The Sisterhood

by Helen Bryan

  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?”

  Sarah-Lynn was folding up the map and looking around for the gate. Virgil was going on and on like a travelogue because he was nervous. She understood; she was edgy as a cat herself. She jumped as a tray of shabby merchandise was thrust under her nose by an old man with no teeth, muttering “Cheap! Cheap!”

  “Virgil, tell that man we don’t want any souvenirs!”

  Her husband shook his head at the souvenir seller and, taking Sarah-Lynn’s arm, pulled her away to have her photo taken in front of the gate. He kept talking. “Before the Spanish came, the Incas had some kind of women’s building in this same site, the Virgins of the Sun or some such heathen thing. Had a garden inside, made all out of silver with gold flowers.”

  He kept talking, loud and conversational, while he snapped pictures. “Yep, the Spanish tore it down, reused the stones to build a convent for missionary nuns who came here from Spain. They had them a school and a hospital for native girls and an orphanage. Lotta illegitimate babies, the Spanish men and the Indian women—the nuns would take the children in and see they got baptized and saved. There was even a women’s jail in there…”

  “I don’t want to hear about jails, Virgil! We’re about to go in and get our child and we have to decide once and for all what her name’s going to be!”

  “I thought we planned we’d name a girl after your mama, like you wanted. And if it was a boy, Virgil Walker Jr.” Sarah-Lynn patted her husband on the arm. He had wanted a son.

  “God’s sent us to this little girl. I know she’s special. Where on earth is the gate?”

  “That’s it behind you. I’ll take a couple of pictures for that scrapbook the adoption worker told us to make for her. Then we better hurry. We don’t want them thinking we’ve changed our minds about the adoption.”

  Inside the convent, Mother Superior was waiting behind her desk with its ancient black telephone. Light slanted through barred windows set high in the wall, and the room was crammed with solid old-fashioned furniture in dark carved wood. The walls held the convent’s collection of portraits. Dark-eyed girls with heavy eyebrows dressed in fine clothes and jewels, holding flowers, stared down at Mother. They were long-dead monjas coronadas, crowned nuns, girls about to enter a convent. Portraits of a daughter betrothed to Christ had been a status symbol among the Spanish colonial families of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In their salas grandes, where visitors were entertained, they were hung conspicuously higher on the walls than the betrothal portraits of daughters engaged to mere men. It had been customary to eventually donate the portraits to the girls’ convents. Mother found the silent company of the portraits restful, and often sought their imaginary advice in convent matters.

  As the parlor clock ticked, Mother began to wonder if the American couple had changed their minds and were not coming for Isabelita after all. She sighed and looked up to argue the case for the adoption once more with her serene companions. She reminded them there was another civil war brewing—stories of atrocities and foreign-trained paramilitaries with plentiful supplies of weapons had reached the convent. And she reminded them of Sor Rosario’s cla
im of having a vision last year, shortly before the hurricane.

  Sor Rosario, the youngest nun and somewhat giddy at the best of times, had been hurrying across the cloister, late as usual for compline, when a “vision” had halted her in her tracks. Mother had been skeptical and questioned her closely, fully expecting the vision would resemble a Renaissance statue of the Madonna to which Sor Rosario was particularly devoted. The statue had its own small chapel in the convent church, built by a conquistador’s widow to house her husband’s tomb. The daylight poured through a window above, as if from heaven, on a Madonna who was slender and blonde with gold stars on her blue gown, a red cloak trimmed with ermine, a filigree crown, and pointed golden slippers peeking from the hem of her gown.

  Sor Rosario said, “She was tall, with dark hair down her back. It had bits of gray. She had dark eyes that looked directly into mine. Black eyes. Heavy eyebrows that met over her nose. The evening wind was just beginning to blow and her dress and cloak billowed behind her—she looked like she had wings! She spoke of a warning, a promise, and a reminder. Her voice was not soft or gentle—she spoke loudly, as women do when they intend to make men listen whether men want to or not.”

  “Indeed!” It didn’t sound like any vision of the Madonna Mother knew of.

  Sor Rosario nodded. “Naturally I knelt and began saying the Ave, but she stamped her foot and held up her hand for silence, saying there was no time for all that and to pay attention. A terrible storm was coming. The sky would be ripped apart and the angel of death would spread its wings above us. But a blessing or a gift would come from the sea, something would be found…we must save something…but her voice began to fade and I couldn’t hear her every word, and she stamped her foot again, looking angry, but I think that was because she had not finished what she had to say and—”

  “Stamped her foot, Sister? Perhaps you were dreaming.” Mother sighed, closed her eyes and tried to massage away the beginnings of a headache. The more emotional nuns often claimed to see visions, particularly when there wasn’t enough to eat. Usually they were of Santa Teresa and roses.

  “Oh no! She was real as anything, Mother. Her cloak was brown.” Sor Rosario’s voice was tinged with disappointment. She had loved pretty frocks once. “Plain brown. You would think, blue, perhaps a nice rose pink, but no…a kind of grayish brown. Rough fabric, stained white around the hem, as if it had been dragged through something and dried. She began fading away, still talking, shouting almost, but the sound was fainter—something about…fools of men…the Sors Santas de Jesus must protect…something—the Chronicle. That was it—protect the Chronicle! Because it explains something to do with the gift, the one from the sea.”

  “The Chronicle? We haven’t seen that in over half a century; how are we supposed to ‘protect’ it?” Mother was exasperated. The order’s Chronicle was an ancient volume that had supposedly come from their mother house in Spain, wherever that might be, like the medal that had supposedly come from the same place but disappeared during the 1932 civil war. It had been hidden as a precautionary measure by an elderly and forgetful nun, Sor Agnes, when the convent was attacked by a revolutionary mob, inflamed by legends of Inca treasure supposedly buried in the convent’s chapel crypt. The convent’s stout gates had held against the mob then, though the stories about hidden Inca treasure had survived and resurfaced periodically. Mother suspected it was only a matter of time until the gates failed.

  When the army crushed the revolt in 1933, the nuns of the day searched for the Chronicle in vain, and the then–Mother Superior beseeched God for patience with Sor Agnes, who died unable to recall where she had hidden it, whispering only that it was in a secret place.

  With the Chronicle missing, the nuns passed their traditions on to younger nuns by word of mouth, but as time passed they recalled less and less. When Mother herself was a young novice, only the very oldest nuns remembered actually seeing the Chronicle before it disappeared. They told the novices that they would know it at once; it was an old leather-bound volume with vellum pages and a faint gilt imprint of a bird on its cover.

  Mother asked crossly if Sor Rosario’s “vision” might have revealed where the Chronicle was hidden, if it was so important. Sor Rosario shook her head. Mother had sighed and asked if the vision explained whether she meant a political storm or a weather storm was coming. What kind of blessing was coming from the sea? And what were the nuns supposed to do about it? But Sor Rosario only shrugged apologetically. Mother despaired of getting any sense out of her and sent Sor Rosario back to her chores.

  In a matter of days the Mano del Diablo answered the first question.

  In the convent’s orphanage, nuns and lay sisters made up extra pallets and readied their meager collection of medical supplies, their stocks of patched nightdresses and underwear and threadbare pullovers for the traumatized and injured children that began arriving—brought by the makeshift rescue services, the police, the army, neighbors, and strangers.

  The arrivals stretched the convent’s resources to the limit. Once, patrician nuns’ dowries—land, gold and silver and emerald mines, and vast sums of money—had enriched the convent, but as centuries passed the convent’s wealth diminished with vocations. When Sor Rosario, their last novice, came begging to be admitted, her dowry was two squawking chickens—all she had in the world. So the burden of the orphanage fell on the shoulders of a dwindling population of aging nuns and equally elderly lay sisters. And the children orphaned by the disaster cried all night, from pain and for their lost families. They wet their beds and had nightmares. Those who could not cry desperately needed specialist help, but there was no one to give it. Sor Rosario hitched up her habit and scrubbed pots and floors, boiled sheets, set older children to look after the younger ones, and watered the maize gruel and the dwindling contents of the last bottles of iodine, until the tincture was no longer red but barely pink.

  Soon both nuns and lay sisters were tottering with exhaustion, but with so much extra work the afternoon siesta was abandoned until Mother finally insisted that everyone—children, nuns, lay sisters, even the elderly odd-job man—was not to stir for an hour after lunch, regardless.

  That brief interlude of tranquillity was broken one afternoon by the sound of running footsteps coming down the corridor. “Mother!” shouted Sor Rosario, racing round the corner, skirts still hitched from her morning’s work and beads swinging at her waist as she hurried round the cloister toward Mother Superior’s office. “Mother!” echoed the old nun hurrying behind her. Her high-pitched voice, wobbling with excitement and breathlessness, was shrill. “The key! You must come at once!”

  At her desk Mother had sat up with a start and straightened her wimple, realizing she had fallen asleep again over the orphanage accounts. The convent was desperately short of money, the roof over the crowded dormitory was sagging, and food was in short supply and more expensive by the day. The intake of children orphaned by the hurricane had strained resources to the breaking point. The children often went to bed hungry. There were not enough blankets, and though the children bundled three and four to a bed for warmth, they shivered at night. As for clothing and sandals…Anxiety and despair always made Mother sleepy. Her glasses had slid down as she dozed, and now she pushed them back up and scolded, “Sor Rosario! Sor Maria Gracia! The siesta! No need for running! Most unseemly!” Mother tried to sound stern, but really, how did they have the energy? “What key?”

  Sor Maria Gracia was wheezing too badly to speak, but Sor Rosario gasped, “Sailors, two…sailors…visitors’ parlor…the key…open the locutio gate!”

  Mother was shocked. “The key? Open the locutio gate? Sor Rosario! We never open that gate! The locutio symbolizes our separation from the world, and—”

  “Mother,” Sor Maria Gracia piped up, “the world has sent us a gift!”

  Sor Rosario nodded earnestly, big eyes wide. “I told Sor Maria Gracia it is just as the vision promised…” she began, ecstatically.

  “Vision inde
ed!” snapped Mother, thinking Sor Rosario was an impressionable peasant and Sor Maria Gracia was wandering in her wits. Then Sor Maria Gracia leaned forward and murmured in Mother’s ear.

  Mother started back and stared at her. “Two sailors with another child, who was wearing our medal? And the portress thinks I must deal with it?” Mother reconsidered Sor Rosario’s vision, whose warning, she had to admit, had been accurate so far as the hurricane was concerned.

  “The portress is surely mistaken!” The portress was old but sharp-eyed. “After three hundred years, the likelihood this is our medal is small. Nevertheless…”

  Mother set off with a surprisingly quick step for the visitors’ parlor, fingering the heavy key ring she wore on her girdle. The two nuns hurried after her. By the time they reached the parlor, Mother had extracted a large, rusty cast-iron key decorated with a cross and a symbol of a bird with a forked tail, and she struggled to fit it into the lock.

  On the other side, two young sailors shifted from foot to foot while the nuns gathered behind the locutio. The gate in the middle shook as if someone was growing impatient and rattling it. A woman’s voice muttered something that sounded like a profane oath. One sailor, holding a small malnourished girl sucking her thumb, raised his eyebrows at the other, who shrugged and shook his head. The sisters seemed to be behaving strangely.

  The two sailors knew they had done what they should. They had taken the child to a side door of the convent, where for hundreds of years there had been a latticed hatch where abandoned babies and children were passed to the portress on the other side.

  They had knocked on the hatch; the portress had come. “Take off the medal first so it doesn’t get caught in the hatch and choke her,” said the sailor holding the child to his companion. The companion unwound the chain and pushed it and the medal through the hatch and was about to set the child down when inside the portress shrieked, pushed the medal back, and said they must take the child and the medal to Mother Superior, before slamming the hatch closed.