How I Became A Nun Read online

  “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.

  3

  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 …

  Another form of the story: I was offering poisoned chocolates to my parents … Chocolate on the outside, then a very thin layer of glass, and, inside, a solution of arsenic in alcohol … There was no antidote … No way back … Dad took one, Mom too … I wanted to rewind time, I was sorry, but it was too late … They were going to die … The police would have no trouble establishing the cause of death … they would interrogate me … I decided to confess everything, to cry rivers of tears and let the current sweep me away … But even death was no consolation, since without Mom and Dad how could I live anyway? And the worst thing was that it was unheard of for a little girl to kill her parents … absolutely unheard of …

  And another (but this was an alternative version of the Flood): an animal swimming in the inundated house, an otter … It would bite our feet if we tried to walk in the rising water … If my hand slipped from the sheet it would eat my fingers one by one …

  Yet another: I was still rigid with fear, my head propped up on a thick pillow, and my mother went to open the cupboard with green glass doors opposite the bed, in which I kept my books… To tell the truth I didn’t have any books: I was too young, I hadn’t learnt to read … I began to panic … I could hardly breathe … What had Mom gone to get from the cupboard? Could she have known? She was taking advantage of my helplessness to … Any moment now she would find it, my secret … Stop, Mom! Don’t do it! It will only bring you grief, the most terrible grief of your life! A grief to match my shame and terror …

  Needless to say there was no secret … I never had any secrets, although, at the same time, everything was a secret, but not on purpose … Delirium provided a model, and not just a model … Mom was rummaging through the cupboard … as the waters rose … instead of doing something useful, like picking me up and carrying me in her arms across the fields, over the flooded plains to a safe place! I hated her for that … She went on searching, in a daze, although the otter, who had suddenly become my accomplice, was gnawing at her ankles under the water … and I knew that she had only minutes left to live, the poison would already be taking effect … that is, if she had eaten the chocolate. And I hoped to God she had!

  I hoped … if only … But no. It wasn’t a matter of this or that happening … but of how the events were combined, or rather the order in which they occurred … The ordering was different … They were repeating themselves … Or rather, drifting free … When it was really bad, I wondered if I was going crazy.

  Over all these stories hovered another, more conventional in a way, but more fantastic too. Separate from the series, it functioned like a “background,” always there. It was a kind of static story … a chilling episode, with a wealth of horrific details … It filled me with dread, making the four-part delirium seem like light entertainment by comparison … Except that it wasn’t just one more element, a bolt of lightning in a stormy sky … it was everything that was happening to me … everything that would happen to me in an eternity that had not yet begun and would never end … I was the girl in an illustrated book of fairy tales; I had become a myth … I was seeing it from inside …

  From inside … I was alone in the house. Mom and Dad had gone to a wake and they had left me shut inside … in that little old house in Pringles where we no longer lived … alone with my four cartoon stories going round and round in my head … my crown of thorns … the two doors were locked, the wooden shutters closed … a safe for my parents’ living treasure: me. The realism was meticulous, hermetic … But when I say that I was alone, that the house was locked, that it was night, these are not circumstances, or sundry elements that could be linked in a series … The series (the flood, the otter, the chocolates, the secret) was out there, using up all the delirium my fever could generate… The only thing left in here was reality, in one great cumbersome, wildly plausible block …

  I had been sternly instructed not to open the door to anyone, under any circumstances. As if I needed to be told! My life depended on it, and not only my life. It was the first time I had been left on my own (this never happened in reality) but it was unavoidable … The first time is always frightening, because of the unknown … I was confident, the instructions were simple … Don’t open the door. I could do that. It was easy. They could trust me. Anyway, who would come, at midnight …? My life and my safety depended on the answer to that question … Who, who, who could it be?

  But someone was knocking at the front door! Beating as if they wanted to break it down! They weren’t just knocking: they were trying to get in … Why would they want to do that, if not to kill me? And I was alone …! They must have known … they knew perfectly well; that was why they had come … At best, they were burglars … The security of the house was in my hands, but my hands were so feeble. I was shaking like a leaf, on the other side of the door … Why had they left me on my own? What was so important that they had to abandon me?

  The worst thing was … it was them … it was Mom and Dad knocking at the door! The monsters had taken on the appearance of my Mom and Dad … I don’t know how I saw them, through the keyhole, I guess, standing on tiptoe … I got goose-pimples from head to foot, I froze … the likeness was amazing … they had stolen their faces, their clothes, their hair … not much hair from Dad because he was bald, but all Mom’s red curls … They were perfect imitations, flawless … The trouble they had gone to! Those beings who had no form, or wouldn’t reveal it to me … those simulacra … with their sinister intentions … Terror froze my blood, I couldn’t think …

  They were thumping at the door in a frenzy; I don’t know how it withstood the onslaught … They were shouting my name, they had been shouting for hours … with Mom and Dad’s voices … Even the voices! But slightly different, slightly hoarse … They had drunk cognac at the wake, and they weren’t used to it … they were going crazy … They had lost the key, or left it somewhere … some story … their lying was so transparent … They were insulting me! They were saying awful things! And I was crying, horrified, dumb, transfixed …

  Dad jumped over the wall into the yard, he went to the kitchen door and started beating on it, kicking it … I walked through the darkened house, like a sleepwalker, stopped in front of the kitchen door and prayed to God it would hold … and my prayer was answered, for once … he went back to the front door …

  Even if I’d wanted to let them in, how could I? I was locked in. I didn’t have the key … Or did I?

  That was beside the point. Did I want to let them in or not? Of course not. They hadn’t fooled me … Or had they? How could I tell? They were exactly like my parents, more real than the real thing … I kept my eye to the keyhole, hypnotized by that unreal scene … But there they were in the midst of that unreality, my parents, it really was them … Not just their masks, but also their expressions, their tics, their style, their stories … That was how I saw my parents, especially Dad … it was different with Mom … I didn’t see Dad’s outward appearance as other people did … I saw the way he was, his past, his reactions, his reasoning … it was the same with Mom, now that I think of it … not that I was especially insightful, but they were my parents, so they had no form, or didn’t reveal it to me … or wouldn’t … that was the tragedy of my childhood and my whole life … My vision couldn’t be satisfied with what was visible, it had to go rushing on, beyond, into the abyss, dragging me along behind …

  The blows were deafening, the house was shaking on its foundations … the shouts grew louder … they were telling me in no uncertain terms … without words now … but I could understand anyway … But can’t you see it’s us? Can’t you see it’s us, you idiot? Idiot!

  No! My parents wouldn’t talk to me like that … they loved me, respected me … and yet … sometimes they lost their temper … I was a difficult girl, a problem child in a sense … and the assailants knew that, they were using it … all the world’s evil w
as the clay from which they had molded those two ghastly dummies …

  What would become of me? Would I fall into their hands? Would they get in? Would I open the door in a reckless moment, without thinking, prompted by an idiotic optimism … ? Would I believe them?

  How could I tell? That was the worst thing: there was no end to it … Or rather: there was. Because if the only thing missing had been the end, in a way I could have stayed calm, waiting for it … putting it off, leaving it for later … But the waiting was the end! It was and it wasn’t … It almost seemed like nothing at all. Because I couldn’t see anything, the delirium wasn’t strong enough, or it was too strong … I couldn’t see the house in which I was trapped, I couldn’t see the horrendous mannequins besieging it … the souls of Mom and Dad … It wasn’t a hallucination … If only it had been: what a relief! No, it was a force … an invisible radiation …

  It lasted a month. Amazingly, I survived. I could say: I woke up. Coming out of the delirium was like being released from prison. It would have been logical to feel relieved, but I didn’t. Something had broken inside me, a valve, the little safety device that used to allow me to switch levels.

  4

  WHEN I REGAINED consciousness, I found myself in the pediatric ward of the Rosario Central Hospital.

  I opened my eyes and found myself in a world that was new to me: the world of mothers. Dad didn’t come to visit me once. But every single day I waited for him, with a mixture of longing and apprehension that prolonged my delirious trains of thought in a milder form. Mom came, though, and the scent of terror she brought with her was like Dad’s shadow. There was no escaping it, because now I was locked into the system of accumulation, in which nothing is ever left behind. I didn’t ask her about him. She was different. She seemed distracted, worried, anxious. She didn’t stay long; she said she had things to do, and I understood. The other beds were attended twenty-four hours a day by mothers, aunts and grandmothers taking turns. I was alone, a daughter abandoned in a maternal realm.