Once Nina had left, Agata dissolved into a stream of tears: now she really was alone and friendless in the world. She anxiously opened the letter. The abbess was sending her just fifty ducats; she explained that the cardinal had issued the brevi to her on the understanding that any inheritance, as well as her stipend, would be split equally between the convent of San Giorgio Stilita and the Benedictine convent that took her in; just this once, on an entirely exceptional basis, and with the cardinal’s consent, she was sending her that money. Agata looked around her, devastated—another brutal blow inflicted by the cardinal—and she met the glazed eye of a tignuseddu—a gecko—clinging to the wall with the suction cups on its feet, lying in ambush just inches from her head.
She opened the package—it was another novel, The Monk. The title made her smile. She wondered who might have chosen it. She leafed through it, as she always did. Every book has its own identity and characteristics, and Agata had a ritual that she followed in order to get to know and love a book. First she looked at it, observing the inscriptions on the spine, the color and patterns on the paper endsheets glued to the inside of the cover, the typographical characters and the intensity of blackness of the ink. She felt the uncut pages, with delicacy, respectfully, to sense the finish and the thickness on the surface of her own skin. Last of all, she hefted the volume, passing it from one hand to the other, to become accustomed to its weight, and only then did she pick up the paper knife. She put the little uneven tabs of paper that ripped off as she cut the pages into her mouth, as if they were communion wafers.
As she sliced the pages with her paper knife, her gaze chanced upon words and phrases of dialogue, and she wondered just what kind of book this was. She’d made her way more or less halfway through when an envelope addressed to her slid out from between two pages and into her lap. The handwriting was different from the lettering of the address on the package, which was very familiar to Agata. She opened it, absent-mindedly, thinking it might contain an odd, personalized sheet of errata corrige.
My dear Agata,
I beg your forgiveness if I dare to write to you in this fashion; if what I am about to say to you should offend you, please rest assured that this is certainly not my intention. Let me come straight to the point; I certainly understand that you might well prefer to let your silence convey to me the answer that I so fear.
The first time that I met you, ten years ago, I was the exact age that you are now, twenty-two years old; I had already traveled around the world and I was accustomed to fighting to achieve the objectives that I had set for myself. You already know that I come from a family of shipowners and that we are responsible for the sulfur trade in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. We own a house in Naples, but our roots were and remain in Devon, where my Norman forefathers settled long ago. I mention these details to make it clear to you that I belong to a family of glorious lineage, that I possess considerable personal wealth, and that when I give my word of honor it is the honor of my entire ancestry that is at stake.
In September 1839 I left Messina for Naples, where I was to meet my fiancée Georgina, a gentle girl whose family has more than once intermarried with my family, a girl I loved and who loved me. I chose to challenge a furious gale rather than miss my appointment, and I took your family aboard my ship as my guests and as passengers. It was dawn, and the storm had subsided. I heard you sing a song from my childhood; then I saw you leaning against the door of the cabin. Storm-tossed, wind-beaten, and exhausted, we were able to carry on a polite drawing-room conversation, until you looked me straight in the eye and bared your soul, speaking openly about yourself, of your dearest affections, and of your family. The wind had pinned you against the cabin door and it revealed your body to me–legs, hips, belly, breasts; you were looking into the east and the low rays of the rising sun were caressing your face. I desired you. When you spoke to me about your inamorato, I was stabbed by a bolt of jealousy so powerful that it made me stagger. That was when I realized that I loved you, more than any other woman on earth, and that that would always be true.
While you were following your father’s casket, I was revealing to Georgina that I loved another woman; I offered her the opportunity to break our engagement. She refused to give me back my freedom; she said that it was merely a passing infatuation. I begged her to reconsider and pointed out that I felt no physical attraction for her and that our marriage would be in name only.
It wasn’t very difficult for me to arrange to see you again; it was enough to make a point of spending more time socializing with your extended family. Every brief meeting we had only confirmed my love. I kept track of your fate through contacts and—let me admit it—spies. Even before the birth of our only son, our conjugal relationship had flickered, and so it remains. Georgina does not enjoy good health, and I feel that I am responsible for that: she has certainly paid a high price for refusing to believe me. She lives in France and I go to see her four times a year. Our child is at boarding school. I have no intention of failing to maintain her, nor would I ever want to humiliate her.
I love you. More than before, if that’s possible. I can’t stand this life of waiting and celibacy any longer. We are made for one another. We think alike—you like Pamela more than you do Clarissa—we believe in a constitutional monarchy more than we do in a republic, we laugh at the same things, we have the same tastes, we brood over the same thoughts. I have learned all this from your comments on the books that I send you and from the notes that you’ve written me recently.
I offer you and I give you my word of honor that you will always have my love, ample economic independence, and the life that you want to live, where and as you wish. I am willing to move to Sicily, to remain in Naples, or to go to any other country you care to choose. I want your happiness and my own. And I want children with you, children who would feel no lack or disadvantage with respect to their older brother.
I cannot offer you marriage.
I wonder, however, just what “marriage” could mean, in your eyes and mine, if not a promise between two people to love and respect one another to the exclusion of others, and to raise a family together. I never made such a promise to Georgina. I am more than willing to do so with you. You too have made a marriage that you regret, with Christ; you took the veil to satisfy your family and to avoid much worse. You lack a vocation. A “marriage” between the two of us would be acceptable in God’s sight, as it would be the only marriage desired and intended.
I have no doubt that my feelings might indeed be shared by you, and perhaps they really are. In order to be able to be closer to you, I have accepted a diplomatic role between our respective governments; at times I am summoned to London or I am sent to Sicily. In the future my interests will take me to England, unless I receive an answer from you, and I urge you to give me your answer as soon as you are able, but not before reading the novel that I enclose.
It is full-blooded and carnal. Like the relationship that I desire with you.
Yours always,
James
Agata was weeping. She had so missed the English books that he sent her, and now she understood why he had stopped. He had taken her silence as a refusal. It had never occurred to her that she might love him and now, as in a mosaic, she reconstructed his personality through his literary choices. She felt a stirring within her. Exhausted, she fell asleep with the letter in her hand.
36.
July 1847.
The doorkeeper of the conservatory of Smirne
refuses to admit Agata, who has returned late
Agata missed the choir—the musky aroma of freshly waxed wood, the dense cool air that poured in through the open windows, the wafting gusts of incense, the rituals, the chants and songs, the silences. Chanting the Psalter had become part of her very being. Those were moments when she actually found herself desiring the seclusion of the cloister, though afterwards she revised her views, blushing with no one to see how deeply she depended on her senses. One afternoon, eaten alive b
y her yearning for her choir, she went to the church of San Giorgio Stilita; she took a seat in the back pew, in the shadows, to keep from being noticed. From there she would rejoin her sister nuns. She waited for the hour of the Vespers in the silence of the empty church. Then she heard a scraping of feet. Three tall well dressed men were taking a tour of the church, beginning with the side chapels. The youngest man was acting as their guide. The young man had turned and with a sweep of his arm was showing them the choir above the portal. Agata recognized the blond beard: it was James Garson. It seemed to her that their eyes had locked. He continued the tour, as if he hadn’t recognized her. She covered her face with her hands and went on praying.
She peeked out at him from between her fingers. James had returned to the transept and was looking at the comunichino. In that instant Agata felt something like an electric shock: she knew he thought of her with an almost animal intensity, and although she failed to understand it, she instinctively felt it in return. Then James caught up with the other two and together they headed slowly for the exit, admiring the rich decorations as they went. Just then he recognized her. Their eyes met for an instant; Agata felt her cheeks burn and she ducked her head suddenly: she prayed to God to help her understand her feelings for James.
Vespers was beginning.
Agata had sharp hearing and she heard the rustling footsteps of the nuns preparing for prayer in the choir. The few worshippers were mostly seated in the front pews.
“Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord,” intoned Donna Maria Assunta, and Agata, from her hiding place, beneath the choir, like the other choristers, remained seated as she intoned the psalm; then she stood up at the Gloria and like them lowered her head at the word “father.” At the end of the Gloria they began to sing the hymn of that day, the Magnificat:
Magnificat anima mea Dominum,
et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo;
quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae,
ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.
As if she were with her sister nuns in the Choir, Agata saw one of the Padellani cousins go to the lectern for the reading. She recognized her voice. Then, the Silence, followed by the responsory, antiphon to the song of Mary, intercessions, and the Pater noster. Agata nourished her soul in the choral prayer and asked God to show her the right path. She prayed with such intensity that she failed to notice that the Vespers were over and the church was now empty. The shuffling feet of the sacristan brought her back to reality, and she scurried out of the church before he recognized her.
She was already late getting back. Looking for a shortcut, she’d taken the wrong turning and now she was lost in a maze of alleys.
The hour when workers returned home had already passed. Poorly lit by the lamps that burned before the shrines of the saints, the narrow lanes of the bassi, the poorest part of Naples, were crowded with the many paupers who had no home to return to: a populace of faceless men, women, and children—vagabonds, mendicants, lepers, musicians. They stumbled along aimlessly, slowly because they had no idea where they were going, nor what would become of them by the time day dawned and they opened their eyes from sleep. Agata had lowered her hood over her face. There was no need: none of them were thinking of her.
She walked into a sort of funnel, a cul-de-sac that had been colonized by a cluster of paupers. Squatting on the ground in a circle, they were slurping soup and gnawing on something dry that was left over or had been wheedled from some rich person’s table. Old men with children clutching their legs and invalids were sitting on chairs or reclining on pallets. A couple of them looked at her without asking a thing. In a few adjoining hovels, women had finished their meal and were sweeping the filth out of their houses and directly onto the stone slabs of the street. Every so often the quiet muttering was interrupted by the sound of a patrol, the sound of booted feet, either the police or the army.
In the back alleys night was not all that different from daytime. Carts towering with loads of vegetables swayed as they creaked through crowds of walkers, threatening to sweep away the chairs set out in front of street doors, to drag down laundry hanging out to dry. The balconies were cluttered with pots and pans and oddly shaped receptacles, crates, splintered chairs, with sleepy old men perched on them, half-naked children wandering in and out of the hovels, and shopping baskets waiting to be let down—but in the bassi, people never went shopping, they stole what they needed.
Agata’s eyes saw nothing but James, his golden beard, handsome as the Christ of the Holy Staircase in the hall of the comunichino. Beneath a wall shrine housing an effigy of the Virgin Mary—eyes raised heavenward, diaphanous smile—what had from a distance seemed like two children actually turned out to be two adolescent lovers. The young woman had her back to the edicule and her skirt hoisted around her hips: a beggar boy, panting, was mounting her. Agata lowered her eyes; as she went past she glanced at their bare feet: the girl’s feet were light and curling as if she were levitating, his feet, braced and thrusting. She envied them.
She’d made her way through the maze of narrow lanes to a thoroughfare. The main façade of the conservatory of Smirne occupied an entire block–three rows of black windows with double grilles and the vast Renaissance portal. It looked like the backdrop for a stage play.
Agata knocked at the heavy portal: no answer. The infrequent passersby glanced at her, uncertain whether they should offer to help. She knocked again and again. From high above came the voice of the sister doorkeeper: “Madame abbess says that you know perfectly well: those who fail to return by the appointed hour can come back tomorrow morning.” Seized by panic, Agata pleaded; then with all the arrogance of the Padellanis, she commanded the doorkeeper to open the door immediately, threatening to report her to the cardinal; when silence was the only response, she went back to pleading. In the end, she was forced to face up to it: she would have to wait there until morning. She was afraid. The shadows of night were growing thicker and darker; the desperadoes were emerging from the bassi and the carriages of the nobility began to pick up their pace. Shoulders wedged into the corner between the portal and the massive stone doorjamb, Agata glanced warily around her and mechanically repeated the Aves and the Paters in order to invoke divine protection.
The clattering sound of horses’ hooves, the screech of iron wheels on the cobbled street. The abbess’s voice, calling down from high above: “What excuse do you want to palm off on me this time?” was drowned out.
Flattened against the conservatory’s heavy wooden doors, Agata was panting. The darkness was beginning to be broken by the light of dawn. The meowing of cats, the creaking of carts, the crowing of caged roosters. In the hundreds of times that she attempted to relive that night, Agata was never fully able to reconstruct the sequence of emotions and events.
She couldn’t remember whether in the carriage James had taken her hand to place it against his cheek or to kiss it; she couldn’t remember whether she had first laid her veiled head against his shoulder, or whether instead he had wrapped his arm around her shoulders, drawing her toward him.
She couldn’t remember when she realized that the carriage was heading down toward the harbor, when she had first glimpsed the yacht moored along the wharf, or even when the carriage rolled up a planked gangway on board the vast yacht, threading its way carefully up a ramp no broader than a cattle path through a field.
She couldn’t remember when and where, aboard the yacht, they had eaten salted biscuits and olives, or even whether they had eaten bread and cheese instead.
She couldn’t remember which of the two of them had first started talking about the books that he sent her and that she read. She couldn’t remember when they’d started talking about themselves—the more one talked, the more the other drank in the other’s words, and the more they felt a swelling sense of urgency to know one another completely.
She couldn’t remember which of the two of them had removed the pin that held u
p her veil, pulling away the veil itself, who had untied the knot on the string that held her wimple snug around her face, who had tugged free the hairnet that imprisoned her short curls.
She couldn’t remember whether it had been she who removed his jacket and one by one undid his mother-of-pearl shirt buttons.
And she remembered little or nothing of what came afterwards, when they lay as if they were glued together, like dogs, she remembered only that it seemed completely normal, right, and in accordance with God’s will, that the two of them should love each other carnally, in the simple and joyful way in which they acknowledged one another as lovers and glorified their love.
The only thing that Agata recalled clearly was the exchange of words, before dawn, when the time had come to take leave of one another.
She’d said to him, with a feeling of death in her heart, that it was too late for them to have a life together; he had replied, decisively: “It could never be too late for the two of us,” and slipped into her hands his little book of poems by Keats, with his penciled notations.
37.
August-October 1847.
The terrible punishment for Agata in love: isolation
Madame abbess wishes to see you.” The lay sister swung open the door. It was as if the abbess had been waiting in ambush in the conciergerie; she appeared before her as she was climbing the first flight of stairs, and she climbed alongside her, declaiming in a thunderous, unclear voice: “I’m going to speak to the vicar general this very day. You aren’t leaving here again, and if you do, you’ll never come back.” After which, she hurried up the last ramp two steps at a time; once they reached the third floor, she vanished.
Agata was a prisoner, and no one had told her how long she would have to remain there. They brought her meals in the cell—bread, soup, sometimes fruit—in silence, and they gave her enough water to drink and wash herself with a damp washcloth. She was obliged to wear the same clothes every day. When she swept and dusted her cell, the dirt remained in a pile in the corner. There was a stale stench in the room. A servingwoman was in charge of changing the chamber pot once a day; but as for any other cleaning—nothing. By day, flies and ants took away whatever they found, at night, cockroaches emerged from their dens and fed on the filth, watched by mice that, from high atop the window sill, tipped their snouts down curiously before shuttling along to the next cell along the window ledge.
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