Read Online The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric - Free Book Online

chose to illuminate only the soul of His most humble daughter with this insight.
    The Bishop found men and women openly cohabiting without the blessing of God, claiming that weddings were priced too high by the clerics of Arequipa. As if this were the reason that all the richest citizens of the town, including a Venetian nobleman named Fernando Fasan – he whose warehouse had been righteously destroyed by the earthquake of 1784 – lived in open concubinage with their mistresses.
    Next Bishop Chávez de la Rosa campaigned against the number of children born out of holy wedlock in Arequipa. He soon had a thousand children, the spawn of immoral unions, safely sequestered from decent society in his new Foundling Home. The high mortality rate among the bastard offspring reflected the wicked nature of their begetting.
    Little babies were buried every day, and the light nuns at Santa Catalina loved to say sentimental prayers for their souls. ‘A baby mass!’ was the constant cry among them, and of course Sor Andreola of the white skin must sit in the middle of everyone holding a baby doll, and soaking up their adoration as if she were the Virgin herself.
    I had been allowed out of the infirmary by then. But I refused to attend the crowded baby masses. I preferred to worship my own plaster image of the Baby Jesus in the strictest seclusion. I was not sure in my heart if those flesh-and-blood foundling babies could be sinless, as everyone said they were. It was my suspicion that their feckless parents had transmitted something bad in the blood.
    Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
    I never knew my parents. The nuns told me that I was the child of fornication and dishonour. For some time I thought that Fornication was my mother’s name and Dishonour was my father’s. Then that foolish idea was beaten out of me too.
    I was often told that I was fortunate to be an orphan in a Foundling Home in Venice, and not some infidel child left exposed on a mountain in a pagan wilderness. There were many ugly moments when I disagreed.
    By the time I was eight the skin on my back was pleated with the trails of old whippings.The other side of me was concave – I had never known a full belly. But I had clear eyes and a brain that refused to be incurious about the workings of the human body, and had only the mildest interest in what the nuns called my soul. For, as far as I could see, my lively soul was the thing they were trying to whip unconscious.
    The human body, though! Now there was a thing. I lay in bed at night listening to the blood ticking through my veins, working out its ways. I performed a dismal analysis upon the orchestra of coughs emitted by the other children in my dormitory. I soon came to know which coughs would fade away, and which would end with a blanket over the poor child’s head and a curt prayer for his passage to the afterlife.
    What I liked best was skin. Any sign of sores or rash and you would find me by the side of the suffering child. You might call it pity – but who was I to pity anyone? For me, it felt more like fondness. The nuns had done everything possible to harden my heart, yet it still opened up at the sight of a poor creature afflicted in the skin. To this day, it does that. I am still known to follow a stranger in the street, and press an ointment or a balm into his or her surprised hand: whatever is needed to cure his rash or Impetigo.
    Even as a little boy, I had a way with cutaneous maladies. I could pound a poultice from the poorest ingredients scraped up from thecorners of the convent, and apply it secretly under a bandage torn from my own shirt. I was beaten for ruining my clothes, but my little patients prospered; they brought me more patients with newer conditions. I did not know what these illnesses were called, yet I knew how to palliate them, it seemed by instinct, unless it was the Small-Pox that took hold. When Tommaso from my dormitory succumbed, I could do nothing more than hold his hand until he