The aroma of freshly baked pastry wafts from the small, beautifully wrapped package that I carry back from my aunt in the convent. I anticipate the taste of the soft leaves made with milk and fresh butter from the convent’s goats cloistered behind the building. We always have these pastries at Easter time, served along with roasted piglet, radicchio, and tender pea shoots. My aunt is exceptionally talented with them, and in my pregnant state I crave sweets, more than I have ever wanted to eat.
“Your aunt is a genius with the spatula and the fire,” the sister says to me as she escorts me from the visitors’ room to the main entrance of the convent. I would not call her elderly, and I suspect that she appears older than she is. Even though I cannot see her legs under her long habit, I imagine that one leg is significantly longer than the other because she hobbles, carrying her weight on one side.
“I am certain that her skills are well known here, sorella.”
“She is famous!” the nun flashes a few greyed, crooked teeth. She herself is carrying another bag with pastries inside. I know that Antonella will be waiting for me back at the painter’s house, wanting to study my aunt’s confections with great interest, spending many hours trying to recreate the recipe.
I have been avoiding my aunt but she has written to me several times. At Master Trevisan’s canal-side door I have received small folds of paper with her delicate, looping handwriting, entreating me to visit.
Even though she is the one locked behind the iron grille, she seems one of the only ones who can give me the information that I so desperately desire. And so I come to see her, and pray that she will not see me so changed.
Suddenly, a small door swings open and a small boy spills into the convent corridor. “Dolci! I smell dolci!” His high-pitched voice booms in the brick-vaulted corridor, and he rushes toward the nun.
“Get back inside—cattivo!” The nun yells in a stern voice. She swats the boy with her hand, then grasps his shoulders and presses him against her girth, as if she might squeeze the breath out of him. “These are not for you!” she says. He wriggles free, laughing, and escapes through another door open to the corridor. “Cattivo!” the nun yells again, then flashes a smirk at me to show that she is joking.
My eyes follow the running boy into the room. I see flames in a great hearth. Around the room are several steaming cauldrons and piles of linens. Children of all ages with their heads wrapped in rags are beating out the linens over the heat. From the small sliver of an opening in the door I see that the convent laundry is vast. I watch a young girl, her sleeves rolled up to reveal muscled forearms, rubbing a cloth over a washboard.
“I did not know there were so many children here,” I say.
“What in heavens do you think we are here for?” the nun shrugs. “This is what we do. They work, yes. We give them jobs in the laundry, the kitchen, the boathouse, cleaning the dining hall, the latrines. But we also teach them their letters. Many of them go on to do great things in the city and on terra firma, I am proud to say.” She gestures vaguely in the direction of the mainland.
“All of them are orphans?”
She nods. “Well, nearly all. They come to us every day. Right here in fact.”
We approach the side door to the convent, the one I have seen from the quayside, the one with the opening where people leave small bundles in the middle of the night and press money through the opening in the marble to pay for their care. On the interior side of the door I see that there is more than an opening. There is a giant wooden wheel like a grindstone, set horizontally to turn around a vertical column. Part of it projects outside the convent wall to form a ledge beneath the window. When people place their unwanted babies on it, they turn the wheel and the baby is ushered seamlessly inside the convent walls to the care of the sisters. A small wooden trap pricks a string that operates a small brass bell.
“When the bell rings we drop what we are doing to come see what God has brought us,” the nun tells me.
I stare at the wheel and ponder the many reasons why someone might to want to hand over a baby.
As if reading my mind, the nun says, “Sometimes there is a letter that comes with the baby. “More often not.”
“A letter?”
She nods. “So many unfortunate stories,” she clucks. “Most often those born outside the sanctity of marriage. Or the privilege of money. It costs to raise a child,” she says, rubbing her fingers together as if she were fingering a coin. Then she shrugs. “But then others with charitable intentions place money in the box, so the Lord provides for these poor babes.”
I reach my hand out to touch the wooden wheel, feeling it budge and creak on its metal track beneath my hand. Just then, I feel a small kick in my side.