almost sixty choir nuns, eight or nine novices, a few young boarders, and twenty-five converse, all working so tirelessly together that most years the convent sends out baskets of early figs and pomegranates as gifts to the local bishop and as thanks—and encouragement—to its more generous patrons.
Not that they live on charity. Far from it. The river bordering the fourth side of the convent is its trade route as well as an extra form of security. Arriving by water, a visitor sees a dock carved out of the outer wall with a locked door, behind which are supply rooms, themselves locked again from the inner side so that all business can take place without the merchants or traders ever having to encounter the nuns directly. From here the convent takes in flour, fresh fish, whatever meat it does not rear itself, wine, spices, sugar, cloth, threads, inks, and paper. Some of the same barges that bring deliveries leave almost full again, with cases of hand-copied breviaries and hour books, embroidered cloths and church robes, medicines, liquors, and painted religious figurines. The convent’s cellars are packed with good wines for feast days and festivals, and the kitchens produce fresh bread daily, spiked with rosemary, along with bottles of the earliest pressings of olive oil, as green and fragrant as the pulp it is squeezed from. Add to this income the dowries of the choir nuns, the fees from the boarders, and the rents from a dozen or so properties bequeathed to the convent in perpetuity, and there are years when Santa Caterina boasts account books to rival a great estate.
Zuana offers Serafina morsels of this colorful picture as they pass along by the walls and the river storehouse, and there are moments when the young woman seems engaged enough even to ask questions. She would like to tell her more, but she knows there is no point.
It is always hard, understanding what is being gained in the moment at which something is also being taken away. For such a young woman to appreciate the different meanings of incarceration and freedom. How, for example, outside these walls free women will live their whole lives dictated by the decisions of others, yet inside, to a remarkable extent, they govern themselves. How here each and every nun has a voice and a vote (where else in Christendom would you find such a thing?), where they discuss and decide everything together, from the menu for the next saint’s day to the appointment of a new abbess or a choir mistress or a dozen other posts essential to the smooth governing of what is, in effect, a business as well as a spiritual refuge.
In this prison there are no fathers to bully or rage at the expensive uselessness of daughters, no brothers to tease and torment weaker sisters, no rutting drunken husbands poking constantly at tired or pious wives. Women live longer here: the plague finds it harder to jump the walls, and they are saved from all the scabby pus-filled diseases that pass from husband to wife through the marriage bed. Here no one’s womb drops out of her body from an excess of pregnancies, no one dies in the sweated agonies of childbirth or has to suffer the pain of burying half a dozen of her children. And if it is the sweetness of cherub flesh that pulls your heartstrings, there are young ones enough to coddle and nurture, either in the girl children sent to learn to read and write or in the newborn wide-eyed infants who pass through the parlatorio on family visits. Indeed, while angry new novices might laugh at the idea of leaving the gates open to the world, the fact is that for each half-dozen young women who come in howling, there is often an older one, newly widowed or longing to be so, eager for the moment when she might enter of her own accord.
But this is not the time for such special pleading, and Zuana keeps her thoughts to herself as she loops their course back toward the main buildings. As they reach the third quarter where the street begins again, there is
Not that they live on charity. Far from it. The river bordering the fourth side of the convent is its trade route as well as an extra form of security. Arriving by water, a visitor sees a dock carved out of the outer wall with a locked door, behind which are supply rooms, themselves locked again from the inner side so that all business can take place without the merchants or traders ever having to encounter the nuns directly. From here the convent takes in flour, fresh fish, whatever meat it does not rear itself, wine, spices, sugar, cloth, threads, inks, and paper. Some of the same barges that bring deliveries leave almost full again, with cases of hand-copied breviaries and hour books, embroidered cloths and church robes, medicines, liquors, and painted religious figurines. The convent’s cellars are packed with good wines for feast days and festivals, and the kitchens produce fresh bread daily, spiked with rosemary, along with bottles of the earliest pressings of olive oil, as green and fragrant as the pulp it is squeezed from. Add to this income the dowries of the choir nuns, the fees from the boarders, and the rents from a dozen or so properties bequeathed to the convent in perpetuity, and there are years when Santa Caterina boasts account books to rival a great estate.
Zuana offers Serafina morsels of this colorful picture as they pass along by the walls and the river storehouse, and there are moments when the young woman seems engaged enough even to ask questions. She would like to tell her more, but she knows there is no point.
It is always hard, understanding what is being gained in the moment at which something is also being taken away. For such a young woman to appreciate the different meanings of incarceration and freedom. How, for example, outside these walls free women will live their whole lives dictated by the decisions of others, yet inside, to a remarkable extent, they govern themselves. How here each and every nun has a voice and a vote (where else in Christendom would you find such a thing?), where they discuss and decide everything together, from the menu for the next saint’s day to the appointment of a new abbess or a choir mistress or a dozen other posts essential to the smooth governing of what is, in effect, a business as well as a spiritual refuge.
In this prison there are no fathers to bully or rage at the expensive uselessness of daughters, no brothers to tease and torment weaker sisters, no rutting drunken husbands poking constantly at tired or pious wives. Women live longer here: the plague finds it harder to jump the walls, and they are saved from all the scabby pus-filled diseases that pass from husband to wife through the marriage bed. Here no one’s womb drops out of her body from an excess of pregnancies, no one dies in the sweated agonies of childbirth or has to suffer the pain of burying half a dozen of her children. And if it is the sweetness of cherub flesh that pulls your heartstrings, there are young ones enough to coddle and nurture, either in the girl children sent to learn to read and write or in the newborn wide-eyed infants who pass through the parlatorio on family visits. Indeed, while angry new novices might laugh at the idea of leaving the gates open to the world, the fact is that for each half-dozen young women who come in howling, there is often an older one, newly widowed or longing to be so, eager for the moment when she might enter of her own accord.
But this is not the time for such special pleading, and Zuana keeps her thoughts to herself as she loops their course back toward the main buildings. As they reach the third quarter where the street begins again, there is
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