Agata asked her aunt why her father had taken that attitude. As a young man, Peppino read books that were on the Church’s index of forbidden titles; he was a freemason, her aunt told her, crossing herself when she pronounced the dread word “freemason.” “And then there was His Majesty . . . ” She explained to her curious niece that, despite the fact that the king was fifteen years older than him, the two had become great friends. In fact, Peppino remained a gentleman of the privy chamber until he left for Messina. The king was lazy and capricious; he liked to hunt and he would play pranks on anyone. Peppino, himself a jokester, was always ready to go along with the king’s antics. But there was an innovative and modernizing side to the king as well, and Peppino spoke of that aspect with admiration: the foundation of the Real Colonia di San Leucio. At the instigation of the leading minds of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, King Ferdinand had established a manufactory for the production of silk with a charter based on a concept of meritocracy. The families of the weavers lived in the “colony” in modern residences, with schools, hospitals, and everything that a prosperous community could need. “Like a monastery or convent in the olden days, and what’s more they even had vaccination against smallpox!” exclaimed her aunt, and then pointed out that later, the king returned to his natural state of laziness and did no more than to approve his wife’s reforms—she was in cahoots with an Englishman, the prime minister John Acton. “Before the terrible events of Paris,” said the abbess, thus alluding to the storming of the Bastille, “the royals had done a great deal to modernize the university and encourage technology and the arts. But the king cared little or nothing about the monasteries: he and his queen wanted the Kingdom of Naples to be a bulwark of modernity and the leading state of the peninsula.” She added, with a hint of satisfaction: “Of course, they failed.”
Her aunt glided over the horrible years that followed in the wake of the beheading of the French royals, when Queen Maria Carolina, the sister of Marie Antoinette of France, reneging on her sympathetic attitude toward the Freemasons, had withdrawn all support for any and all progressive groups in the kingdom. The abbess was proud of the fact that her brother, who had witnessed the transformation of the king from a jovial prankster to a repressive monarch, still remained loyal to him. In the dark periods, he had even followed his king twice into Sicilian exile, while the other Padellanis drank to the health of the French usurper.
Then her aunt went on at some length about the reason for Agata’s father’s protracted bachelorhood: a womanizer, he married the thirteen-year-old Gesuela when he was on the verge of turning forty. In the family, everyone assumed that Carlo, the eldest brother, who had hitherto shown no interest in women, would not produce offspring. Peppino assumed that he would become the prince and at that point enter into an appropriate and “important” marriage. But Carlo surprised everyone when he was fifty, by marrying a widow from Lecce who bore him a son and then promptly died. “It all happened in less than a year, poor Carlo.”
“Your father was happy that he married your mother,” her aunt told her. “He loved her and he treated her like a little girl, and that was a mistake. She became capricious, even though she’s a good woman.” Donna Maria Crocifissa had criticized her sister-in-law; she regretted it immediately and promised herself to talk about it in confession. After that, she added, with a smile: “I can clearly remember the first time that he talked to me about her, I could tell that she’d made a good impression on him even when she was quite small, because she was well educated. He told me that, toward the end of the king’s second exile, a new opera premiered in Palermo, Così fan tutte, in the new theater of the Baron Pisani, a friend of his whom I also knew. That evening, Gesuela sang him word for word a beautiful aria from that opera; evidently she was already familiar with it.” She seemed to be trying to pursue her memory of the tune. “I wonder how it went,” she murmured. Agata remembered it clearly, her mother still sang it now, with Agata accompanying her on the pianoforte, and in a low voice she sang Dorabella’s aria, È amore un ladroncello. Her aunt, lowering her eyelids, listened raptly and beat out the time with her little finger. Transported by the sugary airiness of those verses, Agata had started singing it over again from the beginning, and her aunt followed along until she opened her eyes, fell silent, and for the second time was obliged to repent.
“After the king and queen returned,” her aunt began reminiscing again, “the kingdom was crawling with spies and policemen.” As he had done in the past, Peppino remonstrated with the king about the excesses of the police. “But that time, your father fell out of favor with the king and he was denied promotion in the army. Unwaveringly loyal, he put blame on the influence of the followers of the Duchess of Floridia; she had always pretended to be a great friend to him and to your mother when they had acted as her intermediaries and matchmakers with the king, then, once she was married, she had betrayed their friendship, ingrate that she was. That’s why they had to move to Messina just after you were born!” The abbess grimaced at the bitter recollection and then added, with a sigh, but with a faint smile as well, that every time he was in Naples, he unfailingly came to see her.
21.
October 1842.
Agata the postulant becomes an assistant pharmacist
Agata became a postulant at the age of sixteen, after two years of Educandate; none of the Padellanis attended the mass for the occasion. The abbess had asked her family members to reduce their contacts with her to a minimum, in order to allow Agata to immerse herself in the monastic life and preserve the precarious equilibrium that she had attained; her Neapolitan relations happily complied with the request, with a collective sigh of relief—the rebellious Sicilian girl was a source of much embarrassment—with the exception of Orsola and Sandra, the only ones who truly loved her. But for that very reason, they too had obeyed the abbess’s request. Isolated from the rest of the world, the educands led a separate life from the postulants, the novices, and the choristers, and were protected from everyone. Agata liked studying and also had a new interest: the manufacture of paperoles—little temples and tiny altars containing miniature relics, or simply sacred images sat against a satin background and framed, created by the nuns in the eighteenth century using—instead of gold and silver thread, pearls and precious stones—strips of golden and colored paper, blades of straw, colored glass, sequins, and tiny mirrors. A French nun who had sought refuge in Naples had introduced them to the convent of San Giorgio Stilita; no longer fashionable and scorned by the choristers because of the inexpensive materials used, the art of paperoles had been preserved by the French nun’s lay sisters, now quite old, and they had very few willing apprentices.
Agata depended upon the generosity of her aunt the abbess and on the money that she earned by selling cucchitelle. Now she had found a new way to earn money to pay for her modest needs. She created her paperoles with scrap materials that she found here and there or with odds and ends of silk given to her by the choristers. She specialized in little altar-shrines and floral decorations. She loved that work, which required patience and concentration. She felt enveloped in a cocoon woven by the loving care of her aunt the abbess and her other teachers, and she hoped that, just as a chrysalis is transformed into a butterfly, she too would receive the gift of a vocation when the time came for her simple profession, and that she would fly upward to God’s side. Agata stubbornly refused to consider the alternative: becoming a nun against her will. She made every effort imaginable to want to become a nun, and she had even limited the time she spent reading the books that she had smuggled into the convent, incarnations of the temptation of civil society.
The nuns had once rotated through the various positions in the convent, from abbess to hebdomadary—the nun in charge of the kitchens—but it no longer worked that way. For more than fifteen years now the same helper nun had been in charge of relations with the outside world. The sister pharmacist, Donna Maria Immacolata, who also worked as the herbalist, had been attending to the sister
s’ health for many years and needed an assistant, but few of the sisters were interested in taking that job. Her Latin title was monaca infirmaria, inasmuch as it covered simultaneously the pharmacologist, the doctor, and the chemist.
When Agata became a postulant, in October 1842, she was assigned to assist her. Donna Maria Immacolata, austere and dark-eyed, had a lovely low soft voice, almost a whisper, a breath, a hush. With that voice, Donna Maria Immacolata carved into the silence the history of their order. She talked about how the medical arts had developed in Benedictine abbeys during the Middle Ages. Their medicine based the “hope of healing” on God’s mercy and on the “action of simples,” that is, the medicamentum simplex—a medicinal herb or a medicament made with officinal plants. This led, within the walls of their convents and monasteries, to the planting of gardens of simples for the cultivation of medicinal herbs and to the creation of the pharmacy, the armarium pigmentariorum, where they were stored and preserved over time. After the Cluniac Reforms, the Benedictines believed that meditation and prayer were preferable to the practices of the mortification of the flesh as an instrument of ascetism, “but you’ll see that there are still sisters who use hair shirts and sackcloth and other ways of mortifying the body,” she said, and she allowed her whisper to reverberate at a slightly higher tone. It was their duty to care for wounds and injuries without making comments or judgments; the pharmacist sister was there to help other nuns who were unwell or suffering from pain without asking questions or expressing her personal moral judgments. “In certain cases,” and here Donna Maria Immacolata’s voice grew faint again, “it is not advisable to call a physician. We take care of women’s matters.”
The garden of simples was divided between the two cloisters of the convent. Angiola Maria, assisted by Checchina, one of the lay sisters of Donna Maria Brigida, as well as by various servingwomen, was in charge of work in the garden of the main cloister. She was also involved in work in the cloister of the novices, dedicated exclusively to medicinal plants, under the jurisdiction of Donna Maria Immacolata. During the periods of harvest and preservation—drying, transformation into pills, tinctures, and essential oils—Angiola Maria supervised all the work, since she had taught herself the rudiments of reading in order to check the prescriptions and recipes.
The first time that Donna Maria Immacolata brought Agata into the garden of simples she had asked Angiola Maria to accompany her; together they had helped her to identify every plant, and for each plant they had listed the medicinal characteristics and properties. Then they had moved on to the more practical suggestions concerning cultivation and care. There was an orderly chaos of individual plants, there were other plants in rows, bushes, shrubs, and potted plants. Donna Maria Immacolata stopped in front of the Cistus creticus, or pink rockrose, a shrub with green leaves that was not particularly attractive: “We use this in herbal teas and infusions, it is a tonic and it strengthens the organism. Its resin was once burned to ward off illness. Now it is an ingredient in the incense for cardinals. When the cardinal is officiating, we use twice as much. Its scent is very sweet. I wonder whether our cardinal even notices, though. Sometimes, at services, he seems distracted . . . ” The two women looked one another in the eye, prompting a sense of uneasiness in Agata that she was unable to decipher. She leaned over to admire a bunch of mauve-colored flowers growing in profusion at the foot of a shrub: each flower sprouted from a bulb. She thought she might pick one for the abbess.
“Stop!” the other two cried in unison. “Did you touch the stalk?”
Silence.
“She touched it!”
Donna Maria Immacolata grabbed her wrist and gripped it tightly; Angiola Maria, at the well, was frantically hauling up the bucket. They plunged her hand into the water and with their fingernails they scrubbed and scraped her fingers and the palm of her hand.
“It’s called Aconitum, also known as wolfsbane or vegetable arsenic,” Donna Maria Immacolata explained to her.
“Be careful! You’d best handle this plant cautiously. It’s a deadly poison.” That was not a suggestion, coming from Angiola Maria: it was a command.
22.
January 1844.
Agata is certain that she prefers nunhood
to the marriage her mother wants for her
From inside the convent it was possible to keep up with what was happening in the outside world, just as it was possible to remain completely in the dark. According to the Rule, the nuns could write and receive letters only with permission from the abbess; Donna Maria Crocifissa readily gave that permission, just as she also authorized unsupervised visits in the parlor. Moreover, the nuns sent and received verbal messages through trusted servingwomen and they also kept up a constant traffic of packages and gifts with relatives, friends, and father confessors. Every day, dozens of trays of pastries went out from the convent, wrapped in tissue paper or oiled paper, depending on the type. They were wrapped in large sheets of heavy brown paper, skillfully tied with a stout twine; large boxes containing bedsheets and towels, custom-embroidered by the lay sisters, and baskets full of intimate linen sent to the nuns’ family homes to be washed, including very fashionable and even coquettish articles of clothing, stitched between linings; less frequently, nuns sent gifts of paperoles to benefactors, prelates, and relatives. The same servingwomen made purchases for the nuns and brought back to the convent gifts from their families—books, both religious and otherwise, chocolate bonbons, pastries with cream toppings, candied almonds, and even sacred jewelry: crucifixes, chains, medallions, brooches, key rings.
The world entered and left through that remarkable subterranean traffic which mingled faith with pleasure, vanity and curiosity, news and gossip. Nothing was truly forbidden and no one could really claim to be impervious to what was happening outside the convent walls.
The time that Agata spent as a postulant was longer than usual because of her mother’s lack of interest. Payment of the monastic dowry was supposed to be fully arranged before the postulant could be admitted to the preparatory course for the simple profession, but Donna Gesuela simply ignored all the letters that Agata wrote her. Agata’s sisters in Messina did the same, evidently at their mother’s orders. Aunt Orsola, the only one to have kept up relations with Agata, suffered from arthritis and when she came to the convent she was always accompanied by Sandra.
Agata knew little or nothing about what was happening with her family, and she knew still less about events in the kingdom, but she didn’t mind a bit: she preferred to ignore the outside world—it was her way of surviving the cloistered life. She was frequently sad, but not entirely unhappy. She believed that she was pretty well along in the process of breaking her ties with the world. She still hoped that Giacomo hadn’t forgotten her, and there were times when she thought that she recognized him as she looked down at the crowd of worshippers in the church. That hope was more of a comforting habit than it was a genuine hope. When she turned eighteen, the abbess told her that it was time for her to begin her studies for the examination of simple profession, and she asked Agata to urge her mother once again to present her proposal for the payment of the dowry. Agata wrote to the address that the abbess had given her, an address that had to do with the general’s responsibilities: in fact, the general and his wife were often away from Palermo, where they had a house. In that period, they were in Catania. Like all Agata’s other letters, however, this one too remained unanswered.
A few days later, a young nun who had just received visitors in the parlor breathlessly reported the news that Mt. Etna was erupting. A small knot of black veils clustered around her in the cloister–Agata was among them. Adding details of her own, the nun told them that all of eastern Sicily had been rocked by the earthquake and that there had been many victims. Catania was in danger: raising her pale hands skyward, the nun stated that the river of lava was about to engulf the Benedictine monastery of San Nicolò l’Arena, which had actually been rebuilt atop the solidified lava after the earthquake of
1693: she began a series of heartfelt supplications of St. Agatha, the city’s–and Agata’s–patron saint, as well as of St. Benedict. The other girls wanted to know more, but they hastily joined in the litanies, feeling the hawk-eyed glare of the prioress upon them. She had been watching them from her elevated vantage point on the terrace across the way.
Like a surging tide, her attachment to the outside world—places, people, things—was rising frantically, irrepressibly. How was her mother? And where was Carmela? Had people she knew been killed? Frustrated at her inability to find out, Agata smashed the bread dough down onto the countertop violently, making the little piles of flour in the corners leap into the air. She chopped the rump steak and yanked out the gristle with such force that it ripped the flesh. By nightfall she was gratified by her exhaustion and the aches in her muscles. At last, she implored the abbess to try to find out something from her married sisters in Messina. Amalia and Giulia replied promptly. It hadn’t really been an “earthquake” so much as a series of minor shocks and tremors, and the eruption of Mt. Etna had posed absolutely no threat to the city of Catania. They both informed their aunt the abbess that their mother was angry with Agata for having refused to be married off to the Cavaliere d’Anna. She had intentionally failed to answer Agata’s letters and she had ordered them not to write to their sister. The Cavaliere d’Anna still wanted to marry Agata and had announced that he would be willing to wait for her, well aware that Agata could legally leave the convent. Amalia wished to let Agata know that, after their mother’s wedding, Carmela, who had stayed behind in Messina and now lived with Amalia, greatly wished to see Agata again.
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