How I Became A Nun (6 page)

“I always tell the truth. I stell it trueways. I children. I am the truth and the
life. I trife. Strue. Childern. I am the second mother. Thecken smother. I love you all
equally. I equal all of you for mother. I tell you the truth for love. The looth for
trove. Momother love mother! For all of you! All of you! But there is one … bun
their is wut … air ee wah …”

Her voice had gone all shrill and scratchy. She raised a vertical index finger. This was
her only gesture during that memorable speech … The finger was steady but the
rest of her was shaking; then, and simultaneously, the finger was shaking and the rest
of her was steady as a block of metal … Tears ran down her cheeks. After this
pause she went on:

“That Aira boy … He’s here among you, and he doesn’t seem any
different. Maybe you haven’t noticed him, he’s so insignificant. But
he’s here. Don’t be fooled. I always tell you the true, the theck, the
trove. You are good, clever, sweet children. Even the ones who are naughty, or have to
repeat, or get into fights all the time. You’re normal, you’re all the same,
because you have a second mother. Aira is a moron. He might seem the same as you, but
he’s a moron all the same. He’s a monster. He doesn’t have a second
mother. He’s wicked. He wants to see me dead. He wants to kill me. But he’s
not going to succeed! Because you are going to protect me. You will protect me from the
monster, won’t you? Say it …”

“…”

“Say, ‘Yes, Miss.’”

“Yes, Miss!”

“Louder!”

“Yeess Miiisss!”

“Say, Yis Mess Rodriguez.”

“Yis Mess Ridróguez.”

“Louder!”

“Yossmessriidroogueez!”

“Loouuder!!”

“Yiiissmooossreeedroooguiiiz!!”

“Good! Gggooood! Protect your teacher. She has forty years of experience. She could
die any moment, and then it’ll be too late to be sorry. The killer is after her.
But it doesn’t matter. I’m not saying all this for my sake, no, I’ve
had my life already. Forty years teaching first grade. The first of the second mothers.
I’m saying it for you. Because he wants to kill you too. Not me. You. But
don’t be afraid, teacher will protect you. You have to watch out for vipers,
tarantulas and rabid dogs. And especially for Aira. Aira is a thousand times worse.
Watch out for Aira! Don’t go near him! Don’t talk to him! Don’t look
at him! Pretend he doesn’t exist. I always thought he was a moron, but I had nnno
idea … I dddidn’t realize … Now I do! Don’t let him dirty you!
Don’t let him infect you! Don’t even give him the time of day! Don’t
breathe when he’s near. Die of asphyxiation if you have to, just so long as you
freeze him out. He’s a monster, a killer! And your mothers will cry if you die.
They’ll try and blame me, I know them. But if you watch out for the monster
nothing will happen. Pretend he doesn’t exist, pretend he’s not there. If
you don’t talk to him or look at him, he can’t harm you. Teacher will
protect you. She is the second mother. Teacher loves you. I am the teacher. I always
tell the truth …”

And so on, for quite a long time. At some point she started repeating herself, word for
word, like a tape recorder. I was looking through her. I was looking at the blackboard
where she had written: zebra, zero, zigzag … in perfectly formed letters …
That calligraphy was her prettiest feature. And she had reached the letter Z …
She seemed upset, but I didn’t think she was talking nonsense. Everything was so
real, it seemed transparent, and I was reading the words on the blackboard … I
was reading … Because that day I had learned to read.

MEANWHILE, DAD WAS in prison for the business with the ice-cream vendor.
One afternoon, Mom took me to visit him. It was logical, because I had been at the
center, at the heart of the misadventure. Did they blame me? Yes and no. They
couldn’t really blame me—it would have been grossly unfair—but at the
same time, they couldn’t help blaming me, because I was the origin of it all. It
was the same for me; I couldn’t blame them for having these feelings, and yet I
did. In any case, one or both of them had decided that it would be a good thing to take
me along at visiting time. To show how his wife and daughter were standing by him and
all that. How naïve. The Rosario remand center was a long way from home, right
across town. We took a bus. Halfway there I had a panic attack for no reason and burst
into tears. Up went the curtain of my private theater. Mom looked at me, unamazed. Yes,
un
amazed.

“Are you going to tell me what’s got into you?”

I didn’t have anything very definite to say, but what came out took her completely
by surprise, and me too.

“Where’s my dad?”

The voice I put on! It was a squawk, but crystal clear, without the slightest
stammer.

Mom glanced around. The bus was packed full and the people surrounding us, hearing my
cry, had turned to look. She didn’t know what to say.

“Where’s my dad?” I raised my voice.

Poor Mom. Who could blame her for thinking I was doing it on purpose?

“You’re going to see him soon,” she said, without committing herself.
She tried to change the subject, to distract me: “Look at the pretty
flowers.”

We were passing a house with superb flowerbeds in the front garden.

“Is he dead?”

There was no stopping me now. The other passengers were already intrigued by the story,
and that excited me inordinately. Because I was the owner of the story. Mom put her arms
around my shoulders and pulled me close.

“No, no. I already told you,” she whispered, lowering her voice until it was
almost inaudible.

“What?” I yelled.

“Shhh …”

“I can’t hear you, Mom!” I shouted, shaking my head, as if I was afraid
that the uncertainty about my dad would make me deaf.

She had no choice but to speak up. “You’re going to see him soon.”

“Yes, I’m going to see him. But is he dead?”

“No, he’s alive.”

I could sense the passengers’ interest. The cityscape slid over the glass of the
windows like a forgotten backdrop.

“Mom, where’s Dad? Why doesn’t he come home?”

I adopted a tone of voice that signified: “Stop lying to me. Let’s behave
like adults. I might look like I’m three years old, but I’m six, and I have
a right to know the truth.”

Mom had told me the whole truth. I knew he was in prison, waiting for the verdict: an
eight-year sentence for homicide. I knew all that. The only reason for these untimely
doubts of mine was to make her tell the story for the benefit of perfect strangers. How
could her daughter be capable of such an idiotic betrayal? She couldn’t believe it
(nor could I). But the panic that I was exhibiting was all too real. As usual, I had
managed to confuse her. It was easy: all I had to do was confuse myself.

“He’s sick,” she said in another inaudible whisper. “That’s
why we’re going to visit him.”

“Sick? Is he going to die? Like grandma?”

One of my grandmothers had died before I was born. The other was in good health, in
Pringles. We never used the expression “grandma” at home. That was a detail
I added to make the scene more convincing.

“No. He’s going to get better. Like you. You were sick and you got better,
didn’t you?”

“Did the ice cream make him sick?”

And so I went on until we arrived: Mom trying to shut me up all the way and me raising my
voice, creating a real scene. When we got off the bus, she didn’t say anything or
ask me for an explanation. I felt that my performance had come to an end, a bad end, and
that she was ashamed of me … The anxiety intensified and I began to cry again,
with much more determination than before. The logical thing to do would have been to
stop in the square, sit down on a bench and wait until I got over it. But Mom was tired,
sick and tired of me and my carrying-on, and she headed straight for the prison. My
tears dried up. I didn’t want Dad to see me crying.

It was visiting time, of course. We joined the line; a lady who seemed nice enough
frisked us, checked the string bag full of food that Mom had brought, and let us
through. We were already in the visitors’ yard. We had to wait a while for Dad.
Mom was off in a world of her own (she didn’t talk to the other women), so I got a
chance to go exploring.

There were entries and exits all around the yard. It didn’t seem to be hermetically
sealed, which came as something of a surprise. It’s hard not to have a romantic
idea of what a prison will be like, even if you don’t know what romanticism is (I
certainly didn’t). To tell the truth, I didn’t know what a prison was
either. This one was steeped in an intense, destructive realism, strong enough to
dissolve all preconceived ideas, whether you had any or not.

I headed for a door, drawn as if by a magnet. Subliminally, I had noticed that there were
other children in the yard, all holding their mothers’ hands. A strong autumn sun
bleached the surfaces. It was a sleepy time of day. I felt invisible.

Of all the places I knew, the one most like this prison was the hospital. People were
shut in both places for a long time. But there was a difference. The reason you
couldn’t get out of the hospital was internal: the patient, as my own case had
shown, was incapable of moving. There was some other reason why you couldn’t get
out of prison. I wasn’t sure what it was: force was still a vague concept for me.
I blended the ideas of prison and hospital. There was an invisible exchange between the
two. Sickness could disappear and sick thought be transferred to others … It was
the perfect escape plan … Perhaps Dad could come back home with us. In that
excessively realist building, I was radiating magic … Since it was my fault that
Dad was there …

But my magic started acting on me: a melancholy fantasy suddenly transported my soul to a
region far, far away. Why didn’t I have any dolls? Why was I the only girl in the
world who didn’t have a single doll? My dad was in prison … and I
didn’t have a doll to keep me company. I had never had one, and I didn’t
know why. It wasn’t because my parents were poor or stingy (when did that ever
stop a child?). There was some other mysterious reason … And yet, although the
mystery remained, poverty was a factor. Especially now. Now we were going to be really
poor, Mom and I: abandoned, all on our own. And that was why I felt the need of a doll
so sharply, so painfully. True to my dramatic style, I surrendered to a nostalgic
lament, rich in variations. The doll had disappeared forever, before I learnt the words
with which to ask for it, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of my sentences … I
saw myself as a lost doll, discarded, without a girl …

That was me. The inexistent girl. Living, I was dead. If I had died, Dad would have been
free. The judges would have been merciful to the father who had taken a life for a life,
especially since one was the life of his darling daughter and the other the life of a
complete stranger. But I had survived. I wasn’t the same as before, I could tell.
I didn’t know how or why, but I wasn’t the same. For one thing, my memory
had gone blank. I couldn’t remember anything before the incident in the ice-cream
store. Maybe I didn’t even remember that properly. Maybe, in fact, the ice-cream
vendor’s life had been swapped for mine. I had begun to live when he died.
That’s why I felt like I was dead, dead and invisible …

When I reached the end of this train of thought, I found myself in a new place. I was
inside. How had I got there? Where was Dad? This last question was the one that woke me
up. It woke me up because it was so much like my dreams. I was alone, abandoned,
invisible.

Either I had climbed a staircase without realizing, or, more likely, there were converted
basements in the building, because when I got to the end of an empty corridor going off
at right angles, which I had hoped would take me back to the yard, where I could run to
my dad’s arms, I found myself on a kind of platform suspended over a square
enclosure divided in two by a grill. With a certain disquiet, I realized I had gone too
far. Looking for a way out, in the grip of a horribly familiar panic, I made a crucial
mistake: instead of trusting myself to go back the way I had come, I went through the
first gap I could find, a gap in the wall, where they must have been doing some kind of
renovation: it was a small hole, not much more than a crack, forty centimeters high and
twenty wide at the most, at the level of the baseboard. It struck me as the perfect
shortcut for getting back to where I had begun. I came out onto a kind of cornice ten
meters above the floor. I edged along it with my back to the wall (I was terrified of
heights). The roof wasn’t far above me. Since I didn’t go near the uneven
edge, all I could see below was a corridor. It was fairly dark too. The cornice, which
in fact was the remains of a plaster ceiling, led to a cubicle, which I crawled into. It
was a skylight, about a square meter in cross section, and two or three meters high: at
the top, a square of sky. At the base of the walls, level with my feet, were slots
opening onto deep, unlighted rooms. Once I was in there, I kept quiet. I sat down on the
floor. I thought: I’m going to spend the whole night here. It was four in the
afternoon, but for me the night had already begun. I couldn’t go any further,
because it was a dead end. And it didn’t occur to me to go back … In that
respect I was consistent. Even if my parents didn’t always say it, their eternal
refrain was “This time you’ve gone too far.” Never “You’ve
come back from too far away,” I guess because once you’ve gone too far
there’s no way back.

I thought of Dad, mostly to pass the time and stop me from worrying about other things. I
multiplied him by all the other men shut in that prison, those desperate men, expelled
from society, who couldn’t hug their children … And there I was on high,
hovering over them all … I was the angel … and it came as no surprise.
Each successive incident, right from the start, from the moment I tasted the strawberry
ice cream, had been leading me to this crowning moment, preparing me to be the angel,
the guardian angel of all the criminals, the thieves and murderers …