BOTH MEN WORE APRONS and rubber gloves. Each had a surgeon’s hat (a sort of snood) on his head. Added to that, Borghini wore a pair of high-magnification surgeon’s glasses. They had small black cubes affixed to the lenses. The two worked quietly, the colonel hunched over his work, Beppe hanging back, ill at ease, but overcome with the heady sensation of donning apron and robes. A bead of sweat glistened on the boy’s forehead, his eyes were riveted on the object splayed out on the surgical table.
The only sounds to be heard in the damp, winding cellars of the gallery in Parioli were the steady drumming of water streaming from a spigot into a steel sink and the high snipping sound of shears. In addition to the scissors, laid out on a narrow rectangular table at right angles to the operating table was an array of surgical instruments and esoteric tools. They included a claw hammer, a tack hammer, a crosscut saw, a ripsaw, a paring knife, tweezers, a pair of side-cutting pliers, a pair of wire cutters, a surgeon’s bone snip, a surgeon’s cartilage knife, a scalpel, a butcher’s skinning knife, a quiver of stainless-steel needles of assorted sizes, a hacksaw, a small ball-peen hammer, a drill set, an upholsterer’s regulator or spindle, various sizes of small files, one medium-fine wood rasp, and one skin scraper for use on large skins.
With his boxy black surgical spectacles jutting forward from the bridge of his nose, Borghini’s latex gloved hands moved swiftly up and down the length of the cadaver. Working with bone snips in one hand and a cartilage knife in the other, he alternated both with deft skill.
Already the top of the skull had been trepanned by means of the circular handsaw. A mass of cortical matter was exposed just beneath the cut, and the skin of the scalp had been pulled forward and down over the face, in much the same way a glove is stripped from a hand. The three-day bath of lye had done much to loosen the skin and subcutaneous tissue from the bony frame just below. By means of scissors, tweezers, and bone and cartilage cutters, Borghini now completed the task of separating the skin from the skeletal structure.
He’d already separated the skin from around the neck and was working with utmost precision to do the same with the skin around the throat and clavicle.
While the colonel snipped and sawed, it was young Beppe’s job to pull back, exerting a gentle but constant downward pressure on the skin just freeing up as the maestro sliced it away from the carcass. The beads of sweat on the boy’s forehead were not the result of exertion. They were a mixture of keen excitement and fear—fear that if he pulled too hard, or not hard enough, the skin might snag and thus tear, an outcome the maestro cautioned would not be tolerated under any circumstances. The maestro was at great pains to stress that at the conclusion of that day they must have a complete skin from head to toe, unbroken and in perfect condition.
Beppe’s eyes burned from the lye fumes wafting upward off the surface of the pool. His discomfort made him focus all the harder on the swift flashes of the maestro’s knife as it went about its work.
In the days following, Borghini seldom left the galleries in Parioli. Working upward of seventeen hours a day on one of his “re-creations,” he would practice what he’d come to think of as his great “alchemical” skills—the art of transforming death into life.
With a complete skin separated from its carcass, the remaining skeleton would then serve as the foundation for constructing a framework.
During that crucial period, Beppe never left the maestro’s side. Initially queasy from the scissoring of flesh and laying back of skin, in a short time he’d become remarkably adept at carrying out his master’s directions. Not only had he a natural finesse, Borghini observed, but he had overcome his first few qualms as well.
For the boy, it was a whole new world of wonders. In his mind, he’d entered the secret rites of some sacred ritual. Before the colonel had discovered him and brought him here, Beppe had been running with a pack of wolves in Trastevere, a group whose nightly work had outraged and sickened the good citizens of Rome. That was merely child’s play, the boy now thought, aglow with a sense of tremendous pride. In a matter of days, the maestro had raised him to a level of consciousness he had no idea existed, beckoning him to a universe so rarefied and mysterious, so replete with fresh possibilities as to make his flesh tingle.
The first day after the skinning, as the pelt dried, they spent applying layers of modeling clay to the skeletal framework. Borghini was at great pains to demonstrate the art of applying the clay so that each curve, each indentation of the original, would be perfectly duplicated in the final product.
The skeleton stood upright, held in position by wood blocks chockered up about the feet and held erect by a thin adjustable pole inserted through the pelvic synthesis. Then threaded upward to the top of the skull, the pole’s length was adjusted by means of a screw clamp at its midpoint. Loosening the clamp enabled one section of the pole to be telescoped into the other.
“Don’t apply clay just to fill up spaces,” Borghini instructed the boy. “The clay has to conform to the framework of the body, just like human flesh.” He took a great lump of clay, kneading it in his fist, then tearing it into pieces. “Apply your clay. Work it on in layers. Where the ribs are, put the clay on thinner so that the viewer can appreciate the configuration of the rib cage. No, no cretino.” The maestro gouged out the clay the boy had just applied and flung it off to the side. “How many times must I tell you? Let your hands sculpt. Just don’t throw it on. Sculpt. Mold. Shape. If it’s done right, the clay will be so perfectly melded to the frame beneath that you should almost feel the shock of something live quivering beneath your hand. Ah, good. You see? There you have it. Now when the clay hardens, it will fall between each rib exactly the way the actual flesh fell there in life. Better.” He tugged the boy’s ear lobe so hard that he winced. “Better. Now go ahead. Do it yourself.”
Before the day was over, they’d completed the clay form, never leaving the upraised platform where they worked. They took their lunch there, wolfing down sandwiches and gulping coffee while they knelt and stooped and stretched over the figure already sculpted into a rough approximation of the position it would assume in Borghini’s diorama—that of an angel in Botticelli’s Chigi Madonna.
When they left the cellar workshop late that night, they applied a coat of plaster of Paris to the clay form. By early the next day, the plaster mold had hardened. Ready to be removed, it peeled away from the form easily, ready for the next step in the procedure.
For a break, they ate toast and fried eggs, swigged coffee noisily, then cut sheets of burlap into long strips and glued them, layer after layer, inside the plaster mold. After that, they could do nothing more but permit the mold with its burlap liner to rest for a period of forty-eight hours. Returning two mornings later, they filled a tub with warm water and soaked the mold.
After several hours of soaking, Borghini and the boy carefully lifted the mold out of the tub. It rose dripping, sloughing off water, like some mummified thing that had rested for eons, Buried in ooze at the bottom of a deep glacial lake.
Scarcely daring to breathe, they carried the form back to the surgical table and placed it there. With a ball-peen hammer and a light chisel, the maestro then tapped gently at several key points along a line visible only to him—a line running from the parietal lobe to the anklebone.
Finally, with a definitive tap, like a pianist playing the final note of a complex sonata, Borghini delivered the coup de grace. A sharp crack sounded, followed by a tearing noise, and the mold fell, open into perfect halves. Revealed below was a hollow burlap mannequin, an exact replica of the clay form that served as a template of Aldo Pettigrilli’s body just as it had appeared in life.
After what seemed an interminable time of studying the mannequin, Borghini, tottering slightly, lifted it out of its plaster shell. The boy moved to help, but the colonel waved him off with a sharp sideward snap of the head. Borghini handled it as though he were carrying the eggs of a hummingbird in his palm, all the while his feverish eyes swarmed over it, searching for weak points, for any slight imperfection.
Young Beppe hung back, not daring to speak. What was going on during that moment was a kind of communion between the maestro and the burlap figure, and the boy recognized with a shock of resentment that he’d been excluded.
Borghini had been studying the figure tilted stiffly sideways on the surgical table. With that crucial part of the operation over, all of his former passion and enthusiasm seemed gone. Instead, something like anger had overtaken him. It left the boy puzzled, thinking he’d done something wrong. But if he had, he couldn’t say what. The mannequin, to him at least, appeared to be a literally perfect re-creation of its living model.
“Tomorrow,” the maestro murmured, his jaw taut, his manner uncharacteristically curt, “the skin.”
The next morning began bumpily, the maestro still tense and out of sorts. Unexpected sounds, the light in the cellar, his instruments—everything infuriated him. They spent a full hour and a half aiming and adjusting floodlights on the mannequin so that the contrast of light and shadow would approximate precisely those conditions of light present in the dioramas at the Palazzo Borghini.
By 10:30, they were ready for the final step, fitting the tanned skin onto the mannequin.
The skin lay draped over the flensing beam, exactly where they’d left it four days before. Treated with oils and acids, it had dried perfectly; now when Borghini lifted it gently from the rungs of the beam, it was amazingly supple and pliant, smooth to the touch.
The next hour was spent slathering a thin white paste over the mannequin, lubricating it thoroughly, then pulling the tanned skin over it, much the same way a sock is drawn onto a foot. It was that final step that seemed to be the source of the maestro’s great vexation. To the boy, that final step in the procedure seemed relatively easy, far more so than many of those preceding it. But the maestro didn’t see things quite that way. Several times, just as Borghini was about to begin lifting the skin off of the beam, he’d suddenly replace it and return to the mannequin, playing light, tremulous fingers over every inch of it, seeking spots in the burlap on which the skin might snag.
By late morning, they began in earnest. At first, their progress was slow and faltering; then it gradually went forward with increasing confidence. Beppe scarcely dared move, occasionally making unwanted sounds. Each time, the maestro’s head snapped around and he glowered at him. When the maestro’s eyes were angry, they could freeze the marrow of your bones.
Shortly past noon, the entire skin had been fitted onto the mannequin. It was only then that Borghini appeared to relax.
“Beautiful, no?”
Moving swiftly around the platform, he viewed the figure from every possible angle. It could be stood on its own feet now, some six feet tall, one arm extended as though hailing a friend.
Borghini kept circling the platform like a nervous, prowling cat. Kneeling down and covering an eye to view it from beneath, he would suddenly bolt up and circle it again, hopping in his boyish excitement.
Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks and clapped his hands. “Fantastico,” he shouted, his laugh echoing through the dark, cobwebbed cellars.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in fitting and adjusting the skin on its burlap frame, removing unsightly ridges or bumps, tucking in and tightening areas where the skin was either baggy or drooped on the frame.
On his knees, with pins in his. mouth, Borghini looked like a tailor. He seemed tireless. He took no lunch. Long, unbroken hours of bending, stretching, lifting, and punishing concentration seemed to have animated rather than tired him. By dusk, he was whistling something softly to himself. Hours later, he was still skipping lightly about. “What time is it, Beppe?”
“Ten-forty-five, maestro.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “Christ. Let’s go get something to eat.”
They ate at a small nearby hosteria, Borghini reeling off lists of things still to be done as he spooned a creamy fettuccine into his mouth.
Later that evening, they returned to the gallery. Back down in the cellar, they fashioned a bed of excelsior and sheets. Then, taking elaborate care, they wrapped the figure inside it. Carrying it upstairs took the better part of an hour. It had to be jockeyed and coaxed along beneath the low overhang of the stair. Negotiating bad turns and narrow corners, Borghini spat angry, rapid-fire instructions at the boy every inch of the way.
Finally, out in the alley where the Hispano-Suiza waited, they created another bed for the figure, this time out of three or four tarpaulins folded over several times across the back-seat to absorb unwanted shocks.
By 2:00 A.M., they were back at the Palazzo Borghini, having earned the burlap figure up several flights of stairs to the top of the house, where it would take its preordained place in Borghini’s tableau vivant version of Botticelli’s Chigi Madonna.
Once they’d settled the mannequin into the approximate position it would occupy in the diorama, they stood for some time admiring it. Already the holy infant was in place, along with a wire armature of the Virgin Mary. The infant Christ had been fashioned from a child the colonel had purchased from a teenage prostitute working near the Caracaila Baths. He’d kept the child a few days, growing quite fond of it, feeding it special treats and tickling it until it giggled happily. He cried when it became time to dispose of it.
In the background stood several farmers, formerly vagrants collected at the railroad terminal and lured out to Parioli with promises of food and work. Anchored into varying positions, they stood alongside a number of farm animals, sheep and oxen grazing on a hillside. The animals had been found at slaughterhouses outside of Rome. And now Aldo Pettigrilli, or what remained of him, had taken his place within the vignette as the heavenly angel of the Chigi Madonna.
Though the features of the mannequin’s face were an exact replication of Pettigrilli’s, the sockets where the eyes were to be were empty, mere hollow cavities sunk into the forehead. Borghini had removed the eyes from the corpse before its immersion in lye. He had already taken perfect molds of them to be reproduced in glass. By means of color swatches, he’d matched the color of the pupils and irises of Botticelli’s angel; now he would paint directly onto the glass molds.
Tomorrow, if all went well, he and Beppe would spend the day at the palazzo, working inside the diorama. He would teach the boy how to use the brushes and oils not only to touch up the faded areas of the skin but to restore the vibrancy of life into flesh already tinged with the gray pallor of death.
“Well, Beppe, what do you think?”
The boy was too overcome to reply. “Fantastico, maestro,” was all he could manage.
Borghini laughed and clapped the boy on the back. “Tomorrow we paint. I’ll put the brush in your hand and a tube of paint at your feet. There are still the eyes to take care of and the wardrobe to match with the original. Then we’re finished with this one.” Borghini glanced slyly at the boy. “Then, Beppe, what do you think comes next?”
“The Madonna, maestro,” the boy answered eagerly. “You’ll want the one in the photographs on the Ponte Vecchio for that.”