Nun (9781609459109)

by Hornby, Simonetta Agnello

  “Yes, if that is my Lord’s will.”

  “Good girl, this young nun!” exclaimed the abbess, stroking the crucifix on her breast. Now that she had passed the test, the consul explained that Donna Maria Ninfa would board a sailing ship and depart Licata for Siracusa, where she could catch the steamship that was en route from Malta to Naples.

  At the loading dock in Licata, Agata was entrusted to two sister nuns from home, who like her were departing for Naples to go stay with their brother, an official of the kingdom. Together they boarded a tartan that was smaller than the one she had arrived in, and which alternated fishing with the coasting trade between Licata and Siracusa, with a stop at Pozzillo. The voyage lasted six days. The tartan was packed with passengers who, like them, were leaving Sicily because of the revolution. Agata and the two women were forced to share a cabin, which was nothing more than a cramped little closet with some pallets and a chamber pot. Her travelling companions were intolerable; they didn’t get along and each of them tried to draw Agata over to her side. When she could, Agata went up on deck, alone. On the fifth day, the tartan rounded Cape Passero, then passed Marzamemi and finally Pachino. After sailing around Cape Murro di Porco the ship slowed down to swing around into the grand harbor of Siracusa at seven the following morning. The English ship, in contrast, was immense. It was brand new and gleaming with brass fittings. It had twenty cabins. The crew wore new, crisply ironed uniforms. When the two nuns learned that a cabin had been reserved only for Agata, and that the two of them were expected to bunk down in a women’s dormitory down below, they clung to Agata and wore her out with their lamentations and exclamations until she finally agreed to take them into her cabin. Agata had no idea of what had been happening in Naples, nor what the outcome had been of the revolt in Sicily, and she lunged at the pile of old newspapers, English and from the kingdom, pamphlets and scraps of local gazettes that she knew had been put there for her by the express orders of James himself. As she pored over the news, the two nuns, exhausted by the voyage, recited their rosaries. Only then did she realize that the revolution had swept through the entire kingdom and all of Europe as well: after the insurrection in Palermo and the city’s staunch resistance to both the army and the shelling from the sea by the royal navy of Naples and Sicily, all Sicily had revolted against the sovereign, leaving only a presidio in Messina. In the meanwhile, in Naples the king had promised a constitution. She was reading eagerly and as she read she grew to understand that the change Tommaso spoke of had become a possibility. Perhaps a reality. Then she thought about James and searched for faint J’s in those newspapers, but there were none. The two women tiptoed over to her. They wanted to know what she was reading and why: Agata explained, but the two of them, intrusively, refused to go away. “A game of cards?” and the younger of the two pulled out a deck. Agata had no interest in playing cards. Offended, the woman swept all the newspapers off the little table, shouting that she’d suffered through the voyage in the stinking tartan and now she had a right to a distraction. Agata gathered the newspapers up off the floor and smoothed them out, one by one. Then she laid them on the table. The nun snatched them up and clutched them to her chest. “Now we’re going to play cards!” she cried, with a smirk on her hairy face. Agata offered to let the two of them use the table to play cards. No, they had to play cards together, all three of them. Agata wanted her newspapers. The woman snickered and refused to hand them over. Agata made a grab for them and the nun jumped out of the way. A page was torn. That was when Agata yanked the bell pull and ordered the stewards to remove the unwanted guests from her cabin. The staff complied with her request immediately—a clear sign that James was behind all this.

  The sea was glittering and the sun had almost vanished below the horizon; the afternoon clamor of voices had subsided. The few passengers on deck were knots of foreign travelers who looked like refugees. They had crates and suitcases heaped around them, and the frightened gaze of people with no idea of what lies in store for them. Agata lifted her gaze, eyes weary from reading, and looked out the window.

  In the silence, she heard a voice singing:

  Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.

  You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s.

  The song was repeated; it was a man’s voice:

  Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.

  You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s.

  Her heart was racing: could that be James? It seemed a natural thing to sing her response:

  When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.

  When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.

  A broad-shouldered man with a dark mustache turned to look, but behind the glass he saw only Agata’s dark, disappointed eyes.

  Agata spent the rest of the voyage alone in her cabin; she prayed and worked on a paperole that was meant to have a gleaming white consecrated host at its center. She thought about James, and the words of Donna Maria Giovanna della Croce: “You were made to serve the Lord in the world.” Each time she tried to embroider the consecrated host, it transformed itself into a camellia; on the outer petals she wrote with tiny chain stitches verses taken from love poems; in the center, which she was supposed to cover with tiny round balls done with fill stitch, the needle seemed to have a will of its own, ruching the shiny silk into a mass of striated petal-shapes done in outline stitch with blood-red thread. In the middle, a chaotic profusion of stamens.

  43.

  The ship docks at Naples

  and Agata is abducted by an unknown woman

  Seagulls flew low, skimming over the choppy swells. The breakwater of the Angevin Fortress stood out against the sleeping city in the morning darkness. The steamship slid over the water and came to a halt alongside another steamship flying the British flag.

  Dressed in her finest habit, Agata was waiting. She was repeating her paternosters, serenely. A peasant woman carrying a basket and a broad sack burst into her cabin. She commanded Agata to undress and put on the clothing that she had brought with her, and then to put only her bare necessities into the sack. They’d leave the rest, along with her habit, in the cabin.

  “Tell me who sent you.” Agata had raised her voice. The woman looked out the window and answered her in a whisper: “Be quiet and be quick.”

  Agata found herself removing her habit in front of that woman. Embarrassed, she dressed uncertainly in the kind of rough homespun, narrow-waisted clothing that she hadn’t worn since she was fourteen. She insisted on carrying the basket full of books and, arm in arm with the other woman, they walked down the gangplank amidst all the other passengers. Before stepping into the carriage, Agata turned and thought she glimpsed James’s golden beard in an enclosed carriage not far away. She brightened and waved. The woman grabbed her hand. She reddened in shame: that reckless gesture could have spoiled everything.

  James climbed the gangplank. The captain and his steward were waiting for him, and together they went to knock at the door of Agata’s cabin. There was no answer. They knocked again; then the steward pulled out his skeleton key and unlocked the door. There on the bunk, neatly folded, lay Agata’s habit, tunic, and scapular. The white, finely pleated wimple contrasted with the black of the habit like a round meringue.

  James sent the others away. Sitting on the bunk next to the habit, his fingers teased at the pleats of the wimple, and he thought. In early January he had been informed that in Palermo a Carbonaro was walking the streets of the city, announcing a revolt to take place on January 12, and that squads of field guards under the command of the pro-independence baronry and armed bands would join with the liberal bourgeoisie. The minute he learned that Agata was no longer at the Cecconi home, the vision of her torn from the house and subjected to the violence of the mob had tortured him, until the cardinal asked James to bring his niece back to Naples. Excited at the prospect of seeing her again soon, James was soon tormented by the fear that her mother had p
ersuaded Agata to stay with her. He had to find out what Agata’s feelings toward him were now. After the visit from the British consul at Girgenti to the convent, he had arranged to embark her on one of his steamships as soon as she set foot in Naples; he would send her to England, while he took the necessary steps with the Curia and the Pope to have her vows dissolved—an easy enough task, if conducted diplomatically. But now Agata’s inexplicable disappearance from her cabin had thrown him into a coil of black despair.

  The cardinal had sent Father Cuoco and two lay sisters down to the Naples waterfront, in an enclosed carriage, to convey Agata to Gaeta, and from there into a convent in the Papal State. The three of them waited for the last passengers to leave the boat before they went aboard. They were shocked when they found the cabin door blocked by the captain and crew: the nun had vanished; access to the cabin was forbidden.

  James Garson’s coach and six had just entered the courtyard of the cardinal’s residence. The minute the cardinal received the note in which James informed him that he had information about Donna Maria Ninfa, he had agreed to see him.

  The sweet scent of early-blooming jasmine filled the air—the odor of power, thought James, with irritation.

  “I am distraught over what happened, and I hold myself personally responsible,” he began.

  “Tell me.” And the cardinal listened with close attention to the details of Agata’s voyage, beginning with the trip aboard the tartan from the loading docks in Licata. James drew out the little or nothing that he had to recount in the hope that the cardinal might inadvertently let slip his plans for Agata. He told the cardinal that the captain of the steamer had questioned the crew; it seemed certain that Agata had been in contact with no one, besides the two nuns that James had arranged to have sent aboard to care for her, and that she had asked to be given a cabin all to herself, a request that had been granted. “This morning, Donna Maria Ninfa ate a hearty breakfast and waited in her cabin to be taken away. She seemed very contented, and she even sang to herself.”

  “She has a lovely voice,” the cardinal had sighed. Nodding agreement, James had betrayed himself. “You know her, don’t you?” The cardinal’s gaze was cutting.

  “Certainly. It was I who offered passage to the Marescialla and her daughters, when the field marshal died, and I also met her at Palazzo Padellani before her simple profession.”

  “I was forgetting.” A new thought filtered into the cardinal’s mind: that it might all have been organized by Donna Gesuela, to keep from losing her daughter. “What about Palermo?”

  The Sicilians were like so many drunks, James said, they did not seem to realize that governing is a difficult task. They talked about waging war, but they had no army—neither troops, nor officers, nor generals, munitions, or provisions. No money. No administrators. Neither roads nor fleets. The illustrious exiles who had returned to their homeland had been given offices for which they were ill suited. Take the case of Amari, who had been put in charge of the Ministry of Finance: he was personally penniless, and had lived off the kindness of his Sicilian friends during his years in exile in France: he knew less than nothing about finance. “These is no education, there is no tradition of political involvement.”

  “I must agree with you. And how could it be any different: out of a hundred Sicilians, only eleven know how to read and write!” said the cardinal. “Perhaps you don’t know that when the Jesuits came down here after the Council of Trent, they were speechless at the conditions in which the denizens of the two kingdoms lived—poor, uncouth, ignorant, and superstitious. In order to instill even a modicum of Christian conscience they were forced to employ instruments of persuasion that ranged from the gentle to the intrusive, striking fear, encouraging violent acts of penitence. In the late sixteenth century, the metaphor of the indios de por açá had become a commonplace.”

  “Now you’re going too far, Eminence. A remedy can be found. You are certainly on a par with the other peoples of Europe.”

  “Leopardi was right: the Italians are the equals of more advanced nations save in two fundamental aspects: literacy, and a complete confusion of ideas.” He paused, and then spoke freely, as if he were alone: “People forget and become weary of the good and the evil done by others, of other people’s lies and dishonesty, and treat both the good and the wicked with indifference, ignoring all moral and ethical values. Italians have empty lives, lives lived entirely in the present. But, being a social animal, the Italian cannot do without the esteem of his fellow man. And he obtains it, by working with what he possesses, that is vanity, of which however he has a complete understanding and utter scorn.

  “The Italians laugh at life: they laugh at life far more heartily and with greater truth and intimate persuasion of their chilly scorn than any other nation on earth. Other nations laugh at things, not at individuals, as the Italian does. A society cannot remain unified if its people are busy mocking one another and continually expressing their utter contempt for their fellow man. In Italy, people take turns persecuting one another, they sting each other until the blood runs. If you do not respect your fellow man, you cannot in turn hope to be respected,” and here he paused. Then he resumed, slowly but inexorably, as if he were savoring James’s impatience.

  “The chief foundation of an individual’s morality and of a people’s morality is a constant and profound sense of self-respect and the effort taken to preserve that sense of self-respect, a sensitivity concerning one’s honor. A man without self-respect can be neither just, nor honest, nor virtuous. Mazzini, an intelligent thinker—God and Fatherland, republican unity, equality of all citizens—is bound to fail. His vision will run aground as soon as it hits the los indios de por açá–the Indians on this side. An illiterate will not know what to make of his thoughts.”

  “Why do you say that? It’s a defeatist attitude.” James couldn’t take any more. He wanted to know about Agata and nothing else.

  “So that you, Captain Garson, will understand that the fewer the dealings you have with Italians, and with Donna Maria Ninfa in particular, the better it will be for everyone. Donna Maria Ninfa is safe and sound, wherever she may be. She has Padellani blood in her veins. And I’m here, worrying about her.” At that, the cardinal tugged his bell pull.

  “So am I, Eminence.”

  And James followed the cardinal’s secretary, who was holding the door open for him.

  44.

  In the Garden of Minerva, in Salerno

  In the carriage, the woman had kept her eyes focused on Agata, studying her. The coachman let them out on the outskirts of Naples, alongside a road leading into a fishing village. Agata stretched her legs and looked around, expecting to see James at any minute. The seagulls skimmed low over the water; then they veered away, soaring up and turning toward the coast, arcing through the sky in broad loops before turning down to the sea again. Moving quickly, the woman stepped over the ditch that ran alongside the road and walked into a cultivated field. She walked a short distance, stooped down, and grabbed a handful of mud. She went back to where Agata was standing and without a word smeared mud on her shoes and the hem of her skirt. Then she seized both of Agata’s hands with her own filthy hands and massaged them, making sure that dirt got under her fingernails. Agata’s lovely delicate hands had now been transformed into the hands of a peasant woman.

  They ate bread and onion while they waited, speaking no more than was necessary. Not a word was said about James. Then the cart arrived, with other passengers and baskets full of hens. The two women climbed aboard after haggling over the price, and only then did Agata learn that they were going to Salerno. That night they slept in a roadside inn, sharing a cot crawling with lice, and in the morning they boarded another cart. Even then, the woman spoke as little as possible. Agata assumed that this was all necessary and was done according to James’s instructions, and was calm.

  Since the thirteenth century, there had been a garden in Salerno, built atop the city’s Longobard walls, with six terraces, a
seventeenth-century staircase running up the side of the massive walls, and a handsome portico protecting the staircase from the blazing sun. Famous for its anise and simple herbs, the Garden of Minerva had belonged to a single family for many centuries, the same family that, in the fourteenth century, had created there the forerunner of all the botanical gardens in Europe. The two women had struggled up the steps of Salerno: Agata had insisted on carrying the heavy bundle of books, letting the other woman carry the lighter bag with her linen and a few possessions of sentimental value. She felt as if she were climbing the stairs of heaven, and that at the top she would find James. She began to have some doubts when, finally arriving in the garden, she saw not a trace of a house or a habitation of any kind.

  Meanwhile, two women clumsily dressed in dark-colored secular clothing were coming down the steps; on their heads they wore the veils of the pious old bigot. Angiola Maria came bounding down the last flight, taking the stairs two-by-two. With a “How pretty you are!” she wrapped Agata in her arms, and she was immediately followed by Checchina. Agata couldn’t understand. James had told her about his contacts in the Curia, but she had no idea that he knew Angiola Maria. Agata immediately asked for an explanation of what had happened, but Angiola Maria refused to tell her, at least not until Agata satisfied her curiosity: where had she been? how was the conservatory? what did she think of the abbess? why had she gone to Sicily? how had she managed to get back?

  The two women showed her the garden before offering her bread and water. On the first, lowest, and broadest terrace, there was a fishpond. The water ran down from the hill, and every one of the other terraces had its own pond and its own little fountain. The shed roof over the steps was covered with grapevines, and on the uppermost terrace there was a pillared loggia from which it was possible to look out over the sea and the surrounding mountains, to the accompaniment of the burbling sound of a fountain that ran constantly, fed by water springing from the wall. There were two fig trees and two bitter orange trees; it was said that this bitter orange tree was a descendant of the original bitter orange that stood in the garden when it was first planted, during the time of Longobard occupation. Behind the loggia were two small cabins in which the two women lived.