The Sisterhood

by Helen Bryan

  When my son-in-law left for a hunting party of several weeks, I took Luz and fled. I had heard that at the Convent of the Swallows, desperate women might find help and protection denied them elsewhere. For the love of God and the Virgin, have pity on Luz and give her shelter, and I will pray for you for the remainder of my life on earth and afterward before the throne of the Almighty.

  The Abbess refolded the paper. “Terrible. Of course we will take the poor child in. We would take the grandmother, too, if only she could be found. But I have sent for you, Esperanza, as well as Sor Beatriz, because I wish you to record every word in the Chronicle, to bear witness to the inhumanity and cruelty that women suffer. But I am curious. You have told us you and your father read forbidden texts. The Moors were observant of the natural world and learned in the natural sciences. And so many of their works have been burned by the church.” Book burning irritates the Abbess beyond measure.

  “Yes,” Esperanza said cautiously. “My father had many medical books he read to me and I studied those I could read for myself…”

  “The infirmary sisters say that you…can you recall anything that considers the matter of dwarves?”

  Esperanza thought for a minute. Then she said a Greek text about the breeding of animals had pointed to the result of inbreeding weak livestock, and the feeble calves or goats with three legs that resulted, and from that the writer deduced that inbreeding among small groups of people might produce weaklings and addled wits. He had then applied his observations about breeding animals to instances where human interbreeding had produced a similar result.

  Pure heresy now. The church taught that observations of animal behavior had no application to humans who had been created in God’s image. Esperanza’s father, however, had agreed with the author of the treatise that it was the order of nature, and nature was a manifestation of God’s laws. And the text had mentioned that a family that produced a dwarf or children with weak spines should avoid marrying any blood relation, no matter how distant. Esperanza added bitterly that the treatise had been burned along with the rest of her father’s library. The Abbess screwed up her face and muttered an imprecation against ignorant fools who concealed knowledge and increased the sorrows of the world, causing innocent children like Luz immeasurable suffering.

  “Thank you, Esperanza.” Then she turned to Luz and said, “Child, your name means light, the beautiful light that shines in your soul and will now shine in safety. Go with Esperanza, who will see that you have a bath and fresh clothes. Then there will be a little bed for you. You must be hungry—ask the kitchen sister for some soup, Esperanza; tell them to strengthen it with an egg and to give Luz a little honey bread if any is left. Tell the sisters in charge of the children to find salve for those bruises. If Luz will not speak, we must have patience; it is not from obstinacy.”

  It is impossible to know Luz’s age. The Abbess guesses between eight and ten or eleven. She cannot read or write, and is too frightened by everything to learn anything but sewing. But that she does very well indeed. While many girls fidget during the long hours of the sewing lesson, Luz hangs onto the sewing mistress’s every word. She is delighted to possess her very own workbasket, with colored silk thread, a needle case, tiny silver scissors, and a thimble. She keeps it all in the neatest order and has mastered every stitch. She sits quietly at her work for hours on her stool, made low enough so her feet reach the floor, until called to prayers or meals or to walk in the cloister. Her stitches are beautiful, neat and almost invisible—unlike Esperanza’s needlework. Esperanza, for all her cleverness, can scarcely sew a line that is not crooked and uneven. Luz is praised and held up as an example to the other girls, and this has done wonders. Little by little she has grown plump. Her bruises healed and she even smiles sometimes. She never speaks, however, and a sharp word or a loud noise sends her running to a corner in tears.

  Esperanza has been made much happier by having Luz to look after, and brings her to sew in the scriptorium while the other girls are having lessons. “She’s very quiet and good, aren’t you, Luz? And look, Sor Beatriz,” said Esperanza to me one day. She took a folded handkerchief from her pocket and spread it out, delicate as a moth’s wing. “Luz worked this for me. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Luz glowed with pleasure as I admired the handkerchief. It was very lovely, trimmed in lace around the edge and embroidered with a bird. “A golondrina!” Esperanza pointed out. “I showed her how they made their nests everywhere in the convent to sing to her because she feeds them crumbs. Isn’t she a good, clever girl!” Luz blushed with pleasure and Esperanza gave her a hug.

  The sewing mistress has now set Luz to work mending linen for the convent chapel. Normally she permits no one to touch it but herself. Meanwhile, the Abbess has received a letter on behalf of our patroness the queen, requesting prayers for the Christian conversion of the natives in Spanish America.

  The Abbess told the sewing mistress to set a new task for Luz, an altar cloth for the queen’s personal chapel, embroidered with religious symbols entwined with little golondrinas, the emblem of our convent. It will be sent with a respectful letter promising to pray as the queen commands, to assure her of our obedience to her wishes, the purity of our faith, and our respectful gratitude.

  “We must take every opportunity to remind the queen that we look to her as our protectress,” murmured the Abbess.

  CHAPTER 14

  Las Golondrinas Convent, Spain, April 2000

  Having fought off sleep to keep nightmares at bay, Menina was groggy the next morning as she followed Sor Clara. She wished she had a whole pot of coffee. They passed the scriptorium and stopped before a heavy double door. “Here is sala grande.” Sor Clara fumbled for a bunch of keys at her waist and found the one that unlocked the ornate iron lock—but even though the key turned, the door refused to open, despite her shoves and mutterings and prayers.

  Menina asked Sor Clara to stand aside, and gave it a good kick with her boot. The door scraped open—probably for the first time in many years, judging by the cloud of dust their entrance raised—and stuck halfway open. Menina sneezed and, looking around, saw they were in a room so long and dark that its ends were in shadow. She guessed it ran the length of the cloister. As her eyes adjusted she saw it was similar to the room with the iron grille where she had been yesterday, only much bigger. This one had the same dark carved wooden furniture, as well as a stiff horsehair settee with stuffing coming out of it, matching chairs, and a huge crucifix crooked on a wall. Then Menina caught her breath. The walls, which had just looked dark at first, were actually covered with picture frames.

  Weak light filtered through the dust motes onto a threadbare Persian rug in the middle of the room. The arms and backs of the furniture were draped in rotting antimacassars, and an arm had fallen off one of the chairs. An embroidered runner with holes in it ran the length of a heavy table against the wall, beneath a dusty plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and two fat lopsided ecclesiastical candles in holders. The musty smell that permeated the convent was overwhelming, and the silence was so heavy it was tangible.

  “How long since anyone used this room?” Menina asked, looking around.

  “Many years. Is cold in winter. But I think the painting by Tristan Mendoza was in this room.”

  “Do you remember where, Sor Clara?” asked Menina faintly, looking up at the walls that held probably hundreds of pictures, all dark with dirt and age. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack. Sor Clara tottered over to one of the stiff-looking settees, sat down, and waited expectantly.

  “Sor Clara, do you know which wall it hung on?”

  “Eh?” Sor Clara cupped her hand around her ear to hear better. Menina repeated the question, almost shouting. Sor Clara gave an expressive eye-rolling shrug.

  “Why did I ask?” Menina said to herself. She chose a small frame at random, lifted it gingerly from the wall, took a piece of bread and began working it between her palms to soften it, then started pressing it gently on
to the surface of the painting. The bread picked up dirt until it disintegrated. Menina stepped back and realized she could see a hand. She hastily pressed some more bread onto the surface until she recognized the same tonsured monk with a crooked nose and squinty eyes she had seen yesterday, only from a different angle. Menina took it to the middle of the room and searched for a signature at the bottom but could see nothing, no sign of writing or a bird. She wished she had a magnifying glass, but she didn’t. Sor Clara was asleep with her rosary in her lap and her mouth open, snoring gently.

  Menina propped the monk out of reach of the sun and picked another frame from the middle of the wall and started to work as quickly as possible. It would take months to get to every painting.

  A couple of hours later, Sor Clara hadn’t moved. Alarmed the elderly nun might be dead, Menina checked her breathing, then realized Sor Clara was probably tired because of the nighttime vigil. By now, half a dozen murky paintings of different sizes stood propped up against the wall. Menina stepped back and squinted at her handiwork. The monk kept drawing her attention, and the longer she looked at it the more uneasy it made her. She knew her reaction was probably due to being tired and disoriented—but it had an evil presence and she didn’t like it. Finally, she turned it face to the wall.

  As for the next four paintings…she peered, trying to see what they were about, looking for familiar themes and symbols and subjects that cropped up in religious art that would give her a clue about the painting. At college she always enjoyed the exercises where students had to “read” a painting, but at college there were textbooks and a library for reference. Now she was on her own, memory her only resource.

  At Holly Hill the course on Renaissance methodology began with the same joke every year, that anyone brought up in the Bible Belt had a head start identifying the themes of Renaissance art. Menina had been astonished to find that years of Baptist Sunday School and coloring books of Bible stories had delivered this particular dividend. And while the methodology course was no more than the basics, Menina loved the process of hunting for clues to a painting’s hidden meaning, unraveling the significance of light and shade and colors, the positioning of the figures, the symbols—like rays streaming through a window to represent the Divine Light illumining the world, or pomegranates to symbolize fertility and the Resurrection, dogs for fidelity, and parrots that people in the Middle Ages believed made the sound “Ave” as if they were about to pray to the Virgin Mary.

  But the artist’s perspective was only part of it. Painting was a dialogue between the artist and the viewer, and to interpret a painting you had to understand how the artist expected people of the time to understand it. And that depended on many things—the period when it was painted, politics, and religious ideas. The question you had to ask was, where were the painter and the viewer “at”? Maybe the painting was intended to link a donor or artist’s patron to holy figures—where everybody was “at” was that the saint’s holiness rubbed off on the donor by association. Maybe it was intended to generate awe in the viewer at the radiance of God’s word, maybe it had a message of the power of life over death, or connected a king or queen to God, or illuminated a mystery everyone would have been aware of at the time, like changing the water and wine of communion into the body and blood of Christ—the possibilities were endless but it was important to search for a painting’s message to the person looking at it.

  Menina thought about all this while she opened her notebook and uncapped a ballpoint. She would be methodical and give each painting a number before she began cleaning it, then write a brief description of what she found. Then she could try the dialogue test.

  She took down painting number one and narrowed her eyes. Where was everybody “at” with this one? The longer she looked, the uglier it seemed—a moon-faced Madonna whose hands looked like they had been painted on as an afterthought, sticking awkwardly out of her sleeves. Either the artist had no grasp of basic anatomy or it was an artistic statement. She would let somebody else worry about it. Just in case, she pat the corners looking for a signature, finding a C followed by something that might be “Lopez.”

  Painting number two was equally disappointing—insipid angels with open mouths, flat and lifeless against a brown sky. No signature. Menina put it next to the Madonna.

  Number three was a still life of roses and lilies which she knew were a reference to the Virgin Mary, and might be valuable depending on the detail and colors under the dirt. She checked for a signature, found a B. and put it aside.

  Number four was a stolid child carrying a lamb over his shoulder. Both lamb and child wore exactly the same dramatic pout and soulful expression. So awful it made her smile. She put it with the Madonna.

  Three and a half hours later Menina was filthy, surrounded by two dozen paintings propped haphazardly against the walls. She wiped her forearm across her brow. None of it looked promising—maybe a cut above, or at least older than what was hanging in the corridors—but still she would bet nothing she had seen so far was worth much. She stood up to stretch her back and looked around the walls again. It was now early afternoon and the room was bright enough that Menina could see that a large black frame hanging at eye level had a lumpy pattern.

  She looked at the frame closely, then scratched it with her nail, leaving a hairlike gray line. Menina spat on it and breathed on it and rubbed it with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, until her sleeve was dirty and the spot she had rubbed had a dull gleam. Not gilt as she had expected, but silver. Venetian? But a silver frame surely must be an indicator that the painting it held must be reasonably good. She looked at it closely. Under the tarnish was an ornate pattern of curling vines. Then Menina cried, “Oh!” Among the vines were small birds with forked tails.

  She staggered under its weight as she lifted it down. Propping it up against the wall she set to work, until she could make out what looked like a crowd of people with no faces. No wait, there was a face in profile on the side. The others weren’t faceless—it showed the backs of their heads. They were looking toward the center right which had something light, what looked like two figures…something was happening in the middle…she could see what looked like a bandaged leg. Was that crooked thing a crutch?

  Unsettling faces, some in profile, some at an angle, emerged from the dirt—grotesque faces, syphilitic or alcoholic or something, noses too short and wide and nostrils twisted up, mouths open, sick and weary and mad faces, faces with features swollen and battered and distorted by hard lives and hunger, a crowd of suffering people all focusing on something. Someone lying on what looked like a stretcher. A skeleton. And something moving at the bottom of the painting. As the grime of centuries came away, demons with reptilian bodies, grinning humanoid features, and malevolent yellow eyes stared directly at Menina even as they scurried away between the legs of the crowd, away from whatever was taking place in the center of the painting.

  She recognized the theme immediately—the story from the Bible of Jesus healing and casting out demons. She cleaned some more dirt off until she could make out two figures in the center. Two men in profile? No, it looked like a man and a woman. With the last piece of bread she dabbed the lower left-hand corner. And as the last bit crumbled, she thought there was a T. Then an r.

  It wasn’t possible, she told herself, turning the painting to get the light on it. But was that a T? And a capital M? At that point she would have licked the dirt off to find out if it wouldn’t have done so much harm to the paint. In her excitement she gathered up dirty crumbs from the floor and rubbed, a little more vigorously than anyone should do on an old painting, and there—she couldn’t believe it, she rubbed her eyes—was a little blob. Mustn’t get overexcited, a blob was a blob…unless it was a swallow! She cleaned until she saw T-r-i-s then M-e-n-d, and stopped rubbing before she damaged it irreparably.

  She stood up and took some deep breaths. She, Menina Ann Walker, age nineteen, had just made a discovery, a real art-world discovery, just like that! Bam! Art histo
rians spent entire careers trying to do what she had just done. “I don’t believe it,” she muttered over and over. Then she punched the air with her fist and cried, “Yes!” Wait till Becky and Holly Hill and her parents heard! Yes! She was so excited she did a little impromptu victory dance, then “Sor Clara. Sor Clara? Wake up! Good news!” She patted the old nun on the arm excitedly and Sor Clara snored loudly and woke up, looking startled. “Eh?”

  Menina said very loudly in Spanish, “I found the Tristan Mendoza! I found it! I found it! It was here! Just like you said! And I found it! Thank you! Thank you!”

  “Deo gratias…” mumbled Sor Clara, rubbing her eyes.

  There was a sound of footsteps, then Sor Teresa threw open the door and without preliminaries announced Menina’s food was waiting for her and they must hurry. Sor Clara had to go to the vigil and she needed to get back to the kitchen because there were polvorónes baking. All the world wanted polvorónes, everything was late today, she had far too much to do, and Alejandro needed to speak to Menina at once.

  “Sor Teresa, come look. I found the Tristan Mendoza! I found it!” Menina was almost jumping up and down with excitement like a five-year-old when she suddenly remembered Sor Teresa couldn’t see. She started to apologize, but she needn’t have bothered; Sor Teresa wasn’t listening.

  “We talk about it later. Come now!” she barked. Leading the way down the corridor to the locutio parlor, she was loud enough to be heard on the other side of the grate, complaining it was Semana Santa, and they were too busy to be always welcoming Menina’s visitors. The captain said reasonably from the other side that he was the only visitor and it was necessary for him to speak to Menina on police business.