The Book of Human Skin (59 page)

‘The . . .
vic
. . .’ The words jerked out of me mixed with vomit and bile. ‘Thank . . .’

‘The
priora
is still alive. And if you had not come, and occupied the Vixen,’ said Margarita, ‘there would have been no cover for what Marcella is doing now.’

‘Has . . . she?’

‘I cannot tell you. I do not know. She refused help with the actual deed because she did not want to implicate us if everything went wrong. If it has been done, it is over now. She will be outside – you must go to her.’

From inside the
priora
’s cell came the sound of Sor Loreta screaming like an animal and younger voices speaking to her angrily.

I rose unsteadily, ‘I mus . . .’

‘No,’ insisted Margarita. ‘If Sor Loreta becomes violent – well, she is not the only one with access to stupefying herbs. Her two assistants sleep peacefully now, thanks to something from the pharmacy garden. We can take care of everything now: we Santa Catalina nuns have a most particular way we wish to proceed.’

A nun who called herself Rosita took my shoulder. ‘I’m the
portera
,’ she explained, producing a bunch of keys from her belt. She led me through meandering ways to the front gate.

‘Marcella will have used the back gate; you must leave this way,’ she whispered. ‘Now go!’

The fresh night air hit my face, waking all my senses up, most of all the one of love.

Marcella Fasan

I limped down a long stone lane, turning right at the first opportunity. But this street was crowded with taverns and their rowdy patrons. I could not be looked at and remarked upon by people whose curiosity and tongues were loosened by corn beer. I doubled back, found a nightsoil alley, stole along it, into another road that led away from Santa Catalina, and at last a turning to the right.

Two priests were strolling towards me, deep in conversation.

One of them was the man who had officiated at Rafaela’s funeral. He had stared at me then, the Venetian cripple – he might remember my face! And if not that, my limp. I stilled my body, forced myself to crouch down, pretending to tie a loose lace of my boot.

Footsteps approached me. The priest spoke, ‘This is no place for a girl to be out alone. Does your mother know where you are?’

My head lowered, I shook my head. I dared not speak: he would recognize my Venetian accent from the confessional.

The two priests passed on, grumbling. I doubled back and turned right. Or should it have been left?

How long had I been galloping around Arequipa, lost? Had they given up hope on me, Santo and Fernando?

Then, unexpectedly, the magnificent square opened up in front of me, and there, in the middle, was the fountain and the little man with his trumpet pointing up to the sky. And under him was a figure that I recognized. His back was to me. He was splashing his face and mouth with water from the fountain – why? Between splashes, he stared intently in the direction of the cathedral. He had expected me to come directly from Santa Catalina – he could not have anticipated the diversions that the soldiers and priests had forced on me. How must he have felt, those dragging minutes, thinking I had failed?

The ground was not beneath my feet as I ran across the square to him. When I reached him, I did not dare to salute or touch him. I breathed quietly behind him, until he turned around and took me into his arms, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to kiss and caress the weeping eyes and smoke-filled hair of an escaped nun and madwoman with a stain of green around her finger.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

For a moment I could not hear Fernando’s voice for the colour of

Marcella’s eyes.

He was calling, ‘Come! Quickly! Bring her to the sedan chair!’

He was asking me to gather Marcella in my arms and carry her?

I thought then,
Once I pick her up, she will have to plead with me to ever let her feet touch the ground again. And even then I may deny her.

Marcella Fasan

In the confusion that followed the discovery of my supposed charred corpse, Josefa too slipped out of the convent, having first rescued my crutch from the pumpkin vines. She brought with her a handful of the ashes of the poor girl we had burned. We gave them a loving and respectful burial beside the dead foetus that Santo had taken from her body.

Josefa was instantly installed as the dearest member of our household, excepting Santo and my new mother Beatriz and my brother Fernando. Oh, that was everyone! Well, we loved her and would never forget what we owed her.

Hermenegilda came to us full of the latest news from behind the walls of Santa Catalina. Within hours, every nun in the convent knew
exactly what had really taken place in my cell and in the
priora
’s. Rosita and Margarita had not been able to keep their secrets, though they were steadfast to our plan of allowing the
vicaria
to stay in her position, in name only and carefully guarded, until the
priora
was well enough to resume her post.

‘People
know
?’ I trembled, for what if Minguillo heard of my flight?

‘’Carse they do. A good story is good story, make talk. Is no problem,’ said Josefa imperturbably.

Even Sor Loreta must have known, in some part of her distorted brain, though she chose not to. Hermenegilda had told us that, rather than admit the scandal, the
vicaria
had written to my brother that I was no more, just as I had hoped.

‘Did she send the portrait to prove it?’ I asked.

‘’Carse she did. Quick-quick. She did not want it around place to haunt, hoo hoooo.’

‘But if people know, won’t someone tell the Holy Fathers, and won’t they come to take me back to the convent? Did I burn that poor woman for nothing?’ I wailed.

Josefa laughed. ‘O no, not nothing. Needed burned dead lady to get buried for you. So Sor Constanza proper dead. But the priests they cannot let out know truth too-too late. Make them look so crazy-fool-stupid. So many times the nuns of Santa Catalina make them look stupid already! Is men, like any other. Proud. Must stand on dignify, pretend don’t know nothing.’

So that would be an end to it. Sor Constanza had gone to her wedding night with God. She would be seen no more on this earth. The Bishop had been informed. A death certificate for Sor Constanza had been lodged with the notaries. For such an irreligious death, and remains already self-cremated, a scanty service in a poor church had been considered more than sufficient. We discovered that Sor Constanza’s ashes, apart from the handful rescued by Josefa, had been quietly buried in an unmarked grave in unconsecrated ground.

Marcella Fasan
could marry whom she wished.

Santo saw trouble from a different quarter: ‘Your brother will come after the truth. The lure of getting back your dowry will bring him here, but more than that, curiosity and frustration. That you died apparently at your own hand and not his: that will drive him into a frenzy. We are not free of him yet.’

We were also stricken with worry for Gianni and Anna – we had not judged it safe to warn them in advance of the plan and its accomplishment. But how agonizing for them, if they heard of my apparent death, now that it was successfully accomplished! We could only hope that our letter reached them before Sor Loreta’s to my brother, informing him of my supposed end, with the portrait as evidence.

We had already decided to live as a public couple in Arequipa. Marcella Fasan had no papers of her own for the notaries, and the last person I wished to see was a man of God, even to marry me, even if we could have afforded the outrageous sums the local priests charged for weddings.

So we married each other.

Mother Beatriz made me a veil sewn with rosebuds, and gave me her best dress to wear, the seams much taken in. As she stitched me into it, I breathed perfume that my father had brought her from Venice and the Old World. Arce arrived with his cart decked in vines and ribbons. In a field on the city outskirts, we gathered a bouquet of wild flowers. Under the high sky, Fernando gave me away, producing two silver rings he had fashioned himself from Beatriz’s last bracelet. Santo took me to his wife. Josefa pronounced us married. There never was a happier wedding. For our wedding feast there were beans and day-old bread. We could afford nothing else. We took my flowers to the grave of the unknown mother and her baby.

For our wedding night, there was peace and privacy, and an endless, light-soaked dawn.

Minguillo Fasan

So suddenly without a scrap of notice I received this portrait of Marcella from the nuns. If a letter had ever accompanied it, that letter had been lost in one of the numerous passages the painting had taken. And, as the Retentive Reader will recall, I at that time knew absolutely nothing of any arcane layings-down as to when and how nuns might have their faces painted.

I had not commissioned any portrait of my sister. It was confoundedly odd that Marcella should wish to send me an image of herself, when she had spent her life trying to hide away from my attention.

I placed the ailing, flaking thing in my study and used it to frighten my daughters for a few days.Then I took it up to the tower and surrounded it with my books of human skin in a tight circle. I thought their clamorous presence would soon sink the life that somehow shimmered in that portrait.

But it did not.The light still sparkled in her eyes.

Then I got to wondering. One hundred and seventy-five steps to visit Marcella and the books – each step a new speculation. And then I got to be tortured, with my brain raking for whys and hows, each doubt like a knife stuck in the small ribs.
Why
would my sister send me a portrait of herself?
How
could she contrive to have it painted and dispatched? Such a fine piece of work: it must have cost a fine piece of money.Where did she get her hands on
that
? I had trimmed her
peculios
to the bone.

I wrote to the nuns in Arequipa, but subtly.The way I phrased it was, ‘
Is all well with my dear sister?
’

Three months later I had my reply, smelling of gunpowder from its passage down the coast. For a general called Bernardo O’Higgins and one José de San Martín, who had ‘liberated’ Argentina, were currently blasting their way to Chilean independence. It was rumoured that Peru would soon be heading in the same direction.

There had also been a change of regime at Santa Catalina. A new
priora
replied tersely, in handwriting that was wild and odd, ‘
Sor Constanza does as well as she deserves
.’

I could not read her signature. I noticed that she used the capital ‘M’ for ‘Me’ when she explained how the top position had fallen to her. It was clear that Marcella had gravely displeased her and that she rejoiced sternly in some misfortune of my sister’s.

But what misfortune? That intrigued me. My sister had misbehaved then, and they were punishing her. That, I had to see. I had missed Marcella’s misery, I realized. It would do me a power of good to be near it again.

Anyway, I had pharmaceutical business in Peru to tickle up, and pleasures to renew in Valparaiso now the Chilean revolution was safely over, by all accounts. I had not been to the South Americas for three years. At the thought of the mountains, the cranes, the white walls and red bougainvillea of Arequipa, I felt a tug of desire in every inch of my body, especially the inches.

I had a yen not to be on my lonesome for this long journey. Now that I had seen the ways and valleys and peaks, they would not detain my entire interest a second time. And it would be useful to have someone to test any food that my nose judged guilty of adulteration. I called in my half-wit valet Gianni and told him, ‘We’re going to Arequipa.’

And watched his jaw drop five inches in one second.

Gianni delle Boccole

The poortret of Marcella got me worrit more than anything. There were a message in them sweet eyes for me, yet I were too stupid to read it. For why a picture of her now? Did nuns get thereselfs painted? It went round n round my head like a rat in a trap, that there were summing not right bout this poortret. Ide heared nothing from Santo nor Fernando to make sense of it.

Minguillo spent most of his time up in the tower now, hardly niver come down een to eat. We was told to leave trays on the second landing. Sumtimes they were untoucht the next morning. He dint scarcely talk to us, just baconed with his hand. When we seed him, he were a thing to behold. His eyes on storks. His skin lookt like a dirty tablecloth. Them three shelves was empty in his study now, and the poortret was vanisht, so I guest he had got them all up there with him, them bein his real famly, that’s what he ud made of it.

When Minguillo told me that we was oft to Peru I were torn atwixt laffing n crying. Laffing that Minguillo ud given me the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world. Crying because Minguillo were going to Arequipa, and that were surely for to do more bad to Marcella.

For himself, he wunt lay his cats upon the table, what he were up to. Wunt say nothin bout the why. It were all bout the when. ‘WHEN can you get my trunk packed? WHEN are you going to get that stupid look off your face?’

Yes, I were daydreamin all the time them days. For I ud painted myself a dream: that the misterious plan was all eksecuted, that Santo n Marcella was alredy safe and happy in Arequipa. That they was marrid and they expected a little one.

I
had to
paint a dream. There was still no letters, Beast ovva God. Silents like death. I brewed on that silents. It fomented in my mind.

I was that firstrated that I went to see Cecilia Cornaro, to tell her bout the poortret. But she weren’t there – one of her signs sayed, ‘Gone to Cadiz to do minor Bourbons. Feed the cat.’ Her studio door were open so I walkt in. Puss were in residence, looking feroshus mean. I went to the butchery next door and bought him some livers for his trouble, and he condesended to eat them in my presents. I strokt his big old head and lookt round the studio.