God's Callgirl (28 page)

Something in me changed after that little incident. My relations with the general community continued as before—everyone was very busy with their work, and diluted to invisibility for most of the day in the vastness of that establishment—but I began talking to the lay sisters, to maintain the feeling of being a human which I had recently gained.

In contrast to the teaching nuns, the lay sisters were a much more cohesive bunch. They worked together in the laundry, the kitchen and the scullery. I joined them after meals when I could, helping to dry the dishes. I enjoyed their company and also sensed a certain independence and assertiveness among them. They were simple, kind, uncomplaining and dedicated women, with only one exception.

This woman had a big mouth, always speaking up when lay sisters should not be seen or heard. The most that was expected of them was to contribute a funny anecdote now and then; for the rest of the time, their assumed lesser intelligence demanded their subservient silence. The lay sisters accepted their lower-class status, except for Sister Bigmouth, Soeur Patrice. Soeur Patrice had a way of stating the truth, to the frequent embarrassment of Mother Josephine and her offsiders. She didn’t mind arguing with them either, and often refused to obey a command to stop. I found her funny, daring, courageous, stupid and enlightening. She definitely served to diffuse some of the unquestioned reverence for the superior that reigned in the chateau, and brought things down to earth a bit.

One day, Soeur Patrice announced that she thought the girls were not being given the right kind of food. Mother
Josephine was trying to save by scrimping on food bills. There was a revolt, not long after, in the senior girls’ refectory: they declared it was dog food and refused to eat it. It was a highly embarrassing incident. This was a crisis Mother Josephine had to field with all of her skill. The storm was weathered, as all storms were, but it could have easily been prevented if the wisdom and honesty of one angry lay sister had counted for anything.

I began to absorb the camaraderie among the lay sisters; it was the secret to their perseverance in that convent sweatshop. They all came from a peasant Flemish background and were used to hard work. They probably knew that life out there would not be any better, most likely worse. Here at least they had some security, and would be looked after in later life if they needed care. In those days, not having a husband might have been a good thing: the astute could opt for a life in a convent. I got to know these women well and they were far from naive.

One of them, Soeur Helene, was totally self-effacing. She was delicate with a thin, angelic face and a smile in her slightly crossed but calm eyes. I never heard her speak; she was either very loyal to the rule of silence or perhaps she had a speech impediment. She didn’t seem to need to speak. This little sister was a balm to my soul; there was a consistent feeling of peace and kindness about her. She would look at me occasionally with those quiet eyes and any soreness in my heart would disappear.

I began to talk to the sisters as I worked with them. It was against the rules, but the little bunch of washer-uppers had agreed that talking was necessary for their sanity. They spoke about what they thought was happening on the floors above them (they worked in the basement), and since they were never told about the things that weren’t supposed to
concern them, like happenings in the schools, they made it their business to find out for themselves. There was always a fair amount of gossip and laughter. I joined in with guffaws which made them warn me to be more quiet!

I had found an underclass in them that I identified with. They seemed to understand that even though I was a visitor and a teacher, I was not in the hierarchy’s good books, and young and vulnerable. They trusted me, and gave me to understand that they were behind me.

Soeur Helene showed me something strange and wonderful one day. She motioned for me to follow her and opened a cleaning cupboard. There I espied a statue of the Black Madonna, hidden in a corner. Just looking at it made my hair stand on end. There was a curious energy about it; her features were strong, not pretty or sweet, and her colour was black, with a shiny finish, giving the impression of sweat on her face and on the infant in her arms.

Why was the statue hidden in that cupboard and not standing in some venerated place like a great many other statues, such as The Little Infant of Prague, Saint Philomena, Saint Anthony, Saint Joseph, and Our Lady of This, That and The Other? And why did the little sister show it to me in such a surreptitious way? She watched my face intently all the time, and I felt that the statue was somehow not kosher, or had unappreciated influences. Now, I wonder if the objections were racist. A
black
Madonna! I had heard of one in Russia, where a secret Catholic movement was challenging the official Communism, but Russians were not like the rest of the world—they were feared as subversive. The Spanish also venerated a black Santa Maria at Montserrat, but at the time I didn’t know about her; nor, most likely, did anyone else in the superstitious and judgmental Belgium of the 1960s.

I loved the statue so much that I thought of stealing her. The sight of her stuck away in a dark cleaning cupboard as though she were evil, simply because she was different, brought tears to my eyes. I must have identified with her plight and, symbolically, wanted to rescue myself by carrying her off. Sadly, I didn’t think I had the right and left the statue there. Over the years, I have often wondered what became of her.

I BEGAN TO
experience nightmares. The old attic where I slept was not only creaky, dusty, draughty and cold, but had dark, unfathomable corners. At night it was easy to imagine that some stranger was prowling around. Maybe a man would get in through the unlined tiled roof of the attic. There were so many Belgians disgruntled with the convent’s involvement with the Americans in Brussels that Mother Josephine took me seriously when, one night, I knocked on her door in a nervous state, convinced that I had heard the footsteps of a man.

She called the porter nun and they searched up and down the attic with powerful torches. There was no one there, except perhaps the many ghosts of centuries gone by that worried me on other nights. They were plentiful, bringing with them shades of ghastly memories of times I felt I had surely known.

One day I was creaking along the corridors when Mother Josephine stopped me and stood in front of me. She was the shorter and so looked up at me. Her face had an expression that I couldn’t read, and what she said was a complete shock to me.

‘Sister Carla, I am sorry—’ she began.

‘It’s all right,’ I interrupted quickly, wanting to spare her the trouble of whatever she was about to say.

Mother Josephine seemed to push aside some annoyance. She started again: ‘I am sorry—’

Again I interrupted her, feeling strangely panicky. She gave up and walked on. I was stunned. Had she intended this to be a confession? Was she trying to make up for something? I never found out. I let her off the hook, which didn’t do me, or her, any good, but there it was.

SUDDENLY, THANKS
to my mother’s insistence that I be sent back to Australia or she would personally go to fetch me, I was told to leave. An agitated Mother Josephine came to me with the news that I would travel to Broadstairs the next morning. There was no time to arrange anyone to replace me, I was to leave as soon as possible; those were the orders from the General. There was an unusual urgency in Mother Josephine’s manner and she looked sickly pale. I was stunned, confused and pleased, but there was no time to get emotional, or say goodbye, or any of those things. My passport was in order now and in Mother Josephine’s hands. My suitcase was retrieved from the storeroom and I quickly packed.

We were up at four in the dark of morning. I stuffed some cold cereal and an unripe banana into my unwilling stomach, pulled on my gloves with the pathetic holes, and Mother Josephine and I were on our way to the port in a taxi.

Once more I was on a ferry, this time going from Ostend to Dover, with some farmers for company. They were sympathetically inclined towards the uncomfortablelooking nun passengers.

‘
C’est très dur,’
said one of them after a while. He had been studying our faces, which were white and drawn. I was
fighting seasickness, something I had never before experienced on an ocean liner, but the green banana in my stomach would not go down.

In the end, nature got the better of me. No time to explain, no time to ask where the toilets were—those things we always pretended we never needed in public. I blindly made it to the passageway, blundered into the lavatories and threw up. I gagged again at the awful mess in the washbowl. It didn’t wash away all that well. I came back quietly to my place beside Mother Josephine, who was preoccupied with her own thoughts. Murmurs of sympathy came from the farmers, whom I didn’t dare look in the face.

We were sitting there, lurching gently, when Mother Josephine handed me something to read. It was a small booklet called
How to Improve Your Willpower.
It contained a good deal of pop psychology about the benefits of a strong will, which I took literally at the time, especially as it was given me by my superior. I assumed that she had chosen it especially to help me. I was so grateful, and even felt that Mother Josephine was sharing a secret with me—one of her personal strategies, perhaps. The implication that I had a weak will didn’t matter!

I kept that tiny booklet for several years. With each exercise—like shredding ten sheets of paper slowly into a hundred pieces—I conjured up the feeling of a strong will. I thought it was exactly what I needed: more control over my feelings. Mother Josephine’s iron will became my model; a desperate hope for control that would eventually collapse. But during those years it helped me to be stoic, to remain unmoved by whatever the gods or God might send to try me. That is how
I
wanted things to be. The gods or God had other things in mind.

BACK AT THE
London convent, I met the nun with whom I would share the journey back to Australia. Sister Marian had just finished a few months of retraining at Stella Maris. She was an introvert who seemed always to be aware of her surroundings. She liked keeping her mouth shut even when the rules allowed her to speak; for example, when travelling at sea.

Our voyage back to Melbourne was uneventful. Taciturn Sister Marian steeped herself in a book most of the time, but there was one memorable break in her silence when we left the boat during a stopover at Calcutta, to find the Jesuit monastery to go to confession.

My first glimpse of the Indian people moved me deeply. From our ship, I watched a small group of children dancing outdoors with their teacher. The grace and ease of their movements had me enthralled. When we alighted, we were met by a woman whose handshake I shall always remember because of its feminine fluidity. In it, she carried the grace of the Ganges, the soft winds of her country, everything that flows naturally. She smiled warmly but shyly, and I lowered my curious eyes that seemed to embarrass her.

Sister Marian and I began the long walk to the monastery. She seemed to have a map in her head and walked resolutely, as if she did this every day of her life. She obviously had been given accurate instructions on where to go, how to get there and how to behave in these unfamiliar surroundings. All I needed to do was copy her. There was no communication between us as we walked. We ignored the groups of children who crowded around us, asking for money. They didn’t see us as holy people—how could they? Our dress and our skin showed that we were foreigners. I noticed bodies in the gutters of Calcutta, immobile, either drunk, asleep or dead. I saw
flies on the meat as it hung in stalls open to the street. I saw many faces crowding the pavement, cameos of lives, snapshots in my mind.

We made it to the oasis of the monastery and were cordially received by the Father in charge. Sister Marian untied her tongue and did all the talking, which was just as well as I seemed to have forgotten how to carry on a normal conversation.

We were ushered into a cool parlour and treated to the finest cup of tea I’ve ever tasted. Whether it was the heat, or the fact this was the purest Ceylon tea, or that it had been prepared with so much care by the young priest who served it, I couldn’t tell. Perhaps it was a unique combination of these things. What was certain was the magic of the young priest, for he enchanted me with his touch as he shook my hand. Electricity flowed between us, forming an instant bond, and I smiled happily at his young face, which beamed back at me. He was truly delighted that I liked the tea so much.

We were shown to the confessionals in the quiet haven that was their chapel: cool, with the scent of sweet incense in the air. The confession itself was a gruelling and humiliating experience. Having met the senior priest personally, I now had to tell him how awful I was. Feeling a terrible cringing inside my chest, I told him how I’d had sexual fantasies. I quickly added that I had also had rebellious thoughts—they were less sordid than sexual feelings…It was all so pathetic. Why did a beautiful afternoon have to be spoiled with this sort of soul-baring? After all, it was a one-way contract: the confessor told neither of us what went on in
his
secret mind! Never, ever, would a priest officially confide his sins to a woman.

We shook hands again, the young priest and I, to say goodbye. His masculine hand clasped mine with warmth
and firmness. Three years later he turned up at my convent in Australia to see me. I wasn’t there at the time, and wasn’t told about his visit until months later, when no one could remember his name nor where he came from. It was one of those strange incidents that made me wonder: were we meant to meet? But if so, then why didn’t we? What difference might it have made if we had met again?

Why do human beings wonder about these things?

WELCOME HOME, SISTER

MY FACE HAD
become pale from the longest winter ever, but my mother knew I would be all right again now that I was back in Australia—even if it was at the beginning of yet another winter. Her face glowed triumphantly when she and my father came to see me. My father grinned with pleasure. I would not stay long at Genazzano, however. I was needed in a country school and no time was wasted in getting me there. It was the middle of 1965.