Cesar Aira - How I Became A Nun

“Are you going to tell me what’s got into you?”

I didn’t have anything very definite to say, but what came out took her completely by surprise, and me too.

“Where’s my dad?”

The voice I put on! It was a squawk, but crystal clear, without the slightest stammer.

Mom glanced around. The bus was packed full and the people surrounding us, hearing my cry, had turned to look. She didn’t know what to say.

“Where’s my dad?” I raised my voice.

Poor Mom. Who could blame her for thinking I was doing it on purpose?

“You’re going to see him soon,” she said, without committing herself. She tried to change the subject, to distract me: “Look at the pretty flowers.”

We were passing a house with superb flowerbeds in the front garden.

“Is he dead?”

There was no stopping me now. The other passengers were already intrigued by the story, and that excited me inordinately. Because I was the owner of the story. Mom put her arms around my shoulders and pulled me close.

“No, no. I already told you,” she whispered, lowering her voice until it was almost inaudible.

“What?” I yelled.

“Shhh …”

“I can’t hear you, Mom!” I shouted, shaking my head, as if I was afraid that the uncertainty about my dad would make me deaf.

She had no choice but to speak up. “You’re going to see him soon.”

“Yes, I’m going to see him. But is he dead?”

“No, he’s alive.”

I could sense the passengers’ interest. The cityscape slid over the glass of the windows like a forgotten backdrop.

“Mom, where’s Dad? Why doesn’t he come home?”

I adopted a tone of voice that signified: “Stop lying to me. Let’s behave like adults. I might look like I’m three years old, but I’m six, and I have a right to know the truth.”

Mom had told me the whole truth. I knew he was in prison, waiting for the verdict: an eight-year sentence for homicide. I knew all that. The only reason for these untimely doubts of mine was to make her tell the story for the benefit of perfect strangers. How could her daughter be capable of such an idiotic betrayal? She couldn’t believe it (nor could I). But the panic that I was exhibiting was all too real. As usual, I had managed to confuse her. It was easy: all I had to do was confuse myself.

“He’s sick,” she said in another inaudible whisper. “That’s why we’re going to visit him.”

“Sick? Is he going to die? Like grandma?”

One of my grandmothers had died before I was born. The other was in good health, in Pringles. We never used the expression “grandma” at home. That was a detail I added to make the scene more convincing.

“No. He’s going to get better. Like you. You were sick and you got better, didn’t you?”

“Did the ice cream make him sick?”

And so I went on until we arrived: Mom trying to shut me up all the way and me raising my voice, creating a real scene. When we got off the bus, she didn’t say anything or ask me for an explanation. I felt that my performance had come to an end, a bad end, and that she was ashamed of me … The anxiety intensified and I began to cry again, with much more determination than before. The logical thing to do would have been to stop in the square, sit down on a bench and wait until I got over it. But Mom was tired, sick and tired of me and my carrying-on, and she headed straight for the prison. My tears dried up. I didn’t want Dad to see me crying.

It was visiting time, of course. We joined the line; a lady who seemed nice enough frisked us, checked the string bag full of food that Mom had brought, and let us through. We were already in the visitors’ yard. We had to wait a while for Dad. Mom was off in a world of her own (she didn’t talk to the other women), so I got a chance to go exploring.

There were entries and exits all around the yard. It didn’t seem to be hermetically sealed, which came as something of a surprise. It’s hard not to have a romantic idea of what a prison will be like, even if you don’t know what romanticism is (I certainly didn’t). To tell the truth, I didn’t know what a prison was either. This one was steeped in an intense, destructive realism, strong enough to dissolve all preconceived ideas, whether you had any or not.

I headed for a door, drawn as if by a magnet. Subliminally, I had noticed that there were other children in the yard, all holding their mothers’ hands. A strong autumn sun bleached the surfaces. It was a sleepy time of day. I felt invisible.

Of all the places I knew, the one most like this prison was the hospital. People were shut in both places for a long time. But there was a difference. The reason you couldn’t get out of the hospital was internal: the patient, as my own case had shown, was incapable of moving. There was some other reason why you couldn’t get out of prison. I wasn’t sure what it was: force was still a vague concept for me. I blended the ideas of prison and hospital. There was an invisible exchange between the two. Sickness could disappear and sick thought be transferred to others … It was the perfect escape plan … Perhaps Dad could come back home with us. In that excessively realist building, I was radiating magic … Since it was my fault that Dad was there …

But my magic started acting on me: a melancholy fantasy suddenly transported my soul to a region far, far away. Why didn’t I have any dolls? Why was I the only girl in the world who didn’t have a single doll? My dad was in prison … and I didn’t have a doll to keep me company. I had never had one, and I didn’t know why. It wasn’t because my parents were poor or stingy (when did that ever stop a child?). There was some other mysterious reason … And yet, although the mystery remained, poverty was a factor. Especially now. Now we were going to be really poor, Mom and I: abandoned, all on our own. And that was why I felt the need of a doll so sharply, so painfully. True to my dramatic style, I surrendered to a nostalgic lament, rich in variations. The doll had disappeared forever, before I learnt the words with which to ask for it, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of my sentences … I saw myself as a lost doll, discarded, without a girl …

That was me. The inexistent girl. Living, I was dead. If I had died, Dad would have been free. The judges would have been merciful to the father who had taken a life for a life, especially since one was the life of his darling daughter and the other the life of a complete stranger. But I had survived. I wasn’t the same as before, I could tell. I didn’t know how or why, but I wasn’t the same. For one thing, my memory had gone blank. I couldn’t remember anything before the incident in the ice-cream store. Maybe I didn’t even remember that properly. Maybe, in fact, the ice-cream vendor’s life had been swapped for mine. I had begun to live when he died. That’s why I felt like I was dead, dead and invisible …

When I reached the end of this train of thought, I found myself in a new place. I was inside. How had I got there? Where was Dad? This last question was the one that woke me up. It woke me up because it was so much like my dreams. I was alone, abandoned, invisible.

Either I had climbed a staircase without realizing, or, more likely, there were converted basements in the building, because when I got to the end of an empty corridor going off at right angles, which I had hoped would take me back to the yard, where I could run to my dad’s arms, I found myself on a kind of platform suspended over a square enclosure divided in two by a grill. With a certain disquiet, I realized I had gone too far. Looking for a way out, in the grip of a horribly familiar panic, I made a crucial mistake: instead of trusting myself to go back the way I had come, I went through the first gap I could find, a gap in the wall, where they must have been doing some kind of renovation: it was a small hole, not much more than a crack, forty centimeters high and twenty wide at the most, at the level of the baseboard. It struck me as the perfect shortcut for getting back to where I had begun. I came out onto a kind of cornice ten meters above the floor. I edged along it with my back to the wall (I was terrified of heights). The roof wasn’t far above me. Since I didn’t go near the uneven edge, all I could see below was a corridor. It was fairly dark too. The cornice, which in fact was the remains of a plaster ceiling, led to a cubicle, which I crawled into. It was a skylight, about a square meter in cross section, and two or three meters high: at the top, a square of sky. At the base of the walls, level with my feet, were slots opening onto deep, unlighted rooms. Once I was in there, I kept quiet. I sat down on the floor. I thought: I’m going to spend the whole night here. It was four in the afternoon, but for me the night had already begun. I couldn’t go any further, because it was a dead end. And it didn’t occur to me to go back … In that respect I was consistent. Even if my parents didn’t always say it, their eternal refrain was “This time you’ve gone too far.” Never “You’ve come back from too far away,” I guess because once you’ve gone too far there’s no way back.