by Sarah Dunant
Others express their gratitude through the words of the office, for Compline, which, marking the end of the day and the beginning of the Great Silence of the night, opens with penitence but moves toward joy. Even Suora Umiliana seems relaxed, almost satisfied, and the once-so-troublesome novice Serafina, who it is rumored was given special dispensation to tend her former mentor, offers up the words of the 30th psalm—Thou hast turned mourning into dances, put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness. O Lord, I will give thanks to Thee for ever—in purest voice. Those sisters—and there are a few of them—who have been as suspicious of her sudden goodness as they had been tired of her outright rebellion find themselves giving extra thanks that the convent has regained its balance. And that there is nothing now to interfere with Carnival, with all its opportunities for pleasure and performance.
The abbess, as ever impeccable in her formality and avoidance of favoritism, waits until the service ends to show her delight, pausing briefly in front of her dispensary sister and bowing her head to welcome her back to the flock. Those who are close enough to note the encounter are struck by the deep warmth in Madonna Chiara’s eyes, not to mention the way she offers the lightest of nods in the direction of the young Serafina herself, who seems so taken aback that the blush is evident behind her veil.
Three hours later, when the convent is deeply asleep, that same young novice slips out of her cell, a parcel concealed under her robe. Not long after, the voice of a perfect male tenor, moving along the street toward the river wharf, lifts up and over the walls. It sings of young love and a woman whose hair is a cloud of gold, Petrarch’s words set to haunting music. When the song ends it is answered by a single high vibrating note, a female voice rather than male, and then a heavy thud as something hurled from inside the walls lands somewhere on the other side.
Three days later the same procedure takes place the other way around. That night Serafina is especially fortunate. With the Carnival spirit on the move again, the watch sister has changed the timing of her rounds, and the novice barely reaches her cell before the footsteps hit the flagstones outside.
She lies on her pallet, fully dressed, heart thudding, the heavy package clasped to her breast, as she hears the footsteps stop by her door, hesitate, then go forward again. In the dark when all is silent once more she pulls open the wrapping and feels underneath her fingers the shape of two newly forged iron keys and the fold of a letter around them.
There is nothing they can do to hurt her now. She is ready. It is only a question of waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
WITH ZUANA BACK on her feet, it takes less than a week for the contagion to be halted. The fever passes naturally from the remaining sisters (in the city, the severity of the attack is already waning), while the chief conversa, in whom it proves more stubborn, emerges three days later with rosy lips and renewed strength: a happy outcome, since her trips to and from the storehouse are even more frequent.
The rehearsals for the play enter their final stage. Suora Perseveranza comes out of her cell word-perfect, having been heard reciting her lines while in the midst of her delirium. Except for meal hours the refectory is now strictly out of bounds, as workmen are brought in from outside to build the stage and set. For three days their sawing and hammering offer a background percussion to the daily orders, and their presence—invisible though it is—introduces a level of exhilaration into the convent, with the novices and boarders closely chaperoned on every journey. There is a story, so often repeated that it is almost certainly apocryphal, of how a particularly beautiful postulant from a convent in Prato had her lover dress up as a workman to come in and fix the pews in the church and then, at the end of his time, he smuggled her out in a great bag of his tools. The very idea is enough to have a few of the younger ones swooning with excitement—but it is Carnival, after all, and when the body is incarcerated the mind cannot help but play a little.
Outside, too, the city has come alive. Family visits to the parlatorio tell of a wave of new arrivals: visitors from Mantua, Bologna, Padua, Venice—even a few from Rome itself. Ferrara has a reputation for good living as well as beautiful voices, and celebrations are already in full swing. It is said that if you walk by the palace you can hear the trumpeting of elephants brought in especially for the d’Este marriage feast and kept on for Carnival. The ducal garden has been transformed into a huge stage set, lit by a thousand candles, with grottoes and temples and even a great pyramid, all part of an elaborate game of valor in which a group of knights must win their ladies’ hands by slaying dragons and answering riddles—though since the duke must triumph there are rumors of the riddles being adapted to fit his somewhat limited knowledge.
Meanwhile, the streets outside the convent have become their own stage for debauchery. All over the city young men are trying on their Carnival masks, and once disguised how can they possibly stay indoors? Disturbing the city’s peace is an accepted part of the celebrations. Disturbing its nuns is a more serious affair, a crime against God as much as against the women themselves, but even here a little leeway is granted in the name of high spirits. Soon the odd slingshot pellet is arriving over the walls, to be picked up by the watch sister after Lauds: balls of paper scrawled with madrigals and bad poetry. Madonna Chiara sighs as she reads them and feeds them to the fire. The sentiments are predictable: unrequited love like evergreen laurel for ladies whose virtue is so fierce that it freezes the sun itself, alongside a handful of scurrilous verses offering a more instant heaven on earth for those with the wit to imagine it. Any abbess worth her salt has seen it all before. Most men are tempted by what they cannot have, and the truth is that it is not just heretics who are greedy for tales of lustful nuns that, like bad confessors, they can both enjoy and denounce at the same time. If anything, she thinks, this year’s crop is somewhat tamer than the last. Surely the city’s poets used to be wittier and cleverer than this? Or perhaps she, like Suora Umiliana, is becoming nostalgic for times past.
When the great annual procession takes to the streets, the whole city stops to watch. The road outside the main entrance of the convent becomes a moving wall of people. At different times throughout the day, small groups of converse and the more adventurous of the choir nuns crane their necks out of the few available high windows to watch as the biggest floats go by. From this vantage point they see giants, dwarfs, mermaids, goddesses, angels, popes, and devils. By now most of the performers have spent so much time waving and shouting up to the noblewomen on the balconies that they have permanent cricks in their necks. The convents, however, are always a challenge, especially for the key makers, who have a float of their own this year and who make a special effort, strutting up and down waving huge counterfeit keys and shouting out verses about their tools being especially useful for women behind locked doors and inviting everyone to come down to the float and handle a few for themselves.
With the cochinilla at last delivered to the kitchens, the first marzipan fruit bowls are now complete. There is a tradition within the convent that the kitchen mistress is allowed to choose one sister and one novice to sample the first batch. After supper one evening Suora Benedicta and Serafina are called to the back cloisters, where Federica gives the choir mistress a fat green pear—“Because your melodies bring us closer to God”—while Serafina is presented with a somewhat misshapen but exceedingly red strawberry—“And your singing gives more pleasure than your howling ever did; also, as the last novice to come inside, you can still remember the tastes you left behind and can judge how this compares.”
While it is probable that the recipe for marzipan remains constant whichever side of the convent wall one lives on, Serafina’s reaction—she is clearly affected by the intensity of the taste—satisfies even Federica.
“Here, wipe your mouth,” she says, handing her a cloth. “We would not want you getting into trouble now that you are doing so well.”
And doing well she is. With every passing day Serafina grows more radiant, despite h
er humble demeanor. She shines even when she is silent, as if God’s great love were trying to burst out of her heart, and her voice in chapel, especially at the darkest point of the night, entrances everyone. When she is not singing she is at prayer. She has even dispensed with Candida and taken on the duties of cleaning her own cell, washing the floor, making her own bed, changing her own linen. There are those who whisper behind her back that she is only trying so hard in the hope that she will be allowed to join the visiting in the parlatorio after the concert is over (the rules are clear that she is not yet eligible to entertain or be entertained). But if that is her aim, she says nothing about it. In fact, these days she says almost nothing at all.
SERAFINA’S BEHAVIOR MIGHT be more remarked upon were it not for the drama that takes place within the convent in the days leading up to the concert and play
Following some urgent exchanges of letters and out-of-hours visits in the parlatorio, Suora Apollonia’s sister, the lady Camilla Bendidio, arrives late one night with a maidservant and a small bag and is quickly settled in the guesthouse to the side of the main cloisters. It doesn’t take long for the news to spread that there is trouble in the marriage and she has asked for refuge away from her husband while negotiations take place within the family to try to bring peace. Apollonia is given special dispensation to spend time with her, and that same night Zuana is called by the abbess to attend her. She has a deep cut at the hairline of her forehead, as if something has been thrown at her, and sits without movement or murmur while Zuana cleans and tends the wound. When asked if there is anything else she needs help with, she removes her shawl and upper bodice to reveal a set of large ripening bruises on her arms and shoulders and sits weeping silently as Zuana rubs ointment gently into the damaged skin.
She was a pretty woman once, Zuana remembers, but she is grown gaunt now, older than her years. Those young nuns who cry themselves to sleep at night for want of a man’s hands on them might find pause for thought here, for this is not the first time she has used the convent as a haven. Her husband, the eldest son of the splendid Bendidio family, is one of the duke’s most favored courtiers and by all accounts a man with a quick temper. There might be more sympathy for his long-suffering wife were it not for the fact that in seven years of marriage she is yet to produce a child. He, in contrast, has no such problems, having already sired half a dozen illegitimate children. If it continues much longer, she will be under pressure to allow the marriage to be dissolved so that he can get himself a sturdier, more fertile bride—in which case she will find herself coming back to Santa Caterina permanently, as there is nowhere else that would take such a castoff Perhaps that would be a relief to her. Looking at Apollonia’s healthy young body and her rebelliously fashionable courtier face, Zuana cannot help but think that Bendidio married the wrong sister. But it is too late now—for both of them.
The next afternoon their father, along with the abbess, meets with a representative of the husband’s family in the guesthouse to discuss her future, while the parlatorio overflows with the last visit before the Carnival concert.
Zuana, in contrast, sits alone in her cell with her books. She has more than enough work but cannot concentrate on doing it. It has been like this for a while now. The time of year has much to do with it. While many of the inhabitants of Santa Caterina find Carnival an exquisite distraction, for Zuana it is more a disruption than a pleasure. During her long and painful assimilation into convent life, it was the rhythm of routine that became one of her greatest solaces, and to have it so rudely interrupted makes her almost nervous. Perhaps it would be different if she were more connected to the outside, if she had family to visit and entertain: mother and aunts, cousins or sisters with an ever-expanding brood of little ones to cuddle and coo over. But all she has is her herbs and her remedies, and while they keep the convent healthy they count for little in the world beyond.
This much she is used to, has grown to understand. Yet there is something else going on now. Over recent weeks, even before the illness, if she is honest, she has detected in herself a strange restlessness that she cannot entirely explain. While it is possible that the contagion may have exacerbated it, with the exception of the blood-red urine she passed for two days after the draft (a shock in itself until she realized it was the drug and not her own insides pouring out of her), she has felt well enough.
No, it seems that it is not her body that is ailing but rather her mind.
She finds herself feeling sad—yes, sad is the right word—for no reason. It is as if for the first time in her life her own company is not enough. She prays, of course, each and every day, but often her mind slips in and around the words, so that they never rise high enough for Him to hear.
The healer in her has witnessed such things in others; convents are full of nuns who become lethargic or tearful or distraught by turns. Winter sadness. Summer madness. Monthly moon cycles, or the more persistent melancholia that comes with their ending. There are as many terms for it as there are states of mind. The stricter nuns—the novice mistress and Suora Felicità (even her name marks her out as immune)—regard it almost as a rebellion against God and counsel stern treatment of work and prayer. But over the years Zuana has tested and used other remedies. Her father’s books are full of them: infusions, pills, borage steeped in wine, Saint John’s wort, fumigants of incense and hypericum, with mandragora and poppy syrups to ease the insomnia that often accompanies such distress. Then there are other treatments that involve neither simples nor compounds: kindness, sympathy, a little relaxation of the rules of solitude. In the darkest cases the best is a combination of all of these. Prayer, work, sleep, and care: God, nature, and man working together as they were meant to.
Of course Zuana is not so distressed herself. Nowhere near. More likely she is simply tired. She disciplines herself through duty. The parlatorio needs more perfumed herb tablets to place on the brazier during the concert, and she busies herself preparing them. When ordinary prayer does not work, she uses recitations from the psalms.
“The voice of the Lord is powerful, I will praise Thee, my Lord, with my whole heart, and show forth all Thy marvelous works. ”
She says these particular phrases over and over again under her breath, wrapping them around her like a blanket, leaving no room for the cold drafts of distraction to slide in around the edges.
“For God is good, His mercy is everlasting, and His truth endureth to all generations. ”
AFTER A WHILE, the simplicity and the repetition bring her a certain calm. Like tonight.
Somewhere outside the walls a muted roar goes up. They must be lighting the Carnival bonfire in the piazza in front of the cathedral in time for the sunset. Her father took her to see it once when she was very small. There were so many people they could barely move, and he had to hold her up amid the crowd. She remembers that the smoke made her eyes water and her throat sore. At least she thinks that is what happened. Recently she has noticed that she is less sure of things she was once certain about, as if her life before the convent is slipping away altogether. Her father’s face, for instance: the broadness of his forehead, the shadows under his eyes, the way his bottom lip always seemed a little pulled downward by the weight of his beard. All this she had assumed was imprinted in her forever. Only, sometimes when she studies the face of Christ on the cloister crucifix, she could swear she sees the same features in Him too, as if the familiarity of one face has simply blended into another.
In contrast, there are a few memories that have become, if anything, almost more powerful. Like the stone carvings in the Ferrara cathedral. There must have been twelve of them, one for each month of the year, but if she closes her eyes there is one she can still see as clearly as if it were in front of her now. In it, a small naked child is crouching on all fours under a goat, suckling from the animal. She can see his mouth, clasped almost lewdly over the fat teat, the fullness of his stone cheeks, the roundness of his belly as the milk pours into it. It surprises her, the powe
r of this memory, for in other ways she does not care much for children; certainly she is not one of those nuns who yearn for the babies they could never have, bringing in Jesus dolls in their dowry chests or imagining themselves taking the suckling baby from Mary’s arms and offering Him their own breasts instead. Nevertheless this less than holy child—with its evident greed for nourishment—has stayed with her.
She pushes back her books and closes her eyes. These are hardly thoughts befitting an infirmary sister with a history of convent infection to write up. If she cannot work she should be praying. Why is it that her mind spirals away from her so easily these days?
The voice of the Lord is powerful …
She closes her eyes.
The voice of the Lord is full of majesty …
By the time the knock comes at her door she has managed to pull herself deep enough inside the words, so that she at first does not hear it.
I will praise Thee, my Lord, with my whole heart.
It comes again, sharper.
She turns, and as she does so she wonders if it might be the novice. Since the day of Zuana’s illness and recovery in the dispensary they have not spoken a word to each other, and when their paths do cross, on their way to chapel or in the cloisters, the girl keeps her head bowed as if she is afraid to meet Zuana’s eyes. Over the years she has watched other young women come in angry and rebellious, hysterical even, only to soften gradually, but she has never seen a change as swift and strange as this. It is as if all the molten fury that had been erupting out of her has simply changed course and is now directed toward God. It should be cause for celebration but when she thinks about it— which she tries not to—it makes her uncomfortable. And that, in turn, adds to the restlessness to which she seems so prone these days.
