“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, be nice, don’t laugh!”
But they are not laughing, not the nuns or the orphans, they are happy to know they will be well-fed, there will be no waste or lack of foresight, and visitors, be they ecclesiastical or family, will admire the way the Schio institute’s kitchens are run.
* * *
—
Elvira does not gossip about what happens in the kitchen. She asked to work there in order to be with the Moretta. She has no gift for cooking and does not intend to take a position as a servant when she leaves the orphanage. She likes drawing and painting. But in the kitchens she is with the Moretta, she has known her since she was ten years old and loves her dearly. She works in this dark basement with walls covered in deposits of soot, in this busy warmhearted atmosphere, and her every day is protected. Elvira is a tall, muscular girl, whose body is mismatched with the delicacy of her smooth, angular face, her lively brown eyes, and her pale lips. It is as if this face opted for the wrong body, or rather is protected by it, a fragile girl carried by an athlete. Elvira was sickly in nursery school, hollow-chested, with legs as thin as reeds, and she fell over so often her injured knees never had time to scab. With time she concentrated on building herself up, battling through childhood as if through a minefield, and she won. From the age of ten she has known the stories about the little black girl who is brought up with the words “If you scream, I’ll kill you,” and who does not scream, the little girl who sleeps in a tree and is not eaten by wild animals, the slave who walks through the desert and climbs into the enormous boat after begging the kind Italian consul to take her with him to the country that saves Africans. Like Madre Moretta, Elvira has no family, her childhood is a wasteland and it is difficult for her to untangle the real memories from the fable she has invented for herself, her childhood is mired in a distant past that wavers like a landscape seen through nearly closed lashes, that flickers and is gone. She knows her mother is still alive, not far away, on the other side of the Alps. Elvira waits for her without truly believing she will return, and perhaps not wanting her to. Her mother writes to say she will come but never does, every letter is an event and a disappointment. Why does she never come? Why does she write? Does she really remember her daughter?
“What about you,” Bakhita asks, “do you remember?”
“I remember what I’ve been told. Not long after emigrating to Geneva, she realized she was pregnant, but immigrants in Switzerland weren’t allowed to have children. So a few days after her confinement she gave me to my grandparents who’d stayed in their village. My grandfather brought me back to Posina, he used to say I weighed no more than a piglet and was as white as milk. I remember him saying that, about the piglet and the milk, and I always picture myself as a swaddled little pig. I was five when they died, him and my grandmother. I was very lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“I had a good mother. She nursed me. She didn’t put oil on her breasts, like the other women did.”
“What oil?”
“Camphor oil, to stop the baby from sucking. Lots of immigrant women starved their babies and stopped just before they died. Then they took them to the orphanage.”
“She loves you.”
“I’m going to teach you to conjugate, Madre.”
“What?”
“I’ll teach you the tenses. You can’t always talk in the present tense, because then what you’re saying isn’t true.”
“But it is, what I’m saying is right. I think it is.”
“No. You said my mother loves me. That’s as wrong as saying ‘your mother’s coming.’ You should say, ‘your mother loved you’ and ‘your mother will come.’ ”
“Your mother will come. And she will still love you. But right now we need to get to work.”
Bakhita dictates her orders to Elvira, anticipates quantities, plans ahead, and her life finds new points of reference. Her most tangible reference is Clementina and her children, whom she calls her nephews and nieces. Stefano died suddenly the year before. She wept a great deal for this good and providential man, but he kept his word and she now has a family, like the other nuns. She has visitors and parcels, and photographs on her nightstand next to pious images and a statuette of the Virgin. With Elvira’s help she learns to talk in the future and past tense, and this changes events, ordering and classifying them. One day, Elvira shows her the drawings she has made of the little slave girl asleep in the trees. Bakhita is speechless. What she sees in these drawings is herself. She is so tiny, scrawny but with a capable look about her, and most important, she looks “gentle and good.”
“How do you know? What I’m like?”
“What I was like, Madre, in the past.”
“No, it’s what I’m like, now. I recognize myself in that drawing, recognize myself now.”
Elvira takes her face and kisses her cheeks with their smell of washing powder, would like to hug her but that is not acceptable. No shows of emotion and no favoritism. But in her mind, when she says “Madre,” the word does not have the same meaning as for the other sisters.
“I’ll bring you more drawings tomorrow. I’ll draw the little girl watching the sheep.”
“Not sheep. Cows.”
“Sheep, cows, it doesn’t make any difference. What I’m interested in is you.”
“But for me, it’s cows. They’re harder. And, anyway…I don’t like sheep. Someday I’ll tell you why.”
* * *
—
And word travels, tales are repeated, stories about the Moretta, and it feels to the community as if she is growing in some way, eluding them a little, taking shape as a complex individual. Human, just like them.
* * *
—
The kitchen is her domain and her pride. Rising every morning to feed children eases her guilt for being saved and for being so far from all the others. But one morning, Mother Superior, Madre Margherita Bonotto, tells her it is over. She is to stop working in the kitchen. It catches her like a tripwire, sending her falling slowly, and she wonders where she can now invest her love and joy.
“Madre Giuseppina, I’m appointing you to the sacristy. Do you understand what that means?”
“Yes, Madre. Thank you.”
“Being a sacristan is more important than being a cook. You have made food for people, now you’ll prepare meals in the House of our Lord, the host and the Eucharist wine.”
“Thank you, Madre.”
“You don’t look very happy.”
“I am.”
“Of course, we’ll all have to get used to not having such good food, we must all offer this…minor sacrifice to the Lord. Can I have the keys, Madre Giuseppina?”
Her hand shakes and the keys make the little metallic clinking sound she dislikes. She is annoyed with herself for experiencing this change of duties as a separation. Being sacristan is an honor and a great responsibility, she knows it is. She hands back the keys to the kitchen, feeling disoriented and hurt.
“I’ll give these to the head cook, I’ll be back in an hour to give you the other keys, the new set. An hour, do you understand how long that is?”
She looks out the window at the shadow of the big chestnut tree in the yard. “Yes. In an hour I’m…I’ll be here, Madre.”
She bows her head and leaves with her slow footsteps, she has kept her habit of hugging the walls to avoid being seen, avoid frightening anyone. She sits on a bench in the corridor and listens to the children reciting their catechism before their lessons start. They are taught in Italian, the language in all the books, they too must forget their dialects, and she knows how difficult it is to think calmly when speaking a language that is harder to pin down than water in the torrent. She keeps telling herself that she is doing God’s will. Keeps telling herself she has been saved and is a joyful daughter of God. Keeps telling herself she has been given an honor. And does n
ot know what to do with her irrational misery. They say she will soon be forty, and here she is crying outside a classroom, she looks at her gnarled hands and feels a loneliness she has no right to feel. So she stands up and goes to her cell, tries to walk as upright as possible, head held high and biting her lip, her breathing is loud, she is relieved not to meet anyone in the corridors or on the stairs. She wants to be alone to experience this heavy burden that, she knows, will be soothed only by tears whose vehemence, though customary, is still surprising. “When we’re sad, we think we always will be, don’t you find, Madre?” She struggled to understand this idea of Elvira’s. Considered it at length and said she disagreed. When she is unhappy, she feels as if she is returning to a place, somewhere she left, someone whom she would like to bring along with her. But who does not come. She would have liked to add that when she is happy, she feels she always will be. But she got confused with the words and said simply, “When you’re sad, you have to do one thing, just one. You have to have faith.”
* * *
—
It will be difficult not feeding the children. Not joining them in the schoolyard anymore. Not tending to them, consoling them, telling them stories. She will miss the way they mispronounce her name, their kisses and their laughter, and their familiar manner that is such a boon in this convent life lived sensibly, with restraint and respect. The work she is to do in the sacristy is so momentous it feels fantastical to her. She will prepare the Master’s House. She will be the one to open the church doors every day. Prepare for services, readying ecclesiastical robes, books, liturgical objects, sacred vases, chalices, wafer boxes, monstrances, bookstands, fonts, trays, she will ensure that they always have the host and wine, but also coal, incense, candles, candle protectors, matches, and boxwood, she will have to know by heart each service and the order of the services, she will be the guardian of el Paron’s Temple. His servant.
She enjoys walking around the town. Enjoys going alone, which is exceptional for a Canossian sister, but on her own she can walk slowly, her legs hurt, and going slowly she sees more, watches, wanders through Schio as if in a garden, her tall silhouette leaning on her folded umbrella. She never mentions her physical suffering, works meticulously, faultlessly, puts passion into being sacristan. No one would guess that her knees are two blazing fires, that she has trouble walking, kneeling, standing up again, that she wakes every night with waves of pain under her skin and gnawing at her bones. She looks down as she walks on Schio’s uneven cobblestones, and the world accosts her in all its mess and fury, boisterous with the sound of children playing among mules and dogs, carts, bicycles, tradesmen, foul water, and detritus, countless children, and just like in her village, as soon as they can walk they become responsible for those born after them. She looks at the yellow and pink walls of the closely packed houses, feels the damp in their cluttered yards, life bursts forth with overexcited urgency and occasionally abates, recedes into docile weariness. She walks cautiously through this living world. There are still, and always will be, people who are afraid of her, who call her the Negress, the devil, the monkey, she dreads this, protects herself in anticipation with the slightly weary smile of a never-ending fight. A few days ago Mother Superior asked her about the stories she used to tell the children when she worked in the kitchens. She did not know how to reply.
“Are they true stories?”
“Partly.”
“Are these things that happened to you? Is it your life?”
She said no at first. Then she wiped away this lie, and said yes, but immediately regretted it. She would rather Madre Bonotto had not asked the question, because she remembered the trial in Venice, remembered the modest celebrations after her baptism, remembered all those inquisitive people who came to the catechumen institute, remembered them asking why she had not rebelled, why she had not taken revenge, and poor girl! Oh, poor thing! How they pitied her. And in the way they looked at her, she was in a cage, studied and condemned. But Mother Superior wanted to know. And Bakhita must obey. She would rather have melted into the convent’s walls, disappeared into the oblique light in the church, offered her work up to el Paron and for Him to keep her forever. But Madre Bonotto asked her to go to Madre Teresa Fabris’s office, and she went. She sat down opposite Madre Fabris and obeyed when she was asked to tell the stories from her life, clearly and calmly tell these stories that she used to tell the children.
* * *
—
She did not know that what she said would be written down. She talked and saw her stories transformed into written words, successions of black shapes, and she asked Madre Fabris to read it to her.
“My mother has lots of children. My mother is very beautiful. My mother watches the morning, every day, I mean she watches the rising sun every morning. And I remember that.”
She was ashamed. Did she really talk like that? Like a little girl. She was forty-one, and in writing, her life sounded like a nursery rhyme. Naïve and commonplace. Her life is commonplace, her life as a slave is just like tens of thousands of others, over many centuries, but she was there in that office and her words were being written, her words, the girl who “neither rebelled nor took revenge.” She wished she could be forgotten. Was almost in tears.
“I’m sorry for stirring up these memories, Madre Giuseppina.”
But the nun was stirring nothing. Quite the opposite. She was making a written record of Bakhita’s inability to describe things, to relate them. What should she do? Hitch up her sleeves and her dress, show her scars? Mime the events, the work, the violence and fear? Elvira was the one who knew, her drawings could tell the stories better than words.
“What’s that for?” Bakhita asked, pointing to the page of writing.
“To know. About your life. And Africa.”
“Africa?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Madre, I’m sorry, but…I know the map. The consul shows me the map and Giuseppe Checchini shows me the map. And Africa…is big. And I…what do I say?”
“You must describe things, Madre Giuseppina, traditions, food, religion.”
“Religion?”
“Of course. Before you met the one true God, what idols did you worship?”
“I like to go in the garden.”
“Giuseppina, do you understand what I asked you?”
“I like to go in the garden.”
They walked around the garden behind the church, the early-autumn light was clear and faltering, the bitter smell of windfall apples and rambling roses reminded Bakhita of the intimacy in private homes, something about their over-furnished old rooms. It was a little cold for Bakhita, and Madre Fabris had put a shawl around her shoulders. She was as gentle as she was ignorant, and her clumsy eagerness betrayed her lack of experience. Bakhita wondered how, with what words she could talk. She knew some of the questions in advance, about her captors, forgiveness, her conversion, and the answers she had to offer never seemed to be what was expected of her. It was different and also more straightforward. Her captors? She had long since entrusted them to el Paron, no longer burdened herself with them, except of course when they decided to pay her visits during her grueling nights of bad dreams. But she had been relieved of them, because God forgave on her behalf. She was His daughter and He did this for her. Were her stories true? Were these memories her own? But nothing was true, only the way we navigated our way through it. How to tell them that? In Venetian? Italian? Latin? She had no language for this, not even a combination of African dialects and Arabic. Because what mattered was not in words. There was what we experienced and what we truly were. Deep inside. That was all. People often asked whether she missed her mother, missed her father and brothers and sisters, her village, and she wanted to say: As much as you do. Yes, as much as you do, because everyone loves someone they miss. But that is not what they wanted to hear. They wanted to hear the difference, they wanted to make an effort to love, to rea
ch out to her as if discovering a dangerous landscape, an archaic Africa. They were sincere, oh so sincere. But she could only disappoint them because her life was simple, and her past suffering had no words.
The institute’s doors open every morning to the pupils and teachers, and the world comes in with them. On November 3, 1911, the sisters cluster around Anna, the youngest teacher, who has a newspaper celebrating a national hero, Giulio Gavotti. They peer at the photograph, cannot understand what it depicts, what the young man is sitting on. There are metal bars, two canopies, and there he is in the middle of it, with his boots and hat. Mother Superior says that two years ago a man in France crossed the sea without touching the sea, her niece, who has emigrated to Paris, told her so. Anna says that the Frenchman, Blériot, flew over the sea.
“Over the sea?”
“Yes. In the sky.”
“The sky?”
No one dares probe any further. It is beyond comprehension, almost blasphemous. But there the photograph is, with this seated man flying like a bird through the kingdom of heaven.
“He flies with this machine,” Anna explains. “It’s called an Etrich Taube, and the writing here says ‘Etrich Taube Monoplane.’ ”
Put like that, it sounds even more aggressive. None of them knows how to pronounce the words. But the man’s name, the hero’s name, Giulio Gavotti, is so beautiful, and so Italian, that Gabriele D’Annunzio has written a poem. They cannot linger here any longer, lessons are about to start, and they go their separate ways. The newspaper stays at the doorkeeper’s lodge, is soon forgotten in a corner. The teachers will chat about it among themselves briefly today. But the nuns never will. Their meals are taken in silence, their days are arduous, their relaxation time joyful, almost childish, and their nights punctuated with prayer. The words in that newspaper celebrate something that happened on November 1, 1911: the first aerial bombing in history, four fragmentation grenades lobbed out over Libya by the pilot Gavotti. At the time no one suspects that this war, this brief easily won war, will arouse nationalistic feelings in the Balkans, because no one ever sees these things coming, these human catastrophes, these successions of events perpetuating mankind’s savagery and shared disaster. The early years of the twentieth century are gearing up to the Great War, but these conflicts are far away and the dead of little importance. It is all happening in deserts and colonies, in dismantled empires, and there are dreams of expansion and territorial revenge. The Canossian sisters patiently teach the children their prayers and the alphabet, mathematics and embroidery. Meanwhile, it thunders on, advancing toward them like an avalanche on the mountain behind Schio. Their world will be turned upside down, they are living in a doomed present, because somewhere there are men dreaming dreams for them, and this heroism will be their martyrdom.
Bakhita Page 28