The Book of Human Skin (32 page)

Then she spoke slowly and clearly, as if to someone deaf. ‘Sor Sofia is not dead, do you hear? The other nuns – and the poor child herself – find it sinister that you carry on so. This stupid hysterical ploy will not work, Sor Loreta. Cease this ostentatious fasting and live like a humble nun. That is all you are, don’t you understand? Humility of heart is what Jesus showed and asked.’

She cried out in a frustrated way, ‘You have lived in God’s beautiful house for three decades without absorbing any of His insight. Your soul has not developed; even your fanatical acts are tediously repetitive. Stop these exaggerated virtuosities, these pretended prodigies! If you want to attract attention with a novelty, then you should crucify your tongue instead of subjecting us all to its pompous rants!’

At this blasphemy she stopped herself short, looking ashamed. ‘For that last, I apologize profoundly. You made me lose control of myself, Sor Loreta. That was my weakness. I shall go to confess directly. Nevertheless, you have been warned. One more offence and I promise you that I shall have you stripped of the title of
vicaria
. I hate to bring them into convent affairs, but even the Holy Fathers, who elevated you beyond your capacity, will see sense if I explain to them this persecution of poor Sor Sofia. So you might as well eat. Otherwise, you will die a ridiculous, and, I promise you,
obscure
death.’

It came to me then, the bitter realization, that only in the powerful position of
vicaria
could I save Sor Sofia’s soul: I could not do so as a despised humble nun without worldly position. So though my heart longed to see my body dead, I forced myself to give up my vigil, keep down a little stale and mouldy bread, and return to the world.

Marcella Fasan

How many lunatics’ tales does one read from their own pens? Their stories are missing, like their persons. Mad people are excluded from society. Others become the custodians of their stories. Those custodians name their conditions, as a writer names his characters.

I did not fit tidily into any of the normal categories,
frenosi pellagrosa, melanconia con stupore, monomania impulsiva, temperamento pazzesco, melanconia semplice, frenosi alcolica
. I was neither a living skeleton, nor grossly fat nor cauliflower-eared. And yet I would pass two years among other souls whose stories were in custody. I shared their table, their bread, their purges. By day I lived with the lunatics, and as one of them. Only at night did I withdraw to my privileged private room, where I resumed my habits of autobiography and sketching, having found a convenient niche behind my chimney breast in which to hide my paper.

Being a
dozzinante
, I was not required to work, but I went daily to the printing workshop and learned the science of etching. My colleagues knew nothing of my noble blood, and cared yet less. They were pleased with my nimble fingers and, when I showed that I knew colour, then they let me tint etchings for special editions by hand.

Once I was set to cutting an etching of a portrait made by Cecilia Cornaro. On that day I broke down in tears and was subjected to a rare forced bath, Padre Portalupi being away and unable to save me from his zealous colleagues.

Clearly, my brother hoped that by living with lunatics I would become one of their number. He thought that their taint would envelop me, and that I would breathe in their ravings and expel them through my own mouth eventually. And he knew, as I did, that the more time I passed at San Servolo, the more others would come to accept that I was mad.

At first I struggled to be my sane self. But it was so achingly lonely to hold myself aloof from the society in which I found myself. The priests
and surgeons plainly saw me as a patient. And the patients embraced me as one of them. Those without visible deformities of their own were sorry for my mutilated leg and even bent to kiss the air near it. They threaded flowers through the wheeled chair that was sometimes used to take me round the verdant gardens. Tentative hands appeared to guide me over broken steps. The white of the bread was placed reverently on my plate.

Padre Portalupi was unfailingly kind. Only one person, apart from Piero, had ever been so gentle with me. And he – I had seen the evidence of how he had betrayed me with my sister-in-law. He had walked across my heart to get to her.

Perhaps San Servolo was the right place for me, I thought: a place for people damaged by love and life. What was I if not distorted and harmed by both?

I must revolt my hands and eyes

There was comfort to be had in acceptance, and I, increasingly, took it.

Gianni delle Boccole

Still, they wunt let us visit her. A month passed, another month. A summer. A year.

I niver stopt hoping that Marcella would show her sound brain to the doctors and that they would send her back to us at the Palazzo Espagnol.
She
were nowise the rampin mad one in the family. I bethought,
surely the doctors will see it clear
. The
Fattybenfratelli
were good men, famoused healers. They would realize they ud been sold the wrong cut o meat. Wunt they? Wunt they?

Each time I heared Minguillo tell the gondolier ‘San Servolo!’ I hoped,
Save us, this is the time he is not coming back. They will exchange him for his sister and keep him there
.

Each time he come back, Robber-God!

Ventually Minguillo deceased his visits. Insted Anna were hallowed to take Marcella some things ovva personal kind, and visit with her for a few short minutes.

Anna come back with her apron soakt in tears. She told me, ‘Marcella is a dead woman walking. There is no light behind her eyes. She does not speak.’

‘Not speak?’

‘She gives out that she is mute. Why would she do that, Gianni?’

‘She must fear that they wunt believe her if she speaks.’

‘So she could stay there for ever, and let them think she is really mad? No! She is one of them now,’ she wept. ‘To see her like that!’

But Anna were wrong: I were sartin on it. Marcella had not lossed her mind. She ud put it away somewhere for safe-keeping on San Servolo. When it were safe, Marcella would be sane agin. I were sure on it, Dear Little God.

Minguillo Fasan

Finally, I received one letter that worried me more than the rest – Portalupi told me that he feared that if she stayed too long on San Servolo, my sister might become ‘habituated’ and incapable of leaving the island to resume normal life.

‘
She must leave
,’ he wrote, ‘
lest we do more harm than good
.’

‘Habituated’ had such a good ring to it. A conclusive, excluding ring, the next best thing to the tolling of a funeral bell. In fact, the word had something of the cloister about it, with the cloister’s dulled finality.

But Padre Portalupi did not agree. ‘Habituated’ was to be avoided at all costs, he insisted, and he already saw dangerous signs of it in Marcella’s behaviour.

‘
It is necessary for the mother bird to push the baby out of the nest sometimes
,’ he drivelled in his godly tight hand, ‘
for the good of the little bird
.’

I ransacked my desk for a certain piece of paper and hurried to the island, thinking of the little birds I had impaled on sticks at our country estate. I was ushered upstairs to the office of Padre Portalupi.

‘Let me see her,’ I insisted, without preamble. ‘I would like to see what miracles you have performed on her. Because when I last saw her she was not ready to leave the nest, pushed or not.’

Padre Portalupi did not hide his surprise at my abrupt arrival. ‘I could have saved you a trip, Conte Fasan. I am sorry to tell you that Marcella has specifically said that she does not wish to see you.’

‘She spoke?’

‘Yes, for the first time, when I told her that I considered her fit for an existence outside this place. She then said a few words, and they were all perfectly sensible.’

My little lame dog of a sister had told him something to my detriment, I supposed. She was playing with me, using this doing-good Brother as her cat’s paw.

‘Then how can she come home? If she won’t see me?’

That silenced him.

‘Given that I pay, and pay handsomely, to have her accommodated here, how is it that I have no rights to see my sister? You calmly tell me that her furious exacerbations are cured and you want to foist her back upon my household, without permitting me to see for myself if it is true! I would imagine that the officers of the
Magistrato alla Sanità
would be interested to hear of such a case.’

There dawned on Padre Portalupi’s face the beginnings of an understanding that it was not convenient for him to have. Fortunately, I had come prepared with an accessory to sway his thinking in the right direction. I opened, ‘Do not worry yourself unduly, Father. I could not conceive of doing anything to hurt poor Marcella. In fact, as you know, I have a strong interest in the salvation of lunatics. Researching establishments of this kind in foreign countries, I have discovered a most excellent English contraption to help Marcella when the fits of
ninfomania
come upon her, as they surely will, when she is exposed once more to the world. I have already commissioned one of
these
for her bedchamber.’

I handed Padre Portalupi a sketch. It was a crude representation of my sister with a stout iron ring riveted about her neck. A short chain passed from that to an upright iron bar bolted to the wall.

Padre Portalupi blanched. ‘Th . . .
this
is how you will keep Marcella if we send her home?’

‘For everyone’s safety, the best course, don’t you think? It can’t help resting her, feeling so secure. And remember, I have male servants and women and children in the house! The fortune-hunter might be lurking! Of course, as soon as she is ready to see me, I shall take her home to the bosom of her family. It will be nothing less than a celebration for us.Why, Marcella has a baby niece she has never yet met!’

‘And no nephews?’

I thought I had him cowed, but the man was cruelly apt. Again, I had a shuddering inkling that Marcella was pulling his jaw-strings from some hidden apartment. I looked around for her cornflower eye at a knot-hole in the wall. I was certain that I was being secretly watched.That sensation undermined the working of my tongue and I stammered for a full minute without coming to the end of a single word. My foot drummed on the floor. Inside my tight skin, my heart too stuttered to a standstill and I heard a sick creaking in my soul, as when a mast splinters preparatory to shipwreck.

Finally I got it out, ‘A nephew is forthcoming.’

Padre Portalupi accepted my parting handshake, yet I saw doubts on his face.

The
medico-religioso
would be more tractable, I divined. I went home to write him a confidential letter.After that, there would be no more need for me to make upsetting personal visits to San Servolo.

I sealed the letter and nestled deep in my father’s chair.

And so comfortable was I in that moment that I experienced a visceral, almost venereal itch to write down my triumph, an account starting with the delightful ploy of the confected letter to my wife from the little doctor Santo, who might never more return to Venice to plague us with his ineffectual seductions.

I was so absorbed in this cheerful work, dwelling on my masterful timing and subtle touches, that I did not notice my simpleton of a valet hovering close behind me with a silver tray on which reposed a midnight-blue velvet toque, the latest masterpiece by my tailor.

‘
Was it not ingenious?
’ I finished with a flourish, reiterating and summing up in a few simple words designed to help the Duller of my Readers comprehend such an artfully complex tale.

Then I felt Gianni’s breathing on my neck.

I turned around to see him staring vaguely like a goat in a field.

Marcella Fasan

My diary from that time makes disquieting reading. I remember little of those months myself. I still worked in the print-shop but gradually the languor of the other Tranquil Lunatics invaded my own soul and I ceased to be as I was; rather I became a floating, faded self, only loosely tethered to what I used to be. Here is an extract of what I wrote, that good Padre Portalupi kept for me all these years. The words were accompanied by many a pencilled sketch of fairylike and somnolent beings in a bowery island world.

‘High windows slash light all over our faces, down to our chins, but below that we are in darkness. We bodiless phantoms steal about, lowering our heads until only our foreheads are illuminated and our brains, those diseased things, the wrongness of which had brought us here, are shown as the only living part of our bodies.

‘
Shadows of door handles frighten us.

‘
Those corridors burn up summer light like flues. And at the end of them, all who interpose themselves between us and the light turn into blurred spiders, their bulbous thoraxes and debatable quantities of limbs a terror to us. The floors are tesserated like rich honeycomb, yet broken like a derelict hive. My friends Marta and Fabrizia fear bees. This is their kingdom
. . .

‘
. . . The mad are often pigeon-toed, and they hang their heads and sometimes reach into their small-clothes, looking for consolation. We will put our heads down anywhere, these heads are so heavy, against tabletops, architraves, anything to take the weight of the heads. On bad days, we slump to the floor and let our knees take the weight of these heads. Rare visitors will often see two heads
bending together to hold up the mutual weight – what mad cyclopses we are at San Servolo, these years!

‘
I speak of the Tranquil Lunatics now, like Marta and Fabrizia and Stella, who are allowed to work at their old trades and live in dormitories, which is regarded as a promotion and a sign of getting better. When they are bad, lunatics live differently.