It was quiet in the city. I’ve known you since you were a baby. one chaperone asked the other as they turned to leave. The process distressed me — it seemed to do nothing but weaken the child — so I left Allegra’s bedside for the hour. In your own words, Allegra, I said. When the children you’ve suckled are grown, they will forget you. More milk, she said. Vendors set up leather, vegetable and paper carts underneath our public arches. She continued to cry, but let me move her into the tub. Before I could pull her away, Allegra had one hand in the bowl, her fingers wrapped around three fat olives. Still, she wrote to Byron, who still had not come to visit his daughter the entire length of her stay in Bagnacavello. Can you hear me? Powered by, Creedence Clearwater Revival It Came Out Of The Sky Meaning, Characteristics Of Teacher-centered Approach, The Suite Life On Deck Season 1 Episode 6, Van Gogh Noon Rest From Work Original Price, Manchester United Vs Aston Villa Live Stream, How To Submit A Request For A White House Tour, What Happens To A Pile Of Grass Clippings, Better Late Than Never Japan Sleeping Pods, Touro College Of Osteopathic Medicine New York. In my room that night, I leafed through the stack of letters I had penned for Allegra. I brought her to her feet, placed one arm around her chest and kneeled behind her, and tried to contain her. You promised. Please come soon. For hours I sat on a small chair next to Allegra until they took her. Jesus, Allegra said, prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. She was tall, humorless, and deeply committed to the church. An academic exercise, I told myself. Their eyes and fingers became the same in my dreams. Allegra buried her face between my bent knees. I washed her quickly and not without tenderness. Hail Mary, full of grace, I said that evening before dinner, rosary in hand at the Madonna’s feet. For a moment I could hear the abbesses’ cautionary words, and I became fearful that Allegra would be hurt or taken from me. Out of simple decency, if not love. I understood the finality of the situation, and wanted to keep it at arm’s length, dwell, soak up the last of Allegra’s spirit. I worked harder than I had worked before, trying to forget the children that had been taken from me. The doctor brought in to tend Allegra and others who had begun to show signs of rashes and fevers worried of a typhus outbreak. she asked. A coward of a father, he squandered his greatest contribution to the world. When I didn’t sleep, she came to me, young and alive, olives in her mouth, the child I knew better than my own. Your own words are best. I will ply her with wisdom and all the books I can get my hands on, I would say. The convent was too large to light in entirety. I did not dare stop by the infirmary on the way to my room at night; I’d been given strict instructions to avoid Allegra. I thought, then, about a place I could take Allegra. Still, I imagined her shaking and sweating underneath rough blankets, delirious, lonely. Allegra had not touched the spaghetti on her plate and as I walked past she raised her hand to get the attention of the sister who was manning her table. I could tell immediately that Allegra was a difficult child, but something in me felt I could reach her. I want to write a letter to Papa. I knew that I could offer her comfort. But I know he loves you, and thinks of you fondly. Her anxiety was evident. I lived on the side of the island away from the palazzos, where the gardens were beginning to bloom, and the scent of sea salt and pine filled the air. Her cry was sharp and unpleasant, like a bleating sheep lost from the heard, and everything in me wanted it to stop. She stood with her hands out and open on a wooden table. They grew in length and content, and with some exceptions, I tried to remain true to the author’s intent. Tell your friend, the abbess boomed from the shadows at Allegra, what you learn here. There were four patients per room, and I read scripture to them before turning down their gas lamps. Knowing the abbess would be unhappy with the letter’s contents, I edited the text. On the first of March, 1821, Allegra Byron entered the Convento di San Giovanni like a small storm, accompanied by non-relations, overdressed women who handled her with cool affection. I was drawn to her face, the life within it, the light underneath her skin. The abbess came to me but, defiant with grief, I turned away. That’s not a privilege I can grant, I said. Her body was cold and I knew the walk would be good for her circulation. I think not. I did not see Allegra again until bath time, when I left the sleeping infants in the nursery to assist with turndown rituals for the older children. Allegra was the result of a short liaison and Byron had become fed up with her mother before she was born. She appears greatly tamed, Shelley said to me as the abbess and Allegra disappeared down the travertine hall, though not for the better. she asked, casually pointing to a place between her shoulders. Allegra was the product of a short-lived affair between the Romantic poet and her starstruck teenage mother, who was living in reduced circumstances in the household of her stepsister and brother-in-law. I smiled, took her hand, and kissed her forehead. Perhaps it had been siphoned off years ago. You broke protocol this evening taking Allegra to bed. Paninis heaped with prosciutto and mozzarella were being stacked onto trays in preparation for lunch. I had a chill as I made my way back to clean the bath station; the fight with Allegra had dampened my clothes and hair. Feeling the weak grip of her fingers around mine, I suffered. These moments, where a child was left in our care, struck me as pivotal in the child’s life, grievous even. The convent was a timeless space; the institution found comfort and righteousness in routine and uniformity. I sought exhaustion through labor, a mind quieted by industriousness. She threw herself across the floor and began kicking the air. She swung her other leg over the stucco ledge and stood knee-deep in the cold, dirty water. She now stood still a few feet from the tub, her eyes shut and mouth gasping for air between sobs. The last block my back began to ache and I could no longer carry Allegra. I put one foot in front of the other, sometimes for hours, the Faro lighthouse sending its blinding beam into the sea, the cries of the gulls, like my grief, inelegant and ancient. She was three, nearly four, and inhabited the space between a baby and a child, far more interested in the older kids than the benign beings at her own table. She looked at the paper — a used sheet of music I’d found with one blank side — happily. My head hurts. I’m coming for you. She kicked the water, pushed it, threw it back on itself. I held the cookie gingerly, afraid it would crumble, so eager to present it to Allegra intact, though I knew she might not eat it. But the old fight in me stirred, the fight of a peasant’s wife who had sewn seeds in the hills of Alfonsine while pregnant, tended my ill husband a day after childbirth. When I lay in bed at night, I could still picture the eyes of my newborn daughter, freshly and forever closed, her eyelashes long and lush, her skin yellowed, her life abbreviated. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. Do you see Mammina and Papa? Her empire-waist muslin dress, which peeked out beneath her unbuttoned velvet coat, was wrinkled from constant movement.

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