But this last appeal to the sister who used to be her confidante is too little, too late.
“If you will excuse me, Madonna Abbess, I must return to my dispensary.”
She gets up and moves to the door. The abbess watches her go.
“Zuana,” she says, as she reaches the door, “she is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
AT SUPPER, SUORA Umiliana accepts only scraps, with a generous layer of wormwood sprinkled on top. The rest of the choir nuns and novices watch nervously as she carries it with her to the table. Once there, she chews each mouthful as if it were filled with honey, a smile playing around her lips. While it is forbidden to look at anything but one’s plate during the meal, it is almost impossible for people to keep their eyes off her. Serafina does not even need to worry about squirreling away her food at this meal, since no one is looking at her. Except Zuana.
The meal and the reading—which no one hears a word of, though Scholastica has been especially picked for her strong voice—finally end, and the novice mistress rises and kneels at the feet of the abbess before going over to take her place in the doorway. She takes a while to get herself down on the floor. While she is adept enough at kneeling, it seems harder for her to lie prone. But then she is not a young woman anymore, and bones at this age become brittle and if broken heal badly.
The abbess leaves the room first, graceful as ever, bringing her left foot to rest on Umiliana’s robe but carefully avoiding her flesh. In her wake, each and every choir nun and novice makes it her business to walk over rather than on the prostrate old nun, though whether it is out of respect or fear for her it is hard to tell. Either way, as convent martyrdoms go it is a fairly painless business. Now that the lines have been drawn, it seems, everyone is nervous about what might happen next.
That night it takes a long time for the convent to settle. In her cell Zuana turns over the hourglass and watches the sand fall. How many times in her life has she sat here, trying to wash away the business of the day in readiness for the prayer before sleep? She has always envied those sisters who live lightly in the world, giving themselves up easily to the silence and stillness of God’s love. She needs that stillness more than ever tonight, for how can she take the next step in her life without His guidance?
Her first spiritual guide, the novice mistress who had shown her paintings in the chapel, had alerted her early to the pitfalls of intoxication with her work. “Your knowledge brings you great solace, Zuana. But knowledge alone has no substance. Our founder, the great Saint Benedict himself, understood that well enough. Let not your heart be puffed up with exaltation. Everyone that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted”
And she had tried, truly and honestly, tried so hard that sometimes, despite the nun’s kindness and patience, she thought she might go mad with the effort. Eventually she had come to accept a level of failure. What point was there in dissembling? He would know it anyway. God always seeth man from heaven and the angels report to Him every hour.
How much easier it had become when the kind old novice sister died and she had found herself in the company of her assistant, Suora Chiara. Chiara, with her smooth skin and dancing eyes and her bright, confident relationship with God and the world around her. Chiara, who seemed able to inhabit both the mind and the spirit without fearing His displeasure and who, even then, enjoyed an almost unnatural standing in the convent itself; much more than the other women of her age with fewer aunts, cousins, and nieces around to support their rise through the ranks.
Yet she had been generous with her power. Without Suora Chiara arguing her case, Zuana might have languished for years in the scriptorium, decorating the word of God with calendula leaves or fennel fronds. It was she who had helped Zuana to find work in the dispensary, she who had organized and supported her election as dispensary mistress and, when she finally became abbess, allowed her to take over the infirmary as well, For it is written in the rule of Saint Benedict that it must be the abbess’s greatest concern that the sick suffer no neglect. Without Madonna Chiara there would be no treatment of the bishop’s ailments and therefore no flow of special outside supplies. Without Madonna Chiara there would be no distillery, a smaller herb garden, fewer shelves with fewer bottles to be broken, fewer notebooks of remedies to be destroyed. Without Madonna Chiara—
Zuana looks up to see two of her books on the table. In her chest there are others, lovingly cared for over all these years. Is she really willing to be instrumental in their destruction? For what? To alleviate the misery and starvation of one obstreperous novice? She is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them.
The truth is that Zuana herself does not understand why this girl has become so important to her. There have been times when she wonders if it is some affliction of the womb: she has seen it enough in others; how an older nun might seek out a novice or postulant or boarder of the age that her own child would have been, had she had one. Such rapports are often characterized by undue care and attention, for while everyone knows the creation of favorites is prohibited, it is also unstoppable.
Yet it has never been like that for her. As a child without brothers or sisters she had always been familiar with her aloneness, her self-sufficiency. And yet, and yet …this young woman with her sense of fury and injustice has somehow infiltrated Zuana’s life. That Zuana likes her is undeniable, despite her spirit and her truculence—or perhaps because of them. No doubt she sees something of herself in her; the curiosity as well as the determination. And it is true that had she married, had she become a wife instead of a nun, her own child might indeed now be Serafina’s age. How would she feel about her then? It is a painful question. While Santa Caterina has been a good home to her, would she choose to give a daughter up to such a life? And if not, does that mean she is willing to risk bringing down the convent to help her?
The abbess is right. The world is full of them: daughters who are too young, too old, too ill, too ugly, too difficult, too stupid, too smart. Waste. Banishment. Burial alive. Custom. The way things are. What can she do about it? It is not as if there is so much out there to celebrate. Freedom? What freedom? To marry the man you are told to and no other? If she had been living outside the walls, Serafina might still have found her singing composer half dead on some riverbank, only the knives would have been wielded by her father’s family rather than the abbess’s. Love is not a marketable commodity; you take what you are given, even if it is your husband’s pleasure to bruise your skin and breed bastards out of prettier loins. It is simply how it is. What point is there in railing against it? And why, in God’s name, single out one spoiled young girl from all the rest?
The sand is at the bottom of the glass. She stares at it, then turns it over again.
The voice of the Lord is powerful. I will praise the Lord, with my whole heart.
She closes her eyes and tries not to think.
The voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
She knows the words as well as any remedy.
For His mercy is everlasting and His truth endureth to all generations.
She prays until the words make no sense, and when the sand comes to rest for a second time—or is it a third? — she gets up and makes her way to the dispensary. She takes down a bottle of acqua-vita and moves out into the cloister, where a half-moon throws the well in the courtyard into gray relief, as it did all those months before when she first visited a howling, furious young entrant.