Their route to the music room takes them by way of the scriptorium, where a dozen desks are positioned to catch every last ray of daylight, with a dozen heads bent diligently over them, the silence broken only by the tapping of pens against inkwells and the scratching of nibs across paper. At the podium, Suora Scholastica, her face as large and bright as the full moon, smiles up at them as they stand in the doorway. Zuana nods back. When she is not copying holy words, Scholastica is writing ones of her own, dramatic plays of saints and sinners in rhyming couplets, the best of them produced at Carnival or on special saint’s days. Her dedication infuses the atmosphere. There are other workrooms where a certain restlessness is always present, but over the years Zuana has come to notice how those who choose books and manuscripts over other forms of labor become most absorbed in their work, for while the task is mostly to copy what already exists, there are great skills to be learned and a slow pleasure to be had in watching an empty page fill. During the first six months, when she had been frantic for the garden and her pestle and mortar, even she had sucked some sweetness here, not to mention the mischief of using only medicinal herbs as her border illustrations, drawn accurately enough to signal a cure for all manner of ills, if only the reader knew how to recognize them.
They move farther along the upper cloister, past the embroidery room, where an intermittent starling chatter slides out from underneath the door. Francesca, the supervising sister here, is lenient with high spirits, believing as she does that laughter is one of God’s methods of purifying the heart, and as a result some of the younger nuns congregate here and take advantage of her. While there are those who disapprove, Zuana is more forgiving: in her eyes small transgressions can often prevent bigger ones.
Today, though, the starlings can wait. That single pure voice has now become a dance between many, a shoal of silvered fish slipping in and over one another in a fast-flowing stream, and Serafina’s footsteps move faster in response. When they reach the music room, Zuana pushes open the door quietly and moves aside to let her in.
Given the color of the sound, it is almost a shock to find the room so monochrome. In the gray light a nun sits bent over a lute, while others stand grouped in fives and sixes. A few move their heads to the music but most are statue-still. They all hold texts in front of them, but their eyes are constantly pulled toward a small figure in front whose arms flutter up and down, fingers bent as if she were plucking each and every note from her own set of invisible strings in the air. The atmosphere is so charged with concentration that no one seems to notice them come in. Zuana glances toward Serafina. Though she might later spend a lifetime denying it, there is evident appetite in her now. And wonder.
Even Zuana herself, whose voice has always been more seagull than lark, cannot help but be affected. Every woman in this room is familiar to her; she has treated them all for a host of ailments that raked their throats or splintered their voices, not to mention the hundred other pains and boils and bad humors of the bowels or stomach to which human bodies are prone. With the exception of Suora Benedicta, all of them are remarkably unremarkable outside this room, no better, no worse, no farther from and certainly no closer to God than any other of the convent sisters. Yet here you only have to close your eyes on their faces (which, in effect, every citizen of Ferrara does when they sit in church and hear only disembodied voices through the altar grille), and such is their sound that you would be tempted to think you were in close proximity to a choir of angels.
In this respect, heaven and earth are excellently connected in Ferrara, since the sweeter the voices of its nuns, the closer to paradise a city begins to feel. And the closer to paradise, the greater the worldly gratitude its rich citizens send flowing back into the convents that house such angels. Even the least musical of novices learns this fast enough, just as it is common knowledge that some convents in Bologna or Siena or Venice attract so many high-ranking visitors that the best choir voices are excused from Matins in winter to save their throats from the chills of the night air. Of course, such overt favoritism can bring resentment, and in Santa Caterina the abbess is careful to keep the peace with a semblance of equality. Nevertheless, there are all manner of ways to show favor.
