How I Became A Nun

by AIRA, CESAR

  The second soap opera was historical too, but secular and Argentinean. Entitled Tell me, Grandma, it was invariably introduced by a sort of prologue, in which the venerable Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson was questioned by her grandchildren, each time about a different event in national history to which she had been an eye witness. One day it would be the first English invasion, another day the second, or some episode during one or the other, or the May revolution, a party during the Viceroyalty or the tyranny of Rosas, an incident in the life of Belgrano or San Martín … I loved the way time was haphazard, the lottery of the years. I knew nothing about history, of course, but the preliminary dialogues and the old lady’s adorably hesitant voice made me imagine it as a broad expanse of time, a spread from which to choose … And Grandma’s memory seemed to be tenuous, hanging from a thread about to snap … but once she got going, her shaky voice faded, making way for the actors of the past … This substitution was my favorite part: the voice hesitating among memories and the mist dissolving to reveal the ultra-real clarity of the scene as it had happened …

  Tell me, Grandma was not really aimed at children or at adults, and yet it was meant for both. It bridged the gap, reminding adults of what they had learned at school and acquainting children with things they would remember when they learned about them. Doña Mariquita and her grandchildren were as one: she was the eternal little girl … Her failing, aged memory was in fact prodigious: scenes remote in time came to life not as the past usually does, in the form of mute images, but images endowed with sound, every inflection intact, down to the faintest sigh or the sound of chair legs scraping on a sitting-room floor as a viceregal official dead seventy years before stood up suddenly to greet a lady who had lain in her grave for more than half as long, and with whom he was, naturally, in love.

  The third soap opera, which started at eight (they were all half an hour long) was definitely for adults. It was about love and featured all the stars of the day. In a sense, this serial connected with reality itself, while the others skirted around it. One proof of this—I saw it as a proof in any case—was the complication of the story. The reality that I knew, my reality, wasn’t complicated. On the contrary, it was simplicity itself. It was too simple. I can’t summarize the Lux serial as I did with the other two. It didn’t have an underlying mechanism; it was pure, free-floating complication. There was a given that guaranteed its perpetual complication: everyone was in love. There were no secondary characters playing supporting roles. Love was the theme of the serial and everyone was in love. They were like molecules with love valencies reaching out into space, into the sonorous ether, and every one of those little yearning arms found a hold. The tangle was so dense, it created a new simplicity: the simplicity of compactness. Space was no longer empty, porous and intangible; it had become a solid rock of love. By contrast, my life was so simple it hardly existed. Deprived as I was, the message I seemed to be receiving from the “radio drama of the stars” was that growing up was a preparation for love, and that only the multitudinous night sky could make a totality, or at least something, out of nothing.

  As well as the soap operas, we listened to all sorts of programs: news, quizzes, comedy and, of course, music. Nicola Paone held me spellbound. But I made no distinctions: every piece of music was my favorite, at least while I was listening to it. I even liked tangos, which children usually find boring. The wonderful thing about music for me was the force with which it took control of the present and banished everything else. No matter what melody I was listening to, it seemed the most beautiful in the world, the best, the only one. It was the instant raised to its highest power. The fascination of the present, a kind of hypnotism (yet another!). Again and again I put it to the test: I tried to think of other pieces of music, other rhythms, I tried to compare and remember, but I couldn’t; I was flooded by the musical present, captive in a golden jail.

  Speaking of music, one day, on Radio Belgrano, in between programs, a singer performed for the first and last time, while Mom and I listened with the utmost attention and not a little perplexity. On this occasion, I think, Mom’s attention was equal to mine. No one has ever sung less tunefully than that woman, not even for a joke. No one else with such a bad sense of pitch would have made it to the end of a measure; this woman sang five whole songs, boleros or romantic ballads, to the accompaniment of a piano. Maybe it was a joke, I don’t know. But it all seemed very serious; the presenter introduced her in a formal manner, and read out the tide of each successive song in a lugubrious voice. It was mysterious. Afterwards, they went on with the normal programs, without any kind of comment. Maybe she was a relative of the radio station’s owner; maybe she paid for the airtime to treat herself, or to keep a promise. Who knows? Most people would be ashamed to sing like that on their own, under the shower. And she sang on the radio. Maybe she was deaf or otherwise handicapped, and it was a great achievement (but they had neglected to explain this to the listeners). Maybe she could sing well, but she got nervous, though it’s hard to believe: it was too bad for that. She couldn’t have sung worse if she’d tried. Every note was out of tune, not only the hard ones. It was almost atonal … It’s inexplicable. It is the inexplicable. The mass media provide an ultimate refuge for the truly inexplicable.

  Anyway, the inexplicable presence of that singer in some deep recess of my memory, some deep recess of the radio and the universe, is the strangest thing in this book. The strangest thing that has happened to me. The only thing I can’t account for. Not that my aim is to explain the tissue of deeply strange events that is my life, but in this case I suspect that an explanation exists, really exists, somewhere in Argentina, in the mind of one of her children, one of her nephews or nieces, or an eye witness … Or the mind of the Tone Deaf Singer herself … perhaps she is still alive, and remembers, and if she is reading this … My number is in the telephone book. My answering machine is always on, but I’m here beside the phone. All you have to do is make yourself known … Not by name, of course, your name wouldn’t mean anything to me. Sing. Just a few notes will do, a phrase, however short, from any of those songs, and I will certainly recognize you.

  8

  THE RADIO HELPED ME to live. The repetition that didn’t always happen gave me a measure of life: a surprise gift for me to unwrap, mad with joy, as the flow of sound made up its mind whether to be the same or different … This calmed my overactive memory … I felt I was no longer beginning to live, with the furious cruelty of beginnings, but simply going on with my life …

  I don’t know if this is something that my readers have noticed, but time is always double: one kind of time always conveys another, as its supplement. The time of the radio’s live repetitions conveyed the time that was passing. The palanquin carried the elephant. And time really was passing, slowly and majestically. The catastrophe turned out to be a mere possibility, and was left behind. This gave me the impression that there would be no more catastrophes in my life: I would have a life, like everyone else, and look down on catastrophes from the superior vantage point afforded by the consciousness of time … and this was what seemed to be happening. At school the teacher went on ignoring me, which was just as well. Mom didn’t take me back to the prison. I was in good health. I didn’t mind the simplicity of my life. A certain peace had come over me. I was discovering that time, long-term time made of days, weeks and months, and not of horrific moments as before, was operating in my favor. Nothing else was, but that didn’t worry me. Time was enough. I clung on to time, and consequently to learning, the only human activity that makes time our ally.

  And that is how, for once in my life, I ended up doing something typical of a girl my age: identifying with the teacher. All girls go through a phase of busily giving lessons to their dolls or the imaginary children who inhabit them. How absurd for someone who knows nothing to throw herself so eagerly into teaching. But what a sublime absurdity. What catechisms of feral pedagogy await the perspicacious observer. What lessons in the primacy of action.r />
  As I had no dolls, I had to make do with make-believe children. And as I didn’t have any already made up, I used real ones, reimagining them as I pleased. They were my classmates, the only children I knew, and they were ideal for my purposes, because I had no idea of their lives outside school. For me they were absolute schoolchildren. To make the game more fun, I gave them twisted, difficult, baroque personalities. Each one suffered from a different and complicated kind of dyslexia. Being the perfect teacher, I dealt with them individually, attentive to their particular needs, setting tasks adapted to their capacities.

  For example … In order to explain this game, I have to fall back on examples. This means switching levels, because until now I have managed to avoid the pernicious logic of examples. I’m making a brief exception here solely in the interests of clarity. For example, then, one child’s peculiar dyslexia consisted of putting all the vowels together at the beginning of a word, followed by the consonants. He would write the word “consonants” as “ooacnsnnts”. That was a relatively simple case. Others got the shapes of the letters wrong, writing them back to front … The first example is purely imaginary, no living being has ever been dyslexic in that way; the second is more realistic, but only because it happens to coincide, by pure chance, with a real possibility. I didn’t know what dyslexia was; I didn’t suffer from it myself, nor did any of my classmates. I had reinvented it all on my own, to make the game more fun. I didn’t even suspect that such a disorder might really exist, and would have been surprised to learn that it did.

  There were forty-two of us in the class (forty-three including me, but the teacher never included me in the roll-call or acknowledged my presence in any way); so my imaginary class consisted of forty-two children. Forty-two individual cases. Forty-two novels. The idea of leaving even one of them out to lighten the burden would have been inconceivable to me. And the burden was colossal. Because for each kind of dyslexia I had also come up with a unique and appropriate family background and etiology, couched in the somewhat deranged terms at my disposal, but displaying remarkable intuition on the part of a six-year old. For example, in the case of the boy who wrote letters back to front, his dad was a woman and his mom was a man. This affected his performance at school, either because he had to help his mom prepare the meals (being a man, his mom didn’t know how to cook), leaving no time for homework, or because the family lived in wretched poverty (his dad, being a woman, couldn’t get a proper job). I had to make sure that the cooperative provided the family with stationery, pens, pencils, etc. And every one of the other forty-one cases was just as involved. It was hellishly complicated. No real teacher would have taken on a task of such magnitude.

  The situation was aggravated by the inflexible pedagogical principles I had imposed on myself: the complication could never be simplified, it could only progress. Although my system of teaching was labyrinthine (because of the number of students), it was a one-way labyrinth, with valves all facing in the same direction. The idea wasn’t to correct each student’s dyslexia, not at all. I wanted to teach them to read and write on their own terms, each according to his particular hieroglyphic system: only within that system was progress possible. For example, the boy who wrote back to front might begin by writing the word mother that way and go on to write a thousand-page back-to-front book, a dictionary, anything. I hadn’t invented disorders so much as systems of difficulty. They weren’t destined to be cured but developed. I’m using the word “dyslexia” here only because the condition is familiar and happens to bear a purely formal resemblance to my systems.

  I would read out a dictation passage (in my head, of course, in imagination) then I would collect the (also imaginary) exercise books, and with that absolute honesty only to be observed among children at play, I conscientiously examined forty-two hieroglyphic texts, correcting each according to its unique and nontransferable rule.

  As if that wasn’t enough, for each kind of dyslexia I also had to determine as best I could how it would affect the student’s performance in subjects other than Spanish: Mathematics, Physical Education, Drawing, and so on. To use the simplest example again (others were far more complex), the boy who wrote back to front not only counted using numbers written backwards, but also reversed the functions, so that two plus two made zero, and two minus two made four; the Argentinean nationalists demanded a closed meeting of the council in May 1810, Columbus discovered Europe, the fruit came before the flower; as for his drawings, I had to imagine them.

  I had to imagine everything, because I gave my classes without props or materials of any kind, not even a piece of paper to take notes on (in any case, at that early stage in my stumbling education I wrote so slowly that there was no way I could have taken notes on the fly, like a stenographer, and I had to keep moving quickly in order to make any progress with so many students). I did it sitting still, concentrating hard, with my eyes open, and some idle part of my mind listening to the radio. My house of cards was always on the point of collapsing; the slightest distraction and I could lose the thread irretrievably. A diagram would have been my salvation. I came to long for a diagram. Had I been able to play aloud it wouldn’t have been so hard, but I didn’t, because secrecy was essential to the game’s aesthetic. So Mom never knew that I was giving lessons. What can she have thought, seeing me sitting there frozen stiff, still as a statue …

  I had to fall back on a mnemonic system. My memory was perfect, but it wasn’t enough. I had gotten myself into a situation where I needed something more. I needed a method, and my method made use of an image of the classroom full of children. To compose this image I needed the figures to be still and silent. Now, in that classroom, and I suppose it would be the same with any class of forty-two six-year-olds (not counting me), it was rare for all the children to be sitting quietly in their places. The only time it happened, in fact, was when the teacher read out the roll. It was like a litany, first the surname, then the first name (mine, which should have come second, between Abate and Artola, was missing). By dint of repetition, I had learned the roll by heart. And in my mind it was like the soundtrack for the mental image of the classroom, each child in his place like a memory peg … Unfortunately the combination meant I couldn’t use the image in a straightforward way, because the alphabetical order of the children’s names on the soundtrack didn’t coincide with the order of their places in the room. So I was forced to zigzag laboriously; one order was superimposed on the other …

  I found this pastime absorbing. So absorbing that it began to give me pleasure, the first lasting and governable pleasure of my life. It was an aching, almost overwhelming pleasure—that’s just the way I was. And soon it underwent a sublimation, transcending itself … Almost independently of my will, it created a supplement, which my imagination seized upon with a mad voracity. I transcended school. I began to give instructions. Instructions for everything, for life. I gave them to no one, to impalpable beings within my personality, who didn’t even take imaginary forms. They were no one and they were everyone.

  The instructions I gave could refer to anything at all. In principle, they were instructions for something I was doing, but they could also be for an activity in which I was not and would never be engaged (such as scaling a mountain peak), which didn’t stop me prescribing a method for it in the minutest detail. But mainly my instructions referred to what I happened to be doing; that was the default case, the model. It got to the point where everything I did was doubled by instructions for doing it. Activities and instructions were indistinguishable. If I was walking I would also be instructing a ghostly disciple in how to walk, the best method for walking … It wasn’t as simple as it looked, nothing was … Because true efficiency was a kind of elegance, and elegance required minutely detailed knowledge, so detailed it was peculiar to me, an esoteric idiosyncrasy that only I could pass on … though to whom, I didn’t know, maybe no one, but then again … The game took over my life. How to hold a fork, how to raise it to one’s mouth, how to take a si
p of water, how to look out the window, how to open a door, how to shut it, how to switch on the light, how to tie one’s shoelaces … Everything accompanied by an unbroken flow of words: “Do it like this … never do it like that … once I did it like this … be careful to … some people prefer to … this way the results are not so …” It was a rapid flow, very rapid, with never a pause for me to catch my breath, because keeping up the pace was essential to getting it right, and I was setting an example. There were so many activities for which I had to issue instructions … no end to them … and some were simultaneous: glancing slightly to the right at a point just above the horizon, controlling the movement of the eyes and the head (and this glance had to be accompanied by some elegant and appropriate thought, or it would be worthless!), at the same time as picking up a little stone with a precise movement of the fingers … How to manipulate cutlery, how to put on one’s trousers, how to swallow saliva. How to keep still, how to sit on a chair, how to breathe! I was doing yoga without knowing it, hyper-yoga … But it wasn’t an exercise for me: it was a class. I took it for granted that I already knew everything, I had mastered it all … that’s why it was my duty to teach … And I really did know it all, naturally I did, since the knowledge was life itself unfolding spontaneously. Although the main thing was not knowing, or even doing, but explaining, opening out the folds of knowledge … And so curious are the mechanisms of the mind and language, that sometimes I surprised myself in the role of pupil, receiving my own instructions.

  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.