The Palace

PART II Chapter Eight

  Suor Merzede had just begun the Agnus Dei when there was a disturbance at the back of the chapel. The assembled Celestiane nuns persevered through the prayer until the noise became too great. With patient resignation the familiar Latin words straggled to a stop and Suor Signale stepped out of the choir to look to her unfortunate charge.

  Estasia shrieked as the nun touched her. "No! Nothing holy!" She twisted violently, crouching low as Suor Signale approached her once again. "No, nothing holy! I won't have it!"

  Suor Signale eluded Estasia's flailing hands and long fingernails, saying gently, "Dear Estasia, don't be troubled. If you will come with me, you may be comfortable once again. "

  By this time Suor Merzede, Superiora of the Sacro Infante convent, had come to join Suor Signale, and said in an undervoice, "She's getting worse. "

  "Yes, she is," Suor Signale agreed in an undervoice, then tried once more to calm Estasia. "No, my dear, don't be troubled in this way. Pray to God to forgive you. He is the beginning of tranquillity. "

  It was doubtful that Estasia heard her at all. She had fallen to her knees and wailed in a hideous voice. "The Devil is tempting me. See how he tempts me!" She threw herself backward. "See how he uses me. See what he does to me!" Her skirts were flung back and she spread her thighs.

  "Oh, dear. " Suor Signale sighed. "It will take time, Superiora. I'm afraid these seizures don't pass quickly. In a moment she will say that a thousand devils are ravishing her. " The nun crossed herself. "It puts me out of all charity with her. " It was a terrible admission for the nun to make.

  "What God sends you, accept gladly in His name," Suor Merzede admonished her, but gently. "See if you can persuade her to confess. I know you have before," she said resignedly. "She has resisted. But we must not be remiss in our faith because others wander. " With that she turned once again and motioned to the assembled nuns to resume their prayers.

  The gentle petition of the Agnus Dei filled the chapel as Suor Signale moved nearer to Estasia.

  "No! No! No!" The cry rent the prayers, but the nuns paid no attention, their voices keeping up the words in a steady rhythm. Estasia flung herself to the stone floor and began to pull off the old gonella she wore.

  "Now, sweet Donna Estasia," Suor Signale said, a certain asperity creeping into her tone. "You must not demean yourself this way. Ask God to give you strength to resist. "

  Estasia struck out at her, her hands like claws, her hazel eyes livid with hatred. "You shall not touch me! It is not for you to touch me. I don't want you. I want the other. See where the demons come. See how they stretch out their hands to me. See how they caress me, how they burn my flesh with their touch. " She was almost naked now, and she lay supine, her legs apart, her head flung back. "No man, no one has done this to me. Only the demons can gratify my senses. They fill me everywhere. " Her breathing slowed, sighed. She panted deeply. "Deeper! Deeper! Your seed burns me like vitriol. Your members are hot as furnace hooks. " Her body tensed, spasmed, she shouted terrible blasphemies, and then fell back heavily, her face slicked with sweat, her body quiet.

  Suor Signale had watched this with annoyed detachment, and recognized the end of the episode. She was relieved that it had taken no longer. Other times Estasia had writhed for hours, bruising herself, digging wounds into her flesh with her fingernails. This seizure had been as brief as it was intense, and Suor Signale was glad it was over. She knew from past experience that it was these times immediately following her erotic fits that Estasia was the most tractable, the most cooperative.

  Gathering up Estasia's discarded gonella, Suor Signale reached gently for her suddenly lethargic charge. "Buona Donna, cover yourself. It isn't seemly for you to be naked in chapel. For your duty to the Good God Who loves you, treat yourself with the respect that is due to one of His creatures. "

  "Uum?" Estasia turned to the nun, and realization flooded her. Her eyes grew bright, and she looked down, sickened, at her voluptuous body, and then at the other Celestiane Sisters who continued their devotions.

  "It happened again?" she said, anguish in her tone, her eyes filling with tears. "The devils came again?"

  "You are better now," Suor Signale assured her, attempting once more to draw her from the chapel.

  "Oh, good Sisters," Estasia cried aloud, "how can you bear one such as me? Why do you not abandon me to my fate? Leave me on the mountainside where beasts will tear me to pieces! I don't deserve your kindness. I deserve your wrath, your curses. " She cried, great racking sobs drowning the gentle susurrus of prayers.

  "Donna Estasia," Suor Signale said firmly as she took the weeping woman by the shoulders, "control yourself. If you are so filled with shame, think of the outrage you are committing at this moment. " Inwardly the nun was horrified at her own outburst, but it seemed to have a calming effect on Estasia, who shuddered and clung suddenly to Suor Signale, making tiny gasps against her coif.

  "I am unworthy. I am unworthy. I am unworthy," Estasia murmured with the same intensity that the nuns used in their repeated litanies.

  Suor Signale clenched her hands on the beads of her rosary and admonished herself to be charitable. "Donna Estasia," she said, pulling her tightly locked hands away from her habit, "you are not doing as well as you should. It is unwise of you to remain here. You are in need of rest and reflection. " A thought occurred to her. "Have you eaten today?"

  Estasia shook her head. "I have no taste for food. I want only to think, to beg God to forgive me, so that I can confess my great errors. So many sins. So many, many sins. " She gave the nun a sly sideways glance. "Do you envy me my sins, Suor Signale?"

  "No," the nun answered brusquely. "I envy no one their sins. "

  "But you would have liked mine," Estasia persisted. "I had a great many lovers, some of them very rich, some of them very beautiful men. They were all intoxicated with me. They made themselves drunk with my body. Only I could satisfy them. Don't you ever wish, in the dark of the night, when you lie alone on your bed, that you had a lover who would so possess you that you were yourself no longer?"

  Suor Signale controlled her sense of outrage. "The love that fills me, Donna Estasia," she said with asperity as she held open the door to the chapel, "is the love of Christ. It is not a love of the body, but a love of the soul. It does not pass when the tryst is over, when the heat of lust is spent. "

  Estasia laughed as she left the chapel beside Suor Signale. "You poor creature. What do I care if I am damned, so long as the devils in hell cannot resist me. " There was a merry light in her face as she reached the door of her cell a few steps beyond the cloister. "If lust is a sin in heaven, it must be a virtue in hell. " She giggled. "Therefore I will be virtuous. "

  Suor Signale blocked Estasia's way into the cell, and there was a quality of light to her face made more penetrating by the white gorget, coif and wimple that framed it. "Listen to me, Donna Estasia. You will send yourself to eternal damnation with your loose words. Eternal damnation! You think that you will be satisfied by demons because they assail you with pleasure, hideous pleasure now. But how do you know what will become of you? And how many times can you be ravished and still feel anything? Hell numbs you, and even the keenest agony would be preferable to the unending, intolerable numbness. There is no passion, not even the passion of hurt there. Hell is boredom, Estasia; it is satiety. Glutted in every sense, you will be without strength, without joy, without anguish throughout eternity, forever repeating that which brought you joy and terror, but finding neither. What is to be gained? Why do you persist in your error, when you know it can avail you nothing? Make confession. Be taken into the Church again, and share in the joy that exalts the spirit and fills the soul. You wanted to know if I ever missed a lover. What lover can lift me up as the love of Christ does? What pleasure of the body compares with the transcendent bliss of the soul?" She stopped abruptly a
nd turned away from Estasia. "Forgive me, Buona Donna. I didn't mean to speak to you in this way. It is immodest of me, and improper. "

  Estasia was staring at her, and at the nun's apology she shook her head as if waking from a dream. "No. You were right to speak to me thus. It's wrong of me to revile you, when I'm the one in error. " She stopped, then turned away from Suor Signale, saying, "Do you really feel so transported? Is the love of Christ so wonderful?" The words were helpless, almost childlike.

  "Oh, Buona Donna!" Suor Signale's lustrous eyes filled with tears and she reached to embrace Estasia. "There is nothing in the world that comes near it. The greatest pleasures are pale in comparison. You think of your lovers and of the ravishment of devils, but they are nothing, nothing at all. Christ is all glory. His Mystery, His Splendor! there are no words to tell you what terrible sweetness fills my heart at the thought of Him. "

  The cell was plain, whitewashed on walls and ceiling, the floor flagged with natural stone. The narrow bed had a straw-filled mattress and two blankets. There was no pillow. Over the bed hung a simple crucifix, and at the moment, light touched it, making the wooden figure glow with the warm tones of life. A small chest held Estasia's few belongings and also served as a chair. One candle stood on the chest. Until that moment the room had seemed unutterably ugly, but now, with Suor Signale's words sounding in her like a call to battle, the cell was transformed. Dazed, Estasia walked into the cell and rather absently took her gonella once again, only to lay it aside before she stretched out on the comfortless bed.

  "Donna Estasia. . . ?" the Celestian nun asked uncertainly, dreading another seizure like the one in the chapel.

  "I am well, Suor Signale," Estasia assured her in an odd, remote tone.

  "But you must eat a meal yet, Buona Donna. "

  Estasia opened her eyes a moment. "It is not mortal bread that will nourish me now," she announced, and closed her eyes again.

  When she had shut the door of Estasia's cell, Suor Signale hastened to the chapel. The last of the prayers were being recited, and Suor Signale said them rapidly, not thinking too much of the significance of the words. Her thoughts were still on Donna Estasia, and the more she thought, the more worried she became.

  "How is she, Suor Signale?" Suor Merzede asked when the ritual was over.

  Suor Signale answered honestly, "I don't know. She's calmer than she's ever been, and that should make me grateful, but I don't trust it. She might do something. . . much worse. " Without knowing what she did, Suor Signale tangled her hands in her rosary and began to move the beads automatically through her fingers.

  "Do you think she could go home?"

  "If she remains as she is now. . . " Suor Signale broke off, frowning.

  "You have some concern, Suor Signale. Tell me what it is. " The Superiora rarely gave orders, but this was plainly one of those occasions. She waited while the nun gathered her thoughts.

  "If she would only confess. Then perhaps there would be no more of this reveling with demons. Perhaps they are demons, and they do assault her as she claims. And perhaps they are mere dreams, and she visits them on herself. " She hesitated, knowing she was perilously near heresy.

  "Go on," Suor Merzede encouraged her. "If you are in the wrong, God will mete out your punishment. But if you are right, it is your duty to speak so that the soul of Donna Estasia may be saved. "

  "As you wish, Suor Merzede. " Suor Signale said against a sudden tightness in her throat. Her eyes closed as she composed herself, breathing a prayer for guidance before she said, "Donna Estasia had many lovers after she became a widow. It's common knowledge. And it was rumored that she satisfied them in many ways, including some that are contrary to the teaching of the Church. If that's so, then she may long for those carnal acts, and being unable to achieve them any other way, entrusts them to the demons of her mind. " She gave her Superiora a defiant stare. "I think she wants the demons. I think she enjoys them. "

  "And that's why you fear her calm now?" Suor Merzede nodded as she considered it. "I have seen this before, once or twice. The women were not usually young and beautiful. But it is possible. " She gazed pensively at Suor Signale. "Her cousin Sandro Filipepi comes tomorrow to see her. What do you think?"

  "He should see her," Suor Signale said promptly.

  "And should he take her home?"

  This time it took Suor Signale some little time to answer. "No. I think that until she confesses, it would be better that she remain with us. "

  Suor Merzede nodded once more. "I believe you're right, Suor Signale. I pray God gives me the words to persuade Filipepi. There will be trouble enough if she remains here. But should she go into the world again, who knows what would happen?"

  Suor Signale crossed herself and joined her hands and began to pray. After a moment, when Suor Merzede had left her, she dropped to her knees, and as her rapture grew, she swayed deliriously and then fell forward onto the floor.

  Text of two identical letters from il Conte Francesco Ragoczy da San Germano to the clerk of la Signoria, Gradazo Ondante, and to Ippolito Andrea Cinquecampi, officer of i Lanzi, written simultaneously with the left and right hands:

  To the most respected clerk of i Priori and Console/ To the excellent Capitano Ippolito Andrea Cinquecampi, il Conte Francesco Ragoczy da San Germano commends himself and asks that you will consider this report and act upon it accordingly.

  Yesterday, being the Feast of San Giocoppo, I had occasion to be away from my palazzo for many hours. Owing to the holiness of the day, I dismissed all but one of my servants so that they might spend the time in devotion appropriate to the honoring of the Apostle. The remaining servant was my houseman, Ruggiero, who is known to you. He, being an honest and industrious man, was busy with household accounts in a room where I keep such records, toward the rear of my palazzo. I wish you to realize that Ruggiero is not a young man, and his labors are as much as he can accommodate.

  The day being holy and the city of Fiorenza at its devotions, I thought my home and property safe. But as it turned out, this was not the case. A person or persons unknown to my servant broke into the house. They subdued my houseman at the points of their swords and they bound him in the stable while the man who surprised Ruggiero and his companions ransacked my palazzo. Apparently they were after coins and other such materials, for they went to the room where I keep my scales and other instruments of measurement. They took three of the scales, most of the weights, and a certain amount of gold which was there to be weighed.

  Also, they took two manuscripts bound in leather and written in a tongue they cannot possibly understand. The loss of that manuscript is a major one for me, far exceeding the worth of the gold.

  In the process of robbing my weighing room, they broke several of the instruments, and I invite you to send your agent or come yourself to assess the damage that was done.

  I am abashed with the need to remind you that members of my household have suffered at the hands of unknown Fiorenzan rowdies before. Magister Branco is still not recovered from his beating. And now, this second intrusion makes it necessary and I once again request that you enforce the laws that govern la Repubblica. If for some reason you are unwilling or unable to do so, I will be forced to seek other remedies.

  Let me assure you that I look forward to receiving you or your agent at the nearest possible hour. I am certain that if you are willing to examine the evidence you will see that there has been an injustice committed here.

  In happy anticipation of the mutually satisfactory conclusion of this lamentable affair, I am honored to sign myself.

  Francesco Ragoczy da San Germano

  In Fiorenza, May 2, 1494