It was the beginning of January 1848. Agata was looking at the crack-ridden plaster of the façade across the way, a book open on her lap. She was meditating on the word “blemish,” noticing new aspects and dimensions of the word. Then she came back to reality: she felt estranged from her mother and couldn’t wait to get back to the conservatory of Smirne, certain as she was that James would succeed in helping her win her dismissal from the monastic order.
The maid came to call her: the general and the Generalessa were waiting for her in the study.
“The cardinal has ordered you to enter the convent of Montereale di Chiana,” her mother said in a flat voice. She was clearly upset.
“What’s happened? Where is it?”
The general broke in. “There is no time to waste. The cardinal, who is your relative, has received intelligence that there is going to be a revolt in Palermo, and I am in agreement. It’s imminent. Tomorrow morning at dawn a lateen-rigged tartan will pass by the main harbor of Palermo, the Cala, carrying nuns directed toward a convent in Trapani. You will board the ship at the landing place of Sferracavallo; we’ll have to set out at dawn in order to be there in time. The tartan will not stand in to tie up at the dock.” He added, imperiously: “You’ll have to beat out to the ship in open water, aboard a fishing boat, and you won’t whine about it!” Then he informed her that the Benedictine convent of Chiana, an old feudal village set on a salubrious hilltop in the ancient comarca of Naro, would be nothing but a first stage of her journey; the cardinal would decide when and in what convent she would ultimately be placed.
“Why can’t I go back to Naples?”
“You are to obey.” Her mother’s voice was harsh.
“Chiana is closer. You could even come back to stay with us, when things calm down. I’ve already told you that we’re expecting a revolt, and so it is quite likely that there will be no ships leaving for Naples,” the general explained, barely able to contain his impatience.
“Not even an English ship?”
“What a question!” her mother promptly replied, beating her husband to the same exclamation.
“Like when my father died.” Agata gave her mother a cold, hard glare.
“Ah, of course, Captain Garson was there . . . ”
The general calmed down; he pricked up his ears and murmured under his breath: “An influential man . . . ”
Agata had heard. “Does he have influence with the cardinal?” she asked.
“The cardinal is keen to establish close ties with the highest ranks of the English Catholic community, and those contacts necessarily pass through the hands of Garson.”
And the general picked up the day’s newspaper.
40.
January 1848.
Agata leaves Palermo on the cardinal’s orders
The entire island of Sicily had almost no passable roads. Goods and foodstuffs traveled along the island’s coastline in small coasting vessels that traveled from dawn to dusk, because there were few lighthouses or maritime signals. The network of sixteenth-century signal towers built at the orders of Emperor Charles V and long neglected had fallen into a state of decay. In practice, every boat captain had his own set of landmarks, generally silhouettes of mountains and promontories with conspicuous points. Only a particularly skillful commander would set sail in the afternoon, even in the winter, with predictions of good weather, and expect to reach port at the first light of day.
Xebecs and tartans circumnavigated the island, making short hops from one port to the next, embarking and discharging goods at each landing place. Tartans, single-masted with a lateen rig, and smaller than the broad-beamed xebec, were chiefly cargo vessels, and they had many uses: for fishing, to haul freight, but also to transport passengers in rudimentary cabins.
The tartan captained by Master Cirincione, nicknamed Scopetta, had set sail the night before from Cefalù for Palermo, where at dawn it would moor and embark a load of ferrous materials and cordage for agricultural use; then it was bound for the island of Pantelleria, after docking at Trapani to load salt to be used for preserving capers. An emissary from the Curia was awaiting the vessel at the Cala, Palermo’s harbor: he carried a request for the master and commander, asking him to convey a number of important female passengers, nuns who were being taken to convents in “more tranquil” locations. It was the cardinal’s wish that one of these nuns, a young Benedictine sister, not be “seen” in Palermo, and the tartan should therefore weigh in to take her aboard at the landing place of Sferracavallo, and even there do its best to remain inconspicuous. The nuns would disembark at Trapani, except for the Benedictine sister. There, Master Scopetta would find the Benedictine sister passage aboard a “trusted” ship, bound for the wharves of Licata on the island’s southern coast. As the word “trusted” was uttered, a pouch of gold coins changed hands.
Agata had borne up with considerable fortitude during the brief but exceedingly choppy journey from the dock of Sferracavallo out to the tartan; since Agata would be the sole passenger, her mother had decided to send Rosalia out with her on the small sardine boat that awaited her. There were high seas and a chilly north wind. Rosalia, terrified, had wrapped her arms around the fishing lantern that had been left in the small watercraft, and at a certain point, in her agitation, she had tipped it overboard into the waves. Intimidated by the rough voices of the sailors, she had turned to Agata for consolation and, as she clutched at her, had torn the veil from her face. Upbraided, the poor thing had burst into tears and never stopped sobbing until she was back on dry land.
Agata had clambered aboard with high hopes, certain that James was somehow behind the cardinal’s order. She had a feeling that she would see him soon, perhaps in Trapani. She put a good face on the hardships of the primitive cabin, the abysmal food—bread and a questionable fish-and-potato soup—and her traveling companions. The young Capuchin nuns glared at the Benedictine sister in a decidedly unfriendly fashion, but she ignored them and looked out to sea. It was chilly and the mountains above Palermo’s fertile plain, the Conca d’Oro, were snow-covered. After roughly an hour’s sailing, the tartan was veering into the gulf of Castellammare. Low cumuliform clouds were shrouding the mountains in the interior. Agata caught her breath: mountains, sky, and sea were all unified by an extraordinary harmony of colors. The air was still and Agata sensed a great bated tension in the atmosphere. In the meanwhile, Master Scopetta was cursing his bad luck and furiously maneuvering his ship into the lee of San Vito lo Capo, before the dangerous libeccio wind springing up from the southwest could unleash high and choppy seas.
For two nights and a day, the tartan was hammered by powerful gusts of libeccio wind and intermittent downpours of rain. Shut up with the other nuns in the dank confined space of the cabin, Agata could smell her own stench: there was no water to wash with, nor was there any private space for the basic hygienic necessities. All the same, she was happy—soon she’d see James.
At five in the morning on the second day she was awakened by the steady rolling of the vessel: they were scudding along, sails bellying, before a light breeze out of the east. Pepi, Master Scopetta’s son, brought them a porridge of dried broad beans and chickpeas and laconically announced that they’d reach Trapani in five hours of navigation, if everything went as expected. Agata decided to head up onto deck; the sunshine was warm, but she kept her short turquoise cape of the order of the canonesses of Bavaria on so that James would be sure to recognize her immediately. She kept her eyes glued to landward; instead of reciting the Psalter, she magnified the Lord for the beauty of His island. Winter on the northern coast had been rainless and dry. The low hills inland were barren and sere. The land along the coastline, beyond the black line of cliffs, jagged and broken here and there by crescents of golden beach, was all scrub and stubble, streaked with charred sections. Mt. Cofano, stout and dark, was completely barren. The rain of the last two days had drained into the bowels of the earth through the cracks in the sun-scorched soil; solitary peasants were
whipping their mules in desperate attempts to break with iron plowshares the crust of sunbaked topsoil, harder than ever before.
The tartan had entered the Mar d’Africa. Mt. Erice loomed massively over sea and land; it too had sere, sunbaked slopes, but not the summit: verdant and tree-topped, it was surrounded by a bright white little cloud, like a halo. Master Scopetta sailed clear of the dangerous rocks of the Asinelli and the Formiche, where breakers crashed. Then he came about and brought his ship straight into the port of Trapani.
The Capuchin sisters flocked chattering down the gangway to where the prelate stood waiting for them on the dock. There was no sign of James at all. Agata stood veiled on the deck and wept. Salt tears wet her lip; she wiped them away with the tip of her tongue and soon her mouth was intolerably bitter. Still, she remained on the deck, wrapped in her turquoise mantle, until Pepi ushered her back into the wheelhouse. Master Scopetta was very pleased with himself: he had found a fellow commander, Master Livestri, about to set sail with his tartan, bound for Siracusa. On that vessel, the Benedictine sister could have a cabin all to herself. Faithful to the orders he’d received, he offered to pay his fellow commander lavishly to convey the nun to the wharves of Licata and ensure that, once disembarked, she reached the convent of Chiana safe and sound. Then he went on to explain to Agata that she could also land at Marsala, where the fleets of the Ingham, Woodhouse, and Florio companies loaded wine and oil to carry to Malta, making port in Licata to take on additional loads of wheat and sulfur. Their vessels would surely be more comfortable than Master Livestri’s tartan, and the journey would also be shorter. But he couldn’t assure her of finding a cabin. There were many English people leaving Sicily for Malta, out of fear of the expected uprisings.
Agata would have preferred an English ship—she could send a message to James, or perhaps he was in Marsala—and for an instant she was swept by panic. She was alone, penniless, ignorant of everything, in unfamiliar places. Master Scopetta did his best to guess what was passing through the eyes that he could barely glimpse behind the black veil, and he remembered his own daughters, Santina and Annunziata: at home, they were a constant earthquake—for every piece of mischief they committed, they thought up a hundred more—but they became timorous creatures, frightened of their own shadows, once they set foot outdoors. A heartfelt impulse drove him to say that he would send Pepi with her on the tartan, to make sure that everything went as planned. Agata accepted.
She regretted it the instant the commander turned and left. But now there was nothing she could do.
Master Livestri’s tartan was small and was painted red and dark blue; the cotton sails were amaranth, from the hue of the goop smeared onto the canvas to make them waterproof. Referred to as “u capu”–“the chief” in Sicilian–by his mariners, Master Livestri was a hulking, blue-eyed man, with thinning blond hair and massive hands, swollen and cracked from exposure to salt water. He gave a respectful welcome to his important passenger and introduced his son Totò, who served as his bosun. They set sail with a north wind, bound for Marsala.
To the west the brilliant blue sky was suddenly transmuted into a blazing mass so dazzling that the sun was almost entirely drowned out; little by little it merged into parallel strips in every variation on pink, orange, flame red, vivid carmine, and amaranth. The strip that marked the horizon line settled over the sea, a luminous intense green, and then darkened to pitch black. Suddenly an orange globe appeared in the center, bright and menacing. And then it sank behind the horizon. Agata thought to herself that this journey around her island was a way of saying farewell to Sicily, but she wasn’t sad. She was destined to go with James, wherever he might take her. Pepi had told her that in Marsala there was a British consul, and in Licata, a vice consul: that was enough to convince her that James was already at sea aboard a fast ship, waiting for her arrival in one of the two ports, enough to settle her nerves. She tucked hungrily into the fresh-fish chowders, the dried fruit, and the candied quince that she was served in bowls of glazed earthenware; she avoided her cabin and spent hours on deck, looking out to sea and back to land. She also enjoyed her newly reacquired solitude. The breeze had turned soft and the sky was diaphanous. Both landscape and climate had changed. The coastline as far as Marsala was white, flat, and sandy, in a succession of salt marshes and basins of seawater enclosed by sandbanks, islands that weren’t islands, all part of what was known as the Laguna dello Stagnone—the Big Pond Lagoon. A profusion of single-masted shallow-draft vessels, perfectly suited to the lagoon waters, were plying its surface, carrying cargoes of salt and tufa stone. The coastline, flat along the waterfront and sloping gently downhill as it ran inland, was spangled with the windmills of the salt marshes and little cone-shaped greyish mountains of salt. The bottom was shallow and treacherous, and for that very reason superlatively beautiful. The transparent water changed from green to sky blue, to light blue and to black, depending on the depth of the sandbanks, the configuration of the buried reefs—the long parallel crests of the rocky ridges that here and there broke the surface—and the varieties of marine vegetation—underwater meadows of seagrass, expanses of bottle green sugar kelp, acres of gulfweed—which gave different colors and hues. Only the morphology of the settlements—little villages perched high in the hills out of fear of Barbary raiders—and of the Baroque churches with onion-dome bell towers remained unvaried. After Selinunte the sea was a succession of shallows and shoals extending into the distance—glistening submerged ribbons of water; from the coast, the white marlstone cliffs glowed in the sunlight reflected off the surface of the sea.
Agata held her breath when she glimpsed in the distance, perched on a ridge covered with pale yellow ruins, an outpost of Girgenti, as Agrigento was then known, a Greek temple, intact, saved from devastation because it had been transformed into a Christian house of worship. Solitary amidst the ruins. That temple of a dead religion reminded her of her mother. Agata remembered the silhouette of the couple at Sferracavallo, while she was setting out to sea aboard the sardine trawler. Leaning one against the other, the general had placed his arm around her shoulders. She hadn’t realized, until then, that they loved one another. One thing the general did had been vividly impressed in her mind—he gently pushed a lock of hair tossing in the breeze away from his wife’s lovely face and tucked it under her hat, tenderly. Agata gripped the little book of poems by Keats more tightly in her hand, a token of her night of love with James. She preferred not to think about James’s wife, but from then on the faceless image of the unfortunate woman remained in her mind.
It was dawn. At the Licata wharf, there was a vast silence. Tied up along the waterfront were polacres, small watercraft, and sardine trawlers in the coasting trade. Two men, standing next to a pyramid of golden-hued sulfur, were waiting for the string of mules loaded with sacks full of sulfur to make their indolent way along the hill. The town seemed to be fast asleep. The morning breeze teased Agata’s disappointed, trembling hands, crossed over her chest. Not a sign of James.
Totò proudly informed her that Master Livestri had managed to get a servingwoman and a lay sister to come down from the convent of the Benedictine nuns of Licata to accompany her to Chiana, in a genuine carriage, not some farm cart. Before stepping up and into the carriage, Agata thanked him, but her voice was lifeless. The boy pulled a bag of dried yellow peaches out of his rucksack, the kind she had liked during the voyage, and clumsily proffered them. That courteous gesture melted the ice in her heart just a little, but she had given up hoping for James.
The carriage was more of a covered cart than a genuine carriage. The side windows, crazed with cracks and covered with glued paper, were black with filth. The wooden benches had folded blankets instead of proper cushions. The journey to Chiana seemed endless, jerking and jolting along the rocky cart track, with two silent women for company. Part of the way they had to walk because a section of road was in such poor repair that it became necessary to push the carriage along by main force. Agata rejected
the offer of a ride in a litter and walked up the narrow lane alongside the two women. She tried more than once to engage them in conversation, but their lips were sealed.
41.
In Chiana, in the Benedictine convent
of the Santissismo Sacramento
The abbess of the convent of the Santissimo Sacramento of Chiana considered the arrival of the Neapolitan nun to be an unreasonable imposition on the part of the clergy: the cardinal of Naples had written a letter to the archbishop of Palermo, who spoke to the abbot of San Martino delle Scale and with the provincial mother superior of the Benedictine order; then all three men had written to the bishop of Girgenti and directly to her: neither the abbess nor the bishop could hope to withstand such high-placed pressure.
In the seventeenth century the pious founder of the convent had settled the first group of nuns in his own palazzo in order to comply with the vocation of his favorite daughter; the central wing of the convent still preserved that original structure: drawing rooms divided into cells, the inner courtyard become a cloister, and windows blinded by wood timbering painted black. Inside, everything had been whitewashed and left simple and bare. The convent of the Santissimo Sacramento was well known throughout the comarca for the devout adherence to the old ways of the choristers who, in the previous century, loyal to the intentions of the founder, had refused to give in to the deterioration of mores of the period, which had infected most other convents. There was no shortage of vocations, and the convent was packed. The level of frugality was in sharp contrast with the richness of the building and the decorations and furnishings of the church, which was built in the eighteenth century. The walls and the chapels were decked with white-and-gold festoons, angels, and cherubs, contrasting sharply with the rich dark brown of the magnificent wooden coffered ceiling. The acoustics were perfect.
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