Nun (9781609459109)

by Hornby, Simonetta Agnello

  The clash between mother and daughter was not a secret for long, in either Messina or Naples. The result was that it stirred the Padellanis from their torpor—one by one they came to pay Agata a visit—and it made Gesuela dig her heels in.

  The first ones who came to see her were Aunt Orsola and Admiral Pietraperciata: both of them wanted to reassure Agata that they would renew their efforts to win her mother’s consent to her becoming a nun; they conveyed greetings from her cousin Michele, the head of the larger family, who fully approved her decision to become a nun. Next came the prince’s wife, Ortensia, a tall woman, insipidly beautiful, with whom Agata had spoken only very rarely. Ortensia too praised her decision and promised that she would speak to Donna Gesuela on Agata’s behalf. The princess also shed light on the reason for the family’s sudden renewal of interest in Agata; in fact, Agata had been baffled by it. The abbess, it turns out, had written directly to her sisters and to the prince, asking them to come out in support of Agata’s vocation, and informing them as to Gesuela’s impious intentions. The abbess had also made it clear, between the lines, that she would not look favorably on the candidacy of other girls from the Padellani di Opiri family at the convent of San Giorgio Stilita if Agata were to be torn from the oasis of salvation in which none other than her mother had first placed her. Ortensia, who had four young daughters, was keenly interested in placing at least one of them as a nun at San Giorgio Stilita.

  Eleonora and Severina Tozzi also came to see her, now both married and still childless. Eleonora had had a series of miscarriages and seemed tense and exhausted. Severina, who was younger and a relative newlywed, asked Agata to pray for her to have a male child, telling her coyly: “My husband is really determined, he never gives me a rest . . . ” The two cousins spoke as if they were in a confessional, about everything and everyone, without caution or care, even about intimate conjugal details.

  While Eleonora stuffed herself on the puff pastries that Sarina offered her in the parlor, and between bites asked her to give her the recipe, Severina confided to Agata in a hushed voice that Eleonora had been threatened by her husband. He had told her that if she were unable to bring her next pregnancy to term, then he would “turn his back on her” and request an annulment. Agata remembered Eleonora as a vivacious young girl, an attractive and talented ballerina; now, at age twenty-two, she’d put on weight and had lost her lovely poise and confidence. As if she’d just read Agata’s mind, Severina whispered: “If you could only see how badly she dances now, fat as she is!” Then, in a rush, she added: “Do you remember that time in the alcove when you danced a waltz with Captain capitano Garson?” Severina told her that she’d seen him again at a reception just the other evening. After his wedding, he’d stopped frequenting Neapolitan society: it was said that his wife had demanded that they go live in Menton, not far from Nice. When he came back to the kingdom, he took care of family business and only socialized within the populous local colony of English people. Suddenly, however, in the last few weeks, Garson was being seen everywhere. “I’ll ask Admiral Pietraperciata, he’ll surely know. I say they’re no longer together. Or perhaps she’s died. I’ve even heard that she’s gone melancholic, and that she’s been put in a madhouse.” Agata had leaned her forehead against the grate; she could hear the notes of the waltz, but she couldn’t see James’s face; Giacomo was her gallant knight, and she was dancing in his arms, feeling his dark eyes upon her.

  A sudden gust of warm, pastry-scented breath wafted over her; Agata was unable to recoil fast enough—Eleonora had thrust her face against the grate, in order to emphasize her request. “We all know that you have a special devotion for the Madonna dell’Utria, we know that through the power of your prayer you made the stolen jewels reappear,” Eleonora said; she went on to beg her cousin to implore the Virgin to give her the grace of a son. “And pray for your sister Sandra, too, she has as much need as I do . . . ”

  After that visit, Agata fell into a different kind of melancholy. The conjugal miseries of her cousins unsettled her; they undercut her certainty that life with Giacomo would have been so greatly preferable to the cloistered life. She wished that she could simply stop the pendulum of time and stay as she was, a postulant at San Giorgio Stilita, with the option of leaving the convent when her mother finally accepted her refusal to be married off to the Cavaliere d’Anna. Once and for all.

  Then she grew restless: she wanted to return to civilian life, read newspapers and novels, pay attention to politics, make friendships, get married. Right away.

  One day, in a fit of agitation, she hastily emptied her trunk of linen and lifted the false bottom. At random, she pulled out a book, Pride and Prejudice, and then tossed the linen higgledy-piggledy back into the trunk and shut it, afraid of being caught. She read the novel in fits and starts, when she was able, but she couldn’t wait to plunge back into it. She identified with the Bennet sisters and their beaus; the memory of Giacomo came back vividly, churning her emotions. She could no longer bring herself to become a nun. She wanted Giacomo. She yearned for him. She went so far as to prepare a decoction to placate her yearnings. But the next day they returned. She convinced herself that Giacomo was in Naples and, just as she was thinking about him, so he must be trying to find her. At the first opportunity that presented itself, she went to listen to Mass from the catwalk next to the choir, and she scrutinized the nave, looking for Giacomo from the grate facing the little altar of the Blessed Elisabetta Padellani, but she never saw him—never.

  Agata tried to peer within, to understand her own behavior, but she was unsuccessful. She was baffled by herself, and she didn’t want to talk about it with Father Cuoco—she didn’t dare. She knew that she was too confused. She did her schoolwork and her chores, she studied and worked like the other postulants, but she felt like the brigantine that had brought her to Naples through the tempest with her father’s coffin: storm-tossed and adrift, uncertain of everything and everyone.

  February 5, 1844 was her eighteenth birthday, as well as the feast day of her patron saint, St. Agatha. She was watching Mass from the parapet. At last! But she had no time to enjoy the show: Giacomo was down there, next to a young woman dressed in green, who wore a hat trimmed with fur. Between them were two small children. He was clearly quite restless; he kept looking around him and he inevitably wound up with his head pointing in the direction of the comunichino. The little boy next to him reached up for his hand; Giacomo, arrogantly, yanked it away. The woman in the hat leaned down to say something to the little boy, then she resumed her stance. The little boy started whining and went on reaching up for his father’s hand; the father made an impatient gesture to a serving girl in the pew behind them. Now the child was wailing in despair; he didn’t want to be taken away, but the father shoved him rudely out of the pew. “Don’t treat a little boy that way!” Agata exclaimed; then she watched what happened next, livid with indignation. The serving girl had left her pew and was standing next to Giacomo. He hoisted the child in the air and set him down hard, like a sack of potatoes, next to her; she dragged the child off up the nave of the church as he bawled his eyes out. The woman with the green hat didn’t seem to have noticed a thing. The other child, smaller still, was holding his mother’s overcoat, and now he tried to hold his father’s hand. Giacomo pulled his hand away brutishly and held it high, out of reach. The little boy, gripping his father’s sleeve, continued to try to seize the hand; unable to do so, he burst into tears. Giacomo ignored him.

  “He’s unworthy of me,” Agata murmured, and turned to the image of the Blessed Elisabetta Padellani. Giacomo, in the meanwhile, had plunged his finger into his nostril, rooting intently, only to wipe it off on the skirt of his overcoat, while his wife soothed the toddler, still in tears.

  That night, Agata finished reading Pride and Prejudice. She was head over heels in love with Darcy. The following morning, in a frenzy, she wrote a note to James Garson and sent it to Detken’s bookshop with a servingwoman:

  My Dear
Mr. Garson,

  I beg your pardon if I bother you after nearly four years. I’m not sure you’ll remember me, but I’ve taken up the first novel you gave me again: I reread it with new eyes. It gave me hope. I wish you and your family the greatest happiness. From here I pray for you.

  His only reply was to send her a new book.

  23.

  November 1844.

  Agata, captivated by the novels that James sends her, wants something else, something more, doubts whether she has the vocation, and has a talk with the cardinal

  At the end of November 1844, Donna Gesuela sent Sandra to inform the abbess, without any further explanation, that she would have no objection to her daughter becoming a nun: she couldn’t guarantee payment of the monastic dowry, but she would do her level best. The abbess decided that the following year, once she’d turned nineteen, Agata would study for the admission examinations for simple profession. Then, after her year of novitiate, at the age of twenty-one, Agata could study for her solemn profession.

  Agata did not welcome her mother’s decision with anything resembling relief. Since turning eighteen, she had felt like an adult, a different person. She was no longer happy to remain in the safety of the convent; now she was restless and curious. She wanted to return to ordinary life and work. She had persuaded herself that sooner or later her mother would let her do so. After all, she had the qualifications to do the same work that Miss Wainwright did. But now Agata wanted something different, something more. In response to every note that she sent thanking him for a book and expressing her observations, Garson would send her another book—poetry and novels, at first in English and then in Italian and even French, some modern, others not, romantic, adventuresome, and melodramatic—these books only increased her restlessness. She dreamed of emulating the heroines of the novels and she desired the love of a man. Very much. Oh, so very much. Then reality swept over her: she was penniless and unwanted by her family, with her back to the wall. So she set about trying to “want” her vocation, but all too soon she succumbed again to the siren call of the world outside. She asked Sandra to hide something for her to read in the basket of personal linen that she sent home to wash, and she avidly listened to everything the other nuns reported after visits from their relations. From Sandra’s newspapers she received a hodgepodge of information about current world events, but she couldn’t seem to put it into any order: in Germany there had been an uprising among the weavers against the owners of the spinning mills in a bid to improve salaries and working conditions; in the Antilles, there was the insurrection of the people of Santo Domingo against the Republic of Haiti, which had in turn won its independence by rebelling against French colonization; in English, labor organizations were demanding more inclusive electoral reforms and universal suffrage; in the Holy Land, the Ottoman Empire, in response to internal and external pressure, had allowed the return of the Jews; in Calabria the royal army had drowned in blood the revolt instigated by the Bandiera brothers, two adherents of the Giovine Italia, a revolutionary sect that was calling for the creation of an Italian republic instead of a unified Kingdom of Italy. She had also learned, both through Sandra and from other nuns, that a book written by Vincenzo Gioberti, a Piedmontese priest living in exile in Brussels, Del primato morale e civile degli italiani—The Moral and Political Primacy of the Italians, called for the unity of Italy in a confederation under the leadership of the pope.

  Agata understood that, beneath the apparent calm of the kingdom and of the rest of the world, social tensions were rumbling like the magma under Mt. Etna, ready to erupt. No longer certain she’d always enjoy the protection of the convent, she was afraid of an uncertain future.

  She turned to the teacher of the novices, Donna Maria Giovanna della Croce, who became for her an example and an informal spiritual guide. With her help, she came to appreciate silence as one of the paths that lead to God, and she attained the level of self-awareness whereby every action becomes prayer, and prayer becomes contemplation, in turn transcending reality and leading to the vastness of the Divine. Agata told her that she felt isolated in her cloistered life. “Our life is stable, but it is neither repetitive nor monotonous: we operate on liturgical time, our working day is not punctuated only by our praise of God and the personal dimension of solitude. There is not a single day that is identical to another day. We are not isolated,” she replied. Agata told her that she wanted to do good and alleviate the sufferings of others, of children, of the sick. “Prayer joins us with the outside world and, like a thurible full of incense, it purifies that which surrounds us as it burns.” The suffering and the calvary of Christ, upon which the monastic day was modeled, was nothing other than a way of growing. They talked about the renunciations implicit in the condition of nunhood. “It’s normal for there to be critical moments, they form part of our process of spiritual growth and they help us to ripen our decision to choose the cloistered life. You must not be afraid of change; you must accept with docility the surprises that life holds in store for us, and savor them to the fullest.” Agata revealed to her the secret of her intense desire to fall in love, be fecund, bear children. Donna Maria Giovanna della Croce encouraged her with her usual sweet smile. “Renouncing children is not necessarily the same as renouncing fecundity. We must remain virgins in order to be fecund and to live every second of our lives with Love for the universe. I am in love with silence, through love of God and God alone. Like Mary the sister of Martha, I want to sit at Jesus’s feet and listen to His words. You should do the same.”

  Agata tried.

  But, in her conversations with God, Agata revealed to Him the indestructible certainty—which she was forced to smother during the day—that she wasn’t suited to seclusion. Every night the truth revealed itself forcefully, and she, by candlelight, immersed herself in books of poetry and the tragic, heartbreaking love stories of the novels concealed under the false bottom of her trunk, all the while yearning for those things to happen to her. By day, she once again believed the persuasive words of Donna Maria Giovanna della Croce. “Wait. You love God. Knowing how to wait teaches you how to enjoy,” she told Agata. “The calling will come. Trust me and do your best to see things through my eyes.”

  Before being admitted to the simple profession of vows and formally becoming a novice, the postulant was required to pass a colloquium with her spiritual father and with the abbess.

  Agata did not lie; she told both her spiritual father and the abbess that while she was happy to take the vows of chastity and poverty, she did not feel the calling; she would do her best to find it. She believed that she had passed her colloquia. Instead the cardinal in person wished to speak with her.

  They were in the abbess’s drawing room, alone and standing face to face.

  They looked at one another in silence. Agata was the first to turn her gaze away: from the round window above the door, the light that came filtering through from the cloister fell on the floor in an oval that reminded her of the shape of the pastenove that she carved out of the puff pastry dough. “I’ve heard that you believe that you lack the calling, and that you’re worried about it,” the cardinal began. Agata lowered her head in assent. “I don’t see why you should be worried,” he went on, with a hint of annoyance in his voice. “St. Teresa of Ávila was obliged to wait many years for her vocation. You are committing the sin of pride, if you try to hasten the process. The calling will come, your spiritual father is certain of it. You have completed fine periods of work in the infirmary and your pastries are selling like hotcakes. But why don’t you tell me what you like best about the cloistered life.” And he stepped toward her.

  Agata looked up—she hadn’t forgotten that many years before he had touched her face—and answered in a rush, to put an end to the conversation: “Listening to the choir and singing.”.

  “Explain why.”

  “It brings me closer to God.”

  At that moment, the bells rang None. A gentle, insistent chiming. He stood looking at her.
Then he moved, and strode past her in a rustle of purple fabric, without coming near her. He threw open both panels of the door that led into the hall where the abbess and her secretary were waiting.

  “Let’s go to the choir together. All of us. From this day forth, Agata Padellani, our future novice, will sing with the choristers.”

  The nuns were moving through the Chapter Hall and walking down the corridors toward the choir with downcast gazes, occasionally casting sidelong glances at the fluttering hems of the cardinal’s cassock; followed by his altar boys, the cardinal was leading the way, walking briskly, erect and proud, by Agata’s side.

  Agata slipped into the choir and made for the seats in the back. Decisively, the cardinal seized her arm: “I want to see you. Here, next to the mother abbess.” And beneath the astonished eyes of the choristers, the aspiring novice was forced to go over to the abbess and remain there, in full view, blushing from head to foot. When the abbess gave the signal, Agata began the Lauds. It was Psalm 119, the longest in the entire Book of Psalms.

  Alone in the sight of God, Agata sang. Like David. And a great feeling of calm spread through her.