Passion Blue (7 page)

“Yes.”

“Before God, are you free of madness, melancholy,
or disease?”

“Yes.”

“Then today and in the sight of God, we will effect your entry into the novitiate of Santa Marta, receiving your vows and bestowing on you the habit of our community. Who stands witness to this sacred passage?”

“I do,” Suor Margarita said.

“Postulant Giulia Borromeo, remove your clothes.”

Giulia obeyed, unfastening her shoes, unbelting her dress, pulling her chemise over her head. She folded each garment neatly as she took it off, piling them all beside the novice clothing. She stood exposed and naked under Madre Damiana’s unblinking regard. Instinctively, she crossed her arms over her breasts.

“Kneel,” Madre Damiana said.

The marble was hard under Giulia’s knees. Though it was not cold, she was shivering.

“O mighty God,” Madre Damiana said, “accept this girl who seeks to pledge her life to You, to become the bride of Your holy Son, Jesus Christ. She has put off her secular garments and comes to You in her skin, for naked we are born into the profane world, and naked we must be when we are reborn to the sacred world. Giulia, give me your hands.”

The abbess laid her staff on the floor and reached to take Giulia’s icy fingers in her own.

“Giulia Borromeo, do you swear yourself to poverty, chastity, and obedience in the novitiate of Santa Marta?”

“Yes,” Giulia said through chattering teeth, because it was not possible to say anything else. But inside herself,
with every ounce of will, she cried
No!

“Do you swear yourself to work, prayer, and contemplation in the novitiate of Santa Marta?”

“Yes.”
Oh, God forgive me, no, no, no!

“It is well.” The abbess released Giulia’s hands and reached into her pocket, producing a small silver flask. “I mark you now with consecrated oil as a sign of your pledge.” She moistened her thumb with the contents of the flask and traced a cross on Giulia’s forehead. “Rise, novice Giulia, and put on your new clothes.”

Giulia stumbled as she got to her feet; Suor Margarita steadied her. With shaking hands she pulled on the coarse linen chemise and the rough gray dress, kneeling again to tie on the sandals from the Countess’s trousseau chest. Suor Margarita helped her with the white kerchief, wrapping it around her head and knotting the ends so that no hair showed.

“You are welcome among us.” Madre Damiana drew Giulia close and set a kiss upon her cheek. “Go now to your duties.”

Giulia followed Suor Margarita into the convent’s kitchen, a cavernous space crammed with stoves, racks of pots and pans and crockery, and several long tables where white-veiled nuns, their sleeves tied back and their habits swathed in aprons, were preparing food. It was as hot as an oven, but the smells were delicious, and Giulia remembered that she hadn’t eaten since the morning.

“Sit there.” Suor Margarita pointed to a bench in the corner. “I must go sing Vespers and then bring
my novices to supper, but I’ll be back to fetch you after that. I’ll see you’re brought something to eat.”

She bustled off. One of the nuns brought over a bowl of lamb and olive stew and a hunk of fresh bread, offering it silently but with a smile. Giulia devoured it. Watching the busy scene before her, she thought miserably of the false oaths she had just sworn, in sight of God, before the Cross. Another lie to add to the many she had told since she learned she was to be sent away, another sin to increase the ones she already carried. Through the scents of the kitchen, she could still smell the oil with which the abbess had marked her, heavy-sweet and musty. She pulled the hanging sleeve of her novice habit over her hand and scrubbed at her forehead, scrubbing and scrubbing until her skin felt sore.

By the time Suor Margarita returned, cauldrons of water had been set to boil, and the kitchen workers were bringing in trays stacked with dirty dishes. Giulia followed the novice mistress through the maze of corridors. The day seemed like a long nightmare that would not end.

The sound of voices rose as they neared the dormitory. Inside, in a flicker of candlelight that made the space no more cheerful, girls sat in groups on the beds or stood at the windows, talking, laughing, playing games.

“Girls, girls!” Suor Margarita clapped her hands.

The talk ceased. They all turned to look: ten pairs of eyes in ten watchful faces, ten bodies clad in identical gray gowns, ten heads wrapped in identical white
kerchiefs.

“This is Giulia Borromeo, all the way from Milan. I know you’ll do everything you can to make her welcome and help her learn our ways. Give Giulia a nice greeting, please!”

“Hello, Giulia,” they chorused. Giulia, uneasy under so many eyes, nodded.

“Good, good. Now go in, Giulia, and meet your new friends.” Suor Margarita gave Giulia a little push. “Alessia, you are in charge.”

“Yes, Suor Margarita,” said one of the girls in the group by the window.

The novice mistress’s brisk footsteps receded down the hall. Most of the novices were already turning back to their interrupted activities, but the girls by the window still stared, their expressions unwelcoming, as Giulia crossed to her bed.

On the neighboring mattress, two novices were playing some sort of game.

“Hello,” said one of them, a pretty girl of about sixteen, with dark curls escaping from her kerchief. The other, the same age or perhaps a little younger, covered her mouth and giggled. “Watch out,” she whispered, her eyes moving beyond Giulia to something at her back.

Giulia turned. The girl Suor Margarita had put in charge of the dormitory had detached herself from her friends.

“I’m Alessia,” she said, her tone conveying the extreme importance of this information, and her extreme condescension in providing it. She looked
older than the others, perhaps nineteen, with a prominent jaw and crooked teeth. She stood with her hands folded into her sleeves, like Suor Margarita. “I’m the senior novice here. By God’s grace, I take my vows at year’s end.”

“And we can’t wait,” one of the game-players muttered.

Alessia shot her a dagger look, then returned her attention to Giulia. “Are you to be a choir nun, new girl, or a
conversa
?”

“I’m sorry,” Giulia said. “I don’t know what those are.”

“A choir nun is a noblewoman,” Alessia said in a patient voice, as if Giulia were a small and very stupid child. “We wear the black veil, and say the Holy Offices, and hold the positions of authority. A
conversa
is a commoner. They wear the white veil, and do the servants’ work.”

“I don’t know which I am. No one told me.”

Alessia sighed. “Surely you know whether you’re noble or common.”

Giulia felt the stresses of the long day flare abruptly into anger. “My father was Count Federico di Assulo Borromeo of Milan,” she snapped. “My mother was a seamstress in his household. So why don’t you tell me, if you can, whether I am noble or common?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it.” Alessia’s lip curled. “I knew you were too coarse to be noble, with that big nose of yours.”

“My nose is from my father. That’s one part of me that is noble beyond a doubt.”

A flush had risen to Alessia’s cheeks, visible even in the dim candlelight. “You’ll have to do something about your pride, new girl, if you want to get along here. We don’t like girls who have ideas above their station.”

She turned on her heel and stalked back to her friends. Beside Giulia, the game-players were snickering.

“Coarse indeed,” said the one who’d said hello. “She should talk, with her ugly horse-face.”

“You’re in for it now,” said the other. She was as homely as her friend was pretty, with small mistrustful eyes. “She’s not used to being talked back to.”

“I’m Isotta,” said the pretty one. “That’s Bice. We’re
conversae
too.”

“I’m Giulia.”

“We know,” Isotta said. “You can join our game, if you want.”

Later, after Suor Margarita had returned to supervise the removing of habits, the saying of prayers, and the blowing out of candles, Giulia lay on her back, staring up at the shadowed ceiling. The window shutters had been opened to let in the cool night air; if she tipped back her head, she could see, through the window above her bed, a slice of sky dusted with pinpoint stars.

Exhausted as she was, she couldn’t fall asleep in this unfamiliar place. For nearly all her life, she’d felt alone among the people who surrounded her. Now she was alone in a different way—alone among
strangers. She had always felt she did not belong at Palazzo Borromeo, but at least it had been home. At least there had been two people who loved her. She pictured Annalena’s face, and Maestro’s. She thought, as she hadn’t for a long time, of the way her mother used to smooth her hair back before she slept.

The tears she’d fought all day came at last. She buried her face in her hard pillow so the others wouldn’t hear.

The bell for Prime began to ring just after dawn, joining other bells in monasteries and nunneries all over Padua. Prime was the third of the eight Holy Offices, or prayer services, that gave structure to the monastic day, but at Santa Marta the nuns had a special dispensation to combine it with Matins and Lauds, the two night Offices, so they weren’t forced to get up twice in the middle of the night.

The bells brought Giulia awake, and to the knowledge, like a stone pressing on her chest, that four weeks had passed and she was still a prisoner at Santa Marta.

She got out of bed. Around her in the half-light of
early morning, the other novices yawned, stretched, and rubbed their eyes. Suor Margarita came bustling in, clapping her hands, the signal for the girls to line up at the washbasin. Alessia, closest to her final vows, was first, while Giulia, the most recently arrived, brought up the rear. Not much water remained by the time her turn came, the other girls having splashed much of it out onto the floor. She washed her face, neck, and hands, then returned to her bed and took her scratchy novice dress out of the trousseau chest where she folded it at night.

Pulling it on over her chemise, she was aware of the talisman against her skin. She had retrieved it, along with the pouch that held her horoscope fragment, the night after her arrival, counting slowly to a thousand after the candles were blown out, then slipping out of bed and creeping to the fireplace, dreading all the while that one of the girls would wake. She could wear the pouch and talisman in safety, for they were hidden by the high neck of her chemise. There was no danger of anyone glimpsing them when she was undressing either—except for the vestition ceremony, no one at Santa Marta ever saw anyone else unclothed. A novice slept in her chemise, washed without taking it off, and changed it once a week by putting a new chemise over her head while unlacing the old one and letting it slip over her shoulders and fall at her feet.

Giulia bound up her hair as best she could—she had yet to perfect the trick of knotting the kerchief-ends so her braid wouldn’t fall out—then made her bed
according to Suor Margarita’s exacting requirements, tugging the blanket smooth, placing the pillow just so. The novice mistress also expected her girls to sweep the floors, fetch the wash water, and empty the chamber pots—something that caused grumbling, because in other convents such work was done by the
conversae
, the servant nuns, at least for the girls of noble blood. Suor Margarita supervised, pacing between the beds, clapping her hands or snapping her fingers at any sign of dawdling or whispering. Giulia had been certain she was going to hate Suor Margarita, but for all her attention to discipline, the novice mistress was not unkind. The other night, when Paola had had the toothache, she’d come in three times to change the girl’s compresses.

Suor Margarita clapped her hands again. The novices assembled for the walk to the refectory. Another clap, and they left the dormitory, hurrying through the corridors, hands clasped at their waists and eyes downcast, like a line of ducklings behind a mother duck. Others made way for them: black-veiled choir nuns returning from singing Prime, a lone
conversa
lugging a pile of linens so high she could hardly see over it.

The sun had risen by the time they reached the refectory, its first rays slanting through the east-facing windows. The refectory was the biggest room at Santa Marta, with whitewashed walls and a vaulted ceiling hung with a forest of chandeliers. Tables and benches to accommodate nearly one hundred and fifty nuns and novices were arranged across the red
tile floor.

Suor Margarita led the way to the novices’ table. Giulia’s seat faced the dais at the head of the room, where Madre Damiana and the other nuns of high authority sat. Above the dais, an enormous fresco of the Last Supper spanned the wall, its rightmost third hidden behind a canvas-draped scaffolding. In the portion Giulia was able to see, the painted disciples enjoyed themselves at the banquet, lifting glasses, throwing back their heads in laughter, leaning toward one another to exchange words or gestures. Their poses were stylized, but their faces were the faces of real people, each one individual and distinct. Jesus sat in their midst, sad amid the revelry, knowing what his companions did not yet understand. All the colors were beautiful, but Giulia thought the sapphire blue of Jesus’ cloak was most beautiful of all, a color so deep and yet so clear that it seemed to shine with its own inner light.

The fresco wasn’t the first painting Giulia had seen. There were the faded hunting scenes in the antechambers of Palazzo Borromeo, the altarpiece in the family’s chapel, and the small, jewel-like Annunciation in her father’s study, which he’d let her look at whenever she visited him. But none of them had been anything like this fresco—a painting that did not simply depict a series of images, but told a story, speaking to the heart and mind as well as to the eyes. Each time Giulia looked at it, she noticed something new: the angle of a disciple’s gesture, the nuance of another’s expression, the bruises
on the apricots in the dish by Jesus’ right hand, the dog peeping from under the tablecloth, the fact that the chandeliers, as well as the ceiling and windows, were exactly like those of the real refectory around her, so that each meal eaten here took on a little of the sanctity of that ancient, holy Supper. Looking at the fresco made her fingers burn, the way they did when she saw something she especially wanted to draw. She couldn’t bear, sometimes, how much she missed her sketchbook.