Led by the priest carrying the cross, with her godmothers walking on either side, and followed by the other priests, formed into two lines, Agata entered the church. The minute she set the toe of her slipper on the first white-and-blue majolica floor tile, the thronging congregation leapt to its feet; simultaneously, a wave of organ music swept over the crowd, followed by the voice of a mezzo-soprano.
The procession reached the middle of the church. The canon emerged from the presbytery and came to meet them. He gave Agata a silver cross to hold in her left hand, which she held against her breast, and a candle to hold in her right hand. The procession resumed.
Agata walked slowly past the pews where her closest relatives were seated. Carmela had an aisle seat. When she saw her sister go by, she burst into tears: “Don’t do it!” Carmela sobbed, her shoulders quivering. Agata slowed her steps. She looked down at her sister and then looked up and straight ahead at the altar, which looked like a flaming sun. Then she went on walking.
She came to a halt at the foot of the main altar. The cardinal was waiting for her, seated on the left side of the altar, next to the Epistle. The priests that had accompanied her to the altar now moved off in another direction.
Agata and her four godmothers were kneeling. Swelling music filled the church. Then all five women walked forward to the cardinal. The godmothers remained standing, while Agata kneeled before him. At that moment, both music and song ceased. Silence. A priest wearing a magnificently embroidered surplice presented the cardinal with a silver basin containing a small pair of scissors, which the cardinal used to snip a lock of Agata’s hair. At that, the choristers resumed singing a cappella—high, pure, sublime voices.
Agata stood up; at that moment, the voices of all the other chorists suddenly fell away and only the voice of Donna Maria Giovanna della Croce continued, accompanied by the organ. Then the voices of the choir burst in, for the last time, while Agata—together with her godmothers and preceded by the same procession that had greeted her at the front portal—left the church beneath the eyes of the guests and all the other eyes, furtive and glistening, behind the grate. When they reached the portico, the procession turned to the left while Agata, followed by the Swiss band and surrounded by the delirious crowd, walked down the street that led to the front door of the convent.
Flanked by her four godmothers, she climbed the steps of the monumental entrance to San Giorgio Stilita; the memory of her visit to the convent as a convent girl, brought a lump to her throat. The massive wooden portal swung open and she walked into the cloister, leaving her godmothers behind her in the vestibule. As soon as she saw the sister concierge, Agata burst into subdued weeping. The choristers were waiting for her, ready to accompany her to the hall of the comunichino. No one spoke.
Agata was standing. There was no music, no singing. Behind her, the hall was packed. All eighty choristers were there. Behind them were all the other nuns, novices, lay sisters, postulants, and educands.
Across from her in the church, standing before the brass gate, was the cardinal. Behind him was a throng of canons, priests, guests, and relatives—the English duke in the first row next to her cousin the prince. Agata kept her eyes locked on the cardinal’s eyes.
The sister teacher of the novices took her by the hand and led her to a corner, where she and the prioress stripped her of her magnificent garments, beginning with the veil and the flowers in her hair and ending with her shoes and stockings, and as the two women undressed her, other women re-dressed her in the homespun woolens of the novitiate.
With her curls disheveled, barefoot and dressed in black, Agata returned to the comunichino. The cardinal blessed the scapular and passed it to her through the brass bars. It struck Agata that his fingers had sought contact with hers and she felt a wave of revulsion. She put on the scapular without stepping away from the comunichino. Then she turned and went straight to the far end of the room, where the abbess was waiting for her, seated on the throne of gilt wood, against the wall, beneath the canvas depicting Moses bringing water forth from the rock. On the left was the monumental blind staircase. On the right, the sister choristers, in order of seniority. The English duke had knelt down and, with the cardinal’s permission, he was watching the intimate ceremony through the aperture of the comunichino.
Agata prostrated herself before the abbess, the soles of her bare feet projecting from her habit. The nuns gathered her long hair into a single tress. The abbess seized the large scissors and prepared to cut the hair.
The silence was absolute.
A powerful voice arose from the congregation: “Barbarians! Don’t cut her hair at least!”
Everyone turned to look. There were loud whispers about a madman. The priests imposed silence. The cardinal remained impassive; he knew who had shouted.
The nuns were in turmoil. The abbess held the scissors in one hand, suspended in midair. Then came the confident voice of a deaconess: “Cut! He is a heretic!”
The tresses fell onto the stone flagstone. And Agata took the veil.
27.
June 18th, 1846.
The solemn profession
During the year of her novitiate, time rushed by for Agata: study, work, prayer, conversations with Father Cuoco and with the abbess. Her aunt’s health was steadily declining; she was in constant pain, and after Nones, she remained in her bedroom. Agata went to see her. The medicaments that Dr. Minutolo and the sister pharmacist prescribed for her were of little if any benefit. Still, she remained untroubled. She tried to follow the rhythm of a prayer and was mortified when she was unable to do so. “To rise in the middle of the night to praise the Lord purifies the soul and helps me to love life, as well as God, and it makes me feel better.” Prayer, punctuating the course of the liturgical week with distinctly Benedictine precision, gave a certain meaning to life; it also confirmed to Agata, however sure she might already have been, that the direction for which she was most naturally suited was that of conjugal love and the love of her children.
Ever since Agata became a novice, she had been accorded privileges and even the occasional liberty. She was treated by the choristers as one of their own, or close to it; some of them had imparted knowledge to her that was not to be repeated outside the doors of the Chapter Hall—gossip of all kinds, to start with, concerning financial matters and dynastic resentments. Still, they scrupulously avoided mentioning the scabrous situations and ferment within the Church that she, acute observer that she was, had already intuited. Agata was even better informed than many of them. Sandra continued to send her pamphlets and newspapers concealed in the baskets of clean linen and one of the deaconesses, the sister of an aristocratic Carbonaro who relied upon her prayers, occasionally allowed Agata to read the letters that he sent her concerning political developments throughout the peninsula.
She was permitted to climb up to the belvedere in her free time, in the afternoon. There she filled her lungs with fresh air, breathing in freedom, and her gaze ranged from the open sky—so different from the sky that hung over the cloister like an awning—to the dark blue waters of the bay. The noise of the traffic and the voices of the Neapolitans rose faintly from below, melded into a general buzzing, just enough to make her feel at one with the people—as when she followed the Mass from behind the grate—and a little more. Agata felt a need to be with other people and to work on their behalf: at times like that, she believed that she could even do it from within the cloister, through the power of prayer. But it wasn’t always like that, and her novitiate was marked by a seesawing oscillation between an acceptance of the values of nunhood and an irrepressible desire to live in the world along with the certainty that, with God’s help, this would come to pass. The previous day they had celebrated with a solemn mass the election of the new pontiff, Pope Pius IX, a liberal cardinal. The royal family and the cardinal were devastated: they had waged a ferocious campaign against him, in emulation of the example set by Austria. Loyal to the sentiments of the cardinal, the abbess had arranged
for an excellent dinner but, according to the deaconesses, not quite as excellent as the dinner prepared to celebrate the election of the previous pope, a detail that had prompted plentiful and speculative gossip. Agata did not feel like a nun and she felt justified disenchantment toward the cloistered life and toward her own family, who had simply ignored her after her simple profession. Even Sandra came only rarely, and only with Aunt Orsola. From the high vantage point of the belvedere, that disenchantment merged with the good of the people: she quivered with yearning, like the heroines of the novels she read, for the advent of a better world in which justice and brotherhood supplanted privilege and selfishness. At those moments, Agata, certain as she was that she would eventually return to civil society, felt great spiritual freedom and experienced her life in the cloister with serenity. The rhythm of prayer and meditation, rather than isolating her, helped her to stay in contact with the outside world through God, and to love that world.
Agata liked to recite the rosary, sitting on the rim of the fountain in the cloister, where she looked up at the statues of Christ and the Samaritan Woman in arcane conversation. The bubbling jet of water and the rhythm of her words conveyed her to the heart of the very meaning of meditation. Ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. “Why nunc? Does that mean that now is when I must find happiness? It’s life that matters, not death. And what is life without love?”
Light footsteps, the rustling of grey aprons: a novice had experienced a vision of Christ while cooking, and the nuns who’d been with her were running for the stairs leading up to the bell tower. At first Agata didn’t want to run with them, but then she changed her mind. She encountered them as they were returning: they told her to make sure she closed the door tightly and to take the key back to the prioress.
Built atop the arcade that in the Middle Ages had joined the convent of San Giorgio Stilita with the male monastery, and long since replaced by the church’s Baroque campanile, the tall bell tower was now used only to announce miracles and the election of the abbess. Agata had never climbed so high. Frightened into flight by the pealing bells, the doves were flying spread-winged around the tower in a circling carousel of flight; occasionally a few would swoop through the high loggia, grazing her veil. Like them, Agata circled around the double bells and looked out from each of the four twin-light windows of the loggia, captivated by the view. Far below, in the portico, the faithful were awaiting the news—they looked like ants. Agata was suddenly swept by a powerful feeling of love for them, and she leaned out over the broad sill. For an instant, she thought she had experienced vertigo, but that wasn’t it at all. She had turned into air and now she was whirling around the tower in a spiraling flight that widened and rose higher and higher with every revolution until she was high in the heavens. The earth and the sea below her had vanished. And so had the clouds. She climbed and climbed, in ever-widening circles. With every loop, her love for the whole world grew vaster. So did her love for her creator. Agata was bursting with happiness. She fell to the floor in ecstasy.
Before she could be admitted to the solemn profession, Agata would have to pass the examination of the vicar general and, after that, undergo two weeks of spiritual exercises. She was anxious: the purpose of the examination was an investigation of her free will, of her determination to abandon the world for God and her ability of live the cloistered life.
Agata feared the fateful question: “If you were to fall in love with a man, would you leave the life of seclusion?” But she wasn’t alone in fearing that question: the vicar general was even more anxious than she was. Both of them knew that if it emerged from that examination that the novice lacked a calling, she would be obliged to leave the convent within twenty-four hours. Where? She had no idea where she would go. In the cloister, Agata had heard horrifying stories: once it was determined that she was unfit for the cloistered life, the prospective nun was left to the tender mercies of the other nuns who, in a crescendo of rage, ripped the scapular off her back, dressed her hastily and roughly in her civilian clothing, and expelled her from the cloistered area immediately, leaving her alone in the vestibule to wait for her indignant family to come get her.
The vicar general steered clear of the more dangerous reefs and asked her only the blandest of questions, to which Agata gave him the answers that were expected.
“What would you do if His Majesty the King proposed that you go live in the royal palace?”
“The splendor of court life is of no interest to me.”
“What would you do if someone offered you a vast sum of ducats in exchange for leaving the cloistered life?”
“My life is not for sale.”
“What would you do if one of your sisters were sick and entreated you to go live with her in order to nurse her?”
“I would explain to her that I have other duties and that I will pray for her.”
The spiritual exercises were administered by the canon. Agata was uncomfortable with him just as she was with all the other canons of the church: at the moment of communion, fingers had grazed her face more than once. The other novices said that those caresses were normal and they didn’t mind them at all.
Agata passed the tests, thanks to her unquestioned, stubborn determination to become a chorister: she owed it to her aunt the abbess. She was well aware that over the long term her sacrifice would be pointless, because her aunt hadn’t long to live. But there was nothing she could do about it. She’d promised.
In the meanwhile, interminable negotiations over the amount of her dowry and the terms of payment proceeded feverishly. General Cecconi was willing to underwrite the dowry only to a minimal degree. Her mother was therefore forced to turn to lenders. In the end, the Chapter agreed to accept a smaller dowry than was customary and to take payment in installments. No secret remained a secret for long in the convent of San Giorgio Stilita: when the conditions attached to Agata’s dowry became public, the resentment that the nuns and novices already felt toward her—the favorite of an abbess drawing close to the end of her life—erupted, and so did the passion with which they actively tried to thwart her. Compressed inside the prison of the cloister, those feelings defied any attempt at mediation and were bound to break out into violence in time: Agata awaited that moment with fear.
It was the day set for her solemn profession, exactly one year after her simple profession.
Agata was finishing her lengthy confession, while the church filled up with guests—there were a vast number of them, and they poured out onto the portico. They were dressed for a gala occasion, with medals and decorations, and once again there were distinguished foreign visitors among them. Then she watched the service from the hall of the comunichino, together with only the choristers.
The cardinal, dressed in magnificent paraments embroidered with gold filigree, intoned the pontifical blessing; then, silence. The organ fell silent, and so did the hundreds of guests. The cardinal slowly approached the comunichino. The guests watched him without a sound. Agata advanced toward him, flanked by four nuns, each of whom carried a candle in her hand. She stopped when she was face to face with him.
It was the moment of the oath. They had given her the parchment, written in Latin. Agata began to read; her voice failed her. “Louder,” one of the nuns hissed at her, the one that had brought her the parchment. With an effort, she raised her voice and pronounced the four vows: chastity, poverty, obedience, and perpetual seclusion. She kept stumbling over her words and at times she had to stop entirely. During a pause, the candle slipped from the fingers of one of the nuns and fell to the floor.
She had signed her oath; the abbess and cardinal underwrote it. She turned: there, behind her, a dark carpet had been laid out on the floor, and four candelabra with large candles burned at the corners of the carpet. She lay upon it facedown. The four nuns covered her with a black blanket, in the middle of which a large needlepoint emblem in silver thread glittered: a skull. From the campanile there rang out the doleful tolling of the d
eath bell, slowly pealing, and between one peal and the next the laments of the women rose from the far end of the church; with each peal of the bell, another row of pews joined in the moaning in a tightly controlled crescendo. Just as a wedding is for a bride, so for a nun the solemn profession meant the end of a previous life. Through this death, Agata was becoming the bride of Christ.
“Surge, quae dormis, et exurge a mortuis, et illuminabit te Christus!” The cardinal pronounced the exhortation three times in Latin, speaking to the skull.
“Awake thou that sleepest . . . ” The nuns pulled the blanket off her.
“And arise from the dead!” Agata, still lying facedown on the carpet, now looked up and arose partway.
“Christ shall give thee light!”
Donna Maria Ninfa, professed nun, leapt to her feet.
“Ut vivant mortui, et moriantur viventes.” The cardinal blessed the habit and extended it to her. She donned it and then she received communion. Behind her a long line had formed. The abbess first, followed by all the other nuns in hierarchical order, came to kiss her while the nave and the hall of the comunichino were filled with the voices of the choristers of the congregation and by the solemn music of the pipe organ. The altar boys swung their censers with renewed emphasis, and the perfume that they released was so powerful that it made the throat itch. After a sermon of which Agata did not hear a single word, the service was at an end.
The parlor, decorated with the silver of the Padellani choristers past and present, looked like the drawing room of an aristocratic palace. The buffet tables loaded with pastries and sweets and refreshments remained intact: the guests were waiting for Donna Maria Ninfa before serving themselves, but Agata required some time before she was able to calm down. Then the door opened, the abbess gently pushed her out and the two women, side by side, joined the guests. The foreign visitors insisted on admiring her habit: it was made of black wool with a very long train and loose draping sleeves—the last relic, maintained over the centuries, of the nunhood of Madame Maintenon. In the meanwhile, the other guests launched themselves upon the delicacies made possible through the generosity of Admiral Pietraperciata.
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