Cross My Heart (2 page)

I’m in the convent garden—and so is Abbess Lucrezia. It’s too late to turn around. She has seen me seeing her. She fixes her pale, watery old reptilian eyes on me, still and alert.

“You’re needed in the infirmary. Go there directly.”

I bow my head and rush off.

It’s cool in the infirmary, and it smells pleasant today. Candles twinkle and shimmer in the dark. There’s a man making a terrible noise—wails and growls like those of two stray dogs at each other’s throats. He’s been put on one of the hard infirmary benches. Cushions and blankets are piled around him to protect his thrashing limbs from the
bareness of the place. His body twists as though he’s possessed. From his mouth comes a whitish-yellow froth, like a clump of sea foam left on the Lido on a stormy day. His eyes roll back and the lids quiver.

Sister Maria runs around and around the bench like an ineffectual insect, trying to get near enough to tend to him. She gets close, but one of his limbs lashes out and strikes her, knocking her prayer book out of one hand and a bottle of medicine from the other. She glances at me and runs to the shelf, grabbing a small length of wood.

“He’ll bite out his tongue in a moment,” she says. “Hold his arms!”

I try to restrain his twisting limbs as she attempts to wedge the piece of wood into his mouth. I don’t think there’s any chance she’ll succeed. The man’s mouth alternately gapes, wide and drooling, and then clenches shut—immovable and grunting. Sister Maria tries to find an elusive moment in between these contortions to force the wood in between the man’s teeth. She gives up the battle and slides away from him, exhausted and sweating, waving an arm limply at me, saying, “Take over. Take over.”

“What am I to do?”

“Peony root,” she gasps. “He must swallow the extract from this bottle. If we can’t get him to take it, he may die.” She holds the small cracked bottle up in front of me, and her hand is trembling so much that some of the liquid comes splashing out. “And remember—his tongue.” With the other hand she holds up the wooden wedge.

I’m the one who’ll have to find a way of getting them into his mouth. I take the bottle and wood and send up a prayer.
Lord, give me strength
.

I approach the man very slowly. I touch his chest and feel the power of a stampeding horse rumble inside him. I look straight at his face, and for a second I think that he’s looking into my eyes too. But then he rolls and thrashes again and the beast within him seems to swell.

I can do this
, I tell myself. I can grapple with fierce things.

Avoiding the worst of his kicking and scratching, I manage to clamber onto him and kneel on his chest. From this height I try to drop the golden peony liquid into his mouth, but his head jerks wildly from one direction to another. Sister Maria chants and turns the pages of her book of healing prayer.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I growl quietly as I wrestle with the monster beneath me.

All of a sudden I’m sure there’s something wicked about this. I’m squatting on top of a man! I’m touching his body as he writhes and twists beneath me. But Sister Maria doesn’t tell me to stop. She carries on chanting in a mournful monotone. I watch the man’s face, waiting for the next grotesque, convulsive yawn. My timing is good, because as his mouth opens I clank the lip of the bottle against his teeth and give him some of the medicine. He gags, and I think he’s going to choke. I try to put the wooden wedge in then. But gently he splutters it away. The storm is receding.

“Calma,”
I say quietly to him.
“Calma.”
I touch his hair and wipe his forehead. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say anything. He shudders like a wild tide going out. Maria doesn’t cease her incantations. She’s locked into the rhythm of prayer, and seems afraid to stop in case the spell is broken.
I don’t know if it’s the prayer or the peony that’s cured him. Perhaps whatever was within him has simply run its course. He stops jerking, and peace ripples through his body. I slide off him, back onto the ground.

The man props himself up on his elbows and looks at me. “Oh, Christ in heaven, not again. Oh, Jesus, I was near undone.”

“You’re much better, sir,” I say to him.

“Yes, well, thank you, little sister.” He looks at the bottle of peony oil, almost empty, still in my hand. “Thank you for taking the poison out of me. I’m almost myself again.”

“Yes, but you’re very weak.”

His face darkens and he grabs my arm, pulling me closer to him. “Weak—what do you mean? How dare you?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I only meant you must be tired. You need rest. You need to drink something.”

He releases me and slumps back onto the bench. “You’re right,” he mutters. “I’m a weak man. Weak and yielding.”

“Sir, I didn’t mean weak of spirit or weak of soul,” I say. “Just weak in your body. Because of what you’ve endured.”

He smiles, but his voice is serious. “No one in Venice can find out what I suffer.”

I promise him I won’t tell a soul.

His gaze flickers to Sister Maria. Then he nods and tells me I’m a good girl. “I trust you,” he says. “I do, sincerely.”

Sister Maria ushers me away. She holds a stern finger up to her curled lips: “Remember, Laura,” she says, “not a single word about this to anyone. This is a secret. Is that clear?
Uno segreto
.”

I whisper the word to myself a couple of times. It has a dark sound. To say it I have to hiss. Then I have to close the
back of my throat and roll the tip of my tongue along the roof of my mouth and peep it out between my teeth as if, for a second, that same tongue is trying to escape.

Se—gre—to
.

Sibilant at the beginning. Guttural in the middle.

Explosive at the end.

A
t the end of choir practice the next day, I’m filing out of the chapel when I see Annalena. She’s standing at the door and beckons to me with her finger. She tells me she has a message. “What? What is it?” I ask as I run along beside her and we wind our way back to the sleeping quarters.

She refuses to say a thing. “Wait,” she tells me. “Will you wait and stop pestering me?”

Even though I’m superior to her, and she’s supposed to do what I say, every time I look at Annalena I feel envious. There’s something about her that is free and defiant and always unafraid.

Back in the room she gets me to sit down. She takes off my veil and tells me my hair is a disgrace. “Oh, Annalena,” I say to her, “is that what you rushed me up here for?”

“No,” she says, and she stands behind me brushing my mop with long slow strokes. The flimsy curtain hanging over my window flails like a live, tethered thing in the
breeze. Through that slow flip-flapping, other sounds float up from the Venetian day: the clicking of heels on stone, the lapping of water in wind, the shouting of men in boats, the laughter of children echoing in the side streets around the convent.

Annalena’s message is that the Abbess wants to talk to me.

“Really?” I turn to her so that my hair becomes twisted and tangled around the comb.

“Stop that, or the Abbess will make you cut it off.”

“For goodness’ sake, Annalena, what does she want to talk to me about?”

“I don’t know, but it’s something important. I can feel it. Stop thrashing!”

Annalena is clever. Always watching, always noticing. A talent for looking, the Abbess said about her once, although I don’t think she meant it as a compliment.

She finishes with the brushing and seems to think me presentable. She says that I’m to go to the Abbess’s study straightaway. She tells me not to worry, that God is with me all the time. I look into Annalena’s face and she seems so very sad.

My nerves are taut as I make my way to the Abbess’s room. Did Sister Maria report the way I behaved in the infirmary with the sick man—the way I climbed onto him? Or has the Abbess intercepted Beatrice’s reply? Is there something in it that’s put me in terrible trouble?

I remember my father’s face on the day he stood outside the great door of this place, giving no salute and showing no emotion as I was dragged in. The flicker of relief in his
eyes as I yowled and the nuns pried my fingers from the bars and stepped on my feet to stop me from kicking.

He washed his hands of me that day. My mouth no longer needed to be fed. I was a liability lifted.

I was ten years old and still didn’t understand why it was I and not Beatrice who would be put away. That the dowry is better spent on one good husband than two mediocre ones.

I can still hear his last words before I was pulled through those studded convent doors. “The fee is paid,” he said to the Abbess.

The fee is never paid. No amount of gold will give me back my joyless days, my listless nights in this prison.

The Abbess motions to me to shut the door. “Good morning, Sister Laura. Please sit down.”

Any sign of weakness feeds her and makes her even stronger. It’s taken me a long time to learn that. I sit, but I manage to hold her watery gaze.

She remains standing. Behind her hangs a great painting from which the rampant lion of the Agliardi Vertova family roars silently down upon the room. Between us, on the table, her Bible sits like a heavy rectangular rock. We all know that the Abbess has a special relationship with God. He comes to her in visions and she translates his lofty words for the rest of us. I think I’m ready for anything. But I’m not prepared for what comes next.

“Laura, you know that I’ve always counseled the sisters here to learn to expect changes in their lives.”

I’ve never heard her say this to anyone. Nothing ever changes in the convent.

She continues, solemn, almost reciting, like she’s teaching
me a new prayer. “Some changes are great, though at the time they seem small. Others are small, though at the time they seem great.”

She looks crosser and sterner than usual, and I’m sure that Sister Maria has briefed her in clammy detail about my improper conduct in the infirmary. I’m going to spend a year in solitary confinement, where La Lunatica lost her mind. God, don’t let her send me there.

The Abbess fingers the golden lettering on her Bible and fondles the silk ribbon bookmark that peeps from the pages in the same way another woman might caress the hand of an infant.

Then she looks up and says: “You’re going to leave the convent, Laura. Someone will be waiting for you at the south entrance at exactly six o’clock.” She doesn’t falter and her face is hard like a stone. Nothing except cold, unexplained instruction flickers from her. She hands me a grim little brown bundle wrapped in string. “These are the clothes you’re to wear. We won’t see you again.”

For a time I’m completely still. Perhaps it’s a cruel game. Or perhaps she’s simply testing me.

I don’t think there’s any wisdom in asking the thousand questions that clatter inside my head. I know that if I do, the Abbess will hold up her smooth pale hand between us. In all the time I’ve been at the convent, I’ve never heard her answer a single question. Eventually you learn to stop asking. I suppose that’s the idea.

She dismisses me and I walk out to the corridor. La Pungenta is there and she looks at me as though I’m someone she’s never seen before.

“What?” I say. “What have I done?”

“Nothing, Laura. I came looking for you as soon as I heard.”

“Heard what?”

“That you’re getting out.”

I feel something waking up inside me. Tonight as the sun goes down on Venice, Beatrice and I will be flying along the pathways and canals as they lap back and forth in celebration beside us. We really will run together to the Lido, and Paulina’s grandmother will again give us
sospiri di monaca
, and we will stuff them into our mouths and inhale the sweet powder.

I’ll be able to taste again the sugars and spices of this twinkling, shimmering city. Everything is about to change.

“L
a Muta is leaving the convent. She’s leaving today! Her father’s sent for her.”

I can almost hear them whispering these words even though they don’t say anything to me. Somehow I know the news is out. I know from the way that they all turn towards me as I run back to my cell. All these staring women and girls. All their possibilities and dreams and longings emptied out onto the Altar of the Angels, left there the day each was forced to commit herself to Christ.