She had become accustomed to the squalor, but she suffered from the lack of daylight, which meant that she could only read during the hours when the sunshine streamed directly onto the wall. She had decided to reread, in the order in which she had received them, all the books that James had sent her, and she tried to puzzle out how and why he had selected them. Sometimes she managed to find a common thread, and when she did she felt close to him and loved him even more. During the rest of the time, she prayed intensely for herself and for James and often she dozed off. Since she wasn’t doing any physical exercise, and eating as little as she was, she slid into a consoling state of lethargy. Then she’d close her eyes and listen to the noises of the city. Gradually, she remembered the words of a poem that James had recited to her:
O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes.
She had learned that city life too has its own punctuation of time. In the morning, there was the traffic of the farmers, fishermen, and market gardeners who brought food to feed the city: she heard the clucking of cartloads of hens, the anxious cooing of pigeons in cages, and the tingling bells of nanny goats, their udders swollen with milk. Then there were the voices of strolling vendors and craftsmen—knife sharpeners, cobblers—and those who set up shop with a rag on the pavement or on a folding table, to sell anything imaginable: fruit, vegetables, needles, thread, buttons, scissors, candles, playing cards, each and every one calling and praising their merchandise. More or less at the same time, the guards and the soldiers passed by; the rhythmic pounding of their feet on the cobblestones echoed in her cell. The sound of the shoes of horses pulling aristocratic carriages threw her into a frenzy: each time she imagined that it was James and dreamed that he was leaning out in hopes of catching a glimpse of her; he didn’t know that she was a prisoner. At times like that, Agata was seized with an overwhelming need to look out the window. She would climb up on the bed: from there, through the window grates, she could see the convent across the way and a patch of sky between two buildings. Sometimes, a dove or even a seagull would cross the sky.
Three weeks later, the abbess came into her cell. She sniffed the fetid air and then told Agata that the cardinal would have to prolong his stay in Rome; Agata would have to wait, and in the meanwhile, there could be no further contact with the outside world.
She was afraid that she would never see James again, and her revulsion for food returned. She scorned herself for making use of the weapons of weakness—misdirected violence, because it was turned on herself—but there was nothing that she could do about it: whenever she ate, she threw up. She lay in bed and dreamed she was talking to James. He had told her that the conversation between them had begun during the crossing from Messina to Naples, even though at the time she had not realized it; it wouldn’t be interrupted again until they finally saw one another, and then they’d never be parted. Agata believed it. Intensely.
38.
October 1847.
Agata heals the abbess and obtains privileges;
suddenly, the cardinal sends her to Sicily
Agata wasn’t about to give up. The brevi stated that Father Cuoco had the right to approve visits from her relatives, but there had been no sign of her confessor. In response to her repeated requests, the abbess had insisted that he was in the Salento with his sick mother; then, seeing that she looked anxious and wan, she had promptly “brought him home again.”
Agata knew that the cardinal had appointed him as her confessor because he was under the cardinal’s control. She avoided all mention of her encounter with James, even though the questions he asked made her think that he must know something, and she told him that she wished to visit with her sister Sandra. Father Cuoco was forced to inform her that the cardinal had taken it solely upon himself to decide whether or not she could receive or make any visits—once again, Agata had her back to the wall.
In the meanwhile, the cardinal had returned to Naples but there had been no sign of him. Then, without warning, she was ordered to go to the episcopal palace; Agata refused, giving her uncertain health as an excuse. She had remained steadfast on that point, even when the abbess intervened and made it clear to her that by insisting on that point she would make the cardinal furious. Which is what happened: the cardinal stopped payment of her stipend entirely. Agata had no money: this was war.
At that point, she shook herself out of the lethargy into which she had fallen: she began to do the calisthenics that Miss Wainwright had taught her, to restore vigor to her weakened muscles; she sang psalms, she repeated this admonition to herself: “First keep peace with yourself; then you will be able to bring peace to others. A peaceful man does more good than a learned man.”
The abbess had been given orders to keep an eye on her, and she came to visit her every day. She watched her eat her meal and sometimes she brought her extra bread and butter or cheese. Agata had been stung by a horsefly, and the bite had suppurated. She had treated the bite with a plaster of herbs that she had brought with her from San Giorgio Stilita. The abbess noticed the box with Infirmary written on it, and she asked what it continued. One day the abbess asked Agata to help her: she had a very painful abscess on her groin. Agata offered to heal it for her, but only on the condition that she be allowed to send and receive letters. At first, she flew into a rage and refused, then, as the pain worsened, she gave in. Agata lanced the boil and medicated it properly. In her gratitude, the abbess became more tractable and gave her permission to receive packages as well. Sandra immediately sent her biscotti and a book. From James, nothing.
After that, the abbess began to ask Agata for help with sick nuns and oblates. An orphan girl was in great pain in the aftermath of a badly managed abortion and the abbess insisted that Agata treat her; for the first time, she showed that she had feelings. “They’re pitiable. They don’t do it on purpose: they’re tricked into it or they’re forced into it.” Agata considered abortion to be a form of murder and, tortured by the memories of her experience with Donna Maria Celeste, she didn’t want to have anything to do with the girl. But the abbess insisted and insisted until Agata reluctantly agreed. In exchange, she was allowed to go secretly up onto the belvedere of the cloister during the rigorous silence, when the other nuns were in their cells for the night. The abbess also procured medical textbooks for her and a copy of an old edition of Matthaeus Silvaticus’ Pandectae Medicinae, which she’d found in a crate—it was a medieval lexicon on simples.
Soon Agata had many patients. Some of the women gave her gifts and others paid her what they were able; little as it was, that money helped to alleviate her financial straits: she certainly had no other way of meeting her obligations. From one of the women she learned that there had been an uprising in Messina in early September, and that it had been put down with great bloodshed. Agata was afraid that her brother-in-law and her sister had been involved in it, but she had no way of finding out for sure.
She was intensely anxious. She was waiting for James to answer the note that she had sent him, as in the past, care of the Detken bookstore in the Piazza del Plebiscito; she thanked him for the poems by Keats and wrote her comments, as she had always done in the past. Moreover, she informed him that she could also now receive newspapers. A slim volume by Leopardi arrived, without the note from him that Agata had so hoped for. She leafed through the book with trepidation, thinking to herself that James’s white hands had caressed the pages before giving it to the bookseller:
Vive quel foco ancor, vive l’affetto,
Spira nel pensier mio la bella imago,
Da cui, se non celeste, altro diletto
Giammai non ebbi, e sol di lei m’appago.3
Next to it was a very faint J; the same J was repeated elsewhere.
And so, from then on, James began to communicate with Agata through faint J’s on the outer margin of the page, but never a single line of writing.
So many books, from James, in those days of late autumn. And so very many J’s.
Her mother and the cardinal, on the other hand, had begun a busy and not entirely friendly correspondence, that concluded with a concession of brevi for a one-month visit to Palermo for Agata, beginning on December 12. When Agata found out about it, she was devastated: she would be forced to break off her exchange of books and letters with James. She hurled herself face down on her bed and burst into sobs, weeping until she had no more tears. Late at night, she stealthily made her way upstairs to the belvedere: she felt as if he were close to her there and she hoped that they could see each other; up there the sluts and fallen women who were her patients sent and received messages by gestures. It was a dark night. It had rained and the sky was covered with clouds. The moisture bathed her hair and weighed down the wool of her habit. Agata leaned out in the hopes of seeing him. But there was no sign of James, or of anyone else—the neighborhood, which at that time of night was sleepy but still awake, seemed deserted. The roar of distant thunder. A flash of lightning illuminated the silhouette of the volcano against the blackness—then it all went dark.
The gas streetlamps illuminated the pale facades of the palazzi, covered by a grey patina, a mysterious slush blended of dust and rain. She was tired of waiting, of hiding, tired of the constant fear that by now had become a part of her life. Agata looked at the steeple in the center of a small square upon which three streets converged. Dizzyingly tall and pointed, it looked like a dagger whose handle had swollen into scrollwork, garlands, festoons, fish, dolphins, fruit, and flowers, wrapping the long blade until only the razor-sharp tip plunged into the sky was left bare. It began raining again in powerful noisy gusts. Agata kept her ears alert, in case by chance James called her, but instead she heard the calls of animals: a few dogs, the braying of a donkey. She squinted to see better through the rain: black, empty forms—she couldn’t tell if they were creatures of her imagination or living things—walked along, brushing close to the walls. She jumped with a start: something was rubbing against her legs. A rain-drenched cat had wriggled under her habit and now was squeezing against her to rid itself of the detested water. They looked at one another. The animal, as unfortunate as she was, emitted an arid meow and looked up at her with blank eyes, filled with unspoken supplication. She felt as if she were losing her mind.
39.
In Palermo at her mother’s house
The brigantine sailed placidly into the gulf. Agata, with her servingwoman-jailor standing next to her, looked out from the bridge. Palermo looked out upon its half-moon bay, at the foot of Mt. Pellegrino, at the westernmost edge. Dark blue and pink, dotted with a maquis of maritime pines nestled between boulders, rooted in tiny patches of earth, the promontory thrust up, then plunged down and surrendered to the arms of the sea. The day of the departure she had fainted, which she interpreted as a sign from the Lord that she should stay in Naples. In vain: two lay sisters had helped her to get up and get dressed and they had carried her aboard the ship on a stretcher. The servingwoman wouldn’t even let her look out the porthole as the steamer chugged out of the harbor. During the crossing she never left her side. Agata felt hope dying: the cardinal knew all about James and was sending her away from Naples.
Palermo, built on a water-rich plain and enclosed by a semicircle of hills, overlooked the Tyrrhenian Sea just as Naples did, and just as regally. Just as proudly. The city lay spread out before Agata’s eyes in a cascading succession of terra-cotta tile roofs of noble palazzi, cupolas of convents, monasteries, churches, and oratories, creating a phantasmagoria of colors—many of those domes were covered in majolica tiles, green and white, dark blue and white, yellow and green; some of them, red as a faded cherry, were rounded and clearly of Islamic influence; others were Baroque, made of golden stone and set atop colonnades. Here and there stood the rare medieval tower, incorporated into Baroque palazzi and thus saved from the ravaging wave of eighteenth-century modernization.
The ship entered Palermo’s harbor and anchored across from Castellammare, at the southernmost tip of the bay: a forest of mainmasts with furled sails and trawlers, small and large, boats with lateen rigs, polacres, feluccas, sardine boats, and fishing dinghies, pitching and yawing at anchor alongside tartans and xebecs. To the north, the waterfront was a rampart of paved ashlars interrupted here and there by terraced half-moons. Then there was a clearing of pounded earth along the walls of the city, incorporated in the palazzi of the aristocracy. It was sunset, time for the evening outing. Shiny and black, the carriages rolled along at walking speed, lined up like so many lazy ants. They passed one another, halting to exchange greetings, and lingering outside cafés.
The Cecconis lived in an eighteenth-century palazzo that had been burned during the revolt of 1820. The façade was pockmarked by hurled stones and bullets, like a face ravaged by smallpox. Inside, however, the apartment was beautifully restored. Her mother had furnished it with inlaid furniture and bronze decorations, which clashed with her husband’s Neoclassical furniture, simplicity in comparison.
Agata was hoping to see Nora and Annuzza, and she was disappointed when she was told that they had remained in Messina, in service to Carmela, now the wife of the Cavaliere d’Anna. General Cecconi concealed beneath rigid courtesy his annoyance at having his wife’s daughter, a nun, as a houseguest; nor was there any joy in her mother’s welcome. Agata had the sensation that she was a guest unwanted by both her host and hostess, even when her mother presented her with a bowl of her favorite dessert, chocolate rice, similar to the cuccìa that is made in Sicily in December, for the feast day of St. Lucy. The rice is boiled in cinnamon- and clove-scented milk with a pat of butter, a spoonful of semolina and another heaping spoonful of sugar, then covered with chocolate cream and garnished with peeled, finely chopped pistachios: it was a treat to be eaten warm, in tiny scoops on the tip of the spoon, slowly, varying the proportions between the white cream and the chocolate cream. But Agata wasn’t allowed to savor the dish the way she liked it. Donna Gesuela wanted her to gobble down spoonful after spoonful and then hurry off to change into a clean, neatly ironed habit for a visit from her uncle, the Baron Aspidi. “Behave nicely with him, my brother is the only one who has helped us out with money when things were bad,” she told her. And that’s how it always was in Palermo. The brevi put Agata under her mother’s control, and Donna Gesuela wanted her at home, available at all times to see relatives, without any advance warning.
Agata soon became accustomed to the routine of the Cecconi household. Every morning, while the house was still asleep, she went to the first mass at the Oratorio del Santissimo Salvatore, around the corner, with Rosalia, her mother’s housekeeper. When the priest said ite . . . , even before he could get out the words missa est, Rosalia was already pushing her out of the pew and down the aisle toward the door, so that she could get home to make coffee and take it, with two biscottini, to the Generalessa, in bed. The general was leisurely in his morning ablutions and he spent time chatting with his barber; then he would go out and come home loaded down with papers and a jar of colorful candy. He retreated into his study and received visitors until lunchtime. Her mother tended to her own affairs and Agata followed her lead, performing the office according to the Rule and reading. In the afternoon, on the other hand, she joined them in the drawing room, in order to save on candles and coal: the general was extremely stingy when it came to daily household expenses. After leaving the army he had been given a few assignments by the king, but they were not at all well remunerated—at least that’s what her mother told her, adding that he hoped to be given a position in the new financial institution, the Cassa di Sconto del Banco delle Due Sicilie. The women did their household chores and mostly read. Every so often he would offer them one of his candies, and for a while the silence was broken by the sound of sucking on
the solid sugar surrounding the cinnamon center.
In Palermo, too, Agata was a prisoner. She could neither send nor receive letters. Her mother only took her out to pay calls on relatives who were nuns. After one or two visits to the convent of Sant’Anna, Donna Gesuela decided that she had had enough. “We have nothing to say to one another and these misers charge us for the pastries they serve us!” Agata felt that she was being watched by her mother, and soon enough she understood the reason why: the general, who was left a widower quite young, had been the administrator of his wife’s estate, held in trust for his only son. When his son came of age, he had brought a lawsuit against his father, accusing him of having profited from the estate. Agata’s mother told her that the case had dragged on for years, costing the general a vast sum, and that recently it had been decided in the son’s favor. Gesuela was yet again in a precarious financial situation. Agata understood: her mother was counting on her, once she left the nunhood, to take care of her in her old age.
Mother and daughter were putting linen into the armoire with the help of Rosalia. “Did you know that Carmela is pregnant? Annuzza is overjoyed and every morning she makes her an egg yolk whipped with sugar!” her mother told her, smoothing out an embroidered sheet. Agata froze—a son by the Cavaliere d’Anna! “She seems happy, to judge from her letters. And to think that I expected this youngest daughter to remain a spinster so she could take care of me!” she commented. She ran her hand over the knotted fringework of the towels, shiny and stiff with starch, and added, pensively: “This one here’s all I have left . . . if he lets me have her.” And she went back to counting the Flanders flax linen towels.
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