Syndrome E

54

The nun’s room was unadorned to the point of destitution: gray stone walls, a bed, a chair, a prayer bench with a Bible resting on it. The sole decorations were limited to a pewter crucifix on the wall above the bed, an armoire stuffed with books, and a clock. A small, high oval window filtered a wan light. The old woman was sitting on top of the bedsheets, feet together, hands folded on her chest, and eyes to the ceiling.

The mother superior leaned toward her and whispered something in her ear, then returned to the two detectives. Sister Marie du Calvaire slowly pivoted her head toward them. Her eyes were veiled: a fine white film, through which one could still make out the color of the ocean.

“I’ll leave you alone,” said the mother superior. “You’ll find your way out easily.”

She disappeared without another word, shutting the door behind her. Sister Marie du Calvaire stood up with a grimace and walked like an old turtle toward a glass of water, which she drank calmly. Her black robe fell to the ground, making it look as if she were floating. Then she returned to her bed and sat down, propping her pillow against the wall.

“It will soon be time for prayers. Whatever it is you want, I would ask you to be brief.”

Her hoarse voice sounded like paper being crumpled. Lucie came forward.

“In that case, we’ll come straight to the point. We’d like to ask you about the little girls you took care of in the early fifties. Alice Tonquin and Lydia Hocquart, among others. And also about Jacques Lacombe and the doctor who came with him.”

It was as if the sister had stopped breathing. She brought her callused hands to her chest. Behind her cataracts, her irises appeared to dilate.

“But… why?”

“Because even today, people are committing murder to protect what your eyes have seen,” Sharko picked up, leaning on the prayer bench.

In the ensuing silence, they could hear the voices of nuns singing in the distance.

“How did you find me? No one has ever come to talk about that ancient history. I am no one. Hidden from the world. I haven’t been outside these walls in more than fifty years.”

“Even so, your name is on the roster of your community. It was never supposed to leave here, but since your convent is scheduled to close, the records were transferred to the national archives.”

The old woman’s mouth opened slightly; she caught her breath after inhaling several times. Lucie had the sensation her pupils were dilating still further, summoning the lights of a banished time.

“Please don’t worry. We’re not here to denounce anything or put your former actions on trial. We’re simply trying to understand what happened to those girls at Mont Providence Hospital.”

The sister lowered her head. Swaths of white cloth concealed her face, leaving visible only a shadowy presence.

“I remember Alice and Lydia very well. How could I ever forget them? I took care of them, in the orphans’ ward of this convent, before moving to Mont Providence because of ‘staffing needs.’ I thought I’d never see my little girls again, but two years later they showed up there, at Mont Providence, along with ten other girls from La Charité… The poor lambs thought they were simply changing institutions, as so often happened at the time. They were used to it. They had come by train, all smiles, happy and carefree, the way you can be at that age.”

She punctuated her monologue with long, heavy silences. The memories slowly rose to the surface.

“But once inside Mont Providence, they soon realized what was in store for them. The cries and screams of the insane mixed in with the religious chants. The bright faces of the newcomers mingled with the ravaged features of the mentally retarded. At that point, those girls understood they would be staying in that place for good. With a stroke of the pen, some doctor working for the state had turned them overnight from perfectly normal orphans into mental defectives. And all for financial reasons, because mental patients made the government more money than illegitimate children. And we, the nuns, were required to treat them as such. We had to… do our duty.”

Her voice caught. Sharko’s fingers clutched the old wood. Around them hung the odor of crumbling walls and worn flooring.

“Meaning?”

“Discipline, bullying, punishments, treatments… The poor girls who rebelled went from one room to the next; the severity increased, and each time the doors of freedom closed a bit more. The Nuns’ Room, the Trades Room, the Gray Room… Girls from one room were not allowed to communicate with the girls from other rooms, under pain of severe punishments. It was as if they were being compartmentalized, as if they were being removed from reality in order to bring them closer to madness. Madness, my children… Madness—do you know what it smells like? It smells like putrefaction and death.”

The sister was having trouble breathing. A long, long inhalation.

“The last room, where they assigned me when I arrived at Mont Providence, was the Martyrs’ Room, a horrible place where they kept more than sixty of the most acute cases, of all ages. Hysterics, schizophrenics, the severely retarded. That’s where they kept the stocks of medication, surgical instruments, and also the Vaseline…”

“Vaseline?”

“To grease the patients’ temples before electroshock.”

Her fingers with their yellow nails squeezed together. Lucie could easily imagine the horror of spending your days in such a place. The screams, the claustrophobia, the suffering, the mental and physical tortures. Inmates and supervisors were in the same hell.

“We were in charge of the patients, with the healthy girls as our aides. Cleaning their cells, feeding them, helping the nurses on rounds. Brawls and injuries were daily occurrences. There were all sorts of lunatics in there, from the harmless ones to the most dangerous. Of all ages, mixed in together. Sometimes the orphans who resisted or misbehaved spent a week in solitary confinement, tied to a mattress and treated with Largactil, the doctors’ favorite drug.”

She raised her arm. With every movement, the black fabric of her garment crinkled like crepe paper. A kind of madness seemed to have taken hold of her too. She had not emerged from Mont Providence unscathed.

“The girls who ended up in that room—the most headstrong ones, the most rebellious, and surely the most intelligent—had no hope of getting out. The nurses treated them exactly the same as the mental patients, without any distinction. And even though we took care of them every day, what we said carried no weight. We had to be submissive and obey orders—do you understand?”

“What orders?”

“Orders from the mother superior, from the Church.”

“Had Alice and Lydia landed in the Martyrs’ Room?”

“Yes—like all the girls who came from La Charité. Such an influx in the Martyrs’ Room was unheard of. We couldn’t understand it.”

“Why not?”

“Normally, the newcomers were put in the other rooms. Only a few of them ended up in Martyrs’, sometimes after years, because they were constantly acting unruly or defiant. Or because they finally went mad themselves.”

“What happened to those orphans, Alice and the others?”

The nun’s fingers clutched her cross.

“Very quickly, they were taken in hand by the doctor in charge of the Martyrs’ Room. We called him the ‘Superintendent.’ He was barely thirty years old, thin blond mustache, and eyes that could freeze your blood. He was the one who regularly brought certain children into other rooms to which no one had access. But the girls used to tell me about it. They would put them in groups and make them wait there, on their feet, for hours on end. There were televisions and loudspeakers that broadcast sudden claps or loud noises to startle them. Then there was a man who would film them, always with the doctor present… Alice liked the filmmaker—she used to call him Jacques. They got along well, and sometimes she got to go outside with him. He took her to the swings in the park next to the convent; he played with her, showed her animals, and made movies of her. I think he became her little glimmer of hope.”

Sharko’s jaws tensed. He could easily imagine what a glimmer of hope might become in the hands of someone like Lacombe.

“In those rooms, the girls must have done more than just wait, watch films, and get startled?” he asked. “Were there other experiments… more violent ones?”

“No. But you mustn’t think their passivity was harmless. The orphans returned from there anxious and hostile. Which only increased the punishments they were subjected to in the Martyrs’ Room. A vicious circle. There is no escape from madness; it’s everywhere. Without and within.”

“Did they talk to you about the experiment with the rabbits?”

“There were in fact rabbits in the room sometimes, gathered in a corner, from what they told me. But… that’s all… I never really understood what it was about.”

“How did it all end?”

The sister shook her head, a grimace on her lips.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t take it anymore. I had devoted my entire life to the service of God and His creatures, and I found myself in a hell on earth, letting myself be enveloped by insanity. I claimed some sort of health problem and ran away from Mont Providence. I abandoned them. Those little girls that I had raised here myself—I abandoned them.”

She made a sign of the cross and compulsively kissed her crucifix. The silence that followed was awful. Lucie suddenly felt very cold.

“I returned to my old orders, the Gray Sisters. Mother Sainte Marguerite had the infinite goodness to hide and protect me. They looked for me, as you can imagine, and I don’t know what would have happened if they’d found me. But the fact is that my ancient bones have endured through the century, and my memory has never forgotten the horrors that took place there, in the depths of the asylum. Who could ever forget so much darkness?”

Lucie looked the nun deep in her cloudy eyes. No one could forget such darkness. No one.

The truth was about to pour out, here, right now, from her old lips. Her pulse pounding, Lucie nonetheless retained her cop’s reflexes.

“This superintendent. We need to know who he was.”

“Of course. His name was James Peterson. Or at least, that’s the name we overheard. Because he always signed Dr. Peter Jameson. James Peterson, Peter Jameson… I still don’t know which was his real identity. But one thing for certain, he lived in Montreal.”

Sharko and Lucie exchanged a brief glance. They had their final link in the chain. The nun stood up, shuffled toward her library, and knelt, tears in her eyes.

“I pray to God every day for those poor children that I left back there. They were my little girls. I had watched them grow, inside these walls, before we all found ourselves in that place of depravity.”

Lucie felt a kind of compassion for the poor woman, who was dying alone and in pain.

“There was nothing you could have done for them. You were a prisoner of the system and your beliefs. God has nothing to do with this.”

With trembling hands, Sister Marie du Calvaire lifted her Bible and began reading in a murmur. Lucie and Sharko knew there was no further reason to remain in the room.

They left without a sound.