Have you ever read a great novel, or listened to a great symphony, or stood in front of a great work of art, and felt—absolutely nothing? You try to open yourself to the text, the music, the painting, but you have no power to respond. Nothing moves you. You are turned to stone. You feel guilty. You blame yourself, but you also wonder if maybe there’s nothing there, and that people only pretend to enjoy Dante’s Paradiso or Beethoven’s Eroica or Botticelli’s Primavera because they get good marks in Culture 101 for doing so. And then, when you least expect it, when you’ve closed the book, walked out of the concert hall or the museum, it hits you. Something hits you, comes at you from an odd angle.
I wandered around the gallery with Tony. I knew that Tony could give me a good lecture, exciting and imaginative, but I was glad that he didn’t because I was thinking of Papa. Papa wouldn’t have expected much from great art, or from any art. If you’d talked to him about the healing power of great art or transcendent moments of vision, he’d have looked at you as if you were trying to sell him a used car. Papa would have admired the horses, he would have read all the lengthy explanatory signs that told about the Parthenon and about the romantic struggle to bring the marbles to England and explained the differences between friezes and metopes. But that wasn’t enough for me.
A bell rang, indicating that the museum would close in fifteen minutes, and we were on our way out when we passed, probably for the third time, the heifer on slab XL of the South Frieze. That’s what hit me. A heifer, struggling to escape, tossing her head in the air, twisting her thick neck, as three young men, their faces badly damaged, drag her along to the sacrifice.
Mama used to spend a lot of time on this heifer, and when I closed my eyes I could picture her clearly; I could see her lips moving in the darkened classroom, lit only by the slide projector, as she asked how many students were familiar with Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I could see her smile when I raised my hand along with a handful of others. Mama picked up a book, opened it, and began to read. She knew the poem by heart, of course, and often quoted it. The book was just a prop, part of her act:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
I opened my eyes and looked at the heifer again. “This is the heifer that John Keats saw,” I said to Tony. “Isn’t that something, to think that Keats stood right where we’re standing now?”
“It wouldn’t have been here,” Tony said. “It would have been in the old gallery.”
“But you get the idea,” I said.
“I get the idea,” he said.
“Keats saw all these fragments,” I went on, “and put them all together in his imagination. You must know it, Tony; you’ve read everything.”
“Do you want the whole thing?”
“No, just the ending.” I knew the words, but I wanted to hear Tony say them: “‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,’—That is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
When I closed my eyes again I could still see Mama, up at the front of the room by the screen, the book in one hand, her pointer in the other, but this time I could hear her too. I could hear her turn the page, and I could hear her voice. I could hear her as clearly as if she’d been standing next to me:
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou are desolate, can e’er return.
I could see Mama snap the book shut, but I didn’t hear it close, and I couldn’t hear the sound of her pointer rapping the desk for the next slide.
We ate at another Indian restaurant that night and took a taxi—one of those big black London taxis—to the airport in the morning. Heathrow. The taxi dropped us off at the British Airways terminal. Tony waited till I had checked in and picked up my boarding pass and then we said our good-byes. He took the bus back into the city, and I picked up a copy of Keats’s collected poems at one of the airport bookstores. I don’t often read poetry, but I wanted to have a copy of the “Grecian Urn” with me on the plane. It seemed like such an extraordinary achievement, so many fragments held together in such perfect unity. I was beginning to see my own task in the same way: to hold my mother and father, and my sisters, my whole family, hold them in my imagination, where they would never fade. No matter how far away they might be from me, I would hold them in place in the house on Chambers Street, where it would always be my birthday. I would hold my sisters at the dining room table; Mama would stand forever in the doorway to the butler’s pantry; the dogs, under the table, would wait forever for a scrap of chocolate or a bit of meringue; and Papa would always be just about to cut into a Saint-Cyr glace, the blade of his knife catching the candlelight.
As the plane taxied out to the runway, I settled back in my seat and read the poem again:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
And I changed my mind. Tree and leaf, flower and seed, fruit and stone. Who was I to arrest the process? Did I really want to? Let the trees lose their leaves, let the fair youth leave his song, let the lover kiss, let her beauty fade, but let them enjoy their love and let us grieve. I was beginning to understand, and with the touch of an imaginary wand I released my prisoners, flung open the dining room doors and sent them on their way, let them go, scattered them like the seeds of a dandelion that one blows into the wind on a warm summer’s day.
19
A Nun Takes the Veil
Signor Giorgio’s congresso internazionale went smoothly. The controversies over the relative merits of various new types of synthetic sizings were spirited but fruitful, as were those on the relative merits of different fungicides. The Russian proposal to kill mold spores with sonic waves, on the other hand, turned out to be impractical since the waves could only be transmitted under water. But new impetus was given to the proposal of Dottor Casamassima, the director of the Biblioteca Nazionale, to establish an International Center for Book Restoration in the Palazzo Davanzati, for which new funds would be necessary.
Protected by Italy’s stringent housing laws, I continued to live in Sandro’s apartment on Piazza Santa Croce, and when a check for 378,784,000 lire arrived from Sotheby’s, I even bought some new furniture with my share—a small bookcase and a comfortable leather armchair, which I placed by the window so that I could sit in it and look out at the piazza.
I set up the trust at the Banca Commerciale, which is where Mama had done her banking. I could remember long hours spent standing in line—lines, actually, since in Italy one line is never enough. Mama had a lot of trouble with the big numbers at first, but everyone was very helpful and she soon got the hang of it. But there were no lines for me this time. I did my business upstairs in a carpeted office.
It was simpler than I thought. The trust officer at the bank had had considerable experience with bequests to religious institutions, and when I said I didn’t want the bishop to get his hands on the money he squeezed his thumb and fingertips together and grimaced to show that he knew exactly what I was talking about. We decided that ten percent of the interest should go back into the principal and ninety percent should be used for the care and maintenance of the convent’s library. The income came to a little over twenty million lire a year, roughly twelve thousand dollars. This would have paid the salary of one or even two
assistant librarians in a small-town library in the States; it would go even further in Italy—after all, I was living comfortably on three hundred dollars a month, and in the convent library, which had no labor costs and no acquisitions program, it would go even further. It would pay for supplies, it would pay for the cost (over a period of several years) of rebinding the books that had been damaged by the flood, and in the future . . . Well, I didn’t want to predict the future, but I thought that the money might well be used to purchase material to support the various scholarly projects that had been interrupted by the flood or to support scholarly editions of the lives of female saints that were the real core of the library.
I continued to oversee the work at the Certosa, and I was drafted by Dottor Casamassima to help with the plans for his Centro Internazionale. He seemed to think I’d be able to raise money from Americans. I was seeing more and more of my old friends from the Liceo Morgagni—Claudia, Silvia, Fabio, Rosella, Giulio, Alessandro—but even so, I managed to spend quite a bit of time at Santa Caterina. The new library had been completed, very handsomely, and all the books had been treated with thymol, but the work of resewing the gatherings went on, and there were plenty of problem cases that had been set aside for special treatment, so I could make myself useful during the evenings.
When I first went back Madre Badessa offered me my old room, as if I were someone who’d been away on a journey and had come home at last, though no one asked me where I’d been; and though I declined her kind offer, I did feel very much at home at Santa Caterina. I was surprised, in fact, by the intensity of my feelings for the place itself—if one can feel intensely comfortable—and for the sisters.
“Particular friendships” are generally discouraged in convent life because they interfere with the primary relationship between the individual soul and God, but this rule didn’t seem to apply in Santa Caterina. At least I felt I had many particular friends among the nuns. Especially Sister Gemma, of course, who would be taking her perpetual vows at the end of the month, and Madre Badessa. It was hard not to confide in them, hard not to tell the story of the Aretino, the story of my great adventure, especially when the news about the anonymous trust for the library arrived, which caused great rejoicing. As far as Madre Badessa knew the Aretino had been returned to the bishop, and I couldn’t tell her otherwise without compromising her. She would have been obliged to tell the bishop or else to lie herself. I preferred to have the lie on my conscience rather than hers. I didn’t find that it weighed me down.
Of course, if you left the story of the Aretino out of my recent life, there wasn’t much to talk about, was there? Well, there was Tony, of course. Tony was due back in a week, and he was going to take me around the Demidoff estate before the sale, and after the sale we were going to Sardegna for a week’s vacation. But I didn’t want to tell the nuns about Tony either, and I didn’t have to. A convent is a place where you don’t have to talk about your life. That’s part of its raison d’être.
Sister Gemma and I soon became as close as we had been before, in the month or so before Christmas, and as she prepared for her perpetual vows something moved me to toy with the possibility of at least thinking about what would happen if I asked to be considered as a postulant. Santa Caterina was a good place for a woman. A woman could feel at home here. It offered a viable alternative to fulfillment through marriage and family; it was a place where a single woman wasn’t made to feel that she had failed; it was a community, a sisterhood that reminded me daily of how close I’d been to my own sisters, Meg and Molly, and to sisters in passing, like Ruth and Yolanda; and it was a place where I could have practiced my own vocation. A library—especially a library full of incunabula—needs looking after, and it wouldn’t have required a large capital outlay to set up our own small bindery. With me in charge, of course. But when I opened my heart to Madre Badessa, she discouraged me, and I knew she was right. Never to feel the sun on my head? Never to feel the wind blowing through my hair? It wasn’t the life for me. I was too much in love, not with Sandro Postiglione or with Tony (though I was looking forward to his return) but with the world itself, the river of things: with the stones of the Badia; the cobbles under my feet; the bare walls of the Lodovici Chapel, where once Saint Francis had preached to the birds and danced before the pope; the curve on the Ponte Santa Trinità, with Donatello’s David, whose rear end was just like my sister Molly’s; with Federigo da Montefeltro’s red hat in his portrait by Piero della Francesca and with the long neck of Parmigianino’s Virgin and with the Parmigiano reggiano that you put on pasta; I was even in love with the old man in the Piazza Santa Croce whose mysterious gestures continued to puzzle me.
Sister Gemma asked me to witness her perpetual vows and of course I obliged her. The ceremony, which normally would have taken place on the Feast of Saint Catherine at the end of April, had been postponed because of the flood, so the feelings of anticipation that pervaded the convent were especially intense.
Like Sister Gemma, several of the novices came from the Abruzzi, and their parents and relatives arrived in bright native costumes, though not (fortunately) with the traditional bagpipes that they play in the streets throughout Italy during the Christmas season. Most of the people in the church, however, were from Northern Italy and might, taken individually, have passed as Americans.
After what seemed a long wait the sacristan, dressed in a new surplice with loops of fine lace, lit the candles. Soon the nuns came trooping in, two by two, almost two hundred of them since they came not simply from Florence but from sister houses in Siena and Lucca. They were followed by the fifteen novices, all in white, many of them dressed in the very dresses their mothers had been married in, for these young women were not simply renouncing the world, they were offering themselves in marriage to the divine bridegroom, to Christ. The nuns peeled off into the folding chairs on either side of the main aisle; the novices proceeded to the altar where they were met by Father Francesco and by my old friend His Eminence, the bishop of Florence, in full regalia: miter, cope, stole, cassock, pectoral cross. I couldn’t begin to describe the splendor of his dress.
The acolytes moved the bishop’s throne to center stage and the mass began. It was a long one, with lots of singing and lots of special prayers. I tried to put myself in Sister Gemma’s place. I could imagine the feelings of a bride-to-be, but not . . . this. All I could imagine was panic, and it seemed to me that some of the novices were experiencing the same thing. Some were crying softly, some sobbing aloud; one seemed to be biting her arm, another had to be supported by her neighbors. But their spiritual parents, their mother and father in Christ—Madre Badessa and the bishop—seemed to notice nothing unusual. They had foreseen everything.
The novices prostrated themselves before the bishop and were covered with a black pall with a white cross embroidered on it. They had died to this world, and now the feeling of panic seemed to spread to the parents. One mother, one of the women in peasant costume, fainted; another shrieked; a third rushed forward to rescue her daughter and had to be restrained by the acolytes.
But then the convent bell began to toll and the pall was removed. The novices had been reborn and their faces, blubbed with tears, shone like suns as they repeated their vows and were given their new names by the bishop. One by one they knelt before their spiritual mother, Madre Badessa, who cut off a lock of hair with a pair of dangerous-looking scissors, and then before the bishop, who gave them their new clothes and sent them off in care of the novice mistress, who took them to a separate room where their heads were shaved completely and they were dressed in their new habits and garlanded with orange blossoms. The bishop blessed them when they returned, and the ceremony was over.
At the reception afterward Sister Gemma, now Sister Amadeus, gave me a shallow china dish full of confetti—the candy, not bits of paper—and a card that read:
Bride of Christ
Mother, guide me, protect me so that one day I
should
present myself before your Jesus not with empty hands.
Sister Amadeus
On the day of her perpetual vows.
Firenze, 20 giugno 1967
I tried to avoid the bishop, but he tracked me down in the cloister. He’d been drinking the sweet vinsanto as if it were water and seemed really quite jolly.
“Signorina,” he boomed, “you are our guest again!”
“This is my home away from home.”
“A convenient hostel, isn’t it?”
“I’m not staying here, Eminenza, not in Santa Caterina. I meant Florence itself.”
“Buono. And will you be staying long?”
“That’s hard to say. I’m working for the Soprintendenza del opificio,” I said, “and for Dottor Casamassima.”
“The city of Florence is in your debt, Signorina. And while you’re here, let me thank you for returning the, ah, missing book.”
“Not at all. I hope you enjoyed it.”
“Not exactly. The quality of the drawings was very poor. But tell me, did you see the article in La Nazione about the Aretino volume sold in London? Almost four hundred million lire. Remarkable.”
The Sixteen Pleasures Page 31