36.
July 1847.
The doorkeeper of the conservatory of Smirne
refuses to admit Agata, who has returned late
 

Agata missed the choir—the musky aroma of freshly waxed wood, the dense cool air that poured in through the open windows, the wafting gusts of incense, the rituals, the chants and songs, the silences. Chanting the Psalter had become part of her very being. Those were moments when she actually found herself desiring the seclusion of the cloister, though afterwards she revised her views, blushing with no one to see how deeply she depended on her senses. One afternoon, eaten alive by her yearning for her choir, she went to the church of San Giorgio Stilita; she took a seat in the back pew, in the shadows, to keep from being noticed. From there she would rejoin her sister nuns. She waited for the hour of the Vespers in the silence of the empty church. Then she heard a scraping of feet. Three tall well dressed men were taking a tour of the church, beginning with the side chapels. The youngest man was acting as their guide. The young man had turned and with a sweep of his arm was showing them the choir above the portal. Agata recognized the blond beard: it was James Garson. It seemed to her that their eyes had locked. He continued the tour, as if he hadn’t recognized her. She covered her face with her hands and went on praying.

She peeked out at him from between her fingers. James had returned to the transept and was looking at the comunichino. In that instant Agata felt something like an electric shock: she knew he thought of her with an almost animal intensity, and although she failed to understand it, she instinctively felt it in return. Then James caught up with the other two and together they headed slowly for the exit, admiring the rich decorations as they went. Just then he recognized her. Their eyes met for an instant; Agata felt her cheeks burn and she ducked her head suddenly: she prayed to God to help her understand her feelings for James.

 

Vespers was beginning.

Agata had sharp hearing and she heard the rustling footsteps of the nuns preparing for prayer in the choir. The few worshippers were mostly seated in the front pews.

“Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord,” intoned Donna Maria Assunta, and Agata, from her hiding place, beneath the choir, like the other choristers, remained seated as she intoned the psalm; then she stood up at the Gloria and like them lowered her head at the word “father.” At the end of the Gloria they began to sing the hymn of that day, the Magnificat:

 

Magnificat anima mea Dominum,

et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo;

quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae,

ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.

 

As if she were with her sister nuns in the Choir, Agata saw one of the Padellani cousins go to the lectern for the reading. She recognized her voice. Then, the Silence, followed by the responsory, antiphon to the song of Mary, intercessions, and the Pater noster. Agata nourished her soul in the choral prayer and asked God to show her the right path. She prayed with such intensity that she failed to notice that the Vespers were over and the church was now empty. The shuffling feet of the sacristan brought her back to reality, and she scurried out of the church before he recognized her.

 

She was already late getting back. Looking for a shortcut, she’d taken the wrong turning and now she was lost in a maze of alleys.

The hour when workers returned home had already passed. Poorly lit by the lamps that burned before the shrines of the saints, the narrow lanes of the bassi, the poorest part of Naples, were crowded with the many paupers who had no home to return to: a populace of faceless men, women, and children—vagabonds, mendicants, lepers, musicians. They stumbled along aimlessly, slowly because they had no idea where they were going, nor what would become of them by the time day dawned and they opened their eyes from sleep. Agata had lowered her hood over her face. There was no need: none of them were thinking of her.

She walked into a sort of funnel, a cul-de-sac that had been colonized by a cluster of paupers. Squatting on the ground in a circle, they were slurping soup and gnawing on something dry that was left over or had been wheedled from some rich person’s table. Old men with children clutching their legs and invalids were sitting on chairs or reclining on pallets. A couple of them looked at her without asking a thing. In a few adjoining hovels, women had finished their meal and were sweeping the filth out of their houses and directly onto the stone slabs of the street. Every so often the quiet muttering was interrupted by the sound of a patrol, the sound of booted feet, either the police or the army.

In the back alleys night was not all that different from daytime. Carts towering with loads of vegetables swayed as they creaked through crowds of walkers, threatening to sweep away the chairs set out in front of street doors, to drag down laundry hanging out to dry. The balconies were cluttered with pots and pans and oddly shaped receptacles, crates, splintered chairs, with sleepy old men perched on them, half-naked children wandering in and out of the hovels, and shopping baskets waiting to be let down—but in the bassi, people never went shopping, they stole what they needed.

Agata’s eyes saw nothing but James, his golden beard, handsome as the Christ of the Holy Staircase in the hall of the comunichino. Beneath a wall shrine housing an effigy of the Virgin Mary—eyes raised heavenward, diaphanous smile—what had from a distance seemed like two children actually turned out to be two adolescent lovers. The young woman had her back to the edicule and her skirt hoisted around her hips: a beggar boy, panting, was mounting her. Agata lowered her eyes; as she went past she glanced at their bare feet: the girl’s feet were light and curling as if she were levitating, his feet, braced and thrusting. She envied them.

She’d made her way through the maze of narrow lanes to a thoroughfare. The main façade of the conservatory of Smirne occupied an entire block–three rows of black windows with double grilles and the vast Renaissance portal. It looked like the backdrop for a stage play.

Agata knocked at the heavy portal: no answer. The infrequent passersby glanced at her, uncertain whether they should offer to help. She knocked again and again. From high above came the voice of the sister doorkeeper: “Madame abbess says that you know perfectly well: those who fail to return by the appointed hour can come back tomorrow morning.” Seized by panic, Agata pleaded; then with all the arrogance of the Padellanis, she commanded the doorkeeper to open the door immediately, threatening to report her to the cardinal; when silence was the only response, she went back to pleading. In the end, she was forced to face up to it: she would have to wait there until morning. She was afraid. The shadows of night were growing thicker and darker; the desperadoes were emerging from the bassi and the carriages of the nobility began to pick up their pace. Shoulders wedged into the corner between the portal and the massive stone doorjamb, Agata glanced warily around her and mechanically repeated the Aves and the Paters in order to invoke divine protection.

The clattering sound of horses’ hooves, the screech of iron wheels on the cobbled street. The abbess’s voice, calling down from high above: “What excuse do you want to palm off on me this time?” was drowned out.

Flattened against the conservatory’s heavy wooden doors, Agata was panting. The darkness was beginning to be broken by the light of dawn. The meowing of cats, the creaking of carts, the crowing of caged roosters. In the hundreds of times that she attempted to relive that night, Agata was never fully able to reconstruct the sequence of emotions and events.

She couldn’t remember whether in the carriage James had taken her hand to place it against his cheek or to kiss it; she couldn’t remember whether she had first laid her veiled head against his shoulder, or whether instead he had wrapped his arm around her shoulders, drawing her toward him.

She couldn’t remember when she realized that the carriage was heading down toward the harbor, when she had first glimpsed the yacht moored along the wharf, or even when the carriage rolled up a planked gangway on board the vast yacht, threading its way carefully up a ramp no broader than a cattle path through a field.

She couldn’t remember when and where, aboard the yacht, they had eaten salted biscuits and olives, or even whether they had eaten bread and cheese instead.

She couldn’t remember which of the two of them had first started talking about the books that he sent her and that she read. She couldn’t remember when they’d started talking about themselves—the more one talked, the more the other drank in the other’s words, and the more they felt a swelling sense of urgency to know one another completely.

She couldn’t remember which of the two of them had removed the pin that held up her veil, pulling away the veil itself, who had untied the knot on the string that held her wimple snug around her face, who had tugged free the hairnet that imprisoned her short curls.

She couldn’t remember whether it had been she who removed his jacket and one by one undid his mother-of-pearl shirt buttons.

And she remembered little or nothing of what came afterwards, when they lay as if they were glued together, like dogs, she remembered only that it seemed completely normal, right, and in accordance with God’s will, that the two of them should love each other carnally, in the simple and joyful way in which they acknowledged one another as lovers and glorified their love.

The only thing that Agata recalled clearly was the exchange of words, before dawn, when the time had come to take leave of one another.

She’d said to him, with a feeling of death in her heart, that it was too late for them to have a life together; he had replied, decisively: “It could never be too late for the two of us,” and slipped into her hands his little book of poems by Keats, with his penciled notations.