Now someone lifts her head and puts a finger across her lips, moving droplets of water inside her mouth. How it stings! After so much agony it is wonderful to be able to feel such a small, distinct pain. Then there is more water. It dribbles into her mouth, burns down the back of her neck. She chokes. It hurts, but not enough to stop. She takes more, would be greedy if the hand did not gently resist her. Her insides start to groan and heave as it hits, and she feels herself retching, but nothing comes out.
Later—is it days or only hours? — she realizes that the pain has stopped.
She is flooded with relief, the utter joy of feeling nothing. Serenity like a flat surface of water: no ripple, no wind, nothing, just the wonder of being still. How is it possible for it to have gone? For there to have been so much of it and now none at all? How does that happen? How much care does it take? What kind of miracle?
“Dominussalvedeigratias.”
The singing is high and thin. She moves her eyes up from the still surface of the water to see a bank of reeds moving in the wind. And there is light now, she thinks. Surely it must be the sun, because she can feel warmth on her skin. In the distance there is a heat haze across the world, and inside it something— a figure? — walking toward her.
“See? Oh, yes, can you see Him, Serafina? Oh, He cares so much. He sent me to wake you.”
It is a strange voice, childish except for the cracks of age in it. She knows it immediately, feels it inside as a familiar hollowness. She concentrates on the image ahead of her. The air is so warm. No wonder everything shimmers so. Within the shimmer a figure forms, tall flowing hair, then seems to unform again, as if stumbling, and is engulfed in haze again.
“See how His poor hands and feet bleed. But He smiles for you. He has been waiting for you. He is come to welcome you back.”
Back. She feels a sudden terrible ache inside her, as if after her innards they have scooped out her womb. But she keeps on looking and He is closer now. Yes, yes, she sees Him: that beautiful broad forehead pierced by a line of fat little wounds, the eyes clear, filled with so much understanding. He cares. He would not leave. He loves me.
“If you open your eyes He will be there.”
She lets out a slight cry. She knows she must wake now. Knows that is what He wants her to do.
She opens her eyes. It is gray in the cell. No shimmer or light here. The smell is foul and stale. On the wall Christ hangs forlornly off the cross. Next to her the shriveled figure of Magdalena, her face like a pickled walnut, is rocking and laughing with girlish delight.
“Serafina?” And now Suora Zuana is on the floor next to her, her face close to hers, tired but smiling, smiling like the sun. “Oh, welcome, welcome.”
Beyond, in the doorway, she sees Suora Umiliana, with Eugenia, Perseveranza, Apollonia, Felicità, and others peering in around her.
“Sweet Jesus! She is alive! Suora Magdalena has brought her back to us.”
The novice mistress’s happiness is so complete, so infectious, that a few of the nuns behind her start to laugh, too.
The room fills up as she tries to move, but of course her bones are weak and she cannot raise herself off the bed.
The old woman puts out her hand. “See?” she says, with a toothless grin. “See? I said He would come.”
She opens her mouth a little, moving her tongue around her blistered lips. No, she did not escape, did not find a way to get free after all. She looks at Zuana, then out across the room. They are all here, this family with whom she must now live until she dies, until the white hairs grow on her chin and her skin shrivels up like old leather, each and every drop of juice squeezed out of her.
Except she is not dead yet.
“I saw Him,” she says, so softly that the voice barely reaches those inside the room. “Yes, I do think I saw Him.”
“Oh, but it is a miracle.” In contrast, Suora Umiliana’s voice carries far out into the courtyard beyond.
PART THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
IN THEIR RESPECTIVE cells, Zuana and Serafina sleep their way through the first days of Lent. The cleansing of the city continues around them. It rains so much that the gutters and the gargoyle mouths cannot keep up with the flow, and the cloisters run with filthy streams. The water seeps under the doors of the cells, and the hems of the sisters’ habits grow sodden as they walk. Even the convent cats retreat indoors, curling themselves inside the warm wood of the choir stalls, to be shooed away at the beginning of every office.
The Murano glass goblets and the ceramic plates are packed back into their dowry chests; the dresses, boots, and wigs are returned to their owners; and the sounds of the stage being dismantled are nowhere near as thrilling as those of its construction. In the kitchens the roasting and the baking pans are shelved, and the sisters contemplate their first fasts, encouraged, no doubt, by the prevailing aromas of boiling vegetables and watery soups.
It is a time for quiet contemplation and considered abstinence. Yet no one is downhearted. Far from it. While Lent usually brings a sense of anticlimax, this year it has been replaced by a bubbling excitement. In the aftermath of the revelation in the novice’s cell, something is happening in the convent. Everyone, novices as well as sisters, is praying more (what else is there to do?), and there is a building anticipation toward the coming chapter meeting.
The girl is cared for by Letizia and her old conversa, who clean the cell around her and, on the orders left by Suora Zuana, hang the leftover pomades from the refectory to freshen the air. When she finally wakes, too weak to walk, Federica brings the kitchen to her. Novices are not required to fast during Lent (it is not recommended for any nun under the age of twenty-five), but though Federica has saved tidbits from the last of the feast, Serafina eats almost nothing. The illness has hollowed out any appetite, and it would be better if she took some sustenance, but she is adamant and refuses everything but liquid. When visited by Suora Umiliana, she begs that she may be allowed to take confession in preparation for the host. The novice mistress, in turn, speaks to the abbess. It is hardly a request that anyone can deny her. As she is clearly too ill to go to Father Romero, he comes to her. It is a while since he has set foot in the cloisters, and the abbess sees to it that he has a flask of wine to sustain him on his long journey. He stays inside her cell for some time. It is a matter for conjecture whether or not he remains awake for all of it.
As he leaves, Madonna Chiara stands watching him pad across the cloisters, a conversa holding up a covering to keep him from the worst of the rain. Whatever he has just heard, he cannot tell and she will not ask. She wonders how long it will be until he dies. He barely remembers any of the sisters’ names, anyway.
The abbess folds her hands and gives a little sigh. She has a busy few weeks in front of her. Whatever work Carnival entails, there is always more to be done afterward: account books to be checked, outgoings to be set against offerings, supplies to be reordered, and letters of thanks to be written. Her attention had been elsewhere when the “wondrous event” in Serafina’s cell took place, so that by the time she arrived it was already over and she could only hear about it secondhand.
She has no illusions, however, as to its possible importance. Lent is a period when traditionally the convent falls back on its own resources, spiritual as well as material, and any abbess must be alive to the undercurrents and tensions that might surface. Having lived for thirty-seven of her forty-three years inside Santa Caterina, there is not much about her convent and its sisters of which Madonna Chiara is not aware, and even without the extended drama of the novice or the reemergence of Suora Magdalena, Umiliana’s challenge to her authority has been building for some time. With the outside world taken care of— relationship with the bishop good, the benefactors fed and entertained, and a good list of requests for new entrants, with dowry offers to be negotiated upward if demand continues to be so healthy—it is time to look inward.