Nun (9781609459109) (15 page)

 

F
rom 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.

 

The clash between mother and daughter was not a secret for long, in either Messina or Naples. The result was that it stirred the Padellanis from their torpor—one by one they came to pay Agata a visit—and it made Gesuela dig her heels in.

The first ones who came to see her were Aunt Orsola and Admiral Pietraperciata: both of them wanted to reassure Agata that they would renew their efforts to win her mother's consent to her becoming a nun; they conveyed greetings from her cousin Michele, the head of the larger family, who fully approved her decision to become a nun. Next came the prince's wife, Ortensia, a tall woman, insipidly beautiful, with whom Agata had spoken only very rarely. Ortensia too praised her decision and promised that she would speak to Donna Gesuela on Agata's behalf. The princess also shed light on the reason for the family's sudden renewal of interest in Agata; in fact, Agata had been baffled by it. The abbess, it turns out, had written directly to her sisters and to the prince, asking them to come out in support of Agata's vocation, and informing them as to Gesuela's impious intentions. The abbess had also made it clear, between the lines, that she would not look favorably on the candidacy of other girls from the Padellani di Opiri family at the convent of San Giorgio Stilita if Agata were to be torn from the oasis of salvation in which none other than her mother had first placed her. Ortensia, who had four young daughters, was keenly interested in placing at least one of them as a nun at San Giorgio Stilita.

Eleonora and Severina Tozzi also came to see her, now both married and still childless. Eleonora had had a series of miscarriages and seemed tense and exhausted. Severina, who was younger and a relative newlywed, asked Agata to pray for her to have a male child, telling her coyly: “My husband is really determined, he never gives me a rest . . . ” The two cousins spoke as if they were in a confessional, about everything and everyone, without caution or care, even about intimate conjugal details.

While Eleonora stuffed herself on the puff pastries that Sarina offered her in the parlor, and between bites asked her to give her the recipe, Severina confided to Agata in a hushed voice that Eleonora had been threatened by her husband. He had told her that if she were unable to bring her next pregnancy to term, then he would “turn his back on her” and request an annulment. Agata remembered Eleonora as a vivacious young girl, an attractive and talented ballerina; now, at age twenty-two, she'd put on weight and had lost her lovely poise and confidence. As if she'd just read Agata's mind, Severina whispered: “If you could only see how badly she dances now, fat as she is!” Then, in a rush, she added: “Do you remember that time in the alcove when you danced a waltz with Captain capitano Garson?” Severina told her that she'd seen him again at a reception just the other evening. After his wedding, he'd stopped frequenting Neapolitan society: it was said that his wife had demanded that they go live in Menton, not far from Nice. When he came back to the kingdom, he took care of family business and only socialized within the populous local colony of English people. Suddenly, however, in the last few weeks, Garson was being seen everywhere. “I'll ask Admiral Pietraperciata, he'll surely know. I say they're no longer together. Or perhaps she's died. I've even heard that she's gone melancholic, and that she's been put in a madhouse.” Agata had leaned her forehead against the grate; she could hear the notes of the waltz, but she couldn't see James's face; Giacomo was her gallant knight, and she was dancing in his arms, feeling his dark eyes upon her.

A sudden gust of warm, pastry-scented breath wafted over her; Agata was unable to recoil fast enough—Eleonora had thrust her face against the grate, in order to emphasize her request. “We all know that you have a special devotion for the Madonna dell'Utria, we know that through the power of your prayer you made the stolen jewels reappear,” Eleonora said; she went on to beg her cousin to implore the Virgin to give her the grace of a son. “And pray for your sister Sandra, too, she has as much need as I do . . . ”

 

After that visit, Agata fell into a different kind of melancholy. The conjugal miseries of her cousins unsettled her; they undercut her certainty that life with Giacomo would have been so greatly preferable to the cloistered life. She wished that she could simply stop the pendulum of time and stay as she was, a postulant at San Giorgio Stilita, with the option of leaving the convent when her mother finally accepted her refusal to be married off to the Cavaliere d'Anna. Once and for all.

Then she grew restless: she wanted to return to civilian life, read newspapers and novels, pay attention to politics, make friendships, get married. Right away.

 

One day, in a fit of agitation, she hastily emptied her trunk of linen and lifted the false bottom. At random, she pulled out a book,
Pride and Prejudice
, and then tossed the linen higgledy-piggledy back into the trunk and shut it, afraid of being caught. She read the novel in fits and starts, when she was able, but she couldn't wait to plunge back into it. She identified with the Bennet sisters and their beaus; the memory of Giacomo came back vividly, churning her emotions. She could no longer bring herself to become a nun. She wanted Giacomo. She yearned for him. She went so far as to prepare a decoction to placate her yearnings. But the next day they returned. She convinced herself that Giacomo was in Naples and, just as she was thinking about him, so he must be trying to find her. At the first opportunity that presented itself, she went to listen to Mass from the catwalk next to the choir, and she scrutinized the nave, looking for Giacomo from the grate facing the little altar of the Blessed Elisabetta Padellani, but she never saw him—never.

Agata tried to peer within, to understand her own behavior, but she was unsuccessful. She was baffled by herself, and she didn't want to talk about it with Father Cuoco—she didn't dare. She knew that she was too confused. She did her schoolwork and her chores, she studied and worked like the other postulants, but she felt like the brigantine that had brought her to Naples through the tempest with her father's coffin: storm-tossed and adrift, uncertain of everything and everyone.

 

February 5, 1844 was her eighteenth birthday, as well as the feast day of her patron saint, St. Agatha. She was watching Mass from the parapet. At last! But she had no time to enjoy the show: Giacomo was down there, next to a young woman dressed in green, who wore a hat trimmed with fur. Between them were two small children. He was clearly quite restless; he kept looking around him and he inevitably wound up with his head pointing in the direction of the comunichino. The little boy next to him reached up for his hand; Giacomo, arrogantly, yanked it away. The woman in the hat leaned down to say something to the little boy, then she resumed her stance. The little boy started whining and went on reaching up for his father's hand; the father made an impatient gesture to a serving girl in the pew behind them. Now the child was wailing in despair; he didn't want to be taken away, but the father shoved him rudely out of the pew. “Don't treat a little boy that way!” Agata exclaimed; then she watched what happened next, livid with indignation. The serving girl had left her pew and was standing next to Giacomo. He hoisted the child in the air and set him down hard, like a sack of potatoes, next to her; she dragged the child off up the nave of the church as he bawled his eyes out. The woman with the green hat didn't seem to have noticed a thing. The other child, smaller still, was holding his mother's overcoat, and now he tried to hold his father's hand. Giacomo pulled his hand away brutishly and held it high, out of reach. The little boy, gripping his father's sleeve, continued to try to seize the hand; unable to do so, he burst into tears. Giacomo ignored him.

“He's unworthy of me,” Agata murmured, and turned to the image of the Blessed Elisabetta Padellani. Giacomo, in the meanwhile, had plunged his finger into his nostril, rooting intently, only to wipe it off on the skirt of his overcoat, while his wife soothed the toddler, still in tears.

 

That night, Agata finished reading
Pride and Prejudice
. She was head over heels in love with Darcy. The following morning, in a frenzy, she wrote a note to James Garson and sent it to Detken's bookshop with a servingwoman: