The Book of Human Skin (42 page)

I bought a map of the South Americas. I stared at fields of ice and killing peaks.

Against my will, stubborn memories imposed themselves on that map: the deaths of our Venetian soldiers that I had been powerless to save in the implacable tracts of Russian snow.

Before they died, many snow-doomed individuals showed signs of idiocy and weakness of sight.They lost the use of their tongues for speech. They had marched on, propelled by the bodies of their comrades. But if they slipped to the outer part of the column, eventually they peeled off the core of men, and lurched into ditches of pillowy snow, where they died.

And if they were brought to a warm place, worse awaited them. For the frozen parts melted only to be seized by an instant gangrene that moved greedily over the whole body, sometimes creating a peculiar phosphorescence, very like beauty, in their skin. The individual would then suffocate with a putrid liquefication of the lungs. Other men, iced in their blood, simply fell down in front of the fire and never rose again.

Signora Sazia, frowning compassionately, taught me
los pulmones, el hielo, la gangrena, piel luminosa, la muerte:
lungs, ice, gangrene, luminous skin, death.

Marcella Fasan

For my journey over the mountains, I was accompanied by an
arriero
, three peons, and six mules carrying my dowry as well as our provisions.

Hamish Gilfeather’s cigars went a long way towards ensuring my comfort. I distributed my stock with smiles on the first day. After that, the peons treated me with more kindness than they had been paid for, and even made an effort to speak a comprehensible Spanish in my hearing.

Out of town the way soon became bleak and steep. On the very first day I saw a vulture astride the back of a lame yet living horse, devouring its torn flesh while it brayed pitifully. The peon called Arce mercifully dispatched the horse with his musket. Higher up, we passed the bodies of mules mummified where they had fallen. Arce showed me how the sun and cracking wind had reduced them to paper models of themselves: he
bounded off his own beast and picked up the carcass of one of the dead mules with a single hand. He urged me to dismount and try it myself. And yes, it was dry and light as a handful of corks. An hour later, Arce pointed out a human corpse on its way to the same airiness of being.

We passed our nights at wretched post houses (‘
esta casa está a su disposición
’) where we slept on mud floors in rooms without doors, and ate in
pulperías
surrounded by drunken local men. Changes of linen were possible only every fourth day. We ate olives in clinging oil, mutton
asados
without salt, and dried beef that tasted and reeked like strips carved off a saddle.

Green fields tidy as villa lawns alternated with dizzy passes where a false step would have dashed us to atoms on the rocks below. And with each step the way grew harder and the cold more cruel.

‘Shake yourself like this!’ the peons urged when we paused. They flung themselves around like dervishes, shouting ‘
Alalau! Alalau!
’ The very words seemed warming, and I followed their example to the best of my abilities, hurtling around my crutch in a jerky dance.

The cold first retarded my circulation. The blood seemed to delay at my heart, unwilling to venture to the frontiers of my body, which became livid and bluish about the ears, nose and fingers. I felt a languor that was hard to resist. My limbs grew disobedient to my feeble will. My animal functions almost ceased. The skin contracted around the roots of my hair. The flesh of my face pocked like a plucked goose. My numb fingers lost the capacity for discrimination – a knife blade or a silk cushion would have felt the same to them. My tongue forgot how to distinguish flavours. Inside their rabbit fur, my fingers and feet shrank until my gloves and snowshoes threatened to drop off.

Drowsiness finally overtook me. I wanted to sleep at all costs, to lay myself down in the snow, just for a quarter-hour. I begged to be allowed to do so. But the peons told me that if I did, I would never get up again.

‘What’s she got to get up for anyway?’ I heard one of them mutter. ‘Poor little girl, poor little one.’

For Santo would wish it
, I thought.
So that Santo may kiss me again
.

Sor Loreta

We received news that the Venetian Cripple had landed at Montevideo. As I pictured her progress over the mountains, I thought of the cold she would endure, how the wind would whip her flesh, how the altitude would poison her belly. As I did so, I scourged Myself with especial severity, to be fit for the great undertaking of bringing the Venetian devil to God.

All the light nuns were gossiping about the Venetian Cripple: what clothes she would bring with her, how beautiful she would be. Most of all they asked one another, why had her brother sent her over the Andes in the worst weather ? How could she survive?

I told Myself. ‘If she is a devil, then she will survive.’

Marcella Fasan

I remember a pleasant torpor stealing over me. Later I was told that the men saw me fall to the side of the horse to which I was tied, just as we approached another mountain inn.

Afterwards Arce explained it to me in stark nursery terms. They had carried me into a cold room and stripped me to my shift. Then they took turns to apply rough frictions with snow and cloths drenched in iced water. Still I lay without signs of life.

‘But we refuse to let you die, girl!’ Arce told me proudly. ‘We say “No! No!” to Mister Death!’

When I first began to moan, they brought every kind of aromatic substance at their disposal into the room, smells both shockingly good, like roasted llama, and bad, like fermented hay. They laid me in an iron tub of cold water, careful not to break off any of my frozen digits, and when
I commenced to stir, they had me out of my bath, and onto a wooden slab where they applied volatiles and sternutatories to my nostrils. They opened my mouth and blew warm air into my lungs.

They tickled my parts with a feather. When washes of hot wine had no effect on my coma, they blew tobacco fumes up my rectum with bellows. They recommenced the manual frictions, this time with rags soaked in brandy and camphorated spirit of wine. When they could raise my head, they made me ingest a basin of tea, and then one of mulled wine, and carried me to a small room where a fire was lit. After an hour, I began to perspire and cry out at the darting pains in my fingers and legs.

‘Then,’ smiled Arce, ‘we know you live all right, girl.’

I had not wanted to open my eyes, even when conscious. But when I felt the dignity of clothing roughly swaddled around me, I unclenched my eyelids for the first time. And saw nothing. In front of my eyes was pure white; a mist more impenetrable than the worst Venetian
caligo
– a sheet glued to my eyeballs.

‘I am blind,’ I wept. ‘I can never see Santo again.’

When the men came to ask me what tortured me so, I added a torrent of Venetian to explain that my existing disabilities were now harnessed to this greater one, making me an entirely useless being.

‘How could even Santo love me like this?’ I sobbed.

‘Your
santo
, your patron saint?’ someone asked me. ‘I think the nuns are supposed to have lady saints up at Santa Catalina.’

‘Is just snow-blindness,’ a kinder, invisible voice told me. ‘It will pass.’

A growl from the
arriero
: ‘And if it does not, it does not matter – the poor one is going to Santa Catalina. She does not need to see anything there, let alone some saint. Not even her Bible. Presumably she knows her prayers by heart already.’

‘Why does she not need to see?’ The mention of Santa Catalina charged the peons’ voices with breathy fascination.

I recognized the
arriero
’s superior tone again, ‘Do you not know what those girls do all day there? And all night?’

‘Do you?’

‘It is their life’s work to pray for the sins of their families. They may do nothing except say
las almas del Purgatorio
to cut down the time their families spend roasting. Those girls get shut away for ever so that their brothers and fathers and uncles may commit all the seven sins all day
long in complete safety of their souls. The little sister will be praying away for them, speeding their way to heaven. One nun can do a whole household, if she is the hard-praying kind. Anyway, it does a family good to know that they have their own little saint in the convent, a living one. If you can call it living.’

‘You don’t say! The nuns cannot do anything else? Do they not visit the poor? Or sew? Or grow flowers? Or have entertainments?’

My ears burned.

‘Most certainly not. Each girl has twelve slaves, and the slaves live any life she might have, doing her cooking, her washing, her shopping – all so that she may do nothing else except sit on her knees, mumbling. She is dead to the outside world. That’s why they wear black, you know. They are in mourning for their lives. The nunnery has everything – mills, water, food. It would not be good for the nun’s soul to be distracted, so everything is walled in there with her, in the living tomb. I heard that in Santa Catalina they are not even allowed to look at the mountain, in case it gives them improper ideas, being so manly and rugged!’

I heard the peons sniggering and slapping each other on the shoulder.

The
arriero
continued, ‘So your nun lives in the convent like a rat in a cage. Until she goes mad or dies, or both. Happens all the time. Women are not s’posed to live locked up without their natural desires being accommodated, are they? So when one goes off, another little sister is sent up to take her place.’

‘We keep this poor little one alive just for that?’ Arce’s voice was hushed with shock.

Another peon said starkly, ‘Might as well put the creature out of its misery, Pedro.’

A gruff voice interrupted, ‘Let’s lose the girl then, and accidentally “lose” all this dowry-treasure. We can bury it in the snow and come back to get it when the story dies down. For her, it would be a mercy. For us, our making!’

There was a cautious murmur of approval from one of the other men and a cry of protest from Arce.

A rougher new voice suggested, ‘We save she life once already, and we not even nearly at Arequipa. So let us tell she this – that we drop she treasure over a cliff, unless she promise on brother’s life to say prayer for each one of we. The Scotsman say brother’s all she got, she father dead.

We tell she that we hunt brother down and kill he if she don’t pray for us and make us path safe.’

The
arriero
asked dubiously, ‘How shall we know she keeps the bargain?’

‘If anything happen to any one of we, us know that she has broke she word. She has to send one up for each of we every day.’

‘No! Every hour!’

‘Christian prayers!’ muttered one peon contemptuously.

‘Well, you can’t expect her to worship the spirit of Pachacamac, can you? Does not matter what comes out of the girl’s mouth – the right gods hear the right prayers, say I.’

After much debate, the peons settled on a prayer for each of them every two hours on weekdays and once an hour on Sundays. There was much talk about a special prayer to Santa Gertrude, that was a sure thing to save a thousand souls each time it was said.

Arce exclaimed, ‘And Santa Águeda, to stop earthquakes!’

‘So she lives, but what about the treasure?’

The
arriero
shouted, ‘You know nothing! If she arrives without the treasure, then those venal cows at Santa Catalina won’t take her in. They’ll put her in the nearest brothel. She would be worth nothing to us then. God does not hear the prayers of whores, not with all those angels singing. We may as well all rot in hell. What would you rather have, a few pieces of gold, or eternal salvation, you miserable dog? Anyway, you would never be able to sell the gold or the statues without drawing suspicion on yourselves. It’s not as if Peru is overflowing with Venetian antiquities. Is it worth a hanging to be a rich man for a day?’

And so Arce’s kindness and the
arriero’
s prudence saved my life.

I kept my face smooth and nodded my agreement as they mentioned the possible ill-consequences for my brother if I did not say the prayers they required. It had not occurred to them that I might have little reason to believe in a merciful and listening God. Or that, however many years I would now spend on my knees, I would sooner pray for the souls of their mules than for Minguillo’s.

Dinner was ready: a stringy fowl that challenged the teeth to a losing duel. They settled down to disputing the year of the chicken’s birth, and I was forgotten.

‘Get some on your inside, girl,’ Arce told me, handing me a portion. ‘We go high-high tomorrow. May be last thing you keep down.’

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

Although the Bible speaks highly of the spiritual worth of such ventures, the human body is annoyed and destroyed by journeys up mountains. If she survived the cold, Marcella would have altitude sickness to endure.

I consulted John Arbuthnot,
An essay concerning the effects of air on human bodies
, 1733. He told of a journey by Joseph d’Acosta to the top of the mountains of Peru, where he and his company were seized with bilious vomitings from the thinness and coldness of the atmosphere. They gasped for air, like fish beached with the tide. Every step was made as if in lead-lined boots.

For Marcella, every step was already twice as hard as for anyone else.

Marcella Fasan

The mist lifted from my eyes overnight. When we started moving again, Arce rode beside me and told me about what they had done to save me from freezing to death the previous day. After that, I lay face-down in the cart. I could not face those men. Each one of them had looked on – even handled – my naked form. They had seen more of me than a doctor, more than Santo had.

Then, when the
puna
came upon me, it took me badly. I had lived all my life at the low level of the sea. The mountains stole all the air out of my lungs, and the world grew glassy in my eyes. I slipped back into a torpid state from which I was roused only when the altitude swooped down and
evacuated my stomach. I vomited meat, water and phlegm, retching and retching till only saliva was cast up.