2. Mariola.
But as to Mariola and Argentina, and their lives after 1510, we do know something. Mariola (Maria) Bastarda had, on leaving Catherine’s service, (probably only some weeks, but possibly some months before her mistress’s death), become one of the servants, or under-nurses (filia), of the Hospital; and, on July 7 of the following year (1511) she was clothed a Novice in the Convent of Bridgettines in Genoa, with the money left to her in Catherine’s Will.[312]
The latter fact is interesting as showing how purposely vague and ambiguous, and how little capable of being pressed, are at least some of the statements of the Vita, if taken as they stand and prior to any distinction of documents and of their varying degrees of trustworthiness. For there we read, after the scene where the evil spirit within the maid declares Catherine’s true surname to be “Serafina”: “this possessed person (spiritata) was endowed with a lofty intelligence, and lived to the end in virginity.” Who would readily guess that we have here to do with little Mariola? The passage is, I think, in part modelled upon Acts xxi, 9: “And he” (Philip the Evangelist, one of the seven Deacons) “had four daughters virgins, who did prophesy.” Even so then did Catherine, the teacher, have “a spiritual daughter,” a virgin, who “prophesied,” divined and announced, the true character of her mistress.—“We believe,” continues the Vita, “that the Lord had given her this spirit to keep her humble. She finished her life in a holy manner.” Who would guess that this meant profession as a Nun? The point is, I take it, kept vague in part to make the insertion of the words which follow possible. “Nor did the evil spirit ever depart from her, till well-nigh the very end, when she was about to die.” It is evident that this cannot be pressed: and that either the attacks continued to the end, but were rare and slight; or that they were serious and frequent, but ceased a considerable time before her death. For, though we do not know when she died, we have no right to assume, in evidently still so young a person, that death came soon.
3. Argentina.
And Argentina appears in several documents. So in an entry of the Hospital Cartulary for November 22, 1510, as to the value of the things then handed over to her in accordance with Catherine’s Will. So again in three legal documents drawn up for her and in her presence,—a Will of October 1514, a Codicil of some later (unspecified) date, and a second Will of January 15, 1522. In the Codicil she doubles the little sum she had left to the Hospital in 1514; and in the last document she declares her wish to be buried “in the Church of the Annunciata, in the monument (vault) of the late Giuliano Adorno, or in such other as may seem good to …”; and leaves moneys “for Masses to be said for her soul, by two of the Brethren of the Monastery of San Nicolò in Boschetto.”[313]
This group of papers is interesting. For we see from it how even an obscure little serving-woman was wont, in Italy, the classic country of Law and Lawyers, and during these claimful, pushing times, to have Wills and Codicils drawn up for her. We perceive, too, how proud and fond Argentina remained of her former avocation of servant to Giuliano, since only he and not his Saint-wife lay in that vault; and how, nevertheless, an uncertainty possesses her mind as to whether this can or will be carried out—no doubt owing to the fact that the vault had not received the remains of his wife, and had not indeed probably been opened again at all since his death, twenty-five years before. And we can note how Argentina, together with, and no doubt at least in part because, of her late mistress, has an affection for the Monastery and Pilgrimage Church of San Nicolò, on that wooded hill, so near to Catherine’s former villa.
And Argentina appears finally in that list of conclusions (already referred to in Marabotto’s case) as continuing to live in the Hospital; and as still living in it in 1523; and, similarly, as continuing in the capacity of servant to Don Marabotto. I have already pointed out the difficulties inherent in this statement, but believe it to be correct. Yet it would be of considerable importance if we could reach lower down, and could fix the exact death-date of poor Marco del Sale’s ardent-minded, imaginative little widow. Since she was doubtless considerably, I think quite twenty years, younger than Marabotto, and since even the latter lived on, we know, till 1528, six years after this Will, there was nothing, in the matter of actual age, to prevent her living on up to 1550 or beyond. And circumstances connected with the growth of Catherine’s legend seem to point, as we shall find, to Argentina having died in any case after Marabotto, and probably not before 1547. Similarly, Catherine herself did not die till twenty-six years after her first Will (1484-1510).
V. The Two Vernazzas: their Debt to Catherine, and Catherine’s Debt to them.
We now move on from these four figures which, seen against the living background of those strenuous times, appear indeed small and contracted; and which, in relation to Catherine, appear rather as a mere memory and mechanical continuation of her limitations, and specially of the phenomenal accidents and relative monotony of her sick-room period, than as a rich and vigorous, because truly personal, expansion and re-application of her many-sided action, breadth and warmth, and human practicality, during the times of her fullest self-expression. Such a new facing of the new problems, with a strength both old and new, enkindled indeed at her light and warmth, and yet developed also from the vigorously fresh centres of other deep hearts and virile minds and wills, we must now attempt to picture, in the case of the two greatest of Catherine’s disciples, Ettore Vernazza and his eldest daughter Battista. And yet if, in the former four cases, while the results of this influence appeared few and insignificant, the actual fact and source of this influence were plain beyond all cavil: in these latter two instances we have, indeed, a rich crop of thoughts and acts, of wisdom and of heroism, but then it is mostly impossible to sort out what is here the direct and unmistakable outcome of Catherine’s influence.
The great, open, spiritual and even temporal, battlefield, if not of Europe at least of Italy; the abuses and tyrannies, but also the necessity and the power for good, of governments; and the strenuous, tragic, and transformatory conflicts of single wills within their own soul’s world, and again with other wills, both single and combined: all this lies spread out here like a map before us, seen from the bracing heights of time. There is nothing here, at least in the Ettore’s case, that the most intolerantly robust, or even the most hysterically would-be strong, mind could suspect of sickliness. And yet, if undoubtedly much of all this fruitful virility in Catherine’s closest friend, and in Catherine’s God-daughter, proceeds from Catherine herself, it nevertheless springs up and grows within them, not as an avowed, nor probably, for the most part, even as conscious, imitation or reminiscence.