The Book of Human Skin Read Free Page A

place occupied by our own Christian convent of Santa Catalina! The two buildings, one heathen, one holy, shared the same foundations. Where pure young novices now fasted and scourged themselves for the glory of God, the pagan girls used to be fattened up for sacrifice with llama stew and maize.
    My servant licked her lips, ‘They aten meat most every day!’
    After that they cut their hair off, apparently, and took them on a long journey up a mountain to a shrine.
    ‘Then did they murder the little girls?’ I whispered.
    ‘Oh no, they girls did it of theyselves. They was give maize beer and coca leaves to make em feel sleep-sleep and byenbye they was left lone.’
    ‘So they starved to death?’
    ‘Some of em got sick before they died. So high up there, the puna , you know. Make everyone sick sometime. Like the old uns. They must clean big vomits off my great-grandpa when he did die,’ she observed, pointing to a dried green mess like lichen on the mummy’s sleeve.
    I left that house with a horrible vision of the great-grandfather’s corpse at table with a napkin wrapped under his ragged chin while they poured soup through him on to the floor. But then I remembered that those people were too poor and vulgar to use a napkin.
    Naturally the Holy Mother Church frowned on the Indians’ keeping and worshipping their ancestors in the house. The Christian conquistadores had hunted down nearly all those mummies hundreds of years ago, so it was exceedingly rare to find one now. I was happy in more ways than I can write down because I knew God had chosen me to specially extirpate this idolatry. Indeed, in my twelve-year-old eyes, my servant’s deceased great-grandfather personified to a nicety a Graven Image. I hastened to my Confessor and told him what I had seen.
    The officers of God had a special way to treat those infidel mummies. They broke them. They bent them out of shape, they wrenched out the teeth, they made them look pitiable and defeated, so the Indians could not think highly enough of them to worship them any more. In the same way, when the Spanish took all the gold from the Inca temples, it was not at all motivated by a lust for treasure, but because our Holy Fathers wished to show the Andeans that those heathen deities were worthless.
    The servant girl did not return to our house for one week. When she did, she showed a beaten face. She dared not look at me, but she sat outside my door and wept her story through the keyhole. Her father had raised his hand against her. This was because my Confessor and his officers had told him how they came by their information, before they thrashed the great-grandfather to clumps of bone and hair and dropped him into a chamber pot with the shards of the pututo shell that would never more utter its pagan moans.
    ‘I thought you was my friend,’ the servant girl moaned. ‘I took you to mine.’
    So Satan tempts the righteous to pity the wrong. I knelt on my side of the door and poked my little finger through the keyhole right into her eye. She fell backwards and crawled away, sobbing humbly. I was pleased to see she had learned a little of the ways of Our Lord.
    It was in those days that I began to read the life of Santa Rosa of Lima with more than simple fervour in my heart. Santa Rosa was the very firstsaint of the New World. Unlike myself, she was cursed with physical beauty. They called her Rosa because her complexion was as petals, and her cheeks bloomed an adorable pink. Her lovely face carried the weight of her family’s earthly ambitions: she was supposed to marry a fortune.
    Everyone loved her looks but Rosa despised them, for she did not wish to marry anyone except God.
    She barely slept, constantly fasted, abjured all flesh. She mortified her delicate skin with continual floggings and a hair shirt. Her family chastised her and even tried to stop her with stern edicts. This only inspired Rosa to more ardent acts of worship.
    One of her innovations was to rub lye