The Book of Human Skin (63 page)

‘For Minguillo Fasan,’ he said quietly, pointing to the packet. ‘Passage paid.’

‘What,’ I demanded, ‘are you doing here?’

Our business together had not flourished.Your man had for some reason taken against me. So what had brought him all this way up a mountain to find me?

‘Anyone may come to Arequipa,’ he remarked, glancing around the sordid room with the air of someone who expected just what he saw. ‘In fact, I have dear friends of my own here and I wished to pay them a visit.’

‘Friends? In Arequipa? You never mentioned that before.’ I was naturally excluded from the circle of ‘friends’. I felt bile tight-lacing its bubbles in my stomach.

Silently, Hamish Gilfeather handed me the parcel.

‘Who’s this from then?’

‘From Venice,’ he replied insolently, as if that was a proper answer. ‘I was coming to inform you that our business relations – that never started as far as I was concerned – are absolutely at an end. I thought I would make this delivery at the same time.’

‘You – you –
dismiss
me?’

‘I was disgusted to learn from a real physician what filth you put into your so-called “Tears of Santa Rosa” that you wished me to sell to respectable ladies in Scotland! Fortunately, I discovered the truth before poisoning any of my countrywomen wi’ lead. I destroyed every bottle.’

‘It is no problem of mine that you did not turn a fortune on “The Tears of Santa Rosa”. Everyone profits from it, who chooses to.You’ll still pay me for what I supplied,’ I parried in a quiet, threatening voice.

He handed me a purse. ‘Pray do not agitate yourself. I had not planned to negotiate wi’ the likes of you. It would soil my hands. This settles our accounts. I’ll be on my way now. Good evening to you, sir, madam,’ he said with the barest civility to me and a sincere smile to the whore.

The ripostes fizzled acidly in my throat, instead of making a clean exit through my lips. Hamish Gilfeather turned on his heel unanswered and uninsulted, and left.

Throwing the purse on the sagging bed, I sent the whore away. It appeared that I had mislaid the usual urge.Anyway, there was surely more entertainment in the mysterious parcel than in her well-ransacked treasury. Its shape and size gave me reason to hope for something that would lift my spirits. I picked up my gift, which was addressed in a lively hand I knew not, and divested it of the string, paper and linen that bound it.A cloud of brown dust rose as I lifted the dense little book out of its swaddling. I buried my nose in the fragrance of its cover, breathing deeply, searching out the familiar scent: yes – and surely the truth shall have already crept upon the Reader – my eager eye, my nose and fingers told me that this was a volume bound in human skin.

It was a book of gynaecological matters, beginning with a treatise on virginity by Severus Pinæus and concluding with a tract on conception and childbirth. Illustrations showed the female parts stretched and dissected. It had been printed in Amsterdam in 1663, but the binding was newer.

Which of my faithful booksellers, my slave-traders, my rind-pimps, I wondered, had dug up this little dainty of anthropodermic bibliopegy?

The cover was golden brown, tessellated like a snake’s back and much beset with delicate gilding. Inside, my anonymous correspondent had inserted a slip of paper on which was written: ‘
The doctor who owned this book had it rebound in the skin of a female patient. He thought it “congruent”. She was a white woman, yet the doctor had it tanned to a darker colour using sumac, presumably to extend his joke.This seems to us to be your kind of a joke
.’

I was already smiling when I read that, and then a shiver took hold of my body. How could this person – no, these
persons
, for they had written ‘seems to
us
’ – know exactly what would amuse me?

Yet how incompetent were my correspondents! Did they not know the rules of the chase? Before handing over such an item, all my usual booksellers would have tempted me by an account in writing, teasing up my fantasies to entice my purse wide open. I swelled with my sixth sense – that of getting a bargain. I would beat them to the ground for this item.

Then an involuntary tremor fluted up and down my spine. I looked around me.Was I observed? Was someone enjoying the spectacle of me at work with my hands on a book of human skin? Were there other messages for me?

I leafed through that dusty old book so fast that it promptly and unkindly cut me right across the palps of my fingers on both hands. A paper cut is notoriously more painful than a sword injury! I sucked my wounded fingers and looked at the diagrams of female reproductive organs, speculating. I tasted the dust of the street suspended in my own sweet blood, and it brought back a memory.

All those years ago, in our country house in Venice, I had damaged my fingers when I shot Marcella’s knee. Dirt had invaded a trifling wound.That was how I lost my favourite finger. Here in filthy South America, might I not be tempting fate to suck on bleeding digits after touching a book that had travelled the world unwashed? I pulled those affectioned pieces of myself
out of my mouth with a plop and stared at them as if they were friends who had just revealed themselves as enemies.

Too late I sniffed at the linen and the paper in which my taking-away gift had been enclosed. I only throw it out to the Investigative Reader, this strange and simple fact: those wrappings smelled of oil paint.

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini

When Hamish Gilfeather walked through our door, I was speechless with surprise.

Not so Marcella, who threw herself upon him with a delighted shriek that made him drop his parcels. For one moment I was pierced by a salty little stab of jealousy. To know Marcella was to love her. Hamish had known her long years. They had voyaged together – I had not yet had that privilege with my wife. Drawing back a little, I watched to detect clinical symptoms of sentimental guilt or complicity. I can plead only this to excuse my unreasonable and unbecoming jealousy: I had not yet grown accustomed to the safety of love.

The Scotsman held her back from him a moment, and ordered, ‘Do that thing again, lassie.’

She ran back to where she had been sitting, then leaped out of her chair and into his arms again.

‘Where’s yon limp of yours, child?’

‘Shoes. Magic shoes. My brother Fernando . . .’

‘Shoes and a wee something else, I would say,’ Hamish Gilfeather smiled hugely. ‘You have resolved to allow others to help you, I see.’

And I must allow Marcella to love
, I reminded myself.
It is what she is made of
. Now I too embraced Hamish Gilfeather with heartfelt warmth, exclaiming, ‘How? Why?’

‘I received a letter from the good Gianni. So I knew Minguillo Fasan was on his way here, and I feared that could mean no good for Marcella. He said that you, Santo, were here already, and well,
I thought it was time for all those wi’ a soft spot in their hearts for young Marcella to bide a while together and see what could be contrived for her good.’

He looked at our thin silver rings, and our transparent happiness, and said, ‘I see that the very best thing has already been contrived. It was worth ten stormy voyages to see this done.’

He kissed the top of Marcella’s head and gathered up his scattered parcels. ‘I bear gifts,’ he murmured, ‘from Cecilia and myself.’

‘Cecilia and yourself,’ I repeated meaningfully – and here he flushed a little.

‘Aye, I met wi’ her in Cadiz on my way here. She is making portraits of the local Bourbons, ye know. She entrusted me with a few errands in Arequipa – deliveries and shopping, ye know women. She has a yen to grind some Andean lapis lazuli into her blue paint . . .’

‘Deliveries?’ I asked sharply. ‘Do you have a letter for me?’

I dreaded a confession, that she had been to my old Master, Doctor Ruggiero in Stra, that she had embarrassed me with a foolish attempt to make use of my Small-Poxed dream of revenge.

‘No letter for you, Doctor Santo, just her best regards,’ and he winked. I did not like the mischievous look of that wink.Was it Cecilia Cornaro’s wink, duly transmitted, or his own? Was he intimate enough with the artist to have been treated to an account of the shaming thoughts I had revealed?

But what could I say to shake all the secrets out of that wink? In retrospect, I could have said many things, and acted decisively, and prevented . . . but I did not. I was too ashamed to expose my filthy fantasy to Marcella and Hamish Gilfeather when such a thing seemed in that joy-filled moment quite unnecessary.

The merchant was opening a large packet. ‘This is for Marcella, from Cecilia,’ and he unfurled a roll of linen with two dozen pockets, each plump with a bladder of oil paint or a pair of squirrel-fur paintbrushes. I breathed a sigh of undeserved relief. Cecilia Cornaro might spit fire like a dragon, but she had simple kindness in her heart.

Hamish Gilfeather embraced us one last time and turned to the door, shaking another of his packets so it gurgled like an empty stomach. ‘Now where is that young villain Gianni? I have a grand desire to tip a dram of some scurrilous Scotch whisky down his throat, and put the
wobbling boots on the chap. I have brought the necessary particularly for that purpose.’

Minguillo Fasan

One day after Hamish Gilfeather made his delivery, I had more than a memory of gangrene. Morning punched me in the face with unbearable illumination: those paper cuts festered and that ominous tingling began again just as it had when I was a young man fresh from shooting his sister. From my skin arose that luminescence that announces the disease: just such a luminescence, I recollected, as was promised by my ‘Tears of Santa Rosa’. Before nightfall the Spanish surgeon Sardon was climbing the stairs with his imperfectly serrated saw and a belated bottle of carbolic acid to stop the putrefaction.

After the first surgery, I burned with a fever and my throat and face grew fat with putrid liquors.The very soles of my feet crisped as if on hot coals. I quacked myself with brandy, letting it suck on my pain. And, as I closed up the hatches of my skin and curled in a ball, I noticed a new patch of red spots rising out of the black hairs on my abdomen.

I drank my dinner alone that night, for my buffle-headed valet had deserted. Gianni sent me an illiterate kind of note – turned out he could write after all! – to say that he ‘risined’ from my service.Then I realized that he had never really been in it, had he? He was Marcella’s creature, right from the start.They all were.

I had travelled to Arequipa with him at my side, I had paid his passage, fed him and watered him: and all the while he must have been carrying my father’s real will in his shirt. I tortured myself with wondering how he had found it: perhaps even in one of the searches I commissioned myself ?

Outside in the street I heard some Indians muttering ‘
chapetones pezuñentos!
’ Stink-hoofed Spaniards. It seemed that another little revolution was brewing in Arequipa, one of those slow-boiling ones that end up with
the cauldron turned over in the fire and all destroyed.The old city seemed destined to mirror the great events of my own life with its upheavals.

I began to scratch the hillocks on my torso, which felt like pieces of shot under my skin.Then, unwillingly, I looked at my face in the mirror. I leave the Reader to supply suggestions for the curses I employed upon myself now for refusing the Small-Pox inoculation on my first visit to Arequipa, only insisting that the epithets are vicious and profane. My whole belly suddenly heaved and I was left looking at sour stars of ill-assimilated food on the floor.

I felt the grave’s maggots tickling under my skin.

This was going to be a little uncomfortable.

Gianni delle Boccole

Josefa come rolling in to the tavern where I were taking my luncheon of beans and bread. ‘The Minguillo is took ill.’

‘Ill how?’ I askt happily.

‘With the spotty swelly smelly sickness. Plus, his fingers is rotted and bein cutted off.’

‘The Small-Pox? Do that make your fingers rot I dunt think? But there haint no Small-Pox in Arequipa. I bethought ye was all innokulerated agin it here.’

‘He got it by a present from Venice, Santo says. From a dirty dirty book with pus crusts on its inside. I don’t know passably why, but Santo is verrrrrry upsetted about it. And here is a letter for you from Cadiz too. Has took its time to come. Three months.’

I ripped oft the seal and scanned the contens. It were a fairy’s writin, a fairy with a hysterkal habit of the drink, Ide say. It tookt me a minute to unnerstand that this were the hand o the artist Cecilia Cornaro.

She writed, ‘
For safety, I send this letter separately from the item of our mutual revenge, and in anticipation of it, so that if anyone thinks I am wrong to do this thing, there is yet time to intercept Hamish Gilfeather and have the item destroyed
.’

I jumpt near out o my skin. By an oirony,
this
letter ud been held up in a quaranty, allowing its plaguey friend to arrive before it, Grate Rascal ovva God!

We sat round the table that night, workin the story back to the bone. Santo ud give Cecilia Cornaro the idea, he admitted it, the day he split her fingers what Minguillo’s thugs had soldered together with the fire.

‘And if I were to go to her studio now, I know I would see the portrait of the doctor from Stra, the one who collects Small-Pox scabs, and I would know how he paid for it, and that this transaction was brokered by me.’

Marcella clutched his hand. He bowed his head.

‘Would that be one Doctor Ruggiero?’ I askt, partly to cover the bowel howls that come from all them beans what we ate.

Santo nodded and lookt down.

Next to him,Amish Gillyfether put his head in his hands. ‘Cecilia!’ he moaned. ‘She told me that her cat liked me. The trouble was I like
her
a great deal more than the little beast could know. With Sarah gone, I was . . . I could not keep away from Cecilia.’