The Book of Human Skin (23 page)

I could guess how Minguillo had worked upon my mother’s credulity, scraped at her vanity and poured acidulous insinuation into cavities where
it was most likely to corrode. She probably believed that Piero would have survived the duel if he had been truly innocent. And if Piero was not innocent in her eyes – then neither was I. My mother was Minguillo’s creature through and through now.

I sent another note. If she could not bring herself to see me, I begged her to call on the artist herself. ‘
Cecilia will explain, Mamma, I promise!
’

But my mother refused to be contaminated by the world that had seemingly betrayed her. Piero had been convicted of unsuitable relations not just with me but with Cecilia Cornaro herself. I could not deny it, when my mother appeared in my doorway to ask just one barbed question in a tight voice: whether the artist and the
cicisbeo
had been ‘close friends’.

My quiet ‘yes’ was enough for her. It was a trap. For Cecilia Cornaro’s florid reputation sealed Piero’s in dishonour.

‘Please, Mamma,’ I repeated, ‘if you will not go to her, then ask Cecilia to come to the Palazzo Espagnol.’

My mother shook her head silently, and gave a warning look to Anna. ‘That name shall not be uttered in this house,’ she pronounced with uncharacteristic firmness. ‘Your brother has decreed it.’

Minguillo appeared, grinning, at her side. I guessed he had been listening to the whole exchange.

‘Dear Mamma!’ he simpered, and kissed her hand. They disappeared down the corridor together.

Cecilia Cornaro, I agonized, must have heard of Piero’s death, officially described as an unusual colonial malady that had overleapt the quarantines around Venice to claim a solitary victim. Anna told me that all the servants at the Palazzo Espagnol had been subjected to the most violent and true-seeming threats from Minguillo, to ensure they did not gainsay that story.

Of course I hoped that Cecilia Cornaro would miss me, make enquiries about me; that she would come in search of me, even. When she did not, I told myself that perhaps she would not wish to lay eyes on me, because I would remind her painfully of her lost friend Piero? Perhaps, I tormented myself, she believed me somehow implicated in his death? That my family had contaminated him with some disease imported from their holdings in Peru? That I might limp back into her studio with the same sickness as my returning gift?

A sad insight asserted itself.
Better she does not know the truth. If she came here to take up my part, she would get hurt. As Anna was hurt. As Piero was hurt
.

What I did not know then was that Cecilia had already left Venice on an expedition to the Low Countries. Her departure had been abrupt, within a day of Piero’s murder. She had always boasted that she did not maintain ties of amity or gossip with Venice when she undertook one of her expeditions to foreign parts.

So she would hear nothing of what was to happen to me next.

Sor Loreta

The story of the Baby Jesus at my bare breast was spread around the convent by the impudent
criada
. For weeks afterwards, nuns passing outside my window made loud sucking sounds followed by snorts of vulgar laughter. They laughed uproariously when I entered the refectory. Sniggers followed me down all the little streets of the convent, and into the confessional and waited for me outside it. I knew it then: God’s will would not be done until all the wickedly irreverent hilarity at Santa Catalina had been put an end to.

It soon pleased the Lord to reward my suffering. As if in answer to the disrespecting nuns, He sent a new challenge for me to contend with, to prove my purity and my perfect faith.

There was one priest who turned a lecherous eye on me, notwithstanding my damaged face, my blue spectacles and my walk made ungainly by the blisters of my penances. Indeed, perhaps it was my body so deeply marked by its devotions that inspired him to try to steal Christ’s most worthy bride. This wicked priest made every effort to find me alone at my worship on the church floor, and to draw me out into unwise speech about myself, about the light nuns, about my scourging, about the death of Tupac Amaru II, but most especially about Sor Sofia.

My own pure state had given me a special gift to detect and excoriate impurity in others. As I described my pure love of Sor Sofia and the things we used to do together, the priest’s breathing quickened and he began to shift
his position on the pew. He asked eagerly, ‘So with Sor Sofia you studied and practised all the arts of how best to please your Bridegroom on your wedding night in Heaven?’

God sent a scorpion to walk across the stone flags just in front of my nose then. So I became aware of this priest’s foul intentions and the lust in his heart. I feared for my virginity. And so I refused to give him obedience, ignoring the tiny penances he set for me and choosing my own superior ones.

In the rapture of communion the next Sunday, I had a vision (behind my closed eyes) of this priest holding the Host with bloodied hands and poking a black tongue out of his mouth at the effigy of the Lord. Beside him Sor Andreola, fat and naked, writhed like a
bacchante
. The chalice that held the communion wine foamed over with green liquid.

I was jubilant. My gifts had enabled me to distinguish a false Host from a real one. Just such a miracle – of detecting a false Host – had previously befallen several saints, including Lidwina of Schiedam, Margherita of Cortona and Joan the Meatless of Norwich, who had fasted for fifteen years. So I knew myself to be especially holy, to have received this vision after just fifteen days of my most recent fast!

I started to my feet in the middle of the service and cried out: ‘Do not drink from the chalice! This man has contaminated the Host with his corrupt hands! Have you not seen how he gnashes his teeth at the mention of Our Saviour’s name?’ until I fainted away, but not before I had pointed at the priest and cried out, ‘He wished to defile me!’

I nearly forgot to mention that my actual last words were, ‘Sor Andreola! See how she dances lasciviously with the Devil!’

Afterwards an investigation was made and it was discovered that this priest had in fact lured many young girls of his parish into sin, and he was dismissed from the service of the Lord and excommunicated. I was called to an interview with two priests in the
priora
’s
oficina
. They told me that as a result of my holy vision (and the five young pregnant girls of Arequipa who confirmed its truth) the nuns’ wishes were for once to be overruled and I was to be made not just a council member but the
vicaria
, second only in power to the
priora
herself. Behind the priests, the
priora
’s eyes flashed with ungodly hatred for me and for them. I heard her growl, ‘This is madness.’

No one was laughing at me now. The faces of the other nuns were mutinous and fierce when they beheld me. For, also as a result of my vision, their favourite Sor Andreola was to be sent away to the stricter convent of Santa
Rosa, where the nuns slept in tombs to remind them of their fate. Those light nuns of Santa Catalina no longer had their silky white girl to idolatrously worship, and Sor Sofia would no longer be subject to Sor Andreola’s caresses.

My little Sor Sofia, so long kept apart from me, I ordered to come into my cell now. Even if they had known, no one would have dared to oppose me. Blushing and lowering her long lashes, Sor Sofia humbly congratulated me on my rise in estate.

And now Sor Sofia admitted that by night I levitated above my bed in my sleep like Douceline of Marseilles. And Sor Sofia agreed that she too saw my stigmata burning on my skin. She was submissive to my every wish, and I caused her to make me happy in more ways than I can write down.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

The valet Gianni from the Palazzo Espagnol saluted me sadly in the street a few months after I tended to the dying Piero Zen.

I had been outraged but not much surprised to see that the Fasans had successfully suppressed the truth about his death. I had seen enough dynastic poisoning in the great country villas. I knew how these things worked among the noble families: Napoleon might humiliate and rob them, but he would never penetrate their secret codes and their ways of intimidating their servants.

I longed to ask Gianni what had happened to the girl with the beautiful skin. I hoped that time would erase the piteous image of her murdered friend. I wondered how the childhood injury to her leg had healed, for I had not seen below her waist when my eyes met hers at the window. I wanted to say all that.

But in what way might a youth barely off the streets ask after a young noble lady in a
palazzo
? She was no longer a child. I was afraid of impertinent enquiries tumbling incontinently out of my mouth. My face fired up red. Gianni must have thought me a foolish country ass.

Although I dared not say her name aloud to Gianni, I had been thinking of her constantly, as a naturalist thinks on a new species he
has glimpsed. My mind’s doting eye hovered over her, cherished and privileged, living inside that great
palazzo
.

I muttered an incoherent greeting to Gianni and rushed off, leaving him mystified in mid-sentence. Only in retrospect did I realize that he had seemed very eager to talk to me, as if there was also something on
his
mind.

Minguillo Fasan

My enemies had grown in ranks like the hairs on an old woman’s wart.

Yet, like the hairs on an old woman’s wart, they were nothing to keep a body awake at night. The Spanish madam in Cannaregio forbade me her fleabitten girls. So? The family of Piero Zen cut me dead in the street.That was the worst they would dare.They did not want a scandal any more than I did.The servants of the Palazzo Espagnol hated me. Bless their dull little heads. My mother was utterly compliant, depending on my every direction, her maternal love quite divorced from the daughter who had betrayed her. Only the will-thief worried me, and that far less since I had concluded negotiations with the convent of Corpus Domini.

But now I was about to take on an enemy any man would have to respect: Napoleon Bonaparte himself. A little enemy, to be sure, yet in the case of Napoleon Bonaparte, a little goes a long way.

As the Retentive Reader will remember, in January 1806, Boney had annexed Venice into his new Kingdom of Italy. It was then that he really stuck his tax tooth into us, rummaging for gold to feed his troops and men to feed the cemeteries of his battlefields in Spain and Portugal.

The Perceptive Reader will easily imagine how much askance our family’s Spanish connections were regarded at that time. I was forced to come to many adroit accommodations with customers who disdained to buy our Bark of Peru, except at a ‘conscientious’ discount.The tide would turn one day: I noted their names in my records for future conscientious treatments
of my own. My prosperity was assured, however. ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’ continued to sell in vast quantities, distributed through a discreet network of hairdressers, who were, of course, much in demand, given the anxious times. Publicly, I dissociated myself from the preparation. A nobleman cannot be seen in intimate proximity with his source of pocket money.

In November 1807, Boney his great self had graced our city for a couple of weeks.We put on a tattered show for him, a
regata
or two, a stagey arch built over the Canalazzo. The little man was not much interested in the pretty stuff. Napoleon looked at Venice and saw not her caparison of romance and legend but a plate of food from which he had to flick back the frivolous garnish in order to get to the meat.

Anything that sounded like a secret was anathema to Napoleon. Small men always feel left out, I suppose, forever craning their necks to hear what the big chaps are on about.To Boney, our patrician
scuole
, which raised cash for art and charity, were a threat.Their doings smacked of clandestine meetings. The well-meaning
scuole
were dismantled, their paintings and archives carried away. Napoleon spent his time with engineers and builders. He did not soirée or fête the city’s noblest sons, like myself. I supposed that he feared our breeding and elegance would highlight his own congenital inferiority.

God was another rival that Napoleon would not tolerate. Napoleon found over a hundred churches in Venice and left half as many. (The Reader’s eyebrow twitches with disbelief? We are speaking here of a man who would soon arrest the Pope.) Dismantling our churches, even demolishing them, did not cause little Boney a moment’s reflection. But his last act in Venice was the one that caused me personally the most crucial problem. Boney began to close down the city’s convents. God knows what foments he imagined going on in
there
to his detriment. But of course, it was Napoleon’s never-ending thirst for liquid assets that truly fuelled their downfall. The cloisters were slowly stripped of every portable valuable: four hundred million francs’ worth, as it turned out.

When I say ‘valuable’, the women inside those convents were not included in the booty.They were worth nothing.Their families had paid their dowries to God, and Napoleon was now tapping on the stained-glass windows.

‘Hand it over, God,’ shrilled little Napoleon. And God knew what was good for him.

At Corpus Domini the priest turned deaf ears on me when I went to set the date for Marcella’s admission. ‘With the situation so uncertain,’ he said, ‘it would be for the best if you kept your sister safe at home a while longer.’

I riposted, ‘Then suppose you let me have the dowry back, so that it can also stay safe at home for the interval?’

The priest peered at me, ‘My son, you’re not looking well. Have you tried a remedy called “The Tears of Santa Rosa”? I’ve heard it cures troubles like your face.’

Then he jerked a cord and a curtain fell between us. By the time I had fought my way through the waxy yellow silk, he had disappeared.

Gianni delle Boccole