by AIRA, CESAR
What I couldn’t work out was how I managed to lose her, how she eluded my tenacious, lucid pursuit; it should have been simple to tail her, the simplest task in the world. Subconsciously I knew that the last thing Mom wanted was for me to lose sight of her. It was only in my game that she was a wily criminal who noticed the ingenious detective on her trail, and threw her off, or tried to, with cunning ploys … Poor Mom must have wished she could walk me on a leash … but since she couldn’t stop me hiding in a doorway until she got a certain distance ahead, all she asked was that I stay within sight of her. She would gladly have left a trail of breadcrumbs or buttons, or made herself phosphorescent or carried a flag on a pole, so her idiotic daughter wouldn’t lose her again … But she couldn’t. She couldn’t make herself too obvious, because that would have meant she was playing my game. It would have been easy for her to walk slowly in the middle of the sidewalk, remaining clearly visible, stopping for a minute at every corner, or before entering a store … That way she could have been sure that I was still following her. But she couldn’t play my game. It’s not that she didn’t want to; she couldn’t. It was almost a question of life or death. She couldn’t grant me that importance. Nor, of course, could she make it hard for me by hiding, shaking me off straight away, which would have been a cinch, but it was doubly impossible because her maternal instinct would have made her sick with worry. The only option left was to act naturally, to do her shopping as if she was on her own, as if no one was following her … But she couldn’t do that either! That was the most impossible thing of all. How could she act naturally, with my eyes boring into her back, when she knew perfectly well I was a hundred meters behind her, hidden behind a dog or a trash can? So where did that leave her? All she could do was combine the three impossibilities, unable to settle on any of them, bouncing from one to another.
Encouraged by my failures (let others be encouraged by success!), I started making it even more difficult. Instead of a distance of a hundred meters, I made it two hundred. I lost sight of her at once. The tailing was no longer visual but divinatory. This was a natural extension of my habit of giving instructions, which had ended up informing my relation to the world; everything had to be done with the utmost subtlety and finesse … The fact that I failed was secondary. The methodical imperative came first. Also, this way, the sense of pursuit was stronger, more intense … to the point where it all flipped around. When I lost Mom—and, increasingly, I made sure that this happened at the beginning of the outing—I started to feel that I was being tailed.
This feeling grew exponentially. I had the brilliant idea of telling Mom about it. My rashness was breathtaking. At first she paid no attention, but I insisted just enough to get her worried, before backing off. So many dreadful things had been happening … She asked me if I’d seen who was following me, if it was a man or a woman … I didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t like that, I was talking about feelings, subtleties, “instructions.”
“You’re not going out any more unless I’ve got you by the hand!”
Around that time the gutter press was feasting on the bloodless cadavers of boys and girls, found raped in vacant lots … They had been completely drained of blood. A vampire plague was sweeping the land. Mom was a village girl, and though not completely ignorant (she had done a year of secondary school), she was naïve, easily taken in … So different from me! She not only believed what she read in the gutter press (if it came to that, I probably did too), but applied it to her own real life. That was the key difference, the abyss that separated us. I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs …
Anyway, once, during one of our outings … I had completely lost Mom, and I didn’t know whether to keep going straight, or turn, or go back home (it was only two blocks away).
The thing was, we had just set out; Mom wouldn’t be back for a good half hour, and she’d be nervous and worried about me, and maybe cross because she couldn’t finish her shopping …
A strange woman accosted me. “Hello, César.”
She knew my name. I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me. Where was she from? Maybe she lived in the tenement, or worked in one of the stores where Mom did her shopping. To me all ladies looked the same, so she could have been anyone, and I wasn’t too surprised not to be able to recognize her. The really strange thing was that she had spoken to me. Because it wasn’t just a question of her identity, but also, and above all, of mine. I was so convinced of my own invisibility, of the utter ordinariness of my features, that I felt this could only be a miracle. It must have something to do with the marks on my nose, I thought, raising my hand to touch them.
“What happened to your little nose?” she asked with interest, smiling.
“I got bitten,” I said, without going into details, not because I didn’t want to tell her the whole story (I promised myself I would, eventually), but to be polite, not to bore her, not to waste her time.
“How awful! Was it a friend, a naughty boy? Or a doggy?”
Her insistence annoyed me. It showed that she hadn’t appreciated my politeness. I was impatient to change the subject, to get things clear between us; then I would be able to tell her the story of the bite in graphic detail. I shrugged my shoulders impatiently, with a faint smile.
As if she had read my mind, she changed tack. “Do you remember me?”
I nodded, with the same smile, but a little more relaxed and charming now. She gave a visible start, but regained control immediately. She smiled again, more broadly. “Do you really remember?”
I had said yes simply to be polite, to reciprocate, since she knew me.
I nodded again, but this time the nod had a totally different meaning. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meaning was, though I could make a vague guess at it. This woman didn’t know me at all, in fact. She was lying. She was a kidnapper, a vampire … But guessing always involves a margin of uncertainty. And operating from that margin, politeness and polite circumspection took control of everything. Even if I had believed that vampires really existed, they wouldn’t have scared me as much as the prospect of upsetting the status quo. Politeness was a kind of stability or balance. For me, life depended on it. Giving it up would have to be worse that being preyed on by a vampire. Anyway, I didn’t believe in vampires, and this lady wasn’t one. So by nodding, what I meant was that nothing had changed.
“No, you don’t remember, but it doesn’t matter. I’m a friend of your mother’s, but I haven’t seen her for a long time. We knew each other in Pringles … How is she?”
“Very well.”
“And Don Tomás?”
“He’s in jail.”
“Yes, I heard.”
She was an ordinary woman, a bottle blonde, rather short and stout, very smartly dressed …
There was something hysterical and delirious about her. I could feel it in the intensity of the scene. It wasn’t how someone would normally talk to a little girl they had met by chance in the street. It was as if she had rehearsed it, as if, for her, a fundamental drama was unfolding. It didn’t worry me too much because there are people like that, women especially, for whom every moment has the same tragic intensity, without any kind of emotional relief.
“What are you doing out on your own? Are you running an errand?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me in surprise. My yeses shattered all her preconceptions. Then she went for broke. “Do you want to come to my house? I live just nearby; you can have some cookies …”
“I don’t know …”
Suddenly reality, the reality of the kidnapping, hit me. And I wasn’t prepared for it. I couldn’t believe it. My politeness was sheer idiocy. For the sake of manners, I was giving up everything, even my life. From that moment on I was seized by an immense fear. But the fear remained hidden beneath my manners. Wasn’t that typical? Any other reaction would have amazed me.
“I’ll take you back home afterwards. I want to
say hello to your Mom, it’s so long since I’ve seen her.” She anticipated my answer with an intensity multiplied a thousandfold.
“Ah, all right then,” I said theatrically, exaggerating my willingness. It was the least I could do, to thank her for making an effort to clear away the impediments.
She took me by the hand and dragged me briskly along the Avenida Brown. She talked all the time but I wasn’t listening. Anxiety was suffocating me. When she looked at me, I smiled at her. I fell in with her step and returned the pressure of her hand on mine. I thought that by stressing my willingness, I was making the hypothesis of a kidnapping too far-fetched. In no time at all we were on a bus, going down unfamiliar streets. The bus was half empty, but she spoke up so all the passengers could hear; she kept cuddling me and saying my name: César, César, César. I loved it when people said my name; it was my favorite word.
“Do you remember when you were little, César, and I used to take you for ice cream?”
“Yes. ”
I was lying. I was lying. I had never eaten ice cream in my life!
I played along with her act, anticipating, waiting … I took politeness to the clearly absurd extreme of supposing that she had mixed me up with another girl, who had the same name as me, had been born in Pringles and whose father was in prison … In which case, she would be so disappointed when she found out the truth … she might even get angry, because my yeses would turn out to have been lies, excesses of politeness.
We got off in a distant, unfamiliar neighborhood, and walked a couple of blocks, holding hands all the way … But her mask was beginning to crack, the madness she had been laboriously keeping under control was rising to the surface, tinged with violence and sarcasm. I felt obliged to accentuate my politeness, to guard against an imminent collapse.
“Mom’s going to be so happy to see you! ”
“Yes, she’ll be thrilled.”
“What a lovely neighborhood!”
“Do you like it, Cesitar?”
“Yes. ”
Her voice had become so sinister! My diagnosis was incontrovertible: this woman was crazy. You would have to be crazy to give up an imaginary status quo. You would have to be crazy to prefer brute reality. I tried not to think about being at the mercy of a crazy woman. Anyway, what could she do to me?
We arrived. She unlocked the front door and shut it again behind us. The house was old and half derelict. Still holding me by the hand (she turned the key and the door handle with her left hand, not letting me go for a moment), she led me down a hallway and through some dark rooms, quickly, without speaking. I was trying to think of something nice to say, but before I could, we were in a sitting room at the back of the house. There were no windows, so she switched on the light. We had arrived. She let me go and took two steps back. She stared at me with fire in her eyes.
She took off the mask and revealed her witch’s face … But there was no need, I had already unmasked her with my politeness. Having striven so hard, in vain, to convince me of one thing, now she wanted to convince me of the opposite. After her superhuman efforts to persuade me that she was good … Now she wanted to persuade me that she was bad … But the switch wasn’t going to be that easy. My strategy had blocked the movement of belief in both directions.
“Do you know who I am?”
Affirmative smile.
“Do you know who I am, you little moron?”
Affirmative smile.
“Do you know who I am, you stupid brat? I’m the wife of the ice-cream vendor, the one your brute of a father killed. His widow! That’s who I am!”
“Ah.” Another affirmative smile. I couldn’t believe my own stubbornness: I was still trying to keep up the act. But all things considered, it was the most logical option. If I had come this far, I could keep going indefinitely.
“I’ve been watching you for months, you and your goody-goody mother. You’re not going to get away with it. Eight years they gave him, that animal, eight lousy years! And he killed my poor husband; he killed him …”
At this point, without meaning to, I was supremely impolite. I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and said,“I don’t understand …”
I understood very well what was happening. I understood what vengeance was; I think that was about all I did understand. But the only way for me to maintain my polite temper was to feign naivety and ignorance of all those grown-up things beyond my understanding. Perhaps because I sensed that this was my last chance to make politeness work, I channeled all my natural acting talent into that shrug and those words. I was perfect. That was my downfall. I could have saved myself simply by saying something else, anything. She would have stopped to think; she would have reconsidered the terrible vendetta that she was about to execute … After all she was a woman, she had a heart, she could be moved; I was a perfectly innocent six-year old girl, I wasn’t guilty of anything and deep down she knew it … But my “I don’t understand” was so perfect that it drove her completely wild, it blinded her. And my imperturbably polite smile (“Whatever you say, Ma’am”) was the last straw. It stripped her of tragedy, of explanation, and at that moment explanation was all she had left.
She said nothing more. The sitting room was cluttered with metal containers and equipment: what was left of the ice-cream store. She had it all planned. She switched on a little motor (the wiring was makeshift; this set-up only had to work once) and as well as its buzzing I could hear the glug-glug of ice cream being mixed. She looked into an aluminum drum, threw the lid to the floor and switched off the motor … She put in her hand and scooped up a handful of strawberry ice cream, which came dribbling out between her fingers …
“Would you like some?”
I was paralyzed, but I could feel my wooden automaton preparing an ultimate “affirmative smile,” in spite of everything! … And that was the supreme horror … Luckily she didn’t give me time. She jumped on me, swept me up like a doll … I didn’t resist, I was rigid … She hadn’t wiped her hand and I felt a cold tickle in my armpit as the ice cream seeped through my shirt. She took me to the drum and threw me in head first … The drum was big, I was tiny, and since the ice cream wasn’t very hard, I managed to right myself and touch the bottom with my feet. But she put the lid on before I could get my head out, and screwed it down onto the overflowing contents. I held my breath because I knew I wouldn’t be able to breathe submerged in ice cream … The cold seeped into my bones … My little heart beat fit to burst … I knew, I who had never known anything in reality, that this was death … And my eyes were open; by a strange miracle I saw the pink that was killing me: luminous, too beautiful to bear … I must have been seeing it not with my eyes but with my frozen optic nerves: a strawberry eye scream … My lungs exploded with a rasping pain, my heart contracted for the last time and stopped … my brain, most loyal of my organs, kept working for a moment longer, just long enough for me to think that what was happening to me was death, real death …
26th of February 1989
DR. © 2005, Ediciones Era, S.A. de C.V.
Translation copyright © 2007 by Chris Andrews
Originally published by Beatriz Viterbo Editora, Argentina, as Cómo me hice monja, in 1993; published by arrangement with the Michael Gaeb Literary Agency, Berlin.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook Original (NDP1043) in 2006
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aira, César, 1949-
[Cómo me hice monja. English]
How I became a nun / Cesar Aira ; translated from the Spanish by Chris
Andrews.
p. cm.
eISBN-13:978-0-8112-1982-2
I. Andrews, Chris. II. Title.
PQ7798.1.17C6613 2006
863’.64--dc22
2006030115
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
By New Directions Publishing Corporation,
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