“It is beautiful, yes?” The abbess smiles at her.
Zuana nods; for the moment she cannot speak. The abbess, understanding, looks away, giving her time to compose herself.
Bricks and cobbles. That was how her father had once described their hometown. There were other cities, he said, more full of stone and marble, with great domes and towers and every surface plastered and painted, and they were in their way fabulous enough; but to appreciate the power of the humble brick, so small and yet so mighty and filled with so many colors of the earth, then a man must come to Ferrara on a summer’s evening when the very fabric of the city was alight and glowing.
“See the fires?”
As yet there are only two of them: one great plume of smoke rising up from the main square, another smaller one from within the courtyard of the palace. Outside the ring caused by the blaze, people, small as ants, are milling and flowing everywhere. Zuana follows one of the larger streets back from the cathedral square into the old town, trying to locate where she once lived. She can get as far as the long thin space—not big enough for a piazza— in front of the main university buildings but then becomes tumblingly lost in the curling alleys that branch off all around.
“You are looking for your father’s house?”
“Yes.”
“You should find a landmark and work backward or perhaps a journey you remember taking.”
But the one she had vowed she would never forget—the walk from the house to the doors of the convent—has gone completely.
She shakes her head. “The streets nearby are too muddled. They all look the same. And you? Can you see your home?”
The abbess spreads out a hand toward the north. “The new city is easier. It is a few blocks to the west of the Palazzo Diamante. There is a garden in the middle—see? — I used to play there with my brother when I was a small child. At least, so he tells me. I don’t remember it myself.”
She says the words lightly. The youngest boarder in Santa Caterina now is six—no, five—years old. If she were to stay and take the veil at sixteen as Chiara had done, there would be precious little past for her to forget. Presumably, what one has never had, one cannot regret losing.
“How much do you remember?”
Zuana does not look at Chiara as she asks this. Instead the two women stand side by side, their arms leaning on the parapet, looking out over their city, as if this is no longer a convent but simply a high balcony in a rich house where two noble wives have chosen to take the evening air for a while, gossiping about this and that.
“Less as the years go by. Though a few things strongly. Being inside a carriage at night going across water, with the noise of the wheels on wood and the torches on fire at the end—the drawbridge over the moat of the castle, no doubt. And there is someone telling me that if the ground were to give way now we would all drown.”
“Were you frightened?”
“No …no, I think I was excited.” She smiles. “And a room—I remember a room I was taken to, with a painting in the cupola ceiling of a round balcony, with the sky above and people and cherubs leaning and peering over the painted parapet as if they were in danger of falling. It was so lifelike. One of the men had black skin and there was a monkey perched on the edge next to him, holding a necklace as if it were about to drop. I remember standing underneath with my arms out waiting to catch it, I was so sure it would fall.” She laughs. “As a young nun I used to dream that when I became abbess I would commission a work by that same artist for one of the chapels. Imagine! The bishop or our benefactors looking up to see Our Lord and all the apostles leaning over a balcony as if they were about to tumble over.”
As she says it, Zuana can think of a good few sisters who would be there waiting to catch them.
The sunset is moving faster now, throwing up great gaudy streaks of pinks and purples. No cherubs or monkeys, though; only a high-pitched chorus of evening swifts darting like showers of arrowheads across the sky. After a while, Zuana turns from the view across the city toward the other side, to the world they do not need to make up, the one they cannot forget.
From this height, Santa Caterina resembles a palace rather than a prison. She looks down over the swooping nave of the chapel into the two cloister courtyards, alive in the golden light, then out over the side houses, by the vegetable and herb patches into the sweep of the gardens and the great bow-shaped pond, onward to orchards backing onto the river, a thick silver ribbon of mercury, with its sluggish traffic of boats and barges. And around the edges the long run of brick wall, so low from up here that one might think all one had to do was to step over it to reach the world outside.
Oh, but there is beauty in here, too, Zuana thinks: the richness of the earth, the warmth of the bricks, the coolness of stone. Beauty, space, and, once you stop wanting it to be different, peace, a relief from the madness outside. If someone were to open the doors now, what point would there be in walking out into the world? Where would she go? Who would she be? The house where a young woman called Faustina grew up is home to another family now, while the city that surrounds it is a maelstrom of people who neither know nor care about her. That infinitesimal space in the world that was once hers has long since disappeared—and to appreciate quiet one must accept less excitement.
No, whatever restlessness is going on within her it is a cloud passing across the sun, the temporary blindness that comes with a morning fog. In all the gossip that filters through the walls, she has never heard of a well-born woman with her own apothecary shop or her own list of patients. I am like the green olive tree in the house of the Lord. I trust in the mercy of God for ever and ever. The cloud will pass, the fog will lift. For the first time in many days she feels quieter.
As her eye moves back across the garden to the cloister, it picks out what looks like a broken line—no, more of an arc— made up of random pale stones on the grass and in among the leafless trees, moving from the edge of the wall close to the river to the path leading past the outhouses back to the cloisters. At this distance it resembles a run of uneven stitches on the hem of a garment or a long necklace of white rose petals fallen onto dark ground.
Far below them on the street in front of the convent, a clash of young men’s voices rises up: laughter, shouts, what sounds like playful jeering at one another. Rose petals. Zuana moves to face the town side again. She has an image of herself, both arms held wide over the parapet into the air, opening her fists and letting loose cascades of rose petals onto the crowds of spectators below.
“May I ask you a question, Madonna Abbess?”
“If you wish, certainly,” the abbess says, almost surprised at the return of formality in her former friend.
“Is it true, the story that Apollonia tells about the tower?”
“Which story is that?”
“About how one year at Carnival a group of novices came up here with dried petals from the storehouse and threw them down on the revelers in the streets below.”
“And what happened then?”
“It seems the young men went mad. Shouted, threw up ropes, tried to climb up to reach them.”
“Hah. I have always thought Suora Apollonia should be writing plays alongside Scholastica,” she says mildly.
She bends down and picks up something at her feet. As she straightens, her fist uncurls over a handful of molted pigeon feathers. She leans over the edge and lets them go.
“Certainly such a thing might have driven young men mad.” The feathers dance coquettishly in the air before floating down. “But as you can see yourself”—and now she leans farther out and over, so far that Zuana has an image of the painting inside the cupola ceiling and begins to feel anxious—“the height of the wall and the angle of the tower over the ground are such that you cannot see directly down to the street immediately below. Or from there up into the tower.” She pulls her body back again. “So, though the petals might have seemed like a shower of grace from heaven, there was little chance of anyone actually seeing the angels who threw them.”