Sacred Hearts (10 page)

Love opened my left side with his right hand, and there within my very heart he planted a laurel tree, so green that its rich hue exceeds the color of all emeralds
.

She can feel hot tears flowing again. Ha! Outside she registers the footsteps of the watch sister moving into the cloisters on her rounds, and she moves swiftly to blow out the candle, so swiftly that the wax from the flame spatters onto her fingers.

She winces from its heat, then registers the change as it coagulates and sticks to her fingers. Hot wax. Like a seal. Of course! A seal. Yes!

As soon as she finds bigger stones, she will use the candle to seal the paper around them. At least that way she will be ready when he comes. Because come he will. She is sure of it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THESE THINGS ZUANA
has never seen and probably never will:

The ocean

The great veins underneath the earth where precious metals   grow

The monster known as the lamia

A newborn baby

The insides of a dead person

Though when it comes to the last she has been closer than most.

HER FATHER WAS
by no means the first to take his knife publicly to a human corpse. By the time he stood up in the lecture hall of Ferrara University his butcher’s apron tied around him, anatomical dissection was already an accepted part of medical education in cities such as Bologna and Padua. (The great Vesalius himself worked for many years in Padua, and it was there that he laid the foundation for his book on the fabric of the human body; this is a fact Zuana has known for so long that she cannot remember anymore when she was told it first.) But thanks to scholars like Mancardi and Brasalola, Ferrara was not far behind, and by the time she was old enough to understand the difference between a vein and a muscle a public dissection was taking place under the auspices of the university every other year: an audience of a hundred or more medical students bundled into thick cloaks and hats, packed alongside a few strong-stomached Ferrarese citizens with the curiosity and appetite to look inside themselves.

The event was held either in one of the regular lecture rooms, makeshift stacked seating arranged as best they could to allow as many people as possible to see the corpse espaliered on the table, or, later, when the crowd grew too large, in a nearby church specially commandeered for the process. In both cases the spaces were bitterly cold, the tang of preserving alcohol a persistent incense in the air. Dissection was, by necessity, a winter business, with windows and doors kept open so the bodies remained fresh over the two or three days it took to complete the process (though when it came to work on living dogs and pigs, it meant you could hear their terror and agony halfway round the town).

At moments when convent weather spikes to the bone—as it does now—or a task in the dispensary demands the same preserving fluid, or some feast day calls for the slaughtering of one of the pigs, their high-pitched squealing echoing through the cloisters, then Zuana is instantly pulled back: imagining herself as a young woman, beside herself with anticipation as she peers down at the table, her father’s voice booming out across the hall as he makes the first incision along the collarbone and down the side to create the skin flap which, when lifted, will expose the breastbone and the lungs and finally the heart underneath.

Alas, it is a dream that never happened. Oh, the sensations were real enough: the smells (her father stank of them when he returned that night), the cold, the hysteria of the penned waiting animals, which always seemed to know what was to happen to them, and the parallel sense of rising excitement in the streets as the students queued and then finally dispersed after the spectacle. But the rest took place behind closed doors for her. It was not for want of trying. By the age of fourteen she knew enough in theory to recognize most of the organs the knife would have revealed. And by sixteen she was tall and broad enough that with a cap and gown she might even have got lost in the crowd. But her father was adamant. While she might stand next to him in the study measuring and mixing, or help him in the gardens gathering herbs and roots—even down to the mandrake, which looked like a miniature human body as it was pulled squealing from the earth—while together they might trace a man’s insides through the study of a hundred woodcuts, when it came to witnessing the actual flesh flayed back to reveal the wonders beneath, to understand this divine creation in all its glory as God had made it, that could never be woman’s work, even to a mind as big as his.

She had come close to defying him once. Had got as far as hiding a cloak and a hat, left over by different visitors, ready to slip out as soon as he was gone. But he seemed to sense her excitement and chose not to leave the house until the dissection was almost due to begin, so that by the time she could get out, the lecture hall was already exploding with bodies and the waiting line stretched halfway down the street. Later, when his death had them all running in circles working out what to do with her, she wondered if he had already begun to question whether the young woman he had so lovingly filled with his knowledge might not be becoming a liability to herself as much as a treasure to him.

Perhaps he had thought he would live forever. She certainly had.

Thus her medical experience had been severely circumscribed, so that now in order to penetrate the insides of the human body she must rely on books: muscles, sinews, viscera, bones, and blood, all reduced to flat patterns of black lines on a white page. Had she kept the volumes of Vesalius’s great anatomical work—oh, if only!—she might have been able to educate herself afresh each time she opened its pages, for there was nowhere his knife and his curiosity had not penetrated. But when the scavengers descended after her father’s death, a few key treasures had walked out of his study before she had had the time or wit to hide them; Vesalius’s fat volumes had been the greatest loss. As for the bodies in the flesh—well, though she might feel swellings or catch glimpses through or under the habits of the convent women when their pain was great enough to disturb their modesty, any understanding of a man’s body was to be forever denied to her.

Except, that is, for one.

For she, like every one of her sisters, spends each and every day in the presence of the most singular, perfect male body: that of God Himself made flesh.

In this—although it would, no doubt, shock those in the church hierarchy to hear it—the convent has been, for Zuana, its own medical school. Because Christ’s body is everywhere: in the altars and nave of the main church, open to the nuns when it is closed to the city; in their own chapel behind the altar, where they pray eight times day and night; on the walls of the cloisters where they walk, in the refectory where they eat, even in the cells where they sleep. Everywhere. And in each and every stage of life and death: from the rosy plumpness of the holy baby reaching, arms outstretched, from Mary’s lap, through the beauty of a grave young man, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped under gathered robes, to the brutal step-by-step destruction of that same perfect body in its most exquisite state of manhood.

It is its destruction, however, that makes the greatest impact.

Over the years Christ’s naked, broken body has become more familiar to Zuana than her own, for not only is it everywhere, it is also lovingly, truthfully, anatomically depicted. She had recognized this in the very first days of her confinement: how the men who carved and sculpted the two most powerful crucifixes in Santa Caterina—the great wooden one that hangs above the altar and the more modest one set on the wall at the end of the main cloisters—were as informed about the human body as any anatomist, since for many years now any painter or sculptor with blood in his veins had made it his business to find his way into charnel houses or even those same lecture theaters that she had been denied, in order to perfect his craft.

In their hands, dead material became flesh. The very surface of the wood or stone appeared tender; you could see—feel— how the layers of skin were vulnerable to the sting and sear of the whip. The way the thorns pierced and hooked into the thin flesh of the forehead. The bowing of spine and shoulders under the burden of carrying the great cross. The force of the blows that sent iron nails smashing through tendon and bone, the knotting and screaming of the sinews as they took the body’s hanging weight, and how, once punctured, a man might bleed so copiously that, unless stanched, life could seep out through a single vicious opening.

On the crucifix in the chapel, the wound in Christ’s side has coagulated, so the edges of the gash lie open like thick scarlet lips with only a single ribbon of blood to be seen. But the figure in the cloisters has a deep fresh hole that weeps a river of brightest red, cascading down His side and legs onto the rock into which the cross is fixed. Even in the deepest winter mists, the fiery red stands out against the white skin, so that as they walk many sisters feel their eyes pulled upward to register the damage before moving on.

Of course not everyone sees or feels the same thing: this too was a revelation that came early to her. For some, usually the ones who come youngest or live longest, the very habit of such images has made them familiar, ordinary even—Christ’s death as a kind of furniture, glimpsed out of the corner of an eye when hurrying, late for office, or marking the usual route from one place to another. For others it is a reason, some might say an excuse, for decoration: the exquisite beauty of Suora Camilla’s silver crucified Christ or the ostentation of the abbess’s jeweled one.

Then there are the few—Suora Perseveranza is the most active—who in contrast find the experience of His suffering so constantly new and affecting that it makes them yearn to share the agony. Or those so moved by His resignation and loneliness on the cross that they are in danger of being constantly overwhelmed by the pity of it all. Before she had been confined to the infirmary, Suora Clementia could be found at all hours of the day and night huddled over the crucifixion in the cloisters trying to wipe the blood from His feet with a cloth. She had always been consumed by her compassion for Christ (more, it must be said, than she ever showed toward her fellow nuns), but recently she had spent so much of her life weeping that the abbess decided she would do better in with the sick. Zuana herself had been less sure. In many ways Clementia had seemed quite content being sad, and too many touched old souls together in the same place can create their own wind of madness. It is true that the old nun cries less now but, separated from familiar surroundings, what was left of her mind has slipped away with her sorrow, hence her distress and occasional night wanderings.

Still, better her than the ones who suffer for effect, parading His pain like their coat of arms. The worst offender here is Suora Elena, who spends her life telling anyone who will listen how much she endures. “Oh, I could not sleep last night because of the great stabbing in my side.” Or, limping into chapel wincing and groaning until someone is forced to ask her what is wrong, “Oh, it pleases God to let a thigh wound fester. I am grateful for it, though it is nothing compared with His suffering,” before limping off, smug in the knowledge that He has marked her out as more special than anyone else—though those with sharp eyes might notice how quickly she recovers her step when she thinks no one is watching.

ZUANA, IN CONTRAST
, has never felt any of these things.

Her fault—for she understands that is what it is—lies in a different direction: the need to heal Him. So much is she her father’s daughter that by the time she became old enough to understand the Passion of Christ her instinct had been to save rather than worship Him. In her first weeks in the convent, when her future had felt like a life sentence, she had kept herself from despair during the endless hours in chapel by studying that great hanging body, detailing the ways in which, had she been called upon, she might have repaired the damage: which poultices and herbs she might have used to stanch the flow of blood, the salves with which she would have treated the whiplashes and the cuts, the ointments she would have rubbed around the jagged flesh to avoid infection. Even, most heretical of all, the draft she might have given Him to blunt the agony.

Had her father ever felt the same thing? She wonders sometimes what he would have made of this world in which she lives now. He had not been a total stranger to it. As a doctor at the university with connections to the court, he had occasionally been called upon to treat noble nuns, if their condition was dangerous enough and the abbess sanctioned his visit. Perhaps if he had taken her with him, she might have found it easier. As it was, she only heard these stories when he wrote them up in his treatment books. And out of those she remembers only one: the time he came back from a convent on the outskirts of the city where he treated a nun who had done violence to herself: first beating her head against the wall until the blood ran and then, when they confined her to her cell, somehow getting hold of a kitchen knife with which she stabbed herself a dozen times before they prized the weapon away from her. When he arrived she had been tied down and was delirious, her life dripping out through those dozen wounds onto the floor. So much blood had been lost there was nothing he could do except offer something to help her with the shock and the suffering. But the abbess had refused, convinced that the devil was inside her now and that if she was soothed by the potion he might renew his attack. “When I questioned them, they said no one had noticed anything amiss with her before that morning,” he had said, shaking his head, though whether from disbelief or pity he did not say.