Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  Her complexion was Mediterranean of hue and thus seemed incongruous with her more northerly nose. Around her eyes the skin looked as if it had been trampled by sparrows, a tracing that caused him to put her age at forty. She was forty-six. Or would be in September.

  In shadow, Domino’s hair was dark brown; in sunlight, reddish tints shone through in streaks, like claw marks on fine maple furniture. She wore it straight, at medium length, and it had a tendency to swing free and half cover one or the other of her rotund cheeks. The cheeks were not fat, exactly, but each might have concealed a bishop’s golfball—with a couple of Communion wafers thrown in for good measure. Her breasts and buttocks were also quite round, but Switters didn’t notice that. He would have sworn under oath that he didn’t notice. Why would he have noticed? She was a middle-aged nun.

  “Well, hello,” she said cheerfully. “You appear to be on the mend.”

  “Thanks to you, I’m sure.”

  “You must thank God, not me.”

  “All right. I may do that. But I sincerely doubt that any Divine Almighty worthy of the name is going to beam if I gush or grumble if I don’t.”

  Much to his astonishment, she nodded in agreement. “I suspect you’re right,” she said.

  “Don’t you find it a bit batty that people believe God—the absolute epitome of perfection and enlightenment—could be so puffed with petty human vanity that he’d expect us to sing his praises at every opportunity and twice on Sunday?”

  She smiled. “Have you traveled by wheelchair to the middle of the Syrian desert in order to debate theology, Mr.—?”

  “Switters,” he answered, without the addition of the usual malarkey. “And no, I have not. I decidedly have not.”

  She laid a hand gently but authoritatively on his brow. “Naturally, we need to learn why—and how—you did travel here, but I don’t wish to interrogate you until you’re stronger, so . . .”

  “Oh, thank you! Please, no interrogation. I’m only insured for fire and theft.”

  If she detected a facetious note, she elected to ignore it. “We must get you strong so we can send you on your way. Your fever has broken”—she removed her hand, somewhat to his disappointment—”but you look la tête comme une pastèque, as we say in France.”

  “Aren’t you American?”

  “No, no. I’m French. Alsatian French, by heritage, which is why I’ve been denied the grand Gallic nose.”

  “But—”

  “When I was four, we moved to Philadelphia so that my father could oversee a famous collection of French art in a private museum there. I lived in the U.S. for the next twelve years and became very Americanized, as children will, and although I haven’t been back since, I’ve worked hard to keep my English pure, so that I don’t sound like Jacques Cousteau describing zuh most ’andsome craytures zaire are in zuh sea.”

  She laughed, and though it jiggled his sore gut, Switters found himself chuckling with her. “So, you’re a Philly fille. What’s your name?”

  There was a pause. A long pause. For some reason, she was pondering the question, as if she lacked a ready or definite answer. “Around here, I’m called Domino,” she said at last. “More formally, Sister Domino—but I’m not so certain I can be called that any longer.” A troubled look dimmed the lights in her eyes. “Before Sister Domino, I was Sister somebody else, and before that I had my christened name, and in the not so far future I may have a different name yet.” She paused and deliberated some more. “I think it’s okay if you just call me Sister.”

  “I’d be honored to call you Sister, Sister.” Then, thinking of Suzy, he added, “Fate has sought to compensate for the shortcomings of my parents in the sister production department by supplying me with the sweetest, loveliest sororal surrogates.”

  “Kind of you to say that, Mr. Switters, but I hope you don’t think you can butter me off and get me to extend your stay here. You really must leave just as soon as you’re healthy enough to travel.”

  Switters ran his hand over his face. A week’s growth of stubble rasped his fingers. I must look like a werewolf’s bedroom slipper, he thought. “I find it difficult to believe that someone who spent her formative years in the City of Brotherly Love could be so callously chomping at the bit in her desire to kick me out into the cruel wastes.”

  “Yes, but you mustn’t take it personally. Or doubt our Christian charity. You see . . . well, no, you couldn’t see because you haven’t looked around, but the Pachomian Order has itself a regular little Eden here. But it’s an Eden for Eves only. We cannot allow even one Adam to intrude, I’m afraid.” She stood up to leave.

  “Hmm? An Adamless Eden? I’ll have to mull that over.” Turning to face her, he heard the ponderosa music his whiskers made as they scratched the silk pillow. “What about a Serpent?”

  “A Serpent?” She laughed. “No, no Serpent here, either.”

  “Oh? But there has to be. Every Paradise has a Serpent. It goes with the territory.”

  “Not this one,” she said, but there was something about her denial that was patently unconvincing.

  All day Switters lay on the cot, listening to the sounds of activity in the compound. There was work going on. He heard the spray of sprinklers, the clang of garden tools, the whisk-whisk of brooms, the rattle of buckets and pots, the ech-zee ech-zee of pruning saws, and the simple grunts of labor (so different in their coloration from the loaded grunts of love). A couple of times he stood on the cot to peer out the window at the adobe buildings, the orchards, and the vegetable plots, but he grew quickly dizzy and lowered himself to a prone position. Laments (there had been an unusually long, coolish winter, and the orange trees had bloomed so late that there was danger the fruit would cook on the boughs), complaints (evidently there was some kind of dispute between the convent and the Mother Church), and snatches of French songs (no hymn among them) drifted into the little room, where they were tossed in an auditory salad with the work noises and the cackle and bray of beast and fowl.

  Every hour or so, Sister Domino would stick her head in to check on him. He’d wave to her helplessly, and it wasn’t entirely an act. Midday, she brought him a warm vegetable broth but departed when satisfied that he was capable of spooning it himself between his fever-cracked lips. Midafternoon, she stopped by, to his supreme embarrassment, to empty his chamber pot.

  Toward dusk, as she delivered a fresh kettle of tea, he apologized for being a burden to her. “I’m interfering with your duties,” he said sincerely, “and it’s making me feel guilty, an emotion my grandmother warned me against.”

  “Well,” she sighed, “you must be carefully attended to for a few more days, and nobody else here has good English. Except for Fannie, our Irish lass, and I wouldn’t trust her alone with you.”

  “Is that a fact? And which one of us wouldn’t you trust?”

  She looked him over. He was physically disabled, he was recuperating from fever, and yet . . . “Neither,” she said. “Frankly.”

  “But what do you think might go on? If we were left alone together?”

  Domino headed for the door. “I don’t sully my mind with such details.”

  “Good,” he congratulated her. “But, please, one more question before you go.”

  “Yes?”

  “Who undressed me?” He nodded at his clothing, which—suit, T-shirt, cartoon shorts, and all—hung from a peg on the wall.

  She turned as red as a blister and sailed out of the room. And it was the older nun who’d first answered his ring at the gate who showed up with his supper tray, removed it a half hour later, and tucked him in for the night.

  “Faites de beaux rêves, monsieur,” she called as she put out the light.

  Switters had always loved that expression, “Make fine dreams.” In contrast to the English, “Have sweet dreams,” the French implied that the sleeper was not a passive spectator, a captive audience, but had some control over and must accept some responsibility for his or her dreaming. Moreover, a “fi
ne” dream had much wider connotations than a “sweet” one.

  In any event, his dreams that night were neither fine nor sweet, for he was made fitful by the notion that toward Sister Domino, with the intention of being playful, he may have behaved like an insensitive boor.

  How oddly delighted he was (though he tried to conceal it) when she turned up the next morning with his breakfast! It was a fine breakfast, too: scrambled eggs, grilled eggplant, chèvre, and toast. Before he dove into it, however, he found himself apologizing once more. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. It’s just that I come from a country where there are prudes on the left, prigs on the right, and hypocrites down the middle, so I sometimes feel obligated to push in the other direction just to keep things honest.”

  “No problem,” she said. “What you don’t understand is . . . well, there’s a deep undercurrent of sexuality flowing through every cloister. That may be especially true of the Pachomian Order because we are merely a centimeter above a lay sisterhood, no pun intended. In the hierarchy of sisterhoods, we are not especially great, and we have accepted members who a few of the more esteemed orders might reject. Of course, a Pachomian sister must adhere to vows of chastity just like any nun, but prior to taking up the cloth, she need not have been a virgin. So, among us, we have women with some experience, and that makes men and carnality a more tense issue, perhaps, than in certain orthodox convents. But when I get so cotton-picking coincée about it, it is I, myself, who is acting the hypocrite.”

  Naturally, Switters had to bite his tongue to keep from asking Domino if she could be counted among those sisters with “some experience.” What he asked, instead, after a lacerating lingual nip, was a question about the role and features of the Pachomian Order.

  “Maybe we can discuss that at a later time,” she said. “Right now, before I go to my work, we must talk about you. Who are you? What are you? What are you doing here? How did you get here? So far from the beaten track.”

  “May I assume my interrogation is off and running?”

  She smiled, and it was a smile, he thought, that could raise roadkill from the dead or turn a lead mine into a Mexican restaurant, yet a smile made more with the eyes than the lips. “You seem to be much improved, Mr. Switters, although you still look like—how do you say it?—a thing that the cat has brought home. I don’t mean to pressure you. If you don’t feel well enough . . .”

  “It’s all right,” he assured her, “although should I die in your custody, you’ll have to answer to Amnesty International.” Then, before she could protest, and holding to his vow to stop lying, he jumped right in with the truth, or, at least, an abridged version of it. “Until six months ago, I was a CIA operative. Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “Really? I know, of course, about the CIA. It has an unpleasant reputation.”

  “And largely deserved, I assure you.” He might have added, “Thanks to corporate-owned politicians and their cowboy dupes,” but he did not.

  “Then why were you? . . .”

  “Its unpleasantness, as you put it, had a purity, a spice, and anarchy that simply didn’t exist in the academic, military, or corporate sectors, and I hadn’t enough talent for art or poetry. Besides, it offered an unparalleled, world-class opportunity for corrective mischief: subverting subversion, if you will, although I won’t pretend my motives were ever entirely altruistic. But all that’s immaterial now. I had to drop out of the game last November.”

  She glanced at his wheelchair, folded in a corner, and he knew what she was assuming. He decided not to correct the assumption. Instead, he told her how he’d recently become involved in a private humanitarian mission inside Iraq, his old stomping grounds, and how, when it was over, he, feeling adventurous and having no particular place to be, joined a band of nomads driving their flocks to summer pasture in the mountains. “We passed by your Garden of Eden here, and for some crackpot reason I felt a magnetic attraction to the place. The rest, as they say, is histrionics.” He shrugged, as if to emphasize the pristine logic of it all.

  Whether or not she bought his story he could not tell. She was quiet, thoughtful, her countenance vacillating between serenity and fret. “Finish your breakfast,” she said at last. “I’ll come back for the tray. A supply truck will be arriving in a few days, bringing petrol for our generator. It can take you to Deir ez-Zur, but I can’t see how you will depart Syria without the proper papers.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Sister,” he called after her. “Impropriety is what I do for a living.”

  Fortified by his first regular meal in more than a week, Switters attempted a few push-ups and sit-ups on the cot. It was a wimpy, pathetic display. After lunch, delivered by a French nun who introduced herself as ZuZu (she was Domino’s age but lacked Domino’s radiance), he tried again, with greater success. Mostly, however, he rested. He meditated, he dozed, he read, he drank in the farmyard sounds and orchard smells of the oasis. Once, a black goat wandered into his room. Almost immediately, ZuZu and another middle-aged nun arrived to shoo it out.

  “That Fannie,” ZuZu clucked. “She should pay more mind to her animal.”

  “Yes,” said her companion. “Instead of to the animal in her mind.” They laughed and departed. It was probably funnier in French.

  In midafternoon, he tried telephoning Maestra. When she didn’t answer, he pulled his computer up onto the cot. Now that Audubon Poe was far away, it shouldn’t matter if the company read or even traced his transmission. Mayflower had little reason to be interested in him, per se, and even if he was, what could the cowboys do to him? Tip off Syrian authorities that he was in their country illegally? Intimate that he was a spy? Get him imprisoned or executed? In the old, crazed Cold War CIA, that might have been a possibility, but these days the company had a different censure and different methods. It had other fish to fry, its own bare asses to cover. Unless it believed he could help it get at Poe, whose whereabouts it doubtless already knew, he would be regarded as no more than a loose cannon with minimum firepower and no direction. He said a prayer to the satellite gods. He e-mailed his grandmother.

  In less than an hour, she responded. Maestra was well. There was some unspecified trouble about the Matisse. She was glad he was enjoying his vacation in “Turkey,” and understood that the Turks made fine silver bracelets. Was he finally out of that stupid wheelchair?

  It was Domino who brought him his supper. “I’m sorry to be ignoring you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  She tested his forehead for signs of fever, and in her hand he sensed a current not unlike the throb of pent-up music he’d felt in the fingers of Skeeter Washington, only what was pent up in Sister Domino was of a different order: spiritual, physical, emotional, or a mixture of the three, he wouldn’t venture to suppose.

  “Can we talk?” he asked.

  “Later tonight, or tomorrow,” she said, glancing out the window at the purpling dusk. “Now we have a special vespers. And, oh, we won’t be turning on the generator for a while, so, I’m sorry, you’ll have to make do with candlelight if you want to read.” She picked up the copy of Finnegans Wake from its place on the bedside stool. “It’s an Irish book, isn’t it? Fannie would be thrilled.”

  “Only a dozen souls in Ireland have actually read this tome,” he said, “and I’d bet a crock o’ gold and a barrel o’ Guinness that your Fannie is not one of them.”

  About an hour after dark, as he lay digesting his thin goat stew, he heard singing. This time the song was a hymn, and more than a couple of voices were joined in its vocalization. “Vespers,” he said to himself. At almost that same moment, he became aware that an orange glow had commenced to flicker, snap, and waggle against the drawn curtains of his little window. Inquisitive, he stood on the cot, down near its foot, and parted the rough cotton fabric. For the next half hour, he was to gawk at an extraordinary spectacle. The psychedelic porthole aside, no window he’d ever peered through looked out on a more memorable scene.

 
The convent chapel, identifiable by its stunted steeple and crude stained glass, was located at—and connected to—the far end of the building that apparently served as living quarters for the sisterhood. The chapel was a good seventy yards, maybe more, from the infirmary, which was situated near the compound gate. In front of the chapel, from whose open door the singing floated, there was a small flower garden, and in that flower patch, amidst poppies and jasmine bushes, a bonfire had been built.

  As Switters watched, nuns—eight of them in all—filed, still singing, out of the chapel. Each wore her traditional nun habit, rather than the Syrian dresses in which he’d become accustomed to seeing them. Joining hands, they formed a circle around the fire, circumnavigating it several times, both clockwise and counterclockwise. Then they suddenly ceased singing, broke the circle, and began to disrobe.

  Initially, a startled Switters jumped to the conclusion that the sisters were practicing witchcraft, that he’d stumbled upon some arcane sect that was combining Catholicism with Wicca. However, as the nuns, one by one—some eagerly, even vehemently, others with obvious reluctance—hurled or gently dropped their habits into the bonfire, he realized that something of a different nature was transpiring here. He couldn’t guess what the ceremony was about, but it was no eye-of-newt sabbat.

  As the heavy habits smoked and slowly ignited, the women watched in their underwear. Most wore knee-length bloomers, the sort of ultra-baggy shorts that might have outfitted a low-rent hip-hop ghetto gangster basketball team, and stiff old-fashioned prototype brassieres that could have harnessed pairs of boudoir oxen. One was in modern bra and panties. From that distance, he couldn’t clearly recognize faces, but he thought (or hoped?) she must be Domino. The last of the eight wore bikini underpants and nothing else, and as firelight twinkled on her far naked nipples, he thought, Fannie?