Carnality, p.19
Carnality, page 19
“But what would she do in return?” the man asked. “I can’t afford to pay.”
Oh, the tedious conscientiousness of the little man. What is the point of always trying to do the right thing in a world that exploits you and that you hate? But I felt obliged to persuade that same man and had to rack my brain for any possible kitchen or janitorial duties. I named a few jobs at random and hoped the kitchen staff would not mind too much having an unsolicited assistant. To my surprise the man nodded, and everything was resolved with astonishing simplicity, as will happen when the Lord approves.
* * *
—
The fact that I failed to take Ada’s mother into account turned out to be an error, a minor error, but one that would prove consequential when she turned up a few days later. I have done a lot of thinking about the fact that a woman like her could bear a child as formidable as Ada. It must be one of the chance equations that creation generates. She was furious, and she was swearing and dripping with sweat, because she had walked all the way to the convent from the bus stop in the heat and had not brought a change of clothes with her, but chose to enter the inner courtyard in all her unvarnished and perspiring flesh.
“You planning on taking my child from me?” she said when she came into my room.
She had skipped all the phrases of greeting and just stood there with her hands on those substantial hips.
“Not in the slightest,” I said.
“Oh yes you are, that’s exactly what you’re planning on doing,” she said with hatred in her voice. “Because that’s what nuns do. You take the children away from us real women. You did it during the dictatorship, and you’re trying to do it now. You’ve all got this wound inside you because you never got to be mothers, and this is your pathetic revenge for what you can’t heal by yourself.”
My heart started racing at those words, but I replied as calmly as you can when facing an enraged animal that she no doubt had a point. There probably was a wound like that inside me, but everyone has a myriad of wounds inside them, and what is important is that you have something else inside you besides those wounds. Little islands where you can find peace and rest and that you can stand on as you jump across the endless quagmire of disappointments life has to offer.
“What a load of drivel,” she hissed.
Then she yelled I shouldn’t try and get the better of her with a load of biblical rubbish. I replied that nothing of what I had said to that point was biblical, and she yelled back at me that the very fact we were in a convent and I was a nun was biblical enough to last her a lifetime.
“A whole godforsaken fucking lifetime!” she yelled.
She paused to catch her breath for a moment and said she was the one who had given birth to the girl and you couldn’t know anything about real maternal feelings and real pain unless you had squeezed a kid out of your own womb.
I had to wipe the sweat from my brow with a handkerchief. We—my sisters and I—sometimes forget what being part of the world beyond the convent is like. We tend to forget that the people out there are actually capable of looking one another in the eye while spitting out indiscriminate insults and we forget that there are people whose daily goal is not to show humility and understanding for one’s fellow men but to crush them with all the finesse of a dog devouring a bowl of its food. I put the handkerchief on the table, cleared my throat, and tried to put on a smile as well. I said it was true I couldn’t know what it was like to have a child of my own. That was true. It was perfectly true as well that I had not squeezed anything out of my womb, and even though I was grateful for that in some respects, it was possible I lacked insight into certain aspects of female life for that very reason. I wiped my brow again with the handkerchief. She nodded at me, and the look in her eyes said, Told you so. So I said there were other things I did know about, things that had been significant for me. She moved over to me at that point, leaned across the table, and put her index finger under my chin. She raised my face toward her and said: “Just because you use a lot of posh words you think you can trick simple folk like me out of the thing they love most. Only you’re not going to trick me, you dried-up lying old nun!”
Dried-up lying old nun? I stared into her eyes, and if not for the fact I could see Ada’s eyes in there as well, I would have countered with a devastating retort. Instead I felt my heart clench and a tenderness well up like lava. I wanted to hug her, press her against me, ask her to be my friend, stay for lunch and a glass of cold white wine in the garden and listen to the water with me—but before I had time to say anything, she had grabbed the flesh under my chin and pinched it. It was terribly painful and decidedly not conducive to my finding something for us to talk about or issuing an invitation. I presume she interpreted my silence as indifference to what she had said, because she turned and walked over to a chair in the middle of the room and sat there doggedly, her arms crossed, as though she never intended to leave. She stayed there for a good while, looking around with an expression of distaste across her face.
“Carpets, candles, canopied beds,” she mumbled and waved her hand. “Potted plants, curtains, fruit bowls, floral displays. Life in this convent really is holy. Some paupers you are.”
Then she stopped talking and locked eyes with me. She drummed her fingers for a bit against the edge of the chair. Meanwhile I was trying to appear as unconcerned as I could. I looked out the window, down at my nails, and then I picked up my pen and drew a little scribble on a piece of paper. The skin under my chin still hurt. I was wondering where Ada had got to and thinking it would be unfortunate if she were to come in now and find out about her mother’s resentment toward me. But she did not turn up. Instead the mother got to her feet, grabbed her bag, and said, “Just so you know, nun, the little miracle is defective.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Ada. She’s defective.”
I shrugged and said I still did not understand. With a peculiar sort of calm all but beaming from her eyes, she said, “Her heart is made of stone.”
“Her heart? What do you mean?”
“It’s made of stone, Sor Lucia. Just wait, you’ll see for yourself.”
I remember the gardener was humming outside my window while watering one of the bushes and a member of the staff was walking across the gravel path and then there was the sound of the door to the street closing. That moment would remain with me like a photo in an album you get out many years later.
“What do you really mean?” I repeated.
“You’re going to regret ever letting her inside the walls of this convent.”
And with that she turned and with a contemptuous expression still plastered across her face she left the room.
* * *
—
I quickly shook her words off, it should be said. You have to believe the evidence of your own eyes. In Ada, I had seen the possibility of something magnificent. She thrived in the convent, she was studious, now and then verging on brilliant, and most importantly she loved spending time with me. She wanted to come into my room whenever she had a free moment. I had Jaime, our factotum, carry up a desk for her that was placed at the other end of my study. We would sit there and work in front of the open window. I answered letters and began writing little instruction manuals on the art of living, the art of growing old, the art of dying—manuals that actually became very popular and which the sisters in the convent, the priests, and the monks began to hand out to the general public. We talked, Ada and I, and I told her about my childhood in Extremadura and about what my mother had told me: that for many people life was about carnality, about the flesh rather than the soul. I also told her, just as my mother told me, that she should watch out.
“Watch out for what?” Ada asked.
“Most things,” I replied.
I also told Ada about my revelation, about the woman with the folded clothes, about Francisca León and all the other people I had helped. Ada listened attentively and when I had finished one episode she would often ask me to tell it again, as if it was a fairy tale. Time passed. Weeks, months, years came and went. Ada did not want to return to her parents, she completed her studies with us instead. A few years ago she also started playing computer games. This latter interest failed to please me as much. I have always wondered why people do things like that when they could be reading a book or listening to music. Ada, for her part, always insisted that the games helped develop her intelligence and that every individual must try to form a connection to the age they live in. I allowed myself to be convinced. But her passion for the games forced me to behave furtively as far as the other nuns were concerned, because I knew they would never consent to that kind of worldliness existing within our walls. And while I had no great problem, personally, with the games, I didn’t think it fitting for Ada to devote so much time to something that did not lead anywhere, so to speak. But if you labored this point with Ada, you ended up in long and complicated arguments involving theories about what actually did lead anywhere and what it meant for something to lead somewhere. The probing, existential nature of the young. She would sit with those huge headphones on in front of the computer and play games and watch video clips. She could sit like that for hours, while I worked, drank my vermouth, and took my naps.
* * *
—
Weeks and months passed in this way. Ada, who had been filled with a kind of holiness that made me think of the holiness that had filled me when I was young, had suddenly become an introverted girl in her late teens who seemed to have barely any memory of the Madonna she once believed herself to embody. I tried to take this gracefully. But when I received a visit from a sister from another convent one afternoon, it dawned on me that Ada had no idea how to behave properly in the presence of a stranger. She sat silently in one corner, sipping her coffee and nibbling the almond cookies, but appeared not to know how to contribute to the conversation or how to make herself heard in any way at all. She did not seem bothered about this either. Sor Ana pretended not to notice, of course, but I could see her stealing glances at Ada, as if she were wondering how this girl could have ended up in our convent. I racked my brains for an explanation once she had left. Hoping that Ada would become a kind of successor to me, might I not have clipped her wings instead? To have become a part of the outside world while living in the convent would have been impossible for her. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had to give Ada room to grow, so to speak. I was determined nonetheless to ensure that she grew in the right direction. I wanted the sun to shine on her so she could grow the right way. Toward me, I mean. I have, of course, come to regret this with hindsight. Everyone needs to be allowed to grow in the direction of their choosing. If you intervene, you risk producing…distortions.
* * *
—
As someone who writes, you will no doubt understand why it was reading in particular that I put my faith in. To determine what someone reads is to shape them. Ada had only read selected portions of the convent literature, and impressive though that may be, it cannot teach you much about the world. And so I spent an entire morning and half an afternoon walking up and down the corridors of the convent pondering the matter, while listening to the clatter from the kitchens and the church bells of Madrid and the distant traffic. Giving a seventeen-year-old a collection of books you know that young person will actually read and think about while also making those texts part of her and a foundation on which to build her future self can only be described as an opportunity both magnificent and breathtaking. To be allowed to sow seed in fertile ground and in furrows that have not yet become rigid. To be able to mold someone, to be God when he created Adam. As Pico della Mirandola puts it—”I have placed you at the center of the world so that you can mold yourself.” This is how I created Ada. I selected the pearls, the crown jewels of literature—she deserved as much because only the best was good enough for my apprentice. I started with the epic of Gilgamesh, continued with the Old Testament, the Greeks, the New Testament, the German and Icelandic epic narratives of the early Middle Ages, and then Dante, Ariosto, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. I did wonder for a while whether I should include the Romantics, but then decided to skip that part of literature entirely. Because I despise suicides I thought it was entirely unnecessary to include Young Werther in the collection or any of the other hemophiliac works of the eighteenth century. So I skipped straight to Nietzsche and the Russians, and then thought that the nineteenth century could wait until the next round.
Content with my compilation, I was seated in my study contemplating the riches I would be bestowing on Ada. I would ask Jaime to drive to the appropriate bookshop to acquire all the works and make a great parcel of them. I was imagining Ada’s joy as she opened the parcel, presumably with a huge smile on my face, when there was a knock on my door. It was Jaime, who had come upstairs with my afternoon drink.
“How convenient,” I said and took the glass from him. “I have a shopping list ready for you, as it happens.”
I handed him the piece of paper and took a swig of my vermouth. I closed my eyes and relished the wave of intoxication that rose to my head.
“Oh,” Jaime said, “books.”
“Yes, for Ada.”
I was expecting him to leave the room at that point.
But Jaime stayed where he was.
“Yes?” I said.
He looked from the list over to me with an anxious expression.
“Can’t you read my handwriting?” I asked.
“Yes, I can.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“If you’ll permit me, Sor Lucia, to raise a point?”
“You wish to make an objection?”
“Yes, if I may.”
“Of course. Where is the problem?”
“They’re all white men.”
“Sorry?”
“On your list. They’re all white men.”
I took back the list and glanced through the names. Jaime was right. They were all white men. I gave the sheet of paper back to him and said, “And you’re not a white man, I suppose?”
“No, I am.”
“God is a white man,” I said. “And if you have a problem with that maybe you should find work elsewhere. Somewhere there aren’t any white men like yourself.”
I leaned back in my chair. It was vexing to be corrected. And I really did not understand, to be perfectly honest.
“Jaime,” I said. “What do you really mean? Do you think I have poor taste?”
“No,” he said. “It’s just maybe you could include some other writers as well. Male or female, from some other part of the world. If your aim is to mold Ada’s mind and spark her interest, then maybe you should use the present as your starting point.”
The present. It was the way he said it.
“The present can wait,” I said, “but I promise to bear it in mind when I compile the nineteenth-century list.”
He remained standing there as though there was something more he wanted to say.
“The thing about privilege,” he began, “is that you can’t see it, if you’re—”
“Leave now, Jaime,” I said.
Jaime left but my feeling of joy had been clouded. I considered what he had said, which was easier once he was no longer physically present. After a while I decided to add some works by Sor Juana de la Cruz and Teresa de Ávila. When he returned he would have to drive all the way back and buy them as well. The idea of him having to go back out in the heat and the traffic cheered me up, and I was able to enjoy my vermouth to the full once more.
* * *
—
I should have prepared myself for a degree of disappointment when giving Ada her books, because when it comes to gifts you always run the risk of things not going as you expected and of you being happier than the recipient. And that was what happened on this occasion as well, because she opened her present, lifted out the books one by one, and regarded their spines with a jaded look.
“Thank you,” she said finally, without any noticeable expression.
“Not at all, Ada,” I replied. “I’d love to compare notes while you’re reading them if you wanted.”
What I hoped, of course, and what I was expecting, was that Ada would continue to come to my room and sit at her desk while I sat at mine, and that we would have long and interesting conversations about the contents of those books. But that is not how it turned out at all. In all honesty I barely saw anything of her once she had been given the books. Jaime carried them over to her room, and then she closed her door and it felt as though she had vanished into thin air. I had to spend my afternoons alone. And the convent became so quiet while she was reading, or that was what I felt at least, though it was obviously no quieter than usual, not that it has ever been really particularly quiet for that matter. But I presume I felt it was quieter than usual because I knew that Ada was in one of the rooms reading all those pages that had inspired me so strongly, and I was wondering how those words would fit in her universe so to speak, whether they would put down roots inside her and what would start to grow and what would be discarded. I found myself wondering what her face looked like while she was reading and wondering about her eyes moving along the lines of text and how she was sitting.
