The Remedy (2 page)
It seemed such an agreeable place. One of the loveliest gardens in Venice was San Zaccaria’s. Still more pleasing was the orchard, with its delicate swathing of trees. The convent was more like a pleasure house in the country than a fortress for God’s brides. Terracotta enfilades laced with arches of white Istrian stone led to two graceful cloisters, one even ornamented with a loggia above. From the door of their cells the nuns saw the church cupola rising above them in harmonious composition with the apse and campanile. Just beyond our southern wall lay the Riva degli Schiavoni and the basin of San Marco: A fresh salt air purified the cloisters even in the summer, though in the winter, being at a low point of the city, they were sometimes briefly transformed into dismal lakes, and, once or twice, into mirrors of ice.
The convent was to the south of the church. At the necessary hours, the nuns filed there quietly and positioned themselves in severely grilled galleries. From behind those grilles they fixed their blinking eyes on the coal-black marble on the floors or rested them on Giovanni Bellini’s transcendent
Sacra Conversazione.
Or they sat in the wooden niches of the choir like so many carved saints, observing one another and the five gilded
chairs which were reserved for the Doge and his party on their annual visit to the church.
It was a small life, without privation but without any variation.
It was not for a person such as me.
When my parents delivered me to the convent after my misdemeanor with the artist, I was quite within my rights to assume the banishment was temporary and that shortly, after a period of demonstrable good behavior, I would be restored to my former freedom and privileges, with due reparations paid for the affront to my dignity To this end, at first I behaved as dumbly as a trained bear, docile as you please. It was hard to keep my temper; yet I did. I would earn my free passage home, no matter what. And there were those marzipan cakes to console me in the meantime.
But the days flowed into weeks, and still I was at San Zaccaria. When I might not leave the place, it seemed suddenly far less attractive. I winced at the noise of keys turning in locks. I shivered in the shadows of the high walls that I had previously perceived as cooling refuges from the Venetian sun.
I wrote to my parents, alternately apologizing, grieving, berating. They did not come to see me as the other parents did. I suspect that the sight of my misery would have shaken their resolve. Only once did my mother come, and I performed such a climacteric in front of her that she departed, biting her lip, without saying a word to me. I heard nothing from them after that.
Yet still I hoped they would relent. How could they leave me there?
The first sign of the finality of their decision was the arrival of my
cassa.
When the painted wedding box was delivered to my cell I lay on the floor and wept, for it meant that they had resolved that I was truly to be married to Christ. I wrenched open the lid, looking for the luxurious trousseau that had been accumulating for many years. My parents had replaced the gay silks and linens with cloth no humbler but in drab colors. There
was one more thing: a gilded casket that was intended for my blonde hair.
Even as a child, I had never thought my parents perfect in wisdom. Now I began to think them mad. Did they realize what they were doing, confining me against my will? Did they not realize how badly such an attempt must end?
I had not a breath of a vocation for the Church.
Until that moment the deepest religious experience of my life had been praying to God to uncreate Sundays, the most tedious day of the week. Now my every day was to become a Sunday, and repeated without mercy, not merely with the passive endurance of my previous life, but an active participation in rituals that I saw as degrading antics.
Now, under the eye of the
madre di consiglio
, I was sworn in as a
monaca da coro
, a proper choir nun, and not a mere
conversa
, the lower order of sisters who acted as our menials, who ate only what the refectory supplied and were always given the dark meat of the chicken. The poor
converge
wore wimples and chafing habits taken from the communal wardrobe. They kept their hair lopped and invisible. But the Golden Book girls like myself might be regarded indulgently if we chose to display our curls about our temples, wear jewellery (if we cared to—I did not), and silk stockings. We adapted our habits to fashion.
You may ask why I agreed to become a professed nun when I so hated my confinement at the convent. It was because I kept my eyes open and saw how the
converge
were treated. While I never accepted that I would spend the rest of my life in the convent, it seemed expedient to take my vows and exist on the superior plane. All Golden Book girls did.
In the preparations for this moment, the convent’s rituals were truly bridal. Those of us about to take our vows were cherished, feted, the subject of whispered admiration. The atmosphere was heightened in those days; my own skin felt like fine glass bottling hot blood. There was breathless giggling in the corridor outside my cell, and fine white sheets were laid on my bed. In it, I fell asleep with the melt of special cakes, sent up expressly from the
kitchen, in my mouth. I awoke to tender smiles and reverent fingers untying the ribbons of my chemise.
I married Christ in a delirium spun of sweetened wine.
I was only bitter later, when I saw little girls dreambound in the smell of almonds and burnt sugar in the orchard. For by then of course I knew full well that real nuns might not freely come and go from there and that God did not make such trees.
Take roots of Smalage 2 ounces; Calamus Aromaticus, Bay-berries, each 2 drams; Zedoary, Cubebs, each 1 dram and a half; Mace 2 scruples; Galingale, Grains of Paradise, each half a scruple; Dittany of Creet, Pennyroyal, each 1 handful; boil in Water 1 quart and white Wine 1 pint to 28 ounces; when it’s strained add Tincture of Saffron (made in Treacle Water) 1 ounce; Syrup of Stechas 3 ounces, mix.
It excites a new Orgasm in the Mass of Blood; and forcing it briskly into the Uterine Arteries, opens the Extremities of the Vessels
.
Other girls of my blood and station found the life of the convent quite convivial.
Not I.
I soon found out my mistake and regretted it bitterly. The seductions of God were short-lived in my hard little heart. Worse, I realized now that I had professed myself as a nun my parents had every excuse to leave me there. I lacerated myself with rabid recriminations. How had I been so stupid? So blind?
Despite my high status and kind treatment I chafed against everything. I could not bear to be there. I began to play them up, to behave as badly as I dared. I was forcibly escorted by different nuns to Prime, Tierce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. Impeccably devout nuns were made responsible for shaking me awake in the dead hours for Matins. The nuns who accompanied me to the choir-stalls chanted continuous, breathy meditations on the glories of the virginal state.
Some had their hair cut off and kept for them until their death in caskets such as my parents had sent me. I shuddered to conjure the image of that moment, when the nuns’ aged corpses would be reunited with their young hair, for it would be buried with them. This so that they might go to their wedding night with God all intact. I could not rid myself of the grotesque vision of their avid, aged faces, toothless as lampreys, curtained by their thirteen-year-old curls, awaiting their deflowering at His hands.
They were all thirteen, in their minds, forever, sealed into adolescent behavior. The natural appetites that were arising in them then were trapped just at the moment when they should be set free. With their primal urges stoppered up inside them, and not even softened by familial affections, they lived the rest of their lives enacting highly charged little melodramas, setting up rivalries and unleashing trails of poisoned whispers, just like a cancerous cluster of spiteful schoolgirls.
One morning, I lost control of myself and confronted two of the smuggest nuns, eyes uplifted and faces alight with their own superiority over fleshly things.
I hissed at them, “Chastity! All it means is that you think continually about the opposite!”
They cast their eyes down, refusing to meet mine. They exchanged glances under the demure shadows of their lids—they would take pleasure in reporting my unseemly outburst.
Yet I knew that there were others like myself among these women: unwilling nuns who had taken no internal vow of chastity. And, like me, they were all perfectly aware of the fact that the sexual enclosure of the Venetian convents might, with a little cleverness, be ruptured; and in no nunnery more so than at San Zaccaria. The city would have preferred a little more virginity in her nuns, but shrugged her shoulders. Those unruly instincts, if they could not be contained, must be managed. Blind eyes were turned where open eyes might lead to inconvenient scandal.
Everyone knows that a man is the only way out of a convent, and after two months as a
monaca
at San Zaccaria, with not the merest sign of mercy from my parents, I was already making my
own plans. I would be happy to leave on the arm of the first man who proffered one. A Venetian, a Frenchman, a Turk, for all I cared, might own that arm. I would have tripped out of that convent even on the withered elbow of the dread Hermippus, rumored to have lived a hundred and thirteen years already by constantly inhaling the breath of young girls and who scoured Europe looking for recruits to his boarding school. It was being said in those days that he was in Venice, on the hunt for little nuns, for he wanted to indulge in a practice prescribed by Marsilio Ficino for prolonging youth: to drink from the opened veins of young women. Yes, I swore to myself, I’d open my veins to a blood-sucking old man, if it would get me out of the living death of the convent.
So it was scarcely a problem to me if my savior turned out to be an Englishman who spoke Italian like a native and even Venetian like a Venetian, with only his little glint of northern coldness to mark him out from us.
He was visiting Venice on some business matter or other that was never made clear to me, quite possibly because I was not listening.
Who can listen when there is so much to touch and taste as this man offered me, even from his first glance, when he came to the
parlatorio
to see the girls, prattling like cloister parrots behind the wall of metal fretwork that contained us, barely, from the world. I saw him and something cold and vivid immediately congealed in my stomach. I rose from my seat and pressed my nose against the grille. He laughed at my frank interest and stepped forward, caressed my nose with a slow finger, as if picking me out from a litter of puppies.
This one.
How was I to know that was all it was to him?
Nor, in all likelihood, was it the first time.
Retrospectively, I have no doubts that my Anglican lover made a habit of cuckolding the Popish God by inducing brides of Christ to commit adultery. For him it was just another form of illicit commerce, of the style he liked so much. He was a man
who revelled in delinquency and malfeasance. Far more than plain dealing, he enjoyed dubious business pacts sealed in dark taverns and dangerous negotiations on deserted bridges in the early hours of the morning. So smuggling me out of a convent spiced the regular joys of lovemaking with a little risky free-trading.
I guessed none of that at the time. I simply rejoiced that this picking out met entirely with my own plans.
I knew almost nothing about him, and I liked it that way.
Some love is like gangrene
, I told myself,
it does not require the oxygen of information in order to thrive.
This love would be of that variety.
Take Venetian Borace, Myrrh, each
45
grains; Birthwort Root, Saffron, each 15 grains; Oil of Pennyroyal, Savine, Cloves, each 2 drops; with Syrup of the 5 opening Roots make 18 Pills for 6 Doses
.
The Title tells their Design. Let them be given about the Menstrous Time, when Nature is slothful and wants Stimulation, twice a Day
.
I never knew whom he paid to have me let out in the middle of that sultry night: at San Zaccaria, at all levels of authority certain things were to be had for cash. I only knew this: an older, humbler nun came and shook me awake, dragged me, stumbling, yawning and protesting to a room where a ewer of steaming water and a bowl of perfumed soap were waiting, with an ostentatious dress of thin silk worn almost to transparency but of a vivid orange color.
“Wash,” she said, curtly, “especially there, and in your mouth.” I could not look at her sallow, tragic face. She was clearly moved by the occasion, but I could not distinguish whether it was jealousy or mere ill temper at the extra chore that kept her lips working in breathless oaths. Blushing, I commenced to wash, trying to keep my chemise lowered. Impatiently she ripped it over my head and I stood before her naked. I whimpered and covered myself with my hands, not able to meet her eyes for shame. She was sorry for me then and spoke more kindly.
“Learn to do this. It won’t be the only time tonight.”
When I was clean and decked in the dress, which covered me
as barely as a sigh, she took my hand, as a nurse might take a little child’s, and hurried me through long, airless corridors to a barred door that opened straight into the orchard. We passed through the trees to the second door where the
ruota
was inserted. This wheel—half in the real world, half in ours, enabled food, money and—at times—unwanted babies to be passed through a hatch, while concealing the identities of the people at either side. I wondered if some kind of illicit transaction was about to take place and how it could concern me. But instead the nun drew back a black cloth that screened the gate’s iron grille and looked out. She seemed to be expecting someone.