Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  Because of its special status, the convent in Parma was not subject to the rule of common closure. Its heads were elected for life and to that extent the mother superior of this Benedictine order had the power of a minor ruler. Not only was she a decision maker inside her group, but she was able to influence political decisions and to keep contacts with the world. And the order was alive with life from the streets, the poor, the rich, studying literature, handling money, running two mills and dealing with the ensuing pollution, managing gardens: real work as well as pleasure.

  Last Monday some life inside of the convents was recounted to me in a modern-day context. An English student of mine told me a story of a friend’s father. The man owns a large prosciutto factory, and he was asked recently to volunteer a truck from his company to carry supplies to the war zone around Sarajevo. In the end, the father felt he could not assign one of his employees to undertake the dangerous journey. The duty fell to him. His depot point was forty kilometers from the war-shattered city, a convent surrounded by bare trees. He reached the spot and was greeted by a young Croatian nun. The women were running a bunker and outstation for distributing the food and medicines, sending them further on in smaller carriers. During his twenty-four-hour stay, resting before turning back, he was invited from his cell-like room to attend mass and an exorcism. He witnessed with his own eyes the nuns’ small flock calming battered souls. They attempted to push Satan out. He watched in wonder as the women wrestled with the tormented. The nuns chanted and prayed, quieting them. He saw one older man write and quack out Chinese, Greek, early High German, and then speak in Serbo-Croatian. The exorcism proved far more troubling than the danger of trucking supplies. He had never imagined that nuns did such weird work. Or that the theater of the mind spewed out such distinct and uncontrollable contents.

  A historical note about a prominent citizen named Scipioni, a financier and Giovanna’s cousin, said that he murdered a banker who once managed the convent’s assets. Giovanna had dismissed the latter, who had, in her opinion, not furthered her family’s holdings. Scipioni’s family sought the church’s immunity within Giovanna’s convent’s doors. He had blood on his hands but was looked upon with favor; soon he resumed his life managing money for the church. Later he would bring Correggio to the abbess. Day by day, power deals as well as sights, smells, illness, violence, and study were part of life for the uncloistered sisters. As the Renaissance spirit touched the abbess, the world for women seemed wide and its dangers seemed manageable. But Popes Julius II, Leo X, and finally Clement VII wanted to rescind Giovanna’s power and the right of the abbess to govern for life.

  Within society at that time, the church offered the greatest intellectual opportunities to women. Providing them with education by teaching reading and writing in Italian and Latin, it also exerted the most absolute power: with learning came the chance to think. One terrifying instrument for stanching the challenges arising from study and discovery was that of silencing.

  Silencing was a duty and a right that the Catholic Church retained and exercised in building its institutions. Clamorous cases have entered our consciousness from Joan of Arc to Giordano Bruno to Galileo Galilei. Physical death was a solution or a threatened possibility for going too far. Giovanna awaited a struggle with this dictatorial power.

  Silence is a common state in religious orders. Cloisters and monasteries were conceived as deeper shelters for learning about the soul’s journey. However, if ratios are revealing, the majority of women’s religious institutions were considered socially appropriate as cloisters, a condition proper to women’s sinful and sexually dangerous state. Women living in convents under the worldly contract offered to the badessa appear rarely. More often, even privileged women were forced by their families into less enlightened places for reasons of consolidating power or settling a daughter who was disgraced. Manzoni shows us such a nun a century later in his famous novel I Promessi Sposi. Fifty years after Giovanna, Margherita, a daughter of Alessandro Farnese, is married in a grand family alliance to Vincenzo Gonzaga, son of the Duke of Mantua. She is banished to the convent of San Paolo when a sexual malformation makes it impossible for the marriage to be consummated. She spends her cloistered life in “misery and tears.”

  The islands of enlightened, freer community have a definite if restricted history in the church. The original charter granted to the Parma convent, in part for economic reasons, also had a religious base. In San Paolo in 1005, Abbess Liuda was running an experimental religious community that was effective and inspiring. Clusters of these more autonomous convents arose further north in what would be present-day Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium or later in the New World. Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century mystic writer and musician, was an abbess from one such Benedictine convent. In one of her many visions she said, “Divinity is in its omniscience and omnipotence like a wheel, a circle, a whole, that can neither be understood, nor divided, nor begun nor ended.”

  The transitive verb to silence often achieves its initial goal. But it usually creates opposing energies that battle with it. Inadvertently, it strengthens a search for a way to upset the perverse appropriation of a noun tending toward calm and peace. It unloosens strategies that try to restore silence to its benign meaning and to free up sound and speech. Strangely the verb in English occupies only a few columns in the OED. Its darkest institutional implications are hard to see. “Silence that fellow. Would he have some cause for prattle” (Measure for Measure, Shakespeare). This suggests many hypotheses about the instrument’s use and the collection of sources about it in Anglo-Saxon countries. The reasons seem to be illuminating and have become a central focus of recent historical deconstruction.

  Written and signed words like Giovanna’s high-strung resistance hold a special place in the history of silencing. They are deliberate, calculated risks, questioning the power of an institution. Nakedly pushing, they mock the oppressor. They give their life over to the message of fearlessness in the face of principle. Such a gift amplifies the meaning of existence.

  Around silence and silencing are uses without end. The noun silence goes further than the mind can go. It is an unfillable vessel. Instead the transitive verb belongs to humanity’s shepherding relationship to words. The heinous act outlines mankind’s smallness in the face of words’ greater power. Silencing shows humans’ dark side traveling in history. The transitive verb’s umbilical nature, tied to institutions, produces stillborns and monsters.

  Giovanna was silenced. Her determination, her courageous fight and indignation, are bitter discoveries to add to women’s unanswered wish for equality. Her silence too, behind the cloistered doors—the defeat lived in her last days—is one more set of vivid and ghostly shadings for a record of women’s lives. There, her conviction and pain become a demand for justice. Filled with intelligent hope, she lived the importance of speaking out from the wall. Her actions, distilled further into words—just a few lines scattered throughout her living quarters—convey suffering, fury, and consciousness about being silenced as powerfully as the volumes Virginia Woolf left us. Suffocation was not accepted without a fight.

  Giovanna, who lived in a city of fewer than twenty thousand people, operated inside a complex institution, given its religious scope and its political structure—affected by a centralized hierarchy and by local autonomy and larger international schemes. The learning and power offered Giovanna led her into an untenable trap. Her provocative words do not surrender their roots in secular culture: she persists in her protest. They are issued from a keen sense of the right to a room of one’s own, the right to liberty promised to the nuns, and a collective sense of the unstoppable rebirth of learning that was in motion, moving beyond religion’s power over thought. The Renaissance spirit reached Parma; Giovanna embraced it.

  A middle-aged woman who fascinates like a fast-moving brushfire said to me at a writers’ workshop in Geneva, “Now that I know that I will die, I do know it down to the tips of my toes. For a long time it was on
ly an image. When I was a child, my mother, who was from Estonia, told me that her mother, when she died, had been put in a reed basket and laid out like a cat on the kitchen table. That was death to me for a long time. You know, an insideout Moses in the bulrushes. My mother went crazy. My father was an alcoholic. I grew up as a ward of the state. I never suffered too much. And my life turned out well. Now I tell my boys, I want to make things. Stories, paintings. They’re going to have to paper the walls with my stuff. I want to leave something. Me on the earth that goes on after me.”

  Giovanna woke each morning for many years believing that her nearly political status and the culture depicted in the room would last and flourish. She entertained guests in her private chambers, and the more searching ones must have discussed the iconography of the wind in Neptune’s shell. It represents fate, perhaps. Perhaps it represents her fate.

  Giovanna’s ambition fits the facts. She felt equal to inviting genius to celebrate her footing in the world. Just as Julius II wanted to leave Michelangelo’s sprawling and volcanic vision, or Raphael’s cool dream of classical reason, high on great walls in Vatican rooms, she wished to commemorate her family’s access to money, the world, and education. But once her freedom came under attack, tolerance receded and shrank. The space she imagined as culture opening around her imploded. The painted ceiling and walls no longer reflected a thrilling reality, but an invented idealization of it. Art failed temporarily under history’s pressure.

  Once the mandate to cloister and its compressing shadow darkened every corner of Giovanna’s existence, then perhaps the secret codes she composed and scattered on her apartment’s walls became the inheritance she wished to leave. The ceiling’s mirror of a sensuous climate open to women was superseded by the locked prayer cells offered to them.

  The written words or motti, aphorisms (motto is the singular form), on the walls were probably put on by her own hand. They articulated the thoughts of a mortal no longer adapted to a system. The motti placed strategically as riddles—phrases with missing letters to be deciphered—became a human subject reaching her. They are common conventions found in many Italian palaces. But hers, stark, ambiguous, and defiant, constitute a work of prison literature. She would not try to escape. That humanity and conviction are hinted at by the painter. Correggio shows us her intelligent face and her open hand. But Giovanna’s words direct us to the costs.

  Giovanna, the badessa of Parma, was a historical figure who, once uncovered, became an obsession for me. Her resolute solitude fit me like a familiar cloak. For many years, I didn’t know she existed, even though I often took visitors into the convent. No one pointed her story out. Art was the Mecca. It was Correggio’s room. I didn’t know who she was, or that she died in those rooms, or that she fought for justice. Nor did I know that the Renaissance vision painted by Correggio is still undecipherable except as an individualistic vision.

  By chance, one day a guide mentioned Giovanna’s words to me. The abbess’s life set off an intact clanging set of bells in my head: large bells whose elaborate mechanics depend on gravity. Some sound like those of Paul Revere, and some, like Osip Mandelstam, are words said into the winds. My first thought upon hearing about her silence was that I knew a very different aspect of those walls from my own life of writing. With an American mind, I wondered over and over: Why didn’t she escape? Leave the church? Go into exile? Live out her beliefs? Then I could feel her faith or the reality of the times telling me that it was impossible. As much as she was defiant and an explorer, she had roots in a god and a life in a place.

  The motti, which cannot be read in the present-day room, can be found in a few art history books. Erwin Panofsky’s essay is perhaps the final word in English on the subject. Some researchers here think that he pushed his interpretation and even translations of the motti too far. In any case, his work was assisted greatly by Father Affò, an eighteenth-century historian from Parma, who presented Giovanna’s life in 1794 at the University of Bologna on the occasion of honoring a female academician, Clotilde Tambroni. Addressing this scholar, he said, “Oh, most valorous woman, to whom shall I present this, my brief Work, if not to you, who having heard me read it last July, in your house, in the presence of Gentlemen, while it was still imperfect and rough, showed such fervor to have it see the light?”

  In the present restored room, where brushstrokes have reunderlined leaves and eyebrows, hoping in some anti-Heraclitean way to reach back in time to what was, the restorers have not painted in Giovanna’s defense. Her terrible story of suffocation has not been reestablished in loud, bold signs of recognition. Her motti are not explained, nor have they been returned to the walls they once clung to. This offense, in the last years of the twentieth century, in a city of exhausted senses of irony, still surprises me. When will this woman’s testament be set straight and given out freely? Her words are unmentioned on the worn-out one-page summary about the room handed to visitors. This woman of fire is still invisible. The word, loaded with so many conscious and unconscious omissions, must almost be incalculable for women’s lives. The crime repeated in Giovanna’s case—the non-telling now—is arrogant and shortsighted. Worse, it reveals that no one believes her inspiration might open something good. There are many outstanding abbesses in San Paolo’s history, and this steady growth in consciousness is fascinating and tragic as it crashes to an end with her.

  The motti, as far as we know, are twelve premeditated remarks. Giovanna evidently wrote most of them, on the absorbing permanence of walls. That carved into the stone cornice over the door of the room and those in the marble of the two fireplaces still remain. Some were in her private chambers. In the clear-cut way her mind worked, she knew that whatever phrases survived, if the world ever came across them, her fire would be felt again. She must have known, too, that her groping questions about her fate went far beyond herself to the heart of political and moral philosophy. She knew that the mind and the spirit cannot be kept in the dark.

  Motti, an amusement like acrostics, commonplace in her time, were clever disguises for her ends. In these apparently harmless games, she explained the crime taking place. Aleksandr Kushner, a contemporary Russian poet, said that one must possess the art of a snake charmer when dealing with rulers who wish to do one in.

  We don’t know when, in her long-drawn-out resistance, each phrase was given its perpetual motion. Who were the words for? They contain a challenge form of address. Were they goads defying the officials trying to dissuade her or written to herself, a set of lines exposed to air, to hold on to like real squirming infants? The motti on the two fireplaces were public, as was the phrase “With virtue everything is granted.” But for the rest? Were the convent doors still open when she wrote? Or barred? Or did the motti span both periods? In all cases, once written, they asked for longer lives.

  The thoughts underpinning her actions show a woman facing a tidal wave. She analyzed her persecution. She bit hard into Job’s questions, but in a more secular way. She felt betrayed. Yet she admitted to power greater than herself. Did the wave thunder in as faith in the end? How straight she stood with her Renaissance attitude of hope and her belief in the law that had offered her order of sixteen women freedom for more than three hundred years.

  Look at the motti, clear and succinct, in an arbitrary order. They are so difficult to find, I pass them on here as facts and women’s words. Like pieces of the new genome maps, or the photos taken by Explorer 2, these retrievals, collected by thousands of people all over the globe, will play at some future time into a different kind of understanding of our history and its thirsts.

  Transimvs per Ignem et Aqvam et Edvxisti nos in Refrigerivm

  NEC TE QVAESIVERIS EXTRA

  GLORIA CVIQVE SUA EST

  SVA CVIQVE MIHI MEA

  IΩHN TE KAI ΠΛANHN

  H ENI ΠANTA H ENIKΛΩ

  IOVIS OMNIA PLENA

  SIC ERAT IN FATIS

  ERIPE TE MORAE

  DII BENE VORTANT

  O(MN)
IA VIRTVTI PERVIA

  IGNEM GLADIO NE FODIAS

  Frescoes give us something other paintings cannot provide. Painted on wet plaster, they blot into a place and become one with it. Correggio’s leafy branches fasten into a time and an irrefutable public position to be seen always there. That rootedness forces a recognition of history as specific and declamatory. Giovanna’s notes in the walls joined the plaster in her actual prison.

  The ceiling and walls show dramatically the schism between art and life. The frescoes still carry the singular daring with which Giovanna and the other women lived for a while. Her words do not deny the ceiling. They correct it. They murmur that history, as much as art, must be gazed at and then questioned for lapses and meaning.

  What do the motti say? I worked with Panofsky’s translations from the Latin and occasional Greek into English. But I read his article in Italian. Looking at other translations, I could say that the interpretations, too, would change if a different translator’s work was used.

  “We passed amidst fire and water and you have given us a place of rest.” This reference to Psalm 66 is inscribed on the fireplace in the room painted by Araldi. It embraces the spiritual faith of a soul improving as well as stressing the privilege guaranteed to the convent. One room and five years later, on the fireplace displaying Diana pointing to her horse’s rear, we read, “Don’t stir up the fire with a sword.” The subject matter and climate have exploded. Giovanna, while keeping peace, is also being taunted by the pope’s gauntlet. She is admonishing the powers that be.