Nun (9781609459109) (9 page)

M
ore than once, during the long first day at the convent of San Giorgio Stilita, Agata had consoled herself with the thought that at least when night came she would finally be left alone. She was stunned when she was told that instead she would be sleeping with the abbess. In compliance with the Benedictine Rule, the abbess's living quarters consisted of a bare space, a bed without a headboard, and an enormous built-in armoire where the chorister nuns kept the silver of the monastic dowries; it opened out onto the spacious majolica-tiled terrace atop the arches of the cloister, where two rows of large terra cotta vases planted with orange trees, camellia plants, and jasmine trees created a private space. A bed had been brought in for Agata and placed at the foot of her aunt's bed, next to the pallet of one of her two lay sisters, Angiola Maria—a hulking middle-aged woman with sharply defined features—while the other lay sister, Sarina, a tall, skinny young woman with a gentle gaze, slept in the corner next to the bathroom.

 

The abbess was reciting aspirations at her kneeling-stool. Agata was already under the blankets. The flickering flame of the oil lamp burned faintly all night long and she was having trouble falling asleep. Every time she raised her eyelids she met the gleaming pupils of Angiola Maria, focused straight at her like a pair of charcoal embers. At last, Agata turned over and lay motionless, but still she could feel that unsettling glare on her back.

At dawn, she awoke with a start: bending over her was Angiola Maria, calling her for morning prayers and shoving her with both hands to get her out of bed. From that day forward the lay sister bestowed upon the niece of her beloved mistress all her uncouth solicitudes.

 

The first week went by quickly and not altogether agreeably. The abbess had given her a number of religious and monastic books to read. In the evening, after None and before Compline, she waited for Agata in the cloister. In the lengthening shadows of day's end, they strolled together in the garden, breathing the scents released by plants and watered earth, and they'd talk. Agata began to feel an intense love for her father's pious sister.

The convent of San Giorgio Stilita was more than a thousand years old and there was a time when it had as many as three hundred nuns, “every one of them with four quarters of nobility,” her aunt told her, without any attempt to conceal her caste-pride. The spirit of the Enlightenment in the last century had reduced the number of vocations, and then the Napoleonic military occupation had put an end to admissions entirely for a decade. “But it was unable to destroy the quest for God through the cloistered life,” the abbess added, wrinkling her nose slightly, and then she went on to tell Agata that after the Bourbon restoration, in 1815, there was a wave of new callings. The convent had another, secondary cloister, lined with cells not currently in use, and the abbess hoped that one day those cells might be filled with Benedictine nuns.

Many of the eighty professed nuns, the choristers, were young, and the same was true of the one hundred twenty lay sisters—religious who came to the convent from the less prosperous classes of society, many of them illiterate. Because they could not pay the monastic dowry, they had simply taken vows of chastity and poverty and they served a nun of high rank. The lay sisters were excluded from the Divine Office. When the bell rang the canonical hours for prayer, the nuns recited the psalms in the choir, while the lay sisters gathered in the hall outside the
comunichino
and recited together the
Pater
, the
Ave
, and the
Credo
. The humblest manual tasks were assigned to a hundred or so servingwomen—lower-ranking than the lay sisters, likewise dressed in the monastic habit but without the pleated wimple that was worn only by the chorists; these servingwomen did not take vows. Aside from taking care of various domestic chores, the servingwomen left the convent to carry out the orders of the nuns and to run errands. They and the helper nuns were the only residents of the convent who were allowed to go out into the world and have contact with others.

The convent's Chapter had resolved on an exceptional basis to admit Agata not as a
probanda
, that is, for a period of probation—as her mother had told her, and as procedure would normally have dictated—but instead directly as a postulant, the stage prior to that of a novice: just one of the many exceptions that were afforded to members of the leading families of the district. Her aunt the abbess wished to make it clear to her that, once she became a professed nun, she could obtain any status she liked, choosing among the offices of teacher of novices, cellaress, hebdomadary, herbalist, infirmarian, pharmacist, helper nun, and sacristan.

 

Now Agata had a cell all to herself on the third floor, in the hallway of the novices; she would be spending part of the day with them. Her first contact with those girls had been fraught and tense. Unwanted or burdensome daughters of the highest Neapolitan aristocracy, these young women were proud of their birth, station, and lineage and they were jealous of the privileges that Agata already enjoyed as the abbess's niece. The novices knew everything about her—while she knew nothing about any of them—and they were ill disposed toward “the Sicilian girl,” as they called her, to begin with. There was no other Padellani di Opiri among them, and so Agata was sharply isolated; even worse, the two novices who were cousins of hers were actually members of the cadet branch of the Padellani family, the Counts of Uttino. That side of the family had been feuding for years with the Opiris over certain issues of inheritance, and so the two novices mocked and berated Agata. As if that were not enough, they managed to humiliate her in front of the other girls by alluding to the poverty into which Agata's mother had fallen, and ridiculing her with one insistent question: “Tell us whether the abbess is going to pay your dowry.” Agata had reacted with haughty pride and from that day on a relationship of mutual dislike, if not outright hostility, was established. That unfriendliness extended to the other friends of the two Uttino girls, further worsening Agata's isolation.

 

Agata's aunt had encouraged her to make use of the archives room, which also served as the convent's library. The shelves lining the walls were made of mahogany, as were both the coffered ceiling and the little altar facing the entry door; on that altar an image of the Virgin Mary, set in a carved mahogany frame, was displayed. The most valuable books were protected behind glass doors: psalters, incunabula, and breviaries that had been illuminated by the Benedictines. Agata took refuge in the wooden stalls where she felt she was protected from prying eyes—if there were any eyes to pry: the room was seldom frequented—and spent her time there reading. It was also a way of escaping her companions. Next to the archives were the ovens and the kitchens. The mornings she spent reading were accompanied by the crunchy scent of biscotti, mingled with the musky aroma of freshly waxed mahogany, while in the afternoons—dedicated to Neapolitan ricotta tarts, or
pastiere,
and whatever other baked dishes might be ordered—the distinctive array of smells of cooking foods whetted her appetite. There Agata read happily.

 

The Benedictine Rule was the scaffolding that supported the larger structure of the Order. In the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia, disgusted by the corruption of the Church of Rome, set out to found an order that would put his followers on the path to God, supporting them along the way by a rigid division of each day and a healthy balance between prayer and physical activity.
Orare est laborare et laborare est orare—To pray is to work and to work is to pray
. Prayer was called
Opus Dei
, the divine office, and it traced the suffering and death of Christ, becoming the very reason for existence of the monastics. Silence was fundamental. During the day silence could be broken during the period of recreation after meals; after Compline, however, it was rigorous. Agata had been quite appreciative of Miss Wainwright's rigid routine and, after her initial dismay, she found the Benedictine structuring of the day into the canonical hours to be somehow reassuring; she was exhilarated by the reading of the Psalms and the
Regula
. And yet, as she looked around, she noticed to her horror that life as it was actually lived in the convent was quite different from the description. The rule of silence was roundly ignored by the nuns in the privacy of their cells and was often broken in the hallways and in the cloister, where there was a subdued hum of whispering; the rules of fasting and plain foods were broken on a daily basis by lavish meals, with multiple courses, sometimes as many as seven dishes on a weekday, and even more on feast days. As for the rule of
ora et labora
—it had become a farce: nuns and novices failed to show up at the hours of prayer, what with one excuse or another, and their chief form of manual labor, aside from embroidery—often making beautiful things in needlepoint for themselves—involved the manufacture of pastries, with the assistance of servants and lay sisters. Agata wondered why the abbess would tolerate all those infractions of the Rule, but she didn't dare to ask about it.

 

The garden was the responsibility of the kitchen servants and a few lay sisters. The choristers looked down upon gardening with disdain, while Agata loved it; the abbess had given her permission to help Angiola Maria, who was the chief gardener. Each morning, the lay sister gathered herbs and flowers, added a fistful of lavender, and filled a little muslin sachet that she presented to the abbess—and now she made one for Agata, too: from under her shirt, there wafted a fragrant scent all day long. Angiola Maria had truly taken a liking to Agata; she taught her the properties of the medicinal herbs and she never failed to give her gifts of whatever herbs she thought Agata might like: fresh green beans to be eaten uncooked from the garden, pods of tender baby peas, a butterfly imprisoned in a glass flytrap, ladybugs as good luck charms in a jar.

One morning, Agata was walking past the kitchen on her way to the archives room with her perfumed sachet in her hand; Brida, one of the servant cooks, gestured for her to come in. She was a servant who was respected by one and all for her good disposition and her mastery of the culinary arts. Petite in size, she would have looked like a little girl if it weren't for her wrinkled face, but she was a tireless worker: she carried the heaviest pots herself and worked into the small hours to make sure that bread would be baked for the morning meal, often a task that had to be put off to make room for the choristers' pastries. Agata, who had worked in the kitchens as part of the process of her induction, appreciated the woman's straight talk and the way that she worked with a smile on her lips; moreover Brida had a rich repertoire of aspirations for every situation. That day, however, the cook had a grim expression on her face. She said to Agata, without preamble: “I'd advise you to steer clear of Angiola Maria, it'd be better for you, and for everyone else.” Agata's feelings were hurt. She remembered that her aunt had recommended that she be courteous with the serving-women but not to be too familiar with them. She gave Brida a scornful glance and continued on her way.

That same day, in the evening, Agata was in bed but she couldn't sleep—she was suffering from a maddening itch on her chest and shoulders. In the silence she heard a subdued sound of people talking. She stepped out into the corridor and followed the noise to the cell from which it was issuing. She looked through the keyhole. A dozen or so novices had removed their habits and were trying out awkward little dance steps in their heavy mannish black leather work boots, preening and posing in their fine linen undergarments adorned with lace, embroidery, and silk ribbons, pointing out details to the other girls. Two of them, perched barefoot on the bed, were talking about life at court and the gossip that they'd heard from their married sisters, and all the while they caressed arms, breasts, and necks; then, with smothered giggles, they lifted their skirts and hoisted their sleeves to show off their naked flesh to long and knowing gazes. Agata was appalled and began walking back to her cell, practically on tiptoe, when she heard a door creak, followed by more giggles. She flattened herself against the wall, her heart in her throat.

The next morning, in the garden, Angiola Maria offered her the usual scented sachet: Agata accepted it and looked up toward the open door of the kitchen with a challenging glare, but she didn't think there was anyone there to see her.

That evening, when she went back to her cell, she found three large cockroaches on the floor—the iridescent kind, black and green, with wings, deeply disgusting—and she shoved them out onto the balcony with tiny, fearful kicks. Then she wept with rage.

 

There were more and more cockroaches every day. Agata was suspicious of everyone. She had the impression that the novices were exchanging winks when she walked by them. She got into a bitter argument with an especially wealthy novice, who coveted the ambition to become abbess herself one day, and who saw Agata as a rival. She wanted the cell to which Agata had been assigned: she claimed that “the Sicilian girl” had no right to occupy that cell because her monastic dowry had been too scanty to cover the rent—at San Giorgio Stilita in fact the best cells were purchased and enjoyed by the nuns as a sort of annuity—and this novice had begun to incite other young women against her. One evening they ganged up on Agata in a corridor and shoved her into a broom closet. They forced her to kneel on the floor in front of them. They rubbed her cheeks with stalks of stinging nettle and heaped insults upon her. Agata started to feel persecuted. She walked timidly down the hallways and when she entered the archives room, she hurried past the kitchen: she felt as if they were looking daggers at her as she went by.