The Convent: A Novel (10 page)

The nun bowed. ‘I would have come sooner, Your Excellency, but I am virtually held prisoner.’

‘Prisoner? What do you mean, Sister?’

‘The Mother Superior has ordered that I am not to be given a lift to the city. But I managed to hide in the van of the baker who collects our altar breads.’

‘Was that deceit really necessary?’

‘Oh, you should see her, Your Excellency. She has changed since the coming of the child.’

‘Are you talking about Sister María Inés?’

‘She poisoned the dogs which Sister Carlota looked after. It was terrible,’ the woman said and described how the nuns had found the dogs dying in the courtyard.

The Bishop was shocked but tried not to show it. He said: ‘I always thought those dogs were a nuisance–not to mention the issue of hygiene. Couldn’t that be the reason for their extermination?’

‘No, Your Excellency. She believed they were a threat to the child. Sister Carlota is deeply upset.’

‘Why did Sister María Inés think the dogs might attack the child?’

‘There was an incident recently…Having witnessed it, I personally think it was blown out of proportion. The Mother has lost her reason.

The Bishop looked away and quoted Terence: ‘
I am human and nothing that is human is alien to me
.’

‘I implore you to intervene before something much worse happens,’ the nun said.

Bishop Estrada stood at the window with his hands clasped and thought for a moment. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I am very busy over the next few days. But I promise to come to the convent before the end of the week.’

This time he offered her his hand without qualms about his humility. The nun kissed his ring and bowed. The Bishop said nothing more but followed her with his unsettled eyes as she crossed the room towards the door, gliding silently over the marble floor like the ghosts he sometimes saw in the languor of his siesta.

B
ishop Estrada had surprised everyone when he had announced that he was to become confessor to the nuns of Our Lady of Mercy himself instead of appointing a priest from his diocese. The post had fallen vacant when the elderly priest who visited the convent once a week had died of exhaustion during his pilgrimage to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Months had passed without the nuns celebrating Mass and confessing their sins. Sister María Inés had written to the Bishop several times but received no reply. Then, exasperated with ecclesiastical bureaucracy, she started to say Mass every Sunday herself, against the rules of the Church.

For his part, the Bishop was too busy with other affairs, and the request from the convent in the sierra had slipped his mind. After showing him the first couple of letters from the Mother Superior, his secretary stopped trying to draw his attention to them, in the belief that he was well aware of the matter and would settle it in due course. The deacon filed them away, something he did as a matter of course, for there was such a constant flood of letters from every corner of the diocese, with invitations, requests, awards, threats, petitions for canonisation and appeals to the Church’s charity, that it was impossible to answer every single one of them. When months later the letters from the Mother Superior continued to arrive, the deacon risked the impertinence of reminding his superior about them. Bishop Estrada admitted his mistake, criticised his secretary for his excessive deference and ordered that a priest be found immediately. In the meantime he visited the convent to apologise to the nuns in person.

It was a Sunday when he drove there in his Model T Ford, the same car he would later give as a gift to the nuns. He had only visited the convent once before, during one of his regular whistle-stop tours of the diocese. He parked his car at the entrance, brushed the dust off his coat, took off his gloves, his goggles and the leather helmet that made him look like an aviator and climbed the steps. He was about to ring the doorbell when he heard chanting. Guessing that he had arrived at the time of prayer, he decided not to disturb the nuns. Instead he pushed the heavy door and walked quietly across the cloistered path with the intention of killing time until they had finished.

On his brief previous visit he had paid little attention to the convent, which now struck him as a marvellous place. Time and damp had scarred the saints in the niches beyond recognition; the worn flagstones shone from thousands of feet having trodden on them over the centuries; the wooden staircases groaned under his weight, while on the tall chimneys storks kept watch over the convent. He did not dare enter the abandoned buildings, which seemed to him in such a bad state that they might collapse at any moment, but looked in through the broken windows and felt the cool draught blowing through the rooms which stirred up the dust on the floor and formed it into peculiar shapes. In the garden he wandered among the flowerbeds, where the fragrant air swarmed with insects that scattered ahead of his flapping cassock. Everything, even the ruins, agreed with his idea of what a convent should be: a place neither on earth nor in heaven but at the exact midpoint between the two. With this thought in mind, he retraced his steps to the cloister and crossed the courtyard to have a drink of water from the well. It was while drinking from his cupped hands that he paid attention to the voices coming from the chapel and recognised not the words of the midmorning prayer, as he had assumed at first, but those of the Sunday Mass:
Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis…
Bishop Estrada wiped his hands and went to the chapel, where he stood at the door, his tall figure and black cassock obscuring the light. The Mother Superior recognised him immediately and stopped in the middle of the hymn.

‘Please, Sisters,’ the Bishop said. ‘Carry on with the service.’

The nuns followed him with their eyes. The Mother Superior resumed the Gloria with a hesitant voice, her heart still palpitating with fear: ‘
Tu solus Altissimus, Jesu Christe, cum Sancto Spiritu, in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.
’

When the hymn ended, the Bishop gathered the skirt of his cassock and sat on a pew a few rows behind the nuns to attend the rest of the Mass. The Mother Superior completed the Canon and moved on to the Communion. At the back of the chapel the Bishop glared but did not interrupt her. He stayed in his seat, his hands clasped on his lap, his lips pouting, observing the nuns who knelt on the steps of the altar to receive the host: ‘
Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam.
’ When the nuns returned to their pews, the Mother Superior waited for the Bishop to come forward and receive the host too, but he did not move. She returned to the altar and concluded the Mass.

Afterwards Bishop Estrada waited for her at the door of the chapel. Sister María Inés kissed his ring and welcomed him to their convent. She said: ‘If we knew you were coming, Your Excellency, we would have waited for you to lead the service.’

The Bishop gave her an ambiguous smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My intention was to surprise you, Sister, but you surprised me instead.’

She understood. ‘I admit my breaking the rules, Your Excellency, but you left us no choice.’

‘You are right to be annoyed. I do not mind you having said Mass under the circumstances. As a matter of fact, you did it very well. But consecrating the host was wrong.’

‘I promise you it will not happen again,’ the woman said. ‘But you ought to give us your word too that you will appoint a priest to our convent.’

The Bishop said what had been in his mind since his stroll around the convent: ‘I have, Sister. Here is your priest.’

‘You, Your Excellency?’

‘I can only do one Sunday a month, I am afraid. Take it or leave it.’

‘Will we be able to celebrate Mass the rest of the Sundays ourselves?’

The Bishop thought for a moment. ‘I should not condone it,’ he said. ‘But promise me not to consecrate the Host again and we are agreed.’

And so he began to visit the convent. He looked forward to the last Sunday of the month, which he set aside for that purpose, despite having to leave the city early in the morning and the arduous drive on the unpaved road that climbed steeply up the hills and brought him, an hour and many twists and turns through the dense pine forest later, to his destination. As soon as Sister María Inés heard the engine of the Ford, she came to the door of the convent to wait for him and exchange the obligatory greetings. Then she showed him to his room, where he washed himself with the attention of one performing his ablutions, lay on the bed in his cassock and shut his eyes for a moment. Ten minutes was enough time for him to recover his strength and clerical authority. When the bell rang, he changed into his liturgical vestments, which he kept in a small suitcase of genuine cordovan leather, and made his way to the chapel, where the women were waiting.

Before the service he listened to confessions. Every time he sat in the cubicle, which had been made in medieval times, when people were much smaller, he felt a morbid sensation, for its size and smell of oak reminded him of a coffin. He continued to use it with bravery, saying nothing to anybody out of shame, since those who have true faith in God have no reason to fear death. After all, the use of the confessional was not symbolic: he could not tell with certainty who was on the other side of the lattice from the sound of their voice.

Although the nuns’ sins were harmless, he often wondered whether the world had become more evil with time, which was how it seemed to him. Perhaps it was only the fact that his ability to tolerate cruelty had diminished with age. A few years earlier, at the time of the Moroccan war, an army lieutenant had come to see him with an unusual request: a soldier of the Spanish Legion had deserted and returned home but had then been arrested and sentenced to death. His last wish was to confess not to any priest but to the Bishop himself.

‘Of course, you don’t have to come if it inconveniences you in any way, Your Excellency,’ the officer said. ‘But granting a condemned man’s wish is a tradition that is good to uphold. It makes the army seem a little more merciful–even towards those who don’t deserve its mercy.’

‘Is the man religious?’

‘I doubt it, Your Excellency. Can a man who’s betrayed his country be a good Christian?’

‘
Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,
’ the Bishop said. ‘One does not preclude the other.’

‘Perhaps he had a change of heart,’ the officer conceded. ‘Someone with his prospects would be wise to do so.’

The man was held in a neighbouring town which Bishop Estrada had visited many times in the past, but it was his first time inside the barracks. Arranged around a cobbled courtyard, the buildings dated from the previous century and reminded the Bishop of a monastery: the same neatness, the same austerity, the same silence, the presence of men dressed alike. The only thing out of place was the tall perimeter wall with corbelled turrets where armed soldiers stood guard. The lieutenant greeted the Bishop and showed him to the prison. The smell of damp, the darkness, the same fear of enclosed spaces the Bishop would later suffer in the confessional of the convent of Our Lady of Mercy made him feel faint. Finally the officer stopped in front of a cell door and put the key in the lock, but did not turn it. He said: ‘You can stay as long as you like, Your Excellency. Or we could go back right away and let him burn in Hell.’

The Bishop, ashamed and ashen-faced by his claustrophobia, replied in a hoarse voice: ‘That is not for us to decide. Unlock the door.’

The interior of the cell was only lit by a shaft of sunlight coming through the barred window. A man lying on a bed that was too small for him spoke up: ‘So you came.’

The Bishop took an uncertain step into the cell. The door swung shut behind him and the rasp of the lock made him uneasy. He asked: ‘How are you, my son?’

The man chuckled: ‘Oh, capital.’

There was another bed in the cell, and the Bishop sat down on it. He asked: ‘Why did you ask expressly for me?’

‘Parish priests are unable to carry on a conversation. They just recite bits from the Bible. If Rome ever ran out of priests it would start to train parrots.’

‘Well, I am not a parrot,’ Bishop Estrada said. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

He stayed longer than he had expected, discussing religion with the condemned man, who had a very good knowledge of matters of faith. When the time came to leave, he was sorry to break off their conversation and promised to return. He visited the legionnaire every afternoon, sacrificing his siesta to debate, under the shadow of death and with a passion he had not felt since his student days: doctrinal issues, the sanctity of human life, Galileo’s trial, Darwin’s theory and other matters that divided the Church. Bishop Estrada marvelled at his opponent’s intelligence. He could tell that the legionnaire was an educated man but only managed to make him admit this after he threatened not to come back. The man relented: ‘I was once a priest, Your Excellency.’

Then Bishop Estrada saw him for what he really was, not simply the worthy opponent of their afternoon debates or the nameless soldier who had abandoned his post in a colonial war, but as a young man full of life who was about to die. From then on the Bishop tried everything to reverse the legionnaire’s sentence and save him from death. He contacted everyone he knew and spoke with lawyers and the judges of the court martial, but they could not help. He travelled to the capital and asked for an audience with King Alfonso, who a few years later would flee the country and live the rest of his life in a hotel in Rome, but was turned down despite his family connections. In his desperation he wrote to the Holy Father, and some time later received a handwritten reply worthy of a Caesar, which sealed the condemned man’s fate:
My dear Ezequiel, you are embarrassing us with a sentimentality that does not befit a senior member of our Church
.

On the day before the execution, Bishop Estrada came to the prison in the afternoon, as always, and saw the legionnaire for the last time. When the man asked him what they should discuss that day, the Bishop, astonished by the condemned man’s composure, waved his hand: ‘No, nothing today.’ At dawn, when the black cockerel of the regiment began to crow, the Bishop returned to give the prisoner absolution and the viaticum with a trembling hand. He insisted that he was present at the execution despite the lieutenant’s repeated attempts to dissuade him, and he walked at the side of the man reciting the Apostles’ Creed until the officer put his hand on his shoulder. Bishop Estrada stopped and shot him an irritated glance: ‘What do you want?’

‘You can’t go any further, Your Excellency. You would be in the line of fire.’

They had reached the place of execution. Standing aside, with horror in his eyes, Bishop Estrada continued to recite until the discharge of the firing squad. He never administered the last rites to a condemned man again. He did not discuss his feelings with anyone nor did he let his bitterness poison his respect for the Vatican. He maintained his pretence of authority, tried to regain his good humour for which he was known across the diocese and some time afterwards resumed his siestas. But his afternoons in bed were no longer peaceful. Everything bothered him: the ticking of the alarm clock on his bedside table, the springs of the mattress, the heat if the windows were shut, the draught if they were open. From time to time he thought that he saw ghosts in the room but kept their presence secret from everyone, telling himself that it was merely the curtains flapping. Still, he continued to live with the hope of finding sanctuary from the cruelty of the world, and then, years later, he happened to visit the convent of Our Lady of Mercy, where he believed that he had found the peace he was searching for.