How I Became A Nun

9

MOM WAS MY BEST friend. It wasn’t one of those choices that defines a personality, or any other sort of choice, but a necessity. We were alone, isolated. What did we have left to cling to but each other? In such cases we make a virtue of necessity, which doesn’t mean it’s any less virtuous. Or any less necessary. Our necessity wasn’t deep, it didn’t have roots or ramifications. It was a casual, provisional necessity. It would be hard to find two beings with fewer affinities than Mom and I. We weren’t even complementary opposites, because we were alike. She was a dreamer too. She would have preferred to hide it from me, but some tiny sign gave her away. Our secret personalities are revealed by furtive actions, but they were what I noticed first of all, so poor Mom had no hope of pretending with me. My monstrous, piercing eyes prevented any living being from merging into the background of my life.

Nevertheless, I made a friend that year: a boy, a neighbor, we played together, a friend in the normal sense of the word … I was becoming almost a normal little girl, in the normal sense of the word (the word “normal” that is). But no, that’s going too far. The story of my friendship with Arturo Carrera is peculiar in the extreme.

We lived, as I think I’ve already said, in a run-down tenement in a poor neighborhood of Rosario, near the river. We occupied a single room, one of the better ones, as it happened, on the top floor. Places like that are normally swarming with children, but the owners of the building didn’t allow them. They had made an exception for me because I was an only child, because Mom was desperate and, above all, because she told them I was mentally retarded, which was believable given my appearance. There must have been some more complicated reason why they made an exception for Arturo Carrera, but I’ve never tried to get to the bottom of it. (Although it’s the key to everything.)

He had lost his father and his mother; his only living relative was his grandma, and she in turn had no one else but him. The same situation as Mom and me, but much more so: we were temporarily alone in Rosario; they were definitively alone in the world. Also their relationship was not at all like ours, since they were so different from us. The grandmother was very old, as small as a child, with white hair and a black dress. She spoke a Sicilian dialect and no one except her grandson could understand her. Nevertheless, she went out and did the shopping on her own, and talked with all the neighbors. I don’t know how she managed.

As for Arturito, he was very small for his age. He was seven, a year older than me, but his head didn’t even come up to my shoulder, and I wasn’t tall. He had a very pale, waxy complexion and blond hair, which he slicked back with oil. But what really made it obvious that he didn’t have a mother or a father or aunts or anything were his clothes. Any reasonable adult would have made him dress in a manner more suited to his age. As it was, he could indulge his whims. He wore suits, with starched white shirts, cufflinks and ties; sometimes they were three-piece suits with a waistcoat, or a checked sports jacket with grey flannel trousers, and claret-colored moccasins buffed to a high polish. He looked like a dwarf. His taste in fabrics and cuts was appalling, but that was nothing compared to the fabulous incongruity of wearing that kind of attire. And yet, it has to be said that he didn’t attract too much attention. Perhaps the people in the tenement and the neighborhood had gotten used to him. Perhaps those ridiculous outfits suited the kind of kid he was. He had a strong personality, you had to give him that. And perhaps the price he had to pay for it was the incongruity of his clothes. By contrast I had no personality. I was prepared to pay the price, but I couldn’t imagine what it might be. As well as being impossible for financial reasons, imitating Arturito wouldn’t have done me any good, although there was no one else I could have taken as a model. So I gave up the idea of imitating him and having a personality, dimly intuiting that my only hope of being someone lay in this renunciation. I became anxious. I looked at myself in the mirror and couldn’t find a single distinctive feature. I was invisible. I was the girl in the crowd. Without a moment’s hesitation, I would have exchanged my regular, pretty features for Arturito’s nose …

No portrait of my friend could be complete without a mention of his most salient feature, that enormous hooked nose of his, so huge it gave form to his whole face, projecting it forward. Another notable characteristic was his voice. Or rather, his way of talking, as if his mouth had been pumped full of gas or stuffed with a hot potato. This gave him an affected, ruling-class sort of air, indescribable but not inimitable. Nothing is inimitable.

Arturito considered himself rich. He thought he was worth a fortune. As the last and only scion of a family of wealthy landowners, he would logically inherit all the properties and the income they yielded … But this was sheer fantasy. He and his grandmother were extremely poor. They barely scraped by with what she earned from odd sewing jobs, and Arturito’s sartorial expenses were ruining her. It was odd that he persisted so unshakably in his conviction, when all she ever talked about was how wretchedly short of money they were and her fears for the future: if she died he could end up begging on the streets. It’s true that she said all this in her dialect, and nobody apart from him could understand. But since he understood, how could he ignore what she was saying and what it meant for him: precisely that he wasn’t rich. He let her words wash over him. As if she was playing to the gallery, complaining to the others, who couldn’t understand her!

In spite of these peculiarities, or because of them, Arturito was a happy child, one of those non-existent typical children, immune to the characteristic torments of middle-class childhood, of which I was such a striking exemplar. He didn’t have a care in the world. Extremely sociable and popular, always at the forefront of fashion, he was in his element at school. The only reason I got to know him was that we happened to live in the same building, otherwise I would never have had access to his magic circle. He became my protector, my agent, always praising my intelligence to the skies. Like everything else about him, his courtesy was over the top. He never missed an opportunity to celebrate my virtues, the towering superiority of my intellect relative to his … And perhaps he was right, without realizing. For a start, I kept my inner life to myself, while he revealed his. Concealment means you have something to conceal. I had nothing but concealed it anyway, stepping onto the world’s stage like someone who has just buried a treasure. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be best friends with the most popular boy in the school, but even this incredulity was duplicitous. For a start, I was careful to conceal it from Arturito. And then I didn’t follow his example in matters of style. He was no help to me in that regard. The hallucinatory style of which I was the supreme mistress remained pristine within me, immune to his influence or any other. Style-wise, Arturito represented another world, the world of wealth … His hallucination threw mine into relief … being rich meant jumping to a whole new level, beyond style, precision and refinement: life became one radiant, compact mass, without the halftones and subtle differential movements that gave my life sense. So without really meaning to, without malice, I concealed myself entirely from Arturito. I concealed a small part of myself and that part concealed the rest … I betrayed my one, irreplaceable friend. How could I have done it? I don’t know. Or maybe I do. It was as if I had put on a mask, to shield the twists and turns of an ever-changing subject.

A fantasy particularly dear to Arturito’s heart revolved around the fancy dress parties, the grand masquerades he supposedly organized for his innumerable friends every year at carnival time. It sounded flippant at first, but he went on to talk about the parties with absolute conviction and he had a fund of stories about things that had happened in previous years. Mom and I had moved into the tenement just after carnival and there was still a while to go before it came round again, so I had no way of knowing if there was any truth to these stories or not. For Arturito life without fancy dress parties was simply inconceivable. He seemed to be perpetually dressed for one, in those little suits of his. Although it was barely the beginning of spring, he was already thinking about the costume he would wear to the next carnival party, to which I had already been invited … if I would deign to attend, if I would do him that honor, if I would condescend to partake briefly of frivolities so unworthy of me …

He didn’t seem very imaginative. He wasn’t, compared to me. Or rather he was too imaginative; again he went a bit too far (for my taste), and ended up in a kind of radiant mist of excessive imagining that enabled him to be happy — that is, rich, aristocratic, carefree — but which also sapped the imagination’s creative vigor. He had got it into his head to wear an astronomers costume to the next party. Just what this costume might consist of, he couldn’t say. For him it was just a word: “astronomer”, and its train of associations, spellbinding or, as he loved to say, “exquisite” things, like stars, constellations, galaxies …

But when he asked me what I was going to wear, although I had a thousand times more imagination than him, I couldn’t come up with an answer.

So he decided to help me. It was in the afternoon, after school but before the soap operas. We were in the tenement courtyard, and silence had settled around us, one of those dead silences that attends exclusively on children as they plumb the depths of the day. He told me he had something I could use; although it wasn’t a costume, it might be a starting point … He disappeared into his room. The silence persisted. His grandmother was perfectly quiet … It was like the silence when everyone is sleeping, but it wasn’t siesta time: it was a coincidence. I was worried, uneasy: Arturito was so impulsive, so wrapped up in his own world … What would he come back with? He might offend me without meaning to. I had a twinge of dread, but it didn’t last long. I trusted to my impassivity, which was supernatural.

There was no need to be worried. All he came back with was a cardboard nose. He had used it for one of the jokes he was always playing … His philosophy began and ended with the idea that a busy social life could only be fuelled by large quantities of humor, and humor, as he understood it, consisted of practical jokes, the sort that are funny to look back on. It was just a nose, huge though it was, with an elastic band to hold it on … A nose as big as his or bigger … with the same shape … I was overcome by an infantile enthusiasm. Was it for me? Naturally, it went without saying. Sometimes Arturito was wildly generous. And sometimes he was maniacally stingy. He was so contradictory. He fastened it to my face himself. Not that he thought I was clumsy … no, but because of my alleged superiority I was unaccustomed to carrying out mundane tasks. The nose suited me perfectly. He looked at me and said that I was already half way there. I had the rudiments or the trimmings of a costume, it was just a matter of supplementing it now … with one of my mother’s old dresses … Suddenly he became enthusiastic too, or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it before … In any case his enthusiasm began to turn on him … I could see it coming. We were six and seven years old respectively, and seized by an absolute urgency … as if the party were to be held that night … The supernatural silence reigning in the building had abolished time. Arturito had another idea and ran back into his room … He came back clacking something in his hand. His grandmother’s porcelain false teeth. I wasn’t surprised that he’d been able to steal them; she didn’t wear them all the time … The clack-clack sound he was making resonated in the silence, that silence in which anything could be stolen … It was obvious, really: the teeth had to go with the nose. He wanted me to try them … but of course I refused … there was no way I was putting that in my mouth, nothing that had been in someone else’s mouth was going to enter mine … So he tried the false teeth himself. They distorted his face, especially when he smiled … I could tell what was coming: now he would want the nose … Instinctively, I raised my hands to protect it. In his innocence he mentioned the Astronomer; he wanted to be the Astronomer with false teeth and a fake nose … If he had asked me, I would have given the nose back to him without the slightest hesitation … But no, there was a second turn: his generosity triumphed and at the same time transcended itself … he would hang the false teeth around my neck with a thread. I would be a Cannibal … Or better still: the nose hanging around my neck and the teeth as a barrette in my hair … or the nose growing out of my chest and the teeth in my armpit … There was a moment of sheer permutation, nose and teeth shifting positions all over my body … It had to happen eventually … maybe I had the idea first, or he did, impossible to tell, it was like a scientific discovery … The cardboard nose had to go on my nose, that was the natural place for it … And the teeth had to bite it … It was a costume in itself: the little girl bitten by a ghost … The ghost opened a breach in time, so it didn’t matter that carnival was still six months away … With one bite he placed the false teeth at the perfect angle … Some improvisations outstrip any art … he sank his teeth into the cardboard, without taking the nose off me … I was worried about him ruining his fake nose, but Arturito was not so much generous as sacrificial; he would destroy his possessions with the indifference of a millionaire for the sake of a laugh or a bit of fun … Those little porcelain teeth felt like rat’s teeth, razor sharp … I didn’t know they were porcelain, I though they were from a dead person, I thought that’s where false teeth came from; that’s what lots of people think … The teeth went through the cardboard … Arturito laughed until he cried; he was fashioning me with that deft clumsiness of his … I wanted to see myself in a mirror … although I didn’t really need to; I could see myself in my friend’s little grey eyes … it was phenomenal … the girl who had been bitten by a ghost … But in his passion, the passion for fancy dress that ruled his life, Arturito went too far. He bit too hard. The dentures — and suddenly the full horror of those cadaver’s teeth was revealed to me — cut into my nose … because my real nose was there beneath Arturito’s cardboard fake … It wasn’t so much the pain as the surprise … I had forgotten about having a body of flesh and blood, but now, bitten, suffocating, terrified, I remembered … I let out a spine-chilling scream … I was sure he had mutilated me; now I would be a monster, a skull … Arturito recoiled in horror. My expression froze the blood in his veins … he would never forget this … but it would become an amusing anecdote, one more to add to his stock, perhaps the best, the funniest … although for the moment he was dumbfounded … He looked at me and I looked at myself in his terrified eyes, as I wriggled free of his grip and ran away … as fast as I could, in panic … Where was I going? Where was I running to? If only I had known! I was running away from jokes, from humor and future anecdotes … I was running away from friendship, and not because I disdained it or had something more important to do, as Arturito thought, in his innocence: it was pure, darkest horror that gave my feet wings.