How I Became A Nun (5 page)

The first weeks were a stream of pure images. Human beings tend to make sense of
experience by imbuing it with continuity: what is happening now can be explained by what
happened before. So it’s not surprising that I persisted in the perceptual habits
I had recently acquired with Ana Módena and went on seeing gestures, mimicry,
stories without sound, in which I had no part. No one had explained the purpose of
school to me, and I wasn’t about to work it out for myself. Initially, however,
the problem didn’t seem serious. I regarded it all, rather stubbornly, as a
spectacle, an acrobatic show …

The drama started later on … Why is it that drama always starts late? Whereas
comedy always seems to have started already. Except that later on we come to see that it
was the other way around … The drama was triggered for me by the realization that
the mute scene I was witnessing, the teacher’s and pupils’ abstract mimicry,
affected me vitally. It was
my
story, not someone else’s. The drama had
begun as soon as I had set foot in the school, and it was unfolding before me, entire
and timeless. I was and was not involved in it; I was present, but not a participant, or
participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the performance, but that gap was me! At
least I had finally realized (and for this I should have been grateful) why I was
missing out on the mental soundtrack: I couldn’t read. My little classmates could.
By some sort of miracle, they had learned how to in those first three months; an abyss
had opened between them and me. An inexplicable abyss, a void, precisely because there
was no way to account for the leap. They couldn’t say how or exactly when they had
learned to read, nor could I, of course; not even the teacher could have explained it.
It was simply something that had happened. For the teacher (who had forty years of
experience with the first grade) it was routine: it happened every year. It was so
familiar, it had become invisible, a blind spot.

The curtain went up for me one day, in the boy’s bathroom at school … But
first I need to explain the circumstances, otherwise the anecdote will be
incomprehensible.

We lived on the outskirts of Rosario, in a modest neighborhood, and most of the children
at the local school came from humble families, often living just above the poverty line,
or below it. At the time, children from what would now be called “marginal”
families all went to school, at least for a few years. There were no special schools or
educational psychologists … It was a very rough, very wild environment, a
Darwinian struggle for life. The fights were bloody, and the vocabulary that accompanied
them was brutal. I knew about swear words; I even knew the words themselves, but for
some reason I had never paid them much attention. It was as if I registered them with a
second sense of hearing and transferred them to another level of perception. I had come
to the conclusion that they functioned as a set and their meaning was a kind of action,
which wasn’t too far from the truth. There was only one element that stood out
from the set. Usually, when the boys at school were arguing, the transition from verbal
to physical abuse was signaled by one of them suddenly saying, in the midst of what was,
for me, a nebulous mass of swear words, “He insulted my mother.”

I didn’t find this detail bewildering in itself, because the mother figure was
sacred for me too, and I had noticed that “mother” was often included in the
flow of swear words. Had I been asked, I think I could have even repeated the whole
sentence, having heard it so often: “Your mother’s a bitch.” Now,
except for that central word, the rest was meaningless noise to me. I was almost
unimaginably vague, not because I was stupid, but because nothing really mattered to me.
This is an enormous paradox, because everything mattered to me, far too much; I made a
mountain out of every molehill, and that was my main problem … I might have
seemed indifferent, but nothing could have been further from the truth and I knew it.
This incident was a case in point. I must have noticed that sometimes a kid would say
“He insulted my mother” without the word “mother” having been
pronounced, but I let it pass, and thinking back over the whole incident, I concluded,
for my own convenience, that “mother” must have been said, I must have
missed it. On one occasion, however, I was forced to abandon this explanation. There was
a fight at playtime, near the windmill at the back of the schoolyard. Whenever there was
a fight, everyone went to see, gathering round in a circle two or three deep; there was
no way it could go unnoticed. Then one of the teachers would come to break up the feral
boxing match. But plunging into those mêlées was not for the faint-hearted,
and only a small group of “tough” teachers dared to intervene, one
especially, a strapping young lady, and she was the one who came this time. The
contenders were two boys from the third grade, covered in blood, their smocks torn, both
of them in a mad frenzy. The teacher pried them apart, not without difficulty. The
bigger of the two went back to his gang of friends. The other one began to bawl. He was
hiccoughing through his tears … one of my specialties. The teacher demanded an
explanation at the top of her voice but he couldn’t speak. It was as if the fight
was still going on in his heart. He looked so wretched, the teacher took him in her arms
and hugged him tight. She guessed the explanation, which he finally managed to utter
between violent sobs, “He insulted my mother.” She calmed him, hugged him
… As a tough teacher she could understand; they lived in the same world, after
all. The other boy was watching from a distance, surrounded by his friends, fury and
resentment flaring in his eyes … Meanwhile, for the first time, I felt a note of
boundless bewilderment resonating: Mother? What mother? What was he talking about? Why
did everyone seem to accept what he said?

I had witnessed the brawl from the very start, I was certain I hadn’t missed
anything and I knew that at no point had the word “mother” been pronounced.
The other words, yes, but not that one. It was so clear, I could only conclude that
“mother” must have been
implied
somehow. And of all the things I
might have fastened on, that was what intrigued me most of all; I couldn’t get it
out of my head.

Anyway, one day, in the middle of a lesson, I asked the teacher for permission to go to
the bathroom. I was always doing this; we all were. I asked without needing to go or
having carefully chosen my moment (I guess it was the same for the others). I did it on
impulse. It’s the only unalloyed triumph I can remember from my childhood. As soon
as the teacher saw the little hand go up, she would briefly consider what the pupil was
going to miss (it was always something trivial like when to write b and when to write v)
and then shout: All right! But this is the last time! The
last
time! And the
kid who had been visited by the brilliant idea of asking at precisely that moment, which
had turned out to be the last, ran out of the classroom, deliriously happy, under the
hateful, bitter gaze of all the others, who felt they had missed their last chance
… But the chance was repeated, identically, and seized, four or five times in
every one-hour period. For us it was always now or never and the teacher always repeated
her ultimatum, although she never said no, because the first-grade teachers, who were
immune to other kinds of anxiety, lived in fear of the kids wetting themselves. But we
didn’t know that. We were just kids. The amazing thing is that I managed to join
in the game. It would have been much more like me to hold on until my bladder burst. But
no. I asked without needing to go, like all the others. I wasn’t backward in that
respect, at least.

My anomalous behavior can perhaps be explained by a magically repeated coincidence. Every
time I asked for permission to go to the bathroom, two or three times a day and always
on the spur of the moment, as I was crossing the deserted yard, I met a boy heading in
the same direction, a boy from another grade, I don’t know which. We ended up
becoming friends. His name was Farías. Or was it Quiroga? Now that I’m
trying to remember, I’m getting the names mixed up. Or maybe there were two of
them.

This time, he was there, as usual, although we had never dreamed of arranging to meet.
The dark grey walls of the bathroom were covered with graffiti. The kids were always
stealing chalk so they could write on them. I had never really paid much attention to
the inscriptions.

Farías pointed one out to me; it was large and recent. After a few days of
exposure to the powerful ammoniac fumes of the bathroom the chalk began to darken. These
letters were so white they shone—so they must have been fresh that day. They were
capital letters, fiercely legible, though not for me; all I could see were horizontal
and vertical sticks in a senseless tangle. Until that moment I had thought that the
graffiti in the bathroom were drawings, incomprehensible drawings, runes or hieroglyphs.
Farías waited for me to “read” the inscription, then he laughed. I
laughed with him, in all sincerity. What a funny drawing! I really did find it amusing.
What an idea! I thought. Incomprehensible drawings! But something prevented me from
expressing this thought; my hypocrisy had recesses that were obscure even to me.
Farías, however, spoke his mind; he made some smug and insinuating remark
… I can’t remember what. It was something about a mother. That was all it
took, unfortunately. I understood, and it felt as if the world was crashing down on
me.

I understood what it meant to read. Mothers were mixed up with that too! What I had
mistaken for drawings, or some kind of recondite algebra in which the teachers
specialized for reasons that were none of my concern, turned out to mean the things that
people said, things that could be said anywhere, by anyone, even me. I thought it was
just school stuff, but it was the stuff of life itself. Words, silent words, mimicry,
the process by which words signified themselves … I understood that
I
didn’t know how to read,
and the others did. That’s what it had all
been about, all that I had suffered in ignorance. In an instant I grasped the enormity
of the disaster. Not that I was particularly intelligent or lucid; the understanding
happened in me, but I had almost no part in it, and that was the most horrible thing. I
stood there transfixed, staring at the inscription, as if it had hypnotized me. I
don’t know what I thought or decided to do … maybe nothing. The next thing
I remember is sitting at my desk, where I vegetated day after day. I opened my virgin
exercise book, picked up my pencil, which I still hadn’t used, and reproduced that
inscription from memory, stroke by stroke, without a single error or any idea what I was
writing:

I should say that Farías had not read it out aloud, so I didn’t know how
those drawings translated into sound. And yet, as I wrote,
I knew.
Because
knowledge is never monolithic. We know things in part. For example, I knew that they
were swear words, that it was a conglomerate, that the mother was implied at some level;
I knew about the violence, the fights, insulting the mother, the fury, the blood, the
tears …There were other things I didn’t know, but they were so inextricably
entwined with the things I did know that I wouldn’t have been able to tell them
apart. As it happens, in this case there were things I wouldn’t discover until
much later on. Until the age of fourteen, I thought children came out of their
mothers’ belly buttons. And I discovered my mistake, at the age of fourteen, in a
most peculiar way. I was reading an article about sex education in an issue of
Selecciones
, and in a paragraph about the ignorance in which young girls
were kept in Japan, I found this scandalous example: a fourteen-year old Japanese girl
had professed her belief that children came out of their mothers’ belly buttons.
That was exactly what I, a fourteen-year old Argentinean girl, believed. Except that
from then on, I knew it wasn’t true. And, rightly or wrongly, I pitied my Japanese
counterpart.

That day back in first grade, when I went home, I couldn’t wait for Mom to see what
I had written. But the reason I couldn’t wait was that I was terrified. I knew
that something terrible would happen, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t take
the exercise book out of my school bag; I didn’t show it to Mom. She got it out
herself and looked at it. Why? After the repeated disappointment of finding it blank,
she had given up checking regularly and hadn’t touched it for weeks. I must have
given her some kind of signal. When she read it, she screamed and went pale. She was
indignant for the rest of the day; she went on and on about it. That inscription was
just what she had been waiting for; it unleashed her characteristic fighting spirit,
which recent events had kept in check. It was an outlet for her. The next day she came
to school with me and had an hour-long meeting with my teacher in the office. They
called me in, but naturally they couldn’t get a word out of me. Not that they
needed to. From the veranda where I was waiting (the secretary had been sent to take
care of the class for the duration of the meeting) I could hear Mom shouting, hurling
abuse at the teacher, arguing relentlessly (always coming back to the fact that I
didn’t know how to read). It was a memorable day in the annals of Rosario’s
School Number 22. Finally, just before the bell rang, the teacher came out of the
office, walked along the veranda and through the first door, into the classroom. As she
went past, she neither looked at me nor invited me to follow; in fact, she didn’t
speak to me or look at me again for the rest of the year. Mom left during recess, but
what with the chaos of kids and teachers, I didn’t see her go. When the bell rang
again, I went into the classroom as usual and sat down in my place. The teacher had
recovered a bit, but not much. Her eyes were red; she looked terrible. For once, a dead
silence reigned. Thirty pairs of childish eyes were fixed on her. She was standing in
front of the blackboard. She tried to talk, but all that came out was a hoarse squawk.
She stifled a sob. Moving stiffly, like a tailor’s dummy, she stepped forward and
tousled the hair of a boy sitting in the front row. The gesture was meant to be tender,
and I’m sure that’s how she felt, perhaps her heart had never been so full
of tenderness, but her movements were so rigid that the boy cringed. She didn’t
notice and tousled his louse-ridden mop all the same. Then she did it to a second boy,
and a third. She took a deep breath, and finally spoke: