The Phoenix of Florence

by Philip Kazan

  There were three other women kneeling in front of the altar. An older nun stood up and, tutting with disapproval, led us to a door in the side of the church, and out into a tiny cloister. Two more nuns emerged, fluttering their hands in shock. There was an infirmary, a whitewashed cell no bigger than a horse stall, with a low cot and a slit window. The Venetian told Paolo to lay me down.

  ‘Get back to the company,’ I told him. ‘And remember …’

  ‘God keep you, Don Onorio,’ he said, crossing himself, and let the nuns shoo him out. As soon as he had left, the older nun turned to me.

  ‘We saw the Turkish raiders coming,’ she said. She spoke the heavily accented Venetian dialect of those parts, though it wasn’t the language of her birth. ‘I decided we would spend our last minutes in prayer, but then we heard the sounds of battle. And see, God sent you and your men to us.’ She clasped her hands and breathed deeply. ‘Having said that, you are a man and our rule forbids men inside our house.’

  ‘Heavens, Mother!’ The Venetian knelt down beside me and took my hand. ‘The man is wounded! He is bleeding!’ Her eyes ran down my body, and her face suddenly went pale. ‘Fetch me hot water!’ she called to the other nuns, who were gathered in the doorway.

  ‘Sister Vittoria, you know very well—’

  ‘Mother Superior,’ I croaked, ‘I need to confess something.’

  She looked at me, frowning. ‘Young man, are you a Catholic?’ she asked sternly.

  ‘Of course he is!’ Sister Vittoria began, but the older nun ignored her.

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  ‘Because a Catholic would know that a nun cannot hear confession. Only a priest—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know that.’ The numbness was creeping back into the lower regions of my body, and I knew I had to hurry. ‘I need to tell you something. Not my last words. You can send for the priest if it comes to that.’ I glanced at the women in the doorway, a bouquet of sunburnt faces framed by black, white-edged veils. ‘Please, sisters. Just to you. In private.’ I let my head fall back onto the hard pillow. Was I still acting? If I was, I was overplaying it, I thought, but no, I was suddenly fighting the urge to vomit. It occurred to me that I might really be dying. The Mother Superior must have thought so, because she turned and shooed the others away and shut the door.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘Good sisters, please look on me with mercy. I told a lie to my comrade. I told him that one of you had some skill with wounds. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I had him bring me here, because this is the only place I could come. You must understand. I’m wounded, and I may die from it. But that isn’t …’ My voice trailed off into a dry rasp. It was about to fail me, I knew, so I did the only thing I could. One of my hands was still clamped between my legs. Almost crying out from the pain, I pulled away the sticky mass of linen and drying blood. ‘Look,’ I whispered. ‘Look. I am not …’ The purple light was coming again. Sister Vittoria’s hand tightened in mine, and I squeezed it as hard as I could. ‘No one else knows. God help me. I am a woman,’ I said, and fell into the light.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When I woke up, I was still in the little cell, still on the bed, though I was covered with a rough wool sheet and a blanket. There was a steady, horrible pulse of pain in my thigh, and my body felt both hollow and burning. My first thought was that I had died, and the nuns had embalmed me, taken out my organs and washed the cavity of my chest and belly with vinegar. Then I heard a noise and found Sister Vittoria standing with her back to me, washing strips of linen in a steaming earthenware basin that stood on the only other piece of furniture in the room, a rough olive-wood table. She must have heard the change in my breathing because she turned around and gave me an uncertain smile.

  ‘You’re awake,’ she said, and paused, mouth open to say something else. Instead she twisted the linen band she was holding until water began to fall into the basin. We both watched the drops fall in silence. Then she shook out the linen and draped it over her arm. There was a jug and a cup on the table, and she poured some clear liquid into the cup and knelt down beside the bed. She put her hand under my head and helped me lift it, holding the cup steady until my lips could reach it.

  ‘There’s a spring nearby,’ she said. ‘Izvor: the name of this place. The water is sweet. Drink.’

  I sipped, and let the cool liquid trickle down my throat, easing the dryness. It stung, but I drank some more, and this time it went down more easily.

  ‘Can you speak?’ asked Sister Vittoria.

  I nodded. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

  She seemed to be making up her mind about something. ‘What is your name?’ she asked, after another silence.

  ‘My name.’ I hesitated. My senses were returning, and I could feel that I was naked beneath the sheet. There would be no secrets here.

  ‘I’m Onoria.’ I caught my breath. My voice felt like a dull blade. ‘Onoria Ormani.’

  To my surprise she took my hand and held it gently. Her skin was hard and cool. ‘You were lucky, Onoria Ormani. The lie you told was not a lie after all. I do have a little skill with healing. My father was a doctor of medicine. When I was with the order in Venice I worked in the infirmary there. Sometimes when our fleet had fought with the Turk, when the ships returned, the wounded sailors from our parish might be brought to us. Twice lucky, really, because your wound … It was a spear?’ I nodded. ‘The spear went cleanly through the meat of your thigh. An inch higher …’ She winced. ‘A finger’s width to the left or right, and the great artery of your leg would have been cut. You’d have been dead in two minutes. As it is, you’ve lost a lot of blood. Had you been a big man, perhaps you could have afforded that. But that isn’t the case, is it?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I lay back and closed my eyes. ‘Sister, I wanted you to save me. But now that I find myself alive, like this … It would have been better if I’d let myself die there on the field.’

  ‘Why?’ Sister Vittoria let go of my hand. She pulled back the sheet, and my heart jumped in alarm to see my nakedness: my unbound breasts, pale and still streaked red where the bindings had pressed into them; the little swell of my stomach, and below it, the tuft of hair. My left thigh was bandaged up to my groin. I looked so small. ‘Why do this? Why deform your body and hide it inside those warlike things? Why would a woman disguise herself as a … as a brute?’

  ‘Was I a brute when I came into your church last week?’ I asked. I could feel tears start gathering in the corners of my eyes. A woman’s habit I had erased: soldiers do not cry. But now the tears were running down my face.

  ‘No, my daughter. No, you were not.’

  My chest heaved. No one had called me ‘daughter’ since that last evening in Pietrodoro. And that had been a long time ago.

  ‘I should leave you to rest,’ the nun said. She pulled the covers up over me and, leaning down, wiped away my tears with the sleeve of her habit.

  ‘Please don’t!’ I hissed. ‘I want to tell you. Will you listen, sister? Please listen.’

  ‘You’ll tire yourself,’ she muttered, but nevertheless she settled herself on the very edge of the narrow bed and took my hand again.

  I told Sister Vittoria. My story: all of it, from the moment Augusto Ellebori had burst into my bedroom, to when I had turned to find Don Orazio watching me hunt for bustards. She listened, her face betraying nothing, only stopping me when my voice began to break to help me drink. The words poured out of me: my words, my story. My ugly voice. Perhaps it would be my last confession after all, because I could feel myself weakening by the moment, but I had to finish.

  ‘This Marchese del Forese, he mistook you for a boy straight away?’ Sister Vittoria asked when I had reached the end.

  ‘He did. But Don Orazio made an honest mistake. It was me who told the lie.’

  ‘You did it to protect yourself. You were a frightened little girl. I don’t think God wished you to die.’

  ‘I was not so little, sister. I knew ver
y well that it was wrong. I knew that God asks us to tell the truth. But it was because I was praying. I’d been praying the whole time.’

  ‘To Santa Clara?’

  ‘The Church calls her Clara, but she’s Celava, sister. The saint of our village. She looks after things that are lost. And I felt – I knew – that Celava had given me this chance. A chance to live. Is that wrong?’

  ‘God works through his saints, my daughter. I can see that your devotion is honest, and I don’t believe anything else matters.’

  She smiled for the first time since I had begun my story. It made her face look younger. I studied it now, through a haze of tears. She was in her late forties, and though her features had been shaped by her austere life, by the stillness of contemplation and the sun in the garden where she worked, tumbled like a pebble in a stream until it was all hard, smooth curves, there was a kindness that shone through it, and a hint that perhaps she had never quite left her own youth behind.

  ‘And you’ve lived all this time. With all those men.’ She pursed her lips, but her eyes were laughing.

  She gave me something else to drink, and I think it had poppy juice in it, because I slipped almost instantly into a deep, velvety sleep. Pain woke me, and there was Sister Vittoria, changing my bandages. I was shaking, and the sheets were heavy with sweat. The cup appeared at my lips, and I drank and slipped back into the velvet darkness. I had no idea how much time was passing in that way: sleep, waking, pain, the comfort of hands, a voice I couldn’t quite hear, then sleep again. When I finally opened my eyes, I found that my head was clear, that my sheets were dry.

  ‘Your fever has broken.’ The Mother Superior was watching me through the open door. I wondered how long she had been standing there. ‘And your wound is closing well. Good morning … my daughter,’ she added after a significant pause.

  ‘Good morning, Mother Superior. Thank you. I would have died without your care.’

  ‘That you would. No, don’t move!’ I was trying to sit up, but she had raised her hands in horror. ‘You’ll open it up!’

  ‘Sorry.’ I lay down again. ‘I am not used to being so still.’

  ‘No. Of course you aren’t. You have been living as a soldier.’

  ‘You find that a terrible thing. Which is probably true.’

  ‘I do not understand how you could do such a thing. Practise such deception with your whole being. But Sister Vittoria told me how you came to be …’ She fluttered her fingers at me. ‘This.’

  ‘I am a woman now,’ I said, smoothing the sheets across the contours of my unfettered body.

  ‘And will you stay a woman?’ The Mother Superior shut the door and sat down on a three-legged stool that sat on the floor near the head of the bed. It hadn’t been there before. People had been sitting with me while I slept. The thought of it made me want to cry again.

  ‘I … I could stay here,’ I said, putting words around something that had just come into my head.

  The Mother Superior harrumphed. I couldn’t tell if she was amused or disgusted. ‘Could you, indeed?’ she said. Then she smiled. She had the same smooth, weathered features as Sister Vittoria. They might be sisters, I thought, and that made me smile too. ‘Could you join our order and serve God as a nun? Let me see. You have lived a life of great discipline. You have turned your back on the world that nature intended for you. You have abjured the flesh: you are still a virgin—’ I opened my mouth in shock, but she silenced me with a flourish of her hand. ‘We had to examine you, girl. Who knows where that spear might have gone? All is well, by the way.’

  ‘Good,’ I muttered, uncertain what the news meant to me.

  ‘All of that, on the face of it, might make you seem an ideal candidate for the sisterhood. But you aren’t. I have contemplated your story. And I’ve prayed to God for guidance. Hmm.’ She steepled her fingers and propped her chin on their tips. ‘You could become a monk.’

  ‘Mother Superior!’ I burst out laughing.

  ‘Ah. You find that ridiculous. Why? You’ve passed yourself off as a man for how long? Ten years? In the very heart of their world. A monastery would be no challenge at all.’ She chuckled, then stopped herself abruptly. ‘But there’s the thing, Donna Onoria. Or Don Onorio. You have a gift: you can make yourself who and what you please. A boy, a man. Capo of a lance of cavalry. And another gift: you can hide who you really are. But to serve God as a nun …’ She took a deep, slow breath. ‘To serve God, you cannot hide. You must find who you truly are, the very heartwood of your being, strip yourself of everything else, and as that pure thing, that heartwood, you stand before God. He sees everything, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I struggled upright in bed, despite the Mother Superior’s upraised hands. ‘So I couldn’t do that? You don’t believe I could be pure?’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, be careful with your dressings, girl! I think you have a purity all of your own. It isn’t mine, of course, nor Sister Vittoria’s. I don’t profess to understand it. But I see it.’ She stood up and touched the crucifix above my bed. ‘What you have is a purity of intent. Ours is a purity of devotion. Do you see the difference, my daughter?’

  I did. I saw it very clearly.

  ‘Perhaps I should go back to my company,’ I said.

  ‘Your condottiere has sent his prayers for your speedy recovery. You seem to be a valued … man to them.’

  ‘Has anybody come to see me?’ I asked. The thought hadn’t occurred to me before, and now I wondered why it hadn’t.

  ‘I told that soldier, the one who brought you, that men are utterly forbidden here, and that I made an exception for you only because you were so near death.’ She touched her lips with her fingers and raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Could it be that you miss your life? Your disguise? Perhaps deception feels more real than the truth?’

  ‘Mother Superior, I have no choice!’

  ‘You don’t? You could not live as a woman? The world is a very big place, my daughter.’

  I actually laughed. Her suggestion was absurd to me. ‘I spend my life with men, Mother Superior! They count women as little above farm animals! And of a good less account than their swords or their horses. I might have lived my whole life as nothing more than a man’s goods! I think of my mother, who might have been a teacher at a university if God had made her differently. I shut my eyes and see her butchered by men who, I daresay, barely gave their butchery a second thought. She died as my father’s wife, not as … not as someone who read Virgil and Ovid and Aristotle. She was a clever woman. She wanted me to be clever too, to be more than just a wife, to have more than she had, even if I had to keep it all in my head. And if I had not been wayward and spoilt … No, I did learn. I learnt from her death, that power will always triumph over gentleness. That there is no safety for us.’

  The nun had listened to my outburst with a tiny smile lifting the corner of her mouth. ‘There is safety in the shelter of God,’ she said calmly.

  ‘It was the men of my company that gave you shelter from the Turk,’ I reminded her. ‘Forgive me,’ I added hastily, as a wave of guilt washed over me. But the nun merely chuckled.

  ‘Oh, you are right, you are right. And we are thankful. But you have not answered my question. Could you not live as a woman again? Perhaps I should be clearer. Not should you, but could you?’

  ‘I come from a noble family. Women of my station marry a man, or they marry God. Without a dowry – and I would not marry, not even if my life were at stake – what would I become? What life waits for a woman alone, with no family, no name? One thing alone suggests itself: to turn to whoring, but my looks’ – I turned my scarred face into the light – ‘such as they ever might have been, are ruined.’ I grinned joylessly. ‘But there are men who will pay for a spoilt face. And a woman who looks like a man. So, there is my new life: a whore for men of what one might call slanted tastes.’

  If I had hoped to shock the nun, I failed. ‘You think so little of yourself?’ she asked.

 
‘I think little of Onoria Ormani. I wouldn’t give this’ – I snapped my fingers – ‘for her prospects. But Onorio Celavini? Caposquadra Onorio? He has a man’s prospects. He can stride through the world and it will stand aside for him as he passes.’ I had to ease myself back against the pillow: the nun’s questions had stirred up emotions and thoughts I had spent years trying to avoid. ‘I wish it weren’t so, Mother Superior. But I was robbed of the life that by rights I should have lived. It wasn’t me who upset the balance of nature. You said something about intent. You’re right – what else do I have? My life is poised on the edge of disaster. I’m like an artilleryman who must fire his mortar by lighting both the fuse on his bomb and in his gun. The touchhole must be lit, then he must grit his teeth and lean into the mortar’s jaws with his match, knowing that if he has cut his fuse too short, he will be blasted to rags in an instant. I take that risk with every breath God gives me, but I intend to stay alive, even if I am an offence to the proper order of things. I would like it to be otherwise, believe me.’

  ‘I do, my daughter. It must be hard to have saved your life at the cost of your nature.’

  ‘I want to live because they tried to take my life from me! Theirs is the offence!’ I croaked. The conversation was taking a toll on me. My heart was pounding, and my eyes were stinging. ‘Those men killed my mother, my father, my brother, our people, and yet mine is the offence, because I wear breeches and a sword and live a life of … of honour?’

  The nun sighed. ‘Tell me one thing, Onoria. What is it that drives you, truly? Is it anger? Is it the desire for revenge? Because, my daughter, I am not a scholar like your mother, but I have studied as much as my poor intellect has allowed. The Book of Deuteronomy tells me that God forbids a man to dress as a woman, and a woman to dress like a man. But if you hadn’t practised that deception, you would have condemned yourself to death, and that is the greater sin. Perhaps this is sophistry. I am not wise enough to know. But I do know this: God reserves vengeance for himself, and himself alone. Do not use a lesser sin to mask a greater one.’ She patted my hand. ‘I’ve tired you. I had not fully understood your dilemma, Onoria. Plainly, I still don’t. You confuse me. I’m a dull old woman living an exceedingly dull life. I am not used to confusion.’