I continued to kneel by his side, quiet, numb.
“I will pray for you,” he said. He placed his dry hand on my brow. Alone in my cell I knelt down and prayed. I trembled at the thought of what I had done. I had committed a mortal sin and I had refused to ask for absolution. These were grounds for dismissal from the Order of Saint Francis, of course, and they were grounds for eternal damnation as well. I prayed to understand what I must do next. I should go back and ask for his forgiveness, and then for God’s forgiveness, but I could not. I had made a break and was determined to be free.
I got up and sat at my little writing table. I would hammer this out of my brain.
Adam and Eve were driven from the garden because they ate the forbidden fruit, and only afterward were they told to go and multiply. They were enjoined—by God Himself—to go forth and make love. Surely even the schoolmen would agree to this: from the beginning it was God’s will that we should come together in this way, and so he had blessed it with physical pleasure and crowned it with a sense of giving. The seed is not spent. It is poured into this sacred vessel, to become or not become a child, as God sees fit.
I reviewed my arguments and returned to Father Alfonso. He was asleep but, saint that he was, he sat up in his cot and pointed to the floor next to him. “You’ve come to confess,” he said. “You are a good Brother of Saint Francis.” But he listened impatiently as I talked of Adam and Eve and God’s command. “It is fornication!” he said, exasperated. “Your self-deception is worse than the sin itself.” He said a good deal more but I was only half listening until I heard him say, “You must leave the Order of Saint Francis and consign yourself to misery while you live, and suffer the pains of hell when you die.” He raised his hand and made the sign of the cross. “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen. May you find God’s mercy.”
That night, willful and still determined, I did not confess my sins. I returned to my cell and in the quiet and the dark I reckoned with my conscience. He must be right, of course, he was a priest and old and wise. I would be damned, an outcast while I lived and a soul in hell forever after. What could I do? I was an ignorant monk, reviled as a bastard from my birth, beaten and starved by the dyer and his wife, offered up to God by my natural father, friendless, without a family, and damned by my sins of desire. By lust. Because it could not be love, I acknowledged that, and so it must be lust. I tried to imagine myself in hell, in the second circle Dante reserves for the lustful—the pain of fire, the eternal flames—but in truth I could not imagine God damning me forever. Not me. Not really. I was not important enough to bother with. And what had I done that was so bad? And yet . . .
In the morning I went early to Father Alfonso and confessed my sins and received absolution. I had held it a light thing to be a Brother of Saint Francis and to live as a servant of the servants of God. But now that I might have to leave the Order, I saw that this mission house was my home. Father Alonso was my father and the dying Brothers were my family. I did not want to leave. I told myself it was fear of sin that sent me off to confession, but deep inside I knew it was something other. It was fear itself.
I knelt by Father Alfonso and told my sins. I promised to sever relations with that woman, to avoid every occasion of meeting her, and to sin no more. But inside I was angry: I had been brought to the edge of freedom and I had turned back. But then Father Alfonso pronounced the words of absolution and suddenly I found myself in tears. I was forgiven. I was born new and clean. I was a child of God once more.
CHAPTER
5
I
T WAS LATE
summer—September 8th—and the annual city fair was in its third day. Each year at this time Prato celebrates the greatest of its sacred relics, the
cintura della Madonna
, the sash worn by the Mother of God herself. The main square—the Piazza San Giovanni—becomes host to cloth merchants from all over the world who come to this fair to honor Mary and to show their wares, to sell, and to make sharp bargains. The Church of San Giovanni dominates the piazza that bears its name. Its stone porticoes extend in three sides around the piazza to make a great open market in the center and to provide shelter beneath its arches for makeshift booths where cloth is displayed on trestles. Here is wool and linen and fine damask and, close in to the church, the rich gold and red and green brocades of the master weavers of Florence. At fair time Prato empties itself into the square. Work in the fields is suspended and throngs of children push their way among the red robes of city officials and the dun cloaks of fieldworkers and the rags of the poor who have come for meat pies and shallot tarts and herbs fried in batter and whatever they can cadge from the rich or the unwary. Merchants wearing turbans and bloused trousers of Constantinople bargain with Jews from Florence and with rough Norsemen who grow their yellow hair down to their shoulders. Housewives and burghers and slaves mingle in the street. And, as Saint Augustine reminds us, death stalks silently among them all.
Three months had passed since my promise to sever relations with Maria Sabina, to avoid the occasion of sin, and to remain a child of God. I had tried to keep my promise and I had nearly succeeded. I prayed for purity. I kept myself free from the private sin, mostly. I took care to go to market each morning by the direct route and thus avoid any possibility of running into Maria Sabina. To speak truth, however, on two occasions I did pass through the Camposino San Paolo, leaving a chance encounter with her a matter for God to decide.
Indeed, on the first occasion I lingered there a while hoping Maria Sabina would see me and come out and invite me in, and when she did not, I went quickly up the stairs and, trembling in my knees, I knocked on the door. Her sister opened it—smiling at my eager guilt—and said Maria Sabina had gone to market and did I want to wait? The sister, Alessandra, was my age or perhaps younger and made me feel a fool, so I went on my way, a monk disgraced. In truth I would gladly have spent time with Alessandra, for she was young and slender and, I thought, eager to please. I would have welcomed the chance to try out my new skills on her. I could not get her from my mind and that afternoon on the way home, wantonly and without reason I spilled my seed behind a bush and that night I confessed both sins. It was an economical confession, two for one, and I knew myself a hypocrite.
On the second occasion I resolved merely to pass through the Camposino and if Maria Sabina was not there, I would keep on going—fast—to market; if she was there, I would just talk with her, briefly, and wish her good morning, and go away. She was there standing by the well and we went at once, without a word, to her little room above the stairs. She asked her sister Alessandra to leave us for a while and I was sorry to see her go, she was so lovely in herself. Maria Sabina and I made love, once, and then a second time. This was months ago, in July, and I had been chaste since that day.
Now it was September and I was on my way to market on this third day of the Madonna’s feast. It was hot already at the eighth hour of the morning. The smell of sweetbriar mingled with the scent of grapes fermenting and the acrid smell of newly pressed oil was in the air. Everything was ripening. Even the weeds that sprang up along the gutters were in flower. The kitchen gardens were thick with late lettuce and beans and leeks. There were pots of sage and parsley set out upon the windowsills and stairways.
In the trees the birds were chirping. There were no other sounds, not even the barking of dogs. Everyone was at the fair.
I was crossing through the tiny Camposino San Paolo just as Alessandra descended the stairs. She was shorter than Maria Sabina and slighter of form, but she had the same kind of dark beauty and her eyes were a deep green. I had not noticed this before. “The handsome friar,” she said, and laughed. “Sabina will be glad to see you. She’s not feeling well enough to go to the fair.” She went off across the Camposino as I stared after her with desire. When she was out of sight, I went up the stairs.
Maria Sabina lay propped up on one elbow, looking at me as I peeped in the door. “Alessandra says you’re not well,” I said.
“I’m hot,” she said, “I have a fever,” and indeed her face was warm to my touch. I brought some cool water from a jug and gave her to drink and then I mopped her brow with a wet cloth. “That’s better,” she said. “I feel better.” I sat on the floor by her side, looking at her, stiff with desire. I stroked her hair and lay my palm along her cheek and in a while I kissed her softly and then not so softly. She opened to me and we made love, with some haste this time and with less pleasure than before, and though I was eager for more I could see that she was exhausted, ill. Her flesh was on fire.
“Are you all right?” I asked and she nodded vaguely. I got her more water. I soothed her brow again. But despite my desire and despite her good will, in the end she said, “Go. I feel much better now. But you must go.”
I
WOULD BE
late to the market. The best fish would be gone and the olive bread and at best I would be late with the stuffs for dinner. Brother Isaac was patient about everything except tardiness. I would have to bring him his favorite treat, oat cakes of two kinds, sweetened and unsweetened. He would not be deceived by this but he would be more forgiving.
Even from a distance I could hear piping and the sounds of lute and tambour. Tumblers and acrobats were at their work, and jugglers who kept several apples in the air at once and sometimes even knives. There was a tiny monkey on a leash with a begging cup in hand and a silk turban on its head. Players were crying out news of their performance at the inn: the tale of Adam’s fall and the true history of King Herod and the comedy of Noah and his Wife. The players always interested me. They are lechers, it is true, but men of wit and talent nonetheless. The fair was at its height and the smell and din of the crowd were overpowering. I wanted only to purchase the stuffs for dinner and be on my way.
I had bought hot game pies and loaves of twopenny bread and a mess of comfits so that Brother Isaac would have only small preparation for dinner when suddenly a trumpet blast rose from the crowd in the square. Three more blasts followed, and from just beneath the church steps a loud cry went up, shouts of pleasure mixed with curses and obscenities. Bets had just been placed. I turned, expecting to see a game of hazard, and found instead the cruelest of Prato’s festival sports: a live cat had been nailed to a post and three men, their heads shaved and their hands tied behind their backs, were competing to crush the life out of her by butting her with their naked heads. The cat was terrified and, maddened by pain, she clawed furiously against their blows. Blood coursed down their heads as they took their turns, laughing boldly, while the cat shrieked in terror and the crowd shouted encouragement and abuse. But the cat could not seem to die and the men would not give over. There was laughter and spilled blood and the screams of the crucified animal. Finally someone crushed the cat’s chest and silenced it forever. He was declared winner and he was marching about in triumph now, his fist raised above his head, spreading the ripe stink of fear as he proclaimed his victory. Money exchanged hands. The cat hung dead on the pole, a bloody rag. The crowd receded.
I had always hated this sport. I prefer cockfighting or bear baiting, sport where men can at least pretend it is the animals and not they themselves that are by nature vicious.
I was about to leave the piazza when at the foot of the church stairs I caught sight of Spinetta, the dyer’s wife, crouched in the beggar’s posture, a beautiful child of two or three beside her with a wooden begging bowl in hand. Spinetta saw me just as I saw her. She rose and hurried to me at once.
“You’ve bought so many things,” she said, pointing to my heavy sack, “and we have nothing.”
I made a little bow. “You let her watch this?” I asked and indicated the bloody mess in the square.
“Him, not her. He is a boy. He likes it, for the fun. But you, you are so big now and so handsome, Luca, and you always were my favorite, you know that, even with all my boys, you were the first we had and my favorite.” Spinetta spoke like this when she wanted money. She had come to the friary often enough to beg food and charity, and the Brothers always gave her something, knowing that Matteo had gambled away his money once again, or drunk it up in cheap wine, and the children had to eat. “My Luca,” she said, “how we loved you.” I sometimes thought she had come to believe it. But of course what she had loved was the money that used to come from my natural father, the merchant, when I was still a child and, now that I was grown, went instead to the Friars. She remembered the money and the old days of the merchant’s visits and I too remembered them well. They had made me feel wanted, but they earned me extra beatings from Matteo and a short ration of food from Spinetta. And when I lay awake nights, hungry or beaten or both, I would think of them as the dyer and the dyer’s wife. I could never bring myself to call them Father or Mother. I would have a real father one day, I was resolved on it, if only in heaven. Not this Matteo. Not this Spinetta. So I had thought then, innocent and still believing. “And such beautiful hair you have.” Spinetta touched the reddish brown ruff surrounding my tonsure. “Look at this one’s hair,” she said. “He is my angel, my Agnolo.” And I found myself surprised because I could see she loved him.
“His hair is beautiful,” I said. It was nearly white, the color of new corn silk, and it fell in curls about the child’s face.
“You thought he was a girl,” she said. “It helps with the begging. See? A boy.” She lifted his shift to expose his genitals. The child looked at me, defiant.
“He’s a fine boy.” I bent down and said to him, “You’re a fine boy, Agnolo. And you’re a good boy.” He gave me a wide false smile and a hard judgmental look. “I must go,” I said, “I’m late with the Brothers’ dinner.”
“And nothing for the boy? Some little thing?”