NO ONE HAD SEEN HER NAKED UNTIL HER DEATH.
It was a rule of the order that the Sisters should not look on human flesh, neither their own nor anyone
else's. A considerable amount of thought had gone into the drafting of this observance. Under the
billowing folds of their habits each nun wore a long cotton shift, a garment they kept on always, even
when they washed, so that it acted as screen and partial drying cloth as well as night shift. This shift
they change once a month (more in summer when the stagnant Tuscan air bathed them in sweat),
and there were careful instructions as to correct procedure: how they should keep their eyes firmly
fixed on the crucifix above their bed as they disrobed. If any did let their gaze stray downward, the sin
was a matter for the confessional and therefore not for history.
There was a rumor that when Sister Lucrezia had first entered cloisters she had brought with her a
certain vanity along with her vocation (her dowry to the church, it was said, included a lavishly
decorated marriage chest filled with books, paintings fit for the attentions of the Sumptuary Police).
But that was a time when the sisterhood had been prone to accidents of abuse and luxury, and
since the reforming of the covenant the rules were stricter. None of the present unhabitants could
remember that far bacj, save for the Reverend Mother, who had become a bride to Christ around
the same time as Lucrezia but had long since turned her back on such worldliness. As for Sister
Lucrezia herself, she never spoke of her past. In fact, in the last few years she had spoken very little
at all. That she was pious there was no doubt. And as here bones stooped and glued together with
age, so her piety and modesty had fused. In some ways, it was natural. Even if she has been
tempted to vanity, what surface could she have found to reflect herself in? The cloisters held no
mirrors, the windows no glass; even the fishpond in the gardens had been designed with a
fountain at its center sending out and endless shower if rain to prevent any possible narcissism in
the water's surface Of course, even in the purest of orders some infringement is inevitable, and
there had been times when a few of the more sophisticated novitiates had been caught
surreptitiously considering their own portrait miniaturized in the pupils of their elder's eyes. But
more often than not this faded as the image of Our Lord loomed larger.
Sister Lucrezia seemed not to have looked directly at anyone for some years. Instead, she had
spent increasing time at devotion in her cell, her eyes filming over with age and the love of God. As
she became more ill, so she had been absolved from manual labor, and while others were
working she could be found sitting in the gardens or in the herb plot, which she had sometimes
tended. The week before her death she had been spotted there by the young novitiate Sister
Carmilla, who had been alaramed by coming upon the elderly nun sitting not on the bench but
stretched out upon the ground, her body body under the habit distended by the tumor's growth, her
headdress cast aside, and her face tilted up to the late- afternoon rays of the sun. Such an
undressing was a flagrant breach of regulations, but by then the disease had eaten so deep inside,
and her pain was so evident, that Reverend Mother could not bring herself to discipline her. Later,
after the authorities had left and the body had been finally taken away, Carmilla would spread the
echoing gossip of that encounter along the refectory table, telling how the nun's unruly hair, freed
from her wimple, had blazed out like gray halo around her head, and how her face had been lit up
by happiness--- only the smile playing upon her lips had been one more triumph than of
beatification.
That last week of her life, as the pain flowed in ever deeper waves, dragging her away in its
undertow, the corridor outside her cell began to smell of death: a fetid aroma as if her flesh were
already rotting away. The tumor had grown so tender by then that she could no longer sit up for its
size. They brought in church physicians, even a doctor from Florence (flesh could be exposed in the
cause of the alleviation of suffering), but she had refused them all and shared her agony with no one.
The lump reamained not only covered but hidden away. The summer was upon them by then, and
the convent simmered by day and sweltered by night, but still she lay under the blanket fully clothed.
No one knew how long the disease had been eating into her flesh. The volume of their habit was
designed to hide any hint of shape of female curve. Five years before, in the greatest scandal to hit
the nunnery since the bad old days, a fourteen-year-old novitiate from Siena had concealed nine
months of growth so successfully that she was only found out when the kitchen Sister came up
traces of the afterbirth in the corner of the wine cellar and, fearing it was the entrails of some half
devoured animal, nosed around till she found the tiny bloated body weighted down by a bag of flour
in a vat of Communion wine. Of the girl herself, there was no sign.
When questioned after she had first fainted during Matins a month earlier, Sister Lucrezia
confessed that the lump in her left breast had been there for some time, its malignant energy
pulsing against her skin like a small volcano. But right from the start she was adamant that there
was nothing to be done for it. After a meeting with the Reverend Mother, which caused the latter to
be late for Vespers, the matter was not referred to again. Death was, after all, a temporary staging
post in a longer journey and one that in a house of God was as much to be welcomed as feared.
In the last hours she grew crazy with pain and fever. The strongest herb concoctions gave her no
release. Where she had first borne her sufferings with fortitude , now she could be heard howling
through the night like an animal, a desperate sound that frightened awake younger nuns in the
cells close by. Along with the howling came sporadic words, yelled out in staccato bursts or
whispered like lines from a frenzied prayer: Latin, Greek, and Tuscan all stuck together in a thick
verbal glue.
She was finally taken by God one morning as another suffocating day was dawning. The priest who
had come to deliver last rites had gone and she was alone with one of the nursing Sisters, who
recounted how, at the moment the soul departed, Lucrezia's face had miraculously changed, the
lines etched by pain melting away, leaving the skin smooth, almost translucent: echo of the tender
young nun who had first arrived at the convent doors some thirty years before.
