Letter Number 23

It had been a week since the handsome priest had arrived, and he didn’t want the same breakfast as the others. He asked for chocolate in a large jug, because he wanted to drink many cups. He didn’t want any more of the pastries the nuns made, the ones they kept in pretty tin boxes. He asked for a kind of bread called mogollas, which were darker and heavy and round. He did want his eggs with onion and tomato, but he wanted more because two weren’t enough. He also asked for something we hadn’t seen before called sausages. They were like sticks made of ground beef and jammed into a container that looked like the skin we had covering our bodies. Since he didn’t talk to me or give me pastries, I left his breakfast in front of him on the little table and backed away, bowing, just as Bolita had taught me to do.

What happened took place on a Saturday, because that was the day the nuns gave us off, meaning we didn’t have to work for them but could spend the time mending and washing our own clothes. The nuns left a big basket full of rags and pieces of cloth, which we could take as we wished, to patch holes in our clothes. We never mended our smocks, which had to stay like new. At night when we took off our clothes to put on our nightshirts, first we had to fold our smocks perfectly, as if we were about to iron them, and then, when they were well folded, we put them carefully under the mattress. Since the beds were made of planks of wood, in the morning the smocks were in excellent shape. But the clothes we wore beneath our smocks and nightshirts—those were full of holes, and that was what we did with our Saturdays. The older girls helped the younger girls, of course. Our underwear was always in the worst shape, and we were always asking for new pairs, which weren’t really new, just less ragged.

I was telling you that Saturday was the day of disorder, for the girls as well as for the nuns, because we had it off, so we didn’t follow the regulations. When I arrived with breakfast, the priest was standing. With a gentle smile he asked me to put the pot on the table. I don’t know how it happened, but with a swoop I felt his arm gather me at the waist and his other hand push my head back, and he gave me a kiss on the mouth and then brought his hands down and touched my breasts. I’m sure it was Mary who helped me: I don’t know how I thought to kick in the direction of the table, knocking one of the legs and causing the entire breakfast to crash to the floor. The pot made a terrible sound when it fell, so loud even the priest got scared and he just ran. But before he left, he gave me such a shove that I slammed my head against Saint Christopher. I remember falling to the floor.

They took me to a small empty room where we never went because it was inside the cloister. The kind nuns came to visit and said they were praying for me. Another nun came to tend to the enormous bump on my head. When I’d touch it, I’d cry because I was so scared. When they saw I was starting to improve, the nuns brought me gifts, a little flower, a picture of a saint, sweets. They even gave me a new nightshirt, but they all told me I couldn’t say anything, not a word, to my friends, and that if I did I was committing a sin and would be punished.

“You haven’t been sick, or been bad” (as they liked to say there). “You’ve had bad diarrhea. Very bad diarrhea.”

When I went back to the sacristy, Sor Teofilita hadn’t replaced me with another girl; on the contrary she was, for the first time, affectionate and happy to see me back, but she told me I couldn’t take breakfast to the priest anymore. I never saw him again anyway, because they sent us another new priest.

Many days passed, and I was still not well. Everything hurt, and I began to think that this time it was serious. Everything about the convent, the sacristy, the nuns, the priests, Mary and her son, all of it made me suffer, and I felt I didn’t want to see them again. My friends looked to me as if they’d been drained of their color, and since I couldn’t talk to any of them, I thought I didn’t love them anymore. They hadn’t done me wrong, but they forced me to think about what had happened.

When I was back at the sacristy, Sor Teofilita told me gently that a new priest was coming. She talked a lot about him, assuring me he really was a saint. It was the first time I thought to ask her what she meant by “saint,” and she said it was someone who went straight to heaven when they died . . . I don’t know what the new priest was like; I didn’t look at him. All I saw were the keys that Sor Teofilita kept on the chair, the keys that I watched from the corner of my eye. There was a knock on the door, and she ran to open it. Without prompting, she whispered in my ear: “One-Eye doesn’t come with the milk anymore.”

When communion came, we stood up all at once, as usual, and then returned to our seats, kneeling, as we always did, with our faces in our hands so we could talk to God. I didn’t talk to God or to Mary but to Saint Christopher and asked him to carry me on his shoulders. I raised my head, stretched my arm behind Sor Teofilita, and, very slowly with my fingers stretched wide, I took the keys, clutching them tightly so they wouldn’t make a sound. I said, in a voice that was almost loud, “I’m going for the censer.”

She didn’t see me. She was praying. I unlocked the door to the hallway and locked it again from the other side. I opened the heavy door, turned back, placed the keys on the turnstile, and gave it a spin so the nun would find them when she got back. I left very slowly, so frightened I felt as if a hole might swallow me up, and when I closed the heavy door, I breathed an air that didn’t smell like the convent. A cold wind blew, and I felt as though it had come from behind the door to scare me; but it was too late for all that. The street was long and sloped upward. In the distance I glimpsed part of a church tower. Before moving farther into the world, I realized it had been a long time since I was a girl. There was no one in the street, except two dogs, one of them sniffing the other’s backside.

Bordeaux 1997.