this one, she is true to her invented life: a feisty painter of portraits who endured a painful love affair with Lord Byron after a joyous one with Casanova.
Padre Portalupi and the Rossini-loving priora were real people, though their actual words are invented. A Pío Tristán really was one of the richest and most influential citizens of Arequipa during the time when this novel is set. The unfortunate Bishop Chávez de la Rosa was also a real historical character, as was his successor. M. Dominga Somocursio’s name appears above the cell I chose for Marcella but her biography is invented.
One Matteo Casal did indeed attempt to crucify himself in Venice in the early 1800s.
Venetian curiosities
The Palazzo Espagnol does not exist, under that name at least. There is an exquisite little Palazzo Contarini-Fasan on the Grand Canal opposite the church of Santa Maria della Salute. The Palazzo Contarini Corfù has a tower rather like the one described in this book and rambles in rather the same way as the Palazzo Espagnol.
The Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo was commissioned in 1740 to paint Santa Catalina of Siena and Santa Rosa of Lima, together with Sant’ Agnese of Montepulciano, at the church of Santa Maria del Rosario (known as ‘Gesuati’) on the Zattere, finishing the work in 1748. In the painting, the three saints are shown worshipping the baby Jesus as the Virgin Mary appears to them.
Nuns and convents
It is true that many of Venice’s nuns were forced into convents against their will, installed there for the sake of financial expediency (a nun’s dowry was a fraction of what was required for a noble match). Not surprisingly, these unwilling nuns were sometimes inclined to licentious behaviour. The walls of some Venetian convents were notoriously permeable for nuns who wished to conduct romances. Sor Loreta correctly cites the case of the abate Galogero, who was dismissed from the convent of Santa Chiara in 1758 for issuing the nuns with duplicate keys to the gate.
Not all nuns were unwilling. Marriage to a mortal man at the time of this story could turn even a noblewoman into a kind of serf. Some women genuinely preferred to take the veil than subject themselves to the domination of a husband. Parents, particularly in the more dangerous outposts of the Catholic world, might sincerely believe the convent to be a safe repository for daughters spinstered by a scarcity of suitable men. And some women, of course, entered convents with a true vocation; some even with a religious fervour.
The Nun, a remarkable novella by Denis Diderot (1713–84), tells the story of Suzanne Simonin, a strong-minded girl forcibly incarcerated in a series of convents and subjected to sadistic treatment and sexual abuse.
Suzanne is trampled by the other nuns as they come out of church – just as Sor Loreta craves to be at the end of this book.
The Nun was typical of a body of literature that captured the public’s imagination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sensationalizing the cruelty of powerful clerics and the essential unhealthiness of one-sex confinement. Diderot’s book, published in 1796, is a searing indictment not of the Catholic religion – for Suzanne remains devout throughout – but of the system of confining women in segregated communities where power was easily corrupted and the weak and innocent were especially vulnerable. Suzanne asserts: ‘It is a certain fact, Sir, that out of every hundred nuns who die before fifty there are exactly a hundred damned, and that taking no account of the ones who in the meantime lose their reason, get feeble-minded or go raving mad.’
What happened to the nuns when Napoleon disbanded the convents of Europe
In the early stages of the French Revolution, it became fashionable to think of nuns as the victims of oppression. Later, the nuns and monks were regarded with suspicion as forces of conservatism and potential royalists.
For information about the demonization and executions of nuns in France I am indebted to Mita Choudhury’s excellent book Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (2004).
There were at least several thousand nuns in Venice by the time Napoleon began to disband the city’s convents in 1806. Records show that dowries totalling three million ducats had been paid into the Venetian convents during the second half of the eighteenth century alone.
That bounty was probably not far from Napoleon’s mind when he went to war against Venice’s religious institutions. By 1810 he had closed thirty-two of the forty parish churches, closely followed by the convents and monasteries, confiscating their buildings and turning them into barracks, hospitals, warehouses and museums. Some churches and convents were pulled down. Many more had their fates sealed by Napoleon, for the abandoned ecclesiastical edifices soon degraded into an irreparable state, and were later demolished. The Austrians continued with the process of militarizing the lagoon’s religious architecture or letting it rot away. It was only in 1965, when the Italian army finally gave up its hold on the lagoon islands, that it was possible to see what a tragic and far-reaching disaster Napoleon had visited on the built environment of Venice.
Venice’s written and painted history suffered too. Both the archives and the great art treasures of the churches and convents had been emptied into state galleries like the Accademia, into damp warehouses and wrecked churches, or carried off to Paris. Many items never returned, or were damaged beyond repair by careless storage.
As this story records, the convent of the Penitential Sisters of Saint Dominic in Venice (known as Corpus Domini) was closed in 1810 on the orders of Napoleon and demolished not long afterwards.
What happened to the thousands of nuns evicted when Napoleon closed the convents is a mystery that has never been properly investigated. The scholar Silvia Evangelisti, author of Nuns, A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 (2007), suggests that they were returned to their families, some with and some without pensions. In other places nuns were allowed to live in the convents until they died – if those convent buildings escaped the pickaxes of Napoleon’s demolition teams. The convents were then renamed ‘conservatori’. There are accounts of parents hiring a building so the nuns could live in secular communities almost identical to their former religious ones.
W
hen researching this book I wondered if many of the unwanted noble nuns might have ended up as ‘dozzinanti’, noble paid-for guests on San Servolo. But when I examined the admission records of the asylum during Napoleonic times, it appeared that very few of the nuns were sent there.
Napoleon’s health
Santo’s observations are based on the dictator’s actual medical records. I found immensely useful for my research the following books: Napoleon Bonaparte’s own (or at least attributed) Manuscript of St Helena (written in 1817), translated from the French by Willard Parker (1924); Arno Karlen’s Napoleon’s Glands and Other Ventures in Biohistory (1984); David J. Markham’s Napoleon and Doctor Verling on St Helena (2005); and George B. McClellan’s Venice and Bonaparte (1931).
Napoleon died on May 5th 1821 on the South Atlantic island of St Helena, where he had been sent into perpetual exile by the British. Many colourful theories about the cause of his death have been promoted by different historians – notably one about wallpaper poisoned with arsenic – but it is now generally agreed that he died of stomach cancer, as his father had done before him.
San Servolo and the Archipelago of Maladies
The Archipelago of Maladies was as described by Minguillo and Santo.
San Servolo was in 1714 a military hospital for ‘reduci’ (amputees). It was run by the Fatebenefratelli, originally from Portugal. In 1804 the island became the city’s insane asylum for both male and female patients. The female lunatics were moved to the Ospedale Civile in 1834 and to the nearby island of San Clemente in 1873.
L’archivio della follia, edited by M. Galzigna and H. Terzian (1980), examines the rich archive of documents including ‘cartelle cliniche’ of patients at San Servolo, and provides excellent background to the practices and people on San Servolo. The museum of asylum artefacts, which opened in 2006, was also very helpful in my research.
The Book of Human Skin Page 50