The Palace (31 page)

Suor Merzede had just begun the Agnus Dei when there was a disturbance at the
back of the chapel. The assembled Celestiane nuns persevered through the prayer
until the noise became too great. With patient resignation the familiar Latin
words straggled to a stop and Suor Signale stepped out of the choir to look to
her unfortunate charge.

Estasia shrieked as the nun touched her. "No! Nothing holy!" She twisted
violently, crouching low as Suor Signale approached her once again. "No, nothing
holy! I won't have it!"

Suor Signale eluded Estasia's flailing hands and long fingernails, saying
gently, "Dear Estasia, don't be troubled. If you will come with me, you may be
comfortable once again."

By this time Suor Merzede, Superiora of the Sacro Infante convent, had come
to join Suor Signale, and said in an undervoice, "She's getting worse."

"Yes, she is," Suor Signale agreed in an undervoice, then tried once more to
calm Estasia. "No, my dear, don't be troubled in this way. Pray to God to
forgive you. He is the beginning of tranquillity."

It was doubtful that Estasia heard her at all. She had fallen to her knees
and wailed in a hideous voice. "The Devil is tempting me. See how he tempts me!"
She threw herself backward. "See how he uses me.
See what he does to me
!"
Her skirts were flung back and she spread her thighs.

"Oh, dear." Suor Signale sighed. "It will take time, Superiora. I'm afraid
these seizures don't pass quickly. In a moment she will say that a thousand
devils are ravishing her." The nun crossed herself. "It puts me out of all
charity with her." It was a terrible admission for the nun to make.

"What God sends you, accept gladly in His name," Suor Merzede admonished her,
but gently. "See if you can persuade her to confess. I know you have before,"
she said resignedly. "She has resisted. But we must not be remiss in our faith
because others wander." With that she turned once again and motioned to the
assembled nuns to resume their prayers.

The gentle petition of the Agnus Dei filled the chapel as Suor Signale moved
nearer to Estasia.

"No! No!
No
!" The cry rent the prayers, but the nuns paid no
attention, their voices keeping up the words in a steady rhythm. Estasia flung
herself to the stone floor and began to pull off the old gonella she wore.

"Now, sweet Donna Estasia," Suor Signale said, a certain asperity creeping
into her tone. "You must not demean yourself this way. Ask God to give you
strength to resist."

Estasia struck out at her, her hands like claws, her hazel eyes livid with
hatred. "You shall not touch me! It is not for you to touch me. I don't want
you. I want the other. See where the demons come. See how they stretch out their
hands to me. See how they caress me, how they burn my flesh with their touch."
She was almost naked now, and she lay supine, her legs apart, her head flung
back. "No man, no one has done this to me. Only the demons can gratify my
senses. They fill me everywhere." Her breathing slowed, sighed. She panted
deeply. "Deeper! Deeper! Your seed burns me like vitriol. Your members are hot
as furnace hooks." Her body tensed, spasmed, she shouted terrible blasphemies,
and then fell back heavily, her face slicked with sweat, her body quiet.

Suor Signale had watched this with annoyed detachment, and recognized the end
of the episode. She was relieved that it had taken no longer. Other times
Estasia had writhed for hours, bruising herself, digging wounds into her flesh
with her fingernails. This seizure had been as brief as it was intense, and Suor
Signale was glad it was over. She knew from past experience that it was these
times immediately following her erotic fits that Estasia was the most tractable,
the most cooperative.

Gathering up Estasia's discarded gonella, Suor Signale reached gently for her
suddenly lethargic charge. "Buona Donna, cover yourself. It isn't seemly for you
to be naked in chapel. For your duty to the Good God Who loves you, treat
yourself with the respect that is due to one of His creatures."

"Uum?" Estasia turned to the nun, and realization flooded her. Her eyes grew
bright, and she looked down, sickened, at her voluptuous body, and then at the
other Celestiane Sisters who continued their devotions.

"It happened again?" she said, anguish in her tone, her eyes filling with
tears. "The devils came again?"

"You are better now," Suor Signale assured her, attempting once more to draw
her from the chapel.

"Oh, good Sisters," Estasia cried aloud, "how can you bear one such as me?
Why do you not abandon me to my fate? Leave me on the mountainside where beasts
will tear me to pieces! I don't deserve your kindness. I deserve your wrath,
your curses." She cried, great racking sobs drowning the gentle susurrus of
prayers.

"Donna Estasia," Suor Signale said firmly as she took the weeping woman by
the shoulders, "control yourself. If you are so filled with shame, think of the
outrage you are committing at this moment." Inwardly the nun was horrified at
her own outburst, but it seemed to have a calming effect on Estasia, who
shuddered and clung suddenly to Suor Signale, making tiny gasps against her
coif.

"I am unworthy. I am unworthy. I am unworthy," Estasia murmured with the same
intensity that the nuns used in their repeated litanies.

Suor Signale clenched her hands on the beads of her rosary and admonished
herself to be charitable. "Donna Estasia," she said, pulling her tightly locked
hands away from her habit, "you are not doing as well as you should. It is
unwise of you to remain here. You are in need of rest and reflection." A thought
occurred to her. "Have you eaten today?"

Estasia shook her head. "I have no taste for food. I want only to think, to
beg God to forgive me, so that I can confess my great errors. So many sins. So
many, many sins." She gave the nun a sly sideways glance. "Do you envy me my
sins, Suor Signale?"

"No," the nun answered brusquely. "I envy no one their sins."

"But you would have liked mine," Estasia persisted. "I had a
great many
lovers, some of them very rich, some of them very beautiful men. They were all
intoxicated with me. They made themselves drunk with my body. Only I could
satisfy them. Don't you ever wish, in the dark of the night, when you lie alone
on your bed, that you had a lover who would so possess you that you were
yourself no longer?"

Suor Signale controlled her sense of outrage. "The love that fills me, Donna
Estasia," she said with asperity as she held open the door to the chapel, "is
the love of Christ. It is not a love of the body, but a love of the soul. It
does not pass when the tryst is over, when the heat of lust is spent."

Estasia laughed as she left the chapel beside Suor Signale. "You poor
creature. What do I care if I am damned, so long as the devils in hell cannot
resist me." There was a merry light in her face as she reached the door of her
cell a few steps beyond the cloister. "If lust is a sin in heaven, it must be a
virtue in hell." She giggled. "Therefore I will be virtuous."

Suor Signale blocked Estasia's way into the cell, and there was a quality of
light to her face made more penetrating by the white gorget, coif and wimple
that framed it. "Listen to me, Donna Estasia. You will send yourself to eternal
damnation with your loose words. Eternal damnation! You think that you will be
satisfied by demons because they assail you with pleasure, hideous pleasure now.
But how do you know what will become of you? And how many times can you be
ravished and still feel anything? Hell numbs you, and even the keenest agony
would be preferable to the unending, intolerable numbness. There is no passion,
not even the passion of hurt there. Hell is boredom, Estasia; it is satiety.
Glutted in every sense, you will be without strength, without joy, without
anguish throughout eternity, forever repeating that which brought you joy and
terror, but finding neither. What is to be gained? Why do you persist in your
error, when you know it can avail you nothing? Make confession. Be taken into
the Church again, and share in the joy that exalts the spirit and fills the
soul. You wanted to know if I ever missed a lover. What lover can lift me up as
the love of Christ does? What pleasure of the body compares with the
transcendent bliss of the soul?" She stopped abruptly and turned away from
Estasia. "Forgive me, Buona Donna. I didn't mean to speak to you in this way. It
is immodest of me, and improper."

Estasia was staring at her, and at the nun's apology she shook her head as if
waking from a dream. "No. You were right to speak to me thus. It's wrong of me
to revile you, when
I'm
the one in error." She stopped, then turned
away from Suor Signale, saying, "Do you
really
feel so transported? Is
the love of Christ so wonderful?" The words were helpless, almost childlike.

"Oh, Buona Donna!" Suor Signale's lustrous eyes filled with tears and she
reached to embrace Estasia. "There is nothing in the world that comes near it.
The greatest pleasures are pale in comparison. You think of your lovers and of
the ravishment of devils, but they are nothing, nothing at all. Christ is all
glory. His Mystery, His Splendor! there are no words to tell you what terrible
sweetness fills my heart at the thought of Him."

The cell was plain, whitewashed on walls and ceiling, the floor flagged with
natural stone. The narrow bed had a straw-filled mattress and two blankets.
There was no pillow. Over the bed hung a simple crucifix, and at the moment,
light touched it, making the wooden figure glow with the warm tones of life. A
small chest held Estasia's few belongings and also served as a chair. One candle
stood on the chest. Until that moment the room had seemed unutterably ugly, but
now, with Suor Signale's words sounding in her like a call to battle, the cell
was transformed. Dazed, Estasia walked into the cell and rather absently took
her gonella once again, only to lay it aside before she stretched out on the
comfortless bed.

"Donna Estasia… ?" the Celestian nun asked uncertainly, dreading another
seizure like the one in the chapel.

"I am well, Suor Signale," Estasia assured her in an odd, remote tone.

"But you must eat a meal yet, Buona Donna."

Estasia opened her eyes a moment. "It is not mortal bread that will nourish
me now," she announced, and closed her eyes again.

When she had shut the door of Estasia's cell, Suor Signale hastened to the
chapel. The last of the prayers were being recited, and Suor Signale said them
rapidly, not thinking too much of the significance of the words. Her thoughts
were still on Donna Estasia, and the more she thought, the more worried she
became.

"How is she, Suor Signale?" Suor Merzede asked when the ritual was over.

Suor Signale answered honestly, "I don't know. She's calmer than she's ever
been, and that should make me grateful, but I don't trust it. She might do
something… much worse." Without knowing what she did, Suor Signale tangled her
hands in her rosary and began to move the beads automatically through her
fingers.

"Do you think she could go home?"

"If she remains as she is now…" Suor Signale broke off, frowning.

"You have some concern, Suor Signale. Tell me what it is." The Superiora
rarely gave orders, but this was plainly one of those occasions. She waited
while the nun gathered her thoughts.

"If she would only confess. Then perhaps there would be no more of this
reveling with demons. Perhaps they are demons, and they do assault her as she
claims. And perhaps they are mere dreams, and she visits them on herself." She
hesitated, knowing she was perilously near heresy.

"Go on," Suor Merzede encouraged her. "If you are in the wrong, God will mete
out your punishment. But if you are right, it is your duty to speak so that the
soul of Donna Estasia may be saved."

"As you wish, Suor Merzede." Suor Signale said against a sudden tightness in
her throat. Her eyes closed as she composed herself, breathing a prayer for
guidance before she said, "Donna Estasia had many lovers after she became a
widow. It's common knowledge. And it was rumored that she satisfied them in many
ways, including some that are contrary to the teaching of the Church. If that's
so, then she may long for those carnal acts, and being unable to achieve them
any other way, entrusts them to the demons of her mind." She gave her Superiora
a defiant stare. "I think she wants the demons. I think she enjoys them."

"And that's why you fear her calm now?" Suor Merzede nodded as she considered
it. "I have seen this before, once or twice. The women were not usually young
and beautiful. But it is possible." She gazed pensively at Suor Signale. "Her
cousin Sandro Filipepi comes tomorrow to see her. What do you think?"

"He should see her," Suor Signale said promptly.

"And should he take her home?"

This time it took Suor Signale some little time to answer. "No. I think that
until she confesses, it would be better that she remain with us."

Suor Merzede nodded once more. "I believe you're right, Suor Signale. I pray
God gives me the words to persuade Filipepi. There will be trouble enough if she
remains here. But should she go into the world again, who knows what would
happen?"

Suor Signale crossed herself and joined her hands and began to pray. After a
moment, when Suor Merzede had left her, she dropped to her knees, and as her
rapture grew, she swayed deliriously and then fell forward onto the floor.

Text of two identical letters from il Conte Francesco Ragoczy da San Germano
to the clerk of la Signoria, Gradazo Ondante, and to Ippolito Andrea Cinquecampi,
officer of i Lanzi, written simultaneously with the left and right hands:

To the most respected clerk of i Priori and Console/ To the excellent
Capitano Ippolito Andrea Cinquecampi, il Conte Francesco Ragoczy da San Germano
commends himself and asks that you will consider this report and act upon it
accordingly.

Yesterday, being the Feast of San Giocoppo, I had occasion to be away from my
palazzo for many hours. Owing to the holiness of the day, I dismissed all but
one of my servants so that they might spend the time in devotion appropriate to
the honoring of the Apostle. The remaining servant was my houseman, Ruggiero,
who is known to you. He, being an honest and industrious man, was busy with
household accounts in a room where I keep such records, toward the rear of my
palazzo. I wish you to realize that Ruggiero is not a young man, and his labors
are as much as he can accommodate.

The day being holy and the city of Fiorenza at its devotions, I thought my
home and property safe. But as it turned out, this was not the case. A person or
persons unknown to my servant broke into the house. They subdued my houseman at
the points of their swords and they bound him in the stable while the man who
surprised Ruggiero and his companions ransacked my palazzo. Apparently they were
after coins and other such materials, for they went to the room where I keep my
scales and other instruments of measurement. They took three of the scales, most
of the weights, and a certain amount of gold which was there to be weighed.

Also, they took two manuscripts bound in leather and written in a tongue they
cannot possibly understand. The loss of that manuscript is a major one for me,
far exceeding the worth of the gold.

In the process of robbing my weighing room, they broke several of the
instruments, and I invite you to send your agent or come yourself to assess the
damage that was done.

I am abashed with the need to remind you that members of my household have
suffered at the hands of unknown Fiorenzan rowdies before. Magister Branco is
still not recovered from his beating. And now, this second intrusion makes it
necessary and I once again request that you enforce the laws that govern la
Repubblica. If for some reason you are unwilling or unable to do so, I will be
forced to seek other remedies.

Let me assure you that I look forward to receiving you or your agent at the
nearest possible hour. I am certain that if you are willing to examine the
evidence you will see that there has been an injustice committed here.

In happy anticipation of the mutually satisfactory conclusion of this
lamentable affair, I am honored to sign myself.

Francesco Ragoczy da San Germano

 

In Fiorenza, May 2, 1494