How I Became A Nun

by AIRA, CESAR

  The drama started later on … Why is it that drama always starts late? Whereas comedy always seems to have started already. Except that later on we come to see that it was the other way around … The drama was triggered for me by the realization that the mute scene I was witnessing, the teacher’s and pupils’ abstract mimicry, affected me vitally. It was my story, not someone else’s. The drama had begun as soon as I had set foot in the school, and it was unfolding before me, entire and timeless. I was and was not involved in it; I was present, but not a participant, or participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the performance, but that gap was me! At least I had finally realized (and for this I should have been grateful) why I was missing out on the mental soundtrack: I couldn’t read. My little classmates could. By some sort of miracle, they had learned how to in those first three months; an abyss had opened between them and me. An inexplicable abyss, a void, precisely because there was no way to account for the leap. They couldn’t say how or exactly when they had learned to read, nor could I, of course; not even the teacher could have explained it. It was simply something that had happened. For the teacher (who had forty years of experience with the first grade) it was routine: it happened every year. It was so familiar, it had become invisible, a blind spot.

  The curtain went up for me one day, in the boy’s bathroom at school … But first I need to explain the circumstances, otherwise the anecdote will be incomprehensible.

  We lived on the outskirts of Rosario, in a modest neighborhood, and most of the children at the local school came from humble families, often living just above the poverty line, or below it. At the time, children from what would now be called “marginal” families all went to school, at least for a few years. There were no special schools or educational psychologists … It was a very rough, very wild environment, a Darwinian struggle for life. The fights were bloody, and the vocabulary that accompanied them was brutal. I knew about swear words; I even knew the words themselves, but for some reason I had never paid them much attention. It was as if I registered them with a second sense of hearing and transferred them to another level of perception. I had come to the conclusion that they functioned as a set and their meaning was a kind of action, which wasn’t too far from the truth. There was only one element that stood out from the set. Usually, when the boys at school were arguing, the transition from verbal to physical abuse was signaled by one of them suddenly saying, in the midst of what was, for me, a nebulous mass of swear words, “He insulted my mother.”

  I didn’t find this detail bewildering in itself, because the mother figure was sacred for me too, and I had noticed that “mother” was often included in the flow of swear words. Had I been asked, I think I could have even repeated the whole sentence, having heard it so often: “Your mother’s a bitch.” Now, except for that central word, the rest was meaningless noise to me. I was almost unimaginably vague, not because I was stupid, but because nothing really mattered to me. This is an enormous paradox, because everything mattered to me, far too much; I made a mountain out of every molehill, and that was my main problem … I might have seemed indifferent, but nothing could have been further from the truth and I knew it. This incident was a case in point. I must have noticed that sometimes a kid would say “He insulted my mother” without the word “mother” having been pronounced, but I let it pass, and thinking back over the whole incident, I concluded, for my own convenience, that “mother” must have been said, I must have missed it. On one occasion, however, I was forced to abandon this explanation. There was a fight at playtime, near the windmill at the back of the schoolyard. Whenever there was a fight, everyone went to see, gathering round in a circle two or three deep; there was no way it could go unnoticed. Then one of the teachers would come to break up the feral boxing match. But plunging into those mêlées was not for the faint-hearted, and only a small group of “tough” teachers dared to intervene, one especially, a strapping young lady, and she was the one who came this time. The contenders were two boys from the third grade, covered in blood, their smocks torn, both of them in a mad frenzy. The teacher pried them apart, not without difficulty. The bigger of the two went back to his gang of friends. The other one began to bawl. He was hiccoughing through his tears … one of my specialties. The teacher demanded an explanation at the top of her voice but he couldn’t speak. It was as if the fight was still going on in his heart. He looked so wretched, the teacher took him in her arms and hugged him tight. She guessed the explanation, which he finally managed to utter between violent sobs, “He insulted my mother.” She calmed him, hugged him … As a tough teacher she could understand; they lived in the same world, after all. The other boy was watching from a distance, surrounded by his friends, fury and resentment flaring in his eyes … Meanwhile, for the first time, I felt a note of boundless bewilderment resonating: Mother? What mother? What was he talking about? Why did everyone seem to accept what he said?

  I had witnessed the brawl from the very start, I was certain I hadn’t missed anything and I knew that at no point had the word “mother” been pronounced. The other words, yes, but not that one. It was so clear, I could only conclude that “mother” must have been implied somehow. And of all the things I might have fastened on, that was what intrigued me most of all; I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  Anyway, one day, in the middle of a lesson, I asked the teacher for permission to go to the bathroom. I was always doing this; we all were. I asked without needing to go or having carefully chosen my moment (I guess it was the same for the others). I did it on impulse. It’s the only unalloyed triumph I can remember from my childhood. As soon as the teacher saw the little hand go up, she would briefly consider what the pupil was going to miss (it was always something trivial like when to write b and when to write v) and then shout: All right! But this is the last time! The last time! And the kid who had been visited by the brilliant idea of asking at precisely that moment, which had turned out to be the last, ran out of the classroom, deliriously happy, under the hateful, bitter gaze of all the others, who felt they had missed their last chance … But the chance was repeated, identically, and seized, four or five times in every one-hour period. For us it was always now or never and the teacher always repeated her ultimatum, although she never said no, because the first-grade teachers, who were immune to other kinds of anxiety, lived in fear of the kids wetting themselves. But we didn’t know that. We were just kids. The amazing thing is that I managed to join in the game. It would have been much more like me to hold on until my bladder burst. But no. I asked without needing to go, like all the others. I wasn’t backward in that respect, at least.

  My anomalous behavior can perhaps be explained by a magically repeated coincidence. Every time I asked for permission to go to the bathroom, two or three times a day and always on the spur of the moment, as I was crossing the deserted yard, I met a boy heading in the same direction, a boy from another grade, I don’t know which. We ended up becoming friends. His name was Farías. Or was it Quiroga? Now that I’m trying to remember, I’m getting the names mixed up. Or maybe there were two of them.

  This time, he was there, as usual, although we had never dreamed of arranging to meet. The dark grey walls of the bathroom were covered with graffiti. The kids were always stealing chalk so they could write on them. I had never really paid much attention to the inscriptions.

  Farías pointed one out to me; it was large and recent. After a few days of exposure to the powerful ammoniac fumes of the bathroom the chalk began to darken. These letters were so white they shone—so they must have been fresh that day. They were capital letters, fiercely legible, though not for me; all I could see were horizontal and vertical sticks in a senseless tangle. Until that moment I had thought that the graffiti in the bathroom were drawings, incomprehensible drawings, runes or hieroglyphs. Farías waited for me to “read” the inscription, then he laughed. I laughed with him, in all sincerity. What a funny drawing! I really did find it amusing. What an idea! I thought. Incomprehensibl
e drawings! But something prevented me from expressing this thought; my hypocrisy had recesses that were obscure even to me. Farías, however, spoke his mind; he made some smug and insinuating remark … I can’t remember what. It was something about a mother. That was all it took, unfortunately. I understood, and it felt as if the world was crashing down on me.

  I understood what it meant to read. Mothers were mixed up with that too! What I had mistaken for drawings, or some kind of recondite algebra in which the teachers specialized for reasons that were none of my concern, turned out to mean the things that people said, things that could be said anywhere, by anyone, even me. I thought it was just school stuff, but it was the stuff of life itself. Words, silent words, mimicry, the process by which words signified themselves … I understood that I didn’t know how to read, and the others did. That’s what it had all been about, all that I had suffered in ignorance. In an instant I grasped the enormity of the disaster. Not that I was particularly intelligent or lucid; the understanding happened in me, but I had almost no part in it, and that was the most horrible thing. I stood there transfixed, staring at the inscription, as if it had hypnotized me. I don’t know what I thought or decided to do … maybe nothing. The next thing I remember is sitting at my desk, where I vegetated day after day. I opened my virgin exercise book, picked up my pencil, which I still hadn’t used, and reproduced that inscription from memory, stroke by stroke, without a single error or any idea what I was writing:

  YOFUCKNSONFABITCHPUSSY

  I should say that Farías had not read it out aloud, so I didn’t know how those drawings translated into sound. And yet, as I wrote, I knew. Because knowledge is never monolithic. We know things in part. For example, I knew that they were swear words, that it was a conglomerate, that the mother was implied at some level; I knew about the violence, the fights, insulting the mother, the fury, the blood, the tears …There were other things I didn’t know, but they were so inextricably entwined with the things I did know that I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. As it happens, in this case there were things I wouldn’t discover until much later on. Until the age of fourteen, I thought children came out of their mothers’ belly buttons. And I discovered my mistake, at the age of fourteen, in a most peculiar way. I was reading an article about sex education in an issue of Selecciones, and in a paragraph about the ignorance in which young girls were kept in Japan, I found this scandalous example: a fourteen-year old Japanese girl had professed her belief that children came out of their mothers’ belly buttons. That was exactly what I, a fourteen-year old Argentinean girl, believed. Except that from then on, I knew it wasn’t true. And, rightly or wrongly, I pitied my Japanese counterpart.

  That day back in first grade, when I went home, I couldn’t wait for Mom to see what I had written. But the reason I couldn’t wait was that I was terrified. I knew that something terrible would happen, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t take the exercise book out of my school bag; I didn’t show it to Mom. She got it out herself and looked at it. Why? After the repeated disappointment of finding it blank, she had given up checking regularly and hadn’t touched it for weeks. I must have given her some kind of signal. When she read it, she screamed and went pale. She was indignant for the rest of the day; she went on and on about it. That inscription was just what she had been waiting for; it unleashed her characteristic fighting spirit, which recent events had kept in check. It was an outlet for her. The next day she came to school with me and had an hour-long meeting with my teacher in the office. They called me in, but naturally they couldn’t get a word out of me. Not that they needed to. From the veranda where I was waiting (the secretary had been sent to take care of the class for the duration of the meeting) I could hear Mom shouting, hurling abuse at the teacher, arguing relentlessly (always coming back to the fact that I didn’t know how to read). It was a memorable day in the annals of Rosario’s School Number 22. Finally, just before the bell rang, the teacher came out of the office, walked along the veranda and through the first door, into the classroom. As she went past, she neither looked at me nor invited me to follow; in fact, she didn’t speak to me or look at me again for the rest of the year. Mom left during recess, but what with the chaos of kids and teachers, I didn’t see her go. When the bell rang again, I went into the classroom as usual and sat down in my place. The teacher had recovered a bit, but not much. Her eyes were red; she looked terrible. For once, a dead silence reigned. Thirty pairs of childish eyes were fixed on her. She was standing in front of the blackboard. She tried to talk, but all that came out was a hoarse squawk. She stifled a sob. Moving stiffly, like a tailor’s dummy, she stepped forward and tousled the hair of a boy sitting in the front row. The gesture was meant to be tender, and I’m sure that’s how she felt, perhaps her heart had never been so full of tenderness, but her movements were so rigid that the boy cringed. She didn’t notice and tousled his louse-ridden mop all the same. Then she did it to a second boy, and a third. She took a deep breath, and finally spoke:

  “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 tru
th …”

  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.

  6

  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, unamazed.