by Sarah Dunant
Her first spiritual guide, the novice mistress who had shown her paintings in the chapel, had alerted her early to the pitfalls of intoxication with her work. “Your knowledge brings you great solace, Zuana. But knowledge alone has no substance. Our founder, the great Saint Benedict himself, understood that well enough. Let not your heart be puffed up with exaltation. Everyone that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted”
And she had tried, truly and honestly, tried so hard that sometimes, despite the nun’s kindness and patience, she thought she might go mad with the effort. Eventually she had come to accept a level of failure. What point was there in dissembling? He would know it anyway. God always seeth man from heaven and the angels report to Him every hour.
How much easier it had become when the kind old novice sister died and she had found herself in the company of her assistant, Suora Chiara. Chiara, with her smooth skin and dancing eyes and her bright, confident relationship with God and the world around her. Chiara, who seemed able to inhabit both the mind and the spirit without fearing His displeasure and who, even then, enjoyed an almost unnatural standing in the convent itself; much more than the other women of her age with fewer aunts, cousins, and nieces around to support their rise through the ranks.
Yet she had been generous with her power. Without Suora Chiara arguing her case, Zuana might have languished for years in the scriptorium, decorating the word of God with calendula leaves or fennel fronds. It was she who had helped Zuana to find work in the dispensary, she who had organized and supported her election as dispensary mistress and, when she finally became abbess, allowed her to take over the infirmary as well, For it is written in the rule of Saint Benedict that it must be the abbess’s greatest concern that the sick suffer no neglect. Without Madonna Chiara there would be no treatment of the bishop’s ailments and therefore no flow of special outside supplies. Without Madonna Chiara there would be no distillery, a smaller herb garden, fewer shelves with fewer bottles to be broken, fewer notebooks of remedies to be destroyed. Without Madonna Chiara—
Zuana looks up to see two of her books on the table. In her chest there are others, lovingly cared for over all these years. Is she really willing to be instrumental in their destruction? For what? To alleviate the misery and starvation of one obstreperous novice? She is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them.
The truth is that Zuana herself does not understand why this girl has become so important to her. There have been times when she wonders if it is some affliction of the womb: she has seen it enough in others; how an older nun might seek out a novice or postulant or boarder of the age that her own child would have been, had she had one. Such rapports are often characterized by undue care and attention, for while everyone knows the creation of favorites is prohibited, it is also unstoppable.
Yet it has never been like that for her. As a child without brothers or sisters she had always been familiar with her aloneness, her self-sufficiency. And yet, and yet …this young woman with her sense of fury and injustice has somehow infiltrated Zuana’s life. That Zuana likes her is undeniable, despite her spirit and her truculence—or perhaps because of them. No doubt she sees something of herself in her; the curiosity as well as the determination. And it is true that had she married, had she become a wife instead of a nun, her own child might indeed now be Serafina’s age. How would she feel about her then? It is a painful question. While Santa Caterina has been a good home to her, would she choose to give a daughter up to such a life? And if not, does that mean she is willing to risk bringing down the convent to help her?
The abbess is right. The world is full of them: daughters who are too young, too old, too ill, too ugly, too difficult, too stupid, too smart. Waste. Banishment. Burial alive. Custom. The way things are. What can she do about it? It is not as if there is so much out there to celebrate. Freedom? What freedom? To marry the man you are told to and no other? If she had been living outside the walls, Serafina might still have found her singing composer half dead on some riverbank, only the knives would have been wielded by her father’s family rather than the abbess’s. Love is not a marketable commodity; you take what you are given, even if it is your husband’s pleasure to bruise your skin and breed bastards out of prettier loins. It is simply how it is. What point is there in railing against it? And why, in God’s name, single out one spoiled young girl from all the rest?
The sand is at the bottom of the glass. She stares at it, then turns it over again.
The voice of the Lord is powerful. I will praise the Lord, with my whole heart.
She closes her eyes and tries not to think.
The voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
She knows the words as well as any remedy.
For His mercy is everlasting and His truth endureth to all generations.
She prays until the words make no sense, and when the sand comes to rest for a second time—or is it a third? — she gets up and makes her way to the dispensary. She takes down a bottle of acqua-vita and moves out into the cloister, where a half-moon throws the well in the courtyard into gray relief, as it did all those months before when she first visited a howling, furious young entrant.
If she were to ask herself now why she is doing this, it is unlikely, even after all the meditation and prayers, that she would be able to answer. The truth is that there has been no great revelation between her and God. No transmission of grace, nothing with which she could protect herself in confession for the disobedience she is about to commit. There are words she might use. Words she believes in. Compassion. Caring. The need to address suffering, the offering of comfort. But they are more the language of the healer than of the nun.
She knows this—but it does not stop her. If anything, now, it spurs her on.
Outside the door, she uses the taper she has brought to light the candle concealed in her robe. As she enters, its glow illuminates the room enough to show that the bed is empty. For a second she feels panic, remembering Serafina’s last absence, but then, soon enough, she sees her. She is sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, in the same place where Zuana had found her on that first night. Only now there is no rebellion, no fury, no noise at all, just a small figure swamped by her robe, hunched over, arms wrapped tightly round her knees, head bowed, rocking slightly to and fro.
Zuana crouches beside her. If the girl is aware of her, she does nothing to show it. Zuana’s sin of disobedience is already sealed by her presence there. Now, in the middle of the Great Silence, she must compound it further with speech. “Benedicta.” She says the word gently under her breath, though she knows there can be no absolution of a reply. This time the words Deo gratias remain unsaid. So be it.
She moves the candle closer. “You sleep when you should be awake and you are awake when you should be sleeping.”
The huddled figure remains silent, still no sign that she has heard or even noticed her.
“Come, let me put you to bed.”
“I am praying,” she says at last, her voice dull and flat.
“You are not on your knees.”
“If one is humble enough, He hears you wherever you are.”
“What have you eaten today?” Under the bed the bundle of bread sits untouched. “Serafina, look at me. What have you eaten?”
The girl lifts her head briefly: close to, the planes of her face are sharp angles, her eyes black in deeply scooped sockets, her wrists on her knees as thin as kindling wood. How much body is left inside the sack of clothes? How long before her skin starts bruising purple from lack of flesh? Zuana feels shock like a cold hand squeezing at her throat. Could Umiliana be so unaware of the damage that her search for God is causing?
“Leave me alone,” she says dully.
“No, I will not leave you alone. Your penance is over. You are ill. You need to eat.”
“I am fasting still.”
“No. You are starving.”
“Ha! What do y
ou know about it?”
“I know that without food a person dies.”
The girl shakes her head. “You don’t know what it feels like. How can you? You have never seen Him.”
“No, you are right, I haven’t.”
“Well, I have! I have seen Him.” And for the first time there is a spark of something. She jerks up her head. “And I will again.” Then, as if the move has taken too much energy, she slumps back against the wall. “Suora Umiliana says He will come if I make myself pure for Him.”
“And what about the rest of the convent? Do we not have a place in your search for purity? What about using your voice to praise God? Suora Benedicta waits every day for you. Or your work in the dispensary. I—we, the sick, need your help.”
“Pure voices don’t need an audience.” She shakes her head fiercely. “And you care only for bodies, not souls.”
“Who am I speaking to now, Serafina or Umiliana?” Zuana is surprised by the anger in her own voice.
She shrugs. “In a good convent there will be no need of medicines, for God will take care of us.”
“Oh! Is that how you want to live? Or maybe it is how you want to die.”
“Ah …leave me alone.” She brings her hands up to her head as if to ward off the attack of Zuana’s words.
“No. I won’t. Where are you, Serafina? Where did all that fury and defiance go?”
“I told you,” she says, her voice dead and sullen again. “I don’t feel anything.”
“I don’t believe that is true. I think you are trying not to feel anything, because it hurts so much. I think that is why you have stopped eating. But it will not help. No one can live without sustenance.”
But the girl is not listening anymore. She sits, head on her hands, rocking to and fro, staring dully into the dark. After a while she pulls herself up, slowly, wobbly almost, like a newborn calf not yet steady on its feet. She moves past Zuana as if she were not there and goes to the bed, where she lies down with her face to the wall, curling herself up and pulling the blanket over her.
The room grows quiet. Outside, the convent sleeps. And, beyond it, the city, too.
“No one can live without sustenance,” Zuana says again.
She does not respond or move a muscle. Yet she is not sleeping. Of that Zuana is sure.
“So I have brought you some.”
She takes the letter out from under her robe and unfolds it.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“My dearest Isabetta,
“If this letter reaches your hands, I would understand if you did not want to read it. Yet please, for the sake of what once was between us, continue.”
His handwriting is dense and elaborate, as if he has put his heart into every pen stroke, and in the candlelight the words dance and move on the page. Zuana keeps her voice low, for fear it might penetrate beyond the walls of the cell. Occasionally she stumbles over a phrase and has to stop and begin again. But none of this matters. Not once the first words have been uttered.
“Should you have come through the locked doors onto the dock that night, you will know that I was not there to meet you. I, who had promised on pain of death to be there, deserted you. But what you do not know is that it was only death—or the extreme closeness of it—that kept me from you. A few nights before our planned meeting I was set upon by a group of erstwhile friends, who attacked me with daggers and left me for dead on the riverbank. There have been moments since then when I have wished I had indeed died. But God was with me and I have been saved.
“I write this from the house of two good people who found me, took me in, and cared for me. You spoke once about how you feared your incarceration was God’s punishment for our love. At my worst I wondered if this was my punishment, too. I knew if I lived I would never see you again. But now that I have come to that moment, I cannot go without trying to communicate with you one last time. To tell you I did not, nor would I ever, knowingly desert you.”
Zuana pauses. She is a stranger to the art of love letters. At the time when other young girls were sighing over sonnets and court madrigals she had been tending seedlings and memorizing the names of the organs of the body. It is not something she mourns, for how can one miss what one has never had? And yet, and yet …how honestly and persuasively he writes, this young man. The abbess would no doubt say it is all lies, born out of lust like flies on a dung heap. But then how would she know either? She returns to the page.
“I am in desperate straits. I have no money (all that I owned and had gathered for our life together was about my person that night), and I am disfigured in ways I fear will disqualify me from any kind of polite work. Nevertheless, I shall try. I am leaving Ferrara to travel south, to Naples, where I hear there is a thriving musical culture and where I may find someone who is content to keep their eyes closed while I sing.
“I will never speak to a living soul of our liaison. You told me once that men say such things easily. You were always wiser than your years. But you do not know everything. I will never love or marry another. That is the promise I made to God if He would let me live, and it will be my pleasure to keep it. I hear your voice each night before I go to sleep, its beauty seducing the very sweetness out of silence, and when I wake it is the first thing I remember. I ask for no more.
“I hope the sister you spoke of, whose goodwill I now depend on to deliver this letter, may help you to find a way to live. Forgive me for whatever pain I have caused you. Pray for me, my dear Isabetta.
“I remain, forever, your Jacopo.”
The silence in the cell grows. The girl remains motionless, her face to the wall. Somewhere inside her, though, there is movement. It is as if she is rising slowly from some deep place on the ocean bed, pulled out of the dark by the promise of a world above the water.
As she breaks the surface she has an image of a young man walking toward her through hazy sunlight, long dark hair and broad open face.
“He did not desert me,” she says, so quietly that Zuana can barely hear her.
“No, he did not desert you.”
“He loved me.”
“And, it seems, still does.”
Now, finally, she turns over. Zuana holds out the letter and her hand comes out from the blanket, pale fingers, snap-thin wrist. She pulls it toward her, then lets it fall on the bed, as if it is somehow too heavy to hold.
Zuana takes a small bottle out from under her robe and uncorks it. The air picks up the tangy smell of acqua-vita. She pours some out onto a wooden plate, picks up the lump of bread from under the bed, and dips a small chunk into the liquid to soften it. “So. Will you eat now?”
The girl looks at her, frowning, as if she is having trouble focusing.
Zuana’s hand holds out the dripping bread.
“I …I can’t.” She shakes her head. “I can’t.”
“What? Is Umiliana’s voice stronger than his?”
His …Him. But which him? The very idea seems to unsteady her. “I told you, I can’t. Leave me alone.” And her voice is suddenly hard, full of snake-spit and anger.
Zuana does not move. She has seen this once before, years ago, in a sad, mad young nun who starved herself almost to death: the way in which after a certain point the emptiness becomes its own force, like a whirlpool sucking and destroying anything or anyone who dares challenge its supremacy. If it was not to do with the yearning for purity one might almost fear that the devil had a hand in it, for there is something of his malicious pleasure in such self-destruction.
“Isabetta. Isabetta.”
She says this name, her name, twice, then again. For every student of medicine knows that there are times when a word can be its own talisman and carry a certain power of healing.
“Isabetta, listen to me. I may not be a nun who sees visions, but this I do know. God is as much in life as He is in death. And without a true vocation, starvation is no way to reach Him.”
The girl shakes her head again. “Suora Umiliana says—”
&nbs
p; “Suora Umiliana is not to be trusted. She is looking to take over the convent by mounting an attack on the authority of the abbess, and your starving purity is most helpful to her. If you had eaten more, or had more of your wits about you, you of all people would see that.”
Such confidence. Such certainty. As she speaks, Zuana thinks how much like the abbess she herself now sounds. Except that when she remembers the novice mistress scooping up the fainting girl from under the cross, or catches again the look of triumph in her face when their paths met outside Madonna Chiara’s chambers, she knows that what she herself says is true. The abbess was right. The world is full of young women who do not want to become nuns. But she was also wrong. For this young woman is no longer just another one of them. In the midst of this chess game of church and convent politics, she has been elevated unwittingly to the role of a more powerful piece, greater than her worth but also vulnerable to being used and sacrificed.
And it is not just she. For, like it or not, by bringing the girl the letter, Zuana herself has become one of the players. Now it is her turn to move.
“Yet meanwhile—are you listening to me, Isabetta? — meanwhile there is someone outside these walls who cares for you deeply. A young man who has risked a good deal to get in touch with you and who surely deserves an answer.”
The girl stares at her, then shakes her head as if to rid herself of the fog within. “What do you mean, an answer? What are you talking about? It is over. I am in prison, and he is half dead and gone.” And now she lets out a low wailing moan, the words awakening memory and the memory awakening despair.
“Hush, hush, you will wake the whole convent. Yes, you are in prison. But some of it is of your own making. And from what I hear, though his wounds are grave he will not die of them, nor will he be on the road to Naples—not yet, at least. Perhaps you should look at the page again. Look in the bottom corner around the edge. Someone has written an address there.”