37.
August-October 1847.
The terrible punishment for Agata in love: isolation
 

Madame abbess wishes to see you.” The lay sister swung open the door. It was as if the abbess had been waiting in ambush in the conciergerie; she appeared before her as she was climbing the first flight of stairs, and she climbed alongside her, declaiming in a thunderous, unclear voice: “I’m going to speak to the vicar general this very day. You aren’t leaving here again, and if you do, you’ll never come back.” After which, she hurried up the last ramp two steps at a time; once they reached the third floor, she vanished.

Agata was a prisoner, and no one had told her how long she would have to remain there. They brought her meals in the cell—bread, soup, sometimes fruit—in silence, and they gave her enough water to drink and wash herself with a damp washcloth. She was obliged to wear the same clothes every day. When she swept and dusted her cell, the dirt remained in a pile in the corner. There was a stale stench in the room. A servingwoman was in charge of changing the chamber pot once a day; but as for any other cleaning—nothing. By day, flies and ants took away whatever they found, at night, cockroaches emerged from their dens and fed on the filth, watched by mice that, from high atop the window sill, tipped their snouts down curiously before shuttling along to the next cell along the window ledge.

She had become accustomed to the squalor, but she suffered from the lack of daylight, which meant that she could only read during the hours when the sunshine streamed directly onto the wall. She had decided to reread, in the order in which she had received them, all the books that James had sent her, and she tried to puzzle out how and why he had selected them. Sometimes she managed to find a common thread, and when she did she felt close to him and loved him even more. During the rest of the time, she prayed intensely for herself and for James and often she dozed off. Since she wasn’t doing any physical exercise, and eating as little as she was, she slid into a consoling state of lethargy. Then she’d close her eyes and listen to the noises of the city. Gradually, she remembered the words of a poem that James had recited to her:

 

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!

Shutting with careful fingers and benign

Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,

Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;

O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,

In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes.

 

She had learned that city life too has its own punctuation of time. In the morning, there was the traffic of the farmers, fishermen, and market gardeners who brought food to feed the city: she heard the clucking of cartloads of hens, the anxious cooing of pigeons in cages, and the tingling bells of nanny goats, their udders swollen with milk. Then there were the voices of strolling vendors and craftsmen—knife sharpeners, cobblers—and those who set up shop with a rag on the pavement or on a folding table, to sell anything imaginable: fruit, vegetables, needles, thread, buttons, scissors, candles, playing cards, each and every one calling and praising their merchandise. More or less at the same time, the guards and the soldiers passed by; the rhythmic pounding of their feet on the cobblestones echoed in her cell. The sound of the shoes of horses pulling aristocratic carriages threw her into a frenzy: each time she imagined that it was James and dreamed that he was leaning out in hopes of catching a glimpse of her; he didn’t know that she was a prisoner. At times like that, Agata was seized with an overwhelming need to look out the window. She would climb up on the bed: from there, through the window grates, she could see the convent across the way and a patch of sky between two buildings. Sometimes, a dove or even a seagull would cross the sky.

 

Three weeks later, the abbess came into her cell. She sniffed the fetid air and then told Agata that the cardinal would have to prolong his stay in Rome; Agata would have to wait, and in the meanwhile, there could be no further contact with the outside world.

She was afraid that she would never see James again, and her revulsion for food returned. She scorned herself for making use of the weapons of weakness—misdirected violence, because it was turned on herself—but there was nothing that she could do about it: whenever she ate, she threw up. She lay in bed and dreamed she was talking to James. He had told her that the conversation between them had begun during the crossing from Messina to Naples, even though at the time she had not realized it; it wouldn’t be interrupted again until they finally saw one another, and then they’d never be parted. Agata believed it. Intensely.