Cesar Aira: How I Became A Nun

They kept me alive with serum. Ana Módena replaced the bottles, invariably at the wrong time, and put the needles in my arm … She stuck them in anywhere. My nose began to run. Everything that went in my arm came out of my nose, in a continuous drip. It was an extremely rare case. To her, it seemed normal … In any case it wasn’t a priority. Early in the morning, before the first mother arrived, Ana Módena brought the dwarf, and made her recite her psalms in front of each bed, including the empty ones. The dwarf was an autistic visionary. Ana Módena steered her by the shoulders, as if she were holding the handlebars of a tricycle. The dwarf didn’t seem to see anything; she was a piece of furniture … She was one of those dwarves with an oversize head … Ana Módena would put her in front of a bed occupied by a listless or sleeping child … a deep silence reigned in the ward … Then, responding to a tap between the shoulder blades, the dwarf would mutter a Hail Mary, gesticulating oddly with her little arms …

“Mother Corita will save you, not the doctors!” thundered Ana Módena.

The dwarf passed like a comet … Everything happened automatically … It was a blanket cure: empty and occupied beds received the same blessing … Thus religion was smuggled into the world of sickness. Except that it was an open secret, and, of all that brute’s misdeeds, this was the one the mothers brought up first if they had any pretensions to scientific decorum … but as soon as a doctor seemed unsure, or a child fell ill again or began to vomit, it was: Bring the dwarf, I beg you … Bring her to save my little angel … The hypocrites! Severely, Ana Módena would reply: It is the Virgin who saves, not the dwarf … And the mothers: For mercy’s sake, bring the little dwarf …

Mother Corita was the hospital’s real cement; Ana Módena was just its representative. The dwarf stopped the hospital exploding into a thousand pieces … and my body with it … my head flying off to the north, my legs to the south, an arm here, a finger there … Believing in the dwarf was what made it all hang together … the life fluid flowed through her, through the tube, from my arm up to my nose … But I had to believe. I had to believe deep down, while pretending not to.

Then it occurred to me that … with my body coming apart … I might reach a point at which I could no longer believe in the dwarf. Me, of all people! The perfect hypnotic subject! I believed in everything! And I needed my belief to remain intact!

But what if the dwarf was a fake? What if I couldn’t believe in her? After all, was I so different? Wasn’t I unbelievable myself, objectively? So what was to stop her being like me? Or, worse still, what was to stop me being a sort of dwarf, an emanation of Mother Corita …?

I needed a confirmation. I tried to extract one from Ana Módena … I tried to get to the bottom of things. And so it was that one morning, when she came into range, I blurted, “I dreamt about a dwarf.”

“What?”

“I dreamt about a dwarf.”

“What? What dwarf?”

I had thrown her.

“I dreamt about a dwarf who had a thorn stuck in her heart.”

“ What dwarf?”

“A dwarf … a doowarf … a doo waruff …”

There could be no doubt about the identity of the dwarf … The aim of my ruse was to make her think I had something “difficult” to express. I had to approach it indirectly, resorting to allegory or fiction pure and simple. And she was drawn in, obliged to engage with my clever ploys … which escaped her … And then I began to lie by telling the truth (and vice versa) though how, I don’t know … it escaped me too … My strategies died, like the children in the ward … and came back to life with a vengeance … In a desperate bid to communicate concepts refractory to the understanding of a little girl completely stupefied by her wretched physical state, Ana Módena began to use gestures … Gestures took over … She was an impulsive, unmethodical woman and fell into the trap of trusting intuition, which flies blind and reaches the target before understanding can set to work … Hastiness and clumsiness made all her movements blunder into one another … As for me, the dismemberment made me gesticulate like her mirror image … but it was dizzying, the meanings of her grimaces and looks and intonations were piling up absurdly … the accumulation seemed to be approaching a limit, a threshold … coming closer and closer …

And at that point something snapped. I don’t think it was something in me so much as something between the two of us. But no: it was in me, inside me. From that moment on I have suffered from a peculiar perceptive dysfunction: I can’t understand mime; I’m deaf (or blind, I’m not sure how to put it) to the language of gestures. I have on occasion, in subsequent years, attended mime shows … and while the four-year old children around me understood perfectly what was being represented, and screamed with laughter, all I could see were pointless movements, an abstract gesticulation … It’s funny, now that I think of it, that no mime artist, not even the best, not even Marcel Marceau himself (who is the hardest of all to understand for me), has ever tried to mime a dwarf … Why should that be? In the language of gestures, the dwarf must be the unsayable.

BECAUSE OF MY ILLNESS, I started school three months late, in June. I still can’t understand why they accepted me at that stage in the year and put me in with the children who had started on time. Especially since it was first grade, the absolute beginning of my school life (there was no such thing as kindergarten back then), such a crucial and delicate stage. It’s even harder to understand why Mom insisted on getting me in, why she went to the trouble of making them take me; it can’t have been easy. She must have begged, implored them, got down on her knees. I can imagine it; that was her idea of motherhood. She probably thought she wouldn’t know what to do with me at home for another whole year. But what with the work of taking me to school, going to fetch me afterwards, washing and ironing the smocks, buying the pencils, pens, rulers and so on, finding an old reader to borrow, in the end it must have seemed hardly worth it, just for the relief of having me off her hands for a few hours a day at siesta time. She probably thought she was doing it for my good. It didn’t occur to her that missing three months, the first three months, in first grade, would be too much even for a girl like me. But it wouldn’t be fair to blame her. I don’t. It was only three months, after all. And poor Mom had so many things on her mind at the time. All the same, the teacher and the principal should have known better. But perhaps they were too close to the problems of learning, just as Mom was too far away from them.

The first weeks were a stream of pure images. Human beings tend to make sense of experience by imbuing it with continuity: what is happening now can be explained by what happened before. So it’s not surprising that I persisted in the perceptual habits I had recently acquired with Ana Módena and went on seeing gestures, mimicry, stories without sound, in which I had no part. No one had explained the purpose of school to me, and I wasn’t about to work it out for myself. Initially, however, the problem didn’t seem serious. I regarded it all, rather stubbornly, as a spectacle, an acrobatic show …

The drama started later on … Why is it that drama always starts late? Whereas comedy always seems to have started already. Except that later on we come to see that it was the other way around … The drama was triggered for me by the realization that the mute scene I was witnessing, the teacher’s and pupils’ abstract mimicry, affected me vitally. It was my story, not someone else’s. The drama had begun as soon as I had set foot in the school, and it was unfolding before me, entire and timeless. I was and was not involved in it; I was present, but not a participant, or participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the performance, but that gap was me! At least I had finally realized (and for this I should have been grateful) why I was missing out on the mental soundtrack: I couldn’t read. My little classmates could. By some sort of miracle, they had learned how to in those first three months; an abyss had opened between them and me. An inexplicable abyss, a void, precisely because there was no way to account for the leap. They couldn’t say how or exactly when they had learned to read, nor could I, of course; not even the teacher could have explained it. It was simply something that had happened. For the teacher (who had forty years of experience with the first grade) it was routine: it happened every year. It was so familiar, it had become invisible, a blind spot.