The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  That’s what I was afraid of when I thought about the convent. That it would be like reading Dante’s Paradiso.

  But what about those few readers who weren’t bored? Were they deceiving themselves, or did they really get something out of it that most of us just didn’t catch on to? Like Rossella Moretti, who always read aloud with such feeling, and Giovanni Bicci, who memorized the entire section about the rose? There are always a few in every class. Are these the ones who go on to become monks and nuns? To pursue the spiritual life?

  I had to remind myself that I was not being asked to join a convent but to spend a month there plying my own humble vocation.

  “Keep your shirt on, Jed,” I said, meaning the expression literally.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I may enter a convent.”

  “You what?”

  He raised himself up a little and slid his pants down to his knees. I could see the little Harvard shields on his boxer shorts. VERITAS. Somehow that tickled me, and I started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Harvard underpants.”

  “You’re sore, aren’t you, because we didn’t go to the Piazzale Michelangelo, and because we didn’t take your little walk to Fiesole. What the hell was I supposed to do? Do you know who was at that dinner? Besides Steckley, who holds the purse strings? How could I say ‘no’? Honestly, now. What was I supposed to say, ‘Sorry, I can’t come to Thanksgiving dinner at I Tatti because I’ve got a date’?”

  “You’re a Harvard man,” I said. “You should have been able to think of something.”

  He patted the bed beside him. “Take it easy,” he said. “We’ve got a good thing going. Let’s not spoil it.”

  I was standing by the door. Not that I expected any trouble, but I didn’t want any physical contact.

  “I’m going downstairs for approximately fifteen minutes. When I come back I’ll expect you to be gone.”

  “If that’s the way you feel,” he said, “as far as I’m concerned, you’re fired. F-I-R-E-D. Is that what you want?”

  “I’m not sure what I want.”

  “Try calling I Tatti tomorrow, see how far you get. I’ll speak to your boss, too, what’s-his-name? I’ve heard he’s not too happy about your being here anyway.”

  I went down to the bar and drank a glass of acqua minerale, glad that the time for decisions was past. When I came back he was gone, but he’d left a note on the vanity table: “Please call my room. It’s not too late.”

  I’d already unbuttoned my blouse and was reaching around to unhook my bra when I saw it in the mirror. It was under the hairbrush. I undressed completely and took a good look at myself in the mirror. My body seemed to be in a transitional period that perhaps corresponded to the one in my spiritual—if that’s the word for it—life. I still had the “beauty of youth,” according to Margeaux. It’s a phrase that used to puzzle me when I came across it in Victorian novels. Beauty is beauty, isn’t it? Either a woman is beautiful or she isn’t. But sometimes when you see a young woman with her mother you can see what the old novelists were talking about. You can see that what was beauty in the one will soon lose its charm, that it’s heading in the wrong direction, so to speak. Or in some cases there is a quality that remains constant. And that’s your true beauty. That’s what Meg and Molly had. When they stood next to Mama you could see that they were going in the right direction, that their beauty would hold. But my beauty was of the first type; it was going in the wrong direction. What was left of it wouldn’t hold on much longer. I’d never paid much attention to “beauty aids”—wrinkle creams, skin moisturizers, bust developers, all those things. I’d always been too high minded. But maybe I’d made a mistake. And maybe it wasn’t too late, even now.

  “Nah,” I said to myself, crumpling up the note, “Non vale il pene.”

  5

  What Nuns Talk About at Night

  The Ordo Carmelitarum traces its origins back to the days of the prophet Elijah, who, having retired for religious contemplation to Mount Carmel, was prompted by an angel to found a society of contemplatives for the worship of the one true God. His disciples included some of the lesser prophets (Jonah, Micah and Obadiah) and, later, Pythagoras (“il filosofo rinomato di Magna Graecia”). Elijah’s wife founded a similar society for women, which later included the Virgin Mary.

  In 1154—to skip over roughly two thousand years—a Calabrian monk named Berthold, accompanied by a dozen or so like-minded men, took up where Elijah left off, though official recognition—by Pope Honorius III—was delayed till 1224, just about the time of the construction of the great monastic churches in Florence. In 1593 the order was split down the middle over the question of whether or not to wear shoes. Those who wished to return to the primitive austerity of the original rule, which had been somewhat relaxed earlier under Pope Eugenius IV, became known as the Carmeliti scalzi, or Barefoot Carmelites.

  The feet of the sister who came to lead me to my room, my cell, were concealed by the skirts of her dark habit, and she walked so softly, with such small nunny steps, that I couldn’t tell if she was wearing shoes or not. Did she or didn’t she? For some reason—maybe because those stone floors looked so cold and hard—I had to know, so at the very last minute I opened a door that was closing behind me.

  “Scusi, suora,” I called after her.

  “Dimmi, cara.” She stopped and turned to face me.

  “Tell me something, would you?”

  “Certamente.”

  “Are you wearing shoes?”

  She gave me a surprised look and, coloring slightly, slowly extended a dainty foot. We both looked at it for a moment. I was relieved to see that it was firmly clad in a sensible black shoe.

  “It’s only till Christmas,” I told myself, but in my cell I was reminded of a prison. There was no place to hide, not under the table, not under the rough woolen sheets on the small hard bed, not in the tiny wardrobe. A prie-dieu summoned me to my knees; a crucifix on the wall glared malevolently at my residual Protestant soul; the window, slanted upward, high above my head, revealed nothing but a rag of dirty gray sky, spattered with bird droppings. I stamped my shod foot just to hear a sound.

  There was no place in my cell to hide the sack of romanzi gialli—detective novels—some in English, some in Italian, that I’d bought at the Paperback Exchange on the Via Fiesolana. Hercule Poirot, Travis McGee, Lew Archer, Nero Wolfe. They’d have their work cut out for them this time, rescuing me from angst and ennui, especially the latter. I started an Agatha Christie in English and then switched to John D. MacDonald in Italian: Il Canarino Giallo. I wanted something a little more robust than Agatha Christie, but about ten pages into The Yellow Canary I remembered the ending—a particularly horrible torture scene that I didn’t want to read again. For once Travis bites off more than he can chew and has to be saved by a deus ex machina, a mysterious Israeli secret agent who shoots the ex-Nazi just as she’s about to get to work with her implements of torture. That was a little too robust.

  Nero Wolfe was soon lowering his seventh of a ton into the only chair he was ever comfortable in, made by a Swedish cabinetmaker. I loved it, but I couldn’t seem to concentrate, to evoke an imaginary environment intense enough to cancel the crucifix bearing down on me from the wall above my bed, or the prie-dieu coming at me from below. I needed a window. I let my mind wander, and soon it was peering out imaginary windows: at an ore boat on Lake Michigan from Meg’s apartment in Milwaukee; at Papa’s herb garden, which you could see through a little kitchen window that had once been an ice chute; at the old Victorian houses, big as barns, that I could see when I looked down Chambers Street from my own window over the porte cochere. If Meg were here, what would she do now? But Meg was married to Dan, a doctor, who, though he hadn’t started practicing yet—he kept adding one specialty after another to his list of credentials—seemed to hav
e plenty of money. Meg had two kids and was thinking of starting a business of her own. She wouldn’t be here in the first place. And Molly? There was never any telling what Molly might do. Right now she was living with an Indian mathematician in a run-down apartment in Ann Arbor. If you looked out her kitchen window you saw the Salvation Army.

  I stacked the books in two piles on the table. Not only was there no place to hide the books, there was no place to hide, period. Maybe that was the idea. Maybe there was a peephole in the door too. I checked. There was, but someone had closed up the hole with wood putty. Good for her. And then I had an idea. Maybe Id been using the wrong metaphor. Maybe my room wasn’t a barren prison cell at all but a snug ship’s cabin. Maybe I wasn’t a prisoner but a passenger on a fabulous liner, bound for a new world at the ends of the earth.

  Like most passengers, once I’d stowed my gear I was ready to go out on deck to see what I could see.

  My door opened onto a corridor with doors on one side only, like the corridor of a European train. None of the doors had numbers, nor were they marked in any way that I could see. There was no sign of my fellow inmates, or perhaps I should say passengers. I wanted to escape, but I’ve never had a very good sense of direction and couldn’t have pointed toward the street to save my soul. To the right or to the left? I turned to the right and discovered, after a couple of turns that confused me completely, a door somewhat larger than the rest that opened onto a square cloister, like a prison exercise yard, only smaller. It was full of mud and debris from the flood. Stone benches, too heavy for two strong men to lift, had been overturned by the force of the water. The waterline, like a dirty ring around a bathtub, was higher than the capitals of the columns that supported the small rounded arches of the arcade. Looking down from the loggia, I could picture small knots of nuns, gathered in groups, talking about whatever nuns talk about. I could even hear them singing, in the distance, too far away to make out the words.

  There was not much to look at except the sky—no hills or towers rose high enough to be seen above the red-tiled roof—and the frescoes on the inner wall of the loggia. To tell you the truth, I’ve never cared much for frescoes. Give me your Dutch paintings with lots of interesting details on a tiny scale—tavern scenes with people drinking and playing cards and, inevitably, a little baby going to the bathroom in one corner, or Rembrandt’s side of beef, full of drama and mystery; anything by Rembrandt, in fact. But frescoes are always so big. I mean, the figures in them are big. There’s no exciting detail, and the colors are dull earth tones—browns and dull reds, sepia, umber, maybe a dash of ultramarine to set off the Virgin Mary’s head, but no more than a dash. There’s usually not enough going on, and if something is going on, it’s generally bad. I looked anyway, the way a person will read Good Housekeeping or Family Circle in a doctor’s waiting room, just because it’s there and nothing else is.

  According to my Guide to Florence the paintings were remarkable chiefly for the fact that they had been done by a woman, the niece of Grand Duke Cosimo III, who had entered the convent in 1714, at the age of thirty-nine, bringing with her a considerable dowry and an exaggerated sense of her own abilities. This was the Lucia that Dottor Postiglione had told me about.

  I must say that the fact that they had been done by a woman did pique my curiosity, and I examined the paintings more closely than I might have otherwise. The fact that they had been done by a woman may also have colored my impressions. In any case, it seemed to me that the Virgin Mary was confronting the angel Gabriel with a certain uncharacteristic insouciance, her thumb marking the place in the book she has been reading so that she can find it again once she has sent him on his way. It’s Gabriel, not the Virgin, who wears the traditional “Who me?” expression. In another panel the infant Christ is dwarfed by the powerful figures of his mother and grandmother, and in still another, the crucified Christ is the young consort who has been abandoned by his disciples but not by the three Marys, who stand menacingly at the foot of the cross.

  I was trying to sort out my impressions of these strong women when I heard a noise behind me and turned to find myself face to face with a tall, wimpled figure.

  “Hhhhhhuuuuhh.” I’d been caught, a Peeping Tom in the act of peeping. “O Madonna. I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I hadn’t left my room and feeling the need to apologize for poking my nose into something that was none of my business. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “That’s perfectly normal. None of us knows for sure until it’s revealed to us, and then it’s generally something quite different from what we expected. But I’m sorry I startled you. I’m the superiora; the sisters call me Madre Badessa.”

  I thought maybe I was supposed to kneel down and kiss the ring on the extended hand. But I didn’t. I took the hand and shook it. Madre Badessa—Mother Abbess—shook back.

  “I will treat you,” she said, “just as I would want my own daughter to be treated if she were wandering around the world so far away from home.”

  There was nothing ironic in her remark, nor in my gratitude, which I found difficult to put into words, for she reminded me of my own mother, though Mama, who had refused to see a priest on her deathbed, had always regarded the church with the gravest suspicions.

  “I see you’ve discovered our secret,” she said. “But come now, we’ll talk about it later. Right now I must show you the library. There’s a great deal of work to be done, and the sooner we start the better.”

  The library was small by some standards, large by others. I’d say about two thousand volumes, give or take a hundred. The Widener Library at Harvard, I recalled aloud, has more than eight million volumes.

  The great library at Monte Cassino, Madre Badessa reminded me, contained fewer than five hundred books in the High Middle Ages. “Which was the greater center of learning?” she wanted to know. “Monte Cassino or the Widener Library?” She was very persistent, Madre Badessa. She wouldn’t let me off the hook. An idle remark on my part had become the occasion for a lesson in history. Monte Cassino, founded in 528, destroyed by the Lombards in the sixth century, rebuilt, captured by the Saracens in the ninth century, destroyed by an earthquake in the fourteenth. The collection, formed and reformed, remained intact until it was bombed by the Americans in 1945, when the war was practically over, when all that had been necessary . . .

  I apologized to Madre Badessa for . . .

  “I didn’t mean to lecture you,” she said. “The point I wanted to make was simply that all learning, all knowledge of antiquity, was channeled through the monastic communities.”

  “What about convents?”

  “Convents, too, of course, though the first important convent library was not established until 1142 at Montepulciano, and the idea that nuns might be scholars has never sat very well with the princes of the church. But it’s time to get to work. Let me introduce you.”

  In addition to Sister Chiara, the librarian, my staff consisted of four other sisters who had been waiting in silence: Sisters Priscilla, Maria, Sofia and Angelica. I nodded to each one, resisting the impulse to stick out my hand.

  The library was a long, narrow room, like the Laurentian Library, though much smaller, with the books arranged in tiers that divided the room into bays, like little chapels, opening off the main aisle. The books had already been removed from the top shelves, but those on the lower shelves, which had been under water, had swelled up so that it was impossible to get them out. They were under too much pressure.

  I contemplated the problem for a minute or so without arriving at a solution. What we needed at that point, I thought, was a man. Sisters Chiara, Priscilla, Maria, Sofia and Angelica awaited my instructions, which made me nervous. I’m a book restorer, not a carpenter.

  “I think that what we need at this point,” I said, “is a man.”

  No one responded.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to take an ax or something and smash ou
t the ends of the presses so we can get the books out. Or maybe a saw. I don’t see any other solution.”

  “I think,” said Sister Maria, with what I took to be a gentle but ironic smile, “that that is a typical American solution, but perhaps we can remove the moldings and disassemble the bookcases in the order that they were built—I mean just reverse the order—before we move them upstairs, so we don’t do any further damage to the wood. We wanted to hear your opinion before we proceeded.”

  “Very good,” I said, tossing my head as if to say, Just what I was really thinking all all along, that I’d only mentioned the ax as a joke.

  Sister Angelica was already opening a man-size tool chest. She and Sister Maria, with the confidence of experienced carpenters, or cabinetmakers, started to work on the ornate moldings, first with tiny chisels, then with larger ones, then still larger ones, prying them loose gently—no mean trick since they’d been nailed in to stay with handmade charcoal-iron nails. Seventeenth-century nails, said Sister Angelica. Which is when the bookcases were built, to hold the library that Lucia de’ Medici brought with her, as part of her “dowry” when she entered the convent. That much I remembered.