Time. There is so little of it left and yet what there is seems endless. She closes her eyes but knows she will not sleep. Her public docility has come at a cost. While her head stays bowed and her face remains serene, there are moments when the insides of her gut feel so twisted into knots that it is hard to walk upright. This state of constant excitement has become almost a pleasurable pain. She remembers it from before, at home—how every moment between her singing lessons was like a torture of waiting, sometimes so bad that she could barely breathe with it. Now the idea of him—the freezing, burning anticipation—blots out everything: sleep, thought, hunger.
She has had precious little appetite since her arrival, but recently she has come to enjoy the feeling that comes from not eating; the hollowness, the gnawing and fizzing in her stomach, is a kind of exhilaration in itself, like having something alive dancing inside her. Even her voice sounds purer, with less to hold it down, and when she is made to eat—when Federica calls her to the kitchen and presents her with the marzipan strawberry—the syrupy sweetness is so strong it is all she can do not to vomit it back up again.
It is not easy, though—deliberately contriving not to eat. You might think a convent would be happy to have its sisters starving a little—didn’t the saints live on air? — but here there is moderation in everything: enough prayer, enough work, enough sleep (well, once you get used to the mad clock they live by), and enough food. The rule is that each nun must finish what is on her plate, and disobedience is a matter for penance.
Of course there are ways. Deceptions, pretenses. She is fooling them in everything else, why not in this as well? At meals she comes into the refectory and finds her seat at the long table quickly, bending low over the plate, hands clasped under her chin for grace. When the grace is over she keeps her left hand close to her mouth while her right holds the spoon. In this way it is simple to transfer the food into her hand before it reaches her lips. No one is watching, anyway. Those who are not intent on stuffing their faces are too busy listening to the readings: stories of mad men and women living in caves in the desert, vying with each other to endure the worst suffering.
It is a technique—this squirreling away of food inside her habit—that she perfected after she had started singing. It was as if she had been in need of some minor disobedience to reassure herself that she was not becoming one of them. She liked the way the fear of being caught mixed in with the guilt and the fury: sweet and sour at the same time. She had hidden the scraps away in her cell and eaten a few of them later (how dare she, a novice eating in her cell when she should be asleep!) or used them to pay Candida, for the trade in tidbits moved both ways.
Now she holds on to them until recreation, then surreptitiously lets them fall from under her robe as she wanders in the gardens. She is not the only one doing this. She spotted Eugenia doing the same thing the other day. They exchanged shy, sly little looks as they passed. At least they will not betray each other. The evidence is gone within seconds, thanks to the birds; the pigeons pecking away the finches and sparrows, then pecking at one another. Today they swooped down from the bell tower even before anything had been dropped. Still, she must be careful. Suora Umiliana, though she might approve of fasting and would no doubt love to see their flesh withering on their bones, is hawk-eyed when it comes to any infraction of the rules, however small.
Well, it is only a few days before it is over and she is gone from here forever.
Only a few days. The thought slices into her belly. Sometimes it is hard to tell the hunger from the excitement. Gone from here. But to where? How? Oh, if only she could sleep! You could die of waiting here. She slides her hand into the mattress and extracts the keys from the cloth. The iron is cold to the touch. She runs her fingers over the cut of the teeth, clean and smooth. Of course he would have found a good blacksmith. Like those men on the Carnival carts. When she had heard the stories of their songs she had felt her cheeks burning. She had died a thousand deaths that night he had brought back the keys. He had been so late she had thought he wasn’t coming. She had barely made it back to her cell in time to avoid the watch sister. When she had unwrapped them there was a scrap of paper inside with the confirmation of the day and time upon it. That was it. No endearments, no poetry, no words of love. Since then there has been nothing. His face has long since blurred in her mind, and now she cannot even hear his voice, so that when she thinks about the future, sometimes all she can see is the black ink of the river at night.
