Cesar Aira: How I Became A Nun

It was a thousand times more disgusting than the first taste. I would have spat it out, if I’d known how. I’ve never learnt how to spit properly. It came dribbling out between my lips.

Dad had been watching my every move out of the corner of his eye, all the while eating big spoonfuls of his ice cream. The three different-colored layers were rapidly disappearing. He flattened what remained with the little spoon, making it level with the edges of the cone, which he then proceeded to eat. I didn’t know that the cones were edible; to me this was an act of savagery, and it burst the banks of my fear. I began to shake. I could feel the tears welling up.

With his mouth full, he said to me, “Try it properly, idiot! A big spoonful so you can actually taste it.”

“Bbb … but.”

He finished his cone and threw the spoon on the ground. A wonder he didn’t eat that too, I thought. With his hands free, he turned towards me, and I knew that the sky was falling.

“Now eat it! Can’t you see it’s melting?”

It was true: the peak of the ice cream was turning to liquid, and pink streams were running over the edge of the cone, dripping onto my hand and my arm, then down onto my skinny legs below the hem of my shorts. There was no way I could move now. My anxiety was mounting exponentially. Ice cream seemed the cruelest instrument of torture ever invented. Dad snatched the spoon from my other hand and dug it in. He lifted a big spoonful up to my mouth. My only defense would have been to press my lips shut and never open them again. But I couldn’t. I opened my mouth wide, and in went the spoon. It came to rest on my tongue.

“Shut your mouth.”

I did. Tears were already misting my vision. As my tongue pressed against my palate and I felt the ice cream dissolving, my whole body was seized by a convulsion. I didn’t go through the motions of swallowing. Disgust flooded through me; it was exploding in my brain like a flash of lightning. Another big spoonful was on the way. I opened my mouth. I was already crying. Dad put the spoon in my free hand.

“Go on.”

I choked, coughed, and began to wail.

“Now you’re being stubborn. You’re just doing it to annoy me.”

“No, Daddy!” I stammered unintelligibly. It came out as, “Da no dy no no da.”

“Don’t you like it? Eh? Don’t you like it? You’re a moron, you know that?” I was crying. “Answer me. If you don’t like it, that’s OK. We’ll just chuck it in the trash, end of story.”

He said it as if the story could end there. The worst thing was that, because he had eaten his ice cream so quickly, his tongue had gone numb and he was talking in a way I had never heard him talk before, with a slur that made him fiercer, harder to understand, and much more scary. I thought his tongue had gone stiff with rage.

“Tell me why you don’t like it. Everyone likes it except you. Tell me the reason.”

Astonishingly, I was able to speak; but I had so little to say. “Because it’s horrible.”

“No, it’s not horrible. I like it.”

He took my arm and guided my hand, with the spoon in it, toward the ice cream.

“I don’t,” I implored.

“Just eat it, then we’ll go. What was the point of bringing you?”

“But I don’t like it. Please, please …”

“All right. I’ll never buy you another ice cream. But you’re going to eat this one.”

Mechanically I dug the spoon in. I felt faint at the mere thought that this torture was going to continue. All willpower had deserted me. I was crying openly, making no attempt to hide it. Luckily we were alone. At least Dad was spared public humiliation. He was quiet now, sitting still. He was looking at me with the same deep, visceral disgust I felt, staring at my strawberry ice cream. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. That I didn’t like the ice cream? I had already said that. That the ice cream tasted foul? I had said that too, and it was pointless, because I couldn’t get it across; it was still there inside me, impossible to convey, even after I had spoken. For him, the ice cream was exquisite, because he liked it. Everything was impossible, and always would be. I buckled and broke under the weight of tears. There was no hope of any consolation. The incommunicability cut both ways. He couldn’t tell me how much he despised me, how much he hated me. This time, I had gone too far. His words could not reach me.

AS I SAID AT THE END of the previous chapter, the conversation, if that was what it had been, was over. We had lapsed into a silence that swallowed even the sound of my fitful sobbing. My father was a statue, a block of stone. Shaken, trembling, tear-sodden, holding the ice cream cone in one hand and the spoon in the other, my red face twisted in an anxious wince, I was paralyzed too. More so in fact, since I was fastened to a pain that towered over my childhood, my smallness, and my extreme vulnerability, indicating the scale of the universe. Dad had given up. My one last, desperate hope of turning the situation around would have been to get accustomed to the taste and finish the ice cream of my own free will. But it was impossible. I didn’t need to be told. I didn’t even need to think about it. Utterly helpless as I was, I had a firm grip on the reins of the impossible. My sobs echoed in that empty Rosario street, shaded by plane trees, oppressed by the still January heat. The sun was doodling among the shadows. I was crying my eyes out and the ice cream was melting flagrantly now, pink rills running down to my elbow, then dripping onto my leg.

But nothing lasts forever. Something else always happens. What happened next came from my body, from deep within, without any deliberate preparation or forethought. My solar plexus was convulsed by a retch. It was grotesque, farcical. As if something inside me was trying to show that it had vast reserves of energy ready to be unleashed at any moment. And straight away, another retch, even more exaggerated. To the many layers of my fear, one more was added: fear of being possessed by an uncontrollable physical mechanism.

Dad looked at me, as if returning from somewhere very far away. “That’s enough drama.”

Another retch. And another. And one more. It was a series. All dry, without any vomit. It was like a car hurtling towards an abyss, slamming on the brakes. But over and over, as if the abyss kept splitting.

A look of interest appeared on Dad’s face. I knew that face so well: sallow, round, the hairline receding prematurely, the aquiline nose my sister inherited, not me, and the overly wide gap between nose and mouth, which he hid with a neatly trimmed moustache. I knew it so well, I didn’t have to look. He was a predictable man. For me, at least. I must have been predictable for him too. But the retching had surprised him. He looked at me almost as if I had become an object, detached from him and his destiny. Meanwhile, I was pursuing mine. Retch. Retch. Retch.

Eventually the retching abated, without having produced any vomit. I was no longer crying. I controlled myself, clinging to a sad paralysis. Another residual retch. A bilious hiccup.

“I don’t believe this. Son of a bitch …”

He was slightly hesitant. He must have been wondering how he was going to take me home. Poor Dad, he didn’t realize that he would never take me home again. Although I’m sure that if someone had told him right then, he would have been relieved.

I was still holding the cone and, what with all the retching, I was spattered with ice cream from head to foot; it was all over my clothes. So the first thing he did was to take the cone away from me; then he took the spoon from my other hand. I was very slim and petite, even for my age (I had just turned six). Dad was big without being hefty. His fingers, however (which I have inherited), were long and slender; delicately, they relieved me of my two burdens. He looked for somewhere to throw them. But he wasn’t really looking because he hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Then he did something surprising.