That was when Agata fully came to appreciate the consoling power of group prayer.
One afternoon Agata was in the infirmary, taking care of a sick nun. Angiola Maria came to summon her, urgently.
Already in her aunt’s bedroom when Agata got there were Donna Maria Clotilde, the prioress, and Donna Maria Giovanna della Croce. The brazier was incandescent and the heat in the room was intolerable. The air was motionless. The winter sunlight was illuminating the linen cloth hung over the French doors as a sort of curtain, making it luminescent. Her aunt was already wearing her night veil; she was in pain, suffering as she struggled to catch her breath, trembling, and soon she sank into a wheezing gasp that was barely audible. She raised her hand to her throat, in irritation. Her blouse, with its linen collar and buttons running up the back, was squeezing her neck and chest like a high corset. Her aunt was feverish.
“Loosen her blouse,” Agata ordered the lay sister.
Angiola Maria glared at her. Snorting impatiently she leaned over the sick woman and wrapped her arms around her to lift her so she could undo the top buttons. The abbess opened her eyes in fear; at the sight of her niece, she calmed down. Her breathing returned to normal. Then, with a gesture of the hand, she summoned Agata closer. The prioress moved out of her way. Before sitting down, Agata leaned over to kiss her aunt: she inhaled a stench of rot mixed with lavender; it vanished as soon as she straightened up. It was emanating from her aunt. Agata took her hand and began stroking it. Angiola Maria had keenly scrutinized every motion and she had noticed Agata’s flaring nostrils. “Madame Abbess is tired, she needs sleep,” she ordered. The other nuns crossed themselves and left, but Agata remained behind.
“You too must leave.” Angiola Maria urged her to go a second time, glowering at her.
The abbess was listening; she clutched Agata’s hand and once again her breathing collapsed into death rattles; the abbess reached her hand up to her neck, doing her best to loosen the collar of her nightshirt. She was sweating and panting. Her fingers danced frantically. Helplessly.
“Unbutton her blouse, can’t you see that she’s suffering?” Agata shouted. Angiola Maria ignored her. She wanted Agata to go away, immediately. It was a battle of wills. Agata lifted her aunt, hastily unbuttoned her entire bodice, assisted by the fluttering panicky fingers of the sick woman. The milk-white skin of the abbess’s neck and shoulders was still completely free of lines or wrinkles. The stench that Agata had smelled before came from the bandaged breast. She was impatient, she wanted to be naked. She yanked her bodice down, unsuccessfully because of the narrow sleeves. Staring at Angiola Maria, she asked with her eyes for help.
Angiola Maria brusquely shoved Agata aside and leaned over to loosen the bandages that were tightly bound around the suffering woman’s breasts. The stench of rot filled the room: her right breast was split by a purulent tumor that had been compressed under bandages and lavender sachets.
Donna Maria Crocifissa died a short while later. While she was dying, Agata, instead of praying, remembered what her father had told her about Violante, how he kept insisting on referring to her as his beloved sister. He regretted having gone so rarely to visit her in the convent: he was a coward, but it just caused him too much pain. He had begun going to see his sister again thirty years later, when he was married. “Your mother loved to eat the piping hot puff pastries at San Giorgio Stilita and she always made sure there were plenty when we would come.” During one visit, her mother left them alone in the parlor—Donna Gesuela and the two chaperone nuns had gone together into the cloister. Embarrassed, he was unable to make out her features through the grille and he was struggling to reconstruct the features of his sister’s face. “Do you want to see me?” she had asked him. A moment later, the door leading to the secluded area opened and his sister appeared on the threshold, as if in a painting. He didn’t recognize her. She realized it and beat a hasty retreat; then from behind the grate she said to him: “That was a mistake. I truly am dead.” And brother and sister had waited in silence for the others to return.
The interment of nuns was something that was done differently in every convent. There was a time when they dressed them in their finest garments, seated them in stalls, and placed them in cool, well-ventilated crypts to mummify in an eternal choir. After the suppression of the monasteries and convents by the French in 1808, the Neapolitan convents had modernized. In San Giorgio Stilita the procedure—exceedingly simple—remained unchanged. The prioress verified that the nun was deceased, then it was the duty of four lay sisters to bury the corpse in the dormitory of the novices, which had a beaten earth floor. The burial took place immediately, without anyone else being present, and without any ceremony. The corpse—fully dressed in the habit and wrapped in a white sheet—was placed on a special canvas sheet with four handles: it was carried down into the cellar along a staircase that ran from a corner of the cloister and was closed off by a door with a chain lock. The life of the Cenoby suffered no interruption. The same thing happened when a nun learned of the death of relatives: once the news was delivered, she returned to the duties of her office.
Angiola Maria was evidently grief-stricken at the death of Donna Maria Crocifissa, and she was incapable of containing her sorrow. She had wept at length with Agata and she continued to feel the need to talk to her about the abbess. Agata had learned to accept death as a fact of nature but she felt duty-bound to help the faithful lay sister. “Whosoever is born is already on the road to death,” she would tell her. They met furtively in Agata’s bedroom, after Compline, and, resuming the ritual conversations between aunt and niece, they’d talk in whispers about the life of Donna Maria Crocifissa. Angiola Maria had a wealth of knowledge about the family nuns and she was comforted by the thought that Agata too would bring honor to the name of Padellani, there in San Giorgio Stilita.
During one of these vespertine meetings, it happened that three cockroaches emerged from under the door, dazed and disoriented, as if they’d just been released from captivity. Agata clearly remembered a similar episode, when she was a new arrival at the convent. She shuddered—cockroaches disgusted her—and gathered up the hem of her habit. One of them shuttled rapidly toward the wall, the second followed it, waving its antennae, and the last one moved forward, stopped, changed direction, and stopped again. The first two together headed straight for the bed, vanishing rapidly under the fringework of the bed cover. At that point, the third one rushed after them and slipped under the cover as well. Angiola Maria leapt to her feet and, with the eyes of a madwoman, opened and shut her fists, wordlessly. Then, as if nothing had happened, she went on talking—same tone of voice, different subject—but addressing Agata with the informal “tu” for the first time.
“You should know that your aunt left you a sizable purse of ducats. Don Vincenzo, the prince’s secretary, knows all about it, and he’ll give you the money, but you have to go there, to the Palazzo Padellani.”
“What did she leave you?” Agata was curious, but the lay sister had no intention of answering that question.
“She gave me enough, while she was alive, out of her stipend. I had the keys to the money box. Remember that Donna Maria Crocifissa asked me to serve as your guardian angel. Wherever I might be.” And the lay sister lowered her eyelids, as smooth as the eyelids of Donna Maria Crocifissa.
From the cloister came a rush of feet. Then subdued, excited voices. Confusion and noise.
Donna Maria Immacolata, the sister pharmacist, was knocking at the door of Agata’s cell: “Hurry, a servingwoman has fallen down the well!”
Two nuns, secretly conversing on the terrace, had seen Brida descend into the cloister, down the stairs across from them. She had gone straight to the fountain, she’d immersed her hand in the water and, kneeling before the statue of Christ, she’d crossed herself. Then she had calmly walked over to the well and lifted the iron cover.
A thud and nothing more.
31.
February 1847.
Angiola Maria and Checchina, lay sisters of the Padellani nuns, run away from the convent of San Giorgio Stilita and there are murmurings against Agata
The choristers presented themselves at nocturnal prayers just a few hours after the suicide of the cook, as if nothing had happened. That was the power of the cloistered life, thought Agata: any death was treated as normal; she liked that.
During the Lauds at Matins, Donna Maria Giovanna della Croce gave her a warning: “I’d better tell you now so that you can get used to the idea. Angiola Maria and Checchina, Donna Maria Brigida’s lay sister who often works with the sister herbalist, have vanished. The others are likely to blame you.”
Agata had no time to digest the news before the Padellani cousins, who already knew about it, showed up, gossiping away, and told her the secret story of Angiola Maria. They did it with a fury and a zest that Agata would have even found funny, if she hadn’t been so horrified. It was as if they wanted to liberate themselves and liberate Agata too. “She was your aunt!” Angiola Maria actually was the illegitimate daughter of Agata’s grandfather, and that was why the abbess, God bless her, had protected her and kept her close in the convent—she was her half-sister. “She’s a bad person, half woman and half man!” The abbess by rights should have tossed her out of the convent from the beginning, because Angiola Maria was a hermaphrodite and she had trysts with servingwomen, lay sisters, and even nuns. After the affairs were over, they always remained in love, as if Angiola Maria had cast a spell on them. “That’s the way it is with hermaphrodites, once you fall in love with them, you never get over it!” Everyone knew that Brida, the cook, had been dropped for many other women, including Checchina, with whom Angiola Maria had been having an affair for years. But Brida, crazed with jealousy and convinced that her true rival was Agata, had viewed the meetings between the two women in Agata’s cell to mourn together over the death of the abbess as unmistakable proof of Angiola Maria’s betrayal. “That’s why Brida killed herself.” Agata started to think it over: Could Brida have been the one who sent her cockroaches and threatening notes? Who tried to poison her? Who tried to put the evil eye on her? Gradually these thoughts became a certainty.
“Don’t you worry about Angiola Maria, she’ll be better off than any of us. She’s bought a house and she has money. She stole from the abbess, and she got away with a lot,” said one of the cousins, and then added, knowingly: “They say it was her who took the ex-votos from the Madonna dell’Utria, and then put them back on the sacred image the night that you were unwell.” The other one redoubled the accusation: “I’ve heard that the emerald earrings and 24-carat gold chain are both gone, she took them back from our Madonna!” Then they explained to her that Angiola Maria, who was cunning as a fox, wanted Agata to stay at the convent and had orchestrated the false miracle to strengthen her vocation: Agata could be useful to her when her mistress was no longer alive.
“She was the devil among us and it’s just as well that she’s gone,” the two cousins concluded in unison.
“What does Checchina have to do with any of this? She’s nothing but a poor fool who wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Agata asked.
“She has plenty to do with it, plenty!” said the cousins. Then they changed the topic.
The next night, Agata was summoned by Donna Maria Celeste’s lay sister: she wanted the sister infirmarian to go to her bedside; her mistress was delirious. Maria Celeste had a high fever and didn’t recognize her; she was calling for Father Cutolo, and claimed she was on her deathbed. Agata gave her a small dose of Colchicum autumnale, or autumn crocus, to alleviate her pain and lower her fever. She stayed with her for a long time, placing cold compresses on her forehead. From time to time, she put a few more drops into the glass and tipped it up to the nun’s lips. Before Matins, Maria Celeste regained lucidity but spoke very little. She was waiting for Father Cutolo.
There was a stale smell in the air. Agata was breathing the scent of death—bitter, faint.
“Father Cutolo is coming!” Heralded by the shuffling clatter of footsteps, a lay sister had appeared in the doorway.
Donna Maria Celeste wanted Agata to stay in the cell: she had no intention of saying confession. When she saw Father Cutolo, she fell back into a sort of delirium, her hands trembling, outheld toward him, eagerly grasping for love—a physical love made of arms, kisses, caresses, embraces. She implored him to take her away with him. “Avanti, ramm’ nu vas’, nu vas’! Come here, give me a kiss!”
The priest, standing above her with a crucifix in his hands, looked down at her ashen-faced. Every so often, he looked rapidly at Agata, who had not dignified him with so much as a glance.
“Ramm’ nu vas’, just one kiss, put your arms around me, embrace me,” Donna Maria Celeste implored him again, louder this time.
Father Cutolo held out a trembling arm toward the nun, showing her the crucifix. “Embrace it, embrace your divine spouse.” And he held it high.
“No! You, you embrace me!”
“Christ is your husband!”
“‘Nu vas’ solo, my love, just one kiss!” she pleaded.
“Christ is your husband. Embrace Him!” the priest ordered her, raising his voice, his eyes hard with fear. “Embrace Him!” The nun looked, now at the crucifix, now at him. Then she fell back onto her pillow.
The following night Agata was awakened by Donna Maria Celeste’s lay sister: her mistress was on her deathbed, and was calling for her. Agata ran and in the corridor where the nun’s cell was located she encountered two servingwomen who were running too, one carrying a bucket and the other carrying a bundle of rags. When they got there she was emitting a death rattle. “What happened to her?” she asked. The lay sister looked at her and then, silently, lifted the covers. The nun had her nightshirt wrapped around her waist. Below her waist she was naked: between her legs, clots of blood.
They wrapped the corpse in oilcloth. The lay sister placed a bundle wrapped in the same oilcloth on her belly. “Then she hemorrhaged and died,” she said. Agata and the lay sister covered the corpse with a snow-white sheet, to prevent the prioress, whose job it was to ascertain her death, from becoming suspicious. Only then did they summon the lay sisters of the burial detail.
32.
The new abbess is opposed to Agata;
the cardinal denies her brevi
Agata’s sense of justice demanded that Father Cutolo be punished for having seduced Donna Maria Celeste and caused her death, albeit indirectly. And also that he be deprived of the opportunity to destroy other lives. Agata had a clear, practical mission: to inform the mother abbess, the cardinal, and the vicar general, in order to make sure that the priest was expelled from San Giorgio Stilita and deprived of the right to serve as father confessor to any female religious. For good. She expected intense pressure to cover up what had happened and to prevent any scandal.
Agata knew that she was the subject of much gossip and whispering but she was unaware of the specific content. In the convent, the conversation returned incessantly to the escape of the two lay sisters and the death of the cook and servingwoman; Agata was accused of having provoked that tragedy. Some of the nuns said that Agata painted scenes of putti and little birds kissing one another on the beak on the milky frosting of her cucchitelle in order to make Brida fall in love. The poor thing did fall in love with Agata, but then she was abandoned for Angiola Maria. The evening of her suicide, Brida had gone to see if her suspicions were justified: she’d glimpsed their shadows in Agata’s cell and then she killed herself. Others said that Agata had demanded that Angiola Maria break up with Checchina, who everyone agreed had always been Angiola Maria’s true love. Still others claimed that Angiola Maria, having stolen the jewels of the Madonna dell’Utria, had run away with Checchina, who did not share her inclinations and had been forced to go with Angiola Maria.
Agata requested an interview with Donna Maria del Rosario, the new abbess, who summoned her to meet in her drawing room, along with the prioress, Donna Maria Clotilde.
She extended her hand for Agata to kiss and then invited her to sit down.
“The flight of Donna Maria Crocifissa’s lay sister must have come as a surprise to you.” The abbess had seized the initiative. She was a noblewoman belonging to a family that was hostile to the Padellanis; she was a staunch traditionalist.
Agata had another subject in mind, and she prepared to lay out the story: “I am here to talk to you about a very grave matter, something that has nothing to do with Angiola Maria,” she began; whereupon she launched into the dark story of Donna Maria Celeste. The abbess listened with a growing sense of unease and, before Agata had reached the details of the abortion, interrupted her, in an icy voice: “You are telling me that a highly respected chorister, a distant relative of mine, fell ill and began to rave in a delirium. You yourself, as sister infirmarian, took excellent care of her and, from what you are telling me, your treatment restored her to lucidity, until the sickness proved fatal. Clearly you misunderstood the words that the poor sick woman addressed to her father confessor.”
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