The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  Galatea struggled to keep her voice down and turned to see if any of the novices had heard.

  After a moment’s silence, the abbot answered. “You are right, my poor dear. There seems to be no love of truth in my advice to you, but believe me, behind it there is love for you and your family, and you’ll simply have to trust me. If you were to marry again, I could assure you that these trials, as you rightly call them, would soon be a memory. But you’re about to become a bride of the Lord, and you’ll need all your strength in the difficult times ahead . . . yet I know you have that strength, Sister Galatea, so trust your spiritual director. And this time it’s not advice I’m giving you, it’s an order: forget! I have already forgotten. One day you will thank me.”

  Rainerio rattled off a list of penances and gave her a hasty absolution. Then the little window in the booth slammed shut. Galatea remained on her knees outside it, gripping a curl of carved oak until her knuckles were white. Then she stood up and went back to her place.

  Mass drew to a close. It was all very moving. Six novices knelt before the altar while three boys who would be knighted at the Ardengheschis’ fortress that afternoon held their swords, which had been blessed during the service, high over the abbot to represent their vow to protect the church. The choir thundered, pleaded, and wailed as Rainerio rose over the sinners and pronounced the words of absolution. A hundred eyes watched his bony hands transmitting God’s forgiveness to them.

  At last Galatea got up, a bloodstained bride of God, and Don Rainerio kissed her sweaty brow. She exchanged kisses on the cheek with the other novices and then with the women of her retinue and finally with her little sister Allegra. Then she kissed the hem of the abbot’s habit and left the church.

  CASTEL ROMITORIO, LATER THAT DAY

  Around sixth hour, the vast courtyard of Castel Romitorio and the meadows outside its walls were far more crowded than the abbey had been in the morning. This was because all around Monte Alcino the Christians attracted by a roast pheasant in blackberry sauce were far more numerous than those attracted by a sermon—especially one delivered by Abbot Rainerio.

  The austere fortress was on a rounded hill, separated from the town of Monte Alcino by a deep ravine that guests had been climbing since early morning, some on foot, some astride mules, the wealthy ones in carts hauled by oxen with huge wheels of solid wood. Trees on the way—holm oaks, cypresses, lime trees—were hung with flower garlands, and the fortress was a veritable triumph of flowers, with petals strewn on the grass, garlands on tables and windowsills, and even crowns of flowers on the heads of the pages bearing food and drink, chased by the screams of the women of the castle.

  The occasion for the banquet was not the girls’ vows, of course, but the boys’ knightings. One of them was Galgano, Lupo’s son from his previous wife and Galatea’s stepbrother. He was a year older, and in him the noble blood of Ardenga seemed to have been diluted to invisibility. Despite being the son of counts, Galgano was so ignorant he believed there were people old enough to have known the Virgin and the apostles, and that God had been put to death by the Saracens. Of Jesus he knew three things: he was born from a virgin, was crucified, and came back from the dead. The affection he felt for God was the tenacious, canine one of a vassal for his lord, to die for whom is a joy and an honor.

  Scarcely sixteen, Galgano was feared in the county for the bullying typical of the son of a lord. His true love was reserved for the noble lady of his heart, who changed with the seasons, but he was explicit with peasant girls, and wordlessly forced every female shepherd he came across. His mother died birthing him, and he was a surly boy who used dogs as targets to improve his dagger throwing. Everyone trembled at the thought of the day when he would administer justice in the lands of Ardenga.

  Before the trials of the three boys began, Galatea arrived with the other novices, pale and aching all over. She climbed out of the palanquin—she hadn’t dared ride home from the abbey as she usually did—and excused herself with her mother, saying she was going to lie down because the pains of her cycle had just begun. Blanche, taken up by her hundred guests, took one look at her and immediately agreed.

  The countess nonchalantly passed her thirtieth birthday, albeit with the help of many creams and ointments for her skin. She thinned her eyebrows and washed her blonde hair in chamomile water, carefully tearing it out to widen her forehead, leaving a heart-shaped hairline, as was the fashion in Provence. That day she was wearing a dress of saffron-yellow satin, a wide belt on her waist embroidered with red hearts.

  Her hat was topped by two horns, over which fluttered a vaporous veil of red silk, fixed by a silver buckle with a big ruby. A discreet choice, if compared with some of the ridiculously tall veiled cones that surmounted female heads at the banquet. Had someone watched the ladies from atop the tower, their hats bobbing up and down would have resembled birds on a beach, poking their long beaks in the sand.

  Galatea lay on a big bed. After closing the heavy curtains on the noisy yard she’d tried to sleep, but the headache gave no respite, and she lay there in the dark, musing on the future. The abbot was right; she faced daunting hardships. God, she would miss Allegra, Sister Marianna, her mother, Bonarina . . . and what of riding alone on the Tuscan hills? Could she just abandon it all, forget people, landscapes, smells? Would they become distant memories? A wave of sadness, as when one thinks of the dead, swept over her. No more presences, nothing alive of the people in her life, just occasional news of dated, fading events. Nothing. She would be alone, alone, alone.

  “Yes, but I’ll be far from his eyes!”

  Bonarina glanced into the room, not wanting to wake up the young countess, but Galatea saw her and called her in. She stood at the foot of the bed, head cocked as if asking for an explanation.

  “Bonarina . . . I bled like a wounded animal for the whole ceremony, and I am very unhappy.”

  Her nanny said softly, “Come, little countess, I’ll rub your back, as usual, and you’ll be just fine.”

  Galatea slowly sat on the edge of her bed. “No, Bonarina, I’m not your young countess any more. Now I am Sister Galatea.” She dragged herself to her feet and faced Bonarina. Suddenly they both realized that the girl was, for the first time, taller than her nanny. After a moment’s silence, they embraced, weeping.

  “If you were my daughter, I’d tie you to a big table and there would be no talk of going to a convent!” blurted out Bonarina, covering her mouth at once as if she’d blasphemed, but relaxing at Galatea’s laugh. She undressed Galatea and laid her on her belly, fetched some chamomile ointment and, completely dressed including the white kerchief tied under her chin, climbed on top, knees astride her charge’s thighs, and began to vigorously massage Galatea’s loins.

  Just then, Sister Marianna stepped in. Galatea jumped up, naked, and ran to embrace her. Marianna was a short, cheerful Benedictine nun, famous in all southern Tuscia for her near-miraculous skills as a healer—which she exercised in the abbey of the Santissimo Salvatore, on the other side of Mount Amiata—and was Galatea’s favorite person in the world after her sister Allegra.

  Various tutors had taught Galatea to read and write Italian and Latin, some music, and even a little astronomy, but none had ever made a breach in their ward’s guarded heart except Sister Marianna, whose smile could melt something in the girl that everyone had always found strangely inflexible, ever since she’d refused to play with dolls.

  Sister Marianna took Galatea’s face, a full head above her own, in her hands. “Galatea, my dove, Sister Cristofora is going back to her convent and hasn’t seen you yet, so I came up to ask you to come and say goodbye to your tutor and receive her blessing.”

  Galatea didn’t like Cristofora’s undisguised admiration for Lupo. She looked at both women, nose turned up like a child before a hated food, and then, imitating her mother’s quirks to perfection, tweeted, “But of course, dear sister! I would gladly come down even if I have yet to recover from my cramps!”

  Galat
ea was fifteen, Marianna thirty-two, and Bonarina fifty-one, but to see them laugh one would have thought they’d grown up together. When the girl was dressed, they went down to the kitchens. Standing by the cavernous fireplace, surrounded by a chaos—pots, ladles, rags, jugs, cats, children—that resembled the end of a battle, two nuns were deep in conversation. Sister Cristofora saw Galatea and came toward her, beaming with pride in the novice she’d nursed. Cristofora was so wizened yet energetic that everyone agreed she seemed the female version of Abbot Rainerio.

  “My dears, this is Sister Riccarda von Stade, a Benedictine on a pilgrimage to Rome!” she boomed. “Sister Riccarda, this is the young countess of the Ardengheschi, who today became Sister Galatea and will soon depart for a Cistercian monastery in the Venetian lagoon. Oh, and this is Sister Marianna of Saragiolo, who spreads cures and comfort in all directions from the top of Mount Amiata!”

  Marianna blushed, rejecting praise directed to her instead of the Lord. Bonarina slipped off to her chores, leaving the nuns to discuss spiritual matters beyond her station. Galatea asked the German nun what made her come to Castel Romitorio. Sister Cristofora didn’t give the guest time to attempt an answer.

  “Yesterday a knight from Champagne, headed to Syria with his squires, spent the night in town. When your mother heard of it, she sent a servant to invite him to the knightings, hoping to hear some news from your grandparents’ county. As we speak, he is answering questions from the count, the cardinal, and the abbot on the kingdom of Jerusalem, where it seems he spent some years fighting infidels.”

  Galatea thought bitterly, “Until yesterday, I could have gone out and spoken with this worldly, exotic Frenchman myself . . . but not any longer. Nuns don’t chat with knights and that’s that!”

  Cristofora went on, “So three German nuns, traveling under the knight’s protection, found themselves diverted to your stepfather’s castle! Sister Riccarda was telling us of her journey from the Rhine to here. Heretics and wandering preachers are everywhere. Lumbardy, they say, is allied with Provence against the Lord, and good Christians tremble in fear, for the Day of Judgment appears very close.”

  At the mention of Judgment Day, Sister Riccarda came alive. The largest of the nuns, she had big, watery blue eyes and huge hands—Galatea thought her fingers looked like sausages, which she kept crossed on her belly in a seraphic pose. She interrupted Sister Cristofora with some urgency. “Hear me out, sisters, for few women could tell a tale like mine! I was fortunate enough, as a young nun, to spend ten years in a convent at Eibingen and meet its abbess, Hildegard of Bingen, who passed away twenty-five years ago. She was without doubt the holiest woman of her generation!”

  “You knew the Sybil of the Rhine?” asked Marianna, excited as a child.

  “I didn’t know the fame of my teacher had spread this far. . . .”

  “Her Liber Divinorum Operum taught me how humours operate, and how to recognize temperaments,” said Sister Marianna.

  “The good Lord brought us together, sister! What a joy to discover that the book I helped copy more than thirty years ago is shining its light so far from Disinbodemberg!”

  “Tell me a little about Hildegard, I beg you!” asked Marianna, visibly moved.

  Sister Riccarda stared into the fireplace with the dreamy look of people to whom the world of their youths seems infinitely better than the one they live in. “Life there was more stimulating and desirable for a woman than in any other place. Hildegard excelled at everything, and she never did less than two things at once. She wrote heavenly music, tractates on herbs, poems; she preached sermons, but above all she prophesied, and no one dared doubt her visions. She described them in a book that Pope Eugene declared inspired by the Holy Spirit.”

  Riccarda was heating up. “Hildegard was a woman, but her actions—believe me—were those of a man! I heard her dictate a letter to Emperor Barbarossa calling him godless and evil. I saw many men tremble before her . . . and I have a warm, comforting memory of the sight!”

  Galatea fantasized about the day when the famous Saint Galatea of Monte Alcino would, for the greater glory of God and through the power of her visions alone, cause Lupo and Galgano of Ardenga to tremble before her like two little birds on a windowsill, in winter.

  “She . . . preached sermons, you say?” asked Sister Cristofora, suspiciously.

  “Only to other nuns. Preaching to lay people is forbidden to women, as you know. But her visions gave her doubts on that prohibition. Once she said to me that she had great trust in the souls of women . . . that’s how she put it: ‘trust in the souls of women’!”

  Marianna nodded, smiling. Cristofora clouded over like a stormy sky and was looking at Riccarda as if she’d suddenly found the source of a smell that had been offending her nostrils.

  “‘The nature of women, alas, is such that even if they try to do good, they can’t help but sin, despite their good intentions.’ That’s Saint Jerome. As for women preaching, Saint John Chrysostom said, ‘Woman only preached once, in the garden of Eden, and compromised everything.’” Sister Cristofora smiled the smug smile that Galatea hated. “Come, Sister Riccarda, were there any women among the apostles? If your Hildegard had doubts on that prohibition, it probably means the pope’s blessing of her visions made her commit a sin of pride.”

  Sister Riccarda crossed her fingers over her waist, sizing up the old championess of dogma. “I’ve read the fathers, too, Sister Cristofora. But what I witnessed with my own eyes in my travels in the lands of the Cathars would surprise you. Among those heretics, women preach.”

  Cristofora scoffed, “Nothing that takes place under the skies of heresy could surprise me!”

  “Even if it was men put on trial for violating servant girls? Even if it was rich women making their will out to whomever they wish? Believe me, I condemn heresy with your same disgust, but the life of women in Cathar communities is proof that Jesus took on himself not just the sin of Adam, but that of Eve, too!”

  Sister Marianna’s eyes widened in surprise, the smile never leaving her face. Sister Cristofora by now was outraged. “Ha! If this isn’t sympathy for heretics. . . Wake up, Sister Riccarda, wake up before it’s too late for you, too!” Her eyes darted bolts of righteousness like Abbot Rainerio’s.

  Sister Riccarda smiled amiably. “But if Hildegard was right and the souls of women are not from the Devil, then the heretics have unwittingly discovered God’s true plan! Oh, Cristofora, if only you had heard their troubadours sing rhymes to the lady of their devotion! If every man loved God as they love their lady, wouldn’t his Kingdom be here already?”

  This time Cristofora lost her patience. “Troubadours? They’re nothing but diabolical exalters of lust! I’ve heard the verses of those fornicators, and I’ve nothing in common with anyone who finds them inspiring!”

  Galatea only vaguely perceived the exasperated tone of Riccarda’s retort. A girlish daydream, in which she preached the word of God to adoring crowds, distanced her from the conversation. On the third tug, the faithful trying to touch her habit turned into little Allegra, who noticed her sister’s distraction and was desperate for attention.

  If somewhere in Galatea’s features was the noble falcon that prowled Orlando’s face, Allegra instead inherited Blanche’s pure smile and northern softness. She was six, with curly red hair and freckles, was friends with everyone from birds and horses to squires and abbots, and loved to laugh, as if wanting to deserve her name. Allegra was the real princess of the Ardengheschis’ manors, for nobody could resist her coquetry, and the constant exercise of such absolute power convinced her that her beloved sister would not be sent away, if only she forbade it with sufficient severity.

  Right now Galatea wanted to remember a carefree Allegra, and she accepted the illusion that nothing was about to change. She curtsied to the nuns, who hardly noticed, took her sister’s hand and ran out into the meadows behind the fortress, where their laughter frightened chickens and guinea fowls, while the geese, much touchier
birds, chased them for a distance, angrily flapping their wings.

  CASTEL ROMITORIO, IN THE AFTERNOON

  After handing over Allegra to a tutor, Galatea went back to the kitchens, but the nuns were gone. She thought back to the confrontation she’d witnessed between Sister Cristofora and the German nun and regretted not seeing who won the last word.

  “Fornicators.” Sister Cristofora had never pronounced the word before. Galatea spoke good French, and even knew a few Provençal chansons de geste, but she had never read the passionate poems troubadours wrote for their ladies. She thought bitterly that traveling with her mother between Tuscan residences, she would soon have satisfied her curiosities, but now she would seldom exit the walls of her convent, where verses written by fornicators would be found, as Don Rainerio said, when pigs would fly.

  “But if the Sybil of the Rhine learned from her visions that women have the same dignity as men, well, I’ll find all her books!” thought the novice. “In fact, I’ll make Hildegard a model for my life! And one day, the visions the abbot told me to forget will be recognized by everyone as divinely inspired, and justice will be done!”

  The thought of justice brought back Riccarda’s words, “Men put on trial for violating servant girls.” Her breath shortened. Were heretics then, the supposed emissaries of the Devil, the only ones to practice real justice? Had she, for her whole, brief life, been told nothing but lies?

  Her head swam, and again she felt close to passing out. The bubble of excitement over the imminent journey burst after the ceremony, and melancholy set in. She squared her shoulders, drew a deep breath, and looked around. She’d wandered into the main hall, whose tall, paneless windows looked out on the court where the banquet was in progress. The tables had been dragged outside, and the empty room looked enormous. Voices and clinking glasses and knives wafted in with the afternoon heat from behind heavy curtains. Family shields, swords, and standards filled the walls of the silent hall. She looked around to impress them into memory.