How I Became A Nun (10 page)

ALL THAT HAD HAPPENED had helped to make time pass. Suddenly, in spite
of my habitual distraction, I noticed that the consistency of the air was changing: it
wasn’t as cold, the days were getting longer … Spring was coming. It was as
if the year was receding into the past, compacted into a block of dead matter, foreign
to me. It was absorbing all the little differences, the movements, tremors and thoughts,
extracting them from the present, making way, I sensed, for something new and heady and
slightly wild. Not that I let optimism get the better of me—my experience was too
unilateral for that, and anyway it wouldn’t have been my style. It was more the
sense of a cycle coming to a close, but since my life had begun, as it were, that
autumn, shortly after our arrival in Rosario, I didn’t see the cycle from the
outside, as a repetition, but from the inside, as a rectilinear movement. In short, I
had the feeling that things were about to change.

And how could it have been otherwise, since the world around me was changing, and I was
changing myself? I was no longer preoccupied by school, or Dad’s absence, or the
teacher’s campaign against me, or the radio, or Arturito. It was as if everything
had worn thin and become transparent … I clung to that transparence, but without
anxiety or pain, as if I wasn’t clinging but moving freely through it, like a
bird. I felt the pull of open spaces, like those I had known in Pringles, although I had
no memory of Pringles; a total amnesia cut me off from my life before Rosario, before
the invention of my memory. But the spaces of Pringles were not a memory. They were a
desire, a kind of happiness that could exist anywhere: all I had to do was open my eyes,
hold out my hand …

That space, that happiness had a color: rose-pink. The pink of the sky at sunset, a vast,
transparent, faraway pink whose absurd apparition represented my life. I was vast,
transparent and faraway, and my absurd life represented the sky. Living was painting:
coloring myself with the pink of the inexplicably suspended light …

In our neighborhood, the houses were low, the streets broad, and the pageants of the sky
were within arm’s reach. Mom started letting me go to school on my own—it
was four blocks away. I dawdled, especially on the way home, as dusk unfolded. I was
coming to know freedom and aimlessness. I was discovering the city … without
actually going into it, of course … I kept to my far-flung corner and imagined
the rest of the city from there, and especially from the riverbank, where I went every
day to have a look around, because it wasn’t far and there was always a chance to
get out of the house. Of course I never let a chance go by. I accompanied Mom on all her
errands … I always had, because she didn’t dare leave me alone in the room,
imagining all sorts of disasters, I guess. But now I had come up with a specially fun
method of accompanying her. I had to turn every pleasure into a vice, a mania. There
were no half measures with me. Mom had to resign herself to it, although it was a
constant source of problems and worries. What I did was to “tail” her.
I’d let her get ahead, a hundred meters or so, while I hid, and then I’d
follow her, remaining hidden, going from tree to tree, doorway to doorway … I hid
(it was sheer love of fiction on my part, because she soon wearied of the game and
stopped turning around to look) behind anything that would afford me cover: a parked
car, a lamp post, a pedestrian … When she turned a corner, I ran and hid behind
it, spying on her, letting her get ahead again, waiting for a new opportunity to sneak
up on her under cover … If I saw her go into a store, I’d wait in hiding,
my eyes fixed on the door … When she went back home, it was an anticlimax.
I’d wait for half an hour on the corner to see if she was going to come out again,
and then, finally, I’d go in, usually to be greeted with a slap; my ruses had
understandably frayed her nerves. I almost always lost her. I tried to be too clever,
made it unnecessarily hard, to the point where the distance between us was neither short
nor long, because it had simply evaporated. Then I would go home and hide in the
hallway, not knowing if she had come back or not … and sometimes she had to cut
short her shopping and come home, when it became obvious that I wasn’t following
her … Then she would give me a slap and go out again, dragging me by the hand
this time, squeezing it until the bones cracked … I was incorrigible. The game
was my freedom. Oddly, while I was playing it, I never issued any of my famous mental
instructions, although the game would have been perfect for them … I guess my
tailing was already, in itself, a series of instructions, and maps, for making a city
… Mom stayed within a fairly small radius around our home: always the same
streets, the same routes, the grocery store, the butcher’s, the
fishmonger’s, the fruit and vegetable store … There was no danger of me
getting lost. I always lost track of her sooner or later, but I didn’t get lost
myself. Although she never stopped fearing that I would. And neither of us would have
been surprised if I had. I can’t understand why I never did.

What I couldn’t work out was how I managed to lose her, how she eluded my
tenacious, lucid pursuit; it should have been simple to tail her, the simplest task in
the world. Subconsciously I knew that the last thing Mom wanted was for me to lose sight
of her. It was only in my game that she was a wily criminal who noticed the ingenious
detective on her trail, and threw her off, or tried to, with cunning ploys … Poor
Mom must have wished she could walk me on a leash … but since she couldn’t
stop me hiding in a doorway until she got a certain distance ahead, all she asked was
that I stay within sight of her. She would gladly have left a trail of breadcrumbs or
buttons, or made herself phosphorescent or carried a flag on a pole, so her idiotic
daughter wouldn’t lose her again … But she couldn’t. She
couldn’t make herself too obvious, because that would have meant she was playing
my game. It would have been easy for her to walk slowly in the middle of the sidewalk,
remaining clearly visible, stopping for a minute at every corner, or before entering a
store … That way she could have been sure that I was still following her. But she
couldn’t play my game. It’s not that she didn’t want to; she
couldn’t.
It was almost a question of life or death. She
couldn’t grant me that importance. Nor, of course, could she make it hard for me
by hiding, shaking me off straight away, which would have been a cinch, but it was
doubly impossible because her maternal instinct would have made her sick with worry. The
only option left was to act naturally, to do her shopping as if she was on her own, as
if no one was following her … But she couldn’t do that either! That was the
most impossible thing of all. How could she act naturally, with my eyes boring into her
back, when she knew perfectly well I was a hundred meters behind her, hidden behind a
dog or a trash can? So where did that leave her? All she could do was combine the three
impossibilities, unable to settle on any of them, bouncing from one to another.

Encouraged by my failures (let others be encouraged by success!), I started making it
even more difficult. Instead of a distance of a hundred meters, I made it two hundred. I
lost sight of her at once. The tailing was no longer visual but divinatory. This was a
natural extension of my habit of giving instructions, which had ended up informing my
relation to the world; everything had to be done with the utmost subtlety and finesse
… The fact that I failed was secondary. The methodical imperative came first.
Also, this way, the sense of pursuit was stronger, more intense … to the point
where it all flipped around. When I lost Mom—and, increasingly, I made sure that
this happened at the beginning of the outing—I started to feel that I was being
tailed.

This feeling grew exponentially. I had the brilliant idea of telling Mom about it. My
rashness was breathtaking. At first she paid no attention, but I insisted just enough to
get her worried, before backing off. So many dreadful things had been happening …
She asked me if I’d seen who was following me, if it was a man or a woman …
I didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t like that, I was talking about
feelings, subtleties, “instructions.”

“You’re not going out any more unless I’ve got you by the
hand!”

Around that time the gutter press was feasting on the bloodless cadavers of boys and
girls, found raped in vacant lots … They had been completely drained of blood. A
vampire plague was sweeping the land. Mom was a village girl, and though not completely
ignorant (she had done a year of secondary school), she was naïve, easily taken in
… So different from me! She not only believed what she read in the gutter press
(if it came to that, I probably did too), but applied it to her own real life. That was
the key difference, the abyss that separated us. I had a real life completely separate
from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs …

Anyway, once, during one of our outings … I had completely lost Mom, and I
didn’t know whether to keep going straight, or turn, or go back home (it was only
two blocks away).

The thing was, we had just set out; Mom wouldn’t be back for a good half hour, and
she’d be nervous and worried about me, and maybe cross because she couldn’t
finish her shopping …

A strange woman accosted me. “Hello, César.”

She knew my name. I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me. Where was she from?
Maybe she lived in the tenement, or worked in one of the stores where Mom did her
shopping. To me all ladies looked the same, so she could have been anyone, and I
wasn’t too surprised not to be able to recognize her. The really strange thing was
that she had spoken to me. Because it wasn’t just a question of her identity, but
also, and above all, of mine. I was so convinced of my own invisibility, of the utter
ordinariness of my features, that I felt this could only be a miracle. It must have
something to do with the marks on my nose, I thought, raising my hand to touch them.

“What happened to your little nose?” she asked with interest, smiling.

“I got bitten,” I said, without going into details, not because I
didn’t want to tell her the whole story (I promised myself I would, eventually),
but to be polite, not to bore her, not to waste her time.

“How awful! Was it a friend, a naughty boy? Or a doggy?”

Her insistence annoyed me. It showed that she hadn’t appreciated my politeness. I
was impatient to change the subject, to get things clear between us; then I would be
able to tell her the story of the bite in graphic detail. I shrugged my shoulders
impatiently, with a faint smile.

As if she had read my mind, she changed tack. “Do you remember me?”

I nodded, with the same smile, but a little more relaxed and charming now. She gave a
visible start, but regained control immediately. She smiled again, more broadly.
“Do you really remember?”

I had said yes simply to be polite, to reciprocate, since she knew me.

I nodded again, but this time the nod had a totally different meaning. I wasn’t
exactly sure what that meaning was, though I could make a vague guess at it. This woman
didn’t know me at all, in fact. She was lying. She was a kidnapper, a vampire
… But guessing always involves a margin of uncertainty. And operating from that
margin, politeness and polite circumspection took control of everything. Even if I had
believed that vampires really existed, they wouldn’t have scared me as much as the
prospect of upsetting the status quo. Politeness was a kind of stability or balance. For
me, life depended on it. Giving it up would have to be worse that being preyed on by a
vampire. Anyway, I didn’t believe in vampires, and this lady wasn’t one. So
by nodding, what I meant was that nothing had changed.

“No, you don’t remember, but it doesn’t matter. I’m a friend of
your mother’s, but I haven’t seen her for a long time. We knew each other in
Pringles … How is she?”

“Very well.”

“And Don Tomás?”

“He’s in jail.”

“Yes, I heard.”

She was an ordinary woman, a bottle blonde, rather short and stout, very smartly dressed
…

There was something hysterical and delirious about her. I could feel it in the intensity
of the scene. It wasn’t how someone would normally talk to a little girl they had
met by chance in the street. It was as if she had rehearsed it, as if, for her, a
fundamental drama was unfolding. It didn’t worry me too much because there are
people like that, women especially, for whom every moment has the same tragic intensity,
without any kind of emotional relief.

“What are you doing out on your own? Are you running an errand?”

“Yes.”

She looked at me in surprise. My yeses shattered all her preconceptions. Then she went
for broke. “Do you want to come to my house? I live just nearby; you can have some
cookies …”

“I don’t know …”

Suddenly reality, the reality of the kidnapping, hit me. And I wasn’t prepared for
it. I couldn’t believe it. My politeness was sheer idiocy. For the sake of
manners, I was giving up everything, even my life. From that moment on I was seized by
an immense fear. But the fear remained hidden beneath my manners. Wasn’t that
typical? Any other reaction would have amazed me.

“I’ll take you back home afterwards. I want to say hello to your Mom,
it’s so long since I’ve seen her.” She anticipated my answer with an
intensity multiplied a thousandfold.

“Ah, all right then,” I said theatrically, exaggerating my willingness. It
was the least I could do, to thank her for making an effort to clear away the
impediments.

She took me by the hand and dragged me briskly along the Avenida Brown. She talked all
the time but I wasn’t listening. Anxiety was suffocating me. When she looked at
me, I smiled at her. I fell in with her step and returned the pressure of her hand on
mine. I thought that by stressing my willingness, I was making the hypothesis of a
kidnapping too far-fetched. In no time at all we were on a bus, going down unfamiliar
streets. The bus was half empty, but she spoke up so all the passengers could hear; she
kept cuddling me and saying my name: César, César, César. I loved
it when people said my name; it was my favorite word.