Cesar Aira: How I Became A Nun

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