17.
The vestition of Agata the educand
The evening before the ceremony of Agata Padellani’s vestition, the church, built thanks to the munificence of a sixteenth-century Abbess Padellani, had been closed to the congregation and to the clergy: it had once again briefly become the exclusive property of the convent and of that family. The nuns had decorated the altars with their silver and their candelabra and the church glittered.
Prior to Compline, Agata, with the abbess walking next to her, had marched the length of the nave holding a silver tray on which lay her educand habit. When they came even with the chapel dedicated to St. Benedict, founder of their order, they kneeled on the first step. At that moment the entire church was filled with the monodic chant of the nuns.
Intende voci orationis meae,
Rex meus et Deus meus.
Agata stood up and, alone, she walked up to place the tray on the altar. Then she descended and kneeled next to the abbess. She too was chanting:
Quoniam ad te orabo:
Domine mane exhaudies vocem meam.
Intende voci orationis meae,
Rex meus et Deus
Quoniam ad te orabo:
Domine mane exhaudies vocem meam.
In the morning, O Lord, you will hear my voice.
It was a soft late-September morning; beneath the shady arcades of the cloister, the air was still. The clickety-clack of shoes on the steps, the rustle of habits and a subdued murmur of conversation—the calm of the cloister had been shattered by the group of young people descending the staircase of the novices. Educand and postulants were accompanying Agata Padellani to the comunichino for her vestition; there were many of them, and they pushed her, touched her, caressed her. They were walking down the hallway that ran past the kitchens. Standing in the doors, serving women and lay sisters watched them pass with broad smiles. The elderly nuns had already occupied the lookout seats in the six alcoves the overlooked the nave of the church, and from up there they were waving hello.
The group of celebrants slipped through the small wooden doorway that led to the maze of staircases and corridors that led to the comunichino. They packed into the narrow hallway that ran along the wall of the church’s transept, and then they descended a long unbroken flight of narrow steps; when they reached the tiny landing they made a sharp right turn onto another equally steep staircase. Shoved and squeezed by the other girls crowding around her, Agata stumbled and more than once was afraid that she was about to lose her balance and tumble headlong down the steps.
The hall of the comunichino, bare of any furniture, was filled with the smells of incense and the damp that soaked through from the outside wall. On the left, the Holy Staircase climbed up along the entire wall and stopped, in a dead end, in front of the enormous face of a blond Christ crowned with thorns; on the first Friday of every month, kneeling nuns seeking indulgence climbed up and down the carved wooden steps without ever touching the railing for support. An imposing seventeenth-century painting of Moses striking the rock to bring forth water occupied the wall across from the comunichino; in front of it was the armchair of the abbess. As soon as they entered the room, the girls, like a platoon of soldiers, spread out into compact rows, alongside and behind Agata, and moved slowly forward, taking small steps, until she, in the middle of the front row, had reached the exact center of the four-panel door that covered the grate of the comunichino. The two educands who had been assigned to open the door took their places, in front of Agata; then, in perfect unison, they folded back the panels on their well-oiled, silent hinges. The light of hundreds of candles burst into the hall while the music of the organ flooded the nave, followed by the voices of the choristers. All together, the altar boys, standing erect with their chests thrust out at their places on the steps of the main altar, turned to gaze at the comunichino, to the right of the altar. Seen from inside the church, it looked like the entrance to a particularly sumptuous chapel: a large radiant halo of iron and brass, flanked by two candelabra, masterpieces of the Neapolitan brass-worker’s art, surmounted the three-sectioned grate behind which the nuns listened to the mass, receiving the Eucharist through the central aperture.
The congregation had turned out in great numbers: the people from the quarter had come en masse—both because they remembered the miracle of the Madonna dell’Utria, and out of respect for the Padellanis—but the only family members to attend were the prince, with his wife and stepmother, to distract attention from the absence of the educand’s mother. The solemn benediction of the habit took place on the altar of St. Benedict, prior to the celebration of Mass. The canon and the altar boys began the singing, followed by the faithful. The censers held high by the four altar boys flanking the canon swung in unison. Each time they swung out to the apex of their parabola, they released clouds of incense and myrrh, mixed with ancient unguents—in keeping with the tradition of the Armenian nuns, who fled in the seventh century and founded the convent. The perfume saturated the whole church, wafting upward as high as the choir, which had begun singing Psalm 17 a voci pari.
The canon descended from the altar.
Exurge, Domine, praeveni eum et supplanta eum:
Eripe animam meam ab impio frameam tuam.
The canon handed the habit to Agata through the comunichino.
Ab inimicis manus tuae.
Agata wore the heavy shoes of the nuns and she had combed her hair into two flat bands that ran over her ears and were gathered and pinned to the nape of her neck with a comb. The educands undressed her and then re-dressed her in the black woolen habit, with narrow sleeves extending to the wrist and a small scapular hanging from her shoulders. Then they helped her put on the white muslin apron and tied a handkerchief made of the same material around her neck.
Ego autem in iustitia apparebo conspectu tuo:
Satiabor cum apparuerit gloria tua.
Once the vestition was complete, the new educand was the first to receive the divine host. Agata closed her eyes while the particle of holy wafer dissolved in her mouth. When she reopened them, she looked out at the congregation. In one of the first rows she thought she saw Giacomo with a woman sitting next to him, and she quickly shut her eyes again, very tight.