The bindings, mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, though there were a number of books in the limp vellum of earlier ages, had been ruined but I doubted that the books themselves had been damaged too seriously. The fact that they swelled up and were under pressure kept the naphtha or fuel oil, which can do much more damage than water, from penetrating too deeply.
In most early libraries the books were simply placed on the shelves in order of acquisition, exceptions being made for very large or very small volumes. The catalog, if there was one, would indicate the vertical row, the shelf number (from top to bottom) and the number of the book on the shelf (from left to right). Thus the famous Beowulf manuscript, for example, is known as Cotton Vitellius A.xv, which means it was located in the library of Sir Robert Cotton under the bust of Roman Emperor Vitellius, on the top shelf, the fifteenth book (or bound manuscript) from the left. Lucia, Sister Chiara explained, had employed a much more sophisticated system, one that anticipated modern classification schemes. But Sister Chiara’s explanation was interrupted by a small explosion as the board at the end of the bookcase, no longer held in place by the moldings, gave way with a great wrenching, under the tremendous pressure exerted by the waterlogged books, which spilled out of the shelves like a crowd pouring out of a stadium after a football game, or perhaps I should say a soccer game.
Sisters Maria and Angelica continued to work on the moldings. The rest of us carried the damaged books to the church, where there was room to spread them out. By noon six of the library’s twenty-four tiers or bays had been disassembled, and we had all worked up a sweat in spite of the cold.
We worked in silence. Not absolute silence—not the silenzio maggiore of the night—but saying only what was necessary. At least the sisters said only what was necessary. My own impulse was to chatter, to fill the air with remarks about the weather and with stories about the book-drying operations in Prato and Pistoia, the tobacco barns in Perugia, the way Professor Chapin had taken the credit for thinking of using the tobacco barns, and so on. But as I became more comfortable working with the sisters, I began to talk less, and by the end of the day I had settled into a steady, comforting rhythm that reminded me of the produce market, as if we were unloading a carload of avocados instead of a library of old books. After a few days the silence seemed normal. If a sister spoke it was because she had something to say. What a difference it would make, I thought to myself, if congresses and parliaments operated on the same principle. Whenever I went out, as I did almost every afternoon, to scavenge for blotting paper and other supplies, I was shocked to step out of the silence of the convent into the noise of the piazza.
There was still no running water, and none of the stores had reopened yet, but everywhere men were digging out the mud, scraping the stones with their shovels, and noisy crowds of men, women, and children gathered around the water truck, and around the portable vegetable stand that opened up every afternoon. And every day at three o’clock a woman would sing two or three folk songs as she hung her laundry out the window of the medieval tower opposite the convent. I tried to time my comings and goings so that I could hear her, but even though she sang beautifully, it was always a pleasant relief to hear the heavy convent door close behind me, shutting out some of the confusion of the world along with its noise.
My days began with a knock on the door of my cell, to which, after a prolonged mental and physical struggle, I would answer, “Deo gratias.” I didn’t mean it, and I didn’t actually have to say it, but according to Sister Gemma it’s what one says at five o’clock in the morning to indicate to the knocker that one hasn’t died in one’s sleep. Sister Gemma had been assigned to look after me, to show me the ropes—an expression that doesn’t exist in Italian—and to empty my chamber pot, for there was still no running water for toilets or baths. Nor was there any heat, since all the furnaces had been put out of commission by the flood.
The sisters greeted the day, before sunrise, in a handsome church designed by Giuliano da Sangallo in the thirteenth century: six small chapels open off either side of the nave, under beautiful arches in the clear Tuscan limestone called pietra serena. Were they as sleepy and cold as I? Did their knees hurt from kneeling on stone? Did they get tired of oatmeal for breakfast every morning? Did they regret the vows that bound them, perpetually, as surely as prison bars? That’s the question that was always on my mind. What was the payoff? What did you get in exchange for the whole world? In exchange for family, friends, lovers, husbands, children? The more I got to know the black-habited figures, the more mysterious each became. Each had her own story, one that had led her to this point, to the little door cut out of the big door that separated the convent from the piazza.
Mornings I supervised my team of lay sisters (choir sisters had to spend a lot of time singing the divine office) at their work. The job of interleaving two thousand books with absorbent paper was time consuming and unpleasant. The vellum used for old books will last forever, but it’s generally been sized with animal glue that gives off a powerful odor when wet—the mud angels who went down into the basement of the Biblioteca Nazionale had to wear gas masks—and forms a nasty scum that makes your fingers stick together. The books become bricklike and yet fragile at the same time. Each different strain of mold has its own characteristic visual and tactile properties that might test the resolve even of those accustomed to dressing the wounds of lepers. The sisters, who soon learned how to treat the books so that the spines wouldn’t be torn apart as the paper absorbed water, were less squeamish and more patient than I, fortunately, though their work was not relieved, as mine was, by trips to town. More sisters had been enlisted, including Sister Gemma, my cicerone, who was about my age and who would be taking her perpetual vows in a few months. They knelt on the cold stone floor, like charwomen, as they patiently turned the pages of the books and inserted sheets of paper. They didn’t keep shifting their weight and twisting this way and that, as I did, to try to find a more comfortable position. Personal comfort was not a high-priority item in Santa Caterina Nuova. I did the best I could, but I preferred to leave the work of interleaving to the nuns.
They were good workers, good carpenters, and soon two large thymol vapor chambers had been constructed to my specifications. A thymol chamber is really nothing more than a tightly closed box with a tray for thymol crystals and, in this case, supporting rods to hold the books. The heat from a light bulb at the bottom of the chamber activates the crystals, and the vapor inhibits mold, which is potentially far more dangerous than water.
The chambers were set up in one of the small chapels at the end of the church, near a door that opened onto the lower level of the cloister and provided some ventilation, since the vapors can be harmful. Each chamber held about thirty books, which would need to be subjected to the vapors for two days. I was anxious to get started but hadn’t managed to locate any thymol crystals, which were in great demand.
Dottor Postiglione, whom I was reluctant to call at first, turned out to be very helpful in this matter. He was a man who knew how to far arrangiarsi—a phrase I’d always associated with Signor Bruni—a man who knew, that is, how to get things to arrange themselves in a satisfactory way. He put me in touch with a binder in Prato who had some old sewing frames and other old equipment for hand binding. He located a supply of absorbent paper, which was in very short supply; ditto for thymol crystals. He was a good-natured man, always pleased to be able to help; but he was also a man who enjoyed mystery and indirection, the sort of man who likes to suggest that the bottle of perfume he is giving a woman has been smuggled into the country when in fact it comes from the corner drugstore, or that the wine he orders in a restaurant is from a special cache kept specially for him when actually it’s the second-cheapest on the wine list. So I never found out where the blotting paper came from, or the thymol, though I knew that the CRIA people were having trouble getting it.
In the evenings, during ricreazione, we sat in the sala com
une, a room twice as long as it was wide. It was not particularly handsome, but it was comfortable, though chilly. Two Renaissance cassoni—large, heavy chests—sat at one end; at the other folding chairs were grouped around the fireplace. This is where everyone congregated, and where I had set up our makeshift conservation lab. We talked as we worked. Or worked as we talked, depending on how you look at it. It was during these evenings that I felt most at home in Santa Caterina Nuova. I felt as if I’d been admitted backstage after the daily performance and could sit and chat freely with the actresses and get a sense of what was really going on.
And a lot was going on. The Carmelites are a contemplative order, but Santa Caterina Nuova was a busy place. The nuns didn’t just sit around contemplating, as I had imagined. There were extensive properties to be managed. These properties, like the library, had been part of the dowry of Lucia de’ Medici. (The chapter, I soon realized, would never have survived the eighteenth century—a difficult time for all religious orders—had it not been for that dowry.) These lands produced honey, olive oil, and wine for the convent’s own use and also for sale. Some of the properties, those in the plain of the Arno, had been flooded. Beehives had been destroyed, grapevines had been unstrung, the mats used in pressing the olives had disappeared, the press itself needed repair.
At first I was secretly amused at the keen interest the supposedly contemplative nuns took in these worldly matters but I soon learned to appreciate the precariousness of their position and their determination to keep their financial affairs in their own hands and not turn them over to the bishop of Florence, their technical superior, who had handled all the finances himself before the election of the present mother superior, Madre Badessa, and who had diverted most of the income into the diocesan treasure chest despite the terms of Lucia’s dowry, which specified that all revenues from the dowry belonged to the convent and were to be controlled by the abbess alone. The bishop was not pleased with this arrangement, and the more revenue the land brought in, the less he allotted to the convent from the diocesan budget; but the less money he gave the convent, the less control he had over it.
The church is, of course, a human institution, but these reminders of its humanness—the power struggles, the concerns about money—were as shocking to me as the periodic scandals in the Vatican Bank, which is called, rather deceptively, the Institute for the Works of Religion. Madre Badessa, on the other hand, regarded these human problems as a matter of course. Illusions about bishops and power and money were for novices like me, and she was prepared to oppose the bishop every step of the way: over the finances, over the new habits (why should a few old men dictate how the nuns dressed themselves?), and especially over the fate of the library, which the bishop wanted to remove to San Marco. His position was that the monks at San Marco were much more experienced in the editing of old texts and that they could make more productive use of the books at Santa Caterina. Madre Badessa’s position was that the crucial texts in the library at Santa Caterina dealt with matters that ought to be treated by women, since men had botched them so badly in the past. Sister Chiara had already published an important monograph on the role of women in the early church demonstrating that women had been full-fledged bishops with the power to administer the sacraments. (The application of the Greek words diakonos and presbytera to women as well as men can be explained away only by the the most fantastical interpretations.) The bishop had tried to block the publication, but Madre Badessa had circumvented him by obtaining the church’s nihil obstat through the intervention of a certain cardinal who, like Madre Badessa, was from the Abruzzi.
In short, something important was going on. I had expected peace and calm and (frankly) boredom, but I felt instead that I’d stumbled into the backroom headquarters of a revolution. Was this Madre Badessa’s “secret”?
By the first week of December most of the books had been disbound and interleaved with blotting paper. Several hundred of these had been treated with thymol to inhibit mold spores and were ready to be reassembled, so there was plenty to do. I’d been teaching some of the sisters to do simple case bindings, using equipment I’d begged and borrowed from the binder in Prato who’d supplied us with the sewing frames: bone folders, a backing hammer, band nippers, brad awls, several weights of thread, and some old-fashioned presses for nipping, holding, and ploughing. They were apt pupils. I myself had started work on the jewel of the library, the famous Legenda Sanctissimae Caterinae, set in ragged Gothic type—one of the first books printed in Florence. The eighteenth-century leather binding had been completely destroyed, but the paper itself had suffered little damage and did not need resizing.
It was a Thursday evening, the feast of Saint Bridget of Sweden, and we were each allowed a glass of vinsanto and two or three biscotti, which we dipped into the sweet wine. Sisters Bernardo and Annamaria had been modeling the new habits, which they had designed, and there was a certain amount of excitement in the air as they completed a final circuit of the room and swept into the circle by the fire. The nuns applauded as if they were at a fashion show. My sympathies were with them. The traditional habit is a cruel garment. The floor-length skirts make it difficult to walk; the wimple interferes with peripheral vision; the linen serre-tête chafes. The new postulants suffered terribly. Their serre-têtes were always greasy from the lotion they put on their necks. No one expected the bishop to approve without a struggle. But the nuns were prepared for a struggle. As I’ve already noted, something was in the air, something exciting that wasn’t going to be stopped by bishops.
My apprentices looked up from their work as Sisters Bernardo and Annamaria, heads erect, trying not to smile, pivoted, their short (below the knee) skirts swishing, and made their way to the back of the long room, where Madre Badessa sat quietly on a horsehair sofa, reading. She, too, looked up, trying not to smile.
I turned my attention back to the Legenda Sanctissimae Caterinae. I lined up the cords with the markings on the spines, screwed up the frame, removed all but the first signature of the book from the bed of the frame, and prepared to demonstrate to Sister Gemma, who had joined our sewing circle, the kettle stitch that links the signatures together. In Italian, as Sister Agata had been pleased to inform me, it’s called una maglia legata, something I hadn’t known before.
I put down my needle and placed the second signature of the Legenda carefully on top of the first. “How did Caterina happen to become a nun?” I asked casually. I was familiar with the general outline of her life, but I wanted to hear what the others would say.
“When she was seven years old,” said Sister Chiara, the librarian and an authority on Saint Catherine, who is the patron saint of nuns, “she was coming back from an errand and saw a vision of Jesus and the saints, all dressed in white, standing in a loggia in the sky.”
A loggia in the sky, with people looking down at you. It was a curious image. I didn’t know what to make of it. But to tell you the truth, it wasn’t really Caterina Benincasa who interested me. It was Sister Chiara herself, and Sister Agata, who had almost finished sewing the last signature of the book in the makeshift sewing frame, which she insisted on holding on her lap, despite my protests, and Sisters Bernardo and Annamaria, who had modeled the new habits, and Madre Badessa too, sitting quietly in the shadows, and Sister Gemma, and Annapaola, a new postulant who had arrived shortly after I did and whose serre-tête was not pulled tight enough to prevent chunks of dark hair from poking out around her face.
Needles flashed in the firelight. (The fire, incidentally, was a necessity, not a luxury; none of the furnaces in the quartiere had yet been put back in working order.)
“Is it always like that?” I asked. “A vision? Is it all decided in a single moment? Like a man proposing to a woman? Or is it different for everyone?”
Had I been too bold? My heart was thumping, the way it had thumped when Professor Chapin propositioned me, but I plunged ahead recklessly into the silence that had fallen across the r
oom. My apprentices had stopped their sewing, and the other sisters, gathered around the fire or around two electric heaters in the back of the room, had stopped their sewing, too, or had put down their books.
“How is it decided? How was it decided for you, Annapaola? Did you see a vision?” I felt guilty about singling out Annapaola, who was not accustomed to speaking, but her vocation was the most recent, the freshest. I wanted to know.
The silence was palpable, like the silence after a bell has stopped tolling, as each of the women in the room contemplated, for a moment, the circumstances of her own vocation.
I don’t know why I was afraid. Maybe it was that I still believed—in spite of my own experience in the convent—that at the heart of it there was nothing, a cipher, and that a woman who looked into her heart honestly would discover that she had made a bad bargain, had given up everything for nothing.
It was not Annapaola who spoke up but old Sister Agata, who had finished sewing the small prayer book I had given her and was ready to start on the headband, for which I had purchased several spools of beautiful silk thread. She was a southerner, she said, speaking directly to me, as if it were just the two of us in the room. A calabrese, the last of eight children, four of whom had died before she was born. She punctuated her remarks with a kind of cackling laugh. Her family lived in two rooms, she said. No water. No toilet. No heat. No food. When her father died her mother began to work at the hospital. She left every morning at five o’clock to chop the wood to heat the water in the big kettles in which she did the laundry for the whole hospital, and the neighbors wouldn’t talk to her and the boys called her puttana, whore, because a decent woman isn’t supposed to show her face in the street for three years after her husband’s death. The sisters opened a school in the village. “They took me in. The food was good. It was warm, warmer than it is here! I knew a good thing! Meglio star da papa che da zingaro!” she laughed. Better to live like a pope than a gypsy. She kept on cackling after she’d stopped talking, and then the bell rang for compline and the cackling stopped as suddenly as it had started. No one spoke another word. No one turned another page. No one took another stitch. Recreation was over, and I was reminded of the strict discipline that separated me from these women.
The Sixteen Pleasures Page 10