How I Became A Nun (9 page)

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.