God's Callgirl

by Carla Van Raay

  Why was the statue hidden in that cupboard and not standing in some venerated place like a great many other statues, such as The Little Infant of Prague, Saint Philomena, Saint Anthony, Saint Joseph, and Our Lady of This, That and The Other? And why did the little sister show it to me in such a surreptitious way? She watched my face intently all the time, and I felt that the statue was somehow not kosher, or had unappreciated influences. Now, I wonder if the objections were racist. A black Madonna! I had heard of one in Russia, where a secret Catholic movement was challenging the official Communism, but Russians were not like the rest of the world—they were feared as subversive. The Spanish also venerated a black Santa Maria at Montserrat, but at the time I didn’t know about her; nor, most likely, did anyone else in the superstitious and judgmental Belgium of the 1960s.

  I loved the statue so much that I thought of stealing her. The sight of her stuck away in a dark cleaning cupboard as though she were evil, simply because she was different, brought tears to my eyes. I must have identified with her plight and, symbolically, wanted to rescue myself by carrying her off. Sadly, I didn’t think I had the right and left the statue there. Over the years, I have often wondered what became of her.

  I BEGAN TO experience nightmares. The old attic where I slept was not only creaky, dusty, draughty and cold, but had dark, unfathomable corners. At night it was easy to imagine that some stranger was prowling around. Maybe a man would get in through the unlined tiled roof of the attic. There were so many Belgians disgruntled with the convent’s involvement with the Americans in Brussels that Mother Josephine took me seriously when, one night, I knocked on her door in a nervous state, convinced that I had heard the footsteps of a man.

  She called the porter nun and they searched up and down the attic with powerful torches. There was no one there, except perhaps the many ghosts of centuries gone by that worried me on other nights. They were plentiful, bringing with them shades of ghastly memories of times I felt I had surely known.

  One day I was creaking along the corridors when Mother Josephine stopped me and stood in front of me. She was the shorter and so looked up at me. Her face had an expression that I couldn’t read, and what she said was a complete shock to me.

  ‘Sister Carla, I am sorry—’ she began.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I interrupted quickly, wanting to spare her the trouble of whatever she was about to say.

  Mother Josephine seemed to push aside some annoyance. She started again: ‘I am sorry—’

  Again I interrupted her, feeling strangely panicky. She gave up and walked on. I was stunned. Had she intended this to be a confession? Was she trying to make up for something? I never found out. I let her off the hook, which didn’t do me, or her, any good, but there it was.

  SUDDENLY, THANKS to my mother’s insistence that I be sent back to Australia or she would personally go to fetch me, I was told to leave. An agitated Mother Josephine came to me with the news that I would travel to Broadstairs the next morning. There was no time to arrange anyone to replace me, I was to leave as soon as possible; those were the orders from the General. There was an unusual urgency in Mother Josephine’s manner and she looked sickly pale. I was stunned, confused and pleased, but there was no time to get emotional, or say goodbye, or any of those things. My passport was in order now and in Mother Josephine’s hands. My suitcase was retrieved from the storeroom and I quickly packed.

  We were up at four in the dark of morning. I stuffed some cold cereal and an unripe banana into my unwilling stomach, pulled on my gloves with the pathetic holes, and Mother Josephine and I were on our way to the port in a taxi.

  Once more I was on a ferry, this time going from Ostend to Dover, with some farmers for company. They were sympathetically inclined towards the uncomfortablelooking nun passengers.

  ‘C’est très dur,’ said one of them after a while. He had been studying our faces, which were white and drawn. I was fighting seasickness, something I had never before experienced on an ocean liner, but the green banana in my stomach would not go down.

  In the end, nature got the better of me. No time to explain, no time to ask where the toilets were—those things we always pretended we never needed in public. I blindly made it to the passageway, blundered into the lavatories and threw up. I gagged again at the awful mess in the washbowl. It didn’t wash away all that well. I came back quietly to my place beside Mother Josephine, who was preoccupied with her own thoughts. Murmurs of sympathy came from the farmers, whom I didn’t dare look in the face.

  We were sitting there, lurching gently, when Mother Josephine handed me something to read. It was a small booklet called How to Improve Your Willpower. It contained a good deal of pop psychology about the benefits of a strong will, which I took literally at the time, especially as it was given me by my superior. I assumed that she had chosen it especially to help me. I was so grateful, and even felt that Mother Josephine was sharing a secret with me—one of her personal strategies, perhaps. The implication that I had a weak will didn’t matter!

  I kept that tiny booklet for several years. With each exercise—like shredding ten sheets of paper slowly into a hundred pieces—I conjured up the feeling of a strong will. I thought it was exactly what I needed: more control over my feelings. Mother Josephine’s iron will became my model; a desperate hope for control that would eventually collapse. But during those years it helped me to be stoic, to remain unmoved by whatever the gods or God might send to try me. That is how I wanted things to be. The gods or God had other things in mind.

  BACK AT THE London convent, I met the nun with whom I would share the journey back to Australia. Sister Marian had just finished a few months of retraining at Stella Maris. She was an introvert who seemed always to be aware of her surroundings. She liked keeping her mouth shut even when the rules allowed her to speak; for example, when travelling at sea.

  Our voyage back to Melbourne was uneventful. Taciturn Sister Marian steeped herself in a book most of the time, but there was one memorable break in her silence when we left the boat during a stopover at Calcutta, to find the Jesuit monastery to go to confession.

  My first glimpse of the Indian people moved me deeply. From our ship, I watched a small group of children dancing outdoors with their teacher. The grace and ease of their movements had me enthralled. When we alighted, we were met by a woman whose handshake I shall always remember because of its feminine fluidity. In it, she carried the grace of the Ganges, the soft winds of her country, everything that flows naturally. She smiled warmly but shyly, and I lowered my curious eyes that seemed to embarrass her.

  Sister Marian and I began the long walk to the monastery. She seemed to have a map in her head and walked resolutely, as if she did this every day of her life. She obviously had been given accurate instructions on where to go, how to get there and how to behave in these unfamiliar surroundings. All I needed to do was copy her. There was no communication between us as we walked. We ignored the groups of children who crowded around us, asking for money. They didn’t see us as holy people—how could they? Our dress and our skin showed that we were foreigners. I noticed bodies in the gutters of Calcutta, immobile, either drunk, asleep or dead. I saw flies on the meat as it hung in stalls open to the street. I saw many faces crowding the pavement, cameos of lives, snapshots in my mind.

  We made it to the oasis of the monastery and were cordially received by the Father in charge. Sister Marian untied her tongue and did all the talking, which was just as well as I seemed to have forgotten how to carry on a normal conversation.

  We were ushered into a cool parlour and treated to the finest cup of tea I’ve ever tasted. Whether it was the heat, or the fact this was the purest Ceylon tea, or that it had been prepared with so much care by the young priest who served it, I couldn’t tell. Perhaps it was a unique combination of these things. What was certain was the magic of the young priest, for he enchanted me with his touch as he shook my hand. Electricity flowed between us, forming an instant bond, and I smil
ed happily at his young face, which beamed back at me. He was truly delighted that I liked the tea so much.

  We were shown to the confessionals in the quiet haven that was their chapel: cool, with the scent of sweet incense in the air. The confession itself was a gruelling and humiliating experience. Having met the senior priest personally, I now had to tell him how awful I was. Feeling a terrible cringing inside my chest, I told him how I’d had sexual fantasies. I quickly added that I had also had rebellious thoughts—they were less sordid than sexual feelings…It was all so pathetic. Why did a beautiful afternoon have to be spoiled with this sort of soul-baring? After all, it was a one-way contract: the confessor told neither of us what went on in his secret mind! Never, ever, would a priest officially confide his sins to a woman.

  We shook hands again, the young priest and I, to say goodbye. His masculine hand clasped mine with warmth and firmness. Three years later he turned up at my convent in Australia to see me. I wasn’t there at the time, and wasn’t told about his visit until months later, when no one could remember his name nor where he came from. It was one of those strange incidents that made me wonder: were we meant to meet? But if so, then why didn’t we? What difference might it have made if we had met again?

  Why do human beings wonder about these things?

  WELCOME HOME, SISTER

  MY FACE HAD become pale from the longest winter ever, but my mother knew I would be all right again now that I was back in Australia—even if it was at the beginning of yet another winter. Her face glowed triumphantly when she and my father came to see me. My father grinned with pleasure. I would not stay long at Genazzano, however. I was needed in a country school and no time was wasted in getting me there. It was the middle of 1965.

  Sister Marian and I were taken by car to sleepy Benalla, a country town in Victoria with one Catholic church and two adjacent schools, both taken care of by the FCJs.

  That day—the first in my new community of eleven teaching nuns and one lay sister—was a chance for a new life, a productive life at last, a life with no history, or so I thought. Only two people—Sister Anna, who had entered a year after me, and Sister Madeleine, a year older than me, and both of whom I could trust—had known me before. Sister Marian had been my companion on board ship, but I discounted that short time. The Reverend Mother had never seen me before in her life.

  There were such things as personal reports, of course, with the power to establish a view of someone as yet unknown and unproven in a new community, and such a report naturally had preceded me. In my keen expectation of a new start in convent life, I had forgotten that this would be the case.

  At the first evening gathering around the common-room table, which concluded with some practical announcements, Reverend Mother Clare ended with, ‘We need someone to take on the job of waking us at 5.30 am. Is there a volunteer?’ I saw an opportunity for proving myself willing and useful. ‘Yes; I will,’ I said quickly, and wondered why my offer was not taken up immediately. Reverend Mother Clare smiled ruefully, but not at me, and then said to all the listening ears, ‘All right, Sister Mary Carla will be given the bell. We can expect anything to happen now.’

  My heart stopped. Why had she said this? A soft murmur of giggles went through the gathering. They had understood the joke, which was obviously based on information shared before I had even arrived. A young person’s reputation was of no importance to the Reverend. She wasn’t intentionally cruel, just pressured from being in charge when she wasn’t well suited to the task. My heart sank, but I knew that I would do this job perfectly.

  THE CONVENT WAS on a small acreage, a couple of hundred kilometres north of Melbourne, and inland. The winters were chilblain frosty. ‘Our Lady of the Angels’ was carved in stone relief on an archway over the front porch. In front of the building was a garden large enough for a car to turn full circle; at the back was the playground for the schoolchildren and the convent’s vegetable garden and chicken yard. The small size of the community fostered friendly interaction; the beauty of the rooms and their brightness induced a feeling of homeliness and relaxation. It was such a change from the comfortless spaces the nuns had to put up with at Genazzano.

  The thirty or so boarders were farmers’ daughters whose homes were too far away for daily travel. There were also a few boys, but they were day pupils. All the dorms were upstairs, accessible by two sets of stairs: one at the back of the building, used by the boarders and young or able nuns, and a beautifully polished and curved wooden staircase close to the chapel door, used only by the superior and the senior nuns, to spare their legs. Apart from Anna, Madeleine, Marian and myself, the household was middle-aged or older.

  Sister Marian was the infirmarian, but a number of nuns were trained to look after the sick in order to minimise contact with male doctors. Sister Madeleine was a small, sweet nun, with rotund, pale cheeks, beseeching eyes, a shy little smile and a soft voice. She was given to hiding in a corner. She and Sister Anna—who was more robust than Madeleine in every way, bright, fairly tall, talented in English and sewing—became my friends. We shared a freshness of mind because of our youthfulness, and would later team up against the forces that mistrusted youth.

  The oldest nun in our community, Sister Imelda, was a wispy woman with rumpled hands who worked magic on the piano and organ. She was the unassuming elder of two music mistresses. She could hardly see, had wrinkles all over her kindly blind face, a large, spongy nose and a very wide smile. When Sister Imelda spoke, which wasn’t often, it was music that came out of her mouth: she had the proverbial melodious voice. One of the things she never wanted was to be in charge of anything. Whenever she was asked to take on authority, such as in the temporary absence of the Reverend, she would always smilingly shake her head, never even uttering the word ‘no’.

  As I was the newest arrival, it immediately became my job to keep the corridors and the common room spotless and shiny. I’d had plenty of experience in this sort of thing! And because I had gained craft skills at college, I was given the delightful task of dreaming up themes for festive days and making the decorations. The convent became a hive for one feast day: bees galore festooned the refectory, attached by strings to the rafters, and everyone had to choose a card with a message beginning with B, such as ‘Be happy’ or ‘Before it is too late’. Next came a wondrous butterfly theme; and on another day, an ocean made the refectory swim with magic fish. The immediate effect of this kind of happy occupation was that I was no longer constipated; after more than ten years, my intestines were suddenly perfectly functional again. I felt a precious sense of usefulness.

  I WAS ECSTATIC to be assigned the job of teaching art and craft to several classes of children of different ages. It was so good to have direct human contact and feel useful. I noticed, however, that I was not made a class mistress, and was never trusted with the responsibility for the wellbeing of any particular class. Even in times of dire need, or if anyone was sick, I was never even temporarily placed in charge of a class. Was it an order from above? Whatever it was, I tried not to think about it. It might have been more helpful had I been encouraged to grow in confidence, but self-affirming psychology wasn’t a strong feature of religious life. Unavoidably, as a result of this unspoken and unbending mistrust, I was never fully integrated into the community, in spite of my best efforts and in spite of the otherwise happy environment.

  I soon discovered that my training at Sedgley College had not prepared me for secondary-school dynamics, nor given me any organisational skills. We had been taught content (what to teach), and the principles of learning (how children learned). Thank goodness I had gained some practical experience in the schools of Manchester, watching veteran teachers at work and having a crack at teaching myself.

  That was two years ago. Now I had to learn as I went and I enjoyed the challenge. After all, maintaining discipline among Catholic girls was a cinch. These girls were so passive! In art classes I had trouble stirring up any kind of passion in them to get them to exp
ress themselves in paint and colour. I brought a tape recorder to class and played evocative music, but they just looked at me helplessly and could only produce shadows of the ideas I put before them. They were practical farmers’ girls with an ‘I-hope-this-willdo’ attitude to creativity. The older the children, the lower their ability to be experimental. I went for bold colour instead, and at the end of the year we managed to put on a bright exhibition.

  My other responsibility was needlework and I had a rich store of experience in this field. I loved creating with stitches and fabric. The farmers’ daughters, unfortunately, took badly to fancy needlework—broderie anglaise, shadow work and such—which was done only for show. They would have been better off learning how to put together overalls and aprons. The standard I elicited from them was questioned by a visiting inspector. I don’t know what pieces he criticised since I wasn’t there when he examined their work. He left without giving me any ideas on how to improve the situation. Maybe he was the apron and overalls type too.

  In time, I became almost like one of the family. A precious camaraderie flourished among the members of our small community in spite of the rule of silence. We cleaned the chapel as a team, well organised by the nun in charge. On a sunny day, we would all lift the pews together and take them out onto the front lawn. The old wood was cleaned and polished, the floor dewaxed and waxed anew, the stained-glass windows washed, and all the silver and copperware for the altar polished. To keep our arms free, we tied up our shawls and aprons. I became acutely aware of my inadvertently revealed figure at those times and those of my sisters. A travelling salesman happened to call in during one of our cleaning sprees, catching a number of us outside in working mode. He caused a fast retreat and was left standing alone among our undusted pews.