43.
The ship docks at Naples
and Agata is abducted by an unknown woman
 

Seagulls flew low, skimming over the choppy swells. The breakwater of the Angevin Fortress stood out against the sleeping city in the morning darkness. The steamship slid over the water and came to a halt alongside another steamship flying the British flag.

Dressed in her finest habit, Agata was waiting. She was repeating her paternosters, serenely. A peasant woman carrying a basket and a broad sack burst into her cabin. She commanded Agata to undress and put on the clothing that she had brought with her, and then to put only her bare necessities into the sack. They’d leave the rest, along with her habit, in the cabin.

“Tell me who sent you.” Agata had raised her voice. The woman looked out the window and answered her in a whisper: “Be quiet and be quick.”

Agata found herself removing her habit in front of that woman. Embarrassed, she dressed uncertainly in the kind of rough homespun, narrow-waisted clothing that she hadn’t worn since she was fourteen. She insisted on carrying the basket full of books and, arm in arm with the other woman, they walked down the gangplank amidst all the other passengers. Before stepping into the carriage, Agata turned and thought she glimpsed James’s golden beard in an enclosed carriage not far away. She brightened and waved. The woman grabbed her hand. She reddened in shame: that reckless gesture could have spoiled everything.

James climbed the gangplank. The captain and his steward were waiting for him, and together they went to knock at the door of Agata’s cabin. There was no answer. They knocked again; then the steward pulled out his skeleton key and unlocked the door. There on the bunk, neatly folded, lay Agata’s habit, tunic, and scapular. The white, finely pleated wimple contrasted with the black of the habit like a round meringue.

 

James sent the others away. Sitting on the bunk next to the habit, his fingers teased at the pleats of the wimple, and he thought. In early January he had been informed that in Palermo a Carbonaro was walking the streets of the city, announcing a revolt to take place on January 12, and that squads of field guards under the command of the pro-independence baronry and armed bands would join with the liberal bourgeoisie. The minute he learned that Agata was no longer at the Cecconi home, the vision of her torn from the house and subjected to the violence of the mob had tortured him, until the cardinal asked James to bring his niece back to Naples. Excited at the prospect of seeing her again soon, James was soon tormented by the fear that her mother had persuaded Agata to stay with her. He had to find out what Agata’s feelings toward him were now. After the visit from the British consul at Girgenti to the convent, he had arranged to embark her on one of his steamships as soon as she set foot in Naples; he would send her to England, while he took the necessary steps with the Curia and the Pope to have her vows dissolved—an easy enough task, if conducted diplomatically. But now Agata’s inexplicable disappearance from her cabin had thrown him into a coil of black despair.

The cardinal had sent Father Cuoco and two lay sisters down to the Naples waterfront, in an enclosed carriage, to convey Agata to Gaeta, and from there into a convent in the Papal State. The three of them waited for the last passengers to leave the boat before they went aboard. They were shocked when they found the cabin door blocked by the captain and crew: the nun had vanished; access to the cabin was forbidden.

James Garson’s coach and six had just entered the courtyard of the cardinal’s residence. The minute the cardinal received the note in which James informed him that he had information about Donna Maria Ninfa, he had agreed to see him.

The sweet scent of early-blooming jasmine filled the air—the odor of power, thought James, with irritation.

“I am distraught over what happened, and I hold myself personally responsible,” he began.

“Tell me.” And the cardinal listened with close attention to the details of Agata’s voyage, beginning with the trip aboard the tartan from the loading docks in Licata. James drew out the little or nothing that he had to recount in the hope that the cardinal might inadvertently let slip his plans for Agata. He told the cardinal that the captain of the steamer had questioned the crew; it seemed certain that Agata had been in contact with no one, besides the two nuns that James had arranged to have sent aboard to care for her, and that she had asked to be given a cabin all to herself, a request that had been granted. “This morning, Donna Maria Ninfa ate a hearty breakfast and waited in her cabin to be taken away. She seemed very contented, and she even sang to herself.”

“She has a lovely voice,” the cardinal had sighed. Nodding agreement, James had betrayed himself. “You know her, don’t you?” The cardinal’s gaze was cutting.

“Certainly. It was I who offered passage to the Marescialla and her daughters, when the field marshal died, and I also met her at Palazzo Padellani before her simple profession.”

“I was forgetting.” A new thought filtered into the cardinal’s mind: that it might all have been organized by Donna Gesuela, to keep from losing her daughter. “What about Palermo?”

The Sicilians were like so many drunks, James said, they did not seem to realize that governing is a difficult task. They talked about waging war, but they had no army—neither troops, nor officers, nor generals, munitions, or provisions. No money. No administrators. Neither roads nor fleets. The illustrious exiles who had returned to their homeland had been given offices for which they were ill suited. Take the case of Amari, who had been put in charge of the Ministry of Finance: he was personally penniless, and had lived off the kindness of his Sicilian friends during his years in exile in France: he knew less than nothing about finance. “These is no education, there is no tradition of political involvement.”

“I must agree with you. And how could it be any different: out of a hundred Sicilians, only eleven know how to read and write!” said the cardinal. “Perhaps you don’t know that when the Jesuits came down here after the Council of Trent, they were speechless at the conditions in which the denizens of the two kingdoms lived—poor, uncouth, ignorant, and superstitious. In order to instill even a modicum of Christian conscience they were forced to employ instruments of persuasion that ranged from the gentle to the intrusive, striking fear, encouraging violent acts of penitence. In the late sixteenth century, the metaphor of the indios de por açá had become a commonplace.”

“Now you’re going too far, Eminence. A remedy can be found. You are certainly on a par with the other peoples of Europe.”

“Leopardi was right: the Italians are the equals of more advanced nations save in two fundamental aspects: literacy, and a complete confusion of ideas.” He paused, and then spoke freely, as if he were alone: “People forget and become weary of the good and the evil done by others, of other people’s lies and dishonesty, and treat both the good and the wicked with indifference, ignoring all moral and ethical values. Italians have empty lives, lives lived entirely in the present. But, being a social animal, the Italian cannot do without the esteem of his fellow man. And he obtains it, by working with what he possesses, that is vanity, of which however he has a complete understanding and utter scorn.

“The Italians laugh at life: they laugh at life far more heartily and with greater truth and intimate persuasion of their chilly scorn than any other nation on earth. Other nations laugh at things, not at individuals, as the Italian does. A society cannot remain unified if its people are busy mocking one another and continually expressing their utter contempt for their fellow man. In Italy, people take turns persecuting one another, they sting each other until the blood runs. If you do not respect your fellow man, you cannot in turn hope to be respected,” and here he paused. Then he resumed, slowly but inexorably, as if he were savoring James’s impatience.

“The chief foundation of an individual’s morality and of a people’s morality is a constant and profound sense of self-respect and the effort taken to preserve that sense of self-respect, a sensitivity concerning one’s honor. A man without self-respect can be neither just, nor honest, nor virtuous. Mazzini, an intelligent thinker—God and Fatherland, republican unity, equality of all citizens—is bound to fail. His vision will run aground as soon as it hits the los indios de por açá–the Indians on this side. An illiterate will not know what to make of his thoughts.”

“Why do you say that? It’s a defeatist attitude.” James couldn’t take any more. He wanted to know about Agata and nothing else.

“So that you, Captain Garson, will understand that the fewer the dealings you have with Italians, and with Donna Maria Ninfa in particular, the better it will be for everyone. Donna Maria Ninfa is safe and sound, wherever she may be. She has Padellani blood in her veins. And I’m here, worrying about her.” At that, the cardinal tugged his bell pull.

“So am I, Eminence.”

And James followed the cardinal’s secretary, who was holding the door open for him.