TRAVELING IN STYLE : A NIGHT IN A MONASTERY

At one time, the little mustard-colored room in my high school where I was sent after lunch to practice playing the piano had been a dormitory room. Years before, farmers and bankers as far away as the Dakotas had sent their daughters to the nuns in St. Paul to be finished--as the rather sinister phrase of the day put it.

But by 1964 the boarders were long gone. We were all day pupils, studying trig, hoping to score high on the SATs. Most of the old dorm rooms, opening onto a long, dim corridor, had been turned into practice rooms. Another, used for storage, was filled with Singer treadle sewing machines from some ghostly home-ec class of yore. And one room, always locked, at the darkest end of the corridor, remained a mystery.

The room was next to a door on which a white cardboard sign announced in stern block letters: ENCLOSURE.

It might just as well have read STOP. No girl was allowed past this door or past any other “enclosure” signs posted throughout the building. Such markers indicated the border, strictly observed, between school and cloister.

The whole place, even the big, walled courtyard, was divided in half like that. Them and Us. “I’ll fetch it, dear,” a nun would say affably when one of us lobbed a tennis ball out of range into the cloister garden behind a tall hedge called The Maze. It was unthinkable that one of us might trespass Over There.

The building was romantic, made of red brick and laid out in an L-shape, with a great bell tower from which tolled the Angelus. There was an arched walk, a reflecting pool, statues, a grotto--the works.

Though it was only a few blocks from my own house, it seemed--and it was--foreign. The design of the building had been taken from that of an old French monastery. The fact that the nuns casually referred to their own rooms in the cloister as cells only heightened the romance, the oddity of the place. There is something tantalizing about what can never be seen, especially when it’s nearby. Even more so when those deadpan “enclosure” signs were posted on every floor, teasing.

So complete was the injunction against entering the cloister that no one flirted with the idea of a raid. It was impossible to imagine putting a hand on the doorknob of an enclosure door.

Yet, the cloister calm reached us. I loved the cramped, yellowed room on the fourth floor where, truth be told, I did precious little practicing. After a few swipes at “The Jolly Farmer” and “Fuer Elise,” I threw myself on the flowered daybed behind the black grand piano (said to belong to the archbishop, who stopped by at times and spent an hour playing things like “Begin the Beguine” and “Sweet Georgia Brown”). The long window rattled in its sash, and I stared down upon the courtyard. I was so high up that no enclosure sign could deny a view of the cloister garden below. It proved to be disappointingly ordinary.

I lounged on the daybed in my blue serge uniform and brown oxfords and considered my future. I had many airy castles in mid-construction. I would travel, and I would see the world. It was some kind of oversight, a mistake, that I’d been born in St. Paul, Minn., in the first place. I was really destined for . . . .

One afternoon, emerging from the practice room and my fine plans, I saw that the door to the always-locked room was open. The mystery room! A shaft of light fell across the dark corridor. There was a window in the room, south-facing, and the sun was flooding in.

It’s strange, the places that strike one as perfect. They needn’t be beautiful. But they must somehow register , must touch a core of harmony. A room, after all, is an interior : it speaks to the inner self.

The floor was maple, golden, highly polished. Nun’s work. There was a small, blue rag rug, a plain table meant to be a desk, a chair. No crucifix; instead, a print of a painting of a ship at sea. Behind it, someone had stuck a dried frond--from Palm Sunday--that curled around the wooden frame.

But it was the bed, I think, that did it. The narrow, white bed, the candlewick spread, the great wafer of sunlight cast upon it from the window.

I wanted to go in there, lie down and sleep for maybe a hundred years. The entire cube (it was tiny, another former dorm room) was engulfed in light. Sweet clarity. It seemed not part of the school, not part of the cloister, but belonged to some middle ground of perfect serenity.

Sister Marie Therese was placing a vase of lilacs on the table. She had a bundle of bedding under her other arm. She gave the white bedspread a final flick as she came to the door. What was this room for, I asked.

“This room, dear? This is for visitors.”

“Visitors?” Who, I wondered, ever came here to visit.

Sister Marie Therese took a final look around the little chamber; it seemed to pass inspection. She stepped outside, near me. “Strangers, dear,” she said, closing the door, which left us suddenly in the dark again. “We must always have a room for strangers.”

Then she opened the enclosure door and went on her way into the cloister, out of my part of the world, the bundle of laundry balanced on her hip like a baby.

Hospitality is one of the oldest missions of the monastic life, one largely forgotten by the modern secular world. We tend to think of monasteries, reasonably enough, as places apart, hidden, off limits. And it’s true: The primary work of a contemplative monastery is the Opus Dei --the Work of God. That is--pure and simple--prayer.

But the tradition of monastic hospitality is an old one, providing lodging for “pilgrims and strangers,” as St. Francis of Assisi called himself and his followers. There was a lot of wandering about during the Middle Ages, much of it by pilgrims and itinerant monks attached to no specific monastery. Such wandering monks, called gyrovagi , were a social embarrassment, trading on the commitment to hospitality that governed the great monastic houses. “Concerning their miserable way of life,” St. Benedict wrote, “it is better to be silent than to speak.”

Today’s monastery inns can be anything from a few rooms along a convent wing to a great monastic complex with a separate visitors’ auberge . Maintaining some kind of hostelry is an obvious way for monastic communities to earn some money. But when Soeur Ste. Agathe at Santa Coletta in Assisi handed me the change from my American Express travelers check after I had spent three nights (private room with breakfast), I knew--if I’d ever doubted--that something besides a healthy entrepreneurial spirit was running the show there.

Italy--no surprise--is especially rich in monasteries that take in travelers. In Umbria--”the mystical province,” home of St. Benedict, St. Francis and St. Clare--it seems easy to find convents and monasteries offering hospitality in the little hill towns.

Late last spring, on a hiking trip in the region (destination: Assisi), I stayed one night at the Benedictine monastery in Bevagna. The entrance faced a dark, cramped street littered with cars parked every which way. The place looked as unpromising as the front of a warehouse. Once inside, though, the blank facade gave way to a labyrinthine series of white, hushed hallways that--best of all--formed a square facing a flagstoned courtyard spilling with vines and bright flowers. At the center was a fountain. Tucked under one portion of the arched walk was a cash bar tended in the evening by a novice who bore down forcefully on the chrome handle of the espresso machine and urged me to try the local liqueur, made from truffles sniffed out by dogs trained for that purpose.

In Todi, the most beautifully situated of the medieval towns I visited, I stayed at the Hotel Bramante--not a monastery but a former monastery. There again were the mustard-colored walls, a foot thick, the unmistakable solidity that is a feature of monastic architecture, as though the work of prayer, being so effervescent, requires especially fortified housing.

In the morning, I swung open the inner louvered wooden shutters of the casement windows. The room, which had been dark, was pierced with sunshine. The sharp black-white of a southern landscape. The keen distinction between cloister and world. Outside, the mist that gives Umbria its mystical reputation strayed over the distant hills and the camel-colored medieval towns clinging to them.

After trekking through the region, the final hike brought me into Assisi. From Spello, up and then steeply down Monte Subasio, was a glory of wind and wildflowers. The wind was fierce--not cold, but as if a part of the sun had detached itself and become all blast, no heat. Easy to imagine St. Francis tearing around this exposed, exultant spot.

The wildflowers clung bravely to the rocky soil of the sheer rise, then grew lush in the greener, protected dips. A lot of screaming orange from poppies in great profusion. Also wild gladioli, convolvulus, grape hyacinth, and a lovely china-blue flower with black markings called, in English, love-in-a-mist. Here and there, lizards sunned themselves on the gravel path; the bleached white pebbles made a dry trickling sound as they were dislodged and skittered down the path in little landslides.

Assisi presented itself, finally, as part monastery, part carnival. The twisting streets leading to the Basilica of St. Francis were chockablock with concession stands selling souvenirs. I looked up from a plaster beer mug made in the shape of a friar to see, walking by, a sandaled friar in the shape of a beer mug.

I stayed at the Poor Clare monastery of Santa Coletta on the Borgo San Pietro--a community from France; the language of the house is French. The monastery has a strict cloister as well as common rooms (a pleasant, shadowy lounge and library with easy chairs and a piano, and a breakfast room with many small tables).

The bedrooms, each named for a saint or some part of the liturgical year, are located in a wing of the main monastery and in a separate building that overlooks, on one side, the convent garden and, on the other, the Plain of Spoleto and the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. That was my view from L’Annunciation--the Annunciation, my room. Next door, in La Joie (Joy), a man I never saw coughed a racking smoker’s cough most of the first night and then was gone--or dead. I never heard him again. I seemed to have the whole suite of little rooms to myself the rest of my stay.

At breakfast I sat with a once-beautiful woman, a retired professor of French literature from Nice. After our first cafe creme in the breakfast room, she said she could tell that I was well trained. Trained? I felt like a dog.

“ Chez les soeurs ,” she said. “By the good sisters.” Oh yes, that.

I wandered around by myself, in between the proper sightseeing of churches and Franciscan places. I bought a pair of shoes and tried, without success, to use my phrase book to get enzyme tablets to clean my soft contact lenses. I drank coffee at an outdoor cafe by the Temple of Minerva, a refreshingly pagan site in the middle of town--a building that proved, however, to have been turned into a Catholic church. I lit a candle for world peace in the dark interior and again wandered out into the sunlight.

But the truth was, I wasn’t much of a tourist. I spent most of my time not viewing the Giottos, guidebook in hand, but sitting on the little balcony of my room, gazing down at the nuns who were cultivating the garden, dressed in their heavy habits, which were hitched up slightly. They had broad straw hats over their veils. Birds dipped and paused, twittering and scolding, very busy about their own business.

I read. I slept--maybe a small version of the hundred-years’ sleep I wished for that day in high school when I saw, briefly, the flood of light coming from the locked room for strangers.

I was content. I had bought some ham and cheese, a loaf of crusty bread, some figs and wine, and a bar of chocolate at a local store. “ Bien sur, bien sur ,” Soeur Ste. Agathe said. Of course, I could have a picnic in the garden.

I stayed all afternoon. The light began to fade, going toward Vespers. At five, the bells started up all over town, from church to convent to monastery, a wild cuckoo-clock-shop effect.

I could hear the nuns’ voices coming from the choir, chanting a long, wavering line of a psalm in French. I had no desire to go anywhere.

I gathered up my picnic things and turned toward my room, where the simple bed with the white spread, the plain table and chair and the long French windows were waiting, just as they’d always been, just as they would be early the next morning when the sun would come flooding in. Just as I would be, letting the bright light fall on my face, clear as a ringing bell.

For more information, contact the Italian Government Travel Office, 360 Post St., Suite 801, San Francisco 94108, telephone (415) 392-6206.