When she finishes, she gets up and goes quietly to the door, opening it and stepping out into the corridor, from where she is able to make out any crying or distress from the infirmary below. But everything is still and quiet.
She stands for a moment taking in the atmosphere of the convent asleep around her. Out in the silence, from somewhere on the other side of the walls, comes the sound of a man singing—as he rolls home from a night in some drinking hole, no doubt. It is a fine voice: light but full, an edge of longing in its rises and cadences. The language of love. The song ends, and in the quiet that follows she hears the trill of a night songbird, indignantly protecting its territory from all intruders. As she stands there listening to its bright and insistent voice, her tiredness falls away and a feeling of sudden well-being floods through her: the sense of man and nature interlocking, the order and the beauty, both within God’s plan. And she here now, hearing, receiving it.
Matins tonight will be a cause for special celebration, even if Christ’s body does not move for her on the cross. She wonders if she should look in on Suora Magdalena. Letizia, her conversa, has reported that she has been agitated recently, but she is mindful of the abbess’s exhortation to keep herself free of the watch sister’s jurisdiction, and she does not want to meet her on her rounds.
Around her, the convent is in total darkness, no telltale candle glow from anywhere. Matins will come fast enough now and she should sleep. As she closes her cell door another man’s voice lifts up, this one deeper and darker but equally fine, offering up a swooping run of notes, as if in playful competition with the bird. There is always something to show God’s wonder. She smiles. It will need a fat rook or a crow to rival this one.
“I DON’T SEE why we cannot at least ask.”
“Because it would not be fitting, that is why.”
Half an hour into chapter, and the convent factions are already happily at one another’s throats.
A watery twilight filters in through a row of high-set windows, and despite the weather the place is warm from the heat of so many bodies. Gathered together they make a strange tribe: novices on one side, converse on the other, and in the middle a great swath of choir nuns, with the abbess on a raised dais at the end, immaculate in her newly pressed robes. Zuana looks out over the great room. There are times when she feels as much sense of community here in chapter meeting as she does in chapel. A stranger coming upon them now might see only a flock of identical black-and-white birds—magpies is the most common joke—but for those with sharp eyes the differences are there as soon as you start to look.
The most obvious are the deformities. As in many cities, Ferraras marriage market is cruel; it is easier to find a camel going through the eye of a needle than a cripple or a humpback being serenaded into her wedding bed, and Santa Caterina has its fair share of the rejects. Yet as they become familiar, are they really so monstrous? Consider Suora Lucrezia, sitting two rows in front of her. The first impression would shock anyone, since she was born with a gaping cleft where her upper lip should be. But if you could stop gawping long enough to lift your gaze from her malformed mouth to her eyes, you would find yourself drowning in pools of deepest lapis lazuli. Then there is Suora Stefana, whose peach-down skin and perfect Cupid’s-bow mouth might have poets outversing themselves, if it wasn’t for the fact that they would have to negotiate their way around the great question mark of her spine in order to find her assets.
But the ones who twist Zuana’s heart are the twin sisters, Credenza and Affiliata. It appears their love for each other was so great from the start that they could not bear to leave the togetherness of the womb. Credenza was pulled out first, and the newfangled tongs they used—though they saved her life—left her with such a mangled right leg that she walks like a listing ship. Affiliata, who came five minutes later, might win an army of suitors on the sweetness of her smile alone, except that after a while one senses an unnerving vacuity behind it: not surprising, perhaps, since it was her head that the tongs squeezed to get her out. Put together they would make a whole woman and a good wife for some great nobleman. As it is, in lieu of better offers, they are wedded to Christ and each other.
Zuana finds herself smiling as she looks at them, sitting together as always, robes spread generously to hide the fact that their hands are linked. Like the rest they are busy watching and listening. In the refectory everyone must keep her eyes on her plate, and in chapel they must address themselves only to God. But in chapter—oh, in chapter! — they may look at and talk with whomever they wish. And the greatest freedom of all is to be able to disagree.
