Meanwhile, if the physical refeeding is a challenge, so is the extra level of dissembling that must now accompany it. Once outside her cell, whatever her exhaustion or confusion, Serafina needs to be clever. And deft. At every meal in the refectory, the convent must see her eat, though in a way that makes it clear to Umiliana that no food is actually passing into her mouth but is instead hidden away under her robe to ensure her continued fasting. And Umiliana, as always, is eagle-eyed over the journey of her most beloved novice.
As the food starts to give her back some strength, so does constipation begin, her bowels filling up with stones that grow bigger and harder each day. It feels as if her whole body is bloated with the poison of waste. She remembers the bishop and the way he leaked blood and bad temper everywhere he went. Is this how it will be for me? she wonders. Will I grow back into a body made decrepit by starvation? She looks at herself. Her skin inside the shift is gray, veins running like gnarled branches underneath. Hideous. She is hideous. How can any man ever love her?
Zuana tells her again that it takes time for a body to reacquaint itself with the normality of eating, that it will pass, it will get easier. But what if it doesn’t? What if she simply swells up until she rips open or explodes? Zuana now supplements the acqua-vita with senna: senna, the great healer of life, to clean the spleen and the liver and the heart and, in this dosage, strong enough to move the bowels of a horse. But not, it seems, those of a starved novice.
On the sixth morning at Lauds the pain and pressure are so bad that she almost passes out. Eugenia, as usual, is at her side in chapel, and supports her until she gets her breath back. She straightens up, the sweat of pain glistening on her skin, only to find herself staring into the faces of a dozen choir nuns and novices in the opposite stalls. They look almost disappointed to find her still on her feet. Plainly, every move she makes has the convent enthralled. But then it is not nothing to watch a body starving itself in its search for God.
SUORA UMILIANA, MEANWHILE, is not distressed. On the contrary, she is excited. She, who knows the arc of fasting as well as she knows her psalms, understands that there are moments when one is hard pushed to tell pain from the arrival of transcendence. It is not the right time, anyway. The chapel is still empty, the figure of Christ still in the hands of workmen. If—no, when—this wondrous young soul is called, it should be when He is back to watch over her.
For Umiliana, too, has her plan, her own dream of well-being that warms and sustains her in the darkness. She has nurtured an army of novices in her time and there have been those, such as Perseveranza or Obedienza or Stefana, even the young Carità, who have emerged humble and dedicated brides of Christ. Just as she herself has always yearned to be. She has burned with the love of Jesus for so many years now—worked, fasted, prayed, given her life to Santa Caterina—and yet, and yet, she cannot help but feel there is something lacking.
It is Umiliana’s fate to have stood in this same convent chapel, an impressionable young nun barely twenty-one years old, when a living saint, a small stunted figure, humble and mysterious beyond words, opened her palms during Matins to reveal the bleeding stigmata of Christ Himself. For the rest of the service, with the choir transfixed around her, this tiny but vast soul had sung her way through the office, tears streaming down her face, before limping back to her cell, leaving a trail of bloody footprints in her wake.
As a child Umiliana had heard of such wonders—who had not? — and from the earliest moment they had affected her deeply. She had always dreamed of being pure enough, prayed that she might one day be made so humble. Living saints, they called them. In the years before the heretic madness spread there had seemed to be so many: Lucia of Narni, Angela of Foligno, Camilla of Brodi. Her mother had made sure she heard of every one, feeding their life stories like rich worms into her fledgling’s open mouth. If only all young girls were instructed so young.
Even without her mother’s piety, she would have yearned for the veil. As a child she’d continually had to be restrained for being too fierce with herself. And while the family was never one of the most powerful in the city, their name had certainly been good enough to find her a place at Santa Caterina. By the time she entered at the age of twelve she already had calluses on her knees and found most of her fellow novices vain and frivolous. Surely it would be only a matter of time and self-abasement…
