IN THEIR RESPECTIVE cells, Zuana and Serafina sleep their way through the first days of Lent. The cleansing of the city continues around them. It rains so much that the gutters and the gargoyle mouths cannot keep up with the flow, and the cloisters run with filthy streams. The water seeps under the doors of the cells, and the hems of the sisters’ habits grow sodden as they walk. Even the convent cats retreat indoors, curling themselves inside the warm wood of the choir stalls, to be shooed away at the beginning of every office.
The Murano glass goblets and the ceramic plates are packed back into their dowry chests; the dresses, boots, and wigs are returned to their owners; and the sounds of the stage being dismantled are nowhere near as thrilling as those of its construction. In the kitchens the roasting and the baking pans are shelved, and the sisters contemplate their first fasts, encouraged, no doubt, by the prevailing aromas of boiling vegetables and watery soups.
It is a time for quiet contemplation and considered abstinence. Yet no one is downhearted. Far from it. While Lent usually brings a sense of anticlimax, this year it has been replaced by a bubbling excitement. In the aftermath of the revelation in the novice’s cell, something is happening in the convent. Everyone, novices as well as sisters, is praying more (what else is there to do?), and there is a building anticipation toward the coming chapter meeting.
The girl is cared for by Letizia and her old conversa, who clean the cell around her and, on the orders left by Suora Zuana, hang the leftover pomades from the refectory to freshen the air. When she finally wakes, too weak to walk, Federica brings the kitchen to her. Novices are not required to fast during Lent (it is not recommended for any nun under the age of twenty-five), but though Federica has saved tidbits from the last of the feast, Serafina eats almost nothing. The illness has hollowed out any appetite, and it would be better if she took some sustenance, but she is adamant and refuses everything but liquid. When visited by Suora Umiliana, she begs that she may be allowed to take confession in preparation for the host. The novice mistress, in turn, speaks to the abbess. It is hardly a request that anyone can deny her. As she is clearly too ill to go to Father Romero, he comes to her. It is a while since he has set foot in the cloisters, and the abbess sees to it that he has a flask of wine to sustain him on his long journey. He stays inside her cell for some time. It is a matter for conjecture whether or not he remains awake for all of it.
As he leaves, Madonna Chiara stands watching him pad across the cloisters, a conversa holding up a covering to keep him from the worst of the rain. Whatever he has just heard, he cannot tell and she will not ask. She wonders how long it will be until he dies. He barely remembers any of the sisters’ names, anyway.
The abbess folds her hands and gives a little sigh. She has a busy few weeks in front of her. Whatever work Carnival entails, there is always more to be done afterward: account books to be checked, outgoings to be set against offerings, supplies to be reordered, and letters of thanks to be written. Her attention had been elsewhere when the “wondrous event” in Serafina’s cell took place, so that by the time she arrived it was already over and she could only hear about it secondhand.
She has no illusions, however, as to its possible importance. Lent is a period when traditionally the convent falls back on its own resources, spiritual as well as material, and any abbess must be alive to the undercurrents and tensions that might surface. Having lived for thirty-seven of her forty-three years inside Santa Caterina, there is not much about her convent and its sisters of which Madonna Chiara is not aware, and even without the extended drama of the novice or the reemergence of Suora Magdalena, Umiliana’s challenge to her authority has been building for some time. With the outside world taken care of— relationship with the bishop good, the benefactors fed and entertained, and a good list of requests for new entrants, with dowry offers to be negotiated upward if demand continues to be so healthy—it is time to look inward.
IN HER CELL, given dispensation to miss the morning offices, Zuana finally wakes during the afternoon work hour. Her sleep has been deep and dreamless. She washes in a bowl of warm water, which one of the converse has delivered outside her door along with a new pad of rich-smelling soap and a fresh washing towel. As her own dowry is not sufficient to fund such regular luxuries, she understands this to be a gift from the convent stores and is grateful for it. The smell of the girl’s bodily expulsions still clings to her and she washes herself vigorously. She takes special pleasure—yes, she accepts the word—in lathering up the soap on her head. Her hair has grown during the winter months and she likes the wet weight of it, the shiver of massage as her fingers move over her scalp. She leaves her head bare as she uses the cloth to wash her arms and then her body under her shift.
Working as she does in the infirmary, she is less of a stranger to women’s bodies than most nuns, but in general she takes little interest in her own. Of course there have been moments in her life when she has wondered what it is she will never feel, even once or twice explored her own dark sweetness, but her battles with the flesh have proved to be, at most, passing cravings, absorbed and subdued as much by the challenges of work as the discipline of prayer.
The soap is soft on her skin and lathers up like sea foam. She can detect a hint of almond and calendula within it—perhaps it comes from the abbess’s own stores—and registers a quiet delight in the way the smell and the softness complement each other.
She understands that the fight with the flesh is not always so easy for others. Serafina is far from the only young woman to have brought her virginity to Jesus while in the grip of desire for a more carnal husband. Of course there are ways to earth such lightning bolts. Over the years there have been nights when, unable to sleep because of some problem or remedy she has detected a sudden wind of rushed breathing and moaning sliding out from under one cell door or another. Sometimes it is hard to tell the pain from the pleasure; but either way it is a sound that can ignite yearning in those who hear it, and Zuana has become adept at increasing the volume of her own thoughts to blot it out. It is not up to her to damn or save the souls of others.
She rinses and dries herself quickly, rubbing her hair until it sticks out like a spiked halo around her, though with no mirror in her cell she will never see the effect.
If, or when, such transgression becomes obvious—and in the end it always does—the induced confession will be a private matter, the sister or sisters finding themselves subject to penance and regular discipline. Either it passes—the excess of energy transmuted into the love of Our Lord—or they become better at concealing it. Amid the filth of heretic propaganda, the most popular scandals are those of priests and nuns scaling the walls or squeezing their way through the confession grille to reach one another. The idea of women sinning with themselves or each other is too poisonous even for those who would wash away the structure of the church along with its sins.
She dresses herself in a clean shift and robes and kneels by her bed. She has missed almost two days of offices and is long overdue on prayer, but her mind fills up fast and it is hard to stem the flow of thoughts. She does what she can with words rather than contemplation and then makes her way into the cloisters to check on her patients.
Back in her own cell, Suora Magdalena lies like a corpse on her pallet, the bones of her head so prominent as to seem already half skull. Her sleep is so deep that Zuana has to put her ear next to her mouth to discern any breath at all. It seems inconceivable that this—this wraith—could ever have found the strength to get up and walk to another cell, let alone sing and pray over a sick girl. Well, it is gone now, drained away along with her life force. Whatever she may be seeing behind her eyelids, Zuana prays it is a landscape full of light and joy, for there is nothing left for her here. She moistens her patient’s lips with water and changes her position a little to ease the worst of the bedsores. She can do no more.
Inside Serafina’s cell there is more to celebrate. The air smells of fresh herbs, and by the bed there is bread and vegetable pie, along with a single bright-green marzipan pear. The girl is asleep between clean sheets, her body washed, her hair brushed and flowing around her. Zuana wonders if she should wake her to check on her progress, but her pulse is steady and after such a powerful purging sleep is often the kindest remedy. There is a stillness in the cell, a sense of peace almost, but whether it is the relief that comes with the cessation of suffering or something more she cannot tell. She thinks of Suora Magdalena crouched by the bed, transfixed by her vision of Christ…
Her vision—but not mine, thinks Zuana. However much she might wish it differently, the cell had remained empty for her.
And what of Serafina? What had she seen when she first opened her eyes? Zuana understands her medications well enough to know that anyone in the grip of poppy and hellebore would already have been careering between heaven and hell. In such a softened state, Suora Magdalena’s intensity may indeed have reached inside her, for everything is close to the surface when body and mind melt into each other.
The girl’s skin is pale and there are hollows under her eyes. She will need feeding up if she is not to find herself permanently weakened by the viciousness of the evacuation. How could she not have noticed such loss of weight before? Though convent robes conceal all manner of sins, surely the novice had not been so gaunt when they had last worked together. Was this the result of love sickness, too? Ah, it seems so obvious now. Had Zuana been so preoccupied by work, or so much in need of a younger companion, that she had missed what was in front of her eyes? Would it have been any different if she had known? If the abbess had taken her into her confidence earlier—whenever that might have been, for she has no idea when she found out.
No. She glances around the cell. It had been here all along, everything she needed to know. The fury and the lushness of that young body as she carried her to bed that first night, the love madrigals hidden away in the breviary, the man’s voice singing behind the walls, that single Brava after Vespers, the way the girl’s eyes had grown large as she recited the poem found in the scriptorium manuscript. Tell me, little sister, do you have a fever or are you in love?
Oh, yes, this conflagration of the flesh had been there from the beginning, burning fiercely enough for Serafina to risk everything—disgrace, social exile, even death—to find a way back inside its flame.
Zuana looks down at her. A slight frown flickers over the girl’s forehead. What will she do with all that fire now? All the despair and shredded dreams?
Love. There is no illness like it, or anything in her herb garden or her notebooks to address it. No, this disease must be left in God’s hands, to kill or cure as He sees fit. Instead of comfort, the thought sends a shiver through her. She bows her head in prayer, but the bell for chapter interrupts before she can find the right words.
As she crosses the courtyard she passes Umiliana, her novice flock trotting behind her. A few of them stare openly across at her, a mix of admiration and curiosity on their faces.
“WITH GOD’S GRACE we gather in this the first chapter of Lent to prepare ourselves for the beauty and discipline of abstinence. But before we speak of what we will give up, let us for a moment celebrate what we have.”
The abbess rests her hands lightly on the carved lions’ heads and looks out over a sea of eager faces. The room is full to capacity—choir, nuns, novices, even converse—all in their place. The only ones missing are the old and the infirm, most notably the oldest and the most recently ill.
“In the last days I have received letters from guests and benefactors thanking us for our hospitality. To read them all would spark a contagion of pride that would take another period of Lent to address.” She smiles to allow the humor to penetrate. “However, a few words, I think, are in order. They come from no less a personage than the duke’s sister Leonora, who rose from her sickbed to attend with members of her family.”
Clearing her throat, she lifts her body a little higher in her chair. The small touches of flamboyance encouraged by Carnival are put aside now: the full petticoats have been removed, her wimple is severe, with no lace trimmings to it, and a plain silver crucifix is substituted for the jewel-encrusted one. She looks for all the world like a woman who can take care of her flock.
“To all the holy sisters in your care, please convey the joy and deep spiritual sustenance felt by myself and my companions during your Carnival concert and theatrical performance. We left the convent gates secure in the knowledge that our beloved city is in safe hands with such loving and holy women interceding on our behalf.
“It goes on with the same glowing sentiments, before ending thus: I must also say that while my soul sings, my lips are still rosy with the taste of wild strawberries. If it does not take you away from your duties to God, I would be grateful for the recipe, so I might instruct my own kitchen to deliver such delicacies. Suora Federica, I believe that is directed to you.”
The kitchen mistress, however, is less than delighted. “Must we tell her? She has a niece at the convent of Corpus Domini. If the recipe goes to her, it will also go to them, and by next year everyone will have it.”
“In which case perhaps you might modify it a little to ensure our primacy is retained.” The abbess gives a small tinkling laugh, and the room answers in kind. Zuana glances toward Suora Umiliana, who is watching the others though not joining in herself. She is handling her impatience gracefully.
“Meanwhile, Suora Scholastica, I am to send two copies of The Martyrdom of Santa Caterina to sister convents in Venice and Siena who have heard that we were performing a new work. And Suora Benedicta, I have received a letter from Rome, from no less a figure than Cardinal Ippolito d’Este.”
In the second row, the choir mistress’s face lights up like a star.
“It seems that news of our settings for Saint Agnes’s feast have reached his ears, and he is sending as a gift to the convent a score for The Lamentations of Jeremiah, commissioned from the renowned Giovanni da Palestrina, with the hopes that we might perform it during Easter week.”
Benedicta shakes her head, but whether in disbelief or to tease up some new threads of music it is hard to tell.
“In terms of donations received and promised, assuming that the new dowries come in on time, I can now confirm that we will be able to start work on The Last Supper for the main wall of the refectory next winter.”
Someone claps her hands and a few of the younger nuns actually cheer. It has been almost forty years since a fire caused by a candle left burning after supper wiped out the original frescoes. This will be an opportunity for Santa Caterina to have a great work in the fashion of the day, along with the excitement of a fashionable artist installed behind screens for the time it will take to complete it. Zuana is less enamored of the latest style of painting, which seems to her to be interested more in exploring the violent contortions of the body than in finding the anatomical truths beneath. Nevertheless, she cannot help but be impressed. Such large-scale commissions are expensive. She finds herself wondering what might have happened if Serafina had not survived the treatment. The death of a novice before taking her final vows would trigger the return of a proportion of her dowry. A successful escape, however, would surely render it all forfeit. It is not something Zuana has thought about until this moment.
Perhaps she is not the only one to note the connection between the girl’s health and the fresco; a couple of the choir sisters have been glancing toward the side seats where, amid the row of novices, a small space marks her absence. The abbess, who is better at reading minds than souls, lifts her hands to recover everyone’s attention.
“Finally, before we move on, we should pay tribute to another sister to whom we owe particular thanks. As you will know by now, following the success of the concert and the play our youngest novice, Serafina, was taken suddenly and gravely ill with fits and fever. Without the intervention and vigil of our dispensary mistress, it is likely that we would have lost her. The art of healing is one of Our Lord’s greatest gifts, and Suora Zuana’s expertise and devotion enrich all our lives inside Santa Caterina.”
This is remarkable praise indeed, and the room responds with a rustle of appreciation and smiles. Zuana is so taken unaware that all she can do is smile and drop her eyes.
The abbess, however, has picked her moment well. All present—choir nuns, novices, and converse—are happy to acknowledge their dispensary mistress. The fact is that even before Carnival, Zuana’s star had been rising. Her part in taming Serafina’s rage and delivering her to the choir, her handling of the contagion—including her own illness—and now the drama around the novice’s illness, ending, as it did, so theatrically, all this has naturally brought her to prominence. After years of seeking ways to fit in unnoticed, Zuana has unwittingly become a player in the drama of convent life. And, it would appear, an acknowledged favorite now of the abbess herself.
“I think it is time to go on to the rota for Lent fasting. Yes, Suora Umiliana?”
“Madonna Chiara. If I may?”
In the middle of the second row Umiliana stands, hands clasped together, and turns to address the choir sisters behind her.
“Before we move on we should surely mark a further wonder, one that more than all the others shows the glory of God within our midst.” She pauses until she is sure she has everyone’s attention. “I speak of the arrival of Suora Magdalena in the novice’s cell and the part she played in this …miraculous, marvelous recovery. For those of us who saw it for ourselves, it was as if Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself was in that cell, helping to guide the young woman back to life.”
The room is very still now.
“If I may continue?” She looks to the abbess once more, who nods her head almost imperceptibly.
Umiliana turns to Zuana. “Suora Zuana, you arrived there before any of us. Perhaps you might recount for us what took place.”
Zuana, the center of attention for a second time, looks up into Suora Umiliana’s piercing gaze.
“I …I am not sure I saw any more than you, dear sister. I had been in the dispensary making a potion, and when I returned, Suora Magdalena had left her own cell and was at the bedside of the novice, praying.”
Though the words are entirely truthful, it is clear that they are not what Umiliana wants to hear.
“And was there not something of …of wonder about her? Some vision of the Lord that touched both her and the sick girl?”
Zuana picks her words with special care. “The novice was certainly much comforted by her presence. She opened her eyes for the first time since the remedy had sent her to sleep.”
The novice mistress stares at her coldly. How quickly enemies are made, Zuana thinks.
“Oh, but the girl was dying. It was a miracle!” Suora Felicità’s words burst out as if she can no longer keep them within, for fear of their exploding inside her.
There is a tiny shimmering silence, as if the whole assembly is now holding its breath. This is indeed a chapter meeting worth waiting for.
“Suora Felicità.” The abbess’s voice is gentle and measured by contrast. “Those are strong words to describe an event that, as far as I am aware, you did not yourself witness.”
“I? Well, I …not exactly.”
The abbess turns her attention to Zuana, her gaze cool, professional. “Suora Zuana, you treated the novice, and you were in the cell with her all night and before anyone else arrived. It is most important to know if you saw or noted anything—felt any sense of this …this vision that is being talked about.”
“I …what I saw …” And she struggles toward the right words, ones that tell the truth in her heart as well as her head. “What I saw was Suora Magdalena praying over the young girl—praying most devoutly, and speaking of the Lord and how He was there with her.” She pauses. “I myself did not see anything, but I cannot help but think He was listening to her prayers.”
“Indeed,” the abbess says gravely. “As He will have listened to all our devotion and intercession. Thank you.”
Umiliana moves as if to speak, but the abbess has not finished yet.
“And if I remember our conversation this morning correctly, Suora Umiliana—for this is an important matter—when you yourself came into the cell you did not experience any vision either.”
Umiliana frowns. It is hard to know with whom she is most upset: the abbess, Zuana, or Suora Felicità. Or even perhaps herself.
“I saw Serafina—who had been gravely ill only a few hours before—recovered. And I heard her say that she also had seen Him.”
Again there is the slightest murmur in the room.
“But you yourself did not?”
The novice mistress hesitates …then shakes her head.
“And the other sisters who were present in the room afterward—is there anyone who saw anything?”
The novices glance nervously at one another. Among the choir nuns it is clear that Perseveranza would dearly love to be able to speak but knows she cannot lie. In the row in front of her, Zuana sees both twins shake their heads in unison. The silence grows.
The abbess nods. “Thank you, all of you. And particularly you, Suora Umiliana. You do us a great service to bring up the matter of Suora Magdalena. I had intended to speak of it later, but perhaps this moment is opportune.
“Suora Magdalena, as we know, is an old and chaste soul who would give her last breath for the welfare of a young sister. She has always been the most humble of nuns, with no wish to draw attention to herself. In fact, it has long been her fervent wish to be left alone and undisturbed, to serve God as He saw fit. As a few of the older sisters in the convent can testify—Suora Umiliana, you yourself are one of them—that wish was granted many years ago by both the abbess and the bishop of the time, and the convent has been bound by it ever since.”
Zuana is busy with numbers now. The novice mistress is older by how many years than the abbess? Five, maybe ten; though caring as little as she does for her appearance it is hard to tell. Either way, in 1540 when all the fuss had happened she would have been a young choir nun. And it is always the young who are most affected.
“However, as you point out, it seems that she has of her own accord broken that vow now, in the light of which, I think we must look to her welfare. She is exceedingly frail, certainly not well enough to be moving around the convent on her own without help. It seems to me that the best course of action is for us to transfer her to the infirmary, where Suora Zuana can give her the personal care she needs as she approaches the end of her life.”
This change of mind is so perfect and expressed with such sincerity that Zuana is rendered speechless for a moment.
Umiliana, however, has no such problem.
“If she is now to leave her cell, if the convent decides that is best for her, then surely she could also be allowed to attend chapel and mass and take the host. I know there are sisters who would happily carry her there if she so desired.”
There is an audible gasp. On the surface it is the drama of the sparring between abbess and novice mistress, but there is something else going on here: some of the older nuns, the more natural allies of Umiliana such as Agnesina and Concordia, will no doubt have memories of the services where Suora Magdalena’s appearances coincided with weeping stigmata. And, given the excitement in the convent, some of the younger ones will surely have heard rumors by now.
“Suora Umiliana, you have spoken my own thoughts aloud. However, such is her fragility I do not think that will be possible,” the abbess says smoothly. “In fact, I have discussed the matter with Father Romero already. Indeed, he visited her this morning when he came to hear the confession of the novice.”
Whether he did or did not visit Magdalena, there is no one in the room to contradict her, since they were all at work hour. Anyway, why should anyone doubt the word of their abbess? Although Zuana finds herself doing just that.
“She was, alas, unconscious and so not able to take confession or receive the host. But he has promised to come again.”
“Oh, is she dying? Are we to lose our holiest soul having only just found her again?”
Suora Felicità’s voice is now tearful, so that a few of the young ones look positively alarmed. Umiliana glances at her sharply. It is one thing to pit your wits against a skilled opponent, another thing entirely to find yourself undermined by your own side.
“We must all die in the end, Suora Felicità,” the abbess says gently, “and we must not be selfish. For Magdalena herself it will be the greatest celebration to be taken by God.”
The words, so humble that in other circumstances they might have been spoken by the novice mistress herself, still the room. In her chair on the dais, the abbess sits upright and graceful.
“Suora Zuana? As dispensary mistress you have seen our dear sister the most recently of all of us. Perhaps you might give us your thoughts on her strength or frailty?”
She turns to Zuana and her eyes are shining. To look at her you would think she was positively enjoying herself. At recreation the more mischievous nuns sometimes speculate on what a perfect wife for a great noble she would have made, running his family and his palace as efficiently as she runs the convent. They do her an injustice, Zuana thinks. It is not a mere palace she should run but a state. For surely in its way that is what she is doing here. Right down to a network of spies and agents to help keep her authority intact.
“When I saw her this morning she was unconscious and most weak. She is also suffering from chronic bedsores. In my opinion it would be kinder if she was moved as little as possible.”
A network in which Zuana appears now to have been granted a position of considerable authority.
“And if it was so decided, would you take over her care in the infirmary? You have in the past expressed grave concern over her state, I know.”
But how much does Zuana really want the role? It is not a question she can answer now. She bows her head.
“If it is the will of the convent, I would be honored to do so.”
The abbess smooths her skirts and turns to the audience.
“So. Let us put it to the vote. The motion before the sisters of Santa Caterina today is whether to move our aged and beloved Suora Magdalena from her cell into the infirmary, where we may ease her passage into God’s hands.”
The novices watch as the choir nuns come up one by one to the front and, with their backs to the rest of the room to ensure anonymity, pick out a small wooden ball from the bucket— white for yes, black for no—and drop it through a hole into the voting box.
When everyone has voted, the box is emptied and the balls are counted by the sacristan and witnessed by the gate mistress; the motion is declared duly carried. It is noticeable, however, that among the winning white balls are a greater than usual number of black.
SHE IS EMPTY. Quiet. Still. Maybe stiller than she has ever been in her life. It must be the aftermath of the poison. During her time in the dispensary, she had wondered about the drama of the hellebore: what it might feel like to have one’s insides ripped apart, scraped out nigh unto death. To be so purged, so emptied out. Almost as if one might be able to start again. Another Serafina. Newer, lighter, cleaner, with no hand gripping her heart and twisting her guts. No man to love and yearn for anymore. Because it seems, after all, that he never loved her.
He does not care, you see.
He does not care. Yet how could that be? What of all the poetry? The music? The harmony of voices, the starburst sweetness of mouth on mouth, skin on skin, the mingling of souls that made them for that instant pure, afraid of nothing? Ah, now—now it is too late, she knows that she did really love him; that, amid all the rebellion and hot blood, the very exhilaration of being alive, separately and together, Jacopo had been a man worth loving, himself generous, filled with song and no malice.
Except, it seems, he wasn’t. Instead, he, like she, had been a master of deception. Yet how could that be?
At any other time these thoughts would have been like hooks in her flesh, but there is nothing left to lacerate. She is so tired, too tired to think properly. Certainly this new cleansed Serafina cannot hold on to anything for very long. Her head feels as light and empty as her body. It is not so awful; more like dizziness, like holding a high note for longer even than your longest breath allows, hearing it vibrate, shimmering inside your head.
Perhaps this sensation is the result of her confession? The scouring of her soul as well as her stomach. She has told the old priest everything. With the screams of the pierced and the sliced still inside her, how could she not? Everything—the bliss, the rage, the terror, the disobedience, even the self-destruction—such a fast-flowing river of sin. How much of it he heard she has no idea, for both their eyes were closed as she spoke. But at the end he had prayed for her, imposed a penance of confinement with bread-and-water fasting for two weeks, and given her absolution.
Two weeks’ confinement and fasting. It is not such a torment. In fact she welcomes it. In the time since she opened her eyes on the cell full of nuns, she has relished the solitude. How can she bear to face people again? As for the fasting, well, her hunger is so familiar to her now that even when she does feel the need to eat, she feels a greater sense of triumph when she overcomes it. Her gut has been full of undigested rage and panic for so long that to be without anything inside her seems a marvel in itself.
Whether it comes from the quiet or the exhaustion, she prays more: simple prayers held inside simple phrases. I am sorry. Help me. Forgive me. Childish, almost. Each time she sleeps she wakes to the sight of the crucifix on the wall, but often when she looks at it she sees instead the figure of the man in the marshland, walking toward her with the sun as a radiating halo behind him. The moment when he first came she had thought it might have been Jacopo, because his hair also fell curling around his shoulders and he, too, walked with a long stride. But she knows now that it was not Jacopo but Christ Himself and that He came to her through Suora Magdalena. Why and how this happened she does not know. She is certainly not deserving. Yet, oh—He brought her such comfort then! And now. For He also is generous, filled with song and no malice.
As for the future, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …well, she does not think of that. How could she?
“SERAFINA.”
She knows Zuana is in the room. She heard her come in and registered the noise of something being placed on the table. But once she opens her eyes she will have to speak to her, and of all people she is the one who will surely make it all begin again. Nevertheless …
“Serafina.”
She turns her head and blinks.
Zuana is sitting on a small chair close to the bed. Next to her is a wooden plate with bread and cheese and a bowl of hot soup. She had forgotten how familiar this face is: the broad open forehead with its furrowed lines of thought and those clean clear eyes, smiling now along with the mouth. No malice here, either. Despite everything, she is pleased to see her.
“Praise be to God for your recovery. Do you still have pain in your stomach?”
“No.”
“Any nausea?” She leans over and takes the girl’s pulse, red-stained fingers on the thin pale wrist.
The smell of the cooked food brings a rush of saliva into Serafina’s mouth, but she swallows it down again. Only when I imagine eating, she thinks. “No.”
“What about dreams? Are you having bad dreams?”
“No.” She sees the man in the mist striding toward her. “No, not anymore.”
“Good. Here, I have brought you some cheese and fresh soup and bread.”
“I am not hungry.”
“Still, you should eat.”
“I can’t.” She shakes her head. “I am given penance.”
“Penance?”
“Father Romero. He heard my confession. My penance is confinement and bread and water for two weeks.”
A frown moves across Zuana’s face. “Did no one tell him you had been ill?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you sit up?”
She attempts to pull herself up, but it is an effort.
Zuana goes to help, and as her hands touch her, for an instant Serafina is pulled back into the maelstrom of that night— hanging suspended in strong arms as her bowels open and her stomach screams. Such intimacy makes her embarrassed now, almost ashamed. She moves away, pulling the blanket around her.
“I am sorry”—she keeps her eyes on the blanket—“if what I did got you into trouble.”
Zuana shakes her head. “There is nothing to be sorry for. You have confessed your sins. And you are forgiven.”
“I told him everything,” she says, looking straight at her now, the words thrown down like a gauntlet. “All of it.”
“I am glad,” Zuana says gently.
“Do you think it a fair penance?”
“I can’t say. Though it is not healthy to starve yourself after such violent purging.”
“It doesn’t matter, I am not hungry,” she says again. Then: “Suora Magdalena has not eaten for years.”
“That is not true. She just eats exceedingly little, so that over the years her body has grown used to it. I think she is not someone to emulate in this regard. Not at this moment.”
“That is not what Suora Umiliana says.”
I wonder what else Umiliana says, Zuana thinks to herself, though no doubt some of it she can guess. “Who else has visited you?”
“Suora Federica came. She brought me a pear—look, here.” She pulls it out from under her pillow, the green marzipan coated in particles of dust. “I don’t want it. You take it.”
Zuana shakes her head. “Keep it until the end of your penance. It will be something to look forward to.”
To look forward. Such a simple idea, like waiting for the sun to rise again in the morning. It is a grave sin for any novice to try to escape the convent and an equally grave one to aid or abet her. Serafina has confessed and been forgiven. Zuana should be looking to her own soul now. There is nothing more she can do for the girl. Still …
“Serafina, listen to me. The hellebore along with the poppy is a poisonous evacuator, and the dose that I gave you was not small. You will feel strange for a while. There will be lethargy and sadness, some confusion in your mind, even.”
“I don’t feel anything,” she says flatly.
“That will be part of it. But it will pass.”
She stops because she does not know what else to say.
The girl puts her head back against the wall. “I did see things,” she says quietly. “Terrible things.”
“It was the potion. Remember that: only the visions of the potion.”
“Have you ever seen such things?”
As she looks at Zuana her eyes are huge in her face. And black, black as lumps of charcoal.
“Yes, I have.”
“And wondrous ones, too?”
“I …yes, in a way.”
“But you have never seen Him?”
Zuana does not wait long on this. “No.”
“Why not? You are a good nun.”
“No. I …I am—”
“Yes, yes, you are. I know.”
“Well, I …I think there are many levels of goodness. And only the fewest of the few are given such an honor.”
“But she is given it. She sees Him.”
They do not need to give her a name. We are not allowed to speak of this, Zuana thinks. It is forbidden territory. But then so much has changed over these last weeks. The list of secrets inside the convent is growing ever longer and there seems no point in denying this one, especially since this young woman has been witness to it more profoundly than anyone else.
“Yes. She does.”
“She has always seen Him, hasn’t she?”
“It appears so.”
“Why her? One of the novices told me she was just a peasant girl from a village whom the old duke found somewhere. No family, no study, nothing. Was she born holy? Is it how she prayed? Or was it the fasting? Is that how she did it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think I saw Him, too.” She shakes her head. “Just for a moment.”
The poppy: it can show you anything and everything. “It is possible that this, too, was the potion, Serafina,” she says softly.
“How do you know?” Her voice has a tremble in it. “If we all saw Him maybe it would be all right to live and die here.”
Yes, something has changed in her, Zuana thinks. But then how could it not have? Please God, let it bring her to peace. “I think Our Lord is always here, even if one does not see Him directly.”
Serafina is silent for a moment, as if considering this idea.
“She was wrong about him, you know,” she says at last, and her voice remains small, with none of the edge or energy from before. “The abbess said he didn’t care. But it’s not true. He did love me.”
She should eat something, a little bread at least. That much is permitted. Zuana breaks off a small chunk, dips it in the water, and holds it out to her. “Here.”
The girl stares at it and shakes her head.
“I am not hungry.”
THE BELL FOR work hour is beginning to sound as Zuana comes out of the girl’s cell and moves along the cloister. Directly in front of her she sees Suora Umiliana walking toward her. She drops her head, intending that they should pass without words— the novice mistress practices silence even when it is not called for—but instead the elder woman meets her eye. Her manner is welcoming, almost joyful.
“You have come from the novice? How do you find her? The change is powerful, yes?”
“I …yes, yes, she is different.”
“Praise be to God, He has seen fit to cleanse her of her anger and pretense and plant in their place a seed of humility. Thanks be to Him. And also to you for the care within your remedy.”
Zuana stares at her. Since their encounter in chapter she has expected hostility, even prepared herself for it, but there seems none here. She wonders what the novice mistress would say if she knew why the “remedy” had been administered in the first place. Of course Zuana cannot tell her that. Just as she cannot tell her what went on in Suora Magdalena’s cell all those weeks ago. Secrets within secrets—they grow like mold in a badly run storeroom. But does that also make it a badly run convent? How much deception is permitted in the pursuit of peace? She realizes that she does not know anymore.
“She is grown quieter, that is true. But I am concerned about her health. The remedy has left her very weak. She should be eating, not fasting.”
“In unquiet souls the body must be subdued sometimes to give room to the soul. She will come to no harm, Suora Zuana, I will see to that. These are wondrous times we are living through in Santa Caterina, would you not agree? The Lord has answered our prayers and is come among us. Come through both the old and the young. I fear you have not seen it yet but it is here, as clear as sunshine on water. You must look to your own soul, Suora Zuana. He is longing for you to find Him, too. And you will, I know. All you need is to—”
“I thank you for your good wishes, Suora Umiliana.” Zuana smiles as she cuts across her words. “I long for Him, too. But still I think the girl should not be fasting.”
The novice mistress claps her hands together and pulls them back under her robe. “Neither you nor I have the right to question the wisdom of our father confessor,” she says, the old Umiliana reemerging out of her certainty. “She is in my care and I will tend to her as if she were my own child. God be with you, Suora Zuana.”
“And with you,” Zuana replies, as they pass each other. Ah, if only the love of God moved like the bad seeds of infection through the air, she thinks. Then perhaps we would not need so much constant saving. The boldness of her irreverence takes her by surprise. I am tired, she thinks, and in need of air for my body, if not for my soul.
THE BELL FOR the work hour is still sounding as she puts on her cloak and goes to the herb garden, taking her burlap bag of forks and other tools. The great rain has finally passed, leaving the sky as washed as the earth, and the day that has emerged is cloudless and almost warm. In summer after such storms the cloisters steam as the sun burns off the moisture. There is nothing so dramatic today, but in the gardens the ground will have been softened by the long downpour and whatever early growth has started under the soil may now have a chance to push farther through.
She has not been out of the cloisters since the night in the storeroom, and she is amazed by the difference it makes to her spirits to be in the open again. It will do her good to be working in the garden, surrounded by plants rather than people. She walks briskly, feeling the wind fresh on her cheeks, and as she does so she lets go of her anxieties about the girl and Umiliana and the abbess, all the tangled threads of convent politics and conspiracy, and remembers instead what it is she does here: how the work of a good dispensary mistress is as much about tending plants as tending people.
The garden is probably no bigger than the abbess’s chambers (though Zuana has expanded it by half since she was voted into the post), yet it is home to close to a hundred herbs and medicinal shrubs. There are days between spring and autumn when the workload is such that she barely has time for mental prayer—when the fecundity of nature fills her with wonder and thanks, but her gratitude is waylaid by the attention, even devotion, that the plants require: weeding, splitting, staking, pruning, feeding, harvesting, deadheading, even waging war on their behalf, picking off and crushing small plagues of slugs and snails, which grow out of putrefaction and dampness to lay waste to her most tender and precious herbs.
This winter has been harsh, on both her fingers and the plants, but the worst is over now. She can feel it as soon as she moves into open ground. Protected on one side by the back of the smaller cloister and on the other by the vegetable garden wall, the herb patch is a sheltered enough space for spring to make an early appearance. During a clement March she will see most of the more robust or courageous plants poking their heads aboveground. This mass arrival is one of the most powerful memories of her childhood, for before the university instituted its own medicinal garden (spurred on, no doubt, by the fact that Padua and Pisa were already famous for theirs), the courtyard of her father’s house was a field of old buckets, pots, and wooden trays filled with seeds and cuttings. He would take her out sometimes in the first days of warm weather and make her listen to the silence.
There are scholars, great men of the present as well as the past, who believe that God created man because only through us could He celebrate the power of His vast creation. And thus it is both our pleasure and our duty to witness the wonder. You cannot hear it, can you? But even now as we stand here, under the earth a thousand bulbs and seeds and roots are budding and cracking and sprouting, an army of small tendrils and shoots rising up, moving through the earth toward the light, each one of them so tender that when you see them you will marvel at how they could have moved such a weight of soil above them to emerge. Imagine that, Faustina. Each year the repeating miracle of it.
The picture he painted was so strong, and he had such awe in his voice, that whenever she reads about or imagines the Second Coming, she sees graveyards like vast herb gardens, with bodies, as tender and young as those new shoots, pushing up against the rotten wood of their coffins and rising up toward the light of God to the sound of trumpets. Flesh incorruptible. She had told him of this vision once and he had smiled in that way parents do when their children are wiser or more charming than their years. But she could see that for him it was in some ways no more impressive than the more humble version of God’s glory that nature presented.
Given the complexities of the world around her, she has need of such a simple miracle today.
Save for the occasional drops of rain coming off the evergreen shrubs and trees, it is quiet in the garden. The lavender and the rosemary, bruised from the downpour, are thick with aromatic pungency as she rolls her fingers along their stems. In the early beds, the calendula and fennel and hypericum are already reviving. She clears a space and softens the soil around them so that the shoots can expand. Next will come the belladonna and the betonica and the cardiaca, the plant that strengthens the heart, which once it starts will grow as thick as nettles and as fast as weeds. She used to wonder whether in the very beginning someone had plaited together the alphabet and the seasons: marking the first plants as B’s and C’s, then F’s and H’s, leaving the poppy, the valerian, and the verbena to come later. By then the garden will have gone wild, so there will be barely an inch of space left.
She slips her fingers under the newly sprouting fennel, with its lacy, feathery fronds. Her father was right. It is indeed a wonder how something that can barely hold its head up in the air has the force to break through heavy, sodden earth. Yet give it another month of good weather, and its stem will be proudly upright, thick with its own juice. Soil, light, water, sun. Growth, death, putrefaction, regeneration. No need for confession or forgiveness or redemption here. Life without soul. So clear, so simple. Oh, Zuana, you were bred for plants, not convent politics.
“I thought I might find you here.”
She turns quickly. The abbess is treading her way carefully through the undergrowth.
“So. How are all your new children doing?” She gestures to the garden around them.
“It’s early days. But I think we will have good crop of calendula.”
“Possibly you will be able to harvest some off your cheek.”
Zuana puts her hand up and wipes away a streak of mud. The abbess, in contrast, is clean and newly pressed, though it is her complexion that gives her away most obviously; the choir nuns who live in cloisters stay pale and smooth without the aid of Apollonia’s powders, while those who work outside find the sun and the winter winds excavating rivers of broken veins in their cheeks and noses. How much this releases them from the sin of vanity is hard to know, though an inspection might find fewer silver trays doubling as mirrors in their cells.
“I am come to talk to you about the novice. To explain what happened that night at the dock.”
“You don’t have to explain anything, Madonna Abbess.”
“No, I don’t have to, that is true. Rather I choose to.” She smiles and looks around. “Tell me—where is the hellebore?”
Zuana points to an evergreen shrub toward the back of one of the beds. The abbess lifts her skirts and moves over to it.
“It looks so …innocent.”
“The poison comes from the root, not the foliage.”
She nods, studying it as she starts to talk.
“After I wrote to her father, he took an unconscionably long time in replying. By the time he did she appeared to have settled, which is why I did not think fit to communicate his answer. To his credit, he was as frank in his responses as I had been in my questions. He told me that his daughter had always been of strong character, clever and full of passion, first for one thing, then another, and it was this …volatility …that had decided him that although she had initially been chosen for marriage she might be better ruled by God than any husband. Unfortunately he had omitted to inform her—and us—of this decision until rather late in the proceedings.”
Zuana moves her eyes over the garden beds. Strong character. There are plants like that, ones that survive no matter what— frost, rain, sun, insects—while others born from the same handful of seeds wither away beside them. They are the ones you should nurture and take cuttings from, rather than putting them behind walls to die without propagating. “And the young man?”
“The music teacher? Unfortunately, he was less than frank about him. By then, by God’s grace, I had other information. It seems it was a considerable attachment. When it was discovered, there were accusations and violent scenes, and the man was dismissed. Hence the decision to send her to us here in Ferrara rather than Milan, to separate them with distance and avoid further scandal. It was only later that I found he had made his way independently to the city so he could stay in touch with her, by a form of communication the manner of which they had decided earlier.”
“That is a great deal to have discovered,” Zuana says, for there is no way she cannot be impressed.
The abbess shrugs. “In a good family there is always someone who knows how to find things out. An impoverished stranger in a foreign city warms to friends who open their purses—and a young man who has made a noble conquest likes to boast about it.”
She knows so much about men, Zuana thinks admiringly. How could that be? She has never seen the inside of a tavern, never sat and drunk wine with any man, let alone wooed or been wooed by one. Yet she talks of them, talks of all of it, as if she imbibed the wisdom of the world with her mother’s milk. Perhaps there was some manual passed down in her family, too, hidden away in her dowry chest. She would need to protect such a volume against the long noses of church inspectors.
“And these friends? Are they the same ones who found him the post at Parma?”
“The same.” The abbess nods, her attention now distracted as she brushes some piece of dirt or insect carefully from her skirts. “I would have told you this before, but I did not want to compromise your relationship with the girl. You seemed to have such a …a connection with her that I hoped, despite it all, that she might change her mind. I involved you that night only because I was not privy to what had been arranged between them and because I could not watch her all the time.”
“I should have seen it myself. It was in front of my eyes.”
“No. The level of deception was too great. I would not have seen it if I hadn’t known.”
Zuana shakes her head. “I was thinking more of the poppy syrup missing from the dispensary bottle.”
“As always, you are hard on yourself, Zuana. You had been ill and the convent was mad with Carnival. There is no reason to blame yourself.”
“The thing I do not understand is why, having gone to such trouble to find and contact her, he had no qualms about suddenly deserting her.”
The abbess plucks a leaf from the hellebore bush and crushes it in her hand. “As I said, such young men do not care a fig for anything but their own pleasure. If he had had his way he would have taken her, ruined her, and cast her aside. We must thank God that He saw fit to let you save her from herself.”
Zuana sees the two of them standing on the dock, the black water in the background, Serafina fumbling with the ropes on the boat, while she herself does nothing to stop her. The abbess had known all along that there would be no one there to meet her. It had never been Zuana’s job to prevent her from escaping, only to bring her back from the edge when she realized she had been betrayed. “Thank you.” She hears the girl’s voice low in her ears. Surely the abbess must have heard something, too.
“Madonna Chiara, there is something I must tell you.”
“Actually, Zuana, I think that there is not.” She lets the leaf fall, wiping its juice off her hands. “As far as I am concerned, whatever faults you have committed in this matter, you paid your penance in the room with her that night. Anything else that burdens you, you should take to Father Romero.”
It is clear from her tone that the matter is closed.
Yet there are so many frayed ends.
“What happens now? To the girl?”
“She will take the veil and in time become a valued and valuable sister of the convent.”
“And if she is still unwilling?”
“I do not believe there will be any further rebellion. Not now.”
Again the conversation seems finished but Zuana hesitates. “I am concerned that she is fasting so quickly after the evacuation. I—”
“And I am concerned that she continues to take up so much of your—and this convent’s—time.” Her tone is sharp now. “If she is to settle she must accept her lot as an ordinary novice and taste a little bitter fruit like everyone else. Given her sins, it is hardly an onerous penance and will do her no lasting harm. Suora Umiliana can tend to her needs for a while, not you.”
The abbess’s evident anger, and the fact that Zuana is being forbidden access to the girl, is confirmation in itself that she had seen or suspected what took place on the jetty that night. Zuana bows her head to show obedience. It occurs to her that she might mention Umiliana’s evident joy in the novice’s “conversion,” but she knows this is not the time. In the life of any nun, criticism must be accepted with the same humility as praise. You must look to your own soul, Suora Zuana. Umiliana’s words come back to her. Maybe they are both right: she has given too much of her journey to this volatile young woman. There are others who need her more.
“Anyway, you will have your hands filled in the dispensary looking after Suora Magdalena,” the abbess says, more kindly. “I cannot tell you how good it will be for her to be in your care— how good it will be for all of us.” She pauses, rubbing her hands together hard. “Ooh, it is cold out here. You must have grown a second skin in your work. I think I shall go back in time to see Suora Federica before the Sext bell. Perhaps we might walk as far as the second cloisters together.”
Zuana packs her fork and trowel into her bag, and they make their way along the wall of the vegetable garden.
“I meant what I said in chapter yesterday, Zuana,” the abbess says, as they go. “You are a beloved sister of this convent. Your work enriches all our lives. As do your obedience and loyalty.” She pauses, as if to decide whether to continue. “In that spirit I would like to share with you some news I have received— disturbing news. It seems that Bishop Paleotti in Bologna has sent notice to all the convents in the city that there will be no more public performances of theater, for fear of contamination between the nuns and the outside world. And, in Milan, Cardinal Borromeo has forbidden any musical instruction between nuns and musicians from the outside world and is threatening the removal of all musical instruments other than the chapel organ.”
This is indeed shocking information, and though Zuana might question the abbess’s motives for telling it now, there is no reason to doubt its veracity. She sees Benedicta and Scholastica’s faces, shining with the pride of their achievements. No more plays and no more orchestras? It is unthinkable—except perhaps in a convent run by Suora Umiliana.
“You really think such things could happen here?”
“It is happening already in quiet ways. As Benedicta starts to arrange her ‘gift’ of the Lamentations, she may find that the music that delights Rome these days is a good deal starker than that which pours out of her soul. For the rest, though, we are not yet lost. Our bishop may be a reformer, but he is also of an excellent family and will be open to the entreaties of others. It is, however, essential that we give him no cause for concern.”
They continue silently for a bit. At the cloister entrance they pause, the abbess turning to her and smiling.
“Given the circumstances, you understand, I am sure, how it will be better for all concerned if Suora Magdalena remains confined inside the infirmary until she dies…”
Rather than wandering the corridors having revelations everywhere she goes.
The words are there, even though they are unspoken. Zuana sees the demented Clementia straining her arms against the night straps on the side of the bed. A decrepit old woman, unconscious and covered in bedsores, strapped down like a prisoner. Is that what she is being asked to do? For the good of the convent?
She bows her head but cannot bring herself to speak. Please God, it will not come to that.
THEY MOVE SUORA Magdalena that evening before the office of Compline. Zuana makes up a stretcher from garden poles strapped to a mattress, and she and three of the convent’s strongest converse lift the old woman carefully from her pallet bed onto it. When they pick it up and start to walk, her eyelids flicker a little as her sores rub against the stretcher, but she does not protest.
In the infirmary, Clementia is muttering as usual but falls strangely quiet at their entrance. They slide Magdalena onto the newly prepared bed and Zuana administers a poultice of calendula to the worst of the bedsores. The abbess comes to pay her respects, joined almost immediately by Suora Umiliana, who kneels and prays at the bedside. From across the room, Clementia’s singsong voice joins in the prayers.
Later, while the convent sleeps, Zuana stays at Magdalena’s bedside. In her experience more souls are taken by God during darkness than in the light, which makes the infirmary a potent place to be at night. There are deaths when the end comes in such agony that not even her potions can soothe, when the night candle on the altar seems barely strong enough to keep the darkness at bay. But not tonight. Tonight the room is safe and sweet-smelling, as if the perfume of the fumigant is stronger than usual. Magdalena’s deep sleep seems to affect those in the beds around her. In contrast, Zuana herself feels wide awake, as if she could sit there forever. She keeps vigil until the Matins bell and, when the divine office is finished, checks one last time before allowing herself to sleep.
The morning finds the shadows gone and all her patients still aslumber. From then on, when she is in chapel she has Letizia sit with the old woman so that she is never left wholly unsupervised. There will be no straps and restraints here. She has made her decision about that, whatever the cost.
ON THE SURFACE at least, convent life returns to normal. The weather remains clement as the daily offices of Lent unfold, with their prayers of abstinence and repentance. After so much excitement, the reestablishing of rhythm comes as a balm to all.
In accordance with the abbess’s injunction, Zuana does not see Serafina. While this causes her anxiety, she accepts it. The abbess’s words are not without wisdom. If the girl is to forge any life for herself here, she must find her own way to God like every other novice. And to do that she must make peace with herself. While Suora Umiliana may not be the gentlest of guides, nor the abbess’s greatest ally, it had been she, out of all the nuns, who remained the most skeptical about the novice’s earlier false goodness, and with humility and discipline as her credo she will surely be an honest and steadfast watchdog over any young soul.
As for the fasting—well, it is a route they have all taken at some point in their journeys toward God, and as long as the girl is careful not to exceed the penance she should not be too damaged by it.
AS THE BODY grows thin, so by as much the soul waxes fat.
The lump of stale bread is delivered to the cell every morning, along with a jug of water mixed with a few spoonfuls of wine. Like everything in Santa Caterina, fasting is encouraged in moderation, and the daily ration is designed to prick hunger, not cause starvation.
Serafina, however, is not interested in moderation. Her hunger, curled inside her stomach like a great tapeworm, lies in wait for the delivery. She drinks some water in slow sips, feeling it move down her throat, then tears the bread into a dozen small pieces, arranging them carefully on the wooden plate. She eats a single piece, washed down by more water, then places the plate in the center of the cell so that it is always visible wherever she moves, as a reminder of temptation. At some point during the day she will perhaps take another of these pieces and break it into even smaller bits, a few of which she will put into her mouth, letting her saliva work on it until it is soft enough to swallow. At the end of the day, whatever is left she secretes somewhere around her cell, to hide it from the nun who brings the next day’s ration and in case she might need it later, though she never does. This much is her choice, in her control.
It is a cause for some wonder, how quickly this change has taken place: the way the fasting, the idea as well as the fact of it, has become her life. She carries the hunger with her every moment of the day. When she is praying she prays to withstand it, and when it is at its most acute it moves her toward prayer. The only time she does not feel it is when she is asleep. And yet—and here is the strangest thing—she is not in anguish over it. Instead, this concentration, this absorption in the act of not eating, is so strong that it has begun to wipe out all other feelings and thoughts that might pursue her. There is no room now to pine for voices reciting poetry or to yearn for the touch of a hand upon hers. No time for fury at her incarceration or the indulgence of despair. Even the music that used to soften the silence in her head has stilled. She is too busy with the business in hand, decisions to be taken, challenges to be faced: how many sips of water, when and how many slivers of stale bread, how many times each mouthful must be chewed to make it last, whether at the end she will swallow it or perhaps spit it out. And though there may be setbacks, there are also triumphs. The simple fact of controlling what she does or does not put into her mouth gives her a strange sense of power. It also makes her feel less alone. For in this struggle another voice is becoming louder.
As the body grows thin, so by as much the soul waxes fat.
The novice mistress’s words have become her poetry now. While Suora Zuana was intent on pushing bread into her mouth, Suora Umiliana understands the satisfaction that comes from crushing one’s own resistance. Suora Umiliana, who has always offered her cold comfort, is now kindness itself. Each day she gives up her recreation hour to sit and pray with her. Her instruction, which once seemed so joyless, becomes full of substance and meaning.
“Give it up to Him. The struggle, the temptation. Your weakness and your unworthiness. For no one can do it alone.”
It is as if the novice mistress has been waiting for this moment, to see her so reduced and defeated that she can be rebuilt. Her voice, once so harsh and prodding, has grown gentle in this companionship.
“Hoard your hunger, taste the ache, feel the emptiness. Give it all up to Him, Serafina. He has felt it all and worse. If you are truly humble, He will not reject you. Ask Him for His help. I am not worthy, Lord, but be with me now in this fight. Fill me with emptiness. For You are my only food, my only sustenance. Purge me so I will be ready for You”
MY ONLY FOOD. My only sustenance. When she is not thinking of the stale bread she is thinking more and more about the host, constructing the moment, wondering what it might taste like on a clean conscience. Even as a child, when she tried to be good she was often distracted by small sins of thought, itching like fleabites on her soul. But it is different now. Now, with nothing else in her life to long for, she begins to long for this: the sacrament, laid out like a banquet in her imagination, the tang of the wine, the incomparable melting sweetness of the host on her tongue. But only if she keeps herself pure for it.
So the days begin to blur together, and under Suora Umiliana’s tutelage she waxes fat while she grows thin.
Meanwhile, through the parlatorio come mangled rumors of visitations, changes, and troubles inside other convents in other cities, so that many nuns bow their heads in prayer and give thanks to God that here in Santa Caterina they are not so oppressed.
Many nuns …but not all.
ON THE THIRD Sunday of Lent, after two weeks of confinement and penance, the novice Serafina is given leave to attend mass and take communion, and so rejoin convent life.
Zuana takes her place early in the chapel. She has not seen her former assistant since the morning of her recovery. The girl arrives supported on the arm of young Suora Eugenia. Even at a distance Zuana is disturbed by what she sees. The girl is hunched and withdrawn, eyes to the ground, each step small, considered. Beside her Eugenia stands slender and proud. Like a number of the younger nuns, she has been much affected by the story of the illness and semi-miraculous recovery, and now seems content to offer herself as the novice’s acolyte rather than her rival. They make an arresting pair: the convent’s two songbirds, both in their way highly strung, both worn thin by the intensity of being alive. How susceptible the young are to such storms of emotion and drama, Zuana thinks. It is as if their very hearts beat faster than those of others. She keeps an eye on them as they settle in their seats. Theirs has been an entrance as much as an arrival, and she is not the only one watching through half-closed eyes. There will be no further rebellion. The abbess’s words sound in Zuana’s ears. As Madonna Chiara will be the last to take her seat, she is not here to witness this moment—which is unfortunate, for it is perhaps something she should take note of.
Except …except, Zuana thinks, while I know this young woman to be a dissembler of extraordinary talent, there is no deception in what we are seeing now, surely? How could there be? Installed in her choir seat she looks so small, curled in on herself, eyes dull, her expression almost dreamy. If, on top of her drug-induced voiding, she is starving herself more than the allotted penance, there will be precious little stamina for deception in her now. A better confessor would never have imposed such a rigorous penance, for young girls are known to be more susceptible to the drama of fasting than their older counterparts.
Still, it is possible some good will come of it. She thinks of Suora Magdalena, dried up in her bed like a piece of salted meat. While she represents the extreme, degrees of hunger are necessary—even beneficial—to convent life. In readiness for the host, Zuana herself has not eaten since last night, and there is a familiar, almost pleasurable hollowness in her stomach. For those who find themselves distracted by the world around them, fasting can be a wondrous tool. Indeed, this is the time of year for it: Lent after Carnival. Carne vale, farewell to the flesh. Most of the nuns will be feeling the growl of hunger in their stomachs at some time in the weeks to come. Disciplining the body to free the soul: with the convent still so upside down there will be those who will actively look forward to fasting as a way of returning to a state of greater calm.
When they are all seated, Father Romero enters, flanked by the sacristan sister and the chosen choir nun who will aid him in the business of the mass. In contrast to the ceremony celebrated in the public church, mass in the convent chapel is an intimate affair: a simple altar set below the great crucifix, with the nuns gathered in their choir stalls close by; the greatest privilege as well as the greatest pleasure.
If they are honest they might admit that it is not, alas, always a transcendent experience. Father Romero’s surplice, embroidered by the sisters themselves, is so heavy with gold thread that he can barely walk underneath it. Zuana watches him fumbling with the objects on the altar. In the sixteen years she has been here there has been only one confessor whose inner light matched the gold on his robes. He had lasted a mere seven months, taken when a sudden wave of pestilence hit the city, and in the years that followed they had all been either too fierce or too feeble. In the lives of the convent saints, the journey of the most holy women is marked by the wisdom and charity of their confessors. How would Caterina of Siena have learned to speak so clearly to the world if her first human listener had not been Father Raymond de Capua? But here they must fend for themselves spiritually—what is it that Suora Umiliana says? — “like lambs bleating with hunger in need of a pasture to nurture them.” Though Zuana does not want to live in a convent run with her strictness and ferocity there are nevertheless moments when the novice mistress’s eloquence speaks to her. How many other choir nuns, she wonders, may have felt the same?
The service begins. While Father Romero’s voice is cracked and wheezy, the nuns’ responses are full and joyful and the chapel resounds with eager voices.
“God be with you.”
“And with you also.”
And despite Father Romero, surely He is.
Zuana bows her head. She has lived among these women for almost seventeen years. Recently even her father’s voice has been growing quieter compared with theirs. The thought does not frighten her as it once did. The abbess is right: through the rhythm and discipline of prayer eventually comes acceptance. How many of them could that be said of? She glances across the stalls and senses Suora Umiliana’s eye upon her. Ah, she always has an uncanny way of knowing who is not properly concentrating.
Zuana gives her attention to the altar. They are reaching the moment of the blessing of the Eucharist.
“This is my body.”
“This is my blood.”
She glances up at the great crucifix, the trickle of blood unfurling like a scarlet ribbon from His punctured side. And as she studies it, the body seems to tremble forward against the nails. Zuana narrows her eyes to look more clearly. I am tired, she thinks. It makes my vision untrustworthy. She glances around her but, with the exception of Agnesina, whose faulty vision makes even the closest things unreliable to the eye and who is now staring fixedly upward, no one else seems to have noticed. The bell rings, and all of them bow their heads for the elevation of the communion.
Father Romero turns to face the nuns. The moment has come. The women file out of their seats toward the altar, led by the abbess. She is grace itself at such times, hands folded, back straight, gliding more than walking. Those who follow try to match her, though with the elder nuns it turns to shuffling soon enough. They kneel one by one in front of the stooped figure, heads back, mouths wide open, like hungry birds waiting for the mother’s food. It is as well that Father Romero keeps good hold of the chalice, for a few of them are almost greedy for the wine. His blood. His body. How could you not want more of it? When Zuana’s turn comes she clasps her hands and empties her mind.
“Accept the body and blood of Christ.”
“Amen.”
The wafer slides onto her tongue. She feels its cool familiar weight, the way it slowly starts to disintegrate as it mixes with her saliva. To take the Lord thy God inside you. To be filled with His grace. His sacrifice. His love. The essence of goodness. There is no simpler or greater miracle.
She returns to her place in the choir stalls, head bowed, eager to hold on to the loss of self for as long as she can. At the altar Suora Umiliana kneels, followed by each of her novices in turn.
It is not clear exactly at what moment it happens, whether Serafina is actually receiving the eucharist or if the priest has already moved on to the next young girl. What everybody does agree on is that the noise comes first: a sharp angry crack, as if the very flagstones of the church are splitting open; indeed, those who have lived through such quaking of the earth swear they even felt a shiver. But the ground stays firm enough. It is the world above that changes.
“Aaah!”
“Our Lord …Jesus!”
“The cross. The cross!”
Above their heads the left hand of Christ has pulled away from the horizontal bar of the crucifix and the torso lurches forward. For a second it seems as if the whole body might tear itself off the wood, but the right hand and the feet stay anchored, so that He remains, hanging, suspended, His left arm stuck out into the air, the nail still embedded in His palm, His face staring down in agony toward the altar. At the same time a thin rain of wood dust pours from the exposed hole, showering Father Romero’s robes and head. The priest gives a strangled cry and his hands let go of the psalter and chalice. They bounce off the stones, scattering the remaining host and spilling the wine across the floor. And suddenly everyone is wailing and screaming so that it feels as if the beginning of the end of the world might be nigh, right there in the sanctuary of Santa Caterina’s convent chapel.
In the vacuum left by Father Romeo’s dithering, the abbess is immediately in charge. She retrieves the chalice and sets it back on the altar, though she does not touch the hosts, for even she is not so blessed.
“Sisters, sisters, be calm.” Her voice is clear and penetrating. “There is no danger. One of the nails on the crucifix has come loose, that is all. But we must be alert in case Christ’s dear body falls farther onto us. Return to your cells, all of you. Suora Umiliana, will you guide the novices out of chapel?”
But Umiliana is still on her knees and does not move.
“Suora Umiliana. Look to your novices.”
It might have ended there, for when she chooses, Madonna Chiara delivers not only comfort but unmistakable authority. Yet even as she says it the chapel door is opening and the figure of the conversa Letizia stands inside, the morning light bright behind her.
It is possible that Zuana sees her before the others. Certainly she recognizes her faster. She does not even need to make out the look on her face to know there is more to come. Oh, sweet Jesus, she thinks. What is happening to us here?
“Can someone come …please? Suora Zuana, the old sister is dead.”
The abbess closes her eyes briefly. While she may have indeed been bred for this, there are still moments when the testing seems more than she can bear. She does not have long to rest, however, as at that very moment, behind her, with no fuss or drama at all, the novice Serafina slides quietly to the floor.
FOURTEEN DAYS AND fourteen nights.
During one of them she dreams of Jacopo, his body washed up in black river water, small fishes darting like colored musical notes in and out of his mouth. The dream scares her so much— not for the violence as much as for the very thought of him— that she eats nothing at all the next day making do with only a dozen sips of water, and the fixation of her mind on food—or the lack of it—erases any further thought.
She is tired much of the time now and would sleep all day if she were allowed. There are times while she is awake when she feels so light and giddy that she wonders if she might even be lifting off the ground. The closer it comes to the day of the mass, the more she fears that if anything should pass her lips it might sully the purity of the sacrament. She listens carefully to Umiliana’s instruction leading to this moment—on her state of unworthiness, His boundless grace, and the need to approach Him in complete humility—but there are times when she finds it hard to concentrate, and more than once she finds herself crying with the effort. When this happens the good sister does not chastise or criticize but rather takes her hands and draws up her gaze to meet her own, pulling her back into alertness.
“My soul longeth, yes, even fainteth for the court of the Lord: My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God for the Lord God is sun and shield. The Lord will give grace and glory and no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly.”
There are times when her words are so warm that Serafina is tempted to confess everything, but she is frightened that the depth of her sins might make Umiliana reject her. For her part, if Santa Caterina’s novice mistress is curious as to the reason why such a rigorous fasting penance has been imposed upon her young charge, she does not ask. Some of the holiest journeys begin with transgression, and she speaks of this penance only as a blessed chance. Serafina has been given a great gift, she tells her, and she must treasure it.
Some questions, however, she does permit herself. She is eager to know what happened when the old woman entered the cell as the girl lay there half dead. What had the blessed Magdalena said to her? What did she herself see? And what of the time before, that afternoon before Vespers, the incident that no one speaks of but which everyone in the convent knows about, when Magdalena experienced some form of rapture?
Serafina answers as honestly as she can. When she describes how it was for her in the cell, how as the old woman grabbed her hand and spoke to her she had experienced a terrible hollowness, as if someone had taken a scalpel to her innards and emptied her out, Umiliana’s crumpled face lights up like a lamp and she says that this in itself was a sign, that for all her unworthiness the old sister had seen in her the possibility of grace. And for this reason it is even more important that she continue her fast. Though Serafina has no idea what grace feels like, she knows she is moving toward something, for in all her life she has never felt so …so consumed, so dense and yet so full of air.
The night before mass she prays and prays until she falls asleep on her knees. In place of the gnawing hunger there is now only a dull ache and a certain tingling and numbing in her fingers and her feet. Though the weather remains quite warm, she often finds herself cold and has to add another shift and shawl under her habit. As she changes her clothes she is struck by how strange and large her body looks, as if starvation is making her grow rather than reduce. It is God’s way of telling her she must try harder. She thinks of Suora Magdalena and how the host was her only food. She knows more about her now, for in exchange for Serafina’s acquiescence Umiliana has her own convent stories to tell. She describes how Santa Caterina was once a place of miracles and marvels, nurturing its own living saint, who lit up each and every office with her goodness and even bore the marks of her own stigmata, blood dripping from her hands and feet. How there was not a single novice or young nun who was not thrilled and exalted by the experience. And her eyes shine with rising tears as she says it.
The light outside in the cloisters on the morning of the mass is almost dazzling after the dimness of the cell. As Serafina walks toward the chapel supported by Suora Eugenia, she feels a sudden cramp in her stomach. The cloisters bring back a flood of memories, and for a moment she cannot keep at bay the horror of all that has taken place in her life. She tightens her fingers on the young nun’s arm and Eugenia stops for a second. Serafina looks up at her. Whereas in the past she has seen envy, even anger in her eyes, now there is wariness, even a little awe. What is happening to me? she thinks. Panic, like a jet of water, rises, then subsides. They start to walk again.
Inside the chapel she avoids Suora Zuana, though she feels her eyes on her as soon as she comes in. She takes her place in the choir stalls and sits with her hands on the armrests to keep her sense of balance. On the other side of the pews, Perseveranza and Felicità throw curious little glances in her direction, while old Agnesina stares openly, not even pretending not to look. What do they all see? Maybe they are fasting, too, all equally hollowed out, ready to be filled with God’s grace. How long could one continue? Weeks, months? Longer? Suora Magdalena lived on the host for years. Isn’t that what Umiliana has told her?
The mass begins. When the time comes to sing the responses, the breath she takes makes her dizzy and her voice reverberates so far inside her own head that she is not sure if the sound reaches out at all. By the time they reach the blessing of the Eucharist, she feels as if her whole body is vibrating. She can barely stand in order to make the short walk from the stalls to the altar. She fixes her gaze on the bowed figure of Umiliana in front of her to keep herself steady. She kneels and in readiness tilts her head backward, opening her mouth and closing her eyes, only the sudden darkness makes everything start to spin and she has to open them again. There is a throbbing in her temples. She holds herself still, anticipating the moment, ready to hear the words—which take an age, it seems.
“Accept the body and blood of Christ.”
“Amen.”
And now at last the host is on her tongue. She waits for the explosion of sweetness. The crack is so harsh and sharp that it pulls her head farther back again, and as this happens she feels a terrible dizziness. She sees the figure of Christ tear away from the cross and start to fall, coming straight at her! He has seen through me, she thinks. He knows I am not penitent or empty enough. She tries to stand up and manages to get to her feet but the world is spinning. She hears voices, feels a rush of people around her, and then she is falling, falling…
When she comes to, on the chapel floor, Suora Umiliana’s face is close above her, the white hairs on her chin trembling like animal whiskers. “What did you see?” she whispers urgently. “Was Magdalena in the chapel with you? Did you see Him as He fell?”
“TERMITES.”
The chapter meeting is called by the abbess two days later. Suora Magdalena has been buried, the chapel is closed, and a carpenter and a local sculptor have been brought in to assess the damage. But with the parlatorio open for visiting at the end of the week, it is time to make sure that the story told by everyone is the same one.
“It seems that large amounts of the wood have been eaten away around the iron fixings on the left hand and at the back of the body, where the statue was fixed to the cross behind. The crucifix is over a hundred years old. The carpenters say it has been going on for decades, perhaps longer. Such things are common enough in damp, hot climates like Ferraras.”
The abbess looks out over the assembled sisters. It is true that most of them will have come across termite damage, rooms where the feet of rich desks or tables rest in bowls of water to try to ward off the worst of them. But Our Lord falling off His cross?
“But they are crawling insects. How did they get up there?”
There is a small silence.
“At times in the cycle of their life they have the ability to fly,” Zuana says quietly, for that much she knows to be true. But she also knows that no one really wants to hear this. And not simply because she is the abbess’s favorite and might therefore say whatever she wants her to.
“They have had a hundred years to do such a thing,” Suora Umiliana says bluntly. “Yet the moment it happens is that of our most holy sister’s death.”
No one can argue with that. A few of them look toward Serafina, who sits pale and hunched among the novices. There seems no point in remarking that after fourteen days of fasting it had almost certainly been lack of food that had made her pass out at that same moment as the death was announced. Though as she thinks this, Zuana realizes that she herself is no longer sure.
THE INTERVENING DAYS have been hectic ones, with whisper and rumor moving like wind around the cloisters and workrooms. With the chapel invaded by workmen, Suora Magdalena’s body cannot be laid out in front of the altar as is the custom, so the humble coffin has to rest in the room behind the dispensary that doubles as a mortuary. Zuana is helped by Letizia and Suora Felicità to dress her in a clean shift and new white skullcap and arrange her gnarled limbs as best they can, her hands crossed together over her chest, her frame so thin it barely registers under the gold cloth, which is kept for this moment and will be returned to the stores when the body goes into the ground.
Left alone for a few moments before the night vigil begins, Zuana can only marvel at the corpse. Suora Magdalena looks as if she has been dead for years, half mummified already. That she has survived for so long like this is—well, if not a miracle, then certainly a wonder of nature.
Zuana does not ask—because she knows it would be refused—but she would give anything to open up the chest and abdomen of the cadaver now to search for signs of further holiness. There are other places where this has happened; when a nun who was clearly saintlike before her death has warranted an autopsy in case the body might offer up its own evidence. How often has she thought of those sisters who rolled up their sleeves and took the convent’s kitchen knives to the delicately perfumed corpse of the great Suora Chiara of Montefalco two hundred and fifty years before? Imagine the wonder when they discovered, nestling inside the chest cavity a heart three times the normal size, with the clear sign of a cross made out of nodules of flesh emblazoned within. One of those same sisters had been the daughter of a doctor. That was what her father had told her. Oh, if she had been that nun, what a monograph she would have written on the dissection: fine and detailed enough to take its place on any library shelf.
But it is pointless even thinking of it. Suora Magdalena’s secrets, whatever they may be, will be buried with her, for the good of the convent. For the good of the convent: the phrase is becoming a kind of liturgy.
In lieu of further miracles, the talk has been more of the death itself. The end, when it came, had been clear enough. Magdalena had opened her eyes wide, murmured a few words, then sighed her life out on a long shallow breath. What she actually said has been the subject of some debate, though, after a conversation with Suora Umiliana, Letizia now swears she is certain that the words were “I come to You, sweet Jesus. God save us all.”
Though the parlatorio visit is not until the end of the week, the news slips out fast enough in the pockets of the carpenters or through the mortar between the bricks in the walls. There are a few local Ferrarese old enough to remember Suora Magdalena’s reputation for miracles, and by the end of the first day a small crowd has gathered outside the gates. The abbess accepts a few scribbled condolences but is adamant (despite a protracted private audience with Suora Umiliana) that there will be no public showing of the body. Instead, the convent holds a vigil by the coffin, but only choir nuns are allowed to attend, and with the abbess leading them the atmosphere remains dignified and restrained. The burial takes place the next morning, immediately the twenty-four-hour laying-out period is over: a simple, moving ceremony, with tears, prayers, and words of joy and reassurance from the abbess and Father Romero.
It is, however, not over yet.
“I AM NOT sure I understand your meaning, Suora Umiliana,” the abbess says coolly.
In chapter, Zuana, like the rest of the room, is trying to keep her eyes on both women at once.
“What I mean, Madonna Abbess, is that the taking of the soul of Suora Magdalena at the same moment as the falling of our Blessed Lord from the cross is most surely a sign.” She pauses, but only briefly. Her mind is made up. “I believe we are being told that there is not enough devotion in Santa Caterina. That with all our celebrations and public performances and fame, we are neglecting our true course, which is prayer and humility, discipline and obedience.”
She delivers the speech well; these days it seems as if her piety has a natural performance within it. The chapter holds its breath. In all their years of sparring, the challenge has never been so direct.
In contrast, the abbess smiles broadly. “And yet I see a room before me filled with nuns who celebrate God with all their hearts and souls. There is surely no more joyful or productive convent anywhere in Ferrara.”
“There are those who would disagree.”
“Really?” She looks around the room as if they—whoever they may be—are about to speak. Suora Felicità opens her mouth but Umiliana silences her with a look.
“There are forces abroad greater than us or the city of Ferrara, Madonna Abbess. I am speaking of those within our Holy Mother church, the good fathers of Trento, who might find all manner of faults within the convent of Santa Caterina.”
The abbess, who is done with charm now, stares at her coldly. Her eyes pass over the gathered nuns, and a fair number of them at the back now look away from her. Apparently there have been some conversations within her convent that the Mother Abbess, for all her acuity, has not been privy to.
“Ah! You would prefer to live in Bologna, perhaps. Or Milan, where they no longer play convent instruments and can sing only the plainest of settings when they perform to the outside world. You have, I assume, heard of these changes?”
Benedicta lets out an audible gasp. Arranging the score for The Lamentations of Jeremiah has been keeping her awake at night, and she seems less joyful than she used to be.
The novice mistress gives a little shrug. “There are sisters in those cities who would say there is more worship in the psalms they give up to God now than in all the fancy settings they once entertained visitors with.”
While a number of the choir nuns are now visibly alarmed, from the rows at the back of chapter there is a rustling wave of support.
Zuana finds herself imagining a ripe boil: the way it grows under the surface, swelling, hardening, gathering pus, and however many poultices are applied it will not soften or heal of its own accord. Such is the ailment within the body of the convent now.
“For a novice mistress whose greatest desire it is to close down contact with the outside world, you seem to know a great deal about what goes on there.”
The abbess glances briefly at the gate censor sister, who reads all correspondence that moves in and out and who has the decency now not to be able to meet her eyes.
But Umiliana holds her ground. “Santa Caterina could be as great as any of those convents. He has already given us the purest voices with which to praise Him.”
And now she looks toward Serafina, so the rest of the nuns immediately follow the gaze. Not, however, the abbess.
“So. If I have understood you correctly, Suora Umiliana, you see the work of the termites in the chapel as God’s message to us that we are failing in our duties toward Him?”
“I see it as a sign for us to mend our ways, yes,” Umiliana says again.
Zuana thinks again of the boil and how at such times the only way forward is to lance it, whatever mess and pain it might cause.
“A sign. Ah, yes, signs—they are such a rich language.”
The abbess looks out over the assembled chapter. And her eyes are clear, no hint of fear in her.
“I have been in this convent serving God since I was six years old, and what I have learned in that time is that His plan is wondrous indeed. So that while He would not choose to stop the appetite of termites, for nature must work by her own rules, He can certainly make His will felt.”
What is coming? Zuana thinks. Can she really do this?
“The left-hand nail that held Our Blessed Lord’s body to the cross and the fixing in the back of His torso both worked loose at the same moment. Had the nail on the right side of the crossbar also given way, the great sculpture would definitely have crashed to the ground. In which case we would be mourning the loss not only of Suora Magdalena but also of one or more of our sweetest novices—even perhaps Suora Umiliana herself—as they were all close to the altar, taking the host.”
She pauses. Timing, Zuana thinks. The world is made richer by its subtleties.
“That, to me, is the true sign here. For I have to tell you that the carpenter discovered that the wood behind the right-hand nail was even more badly eaten away—so much so that he and the sculptor are in total amazement that it should have held under the strain.” Another pause. “It seems to me that, far from being damned, we were chosen instead to be saved.”
She waits again now, to make sure the room has taken on the gravity of what she has said.
“I have extracted an oath from the workmen not to speak of this outside the convent, in case careless talk of a miracle should spread and we would seem lacking in humility in our desire to bring attention down upon us. But of course I have informed the bishop and asked if perhaps a small service of thanksgiving within the convent might be called for.” She stops, smoothing her skirts again, though there is not a crease out of place and never will be. “If, however, Suora Umiliana, you are still determined to put another point of view, His Holiness might be interested in hearing from you. If you compose a letter I will make sure that it is delivered.”
The novice mistress stares at her. Zuana watches her chin tremble slightly.
“I will write it today and bring it to you during visiting hour,” she says, absorbing the defeat as if it can only serve to strengthen her, “when I would beg leave to talk of this further.”
A deep silence falls on the room. It is unheard of for a choir nun not to publicly accept the abbess’s conclusion. They are entering uncharted waters now, and that brings with it the taste of excitement as well as fear.
Among the sweet saved novices, some of them now seek out Serafina. She is sitting stock-still, staring out on to the room, those sunken eyes not seeming to focus on anything at all. This is only her third day back within convent life but she had not needed Suora Umiliana’s comment to draw attention to her. In contrast to the showy piety of before, her fasting penance has already had an impact, such that some of the sisters are beginning to wonder who this young woman really is. A novice with the temper of a Gorgon and the voice of an angel is rare enough, let alone one who has been chosen by the convent mystic as worthy of saving. And now, if Madonna Chiara is right, and the falling cross was indeed a symbol of God’s grace rather than His anger, what should one make of the fact that it was she who was receiving the eucharist at that fateful moment? Of the sweet saved, surely that makes her sweetest of all?
Zuana, meanwhile, is concentrating more on the girl’s body than her soul. She is thinking of how excessive fasting, especially when done too suddenly, can bring with it a strange intensity of self, which without proper supervision can become overwhelming; for such emptiness is a place where one can get lost as well as found. She is thinking also that while the penance officially ended three days ago, she has not seen the girl eat anything since. And she makes a note to try to change her place at the refectory table so that she can get a better view of her.
ON THIS OF all visiting days, the abbess does not take any chances. She appoints two chaperone nuns to be present continually inside the parlatorio. This is not unusual—indeed, a single chaperone is convent custom, since any contact with the outside world must be monitored—but the rule, as with so many others in Santa Caterina, is implemented lightly and the nuns generally speak, laugh, and gossip with their relatives freely. Today, however, the presence of two overseers—both from within the abbess’s family faction—will determine the conversations: how in the unfolding drama of convent life, a holy sister has died and is much mourned, and though termites ate the wood of the great chapel crucifix, it proved an opportunity for the convent to be blessed by God rather than criticized by Him. Added to that there is the news, come that very morning, that the crucifix, now removed from the chapel, will be repaired and remounted in a few weeks, in time for Palm Sunday.
That same morning, Zuana is in the dispensary working when she receives a visit from Suora Ysbeta, distraught and cradling a silk-wrapped bundle, the snub nose and gummy half-closed eyes of a small dog just visible at one end of the swaddling.
“He is sick, Suora Zuana. Very sick. Will you look at him?”
There is no point in telling her that the dispensary is a place for nuns, not animals. Ysbeta is a pure enough soul, compassionate and devout. In another world she might have been a follower of a stricter regime, only her love of animals is almost as great as her love of people and in a convent where she could not keep a pet she would surely wither and die. As the dog is doing now.
Zuana places the bundle on the worktop and carefully unwraps the silk. The smell tells her much of what she needs to know. The animal is rank with sickness, its little body trembling, its coat, usually so sleek and groomed, matted and dull. She moves her hand carefully along the line of its stomach and soon locates a hard swelling near the groin. The dog whines and makes a feeble attempt to snap, but there is no fight there anymore.
“He has not been himself for a while. Not since the Feast of Saint Agnes. But it is only in the last few days …Can you help him?”
“I am afraid he is beyond my help. There is a growth, a tumor here. Probably not the only one. It will be sapping his strength and causing him pain.”
“Ah, I knew it. Even the pets are sick here.”
Zuana says nothing. She strokes the dog gently. It bares its teeth a little, then gives up and drops its head heavily on her hand.
“Surely God would not punish us so.”
“What do you mean, sister?”
“Felicità says there is a convent in Siena where the inspectors took away the sisters’ dogs and drowned them in a sack in the river.”
Since the chapter meeting, the floodgates have opened on such stories.
“Oh, I can’t believe they would do such a thing.”
“I can. I think Suora Felicità herself would do it if she could. Last week in the cloisters she kicked him.”
“I’m sure she did not mean to.”
Ysbeta will have none of this, either. “Oh, yes, she did.” She nods her head vigorously. “They are so pleased with themselves, she and Suora Umiliana. Just because they can live without comfort they think everyone else must be the same.”
Zuana has never seen Ysbeta so passionate before. “Well, a kick did not cause this. Nor do I think it punishment for any sin. The fact is that the tumor will have been growing in his body for some time now.”
She stares down at the little animal. “So you cannot do anything?”
“I could give him something to make him sleep, so he would not feel it so much.”
“What about the girl? Might she save him?”
“Which girl?”
“The novice, Serafina.” She hesitates. “I …they are saying that Suora Magdalena passed her powers on to her when she died. That was why the cross did not fall on her and why she fainted afterward.”
Indeed? Is that what they are saying? Zuana thinks. What kind of spy am I if I do not hear even the noisiest rustles in the grass?
“Who is saying such a thing?”
She shrugs. “Oh, some of the choir nuns …Would you ask her? I mean—she is close to you.”
Zuana smiles gently. “Suora Ysbeta, I am sorry, but there is nothing she or any of us can do. Your dog is dying. It is the way of nature.”
The old nun bows her head, nodding slightly. She moves to the worktop and, tender as a mother with an ailing child, starts wrapping up the shaking body again, taking care not to touch the animal’s stomach as she does so. Zuana stares at her. Christ dolls, pets, babies in the parlatorio …some women find the barrenness of marriage to God so hard to bear.
She reaches for the poppy syrup.
SHE IS THINKING of the dog and how the convent has grown restless inside the winds of gossip as she sits at her dispensary desk that same afternoon, marking down the remedies and essences that need replacing, when the knock comes at the door.
“Suora Zuana, the watch sister has sent me.” Letizia, bright and efficient as always. “There is someone to see you in the parlatorio.”
“To see me?”
“Yes. The watch sister says it is the wife of one of your father’s pupils whom you have met before. Her husband is very ill, and she is come to ask you to pray for him.”
Zuana frowns. At the beginning she received a few visits from people who had known her father, women from the court whose children or husbands he had healed, but it has been many years since anyone bothered to look her up and she has no memory of such a woman. Falling crucifixes, ailing dogs, and dying living saints. And now a visitor for a nun who knows no one. These are strange times indeed.
Inside, the parlatorio is humming. While not as ornately decorated as for Carnival, it is still welcoming. Someone has cut a few green fronds and placed them in a vase on a table in the middle, and many of the separate groups have ceramic plates of biscuits and jugs of wine and water for the visitors to eat and drink. There must be close to twenty nuns (not counting the chaperones) entertaining, some with only a few guests, others with what seem like whole families gathered around. The noise level is high, partly because of the children, of whom there are maybe half a dozen: two babies and the rest toddlers, climbing onto the nuns’ laps and playing with their crosses or tottering around the room clutching sticky biscuits.
Zuana’s visitor is sitting on her own close to the wall. She is a middle-aged woman, modestly dressed and a little self-conscious in such surroundings. Clearly she is not of noble birth, but she has made an effort with her clothes, with clean shoes and her hair up as befits her married status, and a simple but stylish veil pinned at the back and falling to her shoulders. Zuana has never seen her before.
“Hello, I am Suora Zuana.”
“Oh, it is a pleasure—” She starts to rise and holds out a hand as if unsure of the correct greeting for a noble nun.
“Please, don’t get up. Forgive me, but do we know each other?”
“I …no.”
“But you are the wife of one of my father’s pupils?”
“Yes. Well, in a manner of speaking.”
“You are sure I am the one you are looking for?”
“Oh, yes, if you are Suora Zuana… My husband did know your father. We keep an apothecary store near the west gate of the city, in Via Apollonia. When he was a boy he met your father often when he used to come in. He said he was a wonderful man.”
The woman is nervous. She smiles. It is a good smile: one that crinkles her eyes and, without the restriction of a wimple, lights up her face.
“So, how can I help you? He is ill, I hear?”
She takes a breath. “There is illness, yes. But I am come on behalf of a gentleman.”
“Not your husband?”
“No, my husband—oh, it’s not what you think. My husband knows I am here. This gentleman—he has been a patient. My husband found him. He was injured, badly injured. We helped him. Without our help he would have died.”
While she is nervous, she is also determined. By rights, Zuana should not be listening further, for there is no connection here to justify the visit, but there is something about the woman that she likes. Or maybe it is the novelty of being here in this room, with a hubbub of people around her, as if it were not a convent at all but a receiving room in some great house where people gather to enjoy ordinary life. The chaperone nuns are moving between the groups. One of them looks over at Zuana; it is unusual to have the dispensary sister here. Zuana smiles and nods at her. She smiles back and moves on.
“Perhaps you should tell me what happened,” she says to the woman.
“Yes, yes, thank you. Some weeks ago my husband was coming back into the city from collecting plants in the country. His horse had gone lame and he had had to walk the last miles, so it was late at night. He heard shouting on the riverbank, and when he approached he disturbed an attack. Some men ran away but there was another on the ground. He had been stabbed and they had tried to cut his throat. My husband stopped the blood as best he could—they had not severed any vital artery—and brought him back to the house. For many days we thought he might die, for he had bled a great deal, but my husband used case wort and yarrow on the wounds and he began to recover.”
“You help your husband with his work?”
The woman blushes. “Yes. A little. We have no children; I was not able, so—well, it is cheaper than an assistant.”
“You like it?”
She gives a little laugh. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
Zuana nods. Father, husband, even sister. Someone to talk to. Someone who is as interested as you are. It is all she has ever really wanted.
“And what is it about this story that has brought you here to me?” she asks gently.
“The young man told us that the men who tried to kill him had been his friends, people he had met when he came to the city, for he is a stranger here.”
“Then why did they try to kill him?”
“He didn’t know. My husband said he must go to the city watch, for he could recognize his attackers. But he said it would be no use as they were from noble families and he would not get justice.”
Zuana can feel the cold moving through her. “Did this young man tell you his name?”
“Yes. Jacopo Bracciolini. He is a singer. Well, I don’t know if he still will be with his face and throat slashed, but he taught singing in Milan.”
Zuana shakes her head. She must get up now and walk away.
“Did he send you here?” she says, more sharply.
“No. When I heard his story I offered to come. He is a good man and he nearly died.” She pauses. “He has written a letter, which he asked me to deliver to you. It is for a young nun, a novice called—”
“I do not want to know who it is for. I don’t know this man and I cannot take anything from him.” She is standing now. “The novice has taken vows and will soon take others, and she is not allowed to receive letters.”
She spots the chaperone across the room looking over at them. The intensity of the conversation has attracted her attention. Zuana sits again and drops her eyes.
“But rest assured I will pray for his full recovery” she says more calmly. “And thank you for coming.”
“Please. Please.” The woman’s voice is low but clear. “It is difficult, I know, but this is a good man. I have spent weeks caring for him. He is not asking anything, only to say goodbye. He is going away and wants to wish her well. He will not bother her again.”
Zuana is shaking her head but it is partly to keep the woman’s voice out of her ears. There is great conviction in the way she speaks. If she was nursing you, you would surely be comforted by her strength as well as her gentleness. Or perhaps this love story has touched her heart. Certainly she would have reason to value love, for without the fondness of her husband a barren woman is easy enough to shrug off in favor of another.
“Have you read it?”
“No. But he is a good man, I swear.”
Now the chaperone has come up to them.
“How are you, dear sister?”
Zuana smiles. “Oh, very well, thank you, Suora Elena. Well, except for this sad news. This is Signora …Vesalio. Her husband was one of my father’s most talented students at the university. He is very sick and she has come to me for advice. But more than any remedy, I think, we must all pray for him.”
The sister stares at the woman, reading the humility in her dress as well as her face. “Rest assured, good woman, we shall add him to our prayers,” she says, smiling, and moves away.
Zuana keeps her head down, as if she is indeed in prayer. Opposite her, the woman holds her hands loosely clasped in her skirts. Under her palms Zuana sees the edge of the folded paper.
“Why me? Why do you come to me?”
“Because he said you were a kind and good nun.”
“He does not know me.”
“He seems to. And he was right. You are …kind and good. I wish I had known your father…” She trails off.
Zuana stares at her for a moment. Later she wonders when she made up her mind. Or perhaps she never did. Perhaps it was only her body that took the decision.
She moves her hands across the divide of their laps until they cover the woman’s own. She is pleased to note that their fingers are equally stained.
“Dear God, look down on Your servants here and help this young man back to health so that he may use his voice to praise You.” As Zuana says the words, the woman releases her grip on the letter and she takes it within her own fingers and holds it there.
“Amen.”
“Amen.”
Zuana pulls her hands back and folds her skirts around them. “You had better go now,” she says quietly.
“Thank you.”
The woman stands and moves swiftly away.
“Oh …Signora Vesalio.”
The woman turns.
“Tell your husband to try honey and cobwebs mixed with white of egg on the neck and face wounds. It will help to salve the scarring.”
Zuana does not immediately leave but sits, her hands folded over the letter, looking out over the room. She watches Suora Perseveranza, her body held upright to compensate for the belt around her middle, in animated conversation with a well-dressed married woman of similar age and features. At her feet a child, a sweet little girl with a mass of fair curls, is balanced against her knees, her mouth grubby with biscuit crumbs, her hand picking at the wooden rosary beads that hang from her aunt’s hips. How old is she, three? Four? Already too pretty to be the next nun of the family. But there is time yet. Come an attack of the pox or some disfiguring accident, or even a gradually perceived slowness of mind …
Zuana slips the letter up inside her wide sleeves and leaves the room and the sound of laughter behind her.
IN THE CHAPEL she takes her usual place in the empty choir stalls and sits, her heart pounding. She closes her eyes and feels the wood against her back, registers the cuts of the craftsman’s knife as a piece of walnut warehouse joins to a sliver of mahogany water. So much work here, so much devotion. After a while she opens her eyes to the frescoes on the walls around her. As it is wasteful to have candles burning during the day the chapel is illuminated only by the progression of natural light, so that different parts are highlighted at different times. For this reason the cusps of the seasons have always been special for Zuana, as from her place in the choir stalls the afternoon light then favors two particular scenes. Over the years she has come to know them very well. Now she uses them to help steady her mind.
In the first, Joseph and Mary are returning to Jerusalem after the birth of the Christ child. Mary rides a donkey while Joseph walks beside her. Baby Jesus, already a sturdy infant, sits astride His father’s shoulders, with His arms thrown out in joyful recognition toward His mother, His childish pleasure so far from the burdens of divinity yet to come. In contrast, the fresco to the side shows the cross on which He is to die, with a ladder leaning up against it and the figure of the adult Christ climbing—His step almost sprightly—up the rungs toward the lateral bar.
When Zuana first entered the convent, the novice mistress of the day had pointed out these two images as representative of the spirit of Santa Caterina: how they showed Our Lord reaching out first toward life and then death. Even then the art was old— over two hundred years—and considered special, she said, since they knew of no other convent where Christ was depicted giving Himself up for sacrifice in this manner. She had died a year later from the fever (it was before Zuana was allowed to treat patients), but her kindness and the power of the images had fused in Zuana’s memory and in times of crisis she has often found comfort being close to them. She sits and studies them now, the letter resting beneath her hands, a modest dot of scarlet wax sealing it shut.
So, Madonna Chiara’s family had taken care of the young man, had made sure that he did indeed disappear from the novice’s life. Dear God! But had they told her what they had done? Had the abbess known all along that instead of a post at Parma there was only the prospect of a corpse pumping blood from a dozen stab wounds into the river? No. Surely not. How could she have known? How could she possibly have condoned such a thing? Except …except that, in all of the abbess’s story, it had been the one event that didn’t make sense: why, after risking so much to be close to his love, he should suddenly choose to desert her.
Because such young men do not care a fig for anything but their own pleasure. If he had had his way he would have taken her and ruined her.
Is that what she truly believed? She, who has lived in the convent all her life, yet seems to know more about man than she does about God? Zuana sees her standing in the herb garden, her hands smoothing out the nonexistent creases in her robes. It is a gesture she knows well. But how well does she really know the abbess, this woman who has dedicated her life to the glory of God, the well-being of her convent, and the reputation of her family? Until, that is, one of those loyalties comes into conflict with another.
In the chapel, Zuana puts her head down and starts to pray
The afternoon light moves around her. Eventually she lifts her head, takes the letter in her hands, and breaks the seal.
IT IS ALMOST the end of visiting hour when she crosses the courtyard to the novice’s cell. By rights she should be studying or at prayer. Instead, she finds the girl lying on her bed, so deeply asleep that she does not even register her entrance. She is fully dressed, curled up like a small child, with a blanket pulled over her. Her face is pale, save for the lightly bruised skin under her eyes. The line of her chin is sharp now, the childish plumpness worn away. She will be feeling the cold, hence the body curled in on itself: before the spirit ignites its own fire, lack of food drains away the body’s warmth.
Under the bed Zuana notices a small bundle. She takes it out and unwraps it. A lump of bread sits inside. It is fresh, her daily portion from lunch, no doubt, concealed somehow in her robes. As her appointed spiritual guide, it is Suora Umiliana’s job to be monitoring her return from fasting to food now. Since there is no nun in the convent with a sharper eye for the infraction of rules, the very presence of the bread is evidence that Umiliana is encouraging the fast beyond the end of the penance. How convenient it would be for her if this sweetest of the sweet saved souls now became a conduit to God. Her very own young mystic.
But how long does it take to truly subdue the body? At what point did Magdalena’s fasting turn to joy? And what happens to those who never manage to light the fire within, young women with no future, who in the end do not really care if they live or die? The letter lies folded in the pocket of her robe. She moves the blanket farther up over the girl’s body and leaves her quietly sleeping.
Back in the cloisters, the abbess’s outer door is closed. It is a sign that she is either at prayer or in conference. Zuana lifts her hand to knock, then makes out muffled voices from behind the door. The mellifluous tones of Madonna Chiara’s voice are instantly recognizable, and in recent months she has become familiar with the harsher, more sibilant sounds of Suora Umiliana. She is about to turn and leave when she hears footsteps moving briskly toward the door. She barely has time to step back before it opens and the novice mistress comes out. The meeting is so abrupt and unexpected that it takes them both a few seconds to recompose their features—Zuana to disguise her discomfort at being caught at a kind of eavesdropping and Umiliana to cover up the unmistakable look of triumph in her eyes.
“WHAT WOULD SHE have us do, drive nails into our own hands?”
Inside her chambers, Zuana has never seen the abbess so angry.
“If she is so in love with humility and poverty, she should have joined the Poor Clares. Though even they might not have been strict enough for her.” She laughs bitterly, moving to and fro across the pile of the Persian rug. “Ah! Who would have thought it? A younger daughter of the Cardolini family turning out so ambitiously pious.”
Zuana would prefer to leave now and come back when she is calmer, but she is already pulled into the orbit of her fury. Evidently she is the abbess’s confidante as well as spy. “What did she say?”
“That God has given her the courage to speak her mind and she can—or rather will—no longer be silent.” She shakes her head. “Though I cannot recall when she was ever quiet, with or without His intercession.”
“Perhaps she feels there are more who agree with her now.”
“And who are they? Agnesina, Concordia, yes, Obedienza, Perseveranza, Stefana, Teresa perhaps, and a couple of the novices and younger nuns—I have not seen Carità so enthusiastic at the idea of deprivation before. Still, I would not give her more than maybe twelve or fifteen in total. Fifteen out of sixty choir nuns; that is hardly the convent. Santa Caterina is home to some of the city’s noblest women. Their families did not pay good dowries to have them living like paupers, fasting and praying twenty-four hours a day.”
She moves to the desk, opens the glass decanter, and pours two glasses of wine. Zuana takes hers without a murmur. She has no idea when she is going to speak and what she is going to say. Strangely, it does not worry her.
“Ha! She is playing with fire. She knows nothing of what is really going on out there. Once a bishop or a cardinal is determined, the inspections can take place with barely any warning. Apostolic visitors, they call themselves and, when they leave, an army of ironmongers and bricklayers come after them, building walls and fitting grilles and gates wherever there is a glimpse of open air. I have heard of places where the parlatorio is being redesigned as a prison, so that the nuns can only see their families through iron grilles covered with curtains. Is that what she wants? We would have half of the city’s fathers hammering on the duke’s door complaining that their daughters were suffering ill treatment.”
“In which case the city’s families will protect us, surely?”
“They will try, but it seems Rome is committed to taking on even the authority of the families: those final statutes of the Council call for elections of abbesses to take place every four years.”
It is a rule that up until now has been honored only in the breach, giving many abbesses and therefore also their families power down through many lifetimes. If it were to be imposed now, Santa Caterina would be voting for a new leader.
“And what if they did? You would still be reelected.”
“What? Even though I underestimate her support?”
“I didn’t say—”
“You did not need to. I saw it in your face.”
“I …I just think there may be more than fifteen.”
“Who are they?”
“I do not know names,” Zuana says quietly, for she is no longer anybody’s spy. “It is more a feeling.”
“Hmm. How much is this to do with the girl?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come, Suora Zuana, naïveté does not suit you. She has done nothing but shake the walls of the temple ever since she arrived. First the fury, then the acquiescence, then the escape, then the drama with Magdalena, and now this showy fasting, and the fainting in chapel just at the right moment. Do you think she is eating on the sly?”
“No, I don’t. In fact I think she has become ill with it.”
The abbess is silent for a moment. “Ah …Suora Umiliana. Of course. I fear I made a grave mistake, leaving her alone so much with her. Though at the time …” She stares at Zuana. “Well, we have come too far to have her die on us now. You must see her and get her eating again.”
Zuana hesitates. This is the moment. There will never be another.
“I think it would do her good, perhaps, to have some news of her lover.”
“How could that help? It would only make it worse.”
“Her sense of abandonment is acute. I feel it might address her despair.”
The abbess shrugs. “From what I hear, there is nothing to tell. He is well enough, singing his heart out with a bevy of pretty girls on his arm.”
“Madonna Chiara, I don’t think there is a more remarkable abbess than you anywhere in Christendom,” Zuana says quietly. “The things you know.”
She shrugs it off, but it is clear she is pleased. “I know only what I have to know to help the convent.”
“So you have no fear that he might try to come back to claim her at the vow-taking ceremony?”
“None at all.”
“Well, perhaps you should have. Because he isn’t dead.”
It is immediate and perfect: the way the abbess now stares at her, the expression on her face changing not one iota. “Dead?” Her voice is strangely light. “No, of course he isn’t dead.”
“However, it seems that the knife wounds to his face and throat will make it hard for him to take up the post at Parma. If, that is, it should ever have been offered.”
Zuana feels her mouth dry. She lifts the glass and takes a sip of the wine. Her hand is very steady. Across the room the abbess’s face remains impassive. Then suddenly she gives a sigh: light, almost playful.
“As always, you do yourself an injustice, Zuana. It is not I who am remarkable but you. I do believe that if you had been born into a better family you might be ruling this convent now.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, such a thing is not impossible.” There is a pause. “Indeed, with the right people behind you it might yet happen. Imagine the great dispensary you could build then.”
“I am happy with the one I have,” she says quietly.
“Yes, I believe you are.”
It is strange, but there is almost a sense of calm inside the room. How amazing, Zuana thinks. When confronted with such danger to herself, this woman still seems at ease, confident. Does she feel it always? When she is praying? When she is in the confessional? How early would she have had to catch Father Romero to be sure that he was sleeping through this admission?
“It seems now I must ask you about your sources, Zuana.”
“I had a visitor.”
“So I heard. Who was she?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, yes, it matters. My nuns do not accept visits from just anyone.”
“What? Do your rules now squeeze harder than Umiliana’s?”
The abbess stares at her, then sits back heavily in her chair, her natural grace deserting her for an instant. This time there is no smoothing of creases or removal of fluff from her skirts.
“I did not have anything to do with it,” she says at last. “It was never—” She breaks off. “It was not my—well, sometimes one does not always have control over what one unleashes. But it was never—never—what I wished.”
Zuana puts down her glass of wine. She has no idea whether she believes her.
“Do I have your permission to treat the novice?”
“And if you do, what will you tell her?”
“That he did not desert her.” She pauses. “I believe knowing this will lessen her despair.”
“No. No, I cannot allow that.”
With the exception, perhaps, of the girl herself, the woman in front of her is the nearest Zuana has come to a friend in her life. She has admired, respected, enjoyed, even at moments sought to emulate her. Most of all, she has obeyed her. For this is the first and most powerful rule of the Benedictine order: to obey one’s abbess in all things.
“And what if she continues to refuse to eat? What if she starves herself to death?”
“Then to make sure we do not lose half her dowry we will just have to arrange for her to take her vows before she does so.” To Zuana’s astonishment, the abbess laughs. “You look shocked! Yet those are the words you wanted to hear from me, yes? Proof that as your abbess I care only about money, not souls? Oh, Zuana, do you know me so little? Is that what they say about me, this small army that is raised up now behind Umiliana? That I think more about reputation than I do salvation? Is that how it is?”
Zuana does not reply. There is nothing to be gained from false comfort now.
“Well, in some ways they are right. There may be times when my methods seem cruel. But believe this, if you believe anything. The battle we are fighting now is not just for the honor of the convent or the influence of one family over another. If Umiliana wins, if she creates enough noise and rebellion to bring the inspectors in, it will affect everyone.
“After they have stripped us of our income, after they have walled us up, even in our own parlatorio, after they have banned Scholastica’s plays and taken away the instruments from the choir orchestra, they will come for you. You, who have found such unexpected sanctuary inside these walls. They will not care about your remedies and your herbs. They will break the bottles in your dispensary and take away the books in your library, and after that they will find the others, the ones that are hidden in your chest. That is what my cruelty is trying to avoid. That—the great and the small of it—is what is at stake here.”
Zuana feels her heart moving fast against her rib cage. She will not think that far ahead. No, she could not live without her books or remedies, in a convent ruled by Umiliana. Yet how can it be acceptable to so offend God in order to be able to continue to serve Him? She, who can solve the most difficult riddles of the body, feels lost in the face of such complexity.
“I am still the abbess of this convent, Suora Zuana. And until I am not you must obey me, or I must impose penance on you.” She pauses. “As I have done already on Umiliana. Which, of course, was exactly what she wanted me to do.” She sighs. “Think of it: the abbess’s enemy and her favorite both lying in the doorway of the refectory for the other nuns to walk over. What a gift it will be to her.”
But this last appeal to the sister who used to be her confidante is too little, too late.
“If you will excuse me, Madonna Abbess, I must return to my dispensary.”
She gets up and moves to the door. The abbess watches her go.
“Zuana,” she says, as she reaches the door, “she is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them.”
AT SUPPER, SUORA Umiliana accepts only scraps, with a generous layer of wormwood sprinkled on top. The rest of the choir nuns and novices watch nervously as she carries it with her to the table. Once there, she chews each mouthful as if it were filled with honey, a smile playing around her lips. While it is forbidden to look at anything but one’s plate during the meal, it is almost impossible for people to keep their eyes off her. Serafina does not even need to worry about squirreling away her food at this meal, since no one is looking at her. Except Zuana.
The meal and the reading—which no one hears a word of, though Scholastica has been especially picked for her strong voice—finally end, and the novice mistress rises and kneels at the feet of the abbess before going over to take her place in the doorway. She takes a while to get herself down on the floor. While she is adept enough at kneeling, it seems harder for her to lie prone. But then she is not a young woman anymore, and bones at this age become brittle and if broken heal badly.
The abbess leaves the room first, graceful as ever, bringing her left foot to rest on Umiliana’s robe but carefully avoiding her flesh. In her wake, each and every choir nun and novice makes it her business to walk over rather than on the prostrate old nun, though whether it is out of respect or fear for her it is hard to tell. Either way, as convent martyrdoms go it is a fairly painless business. Now that the lines have been drawn, it seems, everyone is nervous about what might happen next.
That night it takes a long time for the convent to settle. In her cell Zuana turns over the hourglass and watches the sand fall. How many times in her life has she sat here, trying to wash away the business of the day in readiness for the prayer before sleep? She has always envied those sisters who live lightly in the world, giving themselves up easily to the silence and stillness of God’s love. She needs that stillness more than ever tonight, for how can she take the next step in her life without His guidance?
Her first spiritual guide, the novice mistress who had shown her paintings in the chapel, had alerted her early to the pitfalls of intoxication with her work. “Your knowledge brings you great solace, Zuana. But knowledge alone has no substance. Our founder, the great Saint Benedict himself, understood that well enough. Let not your heart be puffed up with exaltation. Everyone that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted”
And she had tried, truly and honestly, tried so hard that sometimes, despite the nun’s kindness and patience, she thought she might go mad with the effort. Eventually she had come to accept a level of failure. What point was there in dissembling? He would know it anyway. God always seeth man from heaven and the angels report to Him every hour.
How much easier it had become when the kind old novice sister died and she had found herself in the company of her assistant, Suora Chiara. Chiara, with her smooth skin and dancing eyes and her bright, confident relationship with God and the world around her. Chiara, who seemed able to inhabit both the mind and the spirit without fearing His displeasure and who, even then, enjoyed an almost unnatural standing in the convent itself; much more than the other women of her age with fewer aunts, cousins, and nieces around to support their rise through the ranks.
Yet she had been generous with her power. Without Suora Chiara arguing her case, Zuana might have languished for years in the scriptorium, decorating the word of God with calendula leaves or fennel fronds. It was she who had helped Zuana to find work in the dispensary, she who had organized and supported her election as dispensary mistress and, when she finally became abbess, allowed her to take over the infirmary as well, For it is written in the rule of Saint Benedict that it must be the abbess’s greatest concern that the sick suffer no neglect. Without Madonna Chiara there would be no treatment of the bishop’s ailments and therefore no flow of special outside supplies. Without Madonna Chiara there would be no distillery, a smaller herb garden, fewer shelves with fewer bottles to be broken, fewer notebooks of remedies to be destroyed. Without Madonna Chiara—
Zuana looks up to see two of her books on the table. In her chest there are others, lovingly cared for over all these years. Is she really willing to be instrumental in their destruction? For what? To alleviate the misery and starvation of one obstreperous novice? She is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them.
The truth is that Zuana herself does not understand why this girl has become so important to her. There have been times when she wonders if it is some affliction of the womb: she has seen it enough in others; how an older nun might seek out a novice or postulant or boarder of the age that her own child would have been, had she had one. Such rapports are often characterized by undue care and attention, for while everyone knows the creation of favorites is prohibited, it is also unstoppable.
Yet it has never been like that for her. As a child without brothers or sisters she had always been familiar with her aloneness, her self-sufficiency. And yet, and yet …this young woman with her sense of fury and injustice has somehow infiltrated Zuana’s life. That Zuana likes her is undeniable, despite her spirit and her truculence—or perhaps because of them. No doubt she sees something of herself in her; the curiosity as well as the determination. And it is true that had she married, had she become a wife instead of a nun, her own child might indeed now be Serafina’s age. How would she feel about her then? It is a painful question. While Santa Caterina has been a good home to her, would she choose to give a daughter up to such a life? And if not, does that mean she is willing to risk bringing down the convent to help her?
The abbess is right. The world is full of them: daughters who are too young, too old, too ill, too ugly, too difficult, too stupid, too smart. Waste. Banishment. Burial alive. Custom. The way things are. What can she do about it? It is not as if there is so much out there to celebrate. Freedom? What freedom? To marry the man you are told to and no other? If she had been living outside the walls, Serafina might still have found her singing composer half dead on some riverbank, only the knives would have been wielded by her father’s family rather than the abbess’s. Love is not a marketable commodity; you take what you are given, even if it is your husband’s pleasure to bruise your skin and breed bastards out of prettier loins. It is simply how it is. What point is there in railing against it? And why, in God’s name, single out one spoiled young girl from all the rest?
The sand is at the bottom of the glass. She stares at it, then turns it over again.
The voice of the Lord is powerful. I will praise the Lord, with my whole heart.
She closes her eyes and tries not to think.
The voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
She knows the words as well as any remedy.
For His mercy is everlasting and His truth endureth to all generations.
She prays until the words make no sense, and when the sand comes to rest for a second time—or is it a third? — she gets up and makes her way to the dispensary. She takes down a bottle of acqua-vita and moves out into the cloister, where a half-moon throws the well in the courtyard into gray relief, as it did all those months before when she first visited a howling, furious young entrant.
If she were to ask herself now why she is doing this, it is unlikely, even after all the meditation and prayers, that she would be able to answer. The truth is that there has been no great revelation between her and God. No transmission of grace, nothing with which she could protect herself in confession for the disobedience she is about to commit. There are words she might use. Words she believes in. Compassion. Caring. The need to address suffering, the offering of comfort. But they are more the language of the healer than of the nun.
She knows this—but it does not stop her. If anything, now, it spurs her on.
Outside the door, she uses the taper she has brought to light the candle concealed in her robe. As she enters, its glow illuminates the room enough to show that the bed is empty. For a second she feels panic, remembering Serafina’s last absence, but then, soon enough, she sees her. She is sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, in the same place where Zuana had found her on that first night. Only now there is no rebellion, no fury, no noise at all, just a small figure swamped by her robe, hunched over, arms wrapped tightly round her knees, head bowed, rocking slightly to and fro.
Zuana crouches beside her. If the girl is aware of her, she does nothing to show it. Zuana’s sin of disobedience is already sealed by her presence there. Now, in the middle of the Great Silence, she must compound it further with speech. “Benedicta.” She says the word gently under her breath, though she knows there can be no absolution of a reply. This time the words Deo gratias remain unsaid. So be it.
She moves the candle closer. “You sleep when you should be awake and you are awake when you should be sleeping.”
The huddled figure remains silent, still no sign that she has heard or even noticed her.
“Come, let me put you to bed.”
“I am praying,” she says at last, her voice dull and flat.
“You are not on your knees.”
“If one is humble enough, He hears you wherever you are.”
“What have you eaten today?” Under the bed the bundle of bread sits untouched. “Serafina, look at me. What have you eaten?”
The girl lifts her head briefly: close to, the planes of her face are sharp angles, her eyes black in deeply scooped sockets, her wrists on her knees as thin as kindling wood. How much body is left inside the sack of clothes? How long before her skin starts bruising purple from lack of flesh? Zuana feels shock like a cold hand squeezing at her throat. Could Umiliana be so unaware of the damage that her search for God is causing?
“Leave me alone,” she says dully.
“No, I will not leave you alone. Your penance is over. You are ill. You need to eat.”
“I am fasting still.”
“No. You are starving.”
“Ha! What do you know about it?”
“I know that without food a person dies.”
The girl shakes her head. “You don’t know what it feels like. How can you? You have never seen Him.”
“No, you are right, I haven’t.”
“Well, I have! I have seen Him.” And for the first time there is a spark of something. She jerks up her head. “And I will again.” Then, as if the move has taken too much energy, she slumps back against the wall. “Suora Umiliana says He will come if I make myself pure for Him.”
“And what about the rest of the convent? Do we not have a place in your search for purity? What about using your voice to praise God? Suora Benedicta waits every day for you. Or your work in the dispensary. I—we, the sick, need your help.”
“Pure voices don’t need an audience.” She shakes her head fiercely. “And you care only for bodies, not souls.”
“Who am I speaking to now, Serafina or Umiliana?” Zuana is surprised by the anger in her own voice.
She shrugs. “In a good convent there will be no need of medicines, for God will take care of us.”
“Oh! Is that how you want to live? Or maybe it is how you want to die.”
“Ah …leave me alone.” She brings her hands up to her head as if to ward off the attack of Zuana’s words.
“No. I won’t. Where are you, Serafina? Where did all that fury and defiance go?”
“I told you,” she says, her voice dead and sullen again. “I don’t feel anything.”
“I don’t believe that is true. I think you are trying not to feel anything, because it hurts so much. I think that is why you have stopped eating. But it will not help. No one can live without sustenance.”
But the girl is not listening anymore. She sits, head on her hands, rocking to and fro, staring dully into the dark. After a while she pulls herself up, slowly, wobbly almost, like a newborn calf not yet steady on its feet. She moves past Zuana as if she were not there and goes to the bed, where she lies down with her face to the wall, curling herself up and pulling the blanket over her.
The room grows quiet. Outside, the convent sleeps. And, beyond it, the city, too.
“No one can live without sustenance,” Zuana says again.
She does not respond or move a muscle. Yet she is not sleeping. Of that Zuana is sure.
“So I have brought you some.”
She takes the letter out from under her robe and unfolds it.
“My dearest Isabetta,
“If this letter reaches your hands, I would understand if you did not want to read it. Yet please, for the sake of what once was between us, continue.”
His handwriting is dense and elaborate, as if he has put his heart into every pen stroke, and in the candlelight the words dance and move on the page. Zuana keeps her voice low, for fear it might penetrate beyond the walls of the cell. Occasionally she stumbles over a phrase and has to stop and begin again. But none of this matters. Not once the first words have been uttered.
“Should you have come through the locked doors onto the dock that night, you will know that I was not there to meet you. I, who had promised on pain of death to be there, deserted you. But what you do not know is that it was only death—or the extreme closeness of it—that kept me from you. A few nights before our planned meeting I was set upon by a group of erstwhile friends, who attacked me with daggers and left me for dead on the riverbank. There have been moments since then when I have wished I had indeed died. But God was with me and I have been saved.
“I write this from the house of two good people who found me, took me in, and cared for me. You spoke once about how you feared your incarceration was God’s punishment for our love. At my worst I wondered if this was my punishment, too. I knew if I lived I would never see you again. But now that I have come to that moment, I cannot go without trying to communicate with you one last time. To tell you I did not, nor would I ever, knowingly desert you.”
Zuana pauses. She is a stranger to the art of love letters. At the time when other young girls were sighing over sonnets and court madrigals she had been tending seedlings and memorizing the names of the organs of the body. It is not something she mourns, for how can one miss what one has never had? And yet, and yet …how honestly and persuasively he writes, this young man. The abbess would no doubt say it is all lies, born out of lust like flies on a dung heap. But then how would she know either? She returns to the page.
“I am in desperate straits. I have no money (all that I owned and had gathered for our life together was about my person that night), and I am disfigured in ways I fear will disqualify me from any kind of polite work. Nevertheless, I shall try. I am leaving Ferrara to travel south, to Naples, where I hear there is a thriving musical culture and where I may find someone who is content to keep their eyes closed while I sing.
“I will never speak to a living soul of our liaison. You told me once that men say such things easily. You were always wiser than your years. But you do not know everything. I will never love or marry another. That is the promise I made to God if He would let me live, and it will be my pleasure to keep it. I hear your voice each night before I go to sleep, its beauty seducing the very sweetness out of silence, and when I wake it is the first thing I remember. I ask for no more.
“I hope the sister you spoke of, whose goodwill I now depend on to deliver this letter, may help you to find a way to live. Forgive me for whatever pain I have caused you. Pray for me, my dear Isabetta.
“I remain, forever, your Jacopo.”
The silence in the cell grows. The girl remains motionless, her face to the wall. Somewhere inside her, though, there is movement. It is as if she is rising slowly from some deep place on the ocean bed, pulled out of the dark by the promise of a world above the water.
As she breaks the surface she has an image of a young man walking toward her through hazy sunlight, long dark hair and broad open face.
“He did not desert me,” she says, so quietly that Zuana can barely hear her.
“No, he did not desert you.”
“He loved me.”
“And, it seems, still does.”
Now, finally, she turns over. Zuana holds out the letter and her hand comes out from the blanket, pale fingers, snap-thin wrist. She pulls it toward her, then lets it fall on the bed, as if it is somehow too heavy to hold.
Zuana takes a small bottle out from under her robe and uncorks it. The air picks up the tangy smell of acqua-vita. She pours some out onto a wooden plate, picks up the lump of bread from under the bed, and dips a small chunk into the liquid to soften it. “So. Will you eat now?”
The girl looks at her, frowning, as if she is having trouble focusing.
Zuana’s hand holds out the dripping bread.
“I …I can’t.” She shakes her head. “I can’t.”
“What? Is Umiliana’s voice stronger than his?”
His …Him. But which him? The very idea seems to unsteady her. “I told you, I can’t. Leave me alone.” And her voice is suddenly hard, full of snake-spit and anger.
Zuana does not move. She has seen this once before, years ago, in a sad, mad young nun who starved herself almost to death: the way in which after a certain point the emptiness becomes its own force, like a whirlpool sucking and destroying anything or anyone who dares challenge its supremacy. If it was not to do with the yearning for purity one might almost fear that the devil had a hand in it, for there is something of his malicious pleasure in such self-destruction.
“Isabetta. Isabetta.”
She says this name, her name, twice, then again. For every student of medicine knows that there are times when a word can be its own talisman and carry a certain power of healing.
“Isabetta, listen to me. I may not be a nun who sees visions, but this I do know. God is as much in life as He is in death. And without a true vocation, starvation is no way to reach Him.”
The girl shakes her head again. “Suora Umiliana says—”
“Suora Umiliana is not to be trusted. She is looking to take over the convent by mounting an attack on the authority of the abbess, and your starving purity is most helpful to her. If you had eaten more, or had more of your wits about you, you of all people would see that.”
Such confidence. Such certainty. As she speaks, Zuana thinks how much like the abbess she herself now sounds. Except that when she remembers the novice mistress scooping up the fainting girl from under the cross, or catches again the look of triumph in her face when their paths met outside Madonna Chiara’s chambers, she knows that what she herself says is true. The abbess was right. The world is full of young women who do not want to become nuns. But she was also wrong. For this young woman is no longer just another one of them. In the midst of this chess game of church and convent politics, she has been elevated unwittingly to the role of a more powerful piece, greater than her worth but also vulnerable to being used and sacrificed.
And it is not just she. For, like it or not, by bringing the girl the letter, Zuana herself has become one of the players. Now it is her turn to move.
“Yet meanwhile—are you listening to me, Isabetta? — meanwhile there is someone outside these walls who cares for you deeply. A young man who has risked a good deal to get in touch with you and who surely deserves an answer.”
The girl stares at her, then shakes her head as if to rid herself of the fog within. “What do you mean, an answer? What are you talking about? It is over. I am in prison, and he is half dead and gone.” And now she lets out a low wailing moan, the words awakening memory and the memory awakening despair.
“Hush, hush, you will wake the whole convent. Yes, you are in prison. But some of it is of your own making. And from what I hear, though his wounds are grave he will not die of them, nor will he be on the road to Naples—not yet, at least. Perhaps you should look at the page again. Look in the bottom corner around the edge. Someone has written an address there.”
She had only seen it herself later, when studying again the content. The letters were small and not in the same hand. An apothecary’s wife would surely know how to write, if only to help label her husband’s bottles.
The girl pulls herself up and holds the page toward the candlelight. She locates the address; then her eyes go back to the letter. She runs her finger over the lines of ink, then brings the paper to her nose as if to drink in the scent of him.
Does a man’s smell come through his handwriting? It is one of the many things Zuana will never know. She holds out the hand again with the soaked bread.
At last the girl takes it, moving it slowly toward her mouth. To her mouth but no farther. The portcullis of her teeth remains clamped shut. The air is charged with the conflict: words from without and the will from within. How does this half-starved young woman know anymore which is the true voice?
“Eat, Isabetta. It is the only way.”
Her teeth part and she starts to chew, slowly, stubbornly, a dribble of saliva trickling down from her mouth.
“Good. Good.”
She swallows, then takes another bite.
“Oh, you are doing fine. Well done.”
And now the tears come, running silently down her cheeks, as if eating must be the saddest thing on earth.
“Not too fast. Here, drink something. It is full of nourishment.” She hands her the vial. “Just a little at first …good. Now rest a bit.”
The girl leans her head back against the wall, her eyes closed, as the tears fall. The two women sit for a while in silence, the night curled around them.
Zuana puts another small soaked piece into her hands.
“I feel sick,” she says. “I feel sick.”
“That is because your body has forgotten what to do with food. Make sure you chew slowly. Each mouthful.”
But she cannot chew anything, for suddenly she is crying too much, strangled sobs, as if her heart is breaking all over again. Even when the body is drying up with starvation there are always more tears.
“I’m scared, I’m scared.” She crushes the bread within her fingers.
“There is nothing to be scared of.”
“Oh, yes, there is. You don’t understand. Suora Umiliana will damn me, the abbess will hate me, and I will die in here while he is out there.”
Zuana looks at her. What can she say? She cannot lie to her, for she is right: that will be her future. Just another young woman who did not want to become a nun. When she thinks about it later, she does not remember an actual decision. All she knows is the compulsion to bring a body back from death toward life.
Surely God would not damn her for such an action.
“Eat the bread while I read the letter again, Isabetta. It seems to me that you have missed the proposal of marriage it contains.”
The girl stares at her. “What? What are you talking about?”
“Look. I know little enough about such things, but a man who has promised God that he will not love or marry any other woman must be sure enough about the one he wants to spend his life with. Is that not what you want, too?”
“Sweet Jesus, what are you saying? You are mad.”
“Well, if I am mad then you had better get healthy to help cure me.”
And she hands her another piece of soaked bread.