Read Online The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michelle Lovric
Tags: Historical
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talk of a long-haired Corsican. With every passing month the merchants brought more tales of his depredations. An ocean did not seem vast enough to keep that dangerous madman Napoleon Bonaparte away from us.
Minguillo Fasan
Marcella, more lately Sister Constanza, was born twelve years after myself.
The Reader sighs, ‘At last!’ – was this event not promised in the very first pages of my tale? And yet so much verbiage has intervened. Can all of it be relevant? No. But if the Tetchy Reader desires an argument, I defy Him to deny that He’s been royally entertained along the way.
What? What’s that? The birth of my sister Marcella? Why not immediately resume that interesting subject? Ah, let us not rush at it. We shall arrive there roundaboutly with more pleasure. I am sure I hope so myself.
There’s a proverb quoted at the parturition of every Venetian woman, ‘A lord is born in the world’, which rang very hollowly that fearful year of 1796, with the French and Austrians kicking up tufts of the Veneto and Napoleon swearing quotably as ever ‘ I shall be an Attila to the state of Venice ’. Bitter Venetians were saying even at noble births, or perhaps especially at those, ‘Ah, a slave is born to the world.There will be no more Venetian lords now.’All the gladness slunk out of our city, and into its place crept shame.
Marcella was born under an azure sky unmolested by the pesk of a cloud. I lingered in the courtyard, savouring my mother’s birth cries, so much lustier than those of the kitten I had that morning dispatched with a rusty nail. I had left it impaled on our street door. I thought it a suitable emblem to inform passers-by that ours was that day a house of suffering, not to mention our city dying on her legs at the same time as my mother retched and ripped on her bed.
My mother’s screams echoed through the corridors of the Palazzo Espagnol and flowed out of the windows down the Grand Canal. My fatherwas of course away in Arequipa. While everyone else fussed around my mother that day, I, as the owner-in-waiting, had felt entitled to sit at my father’s desk, dip his pen in his inkwell, and open all his drawers with the key he kept hidden in a notch up the chimney. I had passed the sweet hours of the afternoon picking at the yellow meat of the pimples on my chin while looking at his private documents.
Nothing detained my interest for long – until I found a document signed just before his latest voyage to the Spanish colonies.
It began, ‘ I, Conte Fernando Fasan, of the Palazzo Espagnol, residing in this city of Venice, being unaffected in my intellect, but knowing death a certainty yet its hour unknown, do hereby order and execute this my last will and testament in the following manner . . .’
I looked for the words ‘bequeathe my entire estate’ shortly followed by ‘my son Minguillo Fasan’. Then I sat up and spat. It seemed that my papà had been thrown into a flummox by my experiment on the chickens in our courtyard garden. I had explained it to them all quite patiently.The French Revolution had lately separated a number of beings from their heads in a novel way, including nuns and priests. It gave a boy ideas, made him curious. And why should skill not be involved?
My foot started drumming on the floor when I read the following statement in his will: ‘ My son, Minguillo, being incapacitated with a mental disorder, is not fit to inherit.Therefore I leave my possessions to my next-born child upon that child reaching its majority .’
That next-born child was just that minute making its way into my world. My father was a bestial idiot! This will was an impossible deed! What if it was a daughter, the thing dividing my mother’s bowels as I read? In our world, daughters did not inherit except where there were no viable sons. Yet I was feeling very fine and healthy indeed, what’s more well engorged with living anger.
So, even before she was halfway into this world, I began to
Minguillo Fasan
Marcella, more lately Sister Constanza, was born twelve years after myself.
The Reader sighs, ‘At last!’ – was this event not promised in the very first pages of my tale? And yet so much verbiage has intervened. Can all of it be relevant? No. But if the Tetchy Reader desires an argument, I defy Him to deny that He’s been royally entertained along the way.
What? What’s that? The birth of my sister Marcella? Why not immediately resume that interesting subject? Ah, let us not rush at it. We shall arrive there roundaboutly with more pleasure. I am sure I hope so myself.
There’s a proverb quoted at the parturition of every Venetian woman, ‘A lord is born in the world’, which rang very hollowly that fearful year of 1796, with the French and Austrians kicking up tufts of the Veneto and Napoleon swearing quotably as ever ‘ I shall be an Attila to the state of Venice ’. Bitter Venetians were saying even at noble births, or perhaps especially at those, ‘Ah, a slave is born to the world.There will be no more Venetian lords now.’All the gladness slunk out of our city, and into its place crept shame.
Marcella was born under an azure sky unmolested by the pesk of a cloud. I lingered in the courtyard, savouring my mother’s birth cries, so much lustier than those of the kitten I had that morning dispatched with a rusty nail. I had left it impaled on our street door. I thought it a suitable emblem to inform passers-by that ours was that day a house of suffering, not to mention our city dying on her legs at the same time as my mother retched and ripped on her bed.
My mother’s screams echoed through the corridors of the Palazzo Espagnol and flowed out of the windows down the Grand Canal. My fatherwas of course away in Arequipa. While everyone else fussed around my mother that day, I, as the owner-in-waiting, had felt entitled to sit at my father’s desk, dip his pen in his inkwell, and open all his drawers with the key he kept hidden in a notch up the chimney. I had passed the sweet hours of the afternoon picking at the yellow meat of the pimples on my chin while looking at his private documents.
Nothing detained my interest for long – until I found a document signed just before his latest voyage to the Spanish colonies.
It began, ‘ I, Conte Fernando Fasan, of the Palazzo Espagnol, residing in this city of Venice, being unaffected in my intellect, but knowing death a certainty yet its hour unknown, do hereby order and execute this my last will and testament in the following manner . . .’
I looked for the words ‘bequeathe my entire estate’ shortly followed by ‘my son Minguillo Fasan’. Then I sat up and spat. It seemed that my papà had been thrown into a flummox by my experiment on the chickens in our courtyard garden. I had explained it to them all quite patiently.The French Revolution had lately separated a number of beings from their heads in a novel way, including nuns and priests. It gave a boy ideas, made him curious. And why should skill not be involved?
My foot started drumming on the floor when I read the following statement in his will: ‘ My son, Minguillo, being incapacitated with a mental disorder, is not fit to inherit.Therefore I leave my possessions to my next-born child upon that child reaching its majority .’
That next-born child was just that minute making its way into my world. My father was a bestial idiot! This will was an impossible deed! What if it was a daughter, the thing dividing my mother’s bowels as I read? In our world, daughters did not inherit except where there were no viable sons. Yet I was feeling very fine and healthy indeed, what’s more well engorged with living anger.
So, even before she was halfway into this world, I began to
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