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.
IN HER CELL, given dispensation to miss the morning offices, Zuana finally wakes during the afternoon work hour. Her sleep has been deep and dreamless. She washes in a bowl of warm water, which one of the converse has delivered outside her door along with a new pad of rich-smelling soap and a fresh washing towel. As her own dowry is not sufficient to fund such regular luxuries, she understands this to be a gift from the convent stores and is grateful for it. The smell of the girl’s bodily expulsions still clings to her and she washes herself vigorously. She takes special pleasure—yes, she accepts the word—in lathering up the soap on her head. Her hair has grown during the winter months and she likes the wet weight of it, the shiver of massage as her fingers move over her scalp. She leaves her head bare as she uses the cloth to wash her arms and then her body under her shift.
Working as she does in the infirmary, she is less of a stranger to women’s bodies than most nuns, but in general she takes little interest in her own. Of course there have been moments in her life when she has wondered what it is she will never feel, even once or twice explored her own dark sweetness, but her battles with the flesh have proved to be, at most, passing cravings, absorbed and subdued as much by the challenges of work as the discipline of prayer.
The soap is soft on her skin and lathers up like sea foam. She can detect a hint of almond and calendula within it—perhaps it comes from the abbess’s own stores—and registers a quiet delight in the way the smell and the softness complement each other.
