The Sisterhood (2 page)

The sinful world, however, sought us for the selfsame reasons of distance and obscurity. Courtiers who attended the queen on her visit endowed an orphanage within our walls for purposes of their own. And this has had the curious effect of shielding us from the Inquisition, even as the Inquisition has grown in power and influence.

The rigid Catholic morals at court have created new victims, the endangered
escondidas
, the “hidden girls”: illegitimate daughters of courtiers and their mistresses, often aristocratic ladies. There are also offspring from lusts of the vilest kind—fathers and brothers and uncles who have gotten children on their own daughters, sisters, and nieces. Grandees must conceal the fruit of such lusts or jeopardize their positions at court.

The girls are spirited away to us in secrecy, usually when they are weaned. They say that someone prominently placed at court arranges their removal through a chain of middlemen who do not
know the mothers’ identities. The mothers never know where their daughters are bound, only that it is to a convent far away. Save for the courtiers who endowed the orphanage, few others could trace the children to Las Golondrinas.

The hidden girls bring religious dowries, the price of their parents’ guilt. The children never know any life outside the convent, and in due course all become nuns. The pious justification is that giving these girls to God expiates the parents’ sin. The truth is darker, and the reason we agreed to the orphanage. It is frequently the only means of saving the lives of these children. Inconvenient infants are helpless victims, quickly smothered or drowned like kittens.

But while the orphanage girls are a sensitive matter, what endangers us with the Inquisition are the five older girls who found their way here to be hidden in the convent—Esperanza, Pia, Sanchia, Marisol, and Luz. Preparations are nearly complete for four of them to leave tonight, to seek refuge and husbands in Spanish America. If the Inquisition finds them, they will be subjected to hideous interrogations that would quickly yield three “heretics,” one girl hunted like a white doe because her existence threatens the throne itself, and the poor little heiress Luz who must be protected from her father at all costs. Luz, so gifted with her needle, who worked the beautiful altar cloth sent as a gift to the queen, must stay behind. She would endanger the others on the journey. As she cannot speak, perhaps they will have mercy on her.

Perhaps.

The Abbess’s widowed sister, the beata Sor Emmanuela, will accompany the four girls as chaperone. As a lay sister, Sor Emmanuela is not bound by the church’s rules on enclosure that confine nuns to the convent and prevent their going abroad without special letters of permission.

The Abbess believes the safest plan is to divide the responsibility for the medal and the Chronicle between Sor Emmanuela
and the eldest girl, my assistant Esperanza. Sor Emmanuela will wear the medal, but the key to its meaning is hidden in our Gospel, copied into our Chronicle. Esperanza will take charge of the Chronicle. The Abbess has charged her with keeping a record of the journey, just as I would have done, and I have showed her our Gospel, written in Latin and concealed in its middle pages. She reads Latin easily, but more importantly she will understand how it points to those shared beliefs between Jews and early Christians, and later Muslims, that should be a basis of peace, not persecution, between the different faiths. If some mishap befalls the Chronicle on the journey, Esperanza’s memory is as excellent as her understanding, and she has sworn to memorize and rewrite if necessary.

Even as we wait, the Abbess prays for deliverance, that the queen will be moved by Luz’s gift to protect us and stay the Inquisition’s hand. But we cannot wait longer for miracles or influence. A beata has come, weeping with fright. There are arrivals at the gate, despite the early hour of morning. Surprise is one of the Inquisition’s weapons.

Farewell to the Chronicle. May it and our Foundress’s medal find a safe haven and one day, God willing, be returned to this holy place. Let those who read this pray for those who take our treasures to exile and safety, for those who remain, for those who may return in the future, and for the soul of the scribe Sor Beatriz.

Peace be upon you and God’s mercy and blessing.

Deo gratias
. God is great.

Pacific Coast of South America, Spring 1983

The first signs appeared in December. By
Navidad
the warm seas yielded dying fish to the fishermen’s nets. Anxious women crowded into the churches, to light candles and beseech God, the Virgin, and all the saints to stay the hand of
El Niño
. The peasants clung to their superstition that naming the capricious atmospheric phenomenon after the Christ Child might appease it. But this time
El Niño
came in the guise of the Devil,
El Diablo
, to turn the noon sky a strange color. People looked skyward uneasily and crossed themselves, muttering prayers as midday turned black as night, the wind rose, and a hard rain began to fall. The sky sank lower and lower and the wind gained strength, and people called on older, darker gods before abandoning prayers altogether to shout for their children and run for shelter.

The hurricane, the worst in a hundred years, was known afterward as the
Mano del Diablo
—Hand of the Devil. It struck with terrible ferocity. A screaming wind set shutters banging, then tore them away and sent them flying, followed by anything it could reach—doors, roofs, trees, bicycles, cars, and trucks, tossed and smashed like toys. Rain lashed like a hail of bullets, hard enough to kill chickens and goats and babies. Peasants on the road or in their fields were swept away in the storm’s merciless grip. And as
for the poor in the shanty towns, where could they go? Mudslides swallowed flimsy shacks with their inhabitants, and the sea came rolling in towering waves to seize boats and fishermen from shore. Roof tiles and trees and people were tossed, sucked up, hurled down, buried alive, crushed, swept out to sea.

After two days of roaring winds and thudding debris, collapsing buildings and landslides, the aftermath was eerily quiet, broken by the feeble cries and muffled shrieks of survivors, the muttering of the dazed and bereft, the wails of children, the shrill yelping of dogs in pain. People struggled to understand what had happened. The living scrabbled with bare hands to reach the trapped and injured, their families and neighbors, while cries for help from under the rubble grew fainter. The emergency services were pitifully useless, with no heavy-moving equipment, no sniffer dogs. Injured survivors screamed invisibly, and many of those who were found died nonetheless for want of medical supplies, food, and blankets.

It took a week to reopen the airport, and by that time the air was fetid with death. The world’s press arrived with the international rescue teams who had been delayed by red tape and chaos. When aid eventually trickled in, reporters had no shortage of horror stories to back up an international appeal to help victims of the crisis, though hardened correspondents familiar with the region knew the greater part of disaster funds would be siphoned off to private accounts in Switzerland.

On the ninth day amid the carnage and destruction, a single item of good news emerged. A little girl had been found alive and uninjured by a navy ship making a final sweep along the coast. The sailors onboard had nearly abandoned the search at nightfall when they heard crying. Throughout the night the crying continued as they swept searchlights back and forth over the sea, bumping bloated human and animal carcasses aside.

Finally, at dawn, they located the source of the sound in a fishing boat caught between a logjam of smashed timber and a dead mule. It looked empty, but two young sailors climbed aboard to look. Then they gave a shout. The girl, perhaps two or three years old, naked except for a chain looped round her neck several times with a medal strung on it, was found trapped under a nest of fishing nets too heavy for her to escape. It seemed unbelievable that she had not perished from exposure or been drowned by a wave, but she was crying and sucking her fist.

The story of the little survivor appeared briefly in the press, with pictures of the child, the boat, the medal, and the two grinning sailors. But news has a short shelf life and by then the foreign press had moved on. There were wars and celebrity divorces to cover elsewhere. The little girl disappeared into a local orphanage, the only record of her existence a sheaf of yellowing press clippings.

In the Shadow of the Andes, Spring 1984

A year after the
Mano del Diablo
, a battered car with “Taxi” painted on its side wound its way into the oldest part of the old provincial capital, which was still scarred by the disaster. Finally the potholed streets narrowed too much for the car to continue. The driver stopped and pointed. A middle-aged American couple got out of the backseat, shading their eyes against the sun to look around. “They said it was in the old part of the city,” the woman said, looking at her map, “and this part looks old, alright. It’s practically falling down.” She was a plump lady in a neat Liz Claiborne skirt, matching cardigan, and low-heeled pumps, and she patted her coiffed hair nervously.

Her husband, a large man perspiring in a button-down shirt, bow tie, and plaid sports jacket, adjusted a camera around his neck—a cheap one, because he had been warned to leave his expensive one at home. He clutched a guidebook and, incongruously, a large teddy bear sporting a pink bow under his arm. He took his wife’s elbow protectively. “Come on, Sarah-Lynn. Hang on to your pocketbook,” the man muttered, glancing at the driver who was slumped back in his seat rolling a cigarette.

The
Norte Americanos
were conspicuous in that neighborhood. Men in vests and women in cheap print dresses watched from balconies that sagged on peeling houses and peered from lean-tos beneath crumbling arches. Ragged children with big bellies crowded to peek through iron gates. The couple pushed past old cars and donkeys and beggars, and rattling cars whose brakes screeched and whose drivers spat and shouted insults at each other, banging the sides of their vehicles for emphasis. The couple skirted makeshift stalls selling fried fish and
arepas
. A prostitute on a broken chair in a doorway called to them in mocking Spanish, raising a cackle of laughter from her companions. Women shouted, babies cried, children were scolded or slapped. The streets stank of frying oil, urine, tobacco, sweat, exhaust fumes, rotting garbage, animal dung, and fear. In the distance the snow-capped Andes rose clean and remote against a hard blue sky.

The Americans turned their map this way and that, looking around, ignoring the people around them. “There! I recognize it from the posters!” exclaimed Sarah-Lynn suddenly, pointing ahead to a whitewashed bell tower, one that was featured on a famous travel poster of the 1970s when trains still ran to this remote corner of South America. Then, souvenir sellers had done a brisk turnover in clay swallows, cheap silver bracelets, and gourds decorated in the native style.

Now the tourists were long gone, but a few old men still waited hopefully under the convent walls, shabby old merchandise spread on dirty blankets. “Hello! Nice souvenir?” they wheedled.

“That’s definitely the bell tower, Virgil. I guess we found it…Oh, what a smell!” Her nose wrinkled as a gust of open sewers engulfed her.

The man calmly opened his guidebook. “Oldest convent in Latin America,
El Convento de las Golondrinas
, home of
Las Sors Santas de Jesus de Los Andes
,” he read, testing out his newly acquired Spanish. He sensed an undercurrent of violence in the air, ready to be ignited, and instinct told him on no account to show fear, or to hurry, or these people would be on them like vultures. So he stood his ground, acting casual and interested in the sights, a tourist. “Lotta birds, listen to that racket! No wonder they call it Convent of the Swallows.
Las Golon…Golondrinas
.”

Feeling the eyes boring into his back, he planted his feet firmly and stopped to turn a guidebook page, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “Says here, there’s an old superstition about swallows, because of how they migrate back and forth to the same places every year. In the olden days sailors got swallow tattoos for luck so’s they’d make it home after going off, same way as the birds. And if they died at sea, they believed swallows would fly down and carry the souls of the tattooed ones straight to heaven. Ain’t that something? Big, isn’t it?” he remarked, refusing to be hurried. He took a pocket-size Kodak from his pocket and fiddled with the distance setting. “Must be the size of a city block. Wonder where the entrance is?”