"It’s over,” thought Marta as she crossed the threshold of the confessional.
Inside the grey nun’s dress that made her invisible to people’s eyes, Marta carried so many things.
Solitude, the loyal companion of her cell during the long nights in the convent, when she had learned to cry so softly that not even God could hear her.
The memory, still clear and present, of the freezing cold night when she’d let Anna come into her bed. She couldn’t have said why. Perhaps because it was raining outside and Anna was crying when she came into the cell. Perhaps because that night was so dark that they were frightened by everything. Anna’s skin tasted of wax. Each of them needed to feel that the other was there, that the darkness stopped outside their bodies, that in the suddenly small wrought iron bed solitude could no longer find a place to dwell. They had fallen asleep like two puppies from different litters that found themselves in the same lair just for one night.
That was how Mother Agnes had found them, before dawn. After a long, complicated speech in which she had mixed God, the Devil, purity and sin all together, she had punished Anna with useless violence, throwing her out of the convent, not because she was more guilty, but simply because her family was much poorer and could not protest.
But for her, Mother Agnes had found the way to break her from within.
Thirty days of self-flagellation will take away the sin from your soul and make your body pure again.
So she had to punish her body, whipping herself every day until she lost her senses, under the vigilant eye of Mother Agnes, who came down to watch her personally. A bit of bread, water and prayer would have to sustain her all those seemingly endless hours. There was no night because there was no day, and the arrival of Mother Agnes, as punctual as death, was the only clue that another day had begun.
That woman watched her carry out her daily penitence and then went away without a word, each time leaving her with a burning back and new hatred in her heart.
There was no God in that room, only an infinite hatred that had seeped into the walls and turned the air to lead.
Near the end of the thirtieth day she hardly felt the pain any more. As she touched the long scars on her shoulders, her arms, her back and her breast, she fell asleep with the feeling that she held someone else’s body in her arms.
When Mother Agnes had come to tell her she could go back to her cell, she had no reaction. She let herself be led like a small, domesticated animal.
She took up her life in the convent with unexpected docility, under the satisfied eye of Mother Agnes, who celebrated her victory over the diabolical inclinations of that girl.
But it seemed that the Devil had never left her cell. God and the Devil had lost their boundaries in her mind and had melted into one another. Anna’s smell was still in her bed, and Marta caressed the pillow, the sheets and the air, desperately searching for an illusion. Anna, sweet Anna, with skin like warm wax and her trembling body.
The Devil’s sweet breath, jealously guarded so that the cold, the dark and oblivion would not erase it from her heart. Anna, the opposite of prayer, so that the thing they called vice would not abandon her, so that the tenderness and the warmth would stay with her still.
On her knees inside the confessional, she felt the burden of what she had done on her thin, bent shoulders, and fear gripped her heart.
“Father, I have sinned”, she began, in a voice that even she could hardly hear.
“They were looking for the medicine, Father. The medicine for her heart. Mother Agnes was dying and they couldn’t find her medicine. She was suffocating, her hands around her throat. And I had her medicine in my hand, Father. It was as if I had her life in my hand. I kept my fist so tight that it hurt. She was dying. But I didn’t open it. May God forgive me, Father”.
“God forgives you, God forgives you...”
It was as though someone had all at once lifted the weight that was crushing her. Now she was free. She was no longer afraid. She could leave.
***
Anna had put on the only sober coat she had over her garish red dress. She had been awake until dawn, waiting for the last customer to go, before walking hurriedly towards the convent chapel. She still had the smell of her customers on her, and in her heart a new weariness.
“I’m going to a funeral,” she answered Madam, who always wanted to know where she was going.
“But you have no one! What difference can anyone’s death make to you?” she’d heard her mutter as she shut the door. Inside the red dress that had made her a plaything in men’s hands, Anna carried many things. Her body, a temporary refuge for secret desires, withered under careless hands.
Solitude, the loyal companion of the red room below the stairs, where she had learned to pretend so well that sometimes even she could hardly recognise herself.
The memory of that night when, for the only time in her life, someone had been kind to her had never faded. The storm was beating against the windows of the cell and she was curled up in her bed, holding onto the pillow and praying for the night to pass quickly. Fear penetrated her bones as violently as the thunder that invaded the room.
And when she could stand it no longer, she had fled, barefoot, into the hallway, gone into Marta’s room and fell into her bed, quivering like a hunted animal.
Marta hadn’t scolded her and hadn’t sent her away. She made room in the bed and dried her face with her nightgown.
“Don’t cry” she’d said, “we’re together now. Nothing will happen to us”.
Anna needed to believe her, even though Marta’s voice was shaking more than her own. And there, under the rough wool blanket, for a short time they forgot the cold, the darkness, the storm shaking the windows, they forgot Mother Agnes, who was like a phantom from a far-off world. Anna had slept with her face pressed up against Marta’s warm neck, surrounded by her comforting smell.
When she felt herself being pulled out of the bed by Mother Agnes’s strong, brutal hands, she sensed that something irremediable was happening. Instantly, Marta’s skin was far away, someone was covering her with scanty clothing and, with words she couldn’t grasp, pushing her out of the convent and slamming the door behind her.
Stunned, she set out to reach what had, perhaps, once been her home. But Mother Agnes’s venomous words had arrived before her. So she suddenly became living proof that an illegitimate daughter carried within her the seed of sin, and nothing could change her depraved nature. Another door was shut in her face. She had shouldered her desperation, walking around the city streets until her body was weak with hunger and her bones aching with cold.
The only person who hadn’t banged the door in her face was Madam Georgette. Hers was the only place where she could make a trade-off between death and something subtler, something that consumed her more slowly, bit by bit.
Now she was there, hidden in her black coat, in the small chapel that housed Mother Agnes’s coffin. Now the circle was closing.
“Father, I have sinned. My hands are defiled by death. The sweets, the sweets that Mother Agnes received every Sunday morning, were sent by me. I knew she would keep them in the table by her bed. You know she never shared anything with anyone. She would eat them at night, when she couldn’t sleep. The powdered sugar was poisoned, Father. Sweet poison for her heart. I killed her, Father. Little by little, as she did to me. For so many years I’ve been waiting for the news of her funeral. Father, forgive me”.
“God forgives you. God forgives you...”
Anna came out with the feeling that it was another woman who left that confessional. Anna had changed. Anna could go away.
***
The church was empty, wrapped in the play of light filtering through the coloured windows. There was still some time left before those dumb peasants began arriving to bother him with their insignificant sins. He almost dragged himself towards the confessional, his ponderous body moving with difficulty under the black tunic.
When he opened the curtain, a shiver of horror ran down his back. An old tramp was crouching on the seat, his naked, filthy feet drawn up on the velvet cushion.
“You dirty tramp, what are you doing here?”
“ Nothing, Father. I was cold”.
“This is a confessional, not a homeless shelter. Get out, you old bum!”
“I’m going now, Father. Don’t get angry. I only wanted to get in out of the cold”.
Stupid tramp! Good thing no one was here!, thought the priest as he placed the cushion comfortably on the seat. The time for confession was at hand.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t last too long” he said softly, thinking about the lunch that was waiting for him at the Mayor’s house.
Ingrid Beatrice Coman was born in Rumania in 1971. At the age of 23 she moved to Italy, where she continued her studies, dedicating herself to her passion for literature. She attended creative writing workshops in fiction, including one led by the writer Raul Montanari, and in screenplay writing, including the Holden Workshop in Turin. Her published short stories in Italian are: "Evghenij che torna" (Ellin Selae 2001); "Il re della 54", which was included the the anthology by Raul Montanari Onda lunga (Archivi del '900 2001); "La stanza degli ospiti", included in Il laboratorio dei Segnalibro (Roma 2002); and "Non ti aspettavo più" (Ellin Selae 2006). She has also published a novel dedicated to the history of the Afghan people, La città dei tulipani (Luciana Tufani Ed. 2005). An active collaborator of the online literary magazine, "Sagaranaonline", she is currently working on a novel called Tè al samovar, set in Soviet concentration camps in the 1950s.