The Book of Human Skin Read Online Free PDF Page A

midday when my little face first appeared, the wrong way round and awkward with it. My mother screamed and fainted away with the pain.The Reader should take note: even at this evanescent glimmering of our tale, my mother’s weakness was such that it might have withered me and this story inside her. However, the attendant physician dragged me out of that red womb into this drab-coloured world.And there you have it, our adventure begun.
    If the Reader hungers for pathetical fallacies in the natural world to conflate His literary pleasure, let Him look no further.There are times when literary devices truly seem superfluous! For the unvarnished fact is that the world verily shook in the minute I was born: far away across the ocean, at noon on that same thirteenth of May, an earthquake tumbled down ten cities in Peru. Imagine: mountains decrusting themselves, the earth grinning open in chasms to swallow little black apostrophes of people! Yes, Dear Reader, let us mark it one more time for general satisfaction, the earth’s skin as well as my mother’s was fissured the day I was born, and both would bear the scars of it for ever.
    The news from Peru was not all bad. Indeed, what some might call a disaster was soon proving profitable for me and my fortunes.The earthquake, you see, opened up free, gratis , three deep, new veins of silver in my father’s mines in the South Americas.
    Already, all around my cradle were silver rattles, silver cups and silver reflections from the Grand Canal. My sister Riva shook silver earrings above my head to make me cry.
    She would be sorry later.

 
    Gianni delle Boccole
    Weasly little mincer he were from the start. The son o the house were borned and yet there were very little rejoysing, on account of how he had near split my Mistress in half, Brute God! At first there was poorish few hopes o Donata Fasan’s life. Then she rallyed a little and we should of felt reliefed. Yet we did not. We dint know nothin of all them lives lossed in Peru, but we still felt desprit sad at the Palazzo Espagnol them days, for reasons we couldn’t fathom of ourselves.
    The babe hisself ailed and puled. However, he were quite clearly set on livin, whether his Mamma perisht or no.
    Now his sister Riva were a notable pretty infant. But he weren’t nothin nice to look on, this first son o my Master Fernando Fasan. There were not a devil’s mark on him, nothin ye could point a finger at an remark ‘orrible!’ Not yet. Yet
    Nose, eyes, privities all in the right places as ye mite say. Maybe the eyes a little close together. He had that kind o weak repungent face that people fall into staring at, can’t help thereselves, drawn down like into a deep drownin well. There was things about that babe what made evryone stand on there nerves. People would approach the cradle smiling, and draw back, confust n unhappy. Swear that butterflies dropt dead if they flewed oer him.
    That little Minguillo give oft summing dark into the air. It seems ridikilus to say it, when we talk ovva little infant here. Yet the facts is, no matter how Anna scrubbed him, he let loose a kind o fog what smelt like a blacksmiths. They put popery in evry corner of the bedchamber but that smell niver went way. It felt on yer skin zackly like a hot grinding kind o hate.
    My Master and my Mistress was that upset by it. They lookt crossways at each other, sif to ask, ‘What did we make?’
    Now I wernt sittin on the bedpost, but I believe that was the end of all doings atwixt em, sept perhap the onct, by which Marcella were made.
    Only little Riva dint seem to feel nor smell the black fog of her baby brother. She jist laffed and shook her silver earrings at him.
    Poor sweet darlin little fool. Pig ovva God!
    Sor Loreta
    Throughout the ten-day journey from Cuzco to Arequipa I looked with a reproving eye upon the world from which I would shortly be removed. I saw not one thing that I regretted to leave, not the mountains, nor the lambs, nor the fields