The Book of Human Skin (47 page)

‘Here,’ the nun pushed me gently through the first doorway on the left. ‘This is where you shall live now, Sor Constanza.’

I entered my courtyard through a pair of low wooden doors, each hewn out of a single mellow plank with the sheen of roasted butter. Above the door was inscribed the name of a previous occupant, M. Dominga Somocursio.

‘What happened to Sor Dominga?’ I enquired.

‘She is with Our Father and Husband,’ I was told. ‘The Small-Pox. She was afraid of the needle and refused the vaccination. Her parents ordered the cell sold and the proceeds used for masses for her soul. Now your brother has bought it for you.’

My brick-paved courtyard was painted a vivid cobalt blue. Three long stone seats lined the walls, and there was a small flowerbed in the centre. The kitchen opened off to the left and my bedchamber straight ahead, with a pot of geraniums foaming white at either side of the door. How fortunate I was, I thought, to have a beautiful courtyard of my own. Later I would discover that all the professed nuns’ quarters boasted private gardens, some far grander than mine.

The courtyard seemed steeped not in Christian elementals but the flavour of the East: the graceful arch over the door, the low golden stone pocketing the sky.

‘Earthquakes,’ commented the nun, following my eyes.

I smiled to myself. I’d already drawn cartoons of the proud white Arequipans who did not like to admit to the Arabic influence from the Moorish conquest of Spain. Earthquakes were invariably blamed for the oriental shapes of their buildings. Here in this far-flung colony, outnumbered by native people and seared by foreign light, the white Spanish treasured their pure blood and their Catholic religion more than the citizens of the places where such things went unquestioned – except by the risen-again Napoleon Bonaparte.

I followed the
velo blanco
inside a large airy room. Its terracotta floor had been cleaned in readiness for the silk carpet that was part of my dowry. It had a vaulted ceiling with little windows and alcoves, and a creamy, detailed architrave. And a compact black girl, who curtseyed to me.

‘What is your name?’ I asked.

‘Josefa,’ she replied and curtseyed again. ‘I am your servant cook maid slave.’

‘You have just one,’ observed the
velo blanco
condescendingly. ‘Most of the professed nuns have three at least. Margarita the pharmacist has twelve!’

Josefa observed sturdily, ‘I can do a leetle somefing-somefing for my mistress, though.’

‘Then show her the new quarters,’ ordered the
velo blanco
. My belongings were deposited on the divan and the serving nun departed.

Josefa stared at me unblinking. ‘So,’ she announced, ‘here tis your new house. Here tis this, and this, and this’ – she pointed at the fireplace, the chimney, the bed, with studied formality.

Then, when the footsteps of the
velo blanco
had faded, Josefa’s face opened up into a delicious grin. Hands on her hips, she said, ‘The other servants talk. They say you be good mistress. In that case I be good servant, and perhaps slowly by slowly I shall love you. I think is passable.’

‘I very much hope so,’ I smiled, ‘I already feel quite fond of
you
.’

‘Sgood then,’ said Josefa. ‘You look-look some. I put your fings in order.’

My new
hornacina
was already inhabited by the unpleasant statue of Santa Rosa. Her ragged red face looked down on her luxurious new accommodation dismissively, as if to say, ‘All things on earth are the same for me. I live for the world beyond this one.’

‘Ugly cow, she,’ observed Josefa.

‘And dismal with it,’ I concurred. Josefa yelped with mirth.

Below Santa Rosa was a cupboard for candles, already well stocked. My diary would be safe behind the wall of wax. Encloistered opposite was a large cupboard with four doors and two deep shelves. I was amazed at this capacity – what personal possessions might a nun accumulate to fill such a space? Hidden behind some curtains on the opposite wall I found my bed. As in the novitiate quarters, it was in an arched alcove, to protect me from earth tremors. A stark cross hung above the bedhead. There was a space where I supposed my desk and chair would go. The divan was plumped up with cushions. The large kitchen could be approached both from my room and the courtyard. It was furnished with a capacious oven on which Josefa was already stirring something fragrant.

‘Smell good, yes?’ she asked.

I nodded. ‘Where do you sleep?’

She pointed to a pallet bed beside the oven. ‘Hot-hot like Africa.’

I could positively
ramble
through my new world. It was more like a miniature country house than a cell. Noticing a door near the
hornacina
, I poked my head through it, discovering yet another room that was nearly as large again as my new parlour-sleeping-chamber.

I called Josefa, ‘What is this other room for?’

‘For what you likes, madam,’ came the answer.

There came into my mind’s eye the image of Santo writing at a table in that room, looking up to smile at me, reaching out his hand.

Sunshine washed in from the courtyard and a barred tall window that looked down into the innumerable little streets. There was no glass, just wooden shutters.

So this would be my kingdom and my cage. As yet, it seemed a cage as wide as the world and full of pleasant possibilities.

With even a whole room for ‘what you likes’.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

I imagined Marcella looking up at the walls of the convent of Santa Catalina, gazing towards the snow-topped mountains. I felt her shivering in the thin Andean air. She had promised to be married to those walls: she had promised that she would never more leave that place. The promise went beyond her death, for I knew that nuns were destined to be buried within their cloisters when they died.

I could not evict that image from my mind’s eye: Marcella, with God’s ring on her slender finger, gazing up from her stone cage high in the sky of the New World.

Did she think of me? Of the ring I did not give her before she was sent away?

With whom did she talk? Did the nuns force cruel penances on her? Would they hate her for a foreigner, despise her for a cripple?

And the servants? Perhaps Gianni was right to worry. Why should the servants in Arequipa love Marcella? More masters and mistresses are poisoned by their servants than is realized by people outside the medical profession. I have seen plump noblewomen reduced to skeletal children by slow and gradual administration of arsenic, or swiftly dispatched by aconite.

My Spanish madam pronounced herself delighted with my progress in her language. There was no part of my body I could not name, no rash
or spot for which I lacked the Spanish word. But would I ever use my knowledge now?

Marcella – or Sor Constanza, as Gianni told me – was married to God. Would she consider bigamy?

Marcella Fasan

At first the daily life of a professed nun proved little different from my existence in the novitiate. We were woken by a wooden rattle just before five in the morning and we made our way promptly to the central fountain in Plaza Zocodober, all the while reciting our rosaries. We would observe the morning’s canonical hours and attend one chief mass. After that we would go to our cells to take rest, and to recite psalms, counting off the anniversaries of important saints and using psalters to remember any of our number who had recently died. At eleven-thirty, we dined, usually in the refectory, after which we returned to our cells.

In the afternoon we were back in the choir for
vísperas
and
completas
and the silent recitation of the rosary. The rest of the day passed in alternating periods of prayer, reading of the Bible and
Lives
of the saints. The peons had been partly right. We were expected to pray specifically to save the souls of our loved ones from the endless tortures of Purgatory. I murmured my prayers audibly, for the
vicaria
was known to prowl the streets, listening under our windows.

Minguillo’s name did not cross my chanting lips. Piero’s, yes: I devoted my prayer hours to him. Gianni, Anna, and even my mother and nieces figured in my devotions. Nor did I forget my promise to send up the required prayers for the peons and especially Arce.

As for Santo, the thought of him was a prayer of its own kind.

While my lips were busy with prayer, I sketched: Josefa busy in the kitchen; the other nuns bent over their hymnals in the church; my vivid little garden. I longed for colour pastels and paint. But I dared not ask for them.

Food, in profusion or deprivation, marked out our hours and days. Unlike women married to mortal husbands, we did not concern ourselves at all with provisioning, cooking, serving or clearing away. We were served just like men. Our relationship with food was therefore more spiritual, or so the sermons said.

We ‘fasted’ every Friday, which meant eating only potatoes and cereals or fish. This was too greedy for Sor Loreta, who would berate us for our luxuries, and who frequently reminded us that ‘the infant Catherine of Sweden consented to suckle at the breast of her mother only on days when there had been no conjugal relations between her parents’. Another of her favourites was San Nicola. Even when he was a baby, San Nicola was so holy that he took just one breast on Fridays.

‘While you gorge your gullets,’ sniffed the
vicaria
, ‘I myself will feast only on Christ’s Body and Blood at communion.’

‘Cannibal Princess!’ someone observed, and I craned my head to see who so dared, but all the nuns’ faces appeared smooth and guiltless.

Our staple was
locro
, a stew of lamb, beef, peppers and potatoes. On Thursdays we would be given our rations of
manjar blanco
, a milky dessert, and a chicken stew, wine and fruit. Between Ash Wednesday and Forgiveness Week, we were given a dish of chickpeas cooked in honey. On Sundays we had two pastries, rice pudding, two different fish dishes and potatoes. During Holy Week we fed on two honeyed desserts with peaches and quinces.

We were expected to make a daily attendance at one of the confessionals off the main cloister. We climbed up four steps to a tiny cupboard with a door we closed behind us, so we sat in airless darkness to confess ourselves. The grates were cut directly into the wall of the public part of the church: our voices floated through the holes into the place where our bodies were not allowed to go. After each confession – at which Marcella Fasan invented for Sor Constanza a repertoire of mild sins – I emerged blinking into the cloister with its red ochre arches and carmine geraniums.

We were permitted to look after our own gardens, growing flowers for our
hornacinas
. Our servants might go out of the convent to buy seeds and kitchen supplies for us. And of course they came back with ears full of town gossip, items of which were traded like cards in a highly staked game.

Friendships between the nuns could be managed, it seemed. I heard giggles and conversations from behind wooden shutters as I made my way down the Calle Toledo. Yet no one in those first few months of my professed life invited me into their cell, or sat beside me confidentially in the choir. I divined that the
vicaria
had made the other nuns afraid to talk to me.

Like many of the nuns, I made a pet of a living flea in a green glass flask. Indeed, his antics were companionable during the long hours of prayer. The convent fleas seemed much delighted by the
limpieza de sangre
, the purity of the blood that they sucked from the nuns at Santa Catalina.

Josefa would pick them out of my bedlinen with iron forceps and line up the corpses on my
hornacina
as an offering to my ugly Santa Rosa, observing, ‘Shame they can’t bite her. She like that, eh?’

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

When the Waterloo’d Napoleon was transported down to the island of St Helena in the South Pacific, I had the strangest revelation. Marcella was now physically closer to Bonaparte than she was to me.

While I marked out all my days of loss, I began to feel a bizarre kinship with my old patient in his last decline. Did he, like me, quite fail to kill the hope that his life might be given back to him? Did he dream of release, just as I dreamed of rescuing Marcella? Did his mind trace the waves pleating under his ship’s prow, all the way back to his finest hour on the battlefield, just as I remembered my finest second, that in which my lips had been joined to Marcella’s?

Unbeknownst to the generals who had fought and feared him, Napoleon was all along nursing inside his own belly the enemy that would be his nemesis. A prepyloric ulcer was carving out a long niche that would eventually be occupied by a cancerous tumour.

By the time Napoleon was confined on St Helena, the tumour was already on its invisible march north, south, east and west inside
him. To mitigate his intestinal cramps, his doctors set about killing him slowly with colonic irrigations and vomits induced by antimony potassium tartrate. Repeated doses left him with the flow of blood to his brain interrupted by scattered bursts of heartbeats, like gunfire in battle.

Napoleon had no friends on St Helena. In his circumstances, a doctor, however constant his attendance at your side, is not a friend. That doctor is the person who will document your death, ache by ache, gasp by gasp.

Did Marcella gasp on the mountain air? Or was she nourished by its purity? Did they allow her paper to keep her diary? To draw on? Did she have a doctor? I found myself searingly jealous of the unknown Arequipan surgeon who would have the privilege of touching Marcella’s leg, and standing in such proximity to her luminous skin that his own astonished face would be bathed in light.

Marcella Fasan

Josefa gave me to understand that she would scrutinize my behaviour for a provisional period before allowing herself too many familiarities.

‘Noble girls strange,’ she said. ‘Seem nice, then sudden mean and stuck up.’