The Convent

by Panos Karnezis

  The first thing that they agreed was not to let passion stand in the way of their good sense but to take every care not to raise the slightest suspicion. Their best defence was the boundless adulation of the nuns of Our Lady of Mercy for the Bishop, whom they thought incapable even of the most trivial sin. Nevertheless he insisted that they were never to be seen speaking in private, even if Sister Beatriz had something innocent to tell him. When their paths crossed in the convent, she only bowed to him and he greeted her with a hardly noticeable movement of his hand before they went their separate ways. He never lost his head in the confessional again or spoke about what had happened, but met her in his room in the guesthouse, where he began to spend the night during his monthly visits, professing to be exhausted from his drive to the mountains.

  Once he had retired to his room he waited for her without taking off his clothes. Some time later, which always felt like eternity to him, there was a coded knock on the door and he immediately put out the light. Having removed her shoes so as not to make any noise, she came in like a cat, and without either of them saying a word she searched for his shadow in the dark and began to undress him. She started with his pectoral cross, which glimmered in the moonlight, and at those moments it felt to him unbearably heavy with the weight of his sin. After she had gently removed it from around his neck, she unwrapped his purple sash and undid the thirty-three buttons of his cassock.

  On one occasion they were almost caught. Sister Beatriz was about to leave the Bishop’s room in the middle of the night when one of the dogs that happened to sleep outside the door barked at her. She shut the door again and heard footsteps not far away. The bell rang for nocturns: she had forgotten it was time for prayers. Behind her, the Bishop, who was as terrified as she was, heaved a sigh of relief. ‘At least God has not condemned us,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Sister Beatriz said. ‘It’s the dogs which are on our side.’

  They agreed that he should no longer stay the night in the convent. Bishop Estrada thought that it would be safer if she visited him when she came to the city to buy provisions for the convent, a duty which the four younger nuns (Sister Carlota was too old to make the journey on the donkey) took in turns. So, once a month, Sister Beatriz left the convent immediately after the dawn prayer and almost five hours later arrived in the city, where she spent the morning in the market. After filling Midas’s panniers she headed for the square in front of the Bishop’s Palace, and there she walked up and down, waiting for the secret signal. When Bishop Estrada was ready for her, he came to the window of his office and opened and closed the drapes twice. Then she made her way to the quiet cobbled alley round the back of the palace and a little while later the Bishop came to let her into the garage, where she tied Midas next to the Ford. A spiral staircase led directly to his private quarters.

  There they did not have to worry. Bishop Estrada had given strict instructions not to be disturbed during his siesta, even if the palace caught fire. After they had made love, he escorted her back down the stairs and let her out of the garage with the only key, which he kept in his pocket at all times. The woman left without kisses or goodbyes, pulling the lead-rope of the donkey and raising no suspicions in her religious habit. Later, when the Bishop bought a new car, he donated the old Ford to the convent and Sister Beatriz was able to meet with him with greater ease and more often but still in secret.

  Things would have stayed the way they were if she had not become pregnant. Sister Beatriz, who knew all along that the Bishop would not tolerate a pregnancy, decided not to tell him. He often warned her that a child would seal their damnation and he made a point of always wearing a condom. Sister Beatriz assumed that he had an accomplice who bought them for him, but one day Bishop Estrada asked her to follow him to the basement of the palace, where he showed her several old crates that contained hand-dipped vulcanised-rubber condoms made by Julius Schmid, Inc. at the turn of the century. They were what had been left of one of his many enlightened schemes that over the years had landed him in trouble with the Vatican. He had bought them at trade price with the intention of distributing them for free across his diocese, convinced that they would stem the spread of syphilis, which still claimed many lives, but a delegation of parish priests got wind of his ‘moral prophylaxis’ scheme and wrote to the Holy See. He was duly reprimanded and so he was left with enough condoms to sin his way to the ninth circle of Hell.

  The pregnancy made Sister Beatriz face up to her situation. She never thought of not having the baby because to her that would have been a far greater sin than the one she was already committing, but she understood that she risked being expelled from the convent and that the Bishop could be defrocked. She did not want to leave the Order or destroy him. If she went somewhere to give birth she would have to give the baby away to be able to return to Our Lady of Mercy. She thought about it for several days and came up with a way of having the child in the convent while at the same time saving both the Bishop and herself from excommunication.

  The first thing she had to do was end the affair before he noticed the change in her body. It was a difficult decision because all this time he had given her no reason to leave him, but she took comfort from knowing that her plan would not only save the child and herself from destitution but also the Bishop from disgrace. She still loved him: she loved the way he talked to her; she loved his indomitable spirit, his passion for philanthropy and his well-intentioned but doomed schemes; she loved the fact that after they had made love his member smelled of vulcanised rubber, which he tried to drive away with scalding baths and carbolic soap. But she had to leave him. Afraid of how he might react, she did not end their affair in the city but chose to tell him in the confessional the next time he came to the convent. Without tears, she tried to convince him that it was the right thing to do, giving him several reasons why: they were condemning their souls, they were risking being caught, she was losing interest in the act of love. She told him anything but the truth. Bishop Estrada listened in silence until she finished and then said from the other side of the confessional: ‘Go. I cannot stop you. You do not have to pretend to be the Virgin.’

  They were his last words on the matter. Since then he gave every sign that he had forgotten about her. He did not try to dissuade her, did not address her when he sat at lunch with the nuns during his visits, did not come out of the confessional until she had left the chapel. Soon she was too occupied with how to deceive everyone about her pregnancy to think of anything else. Her plan was to pass the baby off as an orphan and have the nuns adopt him so that she would not have to part from him. She had decided to keep him after a visit to the orphanage of San Rafael the Healer, where she had been appalled by the overcrowding of the wards. It was her visit the nurse remembered when, months later, Sister María Inés also happened to come to the orphanage.

  In any case, Sister Beatriz sewed a habit several sizes larger than her current one to hide the way her belly would grow over the next months, and bought an old suitcase which she lined with cotton wool, having had the idea after seeing the night depository for babies at the orphanage. The old school for novices was a good place to give birth in secret because no one went in for fear that it might collapse. She cleaned and prepared a corner in one of the upstairs rooms and prayed for an easy labour. As her time approached she had to ask to be excused from driving the Ford to the city, and when the day came, she went to the derelict building at the very last moment and delivered the baby after a short labour whose worst part was her fear of someone suddenly turning up. Then, exhausted, she bathed the baby and wrapped him up, mopped the floor and buried the bloodied bed sheet on which she had lain to give birth in a secluded corner of the grounds. Early the following morning, while the other sisters were at prayer, she put the newborn in the old suitcase and left him on the steps at the entrance to the convent, where later Sister Lucía came across him on her way to the car.

  The Bishop’s bitterness towards Sister Beatriz concealed a sadness which still sh
owed no signs of waning several months after she had ended their love affair. His visits to the convent became an ordeal of pretences and evasions until, having no more patience left, he made the decision to appoint another priest in his place. He had to find someone who was not only willing to travel to that corner of the diocese several times a year but who was also in no risk of falling into the trap the Bishop had fallen into himself. No parish priest he offered the post wished to do it, claiming that they were too busy already, so he tried the seminary, where he hoped that the idealism of youth would provide him with the appropriate candidate. He interviewed several seminarians, all of them keen to serve under his command, ruled out both those physically unfit for such an arduous duty and the handsome ones, who might cause other kinds of trouble, and settled on Mateo, a timid young man who impressed him with the humility of his pitted face.

  Bishop Estrada did not have the slightest suspicion that the nun was pregnant. He assumed that Sister Beatriz continued to come to the city in the Ford once a week to buy provisions, and still hoped against hope that one day she might visit him again. She never did, but this did not deter him from standing at the big windows of his office several times a day and gazing out at the square with the statue of San Rafael, where she used to wait for his signal.

  A few days after his reluctant visit to the convent, where he had gone to investigate the matter of the orphan, he looked out of the window in his usual, sad, half-hearted way and saw a nun in a white habit and black veil striding across the square. Immediately he felt that the prophecy of his lover’s return, in which he so desperately believed, was at long last being fulfilled. Forgetting his bitterness, he began to make the signal, opening and closing the curtains until the nun got closer and he saw, to his horror, that it was not Sister Beatriz but that unpleasant woman Sister Ana. He let go of the drapes and walked away from the window feeling annoyed. When his deacon came in to announce her, Bishop Estrada answered before the young man had a chance to speak: ‘Send her in.’

  A moment later Sister Ana greeted him with a mischievous smile. ‘Your Excellency,’ she said. ‘I saw you standing at the window.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes. I could tell it was you from the other end of the square. You were doing something with the curtains.’

  Bishop Estrada pouted. ‘Ah yes. I was only trying…’ He made a dismissive gesture in the direction of the window he had been standing at earlier. ‘The drapes were stuck. The rail is probably bent.’

  Reminding himself that he was not obliged to explain himself to a nun, he stopped and stared at her with a serious expression. He could tell that she was very excited about something.

  ‘Did you smuggle yourself out of the convent again, Sister?’ he asked.

  The nun giggled. ‘Oh no, Your Excellency, not this time. I came in the car with Sister Lucía. She is at the market.’

  The Bishop asked: ‘Not with Sister Beatriz?’

  ‘Not this time. She has been helping the Mother with the baby.’ She giggled again, oblivious to the Bishop’s severe look. ‘Who would have thought?’ she said. ‘It’s quite unbelievable.’

  ‘Does whatever you find unbelievable have anything to do with me?’

  ‘Yes, Your Excellency, very much so. It’s Sister Beatriz I came to talk to you about.’

  The Bishop went red in the face. All sorts of thoughts ran through his mind as he slowly went up to the window and looked out with his hands clasped behind his back. ‘Very well, Sister,’ he said harshly. ‘Speak your piece.’

  He expected the nun to tell him that she knew about Sister Beatriz and him, but what he heard shocked him more: Sister Beatriz was the mother of the child. He said: ‘Impossible.’

  ‘She admitted it to me, Your Excellency.’

  Bishop Estrada observed her with dismay, trying to determine whether she suspected him of being the father. Several minutes passed in silence before he spoke up: ‘Who else knows?’

  ‘No one, Your Excellency. I discovered it the day the Mother visited you.’

  ‘Do you think she plays a part in all this?’

  ‘I doubt it. Sister Beatriz begged me not to tell her.’

  Bishop Estrada calmed down a little. He said: ‘Promise me not to say anything about this to anyone.’

  ‘Of course, Your Excellency.’

  ‘No one–do you understand? I will take care of it. We have to avoid a scandal. These things can harm the Church more than anything else. We have to protect our faith.’

  ‘I will do whatever you say.’

  ‘Good. I appreciate your help, Sister. Naturally you will be rewarded for your loyalty.’ He searched for a better word. ‘And your vigilance, of course,’ he finally said, holding back his contempt.

  ‘I do not expect anything in return.’

  ‘I believe we once discussed the post of sister visitatrix.’

  ‘Yes, Your Excellency, we did. It would be an honour to accept it with great humility.’

  ‘Let us sort out this mess first.’

  Bishop Estrada saw her out and then gave orders not to be disturbed. Shut away in his office, he spared a moment to question how such an accident could have happened when he had taken every precaution, and only then did it strike him as very reckless to have put his faith in a piece of rubber almost thirty years old. He tried to think of a way to save himself from the scandal while causing the least harm to Sister Beatriz, and decided that the best thing he could do was to safeguard his own integrity in order to help the woman and her child as best he could.

  Early that evening his deacon knocked on the door but received no reply. He assumed the Bishop had already gone to his room, so he finished his paperwork and left too. It was almost nighttime when Bishop Estrada came out of his daze and answered the knock on the door as if he had just heard it: ‘Come in, Ignacio.’ No one answered and he went next door, where he did not find his secretary at his desk. The waiting room was dark and quiet, and he shuddered as if he were alone not just in the building but in the whole city. He had repeatedly refused the services of a live-in housekeeper and told the cook and servants to always go home as soon as they finished their tasks, for he wanted to keep up some pretence of the simple life that suits a good Christian. He now went from room to room without turning the lights on, bumping into the furniture like a ghost not yet accustomed to its eternal night. The pale moonlight through the windows lit up the portraits of the bishops with the heavy jowls who had served God before him and were now buried under the cold flagstones of the great cathedral. He finally found his way to his bedroom and prayed to God to help him out of his quandary. He said: ‘I was aware of the sin that I was committing and I have no right to ask You for clemency. But please spare me the ridicule and let me serve You until the end of my days before You decide what to do with me.’ Then he offered a way to atone for his mistake: ‘I will do all I can for that child.’

  He finished his prayer and lay exhausted in bed but found it impossible to sleep. He left in the car before dawn and arrived at the convent as the nuns were coming out of the early morning prayer. The Mother Superior said: ‘Welcome, Your Excellency. We did not expect you.’ But the Bishop’s solemn expression made her worry and she added: ‘I hope you are a bringer of good news.’

  ‘My visit is connected of course with the matter of the orphan,’ the Bishop said. ‘I would like a word with Sister Beatriz and you, but separately.’

  He took off his leather helmet and followed Sister María Inés to her office, looking tired after his sleepless night and the car journey. The convent had lost all its charm for him and seemed no more than a few derelict buildings at the mercy of time. He walked across the courtyard hoping he would never have to visit again. In the room kept warm for the child’s sake by a petrol heater, he took off his coat and handed it together with his helmet to the Mother Superior. She hung them behind the door as if she were handling sacred relics, then sat opposite him. Bishop Estrada glanced at the cradle in the corner, where t
he baby was stirring noiselessly, and turned to Sister María Inés. He said: ‘I wish to speak to Sister Beatriz first.’

  She called the young nun and left the room. When Sister Beatriz came in, the Bishop said, without looking at her: ‘Shut the door and take a seat.’

  She obeyed. Then he began, still not looking at her. ‘We have a problem on our hands. And I know that I am responsible at least as much as you are.’

  ‘I do not understand, Your Excellency.’

  ‘Please,’ the Bishop said. ‘This is not necessary. Sister Ana came to see me yesterday.’

  The nun looked at him coldly and said: ‘I assume you have told the Mother.’

  ‘I have told no one. I want you to know that I am on your side.’

  ‘How can you persuade Sister Ana to keep quiet?’

  ‘With bribery.’ He waved his hand. ‘Do not worry about her.’

  He left the desk and walked up to the cradle. Observing the child, he resisted the temptation to deny that he was the father; it would have been vile. He said: ‘Remind me of his name.’

  ‘Renato. The Mother had him baptised.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ The Bishop sighed deeply and said: ‘You should have told me, but I understand why you did not. We have to make arrangements.’

  ‘I want to keep him.’

  ‘I am prepared to take care of him. I will do everything that is necessary. Your name will not be mentioned. No one else needs to know. We only have to adhere to the facts.’

  ‘The facts?’

  ‘The fact is that the child was found on the steps of the convent. Nothing will change. You will be able to go on with your life here. No reason to worry about Sister Ana. She is prepared to go to the Moon if she is given a senior appointment.’