Nun (9781609459109) (12 page)

A
gata was sitting with her Aunt Orsola, stitching needlepoint while waiting for the abbess's consent to her return to the convent. It was slow in coming.

Between one needleful and the next, her aunt reminisced about her own past, trying to dissuade Agata from being overhasty in her dismissal of an arranged marriage. Agata's hand jerked and the sharp needle, clamped between her trembling thumb and index finger, jabbed her other hand. A round drop of blood appeared on the linen. Aunt Orsola noticed and understood but still couldn't manage to keep her mouth shut, perhaps in part because she always found the memory of her virtuous sacrifices so particularly gratifying. Orsola was goodhearted through and through, but she was also insecure and just a tad conceited. She went on at length about her two marriages, neither of them love matches but both quite happy experiences, and her own desire to become a nun, set aside not once but twice out of filial obedience, and then a third time, because of two social pleasures she was unwilling to renounce

As a girl, Orsola Pietraperciata had been educated at the convent of Santa Chiara, in the order of the Poor Clares. She liked the cloistered life and she felt the calling very strongly. Then her older sister, who was already engaged to be married, died; her father took her out of the convent and married her off to her late sister's fiancé, an elderly duke, who loved her deeply; he was respectful of his young bride's religious calling, and allowed her to invite other devoted women–or
pinzochere
—to live with them and he did nothing to interfere with her pious pursuits. Orsola became pregnant but she lost the baby; a few months later, her husband died too.

Her first thought was to take her vows, but her father, who was also a widower, insisted that she come back and live in the family
palazzo
with him, and once again, Orsola obeyed. After her father's death, the prince of Opiri, a distant cousin, who was himself a widower and who had a very young son, Michele, asked her if she would be a mother to his boy. She wasn't particularly inclined to married life, and openly told him so. “I feel the same way,” he replied, with great relief, and promised to respect her wishes, if she would only agree to care for him and his little boy. That too was a happy—if unconsummated—marriage.

Widowed for the second time, and now fully independent, Orsola was no longer willing to retire to a convent or a conservatory: she couldn't imagine giving up either cards or evenings at the opera—she enjoyed them both far too much. “Still,” her aunt concluded, coyly plucking at a ringlet, “I'm quite certain that I would have lived much more happily as a nun. Think about it, Agata.”

 

Her aunt had gone out to the San Carlo opera house and Agata was on the terrace. The gazebo, surrounded by huge potted jasmine plants and magnolia trees, and covered by flourishing and vigorously blooming carpet of morning glories, was a perfect retreat from the prying eyes of the help. Agata hadn't been crying, but still her eyes were swollen and reddened and she felt weak as a kitten. Her legs and arms ached as if she'd been hefting sacks of almonds all day long. The languishing rays of the setting sun were striking Mt. Vesuvius and the peaks of Castellammare. One of the many religious festivals of Naples was being celebrated that day, and she could hear the echoing sounds of the band and the jubilant crowd wafting up to her like a distant, muffled crashing roar from the sea. From her chair, all that Agata could see was the red sky through the green of the foliage and the campanula blooms. Red. Green. Purple. Passion, hope, sorrow. A new wave of emotion swept through her. She was breathing in the free air; she felt alone, but no longer isolated. God would protect her, God loved her. And God was calling her. Not to the nunnery, but to Him. Agata responded to His love and sat there, talking to God, until nightfall, when the damp air rising from the sea enveloped her, making her shiver.

 

Aunt Orsola was home by now, waiting for Agata with a letter in her hand. The abbess had written to inform her that, after consulting with the cardinal, she'd decided it would be advisable to ask the Chapter of the Choristers if they were willing to accept Agata back into the Cenoby, or monastic community, for a second time. The response was unequivocal: Agata could come back to the convent of San Giorgio Stilita the following morning, after Terce, on the condition that she declare her irrevocable determination to become a nun and that she begin from the very first stage–the Educandate.

 

Agata had insisted that she be left alone at the moment of her entry into the convent of San Giorgio Stilita. To the sound of the doorkeeper's cry—“
Deo gratias
” (“God be praised,” in Latin)—Sandra Aviello walked out of the vestibule and descended with a heavy heart the convent staircase. When she heard the creaking of the monumental door, she turned to look up, but the portal had already swallowed up her sister.

 

At that exact time of day, Donna Gesuela Padellani was on the wharf of Messina waiting to board a steamboat. She was furious. She had received a message through one of her future husband's secret informers: her daughter intended to enter the convent of San Giorgio Stilita to undertake the path of nunhood—of her own free will and with a strong vocation. Gesuela was trying to figure out who might have revealed to her Neapolitan relations her matrimonial plans for Agata—she had written an extremely circumspect letter to her sister-in-law, precisely to avoid arousing suspicions about the Cavaliere d'Anna, but Agata's precipitous return to the convent was clearly prompted by that prospect.

Gesuela thought back to her own girlhood; she too had been married off through deception. She was a thirteen-year-old orphan. She was the acting mistress of the house for her thirty-year-old step-brother and she was perfectly happy—the two siblings got along perfectly and agreed on everything, and the last thing she would have expected from him was an arranged marriage at such an early age, much less with Don Peppino Padellani, who was pushing forty. But her step-brother had taken her to Naples, ostensibly for a holiday, and before a month had passed he'd married her off to that old man. In time, she and Peppino had come to love one another, they'd worked out their compromises, and they'd found happiness; but their poverty, her husband's load of debt, and the enormous effort to marry off her own daughters had worn her down. Just when she thought she'd taken care of Agata's future, and was herself on the verge of her second marriage, she was going to have to take on new debt for the monastic dowry for that rebellious daughter of hers; the rage she felt toward Agata and her sister-in-law never subsided once during the entire crossing, and it lasted long afterward.

 

The door swung shut behind Agata. Four serving women were shoving her heavy trunks along the flagstone floor of the corridor. In the cloister garden, concealed between the fountain and the Christ and the Samaritan Woman, both petrified right in the middle of their pleasant conversation, the novices were peering out at her, snickering. Well aware of the enormity of the promise she had made, Agata hesitated, aghast; then she followed Angiola Maria, who was taking her to see the abbess. As she passed by the snickering novices she squared her shoulders, threw back her head, and twisted her lips into a challenging smile.

 

The abbess met with her in the formal reception room. She did not embrace her; she extended her hand to be kissed.

“Do you understand what it means to take the veil?”

“Yes, I've thought it over.”

“But before, you didn't want to.” A pause. “I've been told that you had an inamorato.” And she gave her a stern look.

“He's taken himself a wealthy bride. I no longer want to be married.” Agata gave the abbess a grim look. She would have preferred not to have to own up to Giacomo's betrayal.

“There are other nuns like you here, who would have preferred to marry a husband, but who were prevented from doing so,” said the abbess. Then she raised her voice: “Jesus Christ does not deserve to be the second choice.”

Agata's answer came to her easily and spontaneously: “But I love God most of all, and He will help me!”

T
he evening before the ceremony of Agata Padellani's vestition, the church, built thanks to the munificence of a sixteenth-century Abbess Padellani, had been closed to the congregation and to the clergy: it had once again briefly become the exclusive property of the convent and of that family. The nuns had decorated the altars with their silver and their candelabra and the church glittered.

Prior to Compline, Agata, with the abbess walking next to her, had marched the length of the nave holding a silver tray on which lay her educand habit. When they came even with the chapel dedicated to St. Benedict, founder of their order, they kneeled on the first step. At that moment the entire church was filled with the monodic chant of the nuns.

 

Intende voci orationis meae,

Rex meus et Deus meus.

 

Agata stood up and, alone, she walked up to place the tray on the altar. Then she descended and kneeled next to the abbess. She too was chanting:

 

Quoniam ad te orabo:

Domine mane exhaudies vocem meam.

Intende voci orationis meae,

Rex meus et Deus

Quoniam ad te orabo:

Domine mane exhaudies vocem meam.

 

In the morning, O Lord, you will hear my voice.

 

It was a soft late-September morning; beneath the shady arcades of the cloister, the air was still. The clickety-clack of shoes on the steps, the rustle of habits and a subdued murmur of conversation—the calm of the cloister had been shattered by the group of young people descending the staircase of the novices. Educand and postulants were accompanying Agata Padellani to the comunichino for her vestition; there were many of them, and they pushed her, touched her, caressed her. They were walking down the hallway that ran past the kitchens. Standing in the doors, serving women and lay sisters watched them pass with broad smiles. The elderly nuns had already occupied the lookout seats in the six alcoves the overlooked the nave of the church, and from up there they were waving hello.

The group of celebrants slipped through the small wooden doorway that led to the maze of staircases and corridors that led to the comunichino. They packed into the narrow hallway that ran along the wall of the church's transept, and then they descended a long unbroken flight of narrow steps; when they reached the tiny landing they made a sharp right turn onto another equally steep staircase. Shoved and squeezed by the other girls crowding around her, Agata stumbled and more than once was afraid that she was about to lose her balance and tumble headlong down the steps.

The hall of the comunichino, bare of any furniture, was filled with the smells of incense and the damp that soaked through from the outside wall. On the left, the Holy Staircase climbed up along the entire wall and stopped, in a dead end, in front of the enormous face of a blond Christ crowned with thorns; on the first Friday of every month, kneeling nuns seeking indulgence climbed up and down the carved wooden steps without ever touching the railing for support. An imposing seventeenth-century painting of Moses striking the rock to bring forth water occupied the wall across from the comunichino; in front of it was the armchair of the abbess. As soon as they entered the room, the girls, like a platoon of soldiers, spread out into compact rows, alongside and behind Agata, and moved slowly forward, taking small steps, until she, in the middle of the front row, had reached the exact center of the four-panel door that covered the grate of the comunichino. The two educands who had been assigned to open the door took their places, in front of Agata; then, in perfect unison, they folded back the panels on their well-oiled, silent hinges. The light of hundreds of candles burst into the hall while the music of the organ flooded the nave, followed by the voices of the choristers. All together, the altar boys, standing erect with their chests thrust out at their places on the steps of the main altar, turned to gaze at the comunichino, to the right of the altar. Seen from inside the church, it looked like the entrance to a particularly sumptuous chapel: a large radiant halo of iron and brass, flanked by two candelabra, masterpieces of the Neapolitan brass-worker's art, surmounted the three-sectioned grate behind which the nuns listened to the mass, receiving the Eucharist through the central aperture.

 

The congregation had turned out in great numbers: the people from the quarter had come en masse—both because they remembered the miracle of the Madonna dell'Utria, and out of respect for the Padellanis—but the only family members to attend were the prince, with his wife and stepmother, to distract attention from the absence of the educand's mother. The solemn benediction of the habit took place on the altar of St. Benedict, prior to the celebration of Mass. The canon and the altar boys began the singing, followed by the faithful. The censers held high by the four altar boys flanking the canon swung in unison. Each time they swung out to the apex of their parabola, they released clouds of incense and myrrh, mixed with ancient unguents—in keeping with the tradition of the Armenian nuns, who fled in the seventh century and founded the convent. The perfume saturated the whole church, wafting upward as high as the choir, which had begun singing Psalm 17
a voci pari
.

The canon descended from the altar.

Exurge, Domine, praeveni eum et supplanta eum:

Eripe animam meam ab impio frameam tuam.

 

The canon handed the habit to Agata through the comunichino.

 

Ab inimicis manus tuae.

Agata wore the heavy shoes of the nuns and she had combed her hair into two flat bands that ran over her ears and were gathered and pinned to the nape of her neck with a comb. The educands undressed her and then re-dressed her in the black woolen habit, with narrow sleeves extending to the wrist and a small scapular hanging from her shoulders. Then they helped her put on the white muslin apron and tied a handkerchief made of the same material around her neck.

 

Ego autem in iustitia apparebo conspectu tuo:

Satiabor cum apparuerit gloria tua.

 

Once the vestition was complete, the new educand was the first to receive the divine host. Agata closed her eyes while the particle of holy wafer dissolved in her mouth. When she reopened them, she looked out at the congregation. In one of the first rows she thought she saw Giacomo with a woman sitting next to him, and she quickly shut her eyes again, very tight.