She goes back to the chest, rummaging farther till she finds what she is looking for: two petticoats, both silk: one red, one white. She lays them on the floor side by side. In the night on some cobbled path, which color will stand out more, the white? She moves the candle over it, but it looks gray and ordinary, while the red shines like a puddle of bright blood. Was this the color they were all talking about, the dye that paints lips, breaks fevers, and addresses melancholy? Wasn’t that what it had said in the book written by the dispensary sister’s father? Melancholy. Even the word is sad, like a gray fog suffocating everything it touches. There have been times these last few weeks when she has almost felt it creeping across the stones of her cell, in wait for the moment when she no longer has the energy to fight. But he has come, and that is not how she feels tonight.
My lady’s lips are red as rubies, and her hair is like a cloud of gold that is caught in the sun. But when she turns her back to me the day becomes night and frost is all around.
She takes the red petticoat and, tearing the fabric apart with her teeth, starts ripping it into thick strips. When she has finished she takes out two of the poems, turns them over, and begins to write.
IF ZUANA HAS been expecting gratitude from Serafina, she is quickly disillusioned. In fact, for a while she finds herself working alone in the dispensary, for things do not go well for the girl. That same night after chapter, the watch sister, who has been secretly instructed to increase the number of her rounds in response to the arrival of early Carnival singers, finds the novice skulking in the second cloister trying to get back to her cell, her hands frozen and her sandals caked with mud from whatever part of the gardens she has been wandering in.
When questioned, first by the novice mistress and then by the abbess, she refuses to say where she has been or what she has done. In absence of a confession, a more serious penance is imposed. She is confined to her cell for two days with only bread and water. Before she returns there the room is searched by Augustina and another conversa and certain papers are removed from her trunk. That night, her howling reverberates around the convent again. Zuana sits in her cell over her books, listening but unable to do anything. She, like every other nun, is forbidden to go near her. When the sisters move in procession through the cloisters at Matins, they hear the girl fling herself against her door as they pass her cell, raining blows against the wood until you might think either it or she must splinter from the force. The other novices glance nervously as they pass, and one of them starts crying. But when they emerge from chapel later, the banging and the yelling have stopped. From then on there is silence.
On the afternoon of the second day, Suora Umiliana spends an hour with Serafina in her cell and then accompanies her to dinner in the refectory, where the girl sits alone on the floor, her plate of leftovers thick with ash and bitter wormwood. The lesson, read by Suora Francesca with a slight quiver in her voice, is a teaching from Saint John Climacus, one of the desert fathers, who talks of repentance as the voluntary endurance of affliction, the purification of conscience, the daughter of hope, and the renunciation of despair. It is beautiful in its way, and a number of the nuns find their hearts lifting within them. When the meal finishes, the abbess instructs the girl to lie down in the doorway while the others walk over her, not all of them as carefully as Zuana.
To make matters worse, the next day is convent visiting.
It is not the first time Serafina has had to sit in her cell while others entertain (novices are forbidden outside contact for the first three months, a rule with some kindness in its cruelty, since meeting loved ones too soon can rip raw the wound of missing before new skin has had time to grow), but the growing excitement over Carnival gives this visit a special energy. The day afterward is the Feast of Saint Agnes, when there will be a special meal and a court audience for Suora Benedicta’s new psalm settings for Vespers. The parlatorio is full: almost two dozen nuns gathered in separate small groups, playing host to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, nieces, aunts, and cousins, with such a noisy exchange of gifts and gossip that the casual passerby in the street might think they were eavesdropping on some court function rather than the visiting day of the holy order of Saint Benedict. Zuana, working alone in her cell (what little family she has left is in Venice and has long since left her to her fate), can make out individual sisters’ laughter, and even after the gates are closed and the convent is silent again, those who have played host to the outside world seem lighter, a little more radiant than the rest.
