The canon descended from the altar.
Exurge, Domine, praeveni eum et supplanta eum:
Eripe animam meam ab impio frameam tuam.
The canon handed the habit to Agata through the comunichino.
Ab inimicis manus tuae.
Agata wore the heavy shoes of the nuns and she had combed her hair into two flat bands that ran over her ears and were gathered and pinned to the nape of her neck with a comb. The educands undressed her and then re-dressed her in the black woolen habit, with narrow sleeves extending to the wrist and a small scapular hanging from her shoulders. Then they helped her put on the white muslin apron and tied a handkerchief made of the same material around her neck.
Ego autem in iustitia apparebo conspectu tuo:
Satiabor cum apparuerit gloria tua.
Once the vestition was complete, the new educand was the first to receive the divine host. Agata closed her eyes while the particle of holy wafer dissolved in her mouth. When she reopened them, she looked out at the congregation. In one of the first rows she thought she saw Giacomo with a woman sitting next to him, and she quickly shut her eyes again, very tight.
18.
The educandate of Agata
Agata’s first week as an educand had gone well. The cardinal had confirmed that Father Cuoco would be her father confessor. The abbess, who until the vestition had almost seemed to be avoiding any opportunity to speak with her one-on-one, now behaved more affectionately toward her even than before, though also with greater restraint. The abbess also met with her every day, briefly, before Vespers, during the “time of the nuns,” when they were allowed to read, pray, and meditate on their own as they chose.
Religious instruction was entrusted to the teachers of the educands and the novices, assisted by other novices who were approaching their solemn profession of vows; the young students were treated quite strictly. The school day was punctuated not by lessons but by the rigid schedules of prayer, with little time for recreation. Agata kept her distance from the other educands, who sought her out in order to hear from her lips the true story of her clash with her mother. She preferred to study from the books that they’d given her, but her thoughts kept returning to her mother, who she knew would soon be arriving from Messina, as she had been informed by the abbess.
Donna Gesuela did not go directly to the convent the minute she stepped off the steamer, as she had originally planned to do. At the advice of General Cecconi, she had first talked to relatives and friends in an attempt to understand what had happened with her daughter, so that she’d be able to take Agata back to Messina without necessarily undermining her relations with the Padellanis.
The day had arrived when she was scheduled to visit the convent of San Giorgio Stilita. The sister doorkeeper ushered her into the parlor, instead of into the abbess’s private drawing room. Donna Gesuela, offended at being treated like any ordinary visitor instead of as a close relation, sat on the edge of the seat in front of the grate, without leaning against the backrest. As she waited, her resentment swelled to a slow boil.
Then, she heard a creaking sound behind her: her daughter and her sister-in-law were entering the parlor through the little door concealed behind the red and green volutes of the columns in the fresco. As she leaned forward to kiss her mother’s hand, Agata displayed her hair, neatly combed and clipped into place, clearly revealing the bald patches where she had ripped locks of hair out of her scalp. That sight made Donna Gesuela forget all her best intentions: she upbraided Agata for having filled the convent with her protests against the cloistered life, declaring to the four winds that all she wanted to do was to be married—at this point Donna Gesuela began raising her voice, increasingly shrill—and then accused her of having concocted this diabolical plan in order to persuade everyone else that she had had the vocation, whereas in fact she was only motivated by disobedience: Agata merely wanted to avoid being married to the man that her mother had chosen for her.
“Gesuela, let’s put an end to this. You can’t always force other people to do as you wish. You’re almost forty years old, you should have a little wisdom, now that you’re a widow. Agata is staying here, that’s what she wants . . . and it’s what you wanted, the last time you and I talked.” The abbess’s words only made things more tense. Now Donna Gesuela lost her temper completely; she accused the Padellanis of conspiring against her, and the abbess in particular had betrayed her trust. She threatened to turn to the king’s justice to get her daughter back. Without losing her composure, the abbess reminded her that the cardinal had been closely involved in the whole affair: “He has your daughter’s best interests at heart, you know that.” No, Gesuela hadn’t thought of the cardinal at all, and she was thrown back on her heels at those words. “Then, allow me to assure you that I consulted with him personally,” Donna Maria Crocifissa drove the point home, “when I received Agata’s request. It was he who approved her return to the convent, provided that the professed nuns approve in a full session of the Chapter. He also knows that Agata wishes to become a nun of her own free will.”
The mother glared straight into her daughter’s eyes. Agata returned her gaze without flinching, until Donna Gesuela was forced to turn her eyes away, in defeat, in the face of such a bold challenge.
From that day until the day of her simple profession, Agata had no more contact with her mother.
19.
Agata thinks about love while kneading bread dough
The encounter with her mother had left a deep mark on Agata. She truly felt alone now, and she did nothing to try to change that: she avoided the company of the other young women and of the nuns. She worked, she studied, and she read. She was sad. In November, after the Day of the Dead, she was afraid that she was about to slip back into the slough of melancholy, from which song and the routines of the day saved her. She was orderly by nature and the alternation between work and prayer gave her a sense of satisfaction and comfort. Comfortably ensconced in the empty pews behind the choristers, she joined their chant and psalmodized, opening her heart and her throat to God and praying that He would save her from a world to which she did not belong.
The educand’s day was regulated not only by the divine office and by the lessons, but also by menial tasks. The condition of entering the convent as an educand, which the Chapter had imposed upon Agata, was therefore a punishment that she gladly accepted. She liked getting her hands dirty working in the garden, kneading bread dough, cleaning silver, pleating the brilliant white wimples of the nuns, ironing and mending habits. She happily attended lessons and quickly learned everything that she was taught; then, on her own, she completed her education by reading whatever she laid her hands on in the archive, or the books that she had brought with her.
In Messina her mother had never allowed Agata to spend time in the kitchen, which was down on the ground floor. Agata went there when her mother wasn’t home, but she hadn’t been able to learn much. In Naples, Nora had taught her to cook the peasant dishes that she knew on a bed of embers. Considering her lack of experience, the hebdomadary set Agata to make bread, but even that wasn’t as easy as she had expected.
The kitchen was a big rectangular room with a platform in the center glittering with enameled tile. It culminated in a very tall hood supported by stout columns; the hearth, beneath the hood, with its fire blazoning in the subcellar, was a red-hot circular slab of iron, with holes of different sizes for cauldrons, pots, and pans. Along the short sides of the kitchen were, respectively, the room set aside for baking and roasting in the wood ovens and the anterefectory—both of those rooms had marble counters along the walls, supported on massive wooden beams that projected from the wall; these counters were used for leavening bread dough and for carving meat.
The cellars extended all the way out under the two refectories—the little refectory, for educands, lay sisters, and postulants, and the large refectory, reserved for the use of nuns and novices—and they were connected to the kitchen by a staircase. Air an
d light came down through two shafts protected by a railing. They were used as a storage area and as a wine cellar and they had their own well, with its own aquifer, and a large washing tub.
Sacks of flour and wheat arrived at the convent of San Giorgio Stilita from the convent’s farmlands: the grinding was done by the serving women on old grindstones, in the garden. The pastry flour was stored in large metal barrels, while the kitchen flour was kept in grey sacks on which was written the type of flour and the date on which it was ground. Bread flour was yet another variety. It was Brida’s job to teach Agata how to make bread. First off all, she decided to show her how to select the flour. She stuck her hand into the flour sack and then she plunged Agata’s hand in too. “You must pay close attention to the color: the finest flour is a light yellow and it must be very soft to the touch,” and so saying, she pulled her hand out of the sack. “You see? This is good flour because it sticks to your finger. Now take a handful of it and squeeze it.” She pulled out a fistful herself and then opened her fingers one by one, showing Agata that the first class flour didn’t powder immediately, but formed small clumps on her open palm—that was the flour that would be used to make communion wafers, fancy rolls, and bread for the dinner table. Out of that flour, a finer, more delicate flour would be sifted for the biscotti that were eaten in the convent. The third quality of flour, used to make bread for the serving women, for frying, to thicken sauces, to make pizza, was less white, almost dirty in color and, if compressed, it showed little grey spots. Agata was hypnotized by those operations and she felt alive, receptive: the skin on her hands became very sensitive.
Having shown her how to select the flour the first thing that Brida taught Agata was how to prepare the yeast. She took a handful of the dough that had already been prepared and then she started by punching it down. Then she kneaded it on the counter to refine the dough’s consistency. Agata watched her with rapt interest. Brida gathered the scrapings of the kneading trough and all the bits of dough and the scraps that she found lying around and then she added a tiny amount of flour to give that ball of leftover dough the consistency of a very dense dough. She kneaded it with a very small amount of added water until it became a hard and compact little loaf, which she placed in a small pot covered with an old linen napkin. She covered that with a lid and then wrapped it in a clean rag, ready to be added to the bread dough they’d make in the coming days. Brida looked at it with satisfaction and said, “If it’s properly stored, this yeast dough can last for a long time.” Then she told her the story of how that yeast had come from the mother dough that was brought from Aleppo hundreds of years ago by the founders of the convent, the white-garbed nuns on the walls of the main staircase. Forced to flee in a panic by the advance of the Saracens, the nuns managed to bring away with them nothing but the sacred relics and a ball of yeast. During the grueling crossing of the Mediterranean, they had suffered from terrible scorching heat. The mother abbess flattened the ball and kept it between her breasts, softening it with warm sweat to keep the yeast from drying out and dying.
Making bread became Agata’s favorite job. She carved a shallow crater into the heap of flour piled on the counter. She’d mix it carefully with two fingers, slowly adding lukewarm water, then she began to move faster, enlarging the hole with the handle of a broken ladle, adding more and more water and mixing more flour to the fluid mixture until the original mountain of flour had become a lake with high banks. At that point, she dissolved the yeast into hot water and stirred it into the fluid mixture to blend it thoroughly. It was work that required no particular concentration, and as Agata did it she would find herself thinking: Why did I wind up here? Is this my life?
Agata added more water, or thickened the mixture with flour if it was too liquid, folded over the edges of the flour into the hollow and began feeding them into the white magma without creating channels through which it could run out onto the counter. Once all the flour had been worked into the mixture, it was time to knead it, which was crucial to the quality of the bread. She kneaded the dough in small portions and with great force. In order to obtain the desired elasticity she would lift it—if it was very heavy, she’d arch her shoulders backwards to keep from losing her balance—until it pulled away in a single piece from the counter, and then she’d punch it vigorously with her fist. Last of all, she’d roll it out with the rolling pin to refine it and to eliminate any air pockets. Is this the work that I wanted to do? Once she’d attained the desired consistency, the dough, rolled into large balls, was set to rise in a warm place, in large covered bowls. What does all this mean? Does it make any sense?
Agata found answers to her questions only when she was kneading the risen dough, when she was shaping it, hefting it and giving it bulk, and decorating the bread. The bread became a living thing, then. The sharp, ripening senses of that fifteen-year-old girl were reawakening, to a quickening feeling of joy. Agata felt that she was part of a larger whole that had no beginning or end—life, growth—and she associated the mystery of bread-making with the mystery of communion, of the Eucharist. That an infinitesimal portion of the pellet of fermented dough that the abbess had carried all the way from Aleppo between her breasts, when mixed with water and flour from Naples, could still create fresh, flavorful, crunchy bread was a reprisal of the miracle of life and its growth. In those moments, Agata—her fingers sticky with dough—glorified God and was grateful and happy to have been selected to honor Him in that way.
The real difficulties began when it was time to control the embers in the oven and govern the baking times. However carefully she repeated in her mind the Aves, the Paters, and the Credos prescribed by the recipes, she never managed to produce creditable bread and biscotti. The oven wasn’t something that suited her. She despaired over it, and one day Angiola Maria came to her rescue. She spoke to Brida, who agreed to take care of the baking if in exchange Agata agreed to see to the carving of the meat. Agata not only enjoyed cutting up the sides and quarters of slaughtered animals that arrived in the kitchen on feast days, as well as stripping out the gristle, but she was also happy to do the more tiresome tasks that demanded a special focus and effort, such as boning chickens, capons, and even quails and pigeons, while preserving the skin intact. That work, done while the bread was baking, increased Agata’s profound sense of the sacrifice of Christ.
It was traditional for the nuns to make pastries to sell or give as gifts: all of them were required to know how to make the convent’s specialty—the pastiera napoletana, a ricotta-filled Neapolitan tart—but each of them also had a specialty all their own. Agata dedicated herself to the Sicilian sweets—dolcini—that were prepared cold, made with almond paste (also called royal paste) and filled with pistachio preserves and zuccata, or candied pumpkin, and covered with a shiny white sugar frosting decorated with silver balls, leaves and rose petals made of communion wafer dough and adorned with floral designs in pastel hues. Her imagination ran wild when it came to decorating them. She had invented a method all her own: she used the plants from the garden as she had been taught by Angiola Maria and had devised a number of very beautiful natural dyes. Using brushes made from pigeon feathers she created fanciful compositions on the white glaze of the cucchitelle, which looked like jewel boxes made of French porcelain. Word of mouth ensured that these sold rapidly through the convent’s wheel. Nuns and novices alike were jealous because the abbess had given her permission to paint them in her room, while everyone else was required to complete their pastries in the kitchen. To their eyes, Agata was afforded a dishonest advantage; this was a grave affront to their status and their personal dignity. It was through pastries and sweets that the cloistered nuns not only expressed their own manual creativity and taste, but also conveyed to the outer world their personality.
20.
April 1841.
Agata comes to know her father
through the stories told her by her aunt the abbess
and she develops a bond with her
Mirrors w
ere forbidden in the convent, but there wasn’t a single nun who hadn’t hidden one away somewhere, not a lay sister who didn’t use a specially polished metal plate or a piece of glass with a sheet of tinfoil. One afternoon the abbess and Agata were walking in the shade of the cloister’s arcade talking about their favorite reading materials. Her aunt’s sharp eye was surveying the double cloister. In the garden, beyond the exedra, and already shrouded in shadow, the serving women were taking dry cleaning rags down from the clothesline stretched between the pomegranate tree and the lemon tree. The sun was still beating down in the terraces and in the monumental cloister. A number of nuns were resting in chairs beneath the exedras, watching the water spray from the mouths of the seahorses on the fountain. Suddenly, a ray of sunshine shot at an angle onto the lush foliage of the camellia plant next to the fountain, illuminating it brightly. The light had struck a mirror carelessly left perched on the balustrade of the terrace, and it was darting noticeably. With astonishing rapidity, and stealthy silence, the abbess hurried into the garden to get a better look. The eyes of every woman and girl in the cloister were following the stout figure. The mirror fell and struck the abbess’s leather shoe. In an instant, nuns and serving women had surrounded her and, in low voices, offered her comfort and aid. “No it’s nothing, really, it’s nothing,” murmured the abbess, as she limped off.
Despite her heavy shoes, the abbess’s big toe was suppurating and she was forced to stay in bed. Agata went to see her whenever she could. The birthdays of both her little sister Carmela and of her father fell in April. Agata was missing them both keenly, but she preferred not to talk about that to her aunt. Instead, the abbess, as if she could sense it, started to talk to her about her father. They were ten years apart in age, but they had been especially close; he could never get over the fact that she had accepted the family’s decision to make her become a nun. “But let me tell you something,” she pointed out, arching her eyebrows proudly, “he was wrong. I’m happy to be a nun. Now the Lord has sent you to me, and you’re going to like it here just as I’ve liked it here. You will become abbess yourself, someday.”
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