Authors: Victoria Strauss
Returning to the dormitory with the other novices for recreation hour, Giulia discovered that her bedclothes—which she’d left perfectly tucked in as Suor Margarita required—had been pulled askew, her pillow tossed to the floor. She sighed. In addition to pinching, hair-yanking, and mockery, Alessia and her friends occasionally sneaked back to the dormitory to
leave nasty surprises for the other girls.
Suor Margarita noticed, of course, and sent Giulia to do penance with Lisa at the fireplace. Lisa, who was being punished for knocking over her soup bowl, gave Giulia a sympathetic look as Giulia knelt down.
“It was Costanza,” she mumbled. “Your bed. I saw her. But really it was Alessia.”
“It always is.” The others treated Lisa as if she were slow-witted, but to Giulia it was clear that she was not stupid at all.
“I’m going to pray she gets warts.”
Lisa went back to muttering the Paternoster. Giulia clasped her hands as if in prayer and closed her eyes. She could hear the giggles of Alessia and her clique, but for once she didn’t care.
I’m going out the day after tomorrow. Out of Santa Marta, out into the city
. She could feel herself yearning toward that freedom, like a sunflower twisting to the light.
She thought of the horoscope she had cast. Before winter, it had said. The day after tomorrow wouldn’t be the day she escaped. But something would happen. She was sure of it.
“It’s my chance, Mama,” she whispered, so softly only she could hear. “Everything is about to change.”
On the appointed day, Giulia arrived at the saint’s door right after breakfast. No one was there, and for a few uncomfortable moments she feared that she had somehow mistaken Humilità’s meaning or that there had been a change of plans. But then Humilità appeared, striding along the loggia in her purposeful way. She wore a black cloak over her white habit and carried a covered basket.
“Are you ready, Giulia?”
“Oh yes,” Giulia breathed.
Humilità rapped briskly on the saint’s door. The lock scraped and the door swung open on the cool dimness of the vestibule. Giulia vividly remembered her panic the one and only time she had crossed this
threshold—but today she was going in the opposite direction. Her heart pounded with excitement, not dread.
The doorkeeper pulled open the outer door, and Humilità led the way into the heat and light of the street.
“Take my arm, Giulia.” Behind them, the door thumped closed. “There will be crowds, and I don’t want to lose you.”
Giulia had not seen much of Padua on the day of her arrival, for Cristina had insisted on keeping the carriage’s window covers closed. Now, as she and Humilità walked, she craned her neck to look up at the houses that rose two, three, even four stories on either side, their plaster fronts tinted cream and gold and pink. Balconies jutted overhead; windows spilled drying laundry or held pots of brightly colored flowers. On nearly every block, arcaded walkways along the house fronts allowed pedestrians to stay clear of the carts and riders that thronged the street. The clatter of wheels and hooves echoed in the confined spaces; the air smelled of animals, refuse, smoke, and, distantly, the stagnant water of the canals.
Giulia breathed deeply, savoring the bustle and the noise, the sight of buildings that were not cloisters and people who were not nuns. Humilità set a quick pace, expertly navigating a succession of narrow, twisty avenues. Pedestrians made way for them, bowing or crossing themselves; a few offered alms, which Humilità accepted with a nod and a blessing and dropped into her basket.
Ahead, Giulia saw a dazzle of sunlight. A roaring
swelled beneath the din of traffic: the sound of a great crowd. The houses and arcades fell away, and they emerged into a huge light-filled piazza, packed with market stalls and teeming with people. Beyond the stalls rose one of the most extraordinary buildings Giulia had ever seen, overtopping the surrounding houses and extending almost the entire width of the piazza. It was fronted at ground level by a columned arcade; above the arcade, a graceful loggia ran the full length of the second floor, and above that, red brick walls supported the dome of an immense roof, shaped like a great barrel sawed in half.
“That’s the Palazzo della Ragione, the Palace of Justice,” Humilità said. “It’s a marvel of engineering—that roof is self-supporting, there’s not a single column holding it up. Padua’s courts meet on the upper level, and below is the market, the Piazza della Fruitta on this side, the Piazza dell’Erbe on the other. But it’s not just fruits and vegetables. In the Padua market, you can buy nearly anything.”
They plunged into the market, past stalls heaped high with every kind of fruit, with great cheese wheels and baskets of spices and metal and leather goods and cloth. The air was rich with the odors of all these things, clamorous with the voices of vendors crying their wares and customers haggling over prices. Humilità paused at a stall arrayed with fat rounds of bread, and one offering velvety apricots and dusky plums, and one selling pots of soft cheese. She insisted on paying for her purchases, even when the merchants would have
provided them as charity.
With the items tucked into her basket, she steered Giulia into the shadow of the Palazzo’s ground-level arcade and sat down on one of the benches there, motioning Giulia to do the same.
“I used to come here with my mother when I was a girl,” she said, settling the folds of her cloak. “It seemed like the most wondrous place in the world.”
“My mother used to take me to the market too, when she needed special fabrics or embroidery thread.” Giulia smiled, remembering. “She always bought me a sugar pig.”
“Your mother was a seamstress?”
Giulia nodded. “She taught me to sew. I was never good at it, though. Not the way she was.”
“Were you very young when she died?”
“I was seven.” After all these years, it was still hard to say.
“I was eight.”
Giulia looked at Humilità, surprised, but the workshop mistress was bending forward, rummaging in her basket.
“Here.” She pulled out several sheets of paper and two sticks of charcoal. “I always sit here awhile and draw, on my outside days. You can do the same, if you like.” She handed Giulia the paper and one of the charcoal sticks. “Today isn’t a lesson, so you may please yourself.”
She took out her sketchbook, which she carried everywhere in her waist pouch, as Giulia once had done, and set to work.
Giulia drew a woman lugging a heavy oil jar, a
child hanging on his mother’s skirts, crows wheeling against the cloudless sky. But the bustle of the market was distracting, and after a little while she set her paper aside. It was very hot, even in the shade of the arcade; her chemise was damp under her scratchy novice dress. How did Humilità stand it, with her wimple and veil, her heavy habit and enveloping cloak? Passersby cast them curious looks. At first shyly and then more boldly, Giulia looked back. But their eyes, especially those of the young men, always slid away. Like Alberto, they saw only the ugly novice uniform.
But someone will see more
, she told herself.
This is my day, and it has only just begun
.
She looked at Humilità. The workshop mistress was not sketching scenes or figures, but filling page after page with faces. Giulia was fascinated by the workshop mistress’s swiftness, the sureness with which she captured features and expressions.
At last Humilità sighed, put down her charcoal, and stretched her arms.
“That’s enough for now, I think.” She turned over the sheets she had filled. “I can draw from imagination, but I prefer to work from life, and I can’t use the same nuns’ faces over and over again. And how, in the drawing of men’s faces, can one find inspiration inside a convent? So I bring my book”—she closed the cover and patted it—“on each of my outside days, and add to it as I can. When I need a fresh face, I have it.”
“I used to carry a sketchbook,” Giulia said. “And charcoal. My fingers were always black with it.”
“I too, when I was a child. My mother used to
scold me, though it never did any good. Where is your sketchbook now?”
“I had to…leave it.” Giulia thought of the gap inside the chimney where it was hidden.
“In Milan?”
“Not exactly. But it isn’t with me any longer.”
Humilità’s dark gaze was keen. She was not the stern instructor now, or the energetic workshop mistress, but something else, something Giulia had not seen before.
“You wouldn’t be at Santa Marta, would you, Giulia, if you had your choice.”
Dismayed, Giulia looked down at her clasped hands. She’d thought she was doing a better job of pretending.
“I understand. Truly, I do. Forced vocations are a common evil.”
“Everyone says that.” Giulia looked up. “But then why are they allowed?”
Humilità sighed. “Because they benefit the fathers and brothers who don’t wish to support a woman who cannot marry, a woman who is mad or ugly or disfigured or simply inconvenient.”
Inconvenient
, Giulia thought.
Yes, that’s me
. “Not always fathers and brothers. It was my father’s wife who sent me here.”
“Giulia, I know it isn’t easy. To sacrifice the world and its delights, to accept a life within walls—no, that is not easy. As artists, too, it is more difficult, for we are not in the world, and can only imagine it in our work”—she gestured to her sketchbook—“with a
little help if we’re lucky.” Her voice held the edge it acquired when she spoke of something that angered or frustrated her. “But God knows better than we do what we’re fit for. Your father’s wife may have had ill reasons for sending you to Santa Marta, but she did God’s will nonetheless.”
“I saw nothing of God in what she did to me.”
“All things happen for a reason. Santa Marta is the one place in the world where you can become what God made you: a painter. In time, you will understand that.”
Giulia said nothing. She could not tell the truth, and didn’t want to lie.
Humilità set her sketchbook aside and shifted on the bench so she could look into Giulia’s face.
“I have made my workshop famous,” she said. “I know pride is a sin, yet I confess it—I am proud. I thank God every day that He created me what I am, that He has allowed me to do what I most love and thus give Him glory. Padua is a city of painters—Giotto, Lippi, Altichiero, Mantegna—all have left their mark here, and so will I. But of all the gifts God has given me, there’s one I haven’t had. Can you guess what it is?”
Giulia shook her head.
“An heir. Someone to take my place when I die, or grow too old to hold my brush. Someone to pass my secrets to. Someone to carry on my work.” She paused. “Perhaps you, Giulia.”
Giulia was astonished. “Me?”
“I’m hard on you, I know. But only because I see the promise in you.” Humilità reached out and took both Giulia’s hands in hers. “You have so much talent,
child. It is wild and undisciplined, but if you can learn to master it, if you will let me train you as I know I can, you will become a true artist. Perhaps even a great one. One whose name may be remembered.”
Unbidden, the words of the horoscope fragment came into Giulia’s mind:
She shall not take another’s name, nor shall she bear her own at the end of life
.…
“I know that your vocation has been forced. I know you fear the vows a nun must make. But Giulia, those vows will not give you only a nun’s life. They will give you a painter’s life. An
artist’s
life. And I promise you that a true vocation awaits you there. I promise you that I will show you how to find it.”
Her grip on Giulia’s hands tightened, almost painfully. Then she let go and rose to her feet.
“Come, it must be near noon. We should be getting on. Give me your charcoal and paper.”
Giulia handed them over. She took Humilità’s arm again. They left the market, entering the tangle of streets once more.
This time, Giulia barely noticed where they were going. Humilità’s excitement over her
cortile
drawing…being brought into the workshop, as no other novice ever had been…the rigorous and sometimes harsh instruction…she had never thought to put those things together, to imagine what they might add up to. Humilità, master painter, leader of the only workshop of women in the world, thought that she, Giulia, might become a great artist! Even, perhaps, workshop mistress in her turn!
All at once she could see that future, like a road
stretching out before her. The years of training. Becoming a journeyman like Lucida, then a master like Benedicta. Her work displayed in private chapels and in public places, where hundreds of eyes, maybe thousands of eyes, would see it. A life spent painting—an artist’s life, as Humilità had said.
But I’d have to become a nun. I’d have to spend the rest of my life at Santa Marta
.
And just like that, the vision died. She wanted to paint—yes, she wanted that, though she hadn’t really understood how much until now. But she did not want to live as Humilità did, cloistered within walls, ruled by bells, surrounded by sisters, only sisters—never a husband or a lover, never children. Never a home of her own. Painting or no painting, she could not find a vocation for that kind of life. She did not
want
such a vocation. She hated Santa Marta.
Or did she?
An awful confusion swept her. At her side, Humilità strode purposefully along, a look of satisfaction on her face. For a moment, childishly, Giulia was angry with her—for making such impossible promises, for invoking such an impossible future. But then she remembered her own deception, how every day she cheated Humilità’s trust by falsely playing the part of a true apprentice.
“Is anything the matter, Giulia?”
“No, Maestra.”
It changes nothing. What she told me changes nothing
.
She struggled to believe it.
They stopped at last before a well-kept three-story house, with an arched doorway beneath its shady arcade.
“I was born in this house,” Humilità said. “My mother died in it.”