by Sasha Gould
She refuses to say a thing. “Wait,” she tells me. “Will you wait and stop pestering me?”
Even though I’m superior to her, and she’s supposed to do what I say, every time I look at Annalena I feel envious. There’s something about her that is free and defiant and always unafraid.
Back in the room she gets me to sit down. She takes off my veil and tells me my hair is a disgrace. “Oh, Annalena,” I say to her, “is that what you rushed me up here for?”
“No,” she says, and she stands behind me brushing my mop with long slow strokes. The flimsy curtain hanging over my window flails like a live, tethered thing in the breeze. Through that slow flip-flapping, other sounds float up from the Venetian day: the clicking of heels on stone, the lapping of water in wind, the shouting of men in boats, the laughter of children echoing in the side streets around the convent.
Annalena’s message is that the Abbess wants to talk to me.
“Really?” I turn to her so that my hair becomes twisted and tangled around the comb.
“Stop that, or the Abbess will make you cut it off.”
“For goodness’ sake, Annalena, what does she want to talk to me about?”
“I don’t know, but it’s something important. I can feel it. Stop thrashing!”
Annalena is clever. Always watching, always noticing. A talent for looking, the Abbess said about her once, although I don’t think she meant it as a compliment.
She finishes with the brushing and seems to think me presentable. She says that I’m to go to the Abbess’s study straightaway. She tells me not to worry, that God is with me all the time. I look into Annalena’s face and she seems so very sad.
My nerves are taut as I make my way to the Abbess’s room. Did Sister Maria report the way I behaved in the infirmary with the sick man—the way I climbed onto him? Or has the Abbess intercepted Beatrice’s reply? Is there something in it that’s put me in terrible trouble?
I remember my father’s face on the day he stood outside the great door of this place, giving no salute and showing no emotion as I was dragged in. The flicker of relief in his eyes as I yowled and the nuns pried my fingers from the bars and stepped on my feet to stop me from kicking.
He washed his hands of me that day. My mouth no longer needed to be fed. I was a liability lifted.
I was ten years old and still didn’t understand why it was I and not Beatrice who would be put away. That the dowry is better spent on one good husband than two mediocre ones.
I can still hear his last words before I was pulled through those studded convent doors. “The fee is paid,” he said to the Abbess.
The fee is never paid. No amount of gold will give me back my joyless days, my listless nights in this prison.
The Abbess motions to me to shut the door. “Good morning, Sister Laura. Please sit down.”
Any sign of weakness feeds her and makes her even stronger. It’s taken me a long time to learn that. I sit, but I manage to hold her watery gaze.
She remains standing. Behind her hangs a great painting from which the rampant lion of the Agliardi Vertova family roars silently down upon the room. Between us, on the table, her Bible sits like a heavy rectangular rock. We all know that the Abbess has a special relationship with God. He comes to her in visions and she translates his lofty words for the rest of us. I think I’m ready for anything. But I’m not prepared for what comes next.
“Laura, you know that I’ve always counseled the sisters here to learn to expect changes in their lives.”
I’ve never heard her say this to anyone. Nothing ever changes in the convent.
She continues, solemn, almost reciting, like she’s teaching me a new prayer. “Some changes are great, though at the time they seem small. Others are small, though at the time they seem great.”
She looks crosser and sterner than usual, and I’m sure that Sister Maria has briefed her in clammy detail about my improper conduct in the infirmary. I’m going to spend a year in solitary confinement, where La Lunatica lost her mind. God, don’t let her send me there.
The Abbess fingers the golden lettering on her Bible and fondles the silk ribbon bookmark that peeps from the pages in the same way another woman might caress the hand of an infant.
Then she looks up and says: “You’re going to leave the convent, Laura. Someone will be waiting for you at the south entrance at exactly six o’clock.” She doesn’t falter and her face is hard like a stone. Nothing except cold, unexplained instruction flickers from her. She hands me a grim little brown bundle wrapped in string. “These are the clothes you’re to wear. We won’t see you again.”
For a time I’m completely still. Perhaps it’s a cruel game. Or perhaps she’s simply testing me.
I don’t think there’s any wisdom in asking the thousand questions that clatter inside my head. I know that if I do, the Abbess will hold up her smooth pale hand between us. In all the time I’ve been at the convent, I’ve never heard her answer a single question. Eventually you learn to stop asking. I suppose that’s the idea.
She dismisses me and I walk out to the corridor. La Pungenta is there and she looks at me as though I’m someone she’s never seen before.
“What?” I say. “What have I done?”
“Nothing, Laura. I came looking for you as soon as I heard.”
“Heard what?”
“That you’re getting out.”
I feel something waking up inside me. Tonight as the sun goes down on Venice, Beatrice and I will be flying along the pathways and canals as they lap back and forth in celebration beside us. We really will run together to the Lido, and Paulina’s grandmother will again give us sospiri di monaca, and we will stuff them into our mouths and inhale the sweet powder.
I’ll be able to taste again the sugars and spices of this twinkling, shimmering city. Everything is about to change.
“La Muta is leaving the convent. She’s leaving today! Her father’s sent for her.”
I can almost hear them whispering these words even though they don’t say anything to me. Somehow I know the news is out. I know from the way that they all turn towards me as I run back to my cell. All these staring women and girls. All their possibilities and dreams and longings emptied out onto the Altar of the Angels, left there the day each was forced to commit herself to Christ.
Happiness can be a cruel thing in the face of someone else’s grief. When I tell Annalena, she looks as stricken as if I’d hit her.
“I can’t believe it,” she says, her eyes suddenly wet and glassy. “I’m so happy for you.”
For once, there isn’t a hint of mockery in her tone. I clasp her hand, then rush back to my room. And as thoughts of Annalena are washed away by the onrushing tide of excitement, I feel guilty. I know already that I won’t miss anything about the convent. Not even my conversa.
Back in my room, I lift the wooden floorboard that for six years has hidden my letters from Beatrice, and under which I’ve kept my ring of sisterhood. I open it and take out the tiny cloth-wrapped bundle in which it nests—a dull twist of gold. Beatrice has one too. When Mama realized she was dying, she slid the rings onto our fingers, murmuring “You must care for each other when I am gone.” I put my ring back on the small finger of my left hand. For a minute it feels cold and tight. But then it warms and settles back into place, where it belongs.
As I pass back through the convent, plumes of incense waft behind me for the last time. Mounds of chapel wax drip like tears as I say my final prayers. And the pungent baskets in the infirmary, full of holy herbs, creak a brittle farewell to me.
At six o’clock the carriage really is waiting. Sister Maria stands at the door and kisses me.
“Goodbye, Laura. I’ll miss you. We all will.”
It feels like someone is pouring something warm into me. The convent’s dark, cold skin peels away as soon as I run out through the thick studded door. I dive into the carriage almost headfirst.
The carriage is black and the driver wears a dar
k hat and coat, but everything else out here is a banquet of color: red, gold, blue, leaf-green. I look up to the windows of the convent’s cells. The silhouette of a nun hovers at almost every one of those small rectangular spaces. There’s a shadow in Annalena’s window, but I’m not sure it’s her.
Venice is alive with the festival of the Madonna delle Candele. Smells of perfume and aromatic oils mingle with other things—sulfur, I think, and ripe fruit. Each moment takes me farther away from the convent and closer to my home. I lean out of the carriage window and see serpentine lanes of small candles, their flames spitting with spray from the canals. But as I twist round my elbow whacks into a young man on a milk cart.
“Oh, sir, I’m so terribly sorry,” I shout, feeling my cheeks flush.
The young man smiles, calling back, “No need to be sorry! Always a pleasure to collide with a beautiful girl.”
The carriage crosses the rickety old Rialto Bridge with its orchestra of sounds and smells. This must be what it feels likes to be drunk.
When we come to a halt, I fall forward. I’m home.
It’s strange to be back at this once-shimmering palazzo of my childhood. When I was little, I would peep out my bedroom window and see servants and noblemen, old and young, rich and poor—all hurrying along. But they would always pause to look up at my home and almost all of them would smile, as if the very building were casting a spell of pleasure on them all. My home used to sparkle and glitter.
It doesn’t anymore.
The plaster has shrunk and peeled from the walls like moldy orange peel, and damp stains streak the walls beneath the shutters on the upper floors. The plants and flowers in the window boxes are dying.
The great front door is open and I walk in, my footfall echoing on the cracked marble floor. The cool of the house slips its embrace around me. Where once portraits hung on the walls, now there are empty, pale spaces.
“Beatrice?” I call. There’s no answer.
Something large and dark has been placed on the table in the entrance hall. It takes me a few minutes to realize that it’s a coffin.
My father walks through a side door that I remember leads from his library. If the house has suffered, then he has wilted with it. His clothes were made for a bigger, broader man. They drape over him like threadbare blankets.
“Papa.” I hold one hand out to him as he approaches, but he doesn’t take it. There’s something new and grim about his face.
“Papa, who is it? Who’s died?”
He swallows hard, as if his words are caught in his throat.
It must be one of the servants. A lot of them were old. Renato, my father’s butler, was an alcoholic. And then I think of my beloved nurse, Faustina, and my mind fills up with images of her kind old face.
“Tell me, Papa, that it isn’t Faustina.” I shake my head and step away from him.
When he finally speaks, his voice is solemn, hoarse and faintly slurred.
“It’s not Faustina.”
My poor brother, then. He never was a strong boy. Perhaps he contracted some illness in Bologna. Almost as soon as the thought occurs, I realize my mind is performing logical contortions to avoid the truth. If he died so far south of Venice, they wouldn’t bring him all the way here.
So even before I see who is lying still and silent in the coffin, I already know that this is somehow not the wonderful day I thought it was going to be. I’m not going to see Beatrice today. I’m not going to see her ever again.
I open my mouth but no sound comes out. My father shields his face with a hand.
I reach the edge of the wooden box. My sister’s hands are yellow and bloated. Her face sags, and suddenly it’s hard to remember any of the light that once danced in it. Her body is small but swollen, and it looks dreadfully wrong inside that cheap container for dead things. The exquisite mystery of her is gone.
The unsanded wood scratches my arms and hands as my father drags me away from the coffin, but I don’t care. I want the splintered wood to stick into me. I want to feel the rough slivers under my skin.
“What did you expect?” he asks. “Why did you think I sent for you? Did the Abbess not explain?”
She did not.
Beatrice died by drowning, my father tells me. I can’t speak. I can’t ask the questions that bang like demented drums in my temples. How could she have drowned? Where did she drown? And why? Beatrice, the best swimmer in all of Venice. She used to dart through the water, strong and shiny like a seal.
I push my father away and rush up the stairs to the room I shared with Beatrice. A hunched figure is standing over the bed, unfolding a linen sheet. She turns to me.
Faustina.
“Oh, my darling,” she says, dropping everything and opening her arms.
After a time, we sit beside each other on the bed and talk. We speak of how we’ve missed each other. Of how I’ve grown and changed. I say she doesn’t look any different, but she does. I was wrong about everything. I thought I was coming home to Beatrice, but I was not. I did not think I was going to miss Annalena at all, but I do.
I feel that the dark serpent of loss has crawled inside my body; it lurks there, coiled and muscular. I do not think it will ever leave.
I’m woken by a slant of sunlight blazing across my pillow. The sun seems to bleed through the cracks in the window shutters, like some ancient injured enemy who wishes to punish me for something that I haven’t done.
I sit opposite my father as we eat a breakfast of bread and cured meats. Bianca, a servant I haven’t met before, waits on us, filling our goblets with pomegranate juice and slicing oily ribbons from the leg of ham that rests at the center of the table. Her head is bowed and respectful, but I can see her blue eyes darting curiously between my father’s face and my own. I wonder if she’s also trying to recognize the proud man he used to be. Now he’s broken and bent and he speaks in a low mumble that I have to lean forward to hear.
“You and I will have to find a way through this dreadful situation.”
I reach across the table for his hand and he strokes my fingers gently, absentmindedly, with his thumb—he’s somewhere else. When I speak, he almost looks surprised to see me.
“Papa, I’m lost. Lost without Beatrice.”
“I know, Laura, but there’s much to do. Trust me. You will be happy again. It may seem impossible, but you will recover, and we will be strong once more.”
I shake my head, unable to believe his words. “Not without Beatrice.”
He sits up and looks sternly at me, as if I’m a whining child who needs to be spoken to more firmly.
“You behaved exactly like this after your mother died. It wasn’t helpful then.”
“No, but …”
“Time heals. And it will heal now, just as it did then.”
I let go of my father’s hand and he slumps a little. I tear off a strip of bread, staring at my chipped plate as I swallow down a hot rush of tears. Time doesn’t heal; it destroys. The brightness playing through the windows shifts. I blink, dazzled, and for a moment the trembling light makes it seem that my mother is sitting with us.
In a rush it comes back to me—her face as clear as it ever was. I remember how she once sat on my bed in the middle of a winter night, stroking my damp hair, my five-year-old face wet and frightened after a dark nightmare.
“Mama, will the snakes come and get me in my sleep?”
“Hush, my angel, hush, there are no snakes. Go back to sleep.”
“But what if I dream of them again?”
“Next time, don’t wake up until the dream is over. If you see it through, you’ll find that everything is all right in the end. Nothing bad will ever touch you.”
Mama, you were wrong too.
While Bianca clears the plates, I add this to the list of things I know for sure.
The fee is never paid.
Time destroys.
Nothing will be all right.
I’m building my personal catechism. I’m committing it t
o memory, these ugly lessons that life is teaching me.
I excuse myself from the table and step out into the bitter morning glow of the courtyard at the rear of the house. I walk over the flagstones and lean against the wrought-iron back gate, which leads to a narrow waterway. Thousands of tiny pieces of dust are turning in the sunlight, floating and falling around me: a lifeless dance of decay.
Later, I sit on the floor in the dressing chamber I shared with Beatrice, a linen chest open in front of me, and begin the sad task of sorting her clothes. My father has said that I am already taller than my sister was; since I can’t wear her garments, they must be discarded. Gently I take out her stays, her shawls and underskirts, and lay them in piles. Some will be sold, others cut up and sewn into something new.
Faustina comes in, a stool in her gnarled hands. “Sit here, my love,” she says, putting it beside me. “The floor’s no place for a lady.”
She gently takes a silken headdress from me as I move, then opens the tall, dark wooden cupboard that contains Beatrice’s gowns. As she folds rich velvet and soft satin, I ask her questions as they come to me.
“How did Beatrice drown? Where were you?”
“Stop, Laura, please stop,” she says. “Please don’t keep asking me. I can’t.”
But I have to know and gradually she tells me. Beatrice and Faustina had been to the concert at the Doge’s palazzo. Beatrice’s dancing feet quick-stepped home, the way I always picture her flitting around the courtyard.
“Faustina, was she with you? Was she beside you when she fell in?”
“Yes. I mean no. We were together, but …,” she replies, fumbling and dropping a blue gown. It lands in a collapsed heap, its empty bodice gaping wide. “Beatrice wanted to talk to someone she knew. You remember what she was like, chatting and laughing with every second person she met—day or night, she was the same. She told me to walk on ahead—that she’d return once she’d paid a visit to her friend. She knew I can’t move quickly anymore, and that I was tired and in a hurry to get home.”