Nun (9781609459109) (2 page)

 

It had all begun in February. She regularly woke up before her sisters and went out to sit on the balcony and read; spring was already in the air and a light shawl over her shoulders was enough to keep her warm. The street was deserted. He was sitting on the balcony across the way. They hardly knew one another: they certainly frequented the same drawing rooms, but Giacomo was twenty, and for months he'd paid no attention to her. They fell in love on the basis of stealthy glances, followed by bold direct gazes, then by holding up the title pages of the books they were reading and communicating by hand signals. Giacomo had sent her a note and she had replied. During the Carnival season, her mother threw open their house every night, for a succession of balls, and he hadn't missed a single one. But the two of them had never been alone together. Their true moments of intimacy came during the long early morning gazes from one balcony to the other.

Giacomo Lepre, the only son of a dynasty of notaries and the heir to three bachelor uncles, was an excellent catch. Agata's mother had warned her that the Lepres were looking for a bride with a substantial dowry for their son. Now, even though the Padellanis had no such dowry to offer, if Agata used her charms and wiles to make the young man fall in love with her, and if he stood up to his parents, the Lepres were likely to be won over by the honor of becoming relatives by marriage to one of the first families of the kingdom. The previous year, when His Majesty paid a royal visit to Messina—one of three Sicilian cities that had just adopted a new administrative system—he not only treated the Padellanis publicly as something very close to blood relations, but he'd even asked the field marshal for his advice on the best candidates to appoint as chief police magistrate and to the senate; it was at the field marshal's advice that the king had appointed senator the notary Lepre, the young man's grandfather. That morning, Donna Gesuela was brutally frank with her daughter: the Lepres had already identified a very wealthy young woman and it was only a matter of time before Giacomo announced his engagement; she accused her daughter of bungling everything and letting an excellent catch slip through her fingers. Agata turned her sorrowful gaze to her father but he just went on fanning himself and listening with renewed interest to another conversation in the room.

 

The clock on the wall struck ten. In the Padellani home, there was a feverish hustle and bustle of preparation. The reception was scheduled to begin at noon, at the exact moment that the cart bearing the statue of Our Lady of the Assumption would be passing down the street beneath their balconies, on its way back to the cathedral. Before dressing for the party, Donna Gesuela stopped by the pantry to sample the sherbets and check on the jelly
trionfi
, trembling multicolored mountains cast in molds of varying sizes, shaped like castles, towers, and crowns, either to be stacked or else displayed on the table in simple geometric compositions. She spent a great deal of time nibbling tiny spoonfuls of sweets and ices; they struck her as lacking in sugar—they smacked of bitterness, like her thoughts.

During the first few years of marriage in Naples, she and her husband had merrily run through her dowry with lavish spending, spectacular entertaining, and gambling debts: she'd never regretted it for a moment. A deeply spoiled daughter, born to the second wife of a coarse and ambitious baron of the Nebrodi Mountains, Gesuela had been given an excellent education, imparted by the Collegio di Maria boarding school and an English governess. Her education was later completed, after she was married, by observing the Padellanis. It was from them that she learned the art of entertaining and seducing the high nobility of Naples. Inferior to the women of the house of Padellani by birth and inheritance, but not by education and beauty, the youthful bride decided that she would outshine the rest as mistress of her household: in terms of food, presentation of the table, and entertaining. When her husband's uncle, a duke and the ambassador to the court in Vienna, died, he inherited a number of handsome porcelain dinner sets, although not particularly expensive ones; she then dared to ask her aunt the dowager duchess to let her have the extra livery that she no longer needed. She could count on the fact that she had helped her aunt to gain access to the circle of the Duchess of Floridia, the morganatic wife of King Ferdinand and the godmother of her eldest daughter Anna Lucia. The generosity of her aunt the duchess proved to be fruitful, and even providential once money problems forced the family to opt for a move to Messina. There, the family received a warm welcome, and the Padellani name counted for more than any dowry, especially when it was judiciously served with a little extra something; a mediocre cup of coffee—reheated but presented on a tray by a page boy in white gloves and a white periwig, silk stockings and a uniform in English broadcloth complete with silver buttons—smacked of paradise, and had proven invaluable in arranging marriages for the four eldest daughters.

Times were changing rapidly; the scent of revolution was in the air throughout Europe. Ferdinand II was an isolationist king, completely green in terms of diplomatic experience. The whole matter of sulfur mining, an export of paramount importance both for the economy of the kingdom at large and especially in Sicily, had become a nightmare for the government and a tragedy for the Sicilians. Ever since St
.
Stephen's Day in 1798, when the English navy landed the fugitive king Ferdinand I and his royal family on the docks of Palermo, England had gradually consolidated its economic and political dominion over the island. The English army, deployed in Sicily, had twice prevented the island being taken by French forces. They had been rewarded for the efforts, establishing a tidy monopoly on sulfur exports. Two years earlier, a French consortium had made a very attractive offer for control of the sulfur trade and the king had recklessly insisted on accepting that offer. But the Englishmen who lived in the kingdom had substantial business concerns and represented a sizable market for Bourbon exports. To lose that market would spell considerable economic damage to the kingdom. The king turned a deaf ear to the protests lodged by the British government, and as a result sulfur sales plunged. The field marshal—who had maintained his friendships with Freemasons and a wide-ranging network of contacts throughout the many nations involved in the kingdom's affairs dating back to his earliest days as a gentleman at court—feared the worst imaginable: a general collapse of exports to England. It would have dealt a crushing blow to the thriving seaport of Messina and the business concerns of both his sons-in-law: Domenico Craxi, husband of Amalia and a trader in citrus fruit and silk, and Salvatore Bonajuto, husband of Giulia and the owner of a shipping agency. Both men depended on trade with the English.

Moreover, the Masonic uprisings in Spain had undermined the Bourbon monarchy; Freemasonry was powerful in Messina as well. In that city the age-old power of the aristocracy, long since stripped of their feudal rights and now shuttered into life at court, had weakened and waned. The newly rich bourgeoisie now placed greater value on money than lineage. The actions of the Lepre family made that perfectly clear, to the discomfort of Donna Gesuela. Now she was even starting to worry about Anna Carolina's engagement—even though it had been worked out to the last detail, dowry included, and was to be announced that very afternoon.

Even as the Marescialla was in the kitchen sampling desserts, a message was brought to her—Anna Carolina's future father-in-law, Cavaliere Amilcare Carnevale, had requested a meeting at eleven o'clock, to discuss a matter of some delicacy. Donna Gesuela flushed beet-red and hurried to her dressing room. Her daughter, certain that her betrothal was about to vanish into thin air, flew into a hysterical fit. That fit was followed by a series of tantrums over her hairpiece, and in the end two hairdressers had to be summoned to appease her.

At last, mother and daughter, dressed, brushed, and lustrous, left the bedroom to the footservants who were impatiently waiting to set up the
tablattè
.

Now there was a problem, however: while everyone else was busy gobbling down the
sfincione
, Anna Carolina, unsure which outfit would look best at the reception and then afterward, at the procession, had transported to her parents' bedroom, one item at a time, her entire formal wardrobe—dresses, slippers, hats, shawls: entirely too many items of apparel to be easily concealed under the tablecloths of the
tablattè
. It was now necessary to carry that vast array of clothing back from the bedroom of the mistress of the house, and in so doing, necessarily pass before the eyes of Cavaliere Carnevale.

It was just five minutes to eleven now. Footservants and mistress stared into one another's eyes in utter horror.

“The bathtub!” cried Donna Gesuela.

As Cavaliere Carnevale, with a hint of unease, was informing the field marshal and the Marescialla that, due to the sudden demise of a relative who had appointed him sole heir and executor, he was obliged to postpone the wedding day, a creaking noise reached their ears. With synchronized movements, four liveried footmen threw open the two doors at the far end of the drawing room and ushered in two young pages, also garbed in the sky-blue livery of the Padellani family. The pages were pushing before them an extraordinary dining table on wheels, low, narrow, and rectangular, covered with a tablecloth made of Brussels lace that hung down to the floor. The table was lavishly set for one, complete with crystal glassware, silverware, and candelabra: this was in fact the bathtub, crammed to the brim with Anna Carolina's clothing.

“It's for an invalid relative of mine. That poor woman never leaves the house and it seems a shame to have a banquet table groaning with such delicacies knowing that, prisoner of ill health that she is, she can't enjoy it. We're going to serve her every dish we enjoy out here, in her bedroom,” explained Donna Gesuela; then, in a sudden burst of modesty, she lowered her lovely lashes.

That very afternoon, yet another story of the Marescialla's exquisite kindness was making the rounds of Messina.

P
erched at the foot of the Nebrodi Mountains, whence it looks across the water to the mountainous region of Calabria, Messina the Noble, loyal to the Bourbon king, the second capital of Sicily and a border town, had long controlled the shipping traffic on the strait that shared the city's name. Constantly feuding with its rival Palermo and tormented by a series of natural disasters, Messina recovered from the plague of 1742, the earthquake of 1783, and the cloudburst and flooding of 1824. It was now once again one of the great cities of the kingdom. Messina was enclosed by a ring of walls with seven gates, and it boasted a three-century-old university, numerous convents and monasteries, two theaters and four libraries, five piazzas, six fountains, and twenty-eight aristocratic
palazzi
; its thriving port had attracted a sizable contingent of foreign residents, many of whom owned manufacturing plants and ran businesses.

The populace of Messina expressed its unity and civic pride every year in its celebration of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a grab bag of the sacred and the profane that began on the twelfth of August and had its crescendo in the procession on the fifteenth, a procession that was renowned throughout the kingdom for its extraordinary “machines.” Enjoying pride of place in the Piazza dell'Arcivescovado, outside the archbishop's palace, were two enormous horses ridden by a pair of giants, all made of papier-mâché. In the days leading up to the procession of
ferragosto
, on August 15, two men covered with a camel skin trotted through the city, accompanied by bands, troops of the faithful and the common folk, singling out peddlers and shopkeepers to ask for alms; it was considered an act of devotion to slip a sample of one's merchandise into the gaping mouth of the alms-seeking camel. These goods were collected in sacks to offset the expenses of the festivities. In the past, there had been many other papier-mâché figures and animals with human beings concealed inside them, but in the wake of the devastation caused by the latest earthquake, the tone of the celebrations had become considerably more subdued.

The intensity of surging popular sentiment was palpable. On August 15 all the streets of Messina, not just those along the route of the procession, were overflowing with people: the deeply loyal Messinese expatriates who returned to their birthplace for the feast day, numerous contingents from neighboring towns and villages, and hundreds of Calabrians who made their way across the Strait of Messina for the day. Then there were the worshipful crowds who had made the pilgrimage to fulfill a vow, to ask for a holy grace, or simply as an act of devotion—it was a dazzling spectacle.

 

Agata had sought a moment of seclusion on the balcony. Her puffy muslin petticoat with pink and sky-blue polka dots filled the rounded protruding balcony railing; her sky-blue silk slipper tapped in time to the band. She was restless and excited. Her sharp eyes wandered from the crowd filling the street up to Palazzo Lepre; she knew that Giacomo was somewhere inside. From concealment in the folds of the curtains, Annuzza was watching her; every so often Agata looked down and studied the crowd. The faithful, gathered in separate groups, uttered the repetitive short prayers and aspirations specific to the occasion; their voices wafted upward in unison like the murmuring of the sea, pierced now and again by the harsh cries of those who were trying to find companions from whom they had been separated in the milling morass, or of others who had already secured excellent spots and were defending them with shouts and shoves. Others, visibly overwrought, were standing expectantly, their gazes fixed on the corner around which the cart bearing the statue of Our Lady of the Assumption would appear any minute. Everywhere, children were dressed up as little angels.

Agata was spying on the balcony across the way out of the corner of her eye. From time to time, she fought back tiny tears of sorrow and wounded pride. At last, she managed to glimpse him: from the shadows of the front carriage door of his palazzo, Giacomo was staring up at her; he conveyed with hand gestures that he was still waiting for a reply to his note. Agata, suddenly afraid that her mother had intercepted the message and taken it from Annuzza and had assigned a chambermaid to spy on her, wasn't even sure that she should run the risk of answering him. She had a moment's hesitation. Just then, Annuzza, who had refrained from delivering the note in an attempt to comply with her mistress's orders, drew it out of her pocket and stepped out onto the balcony. Agata eagerly scanned the note and then remained, with her head lowered. She was thinking. Suddenly she held her head high and blinked her eyes, just once, then stood there, straight as a rod, chin pointing slightly upward, neck taut, lips twitching. Her muslin shawl had loosened around her neckline, revealing her shapely bosom. The greedy eyes of the girl who was becoming a young woman were fixed on the figure in the shadows. Giacomo stepped forward; he leaned languidly on the heavy wooden street door, and from there he met her gaze unwaveringly. Agata ripped the note up and lifted the handful of shredded paper to her mouth. Slowly. She chewed the pieces up and swallowed them, one by one, until none were left. Then she dried her eyes with the back of her hand and went back inside.

Wrapped in the coolness of the silk damask, Annuzza stood there, psalmodizing a litany to St. Joseph, invoking the saint's protection on that young girl who was the spitting image of her own mother and, like her mother had been when she was a girl, trapped in the coils of a hopeless love.

 

Cavaliere Carnevale had taken his leave of the Padellanis just as the first few guests were coming upstairs. The reception would last exactly as long as the procession. The guests came and went, leaving to follow the Vara and then returning for refreshments whenever they chose: this was a new style of entertaining introduced in Messina by Donna Gesuela, the novel notion of an “open house,” a foreign custom taught her by her English governess.

Elderly and plagued by aches and pains though the field marshal was, he still greeted his guests, standing erect, at the threshold of the second good drawing room; he then circulated among the guests, with a word for everyone, recounting the amusing jokes and stories for which he was renowned. The guest list included not only the chief police magistrate and the member of the city senate, but also the crème de la crème of the local aristocracy, the highest officers of the Messina garrison, and many of the foreigners who lived in town. There was also an abundance of other people, lacking aristocratic rank but who could still prove useful, or else people whom the Padellanis either owed a favor or planned to ask one: credentialed professionals, businessmen, shopkeepers, and even craftsmen. No one ever turned down the invitation. Don Peppino, who was said by many to be saddled with debts, each year seemed to refute that rumor by hosting another party: from the beginning of the reception until the last guest left in the evening, the
tablattè
stood groaning under the renowned array of refreshments prepared under the careful eyes of Donna Gesuela. Pastries, ice creams, and shaved ice syrups made according to Padellani family recipes as well as delicacies cooked as prescribed by the chef that Donna Gesuela's father, God rest his soul, had poached from an Austrian prince with the offer of a fabulous salary–people whispered that the chef made as much money, if not more, than the salary that Don Peppino was paid by His Majesty's army. The guests little suspected that many of the waiters and footmen were on loan or hired for the occasion. Nor could they guess that Donna Gesuela's older brother, Francesco Aspidi, Baron of Solacio, who had been more than a brother to her and who still had a weakness for his sister, every year for the occasion sent carts overbrimming and mules overburdened with all sorts of delicacies and delights. Donna Gesuela presided over the reception, assisted by her two married daughters who lived in Messina, Amalia and Giulia. At the age of thirty-seven, with her large dark eyes, her lips as red as ripe cherries, and her lovely neckline, Donna Gesuela was still far more alluring than her daughters, respectively twenty-two and twenty years old. Anna Carolina, sixteen years old, smiled in straight-backed pride next to her fiancé: the other Carnevales had already left before the doors to the
tablattè
were thrown open, in a show of respect for the death in their family, and they had seemed contented. Gesuela took comfort: even Agata, the last daughter left to marry off, would surely find a husband, however difficult it might prove—to all appearances she was as tractable as the other girls, though in fact this daughter was obstinate.

 

The footmen moved among the guests carrying trayfuls of lemonade and
acqua e zammù
—water with a few drops of anise seed. It wouldn't be long now before the procession of the Vara went past the palazzo. The approach of the procession was preannounced by a buzz of voices, at first far off in the distance and then gradually closer and higher-pitched: a blend of music, the shouts of the faithful—“Long live the Virgin Mary!”—and a psalmody that, murmured by hundreds of mouths, turned into a roar. Leading the procession was a line of twelve altar boys carrying the insignia of the Virgin Mary, followed by the confraternities and religious orders, both male and female, in two lines on either side of the street, as if they were flanking an invisible simulacrum. Between them walked the nuns and the female orphans of the Collegio di Maria, the boarding school that Agata and Carmela had been attending since the year before, when they were obliged to make do without the services of the English governess, Miss Wainwright. The din was something terrible. The faithful were crammed together on the sidewalks, in the front halls, in the doors of the shops, and in the narrow alleys. Two lines of altar boys, caparisoned in brocade vestments, marching shoulder to shoulder in compact rows, filled the street: the vanguard of Our Lady of the Assumption.

At the shout of “
La Vara
!” the guests poured out onto the balconies. Then silence fell. The tension was unmistakable. The façades of the aristocratic houses seemed to have been garlanded with the colorful dresses of the women on the balconies. The grated windows of the monasteries were all aglitter with dream-glazed eyes. The Vara would appear at the crossroads where it would make the only deviation from a straight line in the course of the entire procession: a ninety-degree turn. A thousand eyes were fixed on the intersection. Music, chants, and shouts of invocation grew to a deafening roar.

The first ones to appear around the corner were the men carrying bucketfuls of water: the “machine,” which had no wheels, rode, as if on a sledge, on a smooth wooden log, and it was their job to wet the pavement in order to make it slippery. They cast the water in all directions, as if sowing seed in an open field. Then silence fell. No music, no litanies, only the humming voices of the faithful. At the intersections, the haulers appeared, barefoot, pulling the cart by sheer force of forearms and faith. This was the moment of the procession's greatest intensity. It was also the most dangerous moment. Rapidly the haulers took their places along the two ropes in accordance with an order that had been clearly established for centuries. Some of them went on pulling to keep the Vara from slowing to a halt. Others, clustering along their ropes, waited for the right moment to exert their strength. Others still waited in line, hands on the rope, ready to haul. Precise. Attentive. Synchronized. At that moment, even the buzzing died away: like a single body, the faithful held their breath. You could hear, faintly, the wailing of the little angels on the Vara. Rhythmic tugs, then one decisive yank from the cluster of haulers: the turn had been completed. As tall as a two-story building, shaped like a narrow pyramid, and immensely heavy, the Vara appeared at the corner. It was vibrating and tottering. For a second it seemed as if it was tipping over. Another yank and it went back to sliding along the wet pavement, solid, erect, accompanied by a gust of applause for the haulers, heroes of the day.

Ever since the late Middle Ages, the Messinese had been the uncontested masters of the whole island in the creation of those ephemeral constructions, unrivaled not only in terms of sheer beauty, but also in terms of mechanical technique: inside the “machine” there were manually operated gears that allowed a variety of movements. When the Vara moved forward, it was unstoppable. Every year, the decoration changed, but the structure and the chief elements remained the same: large circles at the base that grew progressively smaller, narrowing toward the top, upon which celestial bodies were poised, each with its own rotating movement. From each of the circles, wheels projected, also in movement. There was a time when all the characters were live people, and there were more than a hundred of them, but with the passing of the centuries, the adult figures–the Apostles that surrounded the coffin of the Virgin Mary at the base, the angels of the three circles, and Jesus Himself–had been replaced by brightly painted papier-mâché statues. The only remaining humans were the Virgin Mary, at the summit of the pyramid, and dozens of tiny angels, tied to the rays of the Sun and the Moon and to the wheels that spun at the side of each of the circles: these were infants or small children volunteered for the occasion by their families. The circles, wheels, and all the other contrivances would spin in alternating directions for the entire seven hours of the procession.

Because the cart was so dizzyingly high, the Padellanis' guests who hadn't been able to find a place to stand on the balconies still had a full view of the upper circles and of the Virgin Mary. Therefore everyone, including the footmen and chambermaids, was looking outside. Agata had hung back. As soon as she heard the sound of footsteps on the wet pavement and the creaking of the machine sliding along, she ran downstairs at top speed to the stables, which were empty at that time of day. That was where Giacomo was waiting for her. Declarations of undying love, tears, and the good news: Senator Lepre, moved by the sincerity of the two young people's love, had offered to request Agata's hand in marriage to his grandson, in his son's stead. There was no more time to talk; when the coachman gave the agreed-upon signal, the two lovers were forced to take their leave.