The abbess’s drawing room, redecorated in the eighteenth century, was cluttered with furniture, paintings, and ornaments: in the long succession of abbesses, every one of them had tried to leave a tangible sign of their presence there. Agata recovered as she ate the biscotti and drank the lemonade that she had been given. She looked around her, curiously. “Come, then, say farewell to your mother,” the abbess gently told her. “Now I’m going to call two novices, members of the Padellani family of Uttino, relations of yours, and they’ll show you around. Then I’ll join you and show you the rest of the convent.”
The “little nuns” were first cousins, and they looked alike as two peas in a pod: close-lipped with olive complexions and aquiline noses. They had the same voice—low and shrill. They started their tour with the cloister, which was reached through the large carved wooden portal. The cloister was rectangular and split into two sections—one part a flower garden, the other an orchard and vegetable garden—by an exedra decorated with statues in stucco and clay. At that time of day it seemed deserted. Four symmetrical beds surrounded the monumental fountain—round and made of white marble, with mascarons, dolphins, and sea horses—that dominated the garden. Standing in front of the fountain and facing visitors were two statues: Christ and the Samaritan Woman—larger than life and leaning toward one another, the Christ ready to step forward and the Samaritan Woman coyly reserved, as if they were engaged in a gallant conversation. Those statues were completely devoid of any spiritual content, and would have been much better suited to an aristocratic palazzo or villa.
Everything was magnificent, ornate, and rich. The corridors, with piperno-stone arches and cross vaults, supported spacious majolica-tiled terraces, overlooked by the French doors of the luminous second-story cells. Those were the most desirable cells. The third-story cells had equally large French doors, but they only featured narrow balconies. In the orchard and vegetable garden, on the far side of the elegant exedra, orange, lemon, and other fruit trees grew; in the beds, greens, vegetables, aromatic and medicinal herbs were cultivated.
While they were showing Agata around, the two young girls chattered about altar boys and father confessors, using much the same language that Agata’s cousins, the Tozzi girls, used when they talked about their beaus.
Suddenly the bells rang Terce. The young nuns fell silent. The cloister began to fill with black-clad figures; they scurried out of every staircase and door and walked rustling down the porticoed corridors, striding past her and hurrying into the little wooden door that led to the lower floor and to the comunichino, the little window through which the nuns took their communion. Agata wanted to be alone; she took advantage of the situation and offered to wait for her guides in the choir, so that they could attend Terce with the others. “Oh it doesn’t matter, we can hear it from here,” the two young girls reassured her, and they threw open one of the six arched doors that lined the south side of the cloister: on the other side was an alcove with a grated window and side seats, from which it was possible to see the nave and the main altar. The church of San Giorgio Stilita, seen from above, was a magnificent sight. The paintings in the chapels across the way, the stuccoes, the volutes, the putti, and the white-and-gold wreaths of flowers and fruit on the pillars and walls seemed stunningly close, while the white marble altar, illuminated by eight silver candelabra, was like an island of light. Agata held her breath. From the stone seats, the novices listened to the prayers with compunction.
When they returned, the nuns stopped to greet Agata. For the most part, they were young and cheerful. “Don’t you want to become a nun?” was once again the question on everyone’s lips, and in response to Agata’s repeated “no”—sometimes immediate, at times terse, occasionally accompanied by a vigorous shake of the head, other times harsh and grim—they laughed and added that Agata would soon change her mind. When the throng of nuns had passed, Agata felt her cheeks burning. The young sisters told her that the two of them had entered the convent together, at the age of eight, and that they were happy. They said nothing more, though, because now the abbess was approaching. With a simple nod of the head she intimated that they could go.
“Let’s start with the kitchens,” the abbess decreed, and she leaned on Agata’s arm. Agata extended her arm to the abbess and instantly felt completely at ease with her father’s sister. The two were both the same height, one slender, the other stout, but they soon fell into step.
Behind a pomegranate tree there were some workshops; in one, various kinds of flour were being milled, in the other, bread dough was being prepared. The first room in the kitchens was a succession of wood-burning ovens, identical and numbered. On the shorter wall were two ovens, both much larger than the others. On a stone in the wall that had been left uncovered, a phrase was carved in crude letters: “The second week of December bread is not to be made: the large and small ovens belong to Madame the Abbess.” The abbess pointed it out to Agata; it was an inscription from the previous century. She added, with slight irony: “Even then they disobeyed the abbess, if the poor thing had to carve it into stone!” Then she turned serious: “Work and prayer: that’s the life of a Benedictine nun. Here our work is to make sweets and pastries, to be sold or given as gifts. It’s hard work, if it’s done right and conscientiously.” Agata saw a gleam in her aunt’s eyes: “When I was younger, I would commandeer all the ovens just to bake ricotta tarts for my relatives!”
They were walking through the Chapter Hall, on their way to the choir. The abbess was explaining to her that the nuns were self-governing and that in a certain sense that was their parliament: here they deliberated on admissions, such as Agata’s, with votes that involved secret balloting. Then the abbess added with pride that in the old days, when male monasteries and female convents coexisted in the same building, it was the abbess who enjoyed seniority of command over the abbot, and not the other way around.
That second tour of the choir made quite an impression on Agata. It was a vast square room, with a majolica-tile floor, and it was built over the portico of the church. It communicated with the church through a gilded wooden grate with diagonal openings, embellished by tiny scrollwork that reproduced a floral motif. Like the grate in the parlor, this wooden grate made the nuns invisible to the congregation. It also fragmented their view of the church, preventing them from having a complete picture. The two levels of stalls were decorated with exquisite wooden intarsias and could seat two hundred nuns. At the center stood a podium for the abbess, who was thoroughly enjoying the sight of her niece’s astonishment at such lavish grandeur. “I thank God for making me a nun,” the abbess said. “Here we sing the entire Book of Psalms every week. Every day we praise the Lord, beginning with the Nocturnal Office and continuing with Matins, the prayers of Prime, Terce, Sext, and None, Vespers, and finally Compline.”
Just then, the bell rang and the nuns—hands joined, eyes lowered, dressed in habits with flowing sleeves—were taking their places silently in the stalls. Pressed back against the wall next to the holy water fount, Agata observed. At a sign from the abbess, the nuns began singing a cappella in a single clear, pure, incorporeal voice. Faces that were wrinkled or fresh, hollowed out or pudgy, all diaphanous and impassive. Eyes focused on the glittering silver and gold of the altar, soft lips opening and closing in unison like the mouths of the living corals of a reef—it was wonderful singing. Agata was sorry when the nuns began filing out of the choir, as silently as they’d entered, two by two: they lowered their heads before the abbess and then they kneeled in the direction of the altar below them.
The abbess took Agata up onto the catwalks that ran from the choir, extending just below the roof along the entire perimeter of the church—these were narrow corridors, lit by double skylights set in the roof. On the wall overlooking the nave there were alcoves with grilles made of gilded wood. Through these, the nuns could watch the Mass and enjoy an uninterrupted view of the church. Along the outer walls, on the other hand, the abbesses belonging to the familie
s of the sees of Capuana and Nido had built little altar shrines embellished with needlepoint, silverwork, enamels, statuettes, paintings, and crucifixes, all for their own personal use. They had thus vacuously emphasized the dynastic power and might of their families. Those luminous and airy parapets seemed more than anything else a place of regret, not of prayer: up there, alone, unseen by the congregation, a patrician nun would remember her family’s love and be tormented by worldly concerns. Her aunt the abbess showed her the little altars of the other Padellani abbesses and went on at length with stories of the family’s power and piety. Agata was sweating and her eyes were burning, as if from the grains of windblown sand tossed by the sirocco wind that was flowing down through the skylights on the roof, enveloping her and immobilizing her. At that moment, and for the first time, Agata perceived, as if it were corporeal, the haughty solitude of the cloistered life.
11.
The grueling two months of probation
More than once, during the long first day at the convent of San Giorgio Stilita, Agata had consoled herself with the thought that at least when night came she would finally be left alone. She was stunned when she was told that instead she would be sleeping with the abbess. In compliance with the Benedictine Rule, the abbess’s living quarters consisted of a bare space, a bed without a headboard, and an enormous built-in armoire where the chorister nuns kept the silver of the monastic dowries; it opened out onto the spacious majolica-tiled terrace atop the arches of the cloister, where two rows of large terra cotta vases planted with orange trees, camellia plants, and jasmine trees created a private space. A bed had been brought in for Agata and placed at the foot of her aunt’s bed, next to the pallet of one of her two lay sisters, Angiola Maria—a hulking middle-aged woman with sharply defined features—while the other lay sister, Sarina, a tall, skinny young woman with a gentle gaze, slept in the corner next to the bathroom.
The abbess was reciting aspirations at her kneeling-stool. Agata was already under the blankets. The flickering flame of the oil lamp burned faintly all night long and she was having trouble falling asleep. Every time she raised her eyelids she met the gleaming pupils of Angiola Maria, focused straight at her like a pair of charcoal embers. At last, Agata turned over and lay motionless, but still she could feel that unsettling glare on her back.
At dawn, she awoke with a start: bending over her was Angiola Maria, calling her for morning prayers and shoving her with both hands to get her out of bed. From that day forward the lay sister bestowed upon the niece of her beloved mistress all her uncouth solicitudes.
The first week went by quickly and not altogether agreeably. The abbess had given her a number of religious and monastic books to read. In the evening, after None and before Compline, she waited for Agata in the cloister. In the lengthening shadows of day’s end, they strolled together in the garden, breathing the scents released by plants and watered earth, and they’d talk. Agata began to feel an intense love for her father’s pious sister.
The convent of San Giorgio Stilita was more than a thousand years old and there was a time when it had as many as three hundred nuns, “every one of them with four quarters of nobility,” her aunt told her, without any attempt to conceal her caste-pride. The spirit of the Enlightenment in the last century had reduced the number of vocations, and then the Napoleonic military occupation had put an end to admissions entirely for a decade. “But it was unable to destroy the quest for God through the cloistered life,” the abbess added, wrinkling her nose slightly, and then she went on to tell Agata that after the Bourbon restoration, in 1815, there was a wave of new callings. The convent had another, secondary cloister, lined with cells not currently in use, and the abbess hoped that one day those cells might be filled with Benedictine nuns.
Many of the eighty professed nuns, the choristers, were young, and the same was true of the one hundred twenty lay sisters—religious who came to the convent from the less prosperous classes of society, many of them illiterate. Because they could not pay the monastic dowry, they had simply taken vows of chastity and poverty and they served a nun of high rank. The lay sisters were excluded from the Divine Office. When the bell rang the canonical hours for prayer, the nuns recited the psalms in the choir, while the lay sisters gathered in the hall outside the comunichino and recited together the Pater, the Ave, and the Credo. The humblest manual tasks were assigned to a hundred or so servingwomen—lower-ranking than the lay sisters, likewise dressed in the monastic habit but without the pleated wimple that was worn only by the chorists; these servingwomen did not take vows. Aside from taking care of various domestic chores, the servingwomen left the convent to carry out the orders of the nuns and to run errands. They and the helper nuns were the only residents of the convent who were allowed to go out into the world and have contact with others.
The convent’s Chapter had resolved on an exceptional basis to admit Agata not as a probanda, that is, for a period of probation—as her mother had told her, and as procedure would normally have dictated—but instead directly as a postulant, the stage prior to that of a novice: just one of the many exceptions that were afforded to members of the leading families of the district. Her aunt the abbess wished to make it clear to her that, once she became a professed nun, she could obtain any status she liked, choosing among the offices of teacher of novices, cellaress, hebdomadary, herbalist, infirmarian, pharmacist, helper nun, and sacristan.
Now Agata had a cell all to herself on the third floor, in the hallway of the novices; she would be spending part of the day with them. Her first contact with those girls had been fraught and tense. Unwanted or burdensome daughters of the highest Neapolitan aristocracy, these young women were proud of their birth, station, and lineage and they were jealous of the privileges that Agata already enjoyed as the abbess’s niece. The novices knew everything about her—while she knew nothing about any of them—and they were ill disposed toward “the Sicilian girl,” as they called her, to begin with. There was no other Padellani di Opiri among them, and so Agata was sharply isolated; even worse, the two novices who were cousins of hers were actually members of the cadet branch of the Padellani family, the Counts of Uttino. That side of the family had been feuding for years with the Opiris over certain issues of inheritance, and so the two novices mocked and berated Agata. As if that were not enough, they managed to humiliate her in front of the other girls by alluding to the poverty into which Agata’s mother had fallen, and ridiculing her with one insistent question: “Tell us whether the abbess is going to pay your dowry.” Agata had reacted with haughty pride and from that day on a relationship of mutual dislike, if not outright hostility, was established. That unfriendliness extended to the other friends of the two Uttino girls, further worsening Agata’s isolation.
Agata’s aunt had encouraged her to make use of the archives room, which also served as the convent’s library. The shelves lining the walls were made of mahogany, as were both the coffered ceiling and the little altar facing the entry door; on that altar an image of the Virgin Mary, set in a carved mahogany frame, was displayed. The most valuable books were protected behind glass doors: psalters, incunabula, and breviaries that had been illuminated by the Benedictines. Agata took refuge in the wooden stalls where she felt she was protected from prying eyes—if there were any eyes to pry: the room was seldom frequented—and spent her time there reading. It was also a way of escaping her companions. Next to the archives were the ovens and the kitchens. The mornings she spent reading were accompanied by the crunchy scent of biscotti, mingled with the musky aroma of freshly waxed mahogany, while in the afternoons—dedicated to Neapolitan ricotta tarts, or pastiere, and whatever other baked dishes might be ordered—the distinctive array of smells of cooking foods whetted her appetite. There Agata read happily.
The Benedictine Rule was the scaffolding that supported the larger structure of the Order. In the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia, disgusted by the corruption of the Church of Rome, set out to found an order that would put his fo
llowers on the path to God, supporting them along the way by a rigid division of each day and a healthy balance between prayer and physical activity. Orare est laborare et laborare est orare—To pray is to work and to work is to pray. Prayer was called Opus Dei, the divine office, and it traced the suffering and death of Christ, becoming the very reason for existence of the monastics. Silence was fundamental. During the day silence could be broken during the period of recreation after meals; after Compline, however, it was rigorous. Agata had been quite appreciative of Miss Wainwright’s rigid routine and, after her initial dismay, she found the Benedictine structuring of the day into the canonical hours to be somehow reassuring; she was exhilarated by the reading of the Psalms and the Regula. And yet, as she looked around, she noticed to her horror that life as it was actually lived in the convent was quite different from the description. The rule of silence was roundly ignored by the nuns in the privacy of their cells and was often broken in the hallways and in the cloister, where there was a subdued hum of whispering; the rules of fasting and plain foods were broken on a daily basis by lavish meals, with multiple courses, sometimes as many as seven dishes on a weekday, and even more on feast days. As for the rule of ora et labora—it had become a farce: nuns and novices failed to show up at the hours of prayer, what with one excuse or another, and their chief form of manual labor, aside from embroidery—often making beautiful things in needlepoint for themselves—involved the manufacture of pastries, with the assistance of servants and lay sisters. Agata wondered why the abbess would tolerate all those infractions of the Rule, but she didn’t dare to ask about it.
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