How I Became A Nun (2 page)

AS I SAID AT THE END of the previous chapter, the conversation, if that
was what it had been, was over. We had lapsed into a silence that swallowed even the
sound of my fitful sobbing. My father was a statue, a block of stone. Shaken, trembling,
tear-sodden, holding the ice cream cone in one hand and the spoon in the other, my red
face twisted in an anxious wince, I was paralyzed too. More so in fact, since I was
fastened to a pain that towered over my childhood, my smallness, and my extreme
vulnerability, indicating the scale of the universe. Dad had given up. My one last,
desperate hope of turning the situation around would have been to get accustomed to the
taste and finish the ice cream of my own free will. But it was impossible. I
didn’t need to be told. I didn’t even need to think about it. Utterly
helpless as I was, I had a firm grip on the reins of the impossible. My sobs echoed in
that empty Rosario street, shaded by plane trees, oppressed by the still January heat.
The sun was doodling among the shadows. I was crying my eyes out and the ice cream was
melting flagrantly now, pink rills running down to my elbow, then dripping onto my
leg.

But nothing lasts forever. Something else always happens. What happened next came from my
body, from deep within, without any deliberate preparation or forethought. My solar
plexus was convulsed by a retch. It was grotesque, farcical. As if something inside me
was trying to show that it had vast reserves of energy ready to be unleashed at any
moment. And straight away, another retch, even more exaggerated. To the many layers of
my fear, one more was added: fear of being possessed by an uncontrollable physical
mechanism.

Dad looked at me, as if returning from somewhere very far away. “That’s
enough drama.”

Another retch. And another. And one more. It was a series. All dry, without any vomit. It
was like a car hurtling towards an abyss, slamming on the brakes. But over and over, as
if the abyss kept splitting.

A look of interest appeared on Dad’s face. I knew that face so well: sallow, round,
the hairline receding prematurely, the aquiline nose my sister inherited, not me, and
the overly wide gap between nose and mouth, which he hid with a neatly trimmed
moustache. I knew it so well, I didn’t have to look. He was a predictable man. For
me, at least. I must have been predictable for him too. But the retching had surprised
him. He looked at me almost as if I had become an object, detached from him and his
destiny. Meanwhile, I was pursuing mine. Retch. Retch. Retch.

Eventually the retching abated, without having produced any vomit. I was no longer
crying. I controlled myself, clinging to a sad paralysis. Another residual retch. A
bilious hiccup.

“I don’t believe this. Son of a bitch …”

He was slightly hesitant. He must have been wondering how he was going to take me home.
Poor Dad, he didn’t realize that he would never take me home again. Although
I’m sure that if someone had told him right then, he would have been relieved.

I was still holding the cone and, what with all the retching, I was spattered with ice
cream from head to foot; it was all over my clothes. So the first thing he did was to
take the cone away from me; then he took the spoon from my other hand. I was very slim
and petite, even for my age (I had just turned six). Dad was big without being hefty.
His fingers, however (which I
have
inherited), were long and slender;
delicately, they relieved me of my two burdens. He looked for somewhere to throw them.
But he wasn’t really looking because he hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Then
he did something surprising.

He put the spoon into the cone, dipped it into the remains of the pink ice cream,
half-melted now but still solid enough to scoop up, and lifted it to his mouth. I shall
not slight the memory of my father by suggesting that he couldn’t let an ice cream
go to waste when he had paid good money for it. I’m sure that’s not what it
was. Sometimes he had miserly reflexes, as we all do, but not in a situation like that.
He had always been a straightforward, small-town sort of guy. I’m sure he
didn’t even imagine the possibility of complicating the tragedy. I like to think
that he did it simply to relish a spoonful, just one spoonful of delicious, genuine
strawberry ice cream. Like an ultimate, secret, sublime confirmation.

But then the situation turned around. He screwed up his face in a grimace of disgust and
spat emphatically. It was revolting! I was staring at him pop-eyed (I was pop-eyed
already from the retching), seeing double or triple. I should have been exulting in the
triumph of the weak, a sentiment I knew so well, the triumph of those for whom
vindication always comes too late. And perhaps there was an element of that, since the
habit was deeply ingrained. But I didn’t feel exultant. In fact I didn’t
really understand what was going on. Instead of accepting the obvious explanation, as
any person in their right mind would have done, I was so caught up in the disaster that
I was looking for something more baroque, another turn of the screw that would
not
cancel out what had gone before.

He lifted the cone to his nose and gave it a good sniff. His expression of disgust
intensified. There was that stalling of imperceptible movements that precedes the swing
into action. He wasn’t a man of action; in that respect he was normal. But
sometimes action has to be taken. He didn’t look at me. Throughout the rest of
that ill-fated afternoon, he didn’t look at me again. Although I must have been
quite a sight to behold. Not once did he look in my direction. Looking would have been a
kind of explaining, and it was already too late for explanation to bridge the gap
between us. He got up and headed for the ice-cream store, leaving me alone on the
sidewalk bench, all in a mess and crying. But I followed him.

“Mister …”

The ice cream vendor looked up from his comic book. He tried to compose his features,
because he sensed there was a problem, but he couldn’t imagine what it might
be.

“This lousy ice cream you sold me is off.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, No, for Christ’s sake!”

“No sir, all the ice cream I sell is fresh.”

“Well, this one is rotten.”

“What flavor is it? Strawberry? It was delivered this morning.”

“What the hell do I care? It’s rotten.”

“Doesn’t come any fresher,” insisted the vendor. He looked along the
row of drums with aluminum lids lined up under the counter and opened one. “Here
it is. Brand new; I opened it for you.”

“Don’t try it out on me.”

“Is it my fault if the boy didn’t like it?”

Dad had gone red with fury. He held out the cone.

“Try it!”

“I don’t have to try anything.”

“No … you’re going to try it and you’re going to tell me if
…”

“Don’t shout at me.”

In spite of this reasonable suggestion, both of them were shouting.

“I’m going to report you.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“Who do you think you are?”

“Who do you think
you
are?”

By this stage it had become a battle of wills. It was too late for the problem to be
solved in a rational fashion. My father must have known that if he had tried the
strawberry ice cream at the start, things wouldn’t have degenerated to this point.
But he hadn’t, and now he was being paid back in kind, although it seemed like
pure malevolence to him. I sensed that he was prepared to force the vendor to taste it.
The vendor, on the other hand, was in what he thought was a win-win situation: he could
try the ice cream and even if it turned out to have an odd, slightly bitter or medicinal
taste, he could launch into an endless debate about the incommunicability or
undecideability of taste sensations. At that moment two teenagers walked in. The ice
cream vendor turned to them with a look of triumph on his face.

“Two one-peso cones.”

The one-peso ice creams were big: four scoops. At the time two pesos was a considerable
sum. The scene underwent a radical change. It was transformed by a new light, the light
of prosperity and normality; the wide world had entered the shop in the form of those
two teenagers. The sinister figure of the madman complaining about some nuance in the
flavor of a ten-cent ice cream had been swept aside. This opening up of the situation
called for new rules. Rational rules, which had been lacking. Any relationship, even (or
especially) mine with Dad, has its rules. But there were also the general rules for the
game of life.

The ice cream vendor was quick to realize this, and it was the last thing he realized.
Without changing his triumphant expression, he said, “Let’s see about this
strawberry then.”

He was talking more to the newcomers than to Dad. It was the clincher, his final show of
mastery. My father was still holding the sad little cone of melted ice cream. The vendor
wasn’t going to taste that mess; he would sample his good ice cream, untouched and
fresh from the drum.

Dad got worried. He felt defeated. “No, try this …” he said. But he
said it without much conviction. It didn’t make sense. And yet, in a way, it did.
All things considered, he was right to keep that card up his sleeve. If the ice cream
from the drum turned out to be all right, he could still fall back on the cone.

The vendor lifted the lid, took a clean spoon, scraped the surface with it and lifted it
to his mouth like a connoisseur. The reaction was instantaneous and automatic. He spat
to one side. “You’re right. It’s horrible. I hadn’t tried
it.”

He said it just like that. Like the most natural thing in the world. It didn’t
occur to him to say sorry. It really was out of order. It was too much for Dad. Hatred,
the destructive instinct, overwhelmed him in an instant with the force of a physical
blow.

“Is that all you’ve got to say to me? After …”

“Hey, calm down! How was I supposed to know?”

At this point, the only option left open, the only way forward, for both of them, was
sheer, untrammeled violence. Neither was about to back down. Dad leant over the counter
to thump the ice cream vendor, who braced himself behind the cash register. The two
teenagers ran out, past me (I was standing on the threshold, transfixed, engaged in a
warped attempt to connect up the different logics that had supplanted one another in the
course of the dispute) and watched from outside. Dad had jumped over the counter and was
aiming all his punches at his opponent’s head. The vendor was fat, clumsy, and
unable to hit back; all he could do was shield himself, more or less. Dad was shouting
like a lunatic. He was beside himself. A punch that happened to land square on the
vendor’s ear spun him through ninety degrees. He ended up facing away from Dad,
who grabbed him by the nape of the neck with both hands, pushed up against him from
behind (as if he were raping him), and put his head into the drum of strawberry ice
cream, which was still open.

“Go on, eat it! Eat it!”

“Nooo! Get him … uggh … off me!”

“Go on …!”

“Uggh!!”

“Eat it!”

With herculean force he shoved the vendor’s face into the ice cream and kept
pressing down. The victim’s movements became spasmodic, less and less frequent
… and eventually stopped altogether.

I NEVER KNEW HOW I got out of the ice-cream store … or was taken
away … or what happened … I lost consciousness, my body began to dissolve
… literally … My organs deliquesced … turning to green and blue
bags of slime hanging from stony necroses … with no life but the cold fire of
infection … and decomposition … swellings … bundles of ganglia
… A heart the size of a lentil, numb with cold, beating in the midst of the ruins
… a faltering whistle in my twisted trachea … nothing more …

I was a victim of the terrible cyanide contamination … the great wave of lethal
food poisoning that was sweeping Argentina and the neighboring countries that year
… The air was thick with fear, because it struck when least expected; any
foodstuff could be contaminated, even the most natural … potatoes, pumpkin, meat,
rice, oranges … In my case it was ice cream. But even food lovingly prepared at
home could be poisoned … Children were the most vulnerable … they had no
resistance. Housewives were at their wit’s end. A mother could kill her baby with
baby food. It was a lottery … So many conflicting theories … So many
deaths … The cemeteries were filling up with little tombstones, tenderly
inscribed … Our angel has flown to the arms of the Lord … signed: his
inconsolable parents. I got off lightly. I survived. I lived to tell the tale …
but in the end I had to pay a high price … like they say: Buy cheaply, pay
dearly.

My illness duplicated itself. I should have expected it … had I been capable of
expecting anything, which I certainly wasn’t. The affliction manifested itself as
a kind of cruel equivalence. While my body writhed in physical pain, elsewhere, for
different reasons, my soul was subjected to an equivalent torture. My soul … the
fever … In those days it wasn’t standard practice to control fever with
medication … They let it run its course, interminably … I was in a state
of unremitting delirium, with plenty of time to concoct the most baroque stories
… I had my ups and downs, I suppose, but the stories followed one another in a
sustained rush of invention … They fused into one, which was the reverse of a
story … because my anxiety was the only story I had, and the fantasies
didn’t settle or hang together … So I couldn’t even enter them and
lose myself …

One of the forms the story took was the Flood. I was at home … back in Pringles,
in the house we had left to come to Rosario … which was no longer ours …
we would never live there again. The water was rising, and I was in bed, staring at the
roof, rigid with fear … I couldn’t even turn my head to see the water
… but reflections from the rising surface were making whitish loops on the
ceiling … It was pure fiction, with no basis in reality, because we had never
even come close to being flooded …