“The convent has grown in numbers in recent years. I think all change brings more change with it.”
“Yet Our Lord Jesus Christ does not change. His love, His sacrifice. And neither does our duty toward Him. We are bound to serve Him in obedience and humility, not look to the outside world for sustenance and praise. The great bishops at Trento warned against such contamination. Yet look around you, dear sister. Do you not think that in our hunger for ever more dowries and glory we take in too many young women who love themselves more than they love God?”
Ah, so it is the problem of young souls. Everyone knows it has been a source of distress to her for some time. Not to mention this latest challenge. “If you are talking of the young novice Serafina.” She pauses, not sure for a second what she is about to say. “I think …I think with your help—and God’s music—she is slowly finding her way.”
“Do you? I am not so sure. I think the Lord is crying out to her but that now she uses her voice to stop her ears against Him. And why not? These days Santa Caterina is more interested in training voices for profit than for prayers. Perhaps you do not see it because you do not remember, but this was once a convent of great devotion. Novices would feel it all around them. Angels would wrap Suora Agnesina in their arms during Matins, and Suora Magdalena had only to open her hands in chapel for blood to pour out from her wounds. But she is locked and forgotten in her cell.” She pauses. “Though I am sure that He still comes to her. Does He not?”
Ah! So even the novice mistress is not immune to the power of gossip. Surely this, too, is its own form of contagion, Zuana thinks: how words once spoken have no need of repetition, since instead they can travel through the air, invisible, incorporeal, becoming potent as soon as they are ingested. She has a sudden image of the world as it must be seen by the angels, vibrating with a cornucopia of unseen matter, a mix of the benevolent and the malign. On what day was all of this created? She wishes her father were here so she could ask him. But that is not the matter in hand. The matter in hand is Suora Magdalena and her possible transcendence. Is this what the conversation is really about? Could it be that the holy novice mistress is simply using the welfare of the convent as bait to catch a bigger fish? Such cunning seems—well, somehow unworthy of her.
Thank God, Zuana is safe from it, though. Unquestioning obedience is the greatest discipline a nun can aspire to. And the instruction of one’s abbess is the instruction of God Himself.
“The last time I tended her, the good sister was quiet in her cell.”
For that second, the disbelief in Umiliana’s eyes is so naked that Zuana is startled; more so as she watches the tears starting to flow down the plump slopes of the sister’s cheeks.
“Oh, oh, I know you have a good soul, Suora Zuana. I see it in the way you treat the sick. Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself was a healer, and you have been given a gift from Him in your work. But I fear we have failed you by not training your spirit to find His great love through prayer. I would have given much to have had you as my novice.”
“I …I would have liked that, too,” she says, and suddenly it feels as if the words have been wrenched out of her heart, which now feels as hot as her forehead. It may be that she even sways a little.
“Are you all right, sister?”
“Oh, yes, I am fine. I—well, I just have much to do to help the sick.”
Umiliana regards her solemnly, as if wondering how much more she should say. The tears now reach the deep creases around her mouth, slipping down toward the pitted pores of her chin. Zuana watches them, half mesmerized. She is so lovely and so ugly. If Suora Scholastica were to compose a play about the birth of Christ, surely the novice mistress would play the part of Elizabeth, her withered old womb filled by God’s grace…
Enough, enough. I must concentrate, Zuana thinks again.
“I am trespassing upon your work hour. God needs you for other things.” The elder nun takes a step back, but the gaze remains. “I thank you for this …this talk between us. You are always in my prayers. I hope I have not disturbed you too much.”
“No, not at all. I …I will come to Angelica soon.”
But she makes a dismissive gesture with her hands. “Do not worry. I will let you know if you are needed. If the prayers do not help. God be with you, Suora Zuana. You are precious to Him, and He is watching your journey.”
“And with you, Suora Umiliana.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AS SOON AS she is alone again she mixes up the vinegar water and rue and moves on to some fresh eau-de-vie and basil. Though she knows she is ill, she is determined at least to finish the work hour.
How many batches of these remedies has she made up in this room? Twelve, thirteen years’ worth? How many more to come? What will be her allotted span? Fifty, fifty-five? Certainly there are nuns who live that long. Even sixty. Sixty years …She thinks of time almost as a weight. She sees a set of scales, with the years like bags of salt on one side, balanced on the other by good works and prayer. Perhaps when the two are in perfect harmony she will be ready. But how does one measure goodness? And does all time weigh the same? Surely not. Days spent in prayer or sacrifice should be worth more than those taken up in watering plants or distilling juices. Perhaps the point is not balance after all but the tilting of one side in favor of the other?
She wonders if this is something she already knows but has simply forgotten because she feels so strange. Yet she cannot shift the thought that recently her progress has seemed so slow. Sister Imbersaga was barely twenty-two years old when she was taken. On the surface she had been just another nun, in truth rather ordinary. So why her? Unless it was that very ordinariness that had made her the chosen one.
Chosen. Even the word smells of carrion these days. That is what heretics believe: that God has chosen some and not others, and that His choice is more important than a life of good works or a convent full of nuns interceding for your soul. Of course they will burn in everlasting fire for such thoughts—though hell must be overflowing now, for the sickness is still spreading, crossing mountains, seas, and borders, taking villages, universities, towns, even nobles and princes with it, almost as if it is another form of malevolence moving through the air. No wonder the true church grows so nervous for its flock. What had been the abbess’s words? They would even restrict letter writing as not conducive to the tranquillity of our state. Yet how could they do that? Such enforced isolation would surely start another kind of fever.
The basil and eau-de-vie is barely mixed when she hears footsteps and turns to find a young conversa, whose name she cannot remember, in the doorway, a package in her hand.
“I …Madonna Abbess sent this for you.”
The girl steps forward hesitantly. She is new to convent life and finds the infirmary the strangest place of all, inhabited as it is by mad crones, with the dispensary sister, flush-faced and sweating, suddenly the maddest of them all. Zuana holds out her hand but the girl ducks by her and leaves it on the workbench, moving away so fast she knocks against a table as she goes.
The package bears the bishop’s seal, though it has been broken. The abbess will have already checked the contents: no doubt some flowery message from His Holiness, thanking the worthy sisters for their kindness and offering them this gift of cochinilla in recompense for their goodness. Inside the cloth wrapping is a small burlap bag. Zuana holds it in her palm, weighing it up quickly. Ten grams, maybe more. Together with what she has put by, enough for both the kitchen and the dispensary. She pulls open the strings and lifts it to her nose. There is a dusky quality to its scent, of something grown and dried in great heat a long way away. How far has it traveled to get here? Carefully she pours a small quantity of it into her hand. The small granules are a dark dull gray. You would never think they could contain such fiery color. Red gold: that is what people call it. What little she knows of it comes from one of her father’s books, a history of New Spain written by a doctor who had followed the army there. He told of how the dye was made from worms that sprouted out of a cactus, grown in a desert somewhere where they had never heard of the Garden of Eden or Jesus Christ, but where the color produced was strong enough to paint His blood as if it had been shed for them that very day. The book had shown a drawing of the plant, soft and spiky at the same time, but not the men who cultivate it, so she has to imagine what they look like: naked, painted skins, or lips stuck out like plates into the air, as she has seen in drawings elsewhere.