The Book of Human Skin Read Free

early life has monstered such creatures quite against their will.
    While I dress stab-wounds or roll poultices on beaten wives, I often wonder – why are we so lenient towards abominable human beings, yet we declare unequivocally against Cancer, for example, or the Small-Pox?If we put out an illness, we rejoice. There is no lyric moment of regret for its passing.
    Now your human villain stalks the world much the way the Small-Pox roams the blood and wrecks the body’s integument. He hurts. He disfigures. He kills. He’ll do it again, if not stopped. So why do we hesitate to ‘cure’ his evil? Do we try to understand the feelings of the Small-Pox scab? Do we perfume the stink of the Small-Pox pustule with excuses?
    There are people who are a disease, and it is purely our indulgence that makes a plague out of them.
    No one talks of things like this. But I have always liked to write them down and have them keep company with other musings of mine.
    In Peru there are nuns who keep fleas in bottles for the companionship of something lively in their quiet cells. So did these written thoughts of mine serve me for many years. In the absence of mother, father, sister or brother, I was always grateful for the quill and the flutters of paper seeming alive under my fingers, especially in the lonely hours when there were no more patients to tend, and in the aching years when I was denied the company of she whose thoughts are my book and whose heart is my Host.
    Sor Loreta
    Our town of Cuzco was stacked high with the craggy follies of the Incas – forts and palaces dedicated to their barbarous gods. How those graceless offerings must have disgusted our true Creator!
    With the death of Tupac Amaru II, a quietness began to fall in Peru. At first, little spasms of revolt still shuddered through the ignorant valleys, rather as a dead snake still moves, not understanding that God has wished it dead. But gradually everyone grew quiet, from the Indians, the mixed-blood mestizos , the African sambos to the real white Spanish like myself. Inca portraits, names, dances, clothes and their pagan funeral rites were outlawed, so that they might cease to be sorry for being conquered and instead grow to love thegentle dominion of the Spanish and the Mother Church. But the Indians were too ill-bred to understand that it was all over with their gods. Secretly, some still clung to the old infidel ways.
    It was not long after they cut up Tupac Amaru that I was taken by a little Indian servant girl to see her family hovel. No doubt she hoped to excite some charity by her poverty. However, she claimed she wanted to show me something particular. She was filled to the brim with excitement. Inside the house, she opened a cupboard under the stairs and my eyes fell upon a mummy with the skin still on and the teeth grinning through leather lips. He was sitting up on his haunches and dressed in splendid rags.
    ‘Is my great-grandpa,’ she declared, thumping his shoulder affectionately. A little lump of dried gristle fell off in a puff of sour air.
    ‘Why does your great-grandfather sit up like that when he is dead?’ I enquired innocently. ‘Should he not lie down in his grave like a Christian?’
    The servant told me, ‘Because he comes to dinner by us when the dinner is good. All us grandpas do so.’
    Then she picked up a seashell and blew a soft sad note through it. I shook my head because it was one of the forbidden pututo trumpets that the Indians used in their heathen mourning.
    Mistaking my expression for awe, the servant girl next gave me a gruesome tale of the peasant daughters chosen for the honour of sacrifice. ‘Them girls was called capacocha ,’ she breathed reverently through her gapped teeth. These capacochas were taken from their families at the age of four and sent to the priestesses to be raised.
    She told me a scandalous thing then: the Inca house of the priestesses, who were called Virgins of the Sun, once stood in exactly the same