The Book of Human Skin (44 page)

The
velo blanco
hurried me out of the blue courtyard and back down to the cloister of the novices. As we arrived there I saw another nun with a tray of food approaching my new cell. She paused outside the door and peered into the gloom. She saw something inside there that clearly frightened her: she placed the tray on the bench outside the cell, grimaced and ran away without another word. When I turned to ask my
velo blanco
why her sister was so afraid, she too had already disappeared.

Sor Loreta

The demon who possessed Judas and Jezebel had entered this girl from Venice, making her more powerful than the weak sisters of Santa Catalina.

And there was only Myself to keep vigilant. It was My duty to keep our foolish Virgins pure from contamination for they hovered ever on the chasm of impurity.

Perhaps I might forfend the Venetian Cripple’s attack before it was launched?

These were My thoughts as I hurried through the courtyards down to the novitiate where I was to preside over the opening of the Venetian Cripple’s dowry trunks. My angels flitted urgently around the walls.

‘Yes, yes,’ I told them. ‘I shall render this daughter of Satan unto Our Lord.’

The brother of the daughter of Satan, I now discovered, had furnished Me with all the tools that I needed. So God’s design unfailingly reveals Itself to the Enlightened.

Marcella Fasan

I hesitated on the threshold. My arm ached where the doctor had punctured it. My head was heavy. There was the sound of frantic activity inside my cell: as if Venetian rats scurried and gnawed in there. I peered through the window and saw the top of one of my dowry trunks open and a veiled head bent over it. I remembered the wry embarrassment with which the
priora
explained, ‘We must account for your dowry, my dear. It is a sordid business but our chaplain directs us so.’

And they had a sordid nun for doing the business too. It was the
vicaria
, she who had already given me such a cruel salutation at the gate, who was presently engaged in turning my trunks inside out.

She had removed the blue spectacles and I saw that one eye was glued shut. Her face was pitted and scored. Later I would learn that when she was just a child she had plunged her face into boiling water in the hope that the scars would deter any potential husband. Yet those features of hers must have been ugly already. Her eyes were too small and too close together; her chin jowled and jutted, and her nose could not have been scourged into its hooked shape.

She thrust her mannish hands deep inside one of my dowry chests. Then she snatched them out, bleeding from fragments of the Murano glass that had shattered on the mountain. And her ankle was bleeding too, on to my stone floor – she must have been wearing the cilice around her thigh.

As soon as I walked in she rose and slapped me hard across the face. I felt a tiny shard of glass slicing my cheek and blood trickling down towards my collar.

‘I suspected as much. A Venetian here! I was against you from the start. But they voted me down, out of a squalid curiosity to see one like you. You shall come straight to the bathhouse and immerse for two hours to start the cure for your
calor
. Look at that vulgar sweat on your face!’

Calor?
In Venice we said ‘
in calore
’ when a cat was in need of a husband.

I stared down the trajectory of her bloodstained jabbing finger, and discovered that it was, of course, my dowry that had got me accused of indecency. My brother had chosen San Sebastiano as my personal saint. The
vicaria
was glaring at my handsome statue of him, and the gloriously serene image painted by Mantegna.

‘Obscene things!’ she hissed. ‘It is as I warned them, you have come to corrupt our young sisters. They would not listen.’

Minguillo must have got wind of the fact that for some reason San Sebastiano was held in extreme ill-repute here at Santa Catalina. I had been indifferent to the booty in my trunks, just as a slave feels little interest in his price. I had not suspected that even in my dowry Minguillo might find a new way to damage me.

‘My brother . . .’ I faltered, and then stopped. Minguillo had been here and met with them. He would have found a companionable soul in this
vicaria
. Was the apparently sympathetic
priora
also party to his machinations? I felt the full force of my isolation then. Longingly, I pictured Anna’s and Gianni’s faces turned towards me with loving
expressions. And Santo in the garden at San Servolo, looking over the heads of the lady Tranquils to meet my eyes.

‘
What
are we going to put in your
hornacina
?’ the
vicaria
demanded, slapping me again, and pointing to an arched alcove apparently designed to serve as a little altar inside my room. It had been decorated around its borders with naïve paintings of flowers and leaves.

‘This sacrilegious Venetian filth,’ she pointed in disgust at San Sebastiano, ‘will go directly into the vaults and never be seen again by decent women. If it were my choice, it would be put to the flame. Now it is God’s design that
you
learn a lesson you’ll not forget.’

She seized my ear and pulled me out of my cell – tumbling the tray of food to the ground in our wake. She jostled me along myriad little streets – not a soul appearing – to a low chamber where a stone tub the size of a large carriage was filled with water that did not look as if it knew the breath of a coal fire to warm it.

‘Behind the screen,’ she ordered curtly. ‘Take off your clothes.’

The Small-Pox vaccination was coursing palpably through my body, making me slow and dull. I fumbled at my travelling clothes until they had all dropped away. I hesitated behind the blue wooden screen, unwilling to expose my naked self to her hating eye.

‘What are you doing in there?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘Come out this minute.’

I emerged timidly. In the goose-pimpling cool of that stone chamber, my leg scars blazed lividly, as if I had flagellated myself where it most hurt. I caught sight of a severe-looking John the Baptist in an altar above the bath. I supposed that the nuns regarded their baths as a kind of baptism. As I looked bleakly at the saint, I heard a sharp intake of breath, a rustle of indignant wool. The
vicaria
hastened around the rim of the bath and slapped my face again, so hard that I staggered to the very rim of the pool, teetering there.

‘Where is your chemise, lecher?’ she shrieked at me, her eyes feasting on my wounds, the fetor of her breath hot on my body.

‘You said . . .’ I tried to cover myself with my inadequate hands.

Reeling from yet another slap, I crouched inside the shelter of the screen and pulled my chemise back on.

‘Now, get in there!’ she pushed me so I toppled into the wintry water, hitting my head on the stone side as I went down. I plunged deep, hit the
slimy bottom with crumpled hands and rode the splashing water back up to the surface inside the clinging bubble of my shift. I struggled to right myself, grasping the side for safety. Warm blood fell down the iced rictus of my face. Through that red curtain, I searched out my enemy.

She had not finished with me.

She was pinioning one of my hands with a booted foot. I had a glimpse of her face. All humanity had departed from it. A mask of rapture stiffened her features. It was as if she was no longer conscious.

Then she leaned over and pushed my head under the water and kept it there.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

What I needed was money, if I was to be with my love.

Money. Such a little, sordid thing, that would not buy a clean, loving heart. A dirty thing, handed around among strangers. Yet for me, who did not have it, what a monstrous proportion money now assumed in my life.

All my days I had proudly discounted it, feeling superior to the rich noblemen whose self-indulgence I despised.

On San Servolo I had earned little, for I had offered my services cheaply in order to be sure of a place near Marcella. Though I had eaten poorly and dressed worse, I had saved nothing.

In Venice my name had been blackened by Minguillo, so I could not earn my living as a surgeon to the wealthy. (Of course, to get myself to Marcella, I would have attended even spoiled patricians.) I practised on the poor and on the prostitutes of the town, for the Spanish madam advertised my utility to her friends. I charged poor rates to poor patients. How could I do anything else? Slowly, slowly, I began to collect funds.

It was not enough, and it was not fast enough. I had a sense of my breathing impaired, because impatience made me lean forward, always looking for new ways to get money. I became mercantile, calculating.
I inscribed myself to an apothecary, concocting his electuaries. I became bold in demanding my share of the profits. I looked for other opportunities. I took in sewing, pretending that I had a seamstress for a mother: I could stitch up a shirt as well as a wound. I swung wooden crates at the docks.

Money, money. It did not seem attracted to me, but I coaxed it into my pocket, hour by hour. I heard the coins clinking against one another with a happy ear.

In dark moments, the music of the money sounded cold and tinny. Had Marcella survived the journey? If not, the money, and all the things I did to get it, would be worthless.

Then Gianni came to tell me that Marcella had arrived in Arequipa.

‘Thank God,’ I embraced him.

‘But
how
do you know she is safely there?’ I demanded, suddenly insecure.

‘Minguillo pushed the cook down the stairs this morning just after a letter were delivered from the
priora
in Peru isn’t it.’

I rushed to pick up my bag of ointments so I could tend to the poor cook. But Gianni held up his hand: ‘Santo, twould be death for you to come to the Palazzo Espagnol, and
that
would be death for Marcella.’

Silently, I handed him some arnica lotion from my pocket.

The coins in there jingled quietly. The music of money, even when thin and tinny, is always optimistic: I had come to know that at last.

Marcella Fasan

When I awoke I was back in my cell and the
vicaria
was nowhere to be seen. Beside my bed was an opened bottle of smelling salts and a little sack of snuff. My shaking hand found a linen bandage clamped around my forehead. A woolly bladder of hot water rested on my chest, which felt raw, as if it had been rubbed briskly for a long time.

The kindly
priora
was at my side, holding my hand. She held a teaspoon of brandy-and-water to my lips and tipped it in.

‘Welcome back,’ she smiled. ‘We have managed to revive you at last. And you have come through the effects of the Small-Pox vaccination to the side of safety.’

I cried out then because a brutally ugly face swam into my view, behind the
priora
. Her eyes followed mine back to the altar across the room. ‘Ah, Marcella, do not be afraid. That is your new saint.’

What I had glimpsed was not the
vicaria
but a crude statue of a lady saint whose haggard face was scored with red marks. Santa Rosa of Lima, I deduced. My own San Sebastiano painting and statue were nowhere to be seen.

‘What did I do, Mother?’ My teeth chattered.

The
priora
explained to me that the image of San Sebastiano was specifically forbidden in the nunnery. ‘Some prudish edict along the lines that his handsome face and naked torso might encourage lewd dreams and put the nuns “
in calore
”.’

‘We say that for cats in Venice,’ I told her.

‘And so cats are expressly forbidden here too,’ she said mildly. ‘Yet they find their own ways in and live among us Signor Rossini has even written the dear creatures a duet, so I cannot think them entirely evil. Speaking of which, I personally do not blame you for the San Sebastianos, child. Perhaps your brother did not read too closely the terms of our agreement for the dowry.’

Perhaps he did, all too closely
, I thought.

‘I suppose that in Venice the women may look upon San Sebastiano without restraint?’

I nodded. She looked at me searchingly, ‘Is there a possibility that your brother might have wished to set you in a bad position here from the start?’

The
priora
held both my shoulders and looked into my face, ‘Have you carried such a burden for long, child? I refer to the intentions of your brother.’

Her intuition astounded me. I had a mad vision of myself falling into her arms and telling her everything. But I feared to stretch her imagination to a final wall of cynicism, and have her think me guilty of exaggeration. Her tenderness would be very hard to give up even after so short an acquaintance with it. I took refuge in my accustomed vague and wondering stare, the one that had served me so well in the madhouse on San Servolo before Santo came to find me.

‘This is a subject we shall explore another time, when you have seen that you have reason to trust me. I realize the
vicaria
might have damaged your confidence in the humanity of our regime at Santa Catalina. Please believe me, Sor Loreta is not characteristic of our number. She is a person more to be pitied than feared. Her faith took an hysterical turn from the start. We generally choose to be amused at her excesses. It helps us to bear her.’

She sighed, ‘Perhaps we should have been less accommodating in her regard . . . But let us not talk of that now! Let me prove to you our friendly ways. Your new sisters are waiting to meet you.’ The
priora
waved at a nun guarding the door.

My face was caressed by a rush of warm air, as when summer sails are unfurled. Smiling girls surrounded me, kneeling by my bed, bending over one another’s shoulders, folding themselves up to get closer to me.

‘So pretty and delicate!’ one breathed. ‘She is like glass!’

‘Does she speak Spanish?’