Within the great equality of God’s love, it is not considered healthy to pick out the single from the several, the particular thread from within the weave. The very purpose of convent life is to iron out the sense of the individual, to blend the one into the many and, from there, the many into the sublime Oneness of God. And nowhere is that ideal more powerfully realized than in chapel, where the voices of the choir meld into one coherent, seamless sound, praising God and His infinite bounty.
“I have crossed over the filth of the flesh And lo—I am left undefiled,”
There are, however, moments. And there are voices. And when the two come together it can be impossible, even undesirable, to resist.
“Behold, I come to You:”
As the phrase dies away in preparation for the next, Zuana watches the abbess secure Eugenia’s silence with a single glance, though the poor girl is so stunned it is unlikely she would have tried to take back her place. She closes her half-open mouth and drops her eyes. Whatever lesson she is learning now is made more potent by the fact that, in that instant, even her humiliation is irrelevant.
“You, my Lord, whom I have loved, have sought, have longed for—always. ”
Many of those present will talk later of it as a small but perfect miracle. On both sides of the grille they will search for words to describe the sound of the voice they heard, likening it first to the concentrated sweetness of the honeycomb or warm grain inside the wood, then contradicting themselves to speak of the burning flash of a comet, the purity of ice, even the shining transparency of heavenly bodies. But those who will do it most justice will speak not of the voice itself but of how it made them feel.
The old and the pious will speak of a piercing of their heart, so that they found it hard to breathe—a penetration which, though painful, unleashed a flow of love like Christ’s blood, gushing under the centurion’s spear, or the joy of the Virgin Madonna as the words of the angel Gabriel enter her breast. In contrast, the young will recall feeling it most powerfully in their gut, which is where another kind of love resides, though they will claim the arrow entered through the heart; and both young and old will, without noticing, hold their hands to their hearts while recalling the moment. And once they have tried to outdo each other in hyperbole they will sit back exhausted, quietly satisfied that their city is indeed a musical paradise, so much so that God sees fit to send new angels into its midst to guide its citizens on their way.
None of this word-spinning will mean much to Suora Benedicta. Though she might be a visionary in her compositions, she is also a choir mistress with a pragmatic understanding of the tools of her trade. The exuberant sweetness she has heard before (and can make good use of, for there can never be too much purity in a convent choir), but what she could never have predicted is how such a young body—still a girl’s as much as a woman’s—might produce a voice of such extraordinary range and control. How her lungs might hold so much within a single breath. How she might encompass so many registers, from the icicle point of a soprano to the chestnut honey of a tenor, or move between them so effortlessly, betraying no hint of strain or even the smallest of impurities with which the onset of menstruation can often infect the vocal cords. And then—most of all— how, when the choir reaches the new psalm settings in four or even six block parts, this single voice can know and travel between them all with equal assurance, though she can only have heard the notes once, or at best twice, through half-closed windows.
By the time the service ends, Benedicta is already halfway in her composition of the next, her mind filled with a voice that seems to be writing its own parts.
And meanwhile, what of Suora Zuana in all of this? Zuana, who remains as ignorant of the subtleties of vocal technique as she is impervious to the poetry of exaggeration. Zuana, who has been bred to observe and consider, to make sense of what her senses tell her. Except that everything her senses tell her now seems wrong. In front of her she is seeing a novice, apparently suffused with joy, singing her heart out to the glory of God and the joyful sacrifice of a virgin in the fires of martyrdom. But who is she, this girl? How can such a transformation have taken place? How can the strong-willed, recalcitrant, rebellious, angry young woman that she knows—a figure of much power but dubious spirituality—have disappeared so entirely, to be replaced by this new creature: absorbed, distilled, so consumed by the music she is making that she seems not even to be aware that any change has taken place.
Surely at some level she must know what she is doing. What, in effect, she has already done.
