The Book of Human Skin (10 page)

But my diary – no,
that
I hid from everyone. For that diary I never used a book, which would have been conspicuous: just scraps of paper that could be hastily and easily concealed. My body soon became such a public place, visited by the hands of so many doctors: my thoughts, I felt, should have a little privacy somewhere.

There was always the idea in my mind that when Minguillo killed me, as he surely intended to, something of my little presence in the world might be left behind on those pages of mine, something less tenuous than my own flesh, which seemed more insubstantial than paper or glass, and seemed to tear and spill more easily.

From the start Minguillo had an uncanny ability to oppress the bodily fluid out of me. Just his step on the threshold and I was in danger of dampness. Tears, obviously. But also the other. If the urine was coming there was nothing I could do. If Minguillo was there around me, it was certainly coming. If it was coming, it came. And with it, the unbearable sympathy of the servants whisking the wet linen away.

By the time I was five, I was cut in half: there was the top part of me that was universally adored, the
perfettina
, and a part of me that my parents despaired of.

‘The bladder is not functioning well,’ my parents would say, not ‘
Marcella’s
bladder is not functioning well’. They thus avoided a familial relationship with my bladder. And from that it was a short step to not owning Marcella herself. (You see, even I begin to talk about my defective self in the third person.)

And that distance allowed them to go to war against my bladder. Cruel treatments were decreed – not on
me
, in their minds, but on the enemy, that disobedient faction, the badly behaved bladder.

My condition exercised the poetic vocabularies of the doctors. I was too high-born to be a mere incontinent. And so I was treated with violent purges for ‘spurious’ and ‘erratic’ worms in the belly. When those failed, I was dosed with dizzying alcoholic tinctures, according to the theory that my discharges were the result of ‘atrophic degeneration of the kidney due to hysteric paroxysms’.

Piero would intervene, send away the quack, empty his stinking potion out of my window into the Grand Canal. But soon another doctor would step up with his fluent promises and deep black bag.

Whatever the reigning euphemism, everything to do with the bladder became an anathema to my mother. The mention of the necessary room made her flinch. The cotton cloth used to mop up my accidents was purchased by Anna on secret excursions, and it was sent out to Cannaregio to be washed. I was suffocated by concealing perfumes at all times. Watching me drink a glass of water was my mother’s least favourite occupation. (She did not see Minguillo forcing the cups to my lips in private.) The very colour yellow was not popular in our
palazzo
.

‘It does not matter,’ murmured Piero, whispered Anna, blurted Gianni. But it did. I did not want the people I loved to be burdened by my weakness. And I was shamed by it.

And naturally shame made it worse, brought on the dangerous searing tickle at every moment Minguillo was around me, made me desperate, made my heart beat like rain, made me lose control.

Gianni delle Boccole

Anna n me, we headed Minguillo oft, when he went to her room at night under the horsepiss of saying goodnight to her. Yes, we besot to make sure she were accompany-ed wherever she goed. And when the brother was keeped way, or when he were oft huntin ducks in the lagune, why then Marcella’s little problem niver let loose, as ye mite say.

But we dint allus have the vigilince what was needed. There was bruises appeared on her arms. There were sumtimes fear in her pretty eyes.

But there were summing else too, summing brewin in Marcella’s eyes. Not jist fear. Not jist tears.

It were, mazin to tell, a little fire what burned inside her. And that fire were strong nuff to keep
other
folks warm.

I stood stonished as the years went by and little Marcella growed nothin but sweeter n stronger n more comical in her spirit. Ye know the pleasure ye get from a frizzle o perfume on warm young skin nearby ye? Or from the face ovva kitten suprized in a summersalt? It’s a little thing but it can make ye grin all day. That was what kind o pleasure Marcella Fasan give. Evryone loved her, wanted to talk to her, sit beside her, bring her daisies n pastries. And for there pains she would draw there faces for em, little sketches on the corner ovva letter or a page from a ledger, done in humble pencil yet with sich a loving spirit to em. She caught evryone at there best. There wernt a servant in the ouse who wunt rather look at Marcella’s poortret of him than his real fizzog in the mirror.

She were clever, too. She were only four when she lernt to write quicker n lightning. And then there were no stopping her writin things down. An she were quicker n lightning too, if Anna or me was caught in her room when we had no busyness to be. She would say summing pretty in a wink, what saved our skins from a raggin oft my Mistress.

When I think on what Marcella would have to do in the end, I see the root of her strength then, in that little little girl with the brother so set on hurtin her, with a body what let her down so bad sumtimes, and she so set on assolutely not bein a Poor Thing that it felt half the time as if she were takin care of
us
.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

My famous patient, Napoleon, suffered his first attack of dysuria at the Battle of Marengo in 1800. I never got quite close enough myself to make a personal diagnosis, but they say his urinary pain was a terrible thing to behold. He would lean against a tree, moaning as he tried to relieve himself of a burning liquid clotted with sediments. His men rather admired his symptoms, which seemed those of an amatory complaint. Soldiers appreciate a general who makes some feminine conquests to supplement his territorial ones. Yet there was no medical evidence to support a venereal diagnosis, and plenty to make the surgeon (or young
apprentice-surgeon with his nose in the textbooks) suspect bladder gravel.

Napoleon’s personal pain made him reckless of others’ suffering. Having so often tried to bring relief to men in agony, I knew that Napoleon’s illness would eventually waylay and rob him of intelligent decisions. The pain-wracked Napoleon was more dangerous than the one who had been but mildly afflicted. So just as the dictator’s itches had already set a million men a-scratching at each other, now each actual illness of Napoleon Bonaparte sent ten thousand healthy men to shallow battlefield graves.

By that time I was one of his employees, a member of that unthanked, scattered crew of doctors whose lives were also dismembered by Boney’s itch. My country surgeon and I were drummed into service with the Italian contingent of his army. In Egypt, Germany and the Low Countries, we saw battles fought in four languages. Blood spurted and men screamed in one universal dialect, however, as my Master, Doctor Ruggiero, often sneered, in that manner of his that so generally failed to raise the spirits of our patients.

My fingers were grooved by waxed thread, for we were dextrous tailors of human skin. My Master and I became famous amputators, jointing a man faster than gangrene could devour him in the heat of battle and stitching together the cleaved and shattered flesh in neat, swift seams. And when, for the blessed year of 1802, Napoleon briefly stopped scratching, we attended at military hospitals, where the repaired wounded eked out their shortened lives.

Sewing up torn human hide was to my Master a matter as casual as darning a sock. I could snip, patch and mend as fast as he, but I never achieved the detachment on which he prided himself. This, like so many things, annoyed him. He constantly reproached me, ‘Why waste your breath talking to them? “All shall be well”,’ he mimicked my voice cruelly. ‘I don’t think so!’

Once, when our surgical table was caught in crossfire, we took refuge underneath it, and I crawled out to drag a wounded man under its modest shelter. He would need to lose the leg, but I knew we could save his life if our own were spared. My vision suddenly collapsed to stinging red and black. I thought I had taken a bullet, but it was Ruggiero’s hand.

‘Never do that again,’ he hissed at me. ‘That’s one for the corpsewaggoner. Don’t take meat from the other fellow’s plate,’ he sniggered.

Marcella Fasan

The person I loved best to draw was Anna. She was a pretty girl, and cared a great deal about that, so I was never satirical with her likeness, not even affectionately. I saw how she coveted my portraits of her by the way she smoothed them and placed them facing inwards in the pocket of her apron, to protect them.

If only Anna had been able to protect her face from my brother!

It was not long after my fifth birthday. Piero Zen was seeing to the army’s depredations at his country estate. My father was still in Arequipa. The rest of us were gathered in the
chinoiserie
’d drawing-room that night, my mother hard at gossip with her friend the Contessa Foscarini, me sketching their intent faces, and Minguillo, as was his habit, raking the embers of the fire into angry volcanoes and tamping them down with the poker. Occasionally my mother murmured mildly, ‘Pray be careful, Minguillo, not to let the ashes fly.’

Anna lilted in with a tray of sweet wine and my favourite spiced cakes. She winked at me, as she always did, moving towards the low table near the fire. I was winking back when she tripped over the leg that Minguillo stuck out in front of her so that he might detain the cake plate entirely for himself. The tray flew out of Anna’s hand, its contents crashing against the mantelpiece.

Minguillo’s new yellow waistcoat, the one embroidered with poppies and violets, was soaked through with wine. My brother, hissing with indignation, seized the red-hot poker.

Sor Loreta

It was only when I had reached my thirty-first year that I was at last allowed to take the Holy Veil. My profession had been unfairly delayed by those who were jealous of me at Santa Catalina, who spitefully claimed that I was not in my right mind.

But for some years I had displayed only the most modest of behaviour, hiding any miracles that I performed involuntarily, and also the more obvious signs of my penances. I pretended to eat. The ruling nuns ran out of reasons to prevent my promotion.

Of course as soon as I was properly married to God, I began to look forward to when I might pass beyond this false life, to when I might render my soul up to my Celestial Spouse.

In other words, I began to look for a suitably glorious way to die.

I was impatient for my martyrdom, and I was sure that it was imminent. How could God wait to take His most loving daughter to His bosom? Each night I sprinkled my cell with Holy Water before I laid me down. I begged my Confessor to give me extreme unction each day, for I expected it to be my last. He reported this to the
priora
, who came to me with hard words.

‘Sor Loreta,’ she thundered, ‘what will you not do to get attention? I
knew
we should not have let you profess.’

I replied, ‘The Ignorant have always misunderstood and feared the Chosen. And set out to worship false idols, like Sor Andreola.’

‘Chosen!’ she barked. ‘Your jealousy of Sor Andreola and your competitive nature are the only things that mark you out.’

It was then that a miracle occurred. I began to hear with my damaged right ear. Not the vulgar yapping of the
priora
, but the lovely mingled voices of Santa Rosa and Our Lord God, both of whom assured me that I would have great and difficult tasks to perform and that I must steel myself for them, and agree to live a little longer in this ungrateful world.

‘You alone, Sor Loreta,’ God whispered tenderly, ‘must be My earthly voice at Santa Catalina. The others shall be cast into a Great Fire.’

‘How shall I serve You, Lord?’ I asked, but silently, inside my head.

Santa Rosa promised sweetly, ‘I shall tell You, child. How sorry shall Your persecutors be for their crimes against You when the Fiends of Hell lift their great clawed paws to rip out their plump bellies.’

The
priora
’s voice then broke in sharply upon my left ear, ‘You’re not listening to me, are you, Sor Loreta? I wash my hands of you.’

Santa Rosa whispered in my right ear, ‘Remember, dear Sor Loreta, that the more You mortify Your flesh, the more beautiful shall You be for Your Bridegroom.’

Back in the Old World, Napoleon had fallen on the Holy Mother Church like a wolf on the fold. A terrible story came to us, that all good Christians will read with horror, of a cathedral in Bavaria that was sold to a butcher! That night I dreamed of the knives laid out on the altar, legs of ham hung from the rafters, the drooping rabbits, heavy with shot, tied in bunches from the columns. I awoke, trembling, my nose twitching with the smell of the herbed garlic sausages I had seen smoking in the Bavarian confessionals. Of course, it was only the slaves of Santa Catalina cooking luxurious breakfasts. But for a moment it seemed to me that the stink of Napoleon’s sins had floated over the oceans all the way to us.

I kissed the chains that morning before I employed them to beautify my body, and I paid particular attention to my face.

Gianni delle Boccole

Poor Anna, what had been so andsome, found it hard to bare the great red weal that runned from her forrid to her lip all long the left side. I allus told her that no one notist it, but that were a lie. It were ever after the
only
thing most folks notist bout Anna, that pink shiny ribbon down her fizzog.

Marcella’s scar were tinier, jist a burn-mark on her rist from where she ud tried to pull the red-hot poker outa her brother’s hand when Minguillo were already bringin it down fizzlin on Anna’s face. Marcella had een took a bite out o his thumb to try on make him stop. But he jist flunged his little sister cross the room and got on with his busyness. Then he stormt out, shoutin for a new wainscot to replace the loorid thing stained with the wine Anna had dropt on him.