Nun (9781609459109)

by Hornby, Simonetta Agnello

  The entrance to the convent was through a wooden door that stood at the bottom of a long staircase, designed to be accessible to sedan chairs. Agata took her time climbing the stairs. Every one of the thirty-three steps in volcanic piperno stone, broad and low though they were, seemed dauntingly high, and she had difficulty lifting her feet. Still, she had to go on, and go on she did, her mother’s hand gripping her shoulder like a vise grip. She was already a prisoner. On her left stood the outer walls of the convent—high, double, and blank. On her right, the wall covered with delicate eighteenth-century frescoes of faux colonnades and coiling leaves, which she’d found so pleasing on previous visits, now instilled terror in her. She thought that she could detect amidst the fronds the pale and faded figures of Basilian nuns, flickering like ghosts, ready to cast a spell on her.

  They reached the vestibule. There wasn’t a living soul in sight. The nun at the door told them to wait. The bronze wheel right in front of Agata looked like a mouth bristling with teeth, ready to devour her. Slowly, the majestic carved walnut portal swung open and her aunt the abbess emerged to welcome her. Through the grilles in the convent parlor, Agata had been unable to form any idea of her face, and now she turned pale at the sight: her aunt had her father’s exact features and even the same wart on the chin. The abbess embraced her and kissed her heartily, then she pushed her into the cloistered section of the convent through a little hidden door, camouflaged by other frescoes of leaves and columns. They walked into a spacious second vestibule with vast wall paintings, where thirty or so nuns were waiting for them, standing in a semicircle. Other nuns were assembling in the large room—all eyes were on Agata, motionless before them, at the center of the semicircle.

  “Thank the sisters for the favor they have shown by voting for you to become their companion,” the abbess spoke sternly to her.

  Donna Gesuela thanked the sisters on Agata’s behalf, explaining that her daughter was emotionally overwrought with gratitude. Agata could barely restrain her sobs. In the meanwhile, other nuns arrived in the hall and lined up in rows of two or three. They were quite different from the nuns of the Collegio di Maria where Agata had gone to school. Sumptuously dressed in black, with a pleated white wimple and two veils, a white one beneath a black one, impeccably ironed, they had an air of superiority that terrified Agata. The novices entered, the monachelle or little nuns: some of them stood on chairs to get a better look at her, and while her mother and the abbess were talking with the most important nuns, they did nothing but make comments on Agata, who had good hearing and understood everything they said—some thought she was short, some pretty, some ugly, and some unlikable. Until then, she had followed her mother like a puppet, looking straight ahead of her; when she heard those opinions, she lowered her eyes and felt as if she were going to faint. Her mother explained to all the new arrivals that her daughter was very sad because her father had died and she had been separated from her family. Then she turned to look at Agata with an imperious glare, ordering her to speak. But she couldn’t.

  At that moment, the other aunt, Donna Maria Brigida, arrived in the room; two lay sisters were supporting her. Younger than the abbess, she was afflicted with infirmities of body and mind. She raised her weary pupils and stared at Agata. “You’re the daughter of Pippineddu,” she mumbled, and reached out her arms to embrace her. The lay sisters carried her toward Agata and her mother pushed her toward her aunt; Donna Maria Brigida wrapped both arms around her neck, rasping her flesh with her hairy chin.

  Agata trembled and felt a chill. She murmured words of gratitude. After coming to an agreement that she would enter the convent two days after Anna Carolina’s wedding, mother and daughter left the cloistered section of the convent.

  At Aunt Orsola’s house, aunts and female cousins were waiting to congratulate her. When they saw her they were aghast.

  Agata stayed in bed for a number of days, during which time she received visits from all the Padellani women, who were again interested in her—not in helping her, but in persuading her to accept her fate and then, later, to gossip viciously with the rest of the family about both mother and daughter.

  Aunt Orsola, who had spent hours talking with her, was worried about Agata’s health, because she had stopped eating. Agata, certain that she was ready for marriage and motherhood, explained to Aunt Orsola the repulsion she felt at the thought of the cloistered life, and she recalled her father’s firm determination not to force any of his daughters into a nunnery. Once she heard this, and seeing the depression into which her niece had sunk, the elderly princess decided that Agata would never be willing to take the habit; she then devised a plan to marry her off to a widowed duke, a relation of hers, who would have accepted her even without a dowry. She mentioned the plan to her sister-in-law. Donna Gesuela had watched her various female relations paying visits and she had listened to their comments—both those spoken openly and those muttered under their breaths. She had always managed to contain her fury; only now did she vent her wrath against Orsola, accusing her and all the Padellanis with her of miserliness, hypocrisy, and even lack of Christian charity toward her and her daughters. She threw it in Orsola’s face that, when she had asked her for financial assistance in order to secure dowries for her daughters, the Padellanis had refused. Every last one of them. Now that she had been forced to send one of her daughters into a nunnery, they criticized her—and still no one offered her so much as a ducat.

  Anna Carolina had kept her distance from Agata. A few days before the wedding she went to see her and, after treating her like a perfect stranger, told Agata that even in Messina everyone was talking about how selfish and ungrateful it was not to be overjoyed at having been accepted into the most illustrious convent in the kingdom, and that this would certainly undermine her relations with her husband’s family. None of the married sisters, including Sandra, offered an opinion or said a comforting word: they didn’t want to interfere with their mother’s will.

  One day, Nora managed to smuggle her a letter from Giacomo. He had given it to Annuzza, who was not allowed to go to Palazzo Padellani because she was dressed as a commoner and not as a maidservant. It was a saint card of Our Lady of the Assumption with his signature and nothing more. Agata, during all this time, believed that Giacomo had forgotten about her; the feeling that he’d remembered her with that special message was enormously upsetting to her. She felt ill and a doctor had to be called.

  Agata remembered when she sang for her father his favorite Bellini, Qual Cor Tradisti, Qual Cor Perdesti, but now as in some delirium, it seemed as if she were hearing the reply of her Giacomo-Pollione:

  Moriamo insieme, ah, sì, moriamo!

  L’estremo accento sarà ch’io t’amo.1

  She was visibly wasting away. Aunt Orsola sent for Father Cuoco, her confessor, and after he had a conversation with Agata, she decided to talk it over with her brother. The two of them came up with a plan. The admiral spoke to Agata alone and made a suggestion without having discussed it first with Donna Gesuela. Agata would go to the convent for the two months agreed upon; if at the end of that period she still didn’t want to become a nun, he would give her a thousand ducats, half of her dowry. All she had to do was ask. Agata could use the money for any purpose, provided that she explain clearly to him what she intended to do. Agata accepted.

  Aunt Orsola thought that Agata would recover more quickly if she were far away from her mother. She therefore suggested to her sister-in-law that she leave her daughter with her and go back to Messina immediately after the wedding; Donna Gesuela accepted the proposal willingly. It was what she would have preferred in any case. Still, the princess had another objective in mind: to break up the growing intimacy between her sister-in-law and her brother the admiral. She suspected that in the past he had facilitated certain of Gesuela’s escapades and she was afraid that now he wanted his part and might run afoul of her. Gesuela wanted a husband: she wanted a husband at all costs. Orsola did not know that the one limitation her b
rother had placed on his generous gift—that he be informed as to the use of the money, but only by Agata, not by her mother, who was excluded from the transaction—had resulted in a violent argument between the admiral and Donna Gesuela, and that from then on their friendship had never been the same.

  9.

  The wedding of Anna Carolina Padellani

  and Fidenzio Carnevale

  The week before Anna Carolina’s wedding, Aunt Orsola had given Agata the use of a carriage to take Carmela and Annuzza on outings; she hoped that would brighten Agata’s last days before being admitted into the convent. It wasn’t hard: Agata was proud to show the two around her father’s city, the only metropolis in the Italian peninsula.

  She took them down to the waterfront, where they could watch seagoing vessels with foreign travelers, and every so often even an English yacht with mechanical propulsion touring the city and the excavations at Pompeii. She dreamed of setting sail on one of those luxury yachts to explore the world, while Carmela dreamed of winning the heart of the yacht’s wealthy owner. Carmela loved those excursions. Annuzza, on the other hand, wasn’t a bit happy to be in Naples. Agata would treat her to a cup of ice cream, and she would complain that they didn’t serve it with a pastry the way they did in Messina. The carriages traveled too fast and the traffic was too chaotic. Even the Neapolitan vegetables, according to Annuzza, were inferior to the Swiss chard and the borage of Messina, so much fresher and more succulent.

  One day, the carriage passed beneath the underpass of the bell tower of the convent of San Giorgio Stilita. Annuzza, finally impressed, asked who the owner of that fine building might be. Agata shuddered and changed the subject. Then she refused to say anything more. A short while later she ordered the coachman to stop at a candlemaker’s shop so that she could buy Carmela a candle in the shape of an angel. Annuzza ogled, with a blend of curiosity and fear, the massive enclosure wall without windows or openings of any kind. Agata chose to ignore her: she had decided not to think about the coming two months. Comforted by Admiral Pietraperciata’s promise and reassured as to Giacomo’s love, she was convinced that she would leave the convent and be married immediately.

  The wedding of Anna Carolina and Fidenzio Carnevale was necessarily intimate because of the period of mourning; it needed to be elegant in order to make a good impression on the Carnevales; and there were only a few very select guests, in order to facilitate the groom’s family’s foreign contacts, as the Carnevales were agents for a number of Sicilian sulfur mines. After the clash with the king in 1837, when British frigates had threatened to halt all the kingdom’s maritime shipping, the English had become the uncontested arbiters of sulfur exports. For that reason, Aunt Orsola, with her brother’s help, had invited a number of Englishmen, one of whom was James Garson.

  Anna Carolina was the picture of happiness: she cut quite a figure in her taffeta wedding gown with bouquets of pink flowers, wearing her slippers with buckles glittering with paste diamonds. In order to appear more attractive, she had put drops of atropine in her eyes: through her dilated pupils in the center of her light chestnut irises, she could only make out a blurry field of sight, but she felt enchantingly beautiful, and that’s how she looked to Fidenzio—a dark-haired young man with an impeccably groomed mustache—who only had eyes for his blushing bride. Their cousin the prince had outdone himself as the master of the house, and the nuptial banquet table surprised and delighted the Carnevales. The table was illuminated by six enormous Renaissance candelabra, each with eight arms, made of chased silver, set on mirrored trays that reflected their light upward onto an eighteenth-century chandelier in Murano glass, resembling a sailing ship with a thousand bellying sails. The banquet table’s centerpiece was formed by a series of silver statuettes alternating with crystal fruit stands piled high with bonbons and candied almonds, made by the sisters of Santa Patrizia. Crystal dishes and goblets had a 24-karat gold rim with the Padellani coat of arms.

  At their mother’s orders, Agata and Carmela were dressed in mourning. The day before, Annuzza had brought Agata another letter from Giacomo in which he assured her that the next wedding to be celebrated would be theirs. The stubbornness of a fourteen-year-old girl in love, her natural optimism, her desire to enjoy life, inherited from her father, and the pigheaded determination she’d inherited from her mother all made Agata certain that she’d get what she wanted. That morning she had curled her hair into large soft ringlets and she had pinned three pink camellias she’d picked on her aunt’s terrace, tied up with a tulle ribbon: she felt engaged. At the sight of her, her mother felt a wave of gloom; for her, sending her daughter to a nunnery was an admission of defeat, but she had no other options.

  The wedding luncheon was almost over. The guests were still drinking and, their hunger satiated, they ate sweets and pastries and crunched the last candied almonds. Seated between her cousins Severina and Eleonora, Agata felt a stab of sadness: she thought of her father. Her gaze wandered somberly over the table and the guests; then it chanced to light on James Garson, sitting far down the table from her, among the guests who were not family members. With his golden beard and whiskers, and dressed in the uniform of the British navy, dark blue with gold braid, he was handsome; all the girls at the table were giving him sidelong glances of admiration. He was just lifting a forkful of cake to his mouth and he stopped, fork and cake suspended in midair, but Agata’s eye had already glided along to the guest seated next to him.

  It was the time for farewells. Moving adroitly and wending his way through the guests, James managed to find her standing by a window. Agata seemed happy to see him. Through their shared tastes in books, the two had established a semblance of intimate complicity.

  “I’ll be leaving in two weeks,” he said. “My wedding is in June.”

  “You must be very happy,” said Agata in a gentle voice.

  His gaze seemed to harden. “I just hope that I’ll enjoy as much happiness as I saw on the faces of bride and groom today,” then he added: “I wish you all happiness, wherever you may be.”

  Agata turned pale: then he knew about the convent. At that moment, Carmela drew closer to her and slipped her hand in Agata’s, trusting. Agata squeezed her hand and, looking down, murmured a meek thank you.

  10.

  May 11th, 1840.

  Agata enters the convent of San Giorgio Stilita

  It was May 11, 1840. Agata got dressed for the last time in the bedroom that for nine weeks had been her home in the house of her Aunt Orsola. She looked disconsolately at the wrought-iron bed, the little round mahogany table with the single foot in the shape of a column, the boudoir vanity with the adjustable mirror and the chaise longue that had kept her company through good times and bad. She buttoned up her bodice and draped the peignoir over her shoulders so she could finish fixing her hair. She had curled it into the usual ringlets, but bigger than usual. Her mother had walked silently into the room and was watching her from the door.

  “Have you gone mad? The idea of going into the convent with curls!” She was to be admitted to the convent with straight hair, her aunt the abbess had been quite specific. For once, Agata refused to obey; she pointed out to her that she would be going into the monastery for just two months, not as a convent schoolgirl and not even as a postulant. She intended to leave her hair the way it was. In response, her mother said nothing but grabbed the comb and brusquely straightened out her curls for her. Agata was about to try to stop her; then she glimpsed a tear on her mother’s face and she lowered her hand. Her eyes riveted on the face she saw reflected in the mirror the whole time, Agata witnessed the destruction of her ringlets. She allowed her mother to twist her hair into a bun and pin it up to the nape of her neck, and as she watched her she struggled to hold back her tears. That was when her eyes began to become bloodshot. Her mother had brought a black veil, just as a precaution, and after carefully placing pins and clips, she placed it on Agata’s head, covering her face in silence.

  Admiral Pietraperciata, w
ho had close ties with the Catholic curia, and Ortensia, the wife of their cousin the prince, accompanied the two women to the convent of San Giorgio Stilita. Agata had said goodbye to Aunt Orsola and the servants without even a shade of emotion. As soon as she got into the carriage, she opened the floodgates of sobs and that was how she arrived at the convent.

  It was as if the abbess and the two nuns who were waiting for them had known in advance that Agata would arrive in tears. The nuns took her, removed her shawl and her veil before she had a chance to object and then pushed her, gripping her by the arms, through the Chapter Hall, the passageways, and a short flight of stairs, until they reached the choir. There they forced her to kneel before the gilt wooden railing that faced the nave of the church. Agata leaned her forehead against the wood and went on weeping.

  “Don’t cry, enjoy it: look at this marvel!” one nun told her. “Thank the Lord that he has brought you to this garden of salvation!” added another. “Ingrate!” muttered a third, seeing that Agata was reluctant.

  The billowing scent of incense rose thick and pungent from the main altar. Looking down, the white and dark-blue tiles of the church’s majolica floor glittered, as did the gold stucco of the walls and cornices. Agata prayed to God to give her the strength to stay in that place for the two months to which she had agreed, and she slowly regained her calm. She tried to stand up, and she found herself surrounded. Someone asked her if she liked the choir, someone else congratulated her on her sister’s wedding, someone asked her how old she was, and many, many voices repeated the rhetorical question: “Don’t you want to become a nun? Don’t you want to become a nun?” Her two guardians dragged her away from the choir without giving her a chance to answer—the abbess was expecting her.