Cesar Aira: How I Became A Nun

“And how are we today, young Master César? Don’t we look well? Ready to play ball again? Let’s see how we’re going …”

His cheerfulness was contagious. He was a short young man with a little moustache. He seemed to come from far away.

From the outside world. I looked at him with a special face I had invented, which meant, What? What? What are you talking about? Why are you asking all these hard questions? Can’t you see the state I’m in? Why are you talking to me in Chinese instead of Spanish? He lowered his eyes, but took it as well as he could. He sat on the edge of the bed and began to examine me. He poked me with his finger here and there, in the liver, the pancreas, the gall bladder …

“Does it hurt here?”

“Yes.”

“Does it hurt here?”

“No.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“…”

Then, perplexed, he started all over again. He was looking for places where it had to be hurting, where an absence of pain was impossible. But he couldn’t find them; I was the sole keeper and mistress of the impossible. I possessed the keys to pain …

“Does it hurt a little bit here?”

I made it clear that his questions had tired me out. I burst into tears and he tried to comfort me.

He used his stethoscope. I believed that I could accelerate my heartbeat at will, and maybe I could. At once he began to manipulate me with extreme care. For some reason he wanted to put the stethoscope on my back, so he had to sit me up, which turned out to be as difficult as standing a broom handle on end. When he finally succeeded, I began rolling my head around wildly and retching. Fiction and reality were fused at this point; my simulation was becoming real, tinting all my lies with truth. For me, retching was something sacred, something not to be trifled with. The memory of Dad in the ice-cream store made retching more real than reality itself; it was the thing that made everything else real, and nothing could withstand it. For me, ever since, it has been the essence of the sacred, the source from which my calling sprang.

When the doctor moved on, I was a complete wreck. I could hear him at the beds nearby, talking and laughing; I could hear the voices of the little patients answering his questions … All this came to me through a thick fog. I could feel myself plummeting into the abyss … My willfulness wasn’t deliberate. It was just plain willfulness, of the most primitive kind; it had taken control of me, as evolution takes control of a species. I had succumbed to it during my sickness or perhaps just before its onset; I wasn’t like that normally. On the contrary, if I had one salient character trait, it was willingness to cooperate. That man, the doctor, was a kind of hypnotist who had put a spell on me. The worst thing was that, even under his spell, I was perfectly consciousness of being willful.

Mom didn’t miss a single one of the doctor’s visits … She hovered at a discreet distance and came forward to help as soon as I became unmanageable … She was extremely anxious to extract information from him. He used the word “shock” … He can’t have been a real intellectual, because he showed great interest in what Mom said to him. They went away and whispered; I had no idea what about … I didn’t know that we had been in the papers. He said “shock” again, and repeated it over and over …

But the doctor and Mom were hardly more than a brief distraction in the course of the day, which stretched before me, majestically impassive, rolling out from morning to night. It didn’t seem long, but it filled me with a kind of respect. Each instant was different and new and unrepeatable. That was the very nature of time, ceaselessly realizing itself, in every life … My malicious little strategies seemed so petty, I was overcome with shame …

Ana Módena de Collon-Michet, the nurse, was the day incarnate. There was only one nurse in the ward throughout the day shift; just one nurse for forty little patients … It might seem insufficient and no doubt it was. Resources were rather stretched at the Rosario Central Hospital. But no one complained. All the patients were hoping to get out of there alive, one way or another, all fondly imagining that they would not be back. Even the children were fooling themselves, quite unwittingly.

But the days came to rest in the big white ward and wherever I turned my gaze, there was the nurse. Ana Módena was a living hieroglyph. She never left the hospital; she had no illusions. She was a ghost.

The mothers were always complaining about her; they fought with her, but they must have known it was hopeless. The mothers came and went, while she remained. Short-lived alliances were forged against her, and Mom was involved on a number of occasions; she didn’t have the strength of character to say no, even when she realized it would have been in her best interests. The complaints concerned Ana Módena’s abruptness, her impatience, her rudeness, her almost insane ignorance. Having frequented the hospital environment for an average of a week, the mothers formed an idea of the ideal nurse for the children’s ward. They imagined what she would be like, what each of them would have been like in her place: a good fairy, all gentleness and understanding … It wasn’t hard; without realizing, they were imagining how the ideal nurse would have been gentle and understanding with them, and each of us is the ultimate expert on the gentleness and understanding we deserve. It wasn’t their fault; they were poor, ignorant women, housewives struggling to cope. In nine cases out of ten, they were responsible for the illnesses of their children … They had a right to dream … They thought they knew what the perfect nurse would be like, and they did … Their mistake was to go one step further and presume that all those qualities could be combined in a single woman … The fact that Ana Módena, the Perón of the Pediatric Ward, was exactly the opposite of their ideal image, cast them into a stupor which they could only shake off, or so they felt, by drawing up a list of demands or devising a strategy with the aim of having her dismissed … All those dreams turned her into a ghost. As a rule I didn’t understand what was going on, but this was something I understood, because I was a dreamer … and because Ana Módena was a ghost in other ways too. She was always in a rush, extremely busy, as any nurse would have been in that situation, looking after a forty-bed ward on her own. But she was never available for anyone. She was invariably busy with the others, and it was the same for all of them too. As I lay there, I got used to seeing her out of the corner of my eye, whizzing past from dawn to dusk … never stopping … It wasn’t only the children in their beds that she had to attend to, but also those being sent off to the operating theatre, or for X-rays … and she did it all so badly, whispered the mothers, that everything kept going wrong because of her … They said she kept losing patients … They keep dying … as if her touch was lethal … They’re always dying in her ward, said the legend that enveloped me like a bandage made of whispering phylacteries … The children stopped living when they fell into the category of things she was simply too busy to deal with … But this wretched reputation didn’t prevent the mothers from making up to her, flattering her, leaving her tips, bringing her little cakes and being unbelievably, shockingly servile … After all, the greatest treasures they possessed, their children, were in her hands.

She was a fat, hefty woman. When she bore down on me, it was like an elephant splashing in a puddle … I was the water. There was something sublime about her clumsiness … She suffered from a peculiar affliction: for her, left was right and vice versa. Down was up, forward was back … The meager volume of my body came apart in her hands … legs, arms, head … each extremity was subjected to a different gravitational force … I was breaking up into falls and imbalances … With her, there was no point pretending … she projected me into another dimension … yet various parts of my body, suddenly scattered far and wide, took it on themselves to pretend … though what, I don’t know … Her hands, with their lethal touch, were molding an absolute truth.