Leafing through the phonebook, you’ll find no trace of the surname Perremuto, which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belonged to a proud family at the centre of political life in Calacte, whose grand Renaissance palace on the Piano di San Giuliano had survived the cataclysmic earthquake of 1693 unharmed. On the crest, clearly visible over the doorway, ramped the everlasting head of a beast with open jaws, a fierce warning to whoever sought to cross the threshold.
By the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, the male line was extinct, and the surname lost in anonymous genetic labyrinths. The palace changed name and owner. It became Palazzo Crescimanno.
It continues to be known by that name, but the units on the ground floor are now artisan boutiques, while the small apartments on the upper floor are occupied by respectable professionals who only come to Calacte for work.
Only amidst the furnishings and frescoes of the large, silent rooms of the first floor do faint echoes of a lost past remain.
First Movement: Donna Innocenza Palmieri
In that bitterly cold winter of 1699, no amount of brasiers, hot-water bottles, and roaring fires were sufficient to heat the spacious rooms of the palace through which the well-wrapped Donna Innocenza Palmieri wandered as she waited to give birth.
But the birth of Ignazia—the first girl after six boys—made the chilled baroness forget the apocalyptic cold in an instant and made Baron Federico Perremuto forget the irreparable damage the frost had done to his crops. Both threw themselves into preparing fitting celebrations for the birth at the end of spring: a splendid reception to confirm the new-born Ignazia’s place in their noble family and reaffirm their prestige and supremacy in the city.
A wind of renovation swept through the palace; the red velvet of the tapestries was replaced by the delicate pastel tones of fine Damask, while the heavy furniture relinquished its place to lighter, more graceful pieces in the new style then fashionable in Naples and Paris, created by master carpenters and decorators who had been summoned expressly from the capital to make them.
On the evening of the memorable gathering, however, the celebrated Ignazia screamed incessantly, while the baroness, confused and embarrassed, presented her to the honoured guests: a furious, purple-faced thing in ribbons and lace.
Donna Innocenza Palmieri had yearned for a daughter with her whole being, and she had known from her first month of pregnancy that it would be a daughter.
The night she conceived—afterwards, she convinced herself it had been that night—she fell asleep immediately, unlike the other times, when she had lain for hours, wakeful and agitated. She dreamt of her sister, dead in childhood following a plague of locusts, who had offered her a lit lamp and said, “I bring you this light,” while the room filled with the voices of invisible children.
She had felt a quickening of hope which she hadn’t known how to interpret.
The meaning of the dream became clear to her about a month later, when the guards on the bastions spied a shivering black speck on the horizon and raised the alarm. From the heights of the towers and balconies, from the rooftops and campanili, the people of Calacte despaired at the fatal advance of the swarming locusts.
From the heights of the palazzo, Donna Innocenza watched as the speck expanded into a vast, dark cloud and approached the city with a horrible screeching. But the black mass passed over and disappeared into the west.
The link between the dream and the harmless passing of the baleful locusts, which had brought the death of her sister thirty years before, burst upon her: her seventh child would be born alive. And it would be a girl.
*
Ignazia was not the docile daughter she had imagined, but an obstinate little girl who perpetually fought with her brothers and often filled the austere rooms of the palace with shrieks and trills; above all else, she liked to sing.
When Ignazia was on the verge of adolescence, Donna Innocenza sought to please her by taking her to her first festa teatrale. The child’s excitement at the novelty of the spectacle transformed into rapt concentration when the sopranist’s song swelled high and limpid into the starlit night before fading to a melodious whisper.
At the end of the first half, however, Ignazia unexpectedly clambered onto the stage and began singing at the top of her voice. She was unstoppable. They had to carry her off.
As a punishment, she was locked in her room for a week, alone and in silence. The servant who took care of her told her parents that the child kept obstinately repeating, “I’m not allowed just because I’m a girl?”
Donna Innocenza was bewildered by this question from her beloved daughter, who seemed not to recognize the natural order of things: that men, the castrati, sing, but not women. Never women. That this was how the world had been from time immemorial. And how it would always be.
And to remove that horrible idea from her head, she was forbidden to sing. And Ignazia sang no more. But her mother could no longer persuade her to go to the theatre—even the baron, so strict with others, so indulgent with his daughter, was unable to manage it—and when the duty of obedience to her spiritual director compelled her to go, Ignazia saw nothing and heard nothing: neither the elegant toilette of the noblewomen, nor the liveliness of the scenes on stage, nor the sublime contrast of the countertenor and sopranist. She was forced to confess this to Padre Antonio Macusi after he was alerted by a lady who had seen Ignazia sitting all evening with her eyes closed, as though sleeping.
*
This was the first of the unsettling questions which her teenage daughter would spring on Donna Innocenza, sometimes after days of moody silence. Once, when her mother was describing the prophetic dream of her birth, the girl asked abruptly, “And where was I before I was born? Where was my fleshly body, my flaming soul?”
Donna Innocenza sat astounded and speechless.
Ignazia was exactly the opposite of what she had expected. From a capricious little girl, she had transformed into an eccentric young woman who refused society life and preferred a poky room in the servants’ quarters to the comforts and luxuries of the palace. She was obedient, but hers was a detached, duty-bound obedience that left her mother feeling more intimidated than gratified. And to prevent the fragile, obstinate Ignazia from dying of hunger or going mad from thinking too much, Donna Innocenza had been compelled to request the firm intervention of Padre Antonio Macusi, who had drastically restricted Ignazia’s fasting to just during Advent and limited her excessive reading to devotional works.
Little by little, as the years passed, the baroness felt an insurmountable wall separate her ever more painfully from her singular daughter, so different from the daughters of other ladies. Ignazia despised every feminine trapping, keeping instead to her mind’s tortuous paths, as if soul and body, religious devotion and earthly beauty, were at perpetual war.
Now in her twenties, Ignazia continued to occupy that bare room, praying, writing, fasting all day long, as though compelled by an inconsolable grief.
“My poor daughter,” sighed the baroness, often thinking of the final journey that was fast approaching for her and the baron, and of the uncertain destiny of the daughter in whose head whirled alarming questions and unreachable thoughts.
Second Movement: Count Otto Ferdinand Trahun
The inaccessible rooms of Ignazia’s closely guarded “interior castle,” which so worried Donna Innocenza, excited the intense interest of Count Otto Ferdinand Trahun, who was a guest at the palace of Baron Perremuto in the late autumn of 1719.
That year, many German-speaking diplomats and soldiers were in Sicily to prepare the handover of the island to Emperor Charles VI of Austria; in a secret agreement the year before, the King of Sicily Vittorio Amedeo II of Savoy, had agreed to cede the island to the emperor in exchange for Sardinia. Deep had been the disappointment of the Sicilians on seeing their dream of an autonomous kingdom disappear in smoke, and furious was the military counteroffensive of the Spanish who, for nearly two decades, had been trying to reconquer it.
Count Trahun had been in Sicily since the beginning of the year, engaged on the battlefields and in occasional delicate diplomatic missions, such as the one that December. Travelling from Palermo to Syracuse, he decided to stop at Calacte. This would allow time for discreet meetings with the local gentry and give his men and horses a chance to rest following the fatigues of a long and difficult journey.
Accustomed to the snowy winters of the north, he had been dazed by the brightness of the December light which accompanied his journey; he would have preferred a cloudy sky and refreshing rain.
It had not rained for months in Sicily—heralding a long period of drought which would last until 1724—and in all the towns he passed through, he found frantic religious activity: processions, expositions of saints and relics, public penance, all of which he observed with tolerant scepticism.
To the cultured, Lutheran count, all religions were alike, and all—like birthplace, wealth, family—were down to random and accidental destiny; if wisely managed, however, they could be put to good use in governing the world.
He did not particularly care about religion, but since it was necessary to have one, he adhered to that of his family and country, respectfully following the doctrine of Luther.
*
The first time the count saw her, so plain and lacking in affectation next to the refined and tasteful elegance of the baroness, he was unable to hide his surprise: Ignazia was in complete contrast to the ostentation, comforts and domestic luxury of the palace.
The grey eyes that met his over the dinner table were more curious than diffident towards his strange accent, however, and he felt the fire in her temperament. Their conversation following the meal confirmed it; this became a delightful ritual that was repeated each evening to the wonder and unexpected hope of her parents.
Having become accustomed to the elaborate and exhausting verbal ceremonies of the Sicilian nobility, he was struck by the forwardness and lucid intellect of this intense and unreserved young woman who threw herself into the conversation, particularly on religious topics.
And every evening—to keep her there—he pursued those topics. Their progress was unpredictable, ending at times in obstinate theological debate, at others in intimate and melancholy reflections on existence. In these cases, he was deeply disturbed by Ignazia’s radical assertion of nothingness.
She had said to him once, “I always hold in my mind’s eye that, before I came into the world, I was nothing; then, I came: I was and am a sinner. And when I pass into the next life, my body will become dust”—an intransigent “no” to life and to love. To his love, the count thought desolately. While fulfilling his daily duties, he awaited the evening meeting with growing anxiety, as if further conversation could at last breach her barricaded interior rooms: he understood that Ignazia’s present openness with him was of the mind but not the heart.
The count compensated for this disappointing reality by playing out imaginary, transgressive scenes in his mental theatre. Above all, he enjoyed lingering over an image of her in a jolting carriage, where she would sit unresistingly next to him: he felt the flaming surges of her mind so close to him, her intelligent lips, the warm pressure of her breast firmly anchored against his protecting arms.
So, with his departure already fixed for 17 December, an unlooked-for happiness invaded him when Ignazia implored him not to leave, fixing him the while with the luminous, feverish eyes that accompanied their religious conversations. The nobles had already warned the city that the unveiling of the blessed image of the Madonna di Conadomini would bring the rains, and in a dream the Virgin herself had told Ignazia to make the count stay, else great and deadly storms would overwhelm him along the treacherous mountain road to Syracuse.
Though more gratified than convinced by her passionate words, he put off his departure, promising that he would become a Catholic if the prediction proved true.
After months of drought, it rained for days.
The waters swept away beams, beasts, furniture, and some inhabitants of the lower quarters of the city of whom nothing, not even a memory, remains.
*
Highly memorable, in contrast, was the conversion of Count Trahun, who, amidst popular rejoicing and solemn Te Deum, received baptism in the Cathedral of Messina a year later from the hands of the Bishop of Patti himself.
All the same, Ignazia did not accept his proposal of marriage. Instead she ignored social convention and wrote him an extremely long letter; the count carried it with him like a talisman onto the battlefields of Europe, where he spent the greater part of his existence. In it, he always found moral support and existential inspiration; the inspiration was even military at times, since it was an inner voice that inspired him to adopt a transverse manoeuvre against the King of Prussia in August 1744, forcing the King to quit Bohemia and denying him a field battle.
But in his moments of greatest despair on the endless battlefield that was Europe in the early eighteenth century, the final two lines of that letter aided him the most. Like a commandment and a balm, he would repeat them to himself: “The body in chains, the mind free: I serve no one, nor am I anyone’s but my own.”
Third Movement: Padre Antonio Macusi
I
No matter their rank in society, in the opinion of Padre Antonio Macusi, Jesuit and theologian of the Collegio degli Studi, and Ignazia’s spiritual director, women’s natural inclinations divided them into two categories: the many, useful for civic life but without mind and absorbed by appearances; and the few with too much mind and entirely immune to appearances who, if low-born, became witches, and if noble, became mad nuns, deliriously believing themselves to be Saint Theresas or Saint Catherines. All of them, however, nun or witch, eventually ended up before the Tribunals of the Holy Inquisition.
And, he thought, as he made his way towards Palazzo Perremuto, if it had not been for the respect due to her noble family, the mature virgin Ignazia, with her ostentatious difference from every natural, feminine impulse of the heart and soul, would have ended up there a while back. He had never before been required to offer spiritual guidance to one so obstinate in her resolutions and so estranged from all social etiquette, as if wealth and health, joy and beauty, were repulsive faults rather than gifts from God.
In church, instead of sitting in the place that rank and nobility assigned her, she sometimes crouched, wrapped in a filthy shawl, in the church porch along with the beggars who, lacking money or family, sat there out of necessity.
“Father, I’m well dressed, I’m well treated: I want for nothing. Where in all of this can you see a follower of a God made poor for me?” had been Ignazia’s confident and presumptuous response to his call for obedience: it was certainly the Devil—he had told her—who had suggested these eccentric acts that brought so much confusion and scandal to the city and her family.
Her presumption of holiness had never convinced him.
He saw in her the unfathomable resistance and self-opinionated convictions of a masculine, rational intellect which, clothed in modest female form, sought direction and approval from itself alone, on many occasions only obeying the form and avoiding the substance of his prohibitions. Ignazia gave away nothing of herself, trusted no one: not even him, her spiritual director, who was for every other noble lady their sole guide and only confidant.
In his eyes, her excess of virtue camouflaged pride and hypocrisy: she had nothing of the exquisite sensitivity of the beautiful and pious Donna Innocenza, but she was just like the baron, implacable and opinionated. So, for years, he had imposed on her a hard regime of obedience and mortification of desire. She longed to enter a convent, but he had never given her permission, not after the death of her father and not now that her mother was also dead. Nor would he ever give it. Nor would he permit her to attend the gatherings of her friends, the followers of Saint Theresa, forcing her instead to visit other nuns whom she would have rather avoided, deeming them too frivolous and worldly.
To humiliate her—but also to escape her serious and oppressive presence—he would often pretend not to see her when she waited to talk to him after Mass. He would wander about, chat, hear confessions, or withdraw for confidential conversations with other parishioners, and she would stay there waiting for hours, silent and immobile, pursuing him with the arrows of her cold intellect which—he was sure—was judging his attempt to ignore her as laughable and clumsy.
Nevertheless, he felt a sort of pain for that stunted, curbed existence which, like a child, was at times as dependent on him as on a severe and conscientious father: but if he had managed to prevent her from becoming a nun, he had also not managed to persuade her to marry Count Trahun, who, after ten years, still wrote to her from the remote corners of Europe. The Padre had never understood Ignazia’s stubborn refusal. Of her interest, he was sure; shortly after the count’s departure she had confessed to having sinned with him in dreams, the only time that hard-edged body had ever shown any impulsive, feminine nature.
Despite the effort and unconfessed moral unease that his spiritual direction of Ignazia provoked in him, Padre Antonio Macusi felt a contradictory connection binding him to his spiritual charge, such as that between a usurer and his victim: attraction mixed with a need to run away in the face of that soul in continual, merciless inspection of herself and the world, who only seemed to find a temporary rest from her labours in the contemplation of existential nothingness.
Padre Antonio Macusi ascended the wide staircase of Palazzo Perremuto with slow steps, as if to delay for as long as possible his meeting with the woman who, in bed with a fever, had urgently called for him. He could not avoid this request; he had promised Donna Innocenza on her deathbed that he would always watch over her difficult and demanding daughter.
II
“Father, don’t go away. Who’ll be with me when I die? I’m going to eternity,” Ignazia entreated him, having been forcibly moved from her narrow room in the servant’s wing to a lighter one on the first floor, and onto a softer bed than the straw mattress that she had slept on since adolescence.
Her spiritual director heeded neither her words nor her fever: it was not the first time an excess of fasting, cold and the obstinate pursuit of every physical discomfort had forced her to her bed.
“Wait until I get back before dying then,” he replied, with mocking scepticism.
Ignazia’s words nevertheless continued to echo in his head as he walked towards the carriage that would carry him and his brother priests to a distant retreat at Aci on hours of difficult roads; he felt an ill-defined fear and subtle sense of guilt which, even during the eight days of spiritual exercises, resurfaced from time to time.
Fourth Movement: Delirium
Rustling light slants into the room.
“She’s resting at last,” murmurs the servant, reassured.
The servant closes the shutters, tiptoes away.
Ignazia fitfully breathes into the silence.
An occasional babble of words.
*
“Ignis fiamma—flame bursting on high—doesn’t go out—that’s my name—fire must be controlled, like water, earth, trees, beasts.”
Her spiritual director’s words return to invade her mind.
“I won’t sing any more. I’ll only fast during Advent,” she moans contritely.
But the sopranist’s voice storms the balcony, from childhood it returns to pound at her mind: oh painful virtue of obedience.
She catches herself singing. In silence. Inside.
*
She advances on the colours of the fresco, a black shape infecting them: an atonal night between note and note, between sign and sign.
She opens her eyes: the song collapses, fractures.
*
She endures the ceaseless throbbing . . .
. . . mind . . .
. . . darkness before and flame after . . .
. . . hungry, thirsty . . .
. . . colourless face of nothingness . . .
. . . before light and dark separated. “And I, where was I?”
Father Antonio’s gone, Mother doesn’t reply. She’s dead.
*
. . . she finds her at the end of her mind’s meandering, young, with a green and gold gown that swishes while she dances in a festival of songs and violins, of coloured lights and playing water.
A snail advances across her beautiful face.
“Look out!” she cries. Her mother doesn’t respond.
She’s dead again. And she doesn’t know . . .
*
. . . while the fury of the wind thrusts open the balcony, tears off the curtain that billows in the air and disappears into the west, takes the form of a faltering sailing ship on the inky sea of Barbery . . .
. . . for a moment it is and then it is not.
*
“Saint Theresa, help me,” she prays while into a tunnel she is falling
the night
conquers the castle, invades the rooms.
A hibernation of snow falls: everything freezes.
*
She wakes in a shadowy room, gets up.
Barefooted she goes to the balcony: below, on the great tree-lined square, the lively toing and froing, the cheerful crossings of carriages and carrying chairs.
The twilight gradually gives way to a cloudy evening—confused words, muffled sounds—only an unintelligible rustle from the undulating step of the ladies, the stiff strut of the gentlemen.
“The last time I see you, world,” she thinks, while the creak of a carriage stopping before the palace returns from a life that is not hers: a firm step and a foreign tongue. The strong hands of the count support her.
The bed is so far away: she sways.
*
She holds on to the furniture, to the curtains, she passes in front of the mirror.
“Who are you?” she asks.
“The splendour of nothingness,” replies the already wavering mind, scattered: sand amidst infinite sand, dust amidst the infinite dust of earth and sky.
*
It is the first hour of the night on 30 November 1730: with great effort, after millennia, she reaches her bed.
Fifth Movement: Obedience
Ignazia Perremuto was obedient: she waited for her spiritual director, who returned in time to give her the Last Rites and receive her final words.
“Goodbye riches. Goodbye family. Goodbye friends. Goodbye everything. Let us go,” said Ignazia and fell into a coma.
Padre Antonio Macusi wanted to test the obedience of his spiritual charge one last time. He took her hand. He called to her. “Repeat with me, Gesù e Maria,” he ordered.
From the depths of her coma, Ignazia repeated, “Gesù e Maria.” And breathed her last. It was the second hour of the night on 1 December 1730.
Epilogue
If she had been born in Paris, and seventy years later, Ignazia Perremuto might have been one of those femmes-filosofes who transformed abstract speculation on equality and liberty into practice in the clubs, assemblies and revolutionary committees of the late eighteenth century, and asserted the equality of the sexes. She might have been like the Girondin Etta Palm, or the Jacobin Claire Lacombe, or the passionate and singular Olympe de Gouges, who published The Declaration of the Rights of the Woman and the Citizen in September 1791, and dedicated it to Queen Marie Antoinette, considered another oppressed woman: a fatal dedication that led them both to the guillotine.
But in the random and limitless sea of existential possibilities, in which chance and necessity, genetics and history, capriciously coincide and determine what is commonly called “destiny,” Ignazia found herself living in a place and time in which the lives of women were still exclusively structured by family and convent, gossip and religious devotion.
All the same, she chose freedom.
She could not do otherwise than live that freedom within herself, however, rejecting the false fullness of an easy life devoid of the right to choose in favour of the solitary and mystical adventure of the soul: she wanted to imitate the holy life, noble endeavour, and divine ecstasy of Saint Theresa.
But, in seeking ecstasy she found the mind and, unbridled within it, found nothingness.
*
“To the dominion of this awareness of her own nothingness, Ignazia dedicated all her care,” wrote a devoted and anonymous priest forty years after her death in The Life of the Fortunate Servant of God Ignazia Perremuto, published in Caltagirone in 1780.
Without forcing the secret intimacy of those spaces which, using Saint Theresa’s metaphor, Ignazia called “the rooms of the interior castle,” he reconstructed the virtuous and private events of her existence with discretion, humbly stopping before the mysterious portals of a soul who, at the point of death, bade a tormented farewell to those earthly goods that she had rejected in life.
The anonymous biographer compares Ignazia’s ascetic life to the corrupt habits of modern women. In those libertine years of the 1780s, women in risqué attire threw themselves into suggestive dances, demanding that the right to have a lover be written into their marriage contracts; thus every woman had a gallant companion for balls, soirées and leisurely moonlit walks, while her husband was another lady’s lover, in an unending chain of lascivious exchanges.
“O tempora, o mores!” wrote the indignant, devoted priest, pointing to “the masculine virtue” of Ignazia Perremuto as an exemplary model. The masculine quality of her feminine virtue had more than once alarmed her spiritual director Padre Antonio Macusi, who, shortly after the death of his spiritual charge, was called to teach theology at a Jesuit house in Palermo.
*
In that city where the transitory nature of every worldly good was so apparent, and amidst persistent distractions, Padre Antonio Macusi had many opportunities to reflect on this. The position of teacher to the most illustrious families often propelled him into the frivolous and sparkling life of the court: a whirl of parties, ordinations, and receptions which, between natural disasters, bereavements, wars and dynastic changes, repeated themselves with the same rites and the same rituals. With a sort of interior vertigo, he attended the acclamation of Charles II of Bourbon, first King of the Two Sicilies—since, to preserve the new European equilibrium, the island had passed from the Austrian Hapsburgs to the Spanish Bourbons in 1739. It was a great and enthusiastic acclamation, as great and enthusiastic as those that had taken place for all the other sovereigns from all the other dynasties since the beginning of the century.
While many in Palermo circulated violent anti-Jesuit pamphlets, in the midst of his worry, Padre Antonio Macusi thought more and more often about Ignazia. With a sense of guilt and impotent nostalgia, he envied the courageous way in which she had stripped riches, nobility, and affections from her back, but it pained him to recognize that in life she had never been entirely free. Over the years, his memory of Ignazia became an obsession to which, around the middle of the 1750s, the writing and publication of her biography put an end.
But a true understanding of nothingness—the lacerating thorn within his flesh and mind—struck in all its stark clarity when, now old and ill, he sent his new edition of the biography to press in his native city. He was forced to publish it anonymously.
The indestructible and omnipotent Society of Jesus had been expelled like a criminal gang from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies more than ten years before, and the Holy Army had been suppressed and disbanded by the Pope himself. Padre Macusi had become an outlaw, without country or name, without public existence.
