How I Became A Nun

6

MEANWHILE, DAD WAS in prison for the business with the ice-cream vendor. One afternoon, Mom took me to visit him. It was logical, because I had been at the center, at the heart of the misadventure. Did they blame me? Yes and no. They couldn’t really blame me — it would have been grossly unfair — but at the same time, they couldn’t help blaming me, because I was the origin of it all. It was the same for me; I couldn’t blame them for having these feelings, and yet I did. In any case, one or both of them had decided that it would be a good thing to take me along at visiting time. To show how his wife and daughter were standing by him and all that. How naïve. The Rosario remand center was a long way from home, right across town. We took a bus. Halfway there I had a panic attack for no reason and burst into tears. Up went the curtain of my private theater. Mom looked at me, unamazed. Yes, unamazed.

“Are you going to tell me what’s got into you?”

I didn’t have anything very definite to say, but what came out took her completely by surprise, and me too.

“Where’s my dad?”

The voice I put on! It was a squawk, but crystal clear, without the slightest stammer.

Mom glanced around. The bus was packed full and the people surrounding us, hearing my cry, had turned to look. She didn’t know what to say.

“Where’s my dad?” I raised my voice.

Poor Mom. Who could blame her for thinking I was doing it on purpose?

“You’re going to see him soon,” she said, without committing herself. She tried to change the subject, to distract me: “Look at the pretty flowers.”

We were passing a house with superb flowerbeds in the front garden.

“Is he dead?”

There was no stopping me now. The other passengers were already intrigued by the story, and that excited me inordinately. Because I was the owner of the story. Mom put her arms around my shoulders and pulled me close.

“No, no. I already told you,” she whispered, lowering her voice until it was almost inaudible.

“What?” I yelled.

“Shhh …”

“I can’t hear you, Mom!” I shouted, shaking my head, as if I was afraid that the uncertainty about my dad would make me deaf.

She had no choice but to speak up. “You’re going to see him soon.”

“Yes, I’m going to see him. But is he dead?”

“No, he’s alive.”

I could sense the passengers’ interest. The cityscape slid over the glass of the windows like a forgotten backdrop.

“Mom, where’s Dad? Why doesn’t he come home?”

I adopted a tone of voice that signified: “Stop lying to me. Let’s behave like adults. I might look like I’m three years old, but I’m six, and I have a right to know the truth.”

Mom had told me the whole truth. I knew he was in prison, waiting for the verdict: an eight-year sentence for homicide. I knew all that. The only reason for these untimely doubts of mine was to make her tell the story for the benefit of perfect strangers. How could her daughter be capable of such an idiotic betrayal? She couldn’t believe it (nor could I). But the panic that I was exhibiting was all too real. As usual, I had managed to confuse her. It was easy: all I had to do was confuse myself.

“He’s sick,” she said in another inaudible whisper. “That’s why we’re going to visit him.”

“Sick? Is he going to die? Like grandma?”

One of my grandmothers had died before I was born. The other was in good health, in Pringles. We never used the expression “grandma” at home. That was a detail I added to make the scene more convincing.

“No. He’s going to get better. Like you. You were sick and you got better, didn’t you?”

“Did the ice cream make him sick?”

And so I went on until we arrived: Mom trying to shut me up all the way and me raising my voice, creating a real scene. When we got off the bus, she didn’t say anything or ask me for an explanation. I felt that my performance had come to an end, a bad end, and that she was ashamed of me … The anxiety intensified and I began to cry again, with much more determination than before. The logical thing to do would have been to stop in the square, sit down on a bench and wait until I got over it. But Mom was tired, sick and tired of me and my carrying-on, and she headed straight for the prison. My tears dried up. I didn’t want Dad to see me crying.

It was visiting time, of course. We joined the line; a lady who seemed nice enough frisked us, checked the string bag full of food that Mom had brought, and let us through. We were already in the visitors’ yard. We had to wait a while for Dad. Mom was off in a world of her own (she didn’t talk to the other women), so I got a chance to go exploring.

There were entries and exits all around the yard. It didn’t seem to be hermetically sealed, which came as something of a surprise. It’s hard not to have a romantic idea of what a prison will be like, even if you don’t know what romanticism is (I certainly didn’t). To tell the truth, I didn’t know what a prison was either. This one was steeped in an intense, destructive realism, strong enough to dissolve all preconceived ideas, whether you had any or not.

I headed for a door, drawn as if by a magnet. Subliminally, I had noticed that there were other children in the yard, all holding their mothers’ hands. A strong autumn sun bleached the surfaces. It was a sleepy time of day. I felt invisible.

Of all the places I knew, the one most like this prison was the hospital. People were shut in both places for a long time. But there was a difference. The reason you couldn’t get out of the hospital was internal: the patient, as my own case had shown, was incapable of moving. There was some other reason why you couldn’t get out of prison. I wasn’t sure what it was: force was still a vague concept for me. I blended the ideas of prison and hospital. There was an invisible exchange between the two. Sickness could disappear and sick thought be transferred to others … It was the perfect escape plan … Perhaps Dad could come back home with us. In that excessively realist building, I was radiating magic … Since it was my fault that Dad was there …

But my magic started acting on me: a melancholy fantasy suddenly transported my soul to a region far, far away. Why didn’t I have any dolls? Why was I the only girl in the world who didn’t have a single doll? My dad was in prison … and I didn’t have a doll to keep me company. I had never had one, and I didn’t know why. It wasn’t because my parents were poor or stingy (when did that ever stop a child?). There was some other mysterious reason … And yet, although the mystery remained, poverty was a factor. Especially now. Now we were going to be really poor, Mom and I: abandoned, all on our own. And that was why I felt the need of a doll so sharply, so painfully. True to my dramatic style, I surrendered to a nostalgic lament, rich in variations. The doll had disappeared forever, before I learnt the words with which to ask for it, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of my sentences … I saw myself as a lost doll, discarded, without a girl …

That was me. The inexistent girl. Living, I was dead. If I had died, Dad would have been free. The judges would have been merciful to the father who had taken a life for a life, especially since one was the life of his darling daughter and the other the life of a complete stranger. But I had survived. I wasn’t the same as before, I could tell. I didn’t know how or why, but I wasn’t the same. For one thing, my memory had gone blank. I couldn’t remember anything before the incident in the ice-cream store. Maybe I didn’t even remember that properly. Maybe, in fact, the ice-cream vendor’s life had been swapped for mine. I had begun to live when he died. That’s why I felt like I was dead, dead and invisible …

When I reached the end of this train of thought, I found myself in a new place. I was inside. How had I got there? Where was Dad? This last question was the one that woke me up. It woke me up because it was so much like my dreams. I was alone, abandoned, invisible.

Either I had climbed a staircase without realizing, or, more likely, there were converted basements in the building, because when I got to the end of an empty corridor going off at right angles, which I had hoped would take me back to the yard, where I could run to my dad’s arms, I found myself on a kind of platform suspended over a square enclosure divided in two by a grill. With a certain disquiet, I realized I had gone too far. Looking for a way out, in the grip of a horribly familiar panic, I made a crucial mistake: instead of trusting myself to go back the way I had come, I went through the first gap I could find, a gap in the wall, where they must have been doing some kind of renovation: it was a small hole, not much more than a crack, forty centimeters high and twenty wide at the most, at the level of the baseboard. It struck me as the perfect shortcut for getting back to where I had begun. I came out onto a kind of cornice ten meters above the floor. I edged along it with my back to the wall (I was terrified of heights). The roof wasn’t far above me. Since I didn’t go near the uneven edge, all I could see below was a corridor. It was fairly dark too. The cornice, which in fact was the remains of a plaster ceiling, led to a cubicle, which I crawled into. It was a skylight, about a square meter in cross section, and two or three meters high: at the top, a square of sky. At the base of the walls, level with my feet, were slots opening onto deep, unlighted rooms. Once I was in there, I kept quiet. I sat down on the floor. I thought: I’m going to spend the whole night here. It was four in the afternoon, but for me the night had already begun. I couldn’t go any further, because it was a dead end. And it didn’t occur to me to go back … In that respect I was consistent. Even if my parents didn’t always say it, their eternal refrain was “This time you’ve gone too far.” Never “You’ve come back from too far away,” I guess because once you’ve gone too far there’s no way back.

I thought of Dad, mostly to pass the time and stop me from worrying about other things. I multiplied him by all the other men shut in that prison, those desperate men, expelled from society, who couldn’t hug their children … And there I was on high, hovering over them all … I was the angel … and it came as no surprise. Each successive incident, right from the start, from the moment I tasted the strawberry ice cream, had been leading me to this crowning moment, preparing me to be the angel, the guardian angel of all the criminals, the thieves and murderers …

All the prisoners were my dad, and I loved him. Although I thought I loved him before, when he held me in his arms or led me by the hand, now I knew that love was more, much more than that. I had to become the guardian angel of all the desperate men to discover what love really was.

It was a mystical experience, and it lasted many hours. The experience of intimate contact with humanity as a whole, as only a guardian angel can know it. Not even the fact that I didn’t have wings could shake my conviction. On the contrary: wings would have allowed me to get away, up through that square of sky above me.

It was, as I said, a prolonged episode. It lasted all evening and all night. They found me at ten o’clock the next morning. I fantasized about the search provoked by my disappearance, conducted in my absence (knowing how it would end). I could even hear voices calling me; I could hear them coming through the loudspeakers: “César Aira … a boy by the name of César Aira.” But this was not part of the fantasy, the mental reconstruction. I was meant to respond to those voices. And I wanted to, I wanted to say, for example, “Here I am. Help! I don’t know how to get down.” But I couldn’t. Powerless to act, I could only anticipate future events. I imagined a scene in which I was explaining to the governor of the prison what had really happened: “… it was my dad. He grabbed me and hid me somewhere … he was going to use me as a hostage in the breakout he’s planning with his accomplices … “All this was forgivable, even Dad could have forgiven me, considering my innocence, my character, my fears … All the same, to ease my conscience, I tried to improve the story: “But Dad was forced to do it, by the King of the Criminals; he would never have chosen to kidnap his own daughter …” And then, worried that the governor would get the wrong idea, I added a clarification: “But my Dad isn’t the King ….” I had embarked on the complex task of lying. The experienced liar knows that the secret of success is to pretend convincingly not to know certain things. For example the consequences of what one is saying, so that others will seem to discover them first. “Not that Dad ever mentioned the King … it was the others, they were talking about him, afraid, in awe … They were calling Dad your Jamesty … I don’t know why, because my dad’s called Tomás …” The governor was bound to fall for my ploy. He would think: It’s too complicated not to be true. That’s what they always think; it’s the golden rule of fiction. He would believe me completely. Not Dad. Dad knew my tricks; he was my tricks. He would see through them, but he would forgive me, even if it meant another ten years in jail … These were not exactly the reflections of an angel. The sound of the loudspeaker (it was already night, the stars were shining in the sky) swept through the jail, calling me: “Come out of your hiding place, César, your mother is waiting to take you home …” Women’s voices, the social workers … Mom’s voice too … I even thought I heard Dad’s voice — my heart skipped a beat — that beloved voice, which I hadn’t heard for so many months, and then I really did wish I had wings to fly away … But I couldn’t. This was always happening, so often that it literally was the story of my life: hearing a voice, understanding the orders it was giving me, wanting to obey, and not being able to … Because reality, the only sphere in which I could have acted, kept withdrawing at the speed of my desire to enter it …

In this case, and maybe in all the others too, I had the marvelous consolation of knowing that I was an angel. This knowledge transformed the situation, turning it into a dream, but a real dream. It was a transformation of reality. The cruel delirium I had suffered as a result of the fever was a transformation too, but the opposite kind. In the real dream, reality took the form of happiness or paradise. The transformation could go either way, reality becoming delirium or dream, but the real dream turned dreamlike in turn, becoming the angel, or reality.