Except it had not happened. Despite all the praying and passion (one is so sure when so young), she had yet to feel the touch of ecstasy and had begun to fear that she would never be worthy enough. That night, as she had stood staring at the blood trickling from Suora Magdalena’s hands, she had understood the truth: she herself would never be so blessed.
When you love someone so much, it can be unbearably painful to be passed over. But Christ gives different challenges to different souls, and Suora Umiliana had shouldered her own cross without complaint, sewing, copying, cooking, gardening, with as much humility as she could muster, until she had found a way to move into a position where her passion and dedication could help guide younger souls. No one could doubt that she had been an honest and just novice mistress and that a number of her charges grew to love her as much as they once loathed her. But all the time, through all of them, she had been watching, waiting, in case such a moment might come again. And it had never been more important than now, when false truths were everywhere and the church itself was bent on more discipline and less license.
If she were truthful, she had not (though surely this was true no longer?) been entirely sure about Serafina. At the beginning she had seen only a spoiled, angry rebel, full of vanity and carnality. But then had come the changes. First the early encounter with Suora Magdalena, followed by the arrival of her voice, pure as angel’s breath if only it could have been allowed to rise straight to God rather than trained to seduce through the public grille. Then her sudden showy display of piety—well, God had seen through that fast enough, sending her spinning into that terrible night of fits and illness, which had broken her body and brought her so close to death. Without Magdalena, she would certainly have died. That was the moment Umiliana had known for sure. There had been other nuns and novices, some worthy beyond measure, who had expired alone in agony. Yet Santa Caterina’s living saint had come out of her cell for this girl and had triggered within her a hunger for repentance and fasting. Finally, as if there could be any doubt, Magdalena had died at the same moment as Christ slid halfway from the cross, while Serafina herself had been taking the eucharist.
Yes, there was something of power in this young woman, something put there almost despite herself. She had sensed it inside her despair, had nurtured it, watching the spirit quickening as the body starved. She, Suora Umiliana, had prayed for a force like this to help her in her cleansing of the convent. And now it had been given to her.
THAT EVENING SHE comes as she always does, in the hour between dinner and Compline, to pray with Serafina. Eager for each nuance of feeling that her young protégée experiences, she questions her about what happened in chapel that morning, when she had almost collapsed. Had she been in pain? What had she felt or heard? Was there any noise or rushing in her ears, the echo of a voice perhaps, or a disturbance of her vision?
Serafina tells her what she wants to hear.
Not all of it is pretense. In those long, starving nights before Zuana came to her, there had been times when she could swear she saw things: strange half-formed shapes growing out of shadows, sudden auras and flashes of light at the edges of her vision. If she stared for long enough into darkness it turned itself into color, oranges and burning yellows like running veins of gold in black rock. Once, in the no-man’s-land between sleeping and waking, she was sure she saw a face coming out of the gloom: His face, bearded, framed by night-black hair, eyes wet with tears of compassion—oh, please God, she thought, let those tears be for me. In contrast, her dreams were full of nothing, though when she woke sometimes she heard music—voices—in her cell, vibrating notes far too high and pure to be human, and they made her feel giddy and weightless, as if she could lift off the bed to join them.
When, haltingly, she recounts these things to Umiliana, the old nun seems almost beside herself with joy.
Such experiences do not come to the girl anymore. With food as ballast she is now weighted back down to earth, her very solidity interrupting the quivering air around her. If she is truthful, with such ordinariness comes, sometimes, a certain sadness, a wonder at what has been lost. But she does not let herself think of that. She is leaving this place, leaving both its visions and its horrors, and she will do whatever it takes to get herself out.
“Help me. I long for Him so. Help me, please.” She knows the lines well enough.
