The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 10
SIGNORA BARDELLI, concierge of the Palazza Gonfarini, had asked for Sister Annunziata and she stood there firmly waiting until she got what she wanted. It was always Sister Annunziata whom they asked for when they wanted a nun to come to the bedside of one of their dying. Sister Maria Maddelena, who stood in the small square room facing the agitated janitress, was in her heart a proud nun and when she thought "they" she meant all the poor who lived in the decaying old rookeries in the quarter about the Palazzo Gonfarini. Usually "they" asked for Sister Annunziata timidly but there was no timidity in the bearing of the stalwart Signora Bardelli. Sister Maria Maddelena knew her by reputation, a shrewd and a boastful woman, who mocked priests and the Church. The sister, who was human in her small way, could not resist murmuring, "But you do not hold with the Church, Signora Bardelli."
"It is not for me," said the janitress. "It is for the stranger living in my house. She is religious." She gave a shrug indicating that when she came to die she would not call upon the hocus pocus of the Church.
"Her name?" asked Sister Maria Maddelena.
"Signorina Spragg."
"Is she a foreigner?"
"It seems so. I do not know where she came from. She has lived with me for sixteen years."
"And you don't know anything about her?"
"She never talked. She did not speak much Italian."
"She has no money?"
"For three months she has not paid me anything. She hasn't any more money." Signorina Bardelli began to gesticulate. "What has all this got to do with it? She is sick. She is out of her head. She is dying. I cannot care for her and the whole house as well. I want to see Sister Annunziata."
"Sister Annunziata has just come in. She has been staying with the wife of Carducci, the butcher, who died two hours ago."
"It will not matter to Sister Annunziata. Tell her that Signora Bardelli wants to speak to her."
She was stubborn because she was thinking that she could not support the presence in her house of any of the others. They would be asking things of her and disturbing the other tenants. Besides she distrusted nuns as meddlesome creatures, only Sister Annunziata was different. She told herself she was not seeking aid from the Church. She was coming for Sister Annunziata as for a friend. She would not leave until she had seen her.
"The old woman may be dying now while we're talking," persisted the janitress, and then as if to intimidate Sister Maria Maddelena she added threateningly, "Without absolution, without the last rites of the dying. And that will be your fault for delaying me. I will not leave till I talk to Sister Annunziata. It will be on your head."
"They" nearly always talked like this. It was clear that the janitress was beginning to lose her temper. Sister Maria Maddelena said, "Wait," and disappeared through a little door behind the table where she had been sitting, and Signora Bardelli, feeling she had put to rout the entire Church of Rome, seated herself solemnly on a bench against the grey wall beneath the solitary crucifix, a Christ that was elegant and prettified, half-clad in purple and crimson garments with a crown of thorns that was gilded.
When the door opened again Sister Maria Maddelena was followed by a tall malformed figure who was forced to stoop a little to pass through the archway. It was Sister Annunziata. She was rather a grotesque than a woman and her ugliness made her seem no age at all, although you would have guessed that she was forty-five. She had high cheek-bones and a long enormous nose and one eye turned outward a little so that it was impossible to know when she was looking at you. Her great hands hung suspended from fantastically long arms. The nun's dress suited her better than any other. One is not taught to look for beauty as the first quality of a nun. She seemed pale and tired.
At sight of her Signora Bardelli rose politely and greeted her. The manner of open hostility melted away. She told her story—how the strange old woman who had lived with her for sixteen years was ill and perhaps dying. Signora Bardelli had found her in her bed unconscious when she failed to appear during the day. She was fond of the old woman. She had grown used to her. Sister Annunziata knew her. It was the old woman who dressed so queerly and ran about the streets of Brinoë in all weathers.
She talked rapidly and with excitement while Sister Annunziata listened. The gaunt nun had a curious air of humility as if she wanted desperately to please, not only Sister Maria Maddelena but even the janitress.
"I will come," she said. "If she is dying we must fetch a priest. Is she a believer? In the true faith?"
"I do not know," said the janitress. "She goes often to the church, mostly to San Giovanni. She is devout and religious."
"I will come," repeated Sister Annunziata in her deep masculine voice. She turned and disappeared through the doorway, leaving the janitress to savor her triumph over Sister Maria Maddelena. In a moment she returned with a small bag. Without another word the two women set out through the dark, narrow streets. As they stepped through the doorway the wind from Africa blew into their faces like the wind out of an oven. They made haste, for Sister Annunziata had another soul upon her conscience. She walked with the stride of a man, her big feet and long legs covering in one step the distance covered by two steps of the stout short janitress. The streets were empty and they passed no one all the way to the gloomy archway that was the entrance to the ruined Palazzo Gonfarini. It was a quarter in which Sister Annunziata knew every door and every window, every cornice. She knew even the holes in the pavement, which had never been repaired in the twenty-nine years she had spent going from house to house where she was needed. She did not, like Sister Maria Maddelena, think in secret pride of these poor sleeping all about her as "they." To Sister Annunziata this was all of the world, its beginning and its end. She had lived in it so long, absorbed by its pain and sorrows, that she had long ago forgotten she had ever belonged in any other. She had forgotten too because this life had been happy and the other had never held any happiness.
She quite forgot that she was born Eugenia Beatrice d'Orobelli. Among the poor it was said that she belonged to a proud family, but long ago "they" too had forgotten, if they ever knew, what she had been in the world. She was simply Sister Annunziata whom "they" always asked for. Sometimes they called her, behind her back, The Ugly One, and sometimes The Mad One, but there was in both names a kind of affection of that simple quality which colors the feelings of the humble.
In twenty-nine years she had seen none of her family save Faustino, her only brother, and him she had seen only twice when he had come from Venterollo with family papers for her to sign. She knew that he had married an American woman and she knew that he had three sons, one of whom, the eldest, was an invalid and lived always with his father at Venterollo. Faustino had troubled himself to write her these things, but from her sisters and from her mother and father, who were long since dead, she had heard nothing. When they put her into a convent at sixteen they had forgotten her as if she had never existed. Afterwards her mother in speaking of her family spoke of "my son and five daughters," as if Eugenia Beatrice had never existed at all. As a little girl she had never been allowed to see visitors who came to Venterollo. She was always kept out of sight with the gardener's wife in the little house by the river.
So as a child she had played alone most of the time because she was years younger than her sisters and because they were proud and showed her that they did not want her about them. She had come to make friends with the birds and the animals in the park of Venterollo and to spend her days like a wild thing under the ancient oaks and moss-grown decaying walls.
She was twelve years old when she understood what it was that caused them all to treat her differently. She had been sitting quietly one day on a little copse near the ruined pavilion watching a troop of ants building a city, when she heard voices, which she recognized as those of her mother and of her aunt. They were devout women who went every day to mass, and that day because it was hot they had stopped on their way home to rest in the pavilion. Her mother was crying because there was no money to marry off her five daughters. Two were already grown and on their way to being old maids. Her husband had only debts and would not give up gambling and her son of twenty was wild and always in trouble with women. But worst of all and hardest to bear was Eugenia Beatrice. Why had God sent her another daughter late in life? And why had He sent her such a little monster who was as ugly as if she had been the daughter of the Devil himself? Nobody would ever marry such an ugly creature even with a dot of a million lira. What chance would she have without a penny? Why had she, a good woman, been punished thus?
There was nothing to be done with Eugenia Beatrice, said her aunt, but to put her into a convent as soon as possible. Even there a creature so ugly was certain to frighten the other nuns.
That night Eugenia Beatrice did not return from the park. They searched for her, not too carefully, for there was no one who really wanted to find her, but at evening of the next day she was brought home by a peasant living on the side of the mountain fifteen miles away. He had found her shivering among the rocks when he went out with his goats in the early morning.
As the two women passed through the great arched doorway of the Palazzo Gonfarini, the janitress went ahead leading the way up the wide stone stairway. It was cool here, for the thick walls shut out the hot wind that sang so perversely along the ancient cornices. At the second turning of the stairway, Signora Bardelli opened a door and they found themselves in a long corridor with a row of cell-like doors opening along one side. It was lighted by a single jet of flickering gas. The whole space had once been the great banqueting hall of the palace but years before it had been filled in thus with partitions and converted into a kind of rookery by the grandfather of Father d'Astier, who now owned the palace. At the end of the corridor the janitress turned and knocked and the two women stepped into a small square room like a long box turned on end. It was not more than ten by twelve feet in size, but it was high, so high that in the dim glow of the night light floating in a bowl of cheap blue pottery the ceiling would have been lost in shadow save for the occasional glint struck by the light against the ancient gilding of the painted beams. As they entered there arose a flutter and commotion from a great number of tiny birds which rose from the end of the bed where they had been perching and circled blindly about until one by one they settled on the rows of cages hung against the grey wall. In one corner there was a narrow iron bed and on it lay the dying woman, a coarse poor sheet drawn up to her chin.
She was quite still and lay on her back with her eyes closed. It was a curious face, neither old nor young, not beautiful and yet fascinating by the perfection of its modelling. It was the first time anyone save Signora Bardelli had ever seen the face without the hat and the thick veil. Great masses of red hair lay on the pillow. In front it was cut short in a long fringe that hid completely the forehead.
For a moment Sister Annunziata stood by the side of the narrow bed looking down at Miss Annie Spragg and then slowly, almost as if she was unconscious of the gesture, one of the gaunt ugly hands touched the beautiful hair with a curious gesture of reverence.
"She is not an old woman," said Sister Annunziata.
"She was like that when she came to me," said the janitress. "She cannot be young. She has been here for fifteen years. She has not changed much."
Then Sister Annunziata touched the brow, gently pushing back a little the thick fringe of hair. Then she listened to the breathing and while Signora Bardelli held the night light she bent over to look at the pale, tired eyelids.
"She is dying," said Sister Annunziata. "You had better go for Father Baldessare. I will stay with her." She knew all the signs. For twenty-five years she had sat at the side of the dying.
So the janitress went away again out into the hot night and Sister Annunziata closed the great shutters against the heat of the African wind. When she had done this she set about putting the room in order, lifting the bedraggled tweed suit and the battered old picture hat and veil from the only chair in the room. Then she sat by the side of the bed and reaching beneath the sheet felt the wrist of Miss Annie Spragg and knelt beside the bed to pray. It was not to God that she prayed or to the Virgin, but to Saint Francis of the Birds. He was her saint. He was more than that. He was to Sister Annunziata the only God who had ever existed. She prayed for a long time, commending to his care the soul of the dying woman. The souls of all the dying she commended to the care of Saint Francis. He was her saint whom she adored since she was a little girl.
At last she arose and opening the little bag she brought with her took out a powder which she dissolved in water and swallowed. Sister Annunziata was ill herself. Lately she had reached the age when her body was sometimes racked with pain and her mind seemed vague and confused and clouded. Twice lately she had had visions in which she saw Saint Francis far off in the midst of a bright field filled with little daisies and primroses. He appeared to be beckoning to her but he came no nearer. He was the simple Saint Francis of Giotto's picture that hung in her room years ago at Venterollo. Lately she prayed at times to him for some miraculous sign of his approbation. She prayed that Saint Francis would show her a sign of his love. . . .
After bending once more over the sick woman she seated herself by the bed and took out of her bag a little worn leather-bound copy of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis and began to read. Once she had known it all by heart but lately with her trouble she seemed unable to remember the verses in their proper order. She was forced to hold the book close to her face in the dim light because her eyes were weak and swollen.
As she sat reading the little birds, who had been watching her with bright eyes from the tops of the cages, appeared to lose their fear and flew down in small confused groups of two and three to perch once more on the foot of the iron bed. On the day that Eugenia Beatrice was sixteen her aunt took her dressed all in black to enter the convent. They kissed each other good-by coldly, since the aunt had no affection for her and the child had long ago ceased to look for any affection from the world. The door closed and the great ugly girl found herself among the sisters, shrinking and frightened as she had always been in the presence of strangers. They stared at her as intently as if they believed there could be no creature so ugly in all the world.
From that day on her life was given over to pleasing others in the vague half-formed hope that out of her service there would grow some reward of commendation or affection. She scrubbed the floors and swept the vast hallway and took upon herself the meanest tasks, and sometimes there would be a reward, a word of praise from one of the nuns or even the Mother Superior herself. She knelt for long hours on the cold stone floor praying to Saint Francis who had love for all living things and so might love her as well, even if God had made her so ugly that she frightened people. For in the great awkward body there was a soul so hungry for love that it would have given itself over to torture and slavery for the sake of anyone who had for her a kind word. But her ugliness was so great that the other sisters, almost without knowing it, thought of her as something grotesque and strange and different from themselves.
For three years she lived thus and at last when she went out into the city to care for the sick and the poor she began for the first time to find her place in the world and to forget her childhood. Among the wretched she went about with that same humble manner of supplication, seeking to please them in return for kindliness. She entered their squalid houses as a creature unworthy of serving them. She sat at the bedside of old men dying of loathsome diseases and young mothers who died bearing their first children. She sat by young and handsome men cut off in the midst of life and risked her life by the side of children ill with smallpox and scarlet fever. She ate what the poor ate and slept as they slept, asking nothing of them in return but a word of kindness. And even the young men who loved only youth and the joy of being alive and the feeling of the hot blood in their veins came in the end to find a strange kind of beauty in the presence of sister Annunziata. It was an unearthly beauty that seemed less concerned with the ugly body and face of Sister Annunziata than with all that surrounded her. With her by their side even the young found death quiet and peaceful. They loved the gentleness of the huge misshapen hands. A kind of light seemed to flow from the ugly face.
And she knew sometimes that they called her The Ugly One and The Mad One and she smiled to herself and was glad because they would not have called her such names if there had not been affection in their hearts. In a way her body came to exist no longer save as an instrument to serve her spirit. She came, unlike other women, to cherish it not as an instrument of love or of beauty but as something that was useful to her. When at forty-five it began to fail her she prayed desperately to Saint Francis to give her strength. It was not death that she feared but the thought that her body's failing her might shut her off from all those who called her The Ugly One and The Mad One. Saint Francis could help her, whom she loved with all her soul.
Sitting by the bed of Miss Annie Spragg she read, holding the page close to her weak swollen eyes:
"When Saint Francis drew nigh unto Bevagna he came unto a spot wherein a great multitude of birds of divers species were gathered together. When the holy man of God perceived them he ran with all speed unto the place and greeted them as if they had shared in human understanding. They on their part all awaited him and turned toward him, those that were perched on the bushes bending their heads as he drew nigh them, and looking on him in unwonted wise while he came right among them, and diligently exhorted them, all to hear the word of God, saying, 'My brothers the birds, much ought ye to praise your Creator, who hath clothed you with feathers and given you wings to fly, and hath made over unto you the pure air, and careth for you without your taking thought for yourselves.' While he was speaking these and other like words, the little birds—behaving themselves in wondrous wise—began to stretch their necks, to open their beaks, and to look intently upon him. He, with wondrous fervor of spirit, passed in and out among them, touching them with his habit, nor did one of them move from the spot until he had made the sign of the cross over them and given them leave; then with the blessing of the man of God, they all flew away together. All these things were witnessed by his companions who stood awaiting him by the way. Returning unto them, the simple and holy man began to blame himself for neglect in that he not afore then preached unto the birds. . . ."
The little birds were quite still now and sat in a row on the end of the bed, some with eyes closed, some watching Sister Annunziata with their bright eyes.
It was nearly dawn when she was aroused by the sound of creaking boots in the corridor. It was Father Baldessare. She knew the sound of his boots. He was a humble simple priest who had come many times to the homes of the poor in response to her summons. His boots always creaked. The door opened and he came in, fat and short with a red pimply face, followed by Signora Bardelli. They were both hot and panting from the long walk through the hot wind and the climb up the great stone stairway. As they entered the room the birds fluttered up again to their cages and the woman on the bed opened her eyes a little way slowly and with the greatest effort. For a moment they were darkened by a strange look of terror in them as if she thought herself already dead and was awakening in a dark world of black-robed nuns and priests. And then she appeared to recognize Sister Annunziata and the look of fear faded away. She could not speak. Her lips were frozen.
Sister Annunziata made a gesture dismissing the janitress and then turned to the fat little priest. "We had better make haste," she murmured. "I will stay and hold her up. She cannot raise her own body."
And so they made ready to offer Miss Annie Spragg the last service they could give her on this earth and when Father Baldessare, after much panting and sweating, was ready Sister Annunziata knelt beside the bed and lifted the dying woman, resting the thin helpless body against her own gaunt shoulder. They found then that her hands were covered by white cotton gloves and when Father Baldessare tried to remove them a kind of convulsion shook her and into her eyes there came a look so terrible that Sister Annunziata understood her plea and they left her hands covered.
The fat little priest began to read the lines and administer the Sacrament and once more the little birds, no longer fearful, fluttered down one by one to the iron rail at the foot of the bed and sat in a row. The look of fear left the eyes of the dying woman and slowly the eyelids drooped with weariness.
When at last Father Baldessare had finished, the eyes opened a little way and again a look of pleading came into them. Then slowly in a kind of agony Annie Spragg lifted her right arm a little way and made a faint vague gesture which only Sister Annunziata understood. Still supporting the dying woman the nun leaned down and took from the chair the copy of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis and from her bag she took the stub of a worn blue pencil. She put the pencil in Annie Spragg's hand and opening the book held it for her to write. Slowly and with pain the dying woman scrawled seven words and when she had finished the pencil dropped from her hands and the eyelids drooped again. There was a faint sigh filled with weariness and Sister Annunziata commended her soul to the care of Saint Francis of the Birds.
They laid her back upon the bed and Sister Annunziata opened the page where she had written. At first she could make nothing of the scrawl and peered at it for a long time with her swollen red eyes. Then slowly she understood it. The old woman had written,
Open the window. Let them be free.
When Father Baldessare loosened the heavy shutters the first faint color of dawn had begun to rise behind the mountains and the rosy grey light was filtering down among the ancient ghost-filled houses that surrounded the Palazzo Gonfarini. As he stood there for a moment looking out into the hot empty street there was a faint rushing sound all about him. It was the little birds flying past him, chirping and twittering, into the rising dawn. The air was filled with the sound of wings.
After Father Baldessare had gone again, Sister Annunziata drew the sheet over the face of the dead woman and closing the door gently behind her went down the long corridor and the great stone stairway to seek a bowl of hot coffee. She needed it in order to keep her weary eyes open any longer and she could not ask Signora Bardelli to fetch it, for Signora Bardelli was a busy woman and had been up most of the night. The hallway and the cortile were grey blue with morning light and already out of the cell-like doors there had begun to appear figures which Sister Annunziata knew well . . . the old man who washed the streets, the blind old woman who sold flowers in the arcades of the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, Galeazzo the lame stone cutter. They greeted her knowing that her presence in the Palazzo Gonfarini meant that there was suffering and death within its walls. She understood what it was they wanted to know. It was the stranger, she told them, who lived at the far end of the corridor. They crossed themselves and wished good health to Sister Annunziata and peace to the soul of the dead woman.
In a little while she returned bringing with her candles and a great kettle of hot water and when she had entered the room again she set about placing it in order. She went through the drawers of the cheap pine table and the pockets of the grey tweed suit but she found nothing. There were no papers and not even a lira in money. The dead woman appeared to have no possessions but the clothes she wore and the little birds.
Then Sister Annunziata went to the iron bed and lifted the sheet and for a long time she stood looking down at Miss Annie Spragg. The lines of pain had gone out of the dead face, leaving it transparent and smooth and peaceful against the masses of splendid tangled hair. Again Sister Annunziata, who had a way of talking to herself, murmured, "But she is not an old woman." And once more the great bony hand reached out with a gesture of reverence and envy to touch the beauty of the dead woman's hair.
As she set about her task with dim near-sighted eyes, she saw that the body of the dead woman was not old and that it was beautifully made and that in youth it had been superb. She saw that it was a body which perhaps had known the love which was shut out forever from the life of a nun. She had seen bodies many times that were young and splendid even in death when it was no longer wrong to look upon their nakedness, and each time it gave her a kind of twisting, sickening pain, so that in the end she had come to look away from them.
As she worked with averted eyes she tried to repeat the psalms she had learned as a child at Venterollo, but in her trouble and in the pain that racked her body and the clouds that obscured her thoughts she could not remember them. When she had nearly finished her task she discovered that she had not removed the white cotton gloves that covered the hands. She removed first one and then the other and then quite suddenly she made the discovery. On the palm of each hand there was a red scar as if both hands had been pierced by nails. For a moment she stared in silence, leaning close in order to see, and then gently, with a gesture almost of terror, she pushed back the fringe of hair that covered the brow of the dead woman, and there on the brow she discovered other scars as if a crown of thorns had been pressed upon her head. There was a great livid scar in the side and the two feet had the marks of nails.
For a second a vicious pain racked her body and a blinding light dazzled her poor weak eyes and then without a sound she slipped to the floor unconscious. For she had seen the Stigmata. It was the sign of Saint Francis of the Birds.
When Signora Bardelli climbed the stone stairs an hour later she found that all the birds had flown from the room and that Sister Annunziata lay unconscious on the floor. And on the bed lay the naked body of the dead woman bearing in its flesh the scars of the Crucifixion. The room was quite light now and the brilliant morning sun streamed in at the open window.
For the only time in her life Signora Bardelli was frightened. She felt a sudden wild impulse to fall upon her knees and pray to the very saints she had mocked. She had a strange fear of being watched by something which she could neither see nor understand.
She seemed unable to revive the unconscious nun and when Father Baldessare returned creaking and sweating along the corridor he found her still kneeling beside the prostrate figure. He too saw the miraculous scars on the body of the dead woman and knelt humbly in prayer by the side of the bed.
When at last Sister Annunziata opened her eyes, she seemed for a long time unable to speak. They gave her sour wine to drink and at last she told them a strange and muddled story. She said that as she stood over the body a great and blinding light had appeared on the wall opposite the bed and that in the midst of it stood Saint Francis in a tiny field of buttercups and primroses, surrounded by all the little birds that a little time before had fluttered about the room. From his body there streamed great rays of light. These appeared to come from his hands and his feet, his side and his brow, where there were wounds like those of Our Lord. The light streamed toward the body of the dead woman. After that she could remember no more.
As she told the story a strange unearthly look of happy madness came into her face, so that even the hard Signora Bardelli felt a sudden awe.
Before noon the story of the miracle had traveled through all the quarter and crowds came streaming into the cortile, up the staircase and along the corridor. Pushing and crying out hysterically, women thrust themselves into the chamber of the dead woman and there tore her clothes and the very chair and table into bits as relics. They bore off the cages of the little birds, and the night light, and one woman soaked her shawl in the water that was in the bowl of cheap blue crockery. In their hunger for relics they snatched the bedraggled roses from the old picture hat and ripped bits from the very sheet that covered the body of Miss Spragg, until only torn fragments remained to hide its nakedness. It was the police who at last cleared them from the house, pushing them rudely back into the street. But the crowd would not go away. It hung about the great arched gateway of the Palazzo Gonfarini and women knelt in the dust to pray beneath the windows.
Through all the confusion and the vulgar turmoil Sister Annunziata went about calmly, with that strange new light of happiness in her face. She was loved at last. Saint Francis had sent her the sign.