Except, that is, for one.
For she, like every one of her sisters, spends each and every day in the presence of the most singular, perfect male body: that of God Himself made flesh.
In this—although it would, no doubt, shock those in the church hierarchy to hear it—the convent has been, for Zuana, its own medical school. Because Christ’s body is everywhere: in the altars and nave of the main church, open to the nuns when it is closed to the city; in their own chapel behind the altar, where they pray eight times day and night; on the walls of the cloisters where they walk, in the refectory where they eat, even in the cells where they sleep. Everywhere. And in each and every stage of life and death: from the rosy plumpness of the holy baby reaching, arms outstretched, from Mary’s lap, through the beauty of a grave young man, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped under gathered robes, to the brutal step-by-step destruction of that same perfect body in its most exquisite state of manhood.
It is its destruction, however, that makes the greatest impact.
Over the years Christ’s naked, broken body has become more familiar to Zuana than her own, for not only is it everywhere, it is also lovingly, truthfully, anatomically depicted. She had recognized this in the very first days of her confinement: how the men who carved and sculpted the two most powerful crucifixes in Santa Caterina—the great wooden one that hangs above the altar and the more modest one set on the wall at the end of the main cloisters—were as informed about the human body as any anatomist, since for many years now any painter or sculptor with blood in his veins had made it his business to find his way into charnel houses or even those same lecture theaters that she had been denied, in order to perfect his craft.
In their hands, dead material became flesh. The very surface of the wood or stone appeared tender; you could see—feel— how the layers of skin were vulnerable to the sting and sear of the whip. The way the thorns pierced and hooked into the thin flesh of the forehead. The bowing of spine and shoulders under the burden of carrying the great cross. The force of the blows that sent iron nails smashing through tendon and bone, the knotting and screaming of the sinews as they took the body’s hanging weight, and how, once punctured, a man might bleed so copiously that, unless stanched, life could seep out through a single vicious opening.
On the crucifix in the chapel, the wound in Christ’s side has coagulated, so the edges of the gash lie open like thick scarlet lips with only a single ribbon of blood to be seen. But the figure in the cloisters has a deep fresh hole that weeps a river of brightest red, cascading down His side and legs onto the rock into which the cross is fixed. Even in the deepest winter mists, the fiery red stands out against the white skin, so that as they walk many sisters feel their eyes pulled upward to register the damage before moving on.
Of course not everyone sees or feels the same thing: this too was a revelation that came early to her. For some, usually the ones who come youngest or live longest, the very habit of such images has made them familiar, ordinary even—Christ’s death as a kind of furniture, glimpsed out of the corner of an eye when hurrying, late for office, or marking the usual route from one place to another. For others it is a reason, some might say an excuse, for decoration: the exquisite beauty of Suora Camilla’s silver crucified Christ or the ostentation of the abbess’s jeweled one.
Then there are the few—Suora Perseveranza is the most active—who in contrast find the experience of His suffering so constantly new and affecting that it makes them yearn to share the agony. Or those so moved by His resignation and loneliness on the cross that they are in danger of being constantly overwhelmed by the pity of it all. Before she had been confined to the infirmary, Suora Clementia could be found at all hours of the day and night huddled over the crucifixion in the cloisters trying to wipe the blood from His feet with a cloth. She had always been consumed by her compassion for Christ (more, it must be said, than she ever showed toward her fellow nuns), but recently she had spent so much of her life weeping that the abbess decided she would do better in with the sick. Zuana herself had been less sure. In many ways Clementia had seemed quite content being sad, and too many touched old souls together in the same place can create their own wind of madness. It is true that the old nun cries less now but, separated from familiar surroundings, what was left of her mind has slipped away with her sorrow, hence her distress and occasional night wanderings.
Still, better her than the ones who suffer for effect, parading His pain like their coat of arms. The worst offender here is Suora Elena, who spends her life telling anyone who will listen how much she endures. “Oh, I could not sleep last night because of the great stabbing in my side.” Or, limping into chapel wincing and groaning until someone is forced to ask her what is wrong, “Oh, it pleases God to let a thigh wound fester. I am grateful for it, though it is nothing compared with His suffering,” before limping off, smug in the knowledge that He has marked her out as more special than anyone else—though those with sharp eyes might notice how quickly she recovers her step when she thinks no one is watching.
ZUANA, IN CONTRAST, has never felt any of these things.
Her fault—for she understands that is what it is—lies in a different direction: the need to heal Him. So much is she her father’s daughter that by the time she became old enough to understand the Passion of Christ her instinct had been to save rather than worship Him. In her first weeks in the convent, when her future had felt like a life sentence, she had kept herself from despair during the endless hours in chapel by studying that great hanging body, detailing the ways in which, had she been called upon, she might have repaired the damage: which poultices and herbs she might have used to stanch the flow of blood, the salves with which she would have treated the whiplashes and the cuts, the ointments she would have rubbed around the jagged flesh to avoid infection. Even, most heretical of all, the draft she might have given Him to blunt the agony.
Had her father ever felt the same thing? She wonders sometimes what he would have made of this world in which she lives now. He had not been a total stranger to it. As a doctor at the university with connections to the court, he had occasionally been called upon to treat noble nuns, if their condition was dangerous enough and the abbess sanctioned his visit. Perhaps if he had taken her with him, she might have found it easier. As it was, she only heard these stories when he wrote them up in his treatment books. And out of those she remembers only one: the time he came back from a convent on the outskirts of the city where he treated a nun who had done violence to herself: first beating her head against the wall until the blood ran and then, when they confined her to her cell, somehow getting hold of a kitchen knife with which she stabbed herself a dozen times before they prized the weapon away from her. When he arrived she had been tied down and was delirious, her life dripping out through those dozen wounds onto the floor. So much blood had been lost there was nothing he could do except offer something to help her with the shock and the suffering. But the abbess had refused, convinced that the devil was inside her now and that if she was soothed by the potion he might renew his attack. “When I questioned them, they said no one had noticed anything amiss with her before that morning,” he had said, shaking his head, though whether from disbelief or pity he did not say.
She thinks about it sometimes, that story: how it could be possible that something so powerful should erupt out of nothing. In her experience, a well-run convent is as alert to the distress of its sisters as to any excess of joy, since either can tilt the balance of calm living. And even if it had been the work of the devil (and though she has come across mischief—even occasional malice—in this republic of women, she has yet to make the devil’s acquaintance), why had the abbess or the novice mistress seen no signs of it? So she gives thanks to God that when it came to the decision as to where she would spend the rest of her life, it had been Santa Caterina that had taken her in, welcoming her thin voice and her dowry chest as full of remedies as of prayers.