Nun (9781609459109) (24 page)

It wasn't very difficult for me to arrange to see you again; it was enough to make a point of spending more time socializing with your extended family. Every brief meeting we had only confirmed my love. I kept track of your fate through contacts and—let me admit it—spies. Even before the birth of our only son, our conjugal relationship had flickered, and so it remains. Georgina does not enjoy good health, and I feel that I am responsible for that: she has certainly paid a high price for refusing to believe me. She lives in France and I go to see her four times a year. Our child is at boarding school. I have no intention of failing to maintain her, nor would I ever want to humiliate her.

I love you. More than before, if that's possible. I can't stand this life of waiting and celibacy any longer. We are made for one another. We think alike—you like Pamela more than you do Clarissa—we believe in a constitutional monarchy more than we do in a republic, we laugh at the same things, we have the same tastes, we brood over the same thoughts. I have learned all this from your comments on the books that I send you and from the notes that you've written me recently.

I offer you and I give you my word of honor that you will always have my love, ample economic independence, and the life that you want to live, where and as you wish. I am willing to move to Sicily, to remain in Naples, or to go to any other country you care to choose. I want your happiness and my own. And I want children with you, children who would feel no lack or disadvantage with respect to their older brother.

I cannot offer you marriage.

I wonder, however, just what “marriage” could mean, in your eyes and mine, if not a promise between two people to love and respect one another to the exclusion of others, and to raise a family together. I never made such a promise to Georgina. I am more than willing to do so with you. You too have made a marriage that you regret, with Christ; you took the veil to satisfy your family and to avoid much worse. You lack a vocation. A “marriage” between the two of us would be acceptable in God's sight, as it would be the only marriage desired and intended.

I have no doubt that my feelings might indeed be shared by you, and perhaps they really are. In order to be able to be closer to you, I have accepted a diplomatic role between our respective governments; at times I am summoned to London or I am sent to Sicily. In the future my interests will take me to England, unless I receive an answer from you, and I urge you to give me your answer as soon as you are able, but not before reading the novel that I enclose.

It is full-blooded and carnal. Like the relationship that I desire with you.

Yours always,

James

 

Agata was weeping. She had so missed the English books that he sent her, and now she understood why he had stopped. He had taken her silence as a refusal. It had never occurred to her that she might love him and now, as in a mosaic, she reconstructed his personality through his literary choices. She felt a stirring within her. Exhausted, she fell asleep with the letter in her hand.

A
gata missed the choir—the musky aroma of freshly waxed wood, the dense cool air that poured in through the open windows, the wafting gusts of incense, the rituals, the chants and songs, the silences. Chanting the Psalter had become part of her very being. Those were moments when she actually found herself desiring the seclusion of the cloister, though afterwards she revised her views, blushing with no one to see how deeply she depended on her senses. One afternoon, eaten alive by her yearning for
her
choir, she went to the church of San Giorgio Stilita; she took a seat in the back pew, in the shadows, to keep from being noticed. From there she would rejoin her sister nuns. She waited for the hour of the Vespers in the silence of the empty church. Then she heard a scraping of feet. Three tall well dressed men were taking a tour of the church, beginning with the side chapels. The youngest man was acting as their guide. The young man had turned and with a sweep of his arm was showing them the choir above the portal. Agata recognized the blond beard: it was James Garson. It seemed to her that their eyes had locked. He continued the tour, as if he hadn't recognized her. She covered her face with her hands and went on praying.

She peeked out at him from between her fingers. James had returned to the transept and was looking at the
comunichino
. In that instant Agata felt something like an electric shock: she knew he thought of her with an almost animal intensity, and although she failed to understand it, she instinctively felt it in return. Then James caught up with the other two and together they headed slowly for the exit, admiring the rich decorations as they went. Just then he recognized her. Their eyes met for an instant; Agata felt her cheeks burn and she ducked her head suddenly: she prayed to God to help her understand her feelings for James.

 

Vespers was beginning.

Agata had sharp hearing and she heard the rustling footsteps of the nuns preparing for prayer in the choir. The few worshippers were mostly seated in the front pews.

“Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord,” intoned Donna Maria Assunta, and Agata, from her hiding place, beneath the choir, like the other choristers, remained seated as she intoned the psalm; then she stood up at the
Gloria
and like them lowered her head at the word “father.” At the end of the
Gloria
they began to sing the hymn of that day, the
Magnificat
:

 

Magnificat anima mea Dominum,

et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo;

quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae,

ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes
.

 

As if she were with her sister nuns in the Choir, Agata saw one of the Padellani cousins go to the lectern for the reading. She recognized her voice. Then, the Silence, followed by the responsory, antiphon to the song of Mary, intercessions, and the
Pater noster
. Agata nourished her soul in the choral prayer and asked God to show her the right path. She prayed with such intensity that she failed to notice that the Vespers were over and the church was now empty. The shuffling feet of the sacristan brought her back to reality, and she scurried out of the church before he recognized her.

 

She was already late getting back. Looking for a shortcut, she'd taken the wrong turning and now she was lost in a maze of alleys.

The hour when workers returned home had already passed. Poorly lit by the lamps that burned before the shrines of the saints, the narrow lanes of the
bassi
, the poorest part of Naples, were crowded with the many paupers who had no home to return to: a populace of faceless men, women, and children—vagabonds, mendicants, lepers, musicians. They stumbled along aimlessly, slowly because they had no idea where they were going, nor what would become of them by the time day dawned and they opened their eyes from sleep. Agata had lowered her hood over her face. There was no need: none of them were thinking of her.

She walked into a sort of funnel, a cul-de-sac that had been colonized by a cluster of paupers. Squatting on the ground in a circle, they were slurping soup and gnawing on something dry that was left over or had been wheedled from some rich person's table. Old men with children clutching their legs and invalids were sitting on chairs or reclining on pallets. A couple of them looked at her without asking a thing. In a few adjoining hovels, women had finished their meal and were sweeping the filth out of their houses and directly onto the stone slabs of the street. Every so often the quiet muttering was interrupted by the sound of a patrol, the sound of booted feet, either the police or the army.

In the back alleys night was not all that different from daytime. Carts towering with loads of vegetables swayed as they creaked through crowds of walkers, threatening to sweep away the chairs set out in front of street doors, to drag down laundry hanging out to dry. The balconies were cluttered with pots and pans and oddly shaped receptacles, crates, splintered chairs, with sleepy old men perched on them, half-naked children wandering in and out of the hovels, and shopping baskets waiting to be let down—but in the
bassi
, people never went shopping, they stole what they needed.

Agata's eyes saw nothing but James, his golden beard, handsome as the Christ of the Holy Staircase in the hall of the
comunichino
. Beneath a wall shrine housing an effigy of the Virgin Mary—eyes raised heavenward, diaphanous smile—what had from a distance seemed like two children actually turned out to be two adolescent lovers. The young woman had her back to the edicule and her skirt hoisted around her hips: a beggar boy, panting, was mounting her. Agata lowered her eyes; as she went past she glanced at their bare feet: the girl's feet were light and curling as if she were levitating, his feet, braced and thrusting. She envied them.

She'd made her way through the maze of narrow lanes to a thoroughfare. The main façade of the conservatory of Smirne occupied an entire block–three rows of black windows with double grilles and the vast Renaissance portal. It looked like the backdrop for a stage play.

Agata knocked at the heavy portal: no answer. The infrequent passersby glanced at her, uncertain whether they should offer to help. She knocked again and again. From high above came the voice of the sister doorkeeper: “Madame abbess says that you know perfectly well: those who fail to return by the appointed hour can come back tomorrow morning.” Seized by panic, Agata pleaded; then with all the arrogance of the Padellanis, she commanded the doorkeeper to open the door immediately, threatening to report her to the cardinal; when silence was the only response, she went back to pleading. In the end, she was forced to face up to it: she would have to wait there until morning. She was afraid. The shadows of night were growing thicker and darker; the desperadoes were emerging from the
bassi
and the carriages of the nobility began to pick up their pace. Shoulders wedged into the corner between the portal and the massive stone doorjamb, Agata glanced warily around her and mechanically repeated the
Aves
and the
Paters
in order to invoke divine protection.

The clattering sound of horses' hooves, the screech of iron wheels on the cobbled street. The abbess's voice, calling down from high above: “What excuse do you want to palm off on me this time?” was drowned out.

Flattened against the conservatory's heavy wooden doors, Agata was panting. The darkness was beginning to be broken by the light of dawn. The meowing of cats, the creaking of carts, the crowing of caged roosters. In the hundreds of times that she attempted to relive that night, Agata was never fully able to reconstruct the sequence of emotions and events.

She couldn't remember whether in the carriage James had taken her hand to place it against his cheek or to kiss it; she couldn't remember whether she had first laid her veiled head against his shoulder, or whether instead he had wrapped his arm around her shoulders, drawing her toward him.

She couldn't remember when she realized that the carriage was heading down toward the harbor, when she had first glimpsed the yacht moored along the wharf, or even when the carriage rolled up a planked gangway on board the vast yacht, threading its way carefully up a ramp no broader than a cattle path through a field.

She couldn't remember when and where, aboard the yacht, they had eaten salted biscuits and olives, or even whether they had eaten bread and cheese instead.

She couldn't remember which of the two of them had first started talking about the books that he sent her and that she read. She couldn't remember when they'd started talking about themselves—the more one talked, the more the other drank in the other's words, and the more they felt a swelling sense of urgency to know one another completely.

She couldn't remember which of the two of them had removed the pin that held up her veil, pulling away the veil itself, who had untied the knot on the string that held her wimple snug around her face, who had tugged free the hairnet that imprisoned her short curls.

She couldn't remember whether it had been she who removed his jacket and one by one undid his mother-of-pearl shirt buttons.

And she remembered little or nothing of what came afterwards, when they lay as if they were glued together, like dogs, she remembered only that it seemed completely normal, right, and in accordance with God's will, that the two of them should love each other carnally, in the simple and joyful way in which they acknowledged one another as lovers and glorified their love.

The only thing that Agata recalled clearly was the exchange of words, before dawn, when the time had come to take leave of one another.

She'd said to him, with a feeling of death in her heart, that it was too late for them to have a life together; he had replied, decisively: “It could never be too late for the two of us,” and slipped into her hands his little book of poems by Keats, with his penciled notations.

M
adame abbess wishes to see you.” The lay sister swung open the door. It was as if the abbess had been waiting in ambush in the conciergerie; she appeared before her as she was climbing the first flight of stairs, and she climbed alongside her, declaiming in a thunderous, unclear voice: “I'm going to speak to the vicar general this very day. You aren't leaving here again, and if you do, you'll never come back.” After which, she hurried up the last ramp two steps at a time; once they reached the third floor, she vanished.

Agata was a prisoner, and no one had told her how long she would have to remain there. They brought her meals in the cell—bread, soup, sometimes fruit—in silence, and they gave her enough water to drink and wash herself with a damp washcloth. She was obliged to wear the same clothes every day. When she swept and dusted her cell, the dirt remained in a pile in the corner. There was a stale stench in the room. A servingwoman was in charge of changing the chamber pot once a day; but as for any other cleaning—nothing. By day, flies and ants took away whatever they found, at night, cockroaches emerged from their dens and fed on the filth, watched by mice that, from high atop the window sill, tipped their snouts down curiously before shuttling along to the next cell along the window ledge.

She had become accustomed to the squalor, but she suffered from the lack of daylight, which meant that she could only read during the hours when the sunshine streamed directly onto the wall. She had decided to reread, in the order in which she had received them, all the books that James had sent her, and she tried to puzzle out how and why he had selected them. Sometimes she managed to find a common thread, and when she did she felt close to him and loved him even more. During the rest of the time, she prayed intensely for herself and for James and often she dozed off. Since she wasn't doing any physical exercise, and eating as little as she was, she slid into a consoling state of lethargy. Then she'd close her eyes and listen to the noises of the city. Gradually, she remembered the words of a poem that James had recited to her:

 

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!

Shutting with careful fingers and benign

Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,

Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;

O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,

In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes.

 

She had learned that city life too has its own punctuation of time. In the morning, there was the traffic of the farmers, fishermen, and market gardeners who brought food to feed the city: she heard the clucking of cartloads of hens, the anxious cooing of pigeons in cages, and the tingling bells of nanny goats, their udders swollen with milk. Then there were the voices of strolling vendors and craftsmen—knife sharpeners, cobblers—and those who set up shop with a rag on the pavement or on a folding table, to sell anything imaginable: fruit, vegetables, needles, thread, buttons, scissors, candles, playing cards, each and every one calling and praising their merchandise. More or less at the same time, the guards and the soldiers passed by; the rhythmic pounding of their feet on the cobblestones echoed in her cell. The sound of the shoes of horses pulling aristocratic carriages threw her into a frenzy: each time she imagined that it was James and dreamed that he was leaning out in hopes of catching a glimpse of her; he didn't know that she was a prisoner. At times like that, Agata was seized with an overwhelming need to look out the window. She would climb up on the bed: from there, through the window grates, she could see the convent across the way and a patch of sky between two buildings. Sometimes, a dove or even a seagull would cross the sky.

 

Three weeks later, the abbess came into her cell. She sniffed the fetid air and then told Agata that the cardinal would have to prolong his stay in Rome; Agata would have to wait, and in the meanwhile, there could be no further contact with the outside world.

She was afraid that she would never see James again, and her revulsion for food returned. She scorned herself for making use of the weapons of weakness—misdirected violence, because it was turned on herself—but there was nothing that she could do about it: whenever she ate, she threw up. She lay in bed and dreamed she was talking to James. He had told her that the conversation between them had begun during the crossing from Messina to Naples, even though at the time she had not realized it; it wouldn't be interrupted again until they finally saw one another, and then they'd never be parted. Agata believed it. Intensely.