Catalina

by Markus Orths

  Like other convents, San Sebastian el Antiguo had among its inmates the three kinds of nun that have been so often described that they have become cliches. There were four of the so-called victim type, immured there against their will; there were two pathologically God-fearing nuns who took their fear of God to such extremes that they thought they experienced states of religious ecstasy because they heard the voices of saints, the Virgin Mary, even God himself, when in fact they were just completely debilitated by fasting and self-mortification; and there were two nuns drawn to the convent by their lesbian desires, who after their nights of homoerotic seclusion would appear at morning prayers limp and exhausted, with rings under their eyes. But besides these, the convent of San Sebastian el Antiguo had forty other nuns whose lives were wholly unexceptional, following a uniform routine of sleeping, rising, Hours, mass, confession, organ music, books to read or occasional quiet hours when they themselves could write books—saints’ lives or biographies of women of exemplary virtue. Officially the nuns were strictly enclosed and were supposed to be kept apart from the world, tamquam vere mortua, as the phrase went—‘just like a dead woman’—even before the Council of Trent. In reality, however, the regime was casual to the point of laxity: so long as the prioress was informed in advance, a nun could both go out and receive visitors, so that if her parents and relatives lived nearby she could see them at least once a week, and apart from praying, sleeping, eating and studying there was not really much for them to do.

  Although the nuns had, in consequence, only relatively minor problems and worries, the prioress, Ursula Unza y Sarasti, insisted on seeing each one individually once a month. Ursula wanted to be kept informed about everything and would not tolerate secrets. Each day a different nun would creep into the prioress’s presence, cowering a little, for Ursula Unza y Sarasti was a woman with two faces. On the one hand she was capable of truly superhuman goodness and understanding. She showed an exceptional gift for listening and sounding out the sisters who sat before her, training the full force of her eyes on their confessing lips as if she were trying not just to hear but actually to see their words: on such days she was able to analyse what she was told with great perspicacity and respond with sensitivity to each of the little problems laid before her. But at other times Ursula Unza y Sarasti could be extremely nasty. On these occasions she would nod with an insincere smile while a nun confided her worries, and would then summarize what had been said in such a malicious manner that the nun was left looking utterly foolish. She would twist the nun’s words in a way that made her feel that her problem was the silliest and least important there could possibly be, and that she must be the most pathetic creature in the whole convent to have dared to approach the prioress on a matter of such insulting triviality. After being dismissed she would then spend days agonizing over the problem of not really having a problem.

  The prioress was a small, wiry woman. Everything about her was dark: she had black hair and eyes and brown skin that betrayed her southern origins. She also had hair growing on parts of her body where women generally prefer not to have any. But unlike others of her sex, Ursula Unza y Sarasti wore her body hair with pride. It was as if she saw this luxuriant growth as compensation for her slight stature—indeed, she regarded this hair as a visible, God-given, natural endorsement of her leadership, lending her authority, dignity and, to put it bluntly, a touch of masculinity. In summer she often rolled up the sleeves of her habit so that the other nuns could see the bushy hair on her arms; it would never have occurred to her, as her moustache grew ever thicker, to pluck or rub away the hair as other women did. On the contrary, during a one-to-one interview she would often stroke the downy hollow between her nose and upper lip and try to twist an individual hair between her fingers, simply for the satisfaction of observing, with a fleeting glance, that the nun sitting before her was admiring her facial hair.

  It was Catalina who now stood facing the prioress. She had made her way to the convent by herself, without her parents. She had insisted on it: the convent was no distance away, and she knew she would be able to see her parents whenever she liked. Ines had already brought her luggage the day before, and now Catalina had been led into the prioress’s study. Ursula was sitting at her desk with her sleeves rolled up, writing something on a piece of parchment. There was not a word from the prioress, only the pen scratching away, and all that hair. After some minutes the prioress leaned forward, blew on what she had written as if to release the words into the air, then looked at Catalina and invited her to sit down.

  Ursula was having one of her good days, and the room was filled with the amiability of her words. She even apologized for keeping Catalina waiting. And then the questions began. Catalina gave the answers that she thought a prioress would expect. She kept them short for fear of saying something amiss, and the prioress nodded, satisfied. The conversation was like hundreds of others before it: the prioress put her questions, the child responded, the prioress nodded and went on to the next question. But then something happened that caught Ursula’s attention. Nothing special; just a tiny, almost imperceptible change of expression, the hint of a grimace, a slight contraction of the corners of Catalina’s mouth. It was brief and fleeting, certainly unconscious and devoid of any ironic intent, but the prioress was always inclined to follow up any outward sign, however minuscule, and she decided to find out more about this little girl. So the benign expression was replaced by the searching gaze of the counsellor, the penetrating scrutiny of the examiner of souls, and Catalina was startled. In front of her were two eyes that instead of resting upon her seemed like a liquid flowing purposefully towards her, and Catalina was forced to lower her own gaze. Here was someone seriously trying to discover her true thoughts and intentions, someone determined to penetrate her innermost being. And that, thought Catalina, simply must not happen.

  Only six weeks had passed since she had missed saying goodbye to Miguel. In those six weeks Catalina had fallen into a state in which, as Maria Perez wrote in her diary, she seemed to be ‘elsewhere’. She was not completely lost in her own thoughts—no, Catalina responded when she was asked a question, she did what was required of her, but all in a monosyllabic, introverted, mechanical way. Her life went on, but somehow without an inner spark. Sometimes she actually smiled, but the smile did not really come from within: she was merely doing the others a favour, acknowledging the fact of their presence. Often she would sit around somewhere staring straight ahead of her, spending whole days in solitude. The world had lost everything that she cared about, and she had been unable to prevent it. She had willed her brother to stay, but he had not stayed; she willed him to come back, but he would not be coming back. For the first time her will seemed powerless and useless, and Catalina abandoned herself to her disappointment. She would not allow herself to be angry, for there was nothing to reproach Miguel with. He had had to obey his father’s wishes: Potosi, the mine, the job, the silver, the family’s well-being. That much was clear to her, even then. Catalina tried to shake off the sense of having been deserted, which made her feel slightly soiled, and moved on to the next thought: if Miguel is not coming back, then there is only one way I can see him again. And so it is not hard to imagine how one night, lying sleepless in bed, she came to make that now celebrated childish vow to which she was to hold fast, through thick and thin, from the moment of making it. “I’ll follow him!” she vowed, and something new entered her life, something she could cling to from then on, forever, something she could passionately believe in, a goal, a purpose, a mission. She struggled to contain her excitement. It was not easy. It was too tempting to give herself over to dreams: images rose up of her brother at the edge of the world, and of herself sailing towards him. But how could she do that? She was a child, barely eight years old, a girl. Nobody would take her out there. At least not straight away, she thought, not right now. She would need to prepare the ground: she must study, think, and gain knowledge and understanding. And there was only one place in San Sebastia
n where a girl could do that.

  On the morning after the night of her vow, Catalina went to her parents and told them she wanted to enter a convent. She wanted to take the veil and live the life of a nun. It was, Catalina lied, what she had always wished for. To her parents this came totally out of the blue. Her mother crossed herself; her father closed his eyes for a moment, pretending to think it over, but in fact it took him no time at all to calculate that it would be much cheaper to pay a small dowry to the convent now than a far higher marriage dowry in ten years’ time. And so in less than two minutes her parents had given their consent.

  Now the searching gaze of the prioress rested on Catalina, intent on discovering why she was really there. Unable to meet it, Catalina lowered her eyes.

  The prioress said, “Look at me!”

  Catalina obeyed, and the next penetrating look from the prioress opened an even bigger breach in her defences. But, gritting her teeth, Catalina refused to surrender and fought to protect her secret. She kept telling herself, “No one can get inside me against my will, not even the prioress.” Pouring all her resources of strength into her eyes, she gradually became more resistant to the prioress’s gaze, until Ursula Unza y Sarasti was forced to recognize that she was getting nowhere. Still, she knew that it always took several interviews to crack the kernel of a person—she had years of experience, great stamina and infinite patience—and she therefore gave up on Catalina just for that moment, certain that within a few weeks she would have found out what she wanted to know. So the conversation entered a phase of ceasefire, and Ursula recited the monologue which she had prepared for all new entrants to the convent. She talked of the duties to be fulfilled by a future nun, told Catalina the times at which she must attend prayers, handed her a loosely bound copy of the Rule of St. Augustine, explained about the daily classes and finally came to the most important thing of all, the first thing Catalina must learn if she was to stay in the convent and prove herself worthy, and that, said Ursula Unza y Sarasti, was unconditional obedience.

  Catalina’s cell was not a cell in the true sense of the word, but a comfortable room in which her parents had hung tapestries on the walls in advance of her coming. There was a bed and bedding, a table with a tablecloth, some chairs, a basin and ewer, two candelabras, a picture of a saint on the wall, and a barred window. Everything was new to her; even the darkness was deeper and blacker than she was used to. Catalina was accustomed to the streets of San Sebastian, where oil lamps burned all night in front of the statues. There was nothing of the kind here. And it was absolutely quiet. No drunks shouting, no chamber-pots being emptied, no donkeys braying or cart wheels rattling through the mud, no footsteps, no curses, nothing but silence and darkness. She lay on her bed and hoped she would find herself yawning, for her grandmother had once said that yawning was a sign that you would soon fall asleep. But sleep was as far away as her brother.

  Catalina stared up at the ceiling of the cell, but really she was below decks on a ship bound for Veracruz: lying in a dark, musty corner, she could hear the creak of the rigging and the breaking of the bow waves, she could smell fish oil, dirt and salt cod, feel the canvas covering her body and the hard boards beneath her. She sailed across the Atlantic until, exhausted but relieved, she reached the New World, where, from on board ship, she could hear the Indians’ drums—strange, three-beat signals coming from far away, always that same clear, incorruptible rhythm, the same three drum-beats over and over again—and Catalina could positively see before her the naked, red-painted Indians beating their hide drums. The drumming grew louder, came nearer, perilously near, as if they were planning some dreadful deed, as if they were hatching a plot, those savages, those creatures who might or might not be humans—as yet no one knew for certain. The sound was full of menace, so close to her now that Catalina heard it almost physically, and she jumped as her own door suddenly shook with the drum-beat, which was nothing but the knocking of the nun on wake-up duty, approaching relentlessly along the convent corridors. Passing from cell to cell, knocking, she had now reached Catalinas door, and knowing that there was a new girl here she opened her lips to call drowsily, “Time for Lauds!”

  Catalina sat up, took her new convent clothes from the chair and got dressed. Over in a corner she could see her leather trunk with its iron fittings. Opening it, she took out a knife that she had secretly tucked in among her clothes just before leaving home. She lifted the religious picture down from the wall and laid it on the bed. Then she pierced the skin of her forefinger with the knife, cut into the flesh, and raised her bleeding finger to draw a horizontal line on the wall, about a foot above her head. She returned the picture to its place, covering up the line, and licked her finger. “When I’m as tall as that!” she said.

  Catalina made herself as inconspicuous as possible. She avoided contact with both the nuns and the other girls her own age, and behaved like the kind of person who deliberately blends into the background so as not to attract attention. And she did not attract attention. Soon Catalina was part of the furniture, and no one took any notice of her.

  Not to begin with, at any rate.

  As far as religious observance was concerned—her comportment in chapel and church, in the choir and at prayer—she followed her companions’ example and the rule of the convent. She simply did what everyone else did, with no thought for any underlying meaning. All her effort went into this imitation, these actions. However, she was often able to link the daily devotions to her real objective—the strengthening of mind and body. During prayers and masses she knelt for longer than required, so as to strengthen her thigh muscles; while singing the daily-repeated psalms, Catalina learned them by heart in order to train her memory; in the prescribed minutes of stillness after receiving the Host she tried to achieve a suspended state of absolute immobility without so much as the flicker of an eyelash.

  As for the everyday life of the convent, here her conduct can only be described as exemplary. Catalina did whatever was demanded of her. Never grumbling, never objecting, docilely, without the least sign of resentment. She acquiesced in everything, and appeared quiet and contemplative. Unconditional obedience, the prioress had said. Moreover, when Catalina did a thing she did it properly. And so gradually everyone fell into the habit of burdening her with all the unpleasant tasks that no one else wanted. At first Catalina did not find this obedience easy: sometimes she had to lock her rebellious feelings inside herself as if she were stowing them away in a chest, and put the key somewhere out of reach. In fact she put it up so high that, when someone gave her a particularly repugnant task, even though she might mentally pull over a chair and climb onto it, feel around for the key and actually retrieve it, all this would take so long that she would find herself alone with the job, and then she would get on and do it and be able to congratulate herself on having managed, yet again, to subjugate her feelings.

  She very soon found that what she was doing brought her great rewards. Whenever she overcame her reluctance to do something, she celebrated this as a victory. After each successful struggle against herself the victory was greater and more exhilarating. And this exhilaration was fed by two things—on the one hand a sense of possessing perfect self-control; the empowering certainty of being able to switch willingness and unwillingness on and off as she chose, and on the other a kind of superiority to the nuns, for they knew nothing of what really went on inside her and what her true intentions were.

  As the years went by the nuns began to view Catalina with increasing admiration. They could not fail to notice the kind of person she was, or seemed to be. And so she gradually emerged from the shadows of inconspicuousness in which she had spent her first few years there. It started with the use of certain expressions: ‘as good as Catalina’ became a stock phrase. In all those years they had not had a word of complaint from her, they said; no arguing, no misbehaviour, none of the problems one usually had with novices—no, Catalina was an extraordinary person, a kind and selfless person, who had fought an
d conquered her own weakness. And at such a young age too! Even the prioress was amazed by Catalinas progress. In the first few months Ursula had trained her x-ray eyes on Catalina several more times, but the girl had managed to hide so successfully behind external actions, self-denial and the performance of duty that it became easier and easier for her to withstand the prioress’s scrutiny. When Ursula realized that she could not do with Catalina what she had succeeded in doing with every one of her nuns—that is, turn her inside out and bring anything illicit or secret out into the open—it did not for a moment occur to her that her own powers might be at fault: instead, the longer the prioress observed Catalina’s behaviour, the more certain she became that here was indeed an exceptional individual whose ‘heart is truly white and pure, innocent and spotless’, as she writes in the convent chronicle. And once she was convinced of this, she began to treat Catalina with great respect. She praised her conduct, at first only to the nuns but later even when Catalina was present. “Look at Catalina,” she would say, “and you will know how a nun should live.” Or ‘She has not even taken the veil yet, but she already far surpasses you.“ Or ’Unless you become like Catalina, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  All this had some unfortunate consequences. The more Catalina was told that she was leading an almost saintly life, the more she believed it. The role she had adopted began to feel less like a role as her behaviour increasingly became an end in itself. The daily praise and reverential looks she received focused her attention on the outward appearance of her actions, and she fluttered her eyelashes at faster speeds, put on an even more pious expression in church and demonstrated ever greater stamina in her praying. Her performance as humble, kindly, ever-willing Catalina improved to the point where eventually even she forgot that it was only a performance. To the thrill of victory over herself was added the thrill of victory over others. For Catalina had become an example, a shining example. She caught the reverential, admiring glances of the others like butterflies that she could pin to the wall of her cell at night. For the first time she had achieved recognition, and over the next few years this recognition came to be what made her who she was, what held her together, what she strove for. She did everything in her power to make her light shine in the convent with an ever brighter, ever more unassailable radiance.