The Sixteen Pleasures

by Robert Hellenga

  It was time for me to return to my detective novel, a Travis McGee (not Il Canarino Giallo), but I didn’t want to break the circle, the ring of fellowship, or sistership, so I followed the nuns through the frescoed cloister and into the church, where I soon found myself alone in the impending darkness.

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so utterly alone. The dis-ease I’d experienced when I was first shown into my little cell was nothing compared to what I felt now. I’d been telling myself all along that the true life of the convent was to be experienced in those cozy hours in the sala comune, which I could understand and participate in, and not in a mystery that I found as inexplicable and incomprehensible as the Latin of the antiphons and the psalms the choir intoned in a single clear voice. No music could have been more absolutely celestial—everything sensual had been refined from it—and yet I was strangely reminded of Papa’s blues, of men standing in railroad stations, suitcases in their hands, waiting for trains to carry them back home or away from home, depending. The music had the same effect on me: it seemed to go where ordinary music can’t go, so that I was overwhelmed with an intense longing, as painful as homesickness but wonderful at the same time.

  I thought of Agata Agape and her strange vocation: no food, no heat, no water, no toilet. She had never ridden in an automobile, never watched a television program, never talked on a telephone, never loved a man. She had seen eight abbesses come and go, and as many bishops. Although she could neither read nor write, she was an excellent seamstress and without a doubt the star pupil of my little bookbinding class. She had a feel for the materials, could judge with her fingertips what thickness of thread to select for a particular book, a matter that depends on several variables: the thickness of the paper and the number and thickness of the signatures. She could round the back of a book without a single unnecessary stroke of the hammer. She could cut endpapers to size without measuring them. She had strong hands to screw up the nipping press, and sharp eyes, and a sharp tongue, too, for anyone who tried to usurp her comfortable chair next to the fire in the sala comune.

  Had the daily and seasonal rhythms of the convent filled her life with meaning? Had it been enough?

  On winter nights when I was little my sisters and I used to get out from under the covers and take off our pajamas and stand bare naked in front of the open window just to see how long we could stand it. That’s what I did that night in Santa Caterina Nuova. I took off all my spiritual clothes and stood there bare naked, just to see how long I could stand it. I don’t know how long I actually lasted. I kept waiting for something to happen, but nothing happened and nothing happened, and then on the way back to my room I turned a corner and suddenly felt that I was not alone. I’d been taken by surprise in a dark corridor, and my heart began to thump. Would it all be decided in a single moment, perhaps against my will? Did I have to do something or would it all be done for me? Or to me? I could already feel, rather than see, myself in the rough serge of the habit, could feel the serre-tête pulled tight around my face, cutting sharply into the soft skin under my chin. Had it been like this for the others? Or was it different for everyone? I still didn’t know, and I never found out for sure.

  6

  What Sort of a Thing Is a Man?

  When I returned to the convent after one of my afternoon forays, lugging a small iron nipping press, this time from a local bindery, I realized immediately that something was terribly wrong. It was the only time, I think, that I actually found the silence maddening. I could get nothing out of Sister Gemma except that Madre Badessa had forbidden them to talk about it. About what?

  At supper, which consisted of thin broth with pasta in it, two of the postulants—Annapaola and a girl I didn’t know—spent the entire time lying facedown, arms outstretched, on the stone floor. The silence was deeper than usual, and when Madre Badessa tinkled her bell to indicate that conversation was permitted, no one had much to say.

  It was not till evening that I was able to pry the story out of Sister Gemma. I had lured her into my cell with a promise of some Dutch chocolate that I’d bought at the station. Normally the sisters are not allowed into one another’s cells, but Sister Gemma had permission to visit mine.

  She was, as her name suggested, a gem of a woman. Tall, soft spoken, good humored, intelligent. “You should have been a teacher,” I told her more than once. “You remind me of my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Insulman. Her classroom was always

  full of gerbils and snakes and model volcanoes and odd plants. Full of interesting surprises, like you.” It was only to Sister Gemma that I could say such things.

  “You must stop thinking that my life is wasted here,” she reminded me. “This is my vocation, not teaching little children.” But I think she was pleased nonetheless.

  I rummaged around in my book bag for the bar of chocolate, which weighed a hefty hundred and fifty grams.

  “So what happened?”

  “It was nothing, really.”

  “Then tell me.” I unwrapped the chocolate, broke it in half, and handed a piece to Gemma. Semisweet.

  “Annapaola and Maria discovered a book of pictures.”

  “A book of pictures?”

  “Obscene drawings.”

  “Ah, a pornographic magazine?” The newly reopened newspaper kiosk in the piazza was full of them, along with more refined books on the ideal of feminine beauty in the Renaissance, etc. My first thought was that Annapaola and Maria had stepped outside the convent on an errand or that some practical joker had stuffed a dirty magazine under the convent door.

  “No, no, it was a book from the library.”

  “From the library?”

  “Yes, they discovered it when they were interleaving the books.”

  Now here was something exciting indeed. Gemma licked the chocolate slowly and thoughtfully, as if it were an ice-cream cone. I took a big bite out of mine. I’ve never been able to eat chocolate slowly.

  “Did you see it?”

  “Just a glimpse. There was a big commotion. I went to see what was happening. Sister Vincensina, the novice mistress, came at once and took it away from them.”

  “Well, they couldn’t help finding it, could they?”

  “The thing is, they found it yesterday, and Sister Maria kept it in her cell last night. They just pretended to find it today, but Sister Matilde saw them.”

  “Someone should call Oggi or Novella 2000.” (These were the Italian equivalents of The National Enquirer.)

  “Really! That’s why Madre Badessa forbade us to talk about it.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “But I will have to tell Madre Badessa.”

  “That you’ve talked to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because we have no secrets.”

  “What will happen to you?”

  “Nothing much. Madre Badessa is very understanding.”

  “You won’t have to lie facedown on the floor during supper? How barbarous!” (I was really annoyed with Madre Badessa.)

  “How much did you see?” I asked.

  “I didn’t get a very good look, and I didn’t know what I was looking at, but whatever it was looked like a kind of monster, like a giant squid with big tentacles reaching out at you and a beak and one dark eye.”

  “A giant squid?” I couldn’t picture what she was describing, but I didn’t want to press her.

  How fragile the infrastructure. No matter how strong the walls, the fortress can always be betrayed from within. And what was the purpose of these walls? Nothing about monastic and conventual life excites more curiosity than the vow of celibacy. In theory the libido is redirected toward God. The nuns—and monks too, in fact—are “brides of Christ.” They dress up in wedding dresses when they take their perpetual vows. But can the divine embrace ever match the warmth and passion of t
he human one? I suppose I was too steeped in Freudian assumptions to believe it. Not that my own experience had been characterized by any exceptional warmth and passion. (I was thinking of Jed Chapin.)

  “Sister Gemma,” I said. “Are you happy?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Very happy.”

  Of course, I thought, that’s what she’d say even if she weren’t happy. But she didn’t look unhappy.

  “Have you ever wished . . .” I was treading on thin ice, reluctant to go on, but my curiosity was too strong. “Have you ever wished,” I repeated, “have you ever regretted, have you ever been sorry, that is, about not knowing a man?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Very much, in a way. But you know, it’s all so strange. I wouldn’t know what to do. And I’m not sure it’s that important. Madre Badessa has talked to us all.”

  I had finished my chocolate long ago but Sister Gemma still had most of hers. She broke off a piece and gave it to me. I accepted. I needed something in my hand, like a drink.

  “When you say Madre Badessa has talked to you, whom do you mean?”

  “Those of us who have come directly, when we were young, before we were . . . with men. There are many women here who have lived in the world, who have experienced everything, all the things you are thinking of. But when they come here they envy us our innocence, they would trade their experience for our innocence. It must seem strange to you. Does it?”

  “Yes, in a way. But what about you, Gemma? Would you trade innocence for experience?”

  “Do you know the story of Piccarda in the first part of the Inferno?”

  “Sort of. I remember we read it in my Italian class.”

  “Yes, everyone should read it, it’s so perfect.”

  “Piccarda was a nun, wasn’t she? But she gets married?”

  “Her brother Corso took her away from the convent and forced her to marry Rossellino della Tossa, a very important man in Florence. They lived right across the piazza, you know.”

  “And Piccarda winds up on the bottom rung of Heaven, isn’t that it?”

  “Yes, that’s true. But there’s something more important. That passage explains so much, that’s why it’s so beautiful: ‘the essence of this blessed state of being / is to hold all our will within His will, / whereby our wills are one and all-agreeing.’ To hold all our will within His will, that’s what we try to do every day, and that will is our peace: la sua voluntade è nostra pace. ‘It is that sea / to which all moves, all that Itself creates / and Nature bears through all Eternity.’”

  Sister Gemma still had some of her piece of chocolate left. She broke it in two and gave me a piece.

  “No, no, Gemma,” I protested, even as I was holding out my hand. “I’ve already eaten most of it.”

  I took the piece of chocolate and popped it into my mouth. Gemma still had a one-inch piece left. Maybe that was the difference between us.

  Madre Badessa’s office, on the ground floor between the refectory and the cloister, was full of file folders that had been spread out to dry, on the floor, on the chairs, on the sills of the deep-set windows that opened onto the cloister, on top of the file cabinets in which they belonged, on the surface of the large desk behind which sat the woman whose first words to me had been an offer to treat me as she would want her own daughter to be treated. She was tall and handsome, and I could see the resemblance to her cousin: sharp gray eyes, high forehead, an easy smile like an embrace. I was never sure how to greet her. I felt like a country bumpkin in the presence of royalty. I felt that I ought to do something—kneel, curtsy, kiss her hand—but I didn’t know what.

  She didn’t look up from the letter she was writing until she had either finished it or else found a suitable stopping place. There was a book on the edge of the desk, and I knew, without having to ask (which I wouldn’t have), without being told (which I wasn’t), that it was the book of pictures.

  When she did look up I could see that she had been thinking very intently about something other than my visit. “Ah, yes,” she said, putting down her fountain pen. “Sister Gemma tells me that you have been having some interesting conversations.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “And instructive too?”

  “Very instructive, Madre Badessa. I’ve learned a great deal about convent life. And about life itself, too,” I added.

  “When you say ‘life itself,’” she asked, smiling, “what exactly do you mean? Do you mean the world outside the convent, the world of business and politics, marriage and family life? Or do you have something else in mind?”

  “Why,” I said, taken by surprise, “life itself is, well, life itself is, just itself. It’s having your father make a Saint-Cyr glacé for your birthday, it’s jumping off a cliff into the ocean, it’s going for a bike ride with your sisters, it’s having your mother come up to your room and sit with you when you’ve been sick, or walking with you from Fiesole to Settignano.”

  “Yes,” she said, “life is all those things.” She paused, and I waited for her to go on to say that life was also something more, that there was a religious dimension to things, but she surprised me again.

  “But what is your life right now?” she asked. “Right at this moment? What makes it more than a sequence of pleasant moments?”

  I’d taken a course in modern philosophy at Edgar Lee Masters—Berkeley, Hume, Kant—but it had never given me a good handle on questions like this.

  “I don’t mean anything complicated,” she explained, “like a definition of consciousness. I simply mean, what is the good in your own life now that is good just for its own sake, not because it’s a means to some other end?”

  What came to my mind immediately, without my summoning it, was an image of Jed Chapin pulling on his Harvard shorts: VERITAS. This was hardly an example of what the abbess was getting at, but a point of reference, like a travesty or a parody.

  “Hard work,” I said, playing it safe. “Working on the books in the library. We’ve made a lot of progress. It’s my vocation.”

  “It’s a good one. If I had a daughter I’d be pleased if she became a book conservator. To work with your hands as well as your head, and with your heart, too. I can imagine a conservator loving the objects of her work. It might be something for us to look into at Santa Caterina.”

  I was aware, as she was speaking, of the book on the edge of her desk. It didn’t look like a book of obscene pictures!

  “And you know something of the value of books?”

  “Something,” I said. “It would be impossible not to.”

  “The aim of convent life,” she said, abruptly changing the subject, “is to form one’s spiritual life not according to whim, or chance, or even personal inclination, but according to the will of God. Poverty. Chastity. Obedience. Those are the vows. Poverty, chastity, obedience.” She gave each word its full weight: povertà, castità, ubbidienza. “Which do you think is hardest?”

  “I’d think it would depend,” I said, “on the individual. If you’re young and beautiful, like Annapaola, chastity might be hardest.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding as if in agreement, though she was not in fact agreeing.

  “Chastity can be a burden,” she said. “Sometimes I think it would be better if we admitted only women with a late vocation, like myself, who have had some experience of the world, and of men. It would demystify the whole business, take away some of its power, its fascination. But virginity is precious, too. Every society, except perhaps our own, has known how to value it. And lack of sexual intercourse won’t make you go blind! But I’m sorry,” she added, perhaps responding to my look of surprise. “I didn’t mean to be facetious.”

  I was a little uncomfortable at the abbess’s frankness, which was almost coarse. (I’m the sort of person who doesn’t mention baldness in the presence of a bald man or the joy of sex to a spinster.)


  “And poverty might be very hard on someone who was used to luxury, like Sister Gemma.”

  “Yes, but in the case of poverty you’ve giving up something that’s good, at least potentially, for something better, at least in theory; you’re adopting a mode of life that most thinking people, whatever their actual behavior, have always regarded as an honorable estate. The poverty of the convent is a systematic discipline that is good for one. The extreme poverty in the south, or in most of Asia, is another matter. That’s a political scandal—not the kind of poverty that does you any good.”

  “That leaves obedience,” I said.

  She nodded. “Poverty and chastity are hard,” she said, “but obedience is much harder.”

  Were we getting somewhere? Was she starting to tell me about herself?

  “But whom do you have to obey?”

  “We are all subject to the rule of the order, which dates back to 1433, though it’s been relaxed somewhat. The church, you know, is somewhat like an army, with a commander-in-chief and generals and colonels and majors, et cetera, all the way down to sergeants and privates, first class, second class, and so on. Only much more complex. No one person can begin to sort it out. And the religious orders are like battalions or divisions and so on. But in fact convents tend to be more like webs or nets, much more democratic than an army. The novices have to obey the novice mistress, of course, and everybody has to obey me. But they can vote me out if they want to.”

  “Really?” I was genuinely surprised.

  “Oh, yes, we’ve always been very democratic in some ways.”

  “And whom do you have to obey?”

  “I have to obey the bishop of Florence.”