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

its wet eyelashes: the Chivalrous Reader must read on, just as a Knight must save his Lady! There’s no pleasing everyone. One Reader loves the confidential whisper; it makes Him feel magnificent as a confessor in his black booth. Another fixes His lectatory mandibles upon some voyeur’s observations of the more interesting lives of others. Then there’s the bird’s-eye view, the writer serving as invisible air beneath the Reader’s soaring wings. Wheedling and flattery are popular. So is a comical, ranting tone.
    What? What’s that? The Reader requests that I cease holding up long-winded and unflattering mirrors? Insists I provide instead a sensible account of my maturing childhood, with explanations tending to subsequent events etcetera and so forth?
    Pazienza . I would not willingly infuriate, but there’s little of note to tell. My sister Riva’s death made everyone long-nosed as parsnips for a while.That was tedious, as treats and outings were thin upon the ground.The Venetian Republic played out its last days of gold-leafed and spun-sugar magnificence. The oil portraits of a girl artist called Cecilia Cornaro became our city’s sole object of trading value. Speaking of faces, my own countenance beganto take on the features that would carry it through to the end of this story, if you can call it that.
    The stairs of the Palazzo Espagnol grew smaller; I became familiar with the servants’ knees, thighs, bellies and eventually their faces, not that anyone turned theirs my way voluntarily. I attended briefly at an academy for young noblemen. I was sent back. Call that another story. I submitted to a priest’s tutoring at home. The Reader will be gratified to know that my expensive education was not wasted on me. I had a gift for languages, as He knows already. I also grew into a great lover of books, though my tastes were most particular and possibly a little strong for the stomach of the Fastidious Reader.
    When I say that I loved books, I mean that I loved not just the souls of my books but their bodies. Even before I could read, I was a fanatic for bindings, affectioned to the intimate protection and adornment jointly embodied in their snug fittings. I adored the shapeliness and firmness of books. I enjoyed their intransigent corners, their rich smells and the way they opened and lay down flat in front of me on the merest suggestion of my fingers.Then, when I learned to read, I was happy in a whole new way: in a house where everyone avoided me, the books in our library exposed their tender insides and submitted to my attentions whenever and however I wanted.
    Call it a liking that I also nourished for Cristina, the plump little daughter of our former loose-legged cook. (Does the Reader not think it shows a nice side of my nature, to be attached to a human skin that was not attached to my own body? I am sure I hope so myself.)
    I took my first kiss from the said Cristina, as a prelude to easing the virginity off the two of us. She spat and shook me off, ‘You are not nice, Minguillo.’
    ‘What am I then?’ I enquired, my hand warm and busy down her bodice.
    ‘You are . . . the other thing,’ she stammered.
    Her little brother’s employment, I mentioned, hung in the balance.They were bastard orphans, the pair of them, and she grasped the thing directly. But she screamed when I twisted a little bud of a nipple to see if it would come off. I had always wondered. My researches were interrupted by the arrival of the nightsoilman. After that I did not find the cook’s daughter alone again until – another episode of this account, some months later.
    What? It is provoking to hint in this way? Really, I despair of the Reader who still insists on a story delivered in neat pellets like a rosary. He must learn to bear with the vagaries of a tale told the way a cat coughs, unexpectedly, and learn to like it.
    My childhood withered. I suppose I was in my way content. Even though my mother avoided me and my father