Gift to Sebastiano

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 4: Making Perfect Bodies
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by David Sornig

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The tailor was always awed by the sight of a stranger returning from the lawless world of sleep so, having only just set eyes on him for the first time, he had many questions for the prone figure of Orsino Duran. What if I should push your shoulder, thought the tailor, and you are already as hard as stone? Or what if you are not dead but just drunk, or gone mad, and in your long slumber have fallen into a dream of despair? What if I wake you and you are roused into visiting some unwarranted rage against me? Will you be someone new when you wake? Have you been transformed by the world you have visited in your sleep? Who are you?

That the tailor had only just now seen his landlord for the first time was perhaps surprising. After all he had been a tenant in the room immediately beneath the old man's for two weeks already. But the simple fact of the matter was that the only thing the old man ever did was lie in bed all the long day and rattle on to his nurse and neighbour, Signora Maria, about the ache in his legs or the piss that was soaking through his nappy, and the tailor had little time for such lamentosi. He preferred the solitude that enveloped him in his room, journeying into his drawings, his combinations and recombinations of ideas, his cases full of histories, scratching impressions into his small black notebook, coaxing cloth, scissor and needle until late in the night.

It was the woman, Signora Maria, who had prompted the tailor into finally making the journey up to his landlord's room. She had interrupted his work with a shout, almost pushing him upstairs to check on the old man in his bed and had clutched at him from behind like a terrified child as he poked his head through the door and into the room. The way the sheets were pulled taut over the old man's body really did seem to confirm the fears of his nurse.

"Signore Duran is dead!" she wailed. "I dreamt it last night. I am sure of it. Oh, may the Heavenly Virgin look kindly on him."

She sounded just like Viola, the tailor thought.

But just then the old man turned over and snorted loudly, mashing his lips together as if he had never before tasted air. At the same time his skin took on some of the glow of the living again. Perhaps Signora Maria had been right in the first place, perhaps sometime early in the morning the old man had actually died for a few moments. Perhaps in some absentminded dream he had forgotten to breathe and was only just now being washed back into the regular tide of respiration by some felicitous Neptune. When the old man eventually opened his eyes, disturbed by the nurse's yelp of relief, the tailor withdrew down the stairs to his room, preferring to leave the old woman alone to tend to her ward. He looked back up at her as she disappeared into Orsino's room, crossing herself.

"Signore Duran!" he heard her cry. "Heaven be praised. I thought that ..."

But that was enough for the tailor, it was all he had ears for before he closed his door and turned to his work of tatters and threads.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, ON THE DAY OF THE EPIPHANY ITSELF, the tailor woke from a dream of Viola to the sound of a thumping knock at the front door. He groaned out of bed and shuffled towards the door. The rapping came again, but more urgently this time.

"I'm coming, Signora. Be patient. I'm coming," he called, then muttered an impatient curse to himself.

He unlatched the locks and swung the door in, but instead of finding the old woman bent over her stick as he expected, there, propped up against the doorstep in her place, was a package as large as his bolster, neatly wrapped in brown paper and bound with crossed-over strings that had been tied into a neat bow. He picked up the package and felt that it was heavy in his hands, and that its surface was cool and smooth. There was no great surprise in receiving this package. One like it had already arrived from the weaver Fabiano in Trento and another from the wholesale cloth merchant Allais in Paris. What did surprise him was that on this one his own name – his real name, not the name he had entered on the tenancy agreement – was written in large roman characters. He turned the package over, checking it for any other marks that might have given away its origin. But there was nothing on the back or the sides. Not even a postage stamp. Nothing but his own name.

The tailor stepped out onto the Campiello Loredan, searching up and down for any trace of his deliverer. Who could have sent it? No one knew where he was. Not even Viola. He had only told her that he could not come back until he had pieced together his masterpiece, and that certainly had not happened. He had not made anything worthwhile. Nothing original at least. The genius he had been so sure of owning did not want to arrive.

He looked deep into the street, but the morning was cold, and during the night a mist had rolled into every awkward corner of the city from the Adriatic, so there was nothing to see.

"So finally," he laughed out loud, taking the package firmly into his grip. "A gift from La Befana for Sebastiano Bevi!" But his smile tightened over his lips as soon as the words left them and he heard his name report and repeat against the walls of the empty street.

Back in his room the tailor set aside the remnants of his failed labours of the night before and sat the parcel down on the table, loosening the string bow at the knot. He was proud of the care he took in untying it, smoothing each layer of wrapping flat to the wood, imagining that if it had been addressed to Viola how she would have ripped at it purposelessly, impatient for its impending surprise. He folded back the last of the wrapping. Inside was a rusted tin box whose lid had been sealed tight with wax. He took the house key that was tied to a string from his pocket and ran it around the lip of the lid. But even after he had removed all of the wax he still had to prise the key under the rusted lid to lever it off. He pushed and pushed until finally the key snapped.

"Mary and Joseph and Jesus!" he cursed, but was glad to see that the lid had finally popped free.

This small excitement sank though when he saw that there was no letter inside. There was something, only he couldn't work out just what it might be. It looked like a pale leather bag. He lifted it from the box and, as carefully as he could, laid it on top of the wrapping paper. Once it was out of the box he realised that it didn't look like a bag at all. His expertise told him that the material showed no sign of having been sewn together anywhere, and there were no zippers. He rubbed his palm over it and it made his skin crawl with pleasure. It was soft and oily. He dug his fingertips into it, but then flinched and pulled his hand away, surprised that his cock had grown hard.

The leather looked like a single length of bald pelt that had been folded into a fat wad. He let himself touch it again lightly with his fingertips and he folded back one layer so that it formed a strangely familiar rectangle of hide. He scanned the surface of the leather. There were what looked like two dark buttons on either side of the top end of the object, and another below it in the very middle, which really looked more like a shrivelled knot or a button hole, rather than an actual button, and below that the material was folded back and under itself. From above the two buttons he unravelled a pair of long sleeves. It looked to him like a shirt or a coat of a kind he had never seen before. He let his fingers feel the texture of the small hard protrusions and the smoothness below it and around the knot. He felt the ache between his legs again. This certainly was an exquisite material.

The suit (because it was clear to him now that this is what it was) was fashioned into gloves at the ends of each sleeve, each with four petite fingers and a fine thumb, each digit neatly folded back onto itself. He began to unfold it, thinking to himself that it was like a story that would reveal itself fold by fold, a mystery, a sustained musical note. It was an unusually thin hide, not like cow's or sheep's leather, but while it looked fragile, he could tell by its texture that it was resilient, as if it had been tanned or cured with some sort of preserving agent, one that left it still feeling supple and fresh. And most strange of all was that it was all perfectly joined. It was breathlessly seamless.

As he unfurled the hide further and further it started to take shape. He turned it over and folded back what he thought was a pair of stockings. They were folded three times. First at the hips, then at the knees and finally at each ankle. But then, as he turned it over again, he looked to where the neckline of the costume should have been and he had to shut his eyes, disbelieving their evidence. He felt ashamed, sickened by his own erection.

BUT THE TAILOR'S ERECTION WOULD DEFLATE, even though he now knew that what he held in his hands was human skin. He pulled the scalp up by its unnaturally bald crown and looked at the face, into its empty eyeholes. It looked so flat and shallow, like a deflated balloon, that it was hardly a face at all. He stretched it over his fist to try to fill it out but his gorge rose and he had to turn away – not at any horror he felt at handling such a gruesome artefact or even because he was touching it so intimately. He didn't know why. It reminded him of a detail in Michelangelo's Last Judgement, the figure of St Bartholomew on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, his own flayed skin, a limp flag of faith draped from his raised hand. He had taken Viola to see it in Rome for the first time just before Christmas. They had stood there engulfed by the vast temple of colour and drama, but somehow he was bereft of feeling for it. It was not the same emotion he had felt when he was the teenager accompanying his father to see a Rome cloth wholesaler and had made the pilgrimage to the Vatican on his own account. On that first visit he had given out a deflated adolescent gasp of awe at the sight of the fresco, seized with the ambition that he would one day make garments that would rival it in sheer vision, garments that his father would never have been able to imagine possible. His return with Viola 20 years later had only made him realise the gulf between what he had wanted to achieve and what he had actually scratched out. He had turned to Viola, about to admit his disappointment, when she gave her very own short gasp of awe, her eyes moist with the stream of her conquered heart. Who was he to disappoint her young faith?

Now in Venice he was holding this marvellous object in his hands. It was the one garment that promised to fulfil the genius he had come to find. He thought of Viola again and wondered whether he shouldn't just go back to Pistoia after all and end this game of silence.

He carefully lifted the skin across to the bed and examined it. Was it a man? A woman? There was nothing between its legs. Certainly there was a slit, but did that have to mean it was a woman? Perhaps it had had its genitalia removed. Its breasts were so flat that they could have belonged to anything – man, woman or child. And what if he were to be discovered here with this skin? Shouldn't he just surrender it to the police? He imagined incredulity, accusations, murder trials, terrible punishment. Where would he stand then? He didn't want to know. This must be part of someone's perverse game. He did not want to be part of it. He quickly refolded the object and tried to stuff it back in the box, only now it wouldn't fit properly. He pushed it in anyway, sloppily, so that it bulged and bubbled, then put on his coat and tucked the relic away under his arm, finally aware that what had aroused him so forcefully was the same feeling that had also made him so ill. It was that the skin looked alive. More than alive. It was a rhyme of himself. He couldn't bear to have it near him any longer.