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

ruined face troubled them and gave them bad dreams, and that the smell of my breath made them retch.
    Sor Andreola never went to the infirmary except to hold the hands of the sick or sit by them while she embroidered her interminable chasubles and stolas, spinning silks in her fingers like a white spider. Yet for those visits she was praised and almost worshipped by the other nuns, and her presence was constantly requested.
    The infirmary sisters were blind to God’s design, ignorant of the fact that to look on my face was to be blessed. Not wishing them to persist in their delusions, I pressed my request upon them with strong words. I was refused with hysterical curses. So instead I washed all the infirmary filth, even the bandages and garments of two sisters who were sick with enormous stinking sores.
    Secretly in the night I went to those sick sisters and kissed them on the mouth and kissed each of their sores even though they tried to kick me away with their feeble limbs. I told them that I loved their souls so much that nothing would stop me from saving them. They wept. I informed them that, like Colette of Corbie, I could effect cures by putting food I had chewed between their lips, and by spitting over their faces some water I had held in my mouth. Yet they moaned when I did this. Then, like Santa Catalina herself, I drank the very water with which I had washed away their pus, which also tasted sweeter on my tongue than communion wine. The result was that I contracted their fever and was laid out for many days.
    In my rapt state I saw many visions and foretold many great events. In my visions there appeared a beautiful woman of my stature dressed in gold with many jewelled shawls up to her cheeks. If all my visions had been recorded by the other sisters, then they would have made a large book. Yet my sisters neglected to do so.
    As for the aforementioned infirmary nuns who had refused me access to the sick, not much time passed before one of them came down with a tumour in her breast, another fell ill to the dropsy, the third was apparently killed by a tile falling from a roof damaged by the earthquake and the fourth and most discourteous of them succumbed to a swift pneumonia after a solitary cold bath: so it was that the four of them soon expired in the most pitiful circumstances.
    No one can resist the wisdom and will of our great God.
    Gianni delle Boccole
    No one could pin nothin on the young Master. Nothin. Not the doctors. And not the officers of the law, what was summoned because Riva’s passing were so vilent n all-of-a-sudden.The Palazzo Espagnol drained there eyes. Them yahooties took in the tapestries n marbles, and fell to bows n scrapes, dropping there brains out o there breeches. They forgot to ask yer most alimentary question. What zackly were Minguillo doin with young Riva when she died?
    ‘Don’t pertain to me,’ the boy deklared, if anyone dared ask, playin with his lower lip.
    Banditing God!
    It broked my Master Fernando Fasan’s heart, it broked all our hearts. The maid Anna and my sister Cristina was inconsolibble. I held them two in my arms and let em each cry a canal on my shoulder, poor ones.
    Without een pretending not to sob, my Master Fernando Fasan askt Cristina to fold way all Riva’s little dresses in a coffer, and straitway offert my sister a new post as chambermaid.
    ‘I don’t want to stay here no more,’ wept Cristina, but not so’s my Master could hear, of course.
    It felt as if all our blood ud flowed out o the cracks in the walls of the Palazzo Espagnol, for we was left weak and wondering, like the babiest kittens isn’t it.
    Minguillo Fasan
    As I remarked latterly, the Reader has now embarked upon a long walk in the dark with this voice of mine. Given that He’ll not be hearing from the other, oblivious protagonists of this tale, I must do the necessary to keep Him by my side.
    Yet not as some voices do, laying a little white hand on the Reader’s heart and trembling