The Book of Human Skin (56 page)

There was no medickle schools in Arequipa, meaning all doctors n blood-letters allus come from outside. So Santo were not mistrusted on sight as a furriner. Santo writed to me that his Span-yard were serving well, and that I must go to thank the Spanish madam in Cannaregio on his behalf.

He were in high humour: ‘
Occasionally in Arequipa I am caught out by an anatomical vulgarity that Signora Sazia fervently assured me to be the correct and respectable term for some particular organ. To maintain my dignity, I have to explain with a straight face that in the Old World this word is used exclusively by the aristocracy
.’

The Vixen were still in charge of Santa Catalina but she ud arrogated her rule sufficient to allow visits again. Santo deducted she were too prudint to exude the famlies from a sight of there daughters, in case they snifft a rat. Fernando saw Marcella from time to time at the talking-parlour. Not too often, so’s not to draw tension.

Better yet, there were an akshual plan afoot for her escape, but twere too diffuse to tell me as yet, Santo sayed. I burned up not to know it. It hinged, he hinted, pon his personal gaining the confidence o the twitchin Vixen. In the meantime, the grate thing were to keep Marcella alive long nuff for this misterious plan to git carrid through.

Santo had speedy made hisself evryone’s favrit doctor in Arequipa, nowise sorpresing given his gentle ways, clean fingers, safe fizz-sicks and low prices. This meaned he were also getting to be the doctor what pronounct the deaths among the poor. And this, for the plan, were more important than anything, he writed me.

What kind o plan could that be? It sounded dredful grim. I clinched my teeth. So much appening in Arequipa while I anguished way in Venice, servin a Master what seemed to be loosing the grip of hisself. Minguillo ud took to sittin up in the tower at the back of our
palazzo
where no one ud been for sentries. What he doed up there, no one knowed, but he come down agin with hair like a haystack and his eyes starin in diffrint direkshons.

Sor Loreta

It had come to My attention that a holy man had arrived in Arequipa, a man of great sanctity adorned with the highest virtues. He naturally chose Santa Catalina as his place of worship.

He practised as a doctor, but was also a priest. The populace took him to their hearts. The Ignorant even brought him the mummy corpses that were sometimes found in the higher reaches of the mountains, as if he might bring those ancient pagans back to life.

He was come from Italy, the home of the Pope, and so it naturally entered My head that I should meet him and be allowed to partake of the beneficence of holy rays that would surely issue from his glance. He in turn would be illuminated by intercourse with Myself. My secret hope was that a holy man would be able to see My stigmata that had remained invisible to the unenlightened nuns who surrounded Me, and that he would affirm the existence of My angels, denouncing the other doctor who had called them ‘ocular spectres’.

If this Doctor Santo pronounced My stigmata and angels to be real, then the malicious tongues of the Ignorant would be silenced and people would start to take note of My life, and write it down for the instruction and inspiration of posterity.

And perhaps the stupidly protracted illness of our careless
priora
would make it an obvious thing for Me to summon this Doctor Santo to our convent to minister to the sick woman.

Who else should receive him but the
priora
’s trusted deputy, now acting in her stead, who had never been accused of a moment’s lightness?

Marcella Fasan

Santo was in Arequipa. A mere wall of stone separated us, and one murderous, mad nun. That was all. Minguillo was not here to grasp and crush my happiness. I had one appalling act to perform, and I would be free, and with Santo. Beyond that act, in my imagination, the rest of the future glowed a radiant white like the sun at noon.

And each morning at mass I married Santo with my eyes across the grate. ‘I love you,’ I sang instead of the words to the hymns.

‘I love you,’ Santo sang back to me.

Still the
priora
remained unconscious. A quiet spirit of resistance was beginning to suffuse the community of nuns,
criadas
and
sambas
who adored her. The love we bore her meant that we could not conceive of a future without her: we pinned our hopes on her recovery.

‘Give the
priora
a bell,’ I had suggested, ‘tied under the covers. Then it will ring if someone lifts the blanket.’

‘How did you learn to be so vigilant?’ Rosita asked.

By now the whole convent conspired to keep Sor Loreta running around. The nuns invented small disputes upon which she must arbitrate. They sacrificed themselves by deliberately misbehaving so that she would be distracted by the joys of punishing them. The
vicaria
had taken on the
priora
’s
samba
as her own. But the girl was loyal to us, and kept us fed with information about the Vixen’s movements. The treasurer nun was also recruited to our side. She now made a daily incursion to review senseless figures with the Vixen, who had to pretend to comprehend them so as not to lose face. Rosita invented a lost key and a vast inquiry was launched as to its whereabouts, with every sister in Santa Catalina to be personally questioned by the
vicaria
.

In this way, for several more weeks, we avoided her coming for me. Fernando visited as often as he dared and turned himself into a piece of glass – by which I mean that he generously effaced his sweet self so that I might commune directly with Santo.

‘There is talk of an Italian holy man in the town,’ Fernando told me. The Vixen sat listening to our conversation, eager for an excuse to terminate it, her one good ear pressed visibly against the grate.

‘Have you met him?’ I enquired casually, in the shadow of the ear.

‘Indeed. He seems to be a searching kind of soul,’ Fernando smiled. ‘His quest is his whole passion . . .’

Then I saw Sor Loreta’s blue spectacles flash behind the grate.

Good, good
, I thought, for whatever interested her in Santo was only grist to our plan. I shuddered too: it was as if I was offering him to a spider.

Josefa meanwhile brought me yet more letters in her skirts and in the false flap of her basket, and took missives from me in return. Santo begged for more information about the
vicaria
. I wrote down everything I could remember – her obsession with Christ-the-infant, her invented stigmata and her so-called angels.

The one thing I forgot to mention was her astonishing physical strength.

Minguillo Fasan

I began to look with more interest at my daughters, and to urge food upon them. They could be breeding by the age of fifteen. If not a son, then a grandson for my beloved Palazzo Espagnol! I had to be patient, however – everyone who knows anything at all knows that little girls are far too inclined to frustrate the plans of their owners by miscarrying or producing stillborns.

I suspected someone of going through my belongings again.There were signs of disturbance in my study, of someone slipping in like a weasel to spy on me. I feared for my precious books of human skin.

It struck me that children are known book-murderers. To avoid any unpleasantness among my daughters, and by means of
adapting
a fairy story for their consumption, I made the pale little ghosts severely afraid
of entering my study evermore.Their trembling gifted me another idea: I plucked hairs from their heads and inserted them between certain pages of the books, so I would know if anyone other than myself had visited my little colony.

No respect to the Gracious Reader, but even
His
esteemed fingers would not be allowed to partake of that part of my library. I could not bear for anyone but myself to lay a hand on those books.The very thought of it made my flesh creep as if a thousand ants were burrowing underneath it.

I became so fearful for my books that in the end I carried them up to the Palazzo Espagnol’s tall tower where I might be among them privately without fear of interruption or discovery. I laid special pieces of dust on every seventh stair, so I would know if anyone tried to spy on my haven.

Marcella Fasan

My reprieve could not last for ever, I knew that. Yet I was not at all ready when Sor Loreta’s
samba
came running to tell us that the
vicaria
was on her way to my cell, and that she was wearing that face that was not hers, but a mask of rapture.

Josefa put our feeble little plan into play immediately.

‘I so sorry to do this to you, madam, so sorry,’ she lamented, as she hit me on the temple with the Bible, hard enough to bring up an authentic bruise and swelling.

‘Lay you down, is good like that,’ she whispered tenderly as I crumpled to the floor, my head on the cushion she had prepared for me.

The
vicaria
’s footsteps rang through my silent courtyard. Those steps proceeded up to my side, until I felt her shadow cooling my body. I kept my eyes shut, breathing slowly and deeply, as if unconscious. Her sandaled foot nudged me. I smelled her dank breath. But when she turned her back on me to question Josefa, I looked up. There was a pouch of herbs hanging from the Vixen’s belt. I glimpsed her profile, and it took away my breath. Her ecstasy had wiped away all the fretfulness and anger
her features normally wore, rendering her face strangely blank, like those of a painted wooden puppet.

‘Sor Constanza did fall off her crutch, see,’ Josefa was explaining. Was her tone too defiant? ‘Hit the head. Out cold.’

The
vicaria
did not go away. I watched from under my lashes as she untied the strings and handed the pouch to Josefa. ‘Boil this as an infusion,’ she told the girl. ‘Spoon it into her lips even if she does not wake up.’

Sor Loreta rocked slightly, with her arms wrapped around her. She crooned joyfully, ‘It is what the Venetian Cripple needs.’

Josefa nodded soundlessly and took the poison carefully into her hand.

‘Go . . . go and
boil the kettle
,’ insisted the Vixen. Josefa’s face drew tight like a bud.

Sor Loreta is going to wait and watch the deed done
, I thought.
She is going to force my poor Josefa to murder me
.

‘Fire is out,’ Josefa protested.

‘Then make it,’ the
vicaria
sang.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

It is said that in the old times only the Andean nobility were permitted the narcotic pleasures of
Erythroxylum peruvianum
, which the natives call coca. The leaves, once dried in the sun, are stored in pouches. The method of ingestion is by chewing, which releases a pungent but not bitter flavour. These days, when altitude sickness strikes, or hunger, or sadness, Peruvians of all classes take refuge in the coca leaf’s pleasant power to deaden all troublesome sensations without killing the person who suffers them.

Later, when it all came out, I could scarcely breathe when I pictured what happened next. Only Josefa’s quick thinking saved Marcella’s precious life. While she stoked the fire, the
samba
contrived for the
vicaria
to turn her back for a moment. ‘Is someone at the door!’ she cried, kicking the coal bucket behind her.

While the
vicaria
ran to investigate the imagined knock, Josefa emptied the pouch of poison into the fire, substituting coca leaves from her own apron. She was stirring the mixture in a pot when Sor Loreta bustled back. The Vixen slapped Marcella’s face to rouse her from her faint.

‘It’s ready, give it to her now!’ she commanded Josefa.

Then she watched the boiling infusion being tipped down Marcella’s throat, savouring every last drop.

I pictured that moment – the weeping Josefa holding the cup to her beloved Marcella’s lips – and Marcella drinking, not knowing if she would survive to the end of the draught.

The coca infusion sent Marcella into a swift delirium. Her symptoms – clammy skin, blurring eyes and gastric convulsions – convinced the
vicaria
that her work was done, or at least in unstoppable progress. She left.

Josefa stayed with her mistress until she was halfway to being herself again. Then Hermenegilda kept vigil, while Josefa ran to tell us what had happened.

We sat around the scarred old table: myself, Fernando, a tearful Beatriz and the still-trembling Josefa. She urged, ‘You need act quick-quicker now.’

Two days later, one of my patients died. She was the right kind of patient: a destitute young Indian of no family; a slight creature, slighter even than Marcella. She had been found unconscious in a field on the edge of town. Even though just such a body – deceased – was the object of all my desire now, I had tended the woman with all my skill. I would not have killed by negligence, not even to free Marcella. How could I ask her to marry a murderer?

My patient succumbed to a sudden haemorrhage that could not have been anticipated. She had been carrying the beginnings of a dead child inside her, which I was about to remove in the hope of saving the mother at least. My knife revealed that the little corpse had turned putrid in the womb. I sat by the girl as the life ebbed out of her, holding her hand, and thanking her silently for what she was about to do for Marcella and myself. I did not even know her name.

I sent a messenger to a peon whom Marcella had advised me to take into our confidence. In twenty minutes this Arce had driven up with a cart. He pulled a creased drawing out of his pocket and compared it
with my face. Then he smiled, ‘Up on mountain, Marcella draw you,’ he explained.

He received the woman’s body with respect, crossing himself as he laid her in the cart. He waved away the coin I offered him.