The Convent: A Novel (14 page)

They came back to the entrance and Sister María Inés stepped out into the light with relief. The nurse was still talking: ‘…which His Excellency was kind enough to donate. Next year we plan…’ The Mother Superior excused herself and walked back towards the garage. Now the thought returned to her mind: who had visited the orphanage? All the nuns had been to the city at one time or another during the previous year. Perhaps it meant nothing, she thought: a nun on holiday from another diocese, or a visit by one of her nuns out of curiosity or the wish to make a donation, which the nun did not want the others to know about. She would have to think about that but now she had to hurry up. She missed the child. At the end of the road the garage had reopened after the afternoon siesta and the Ford was ready.

S
ister Ana was very upset. She had expected the Bishop to have ordered the Mother Superior to hand over the child to the authorities by now. She did not understand why the irrefutable evidence of satanic practices she had showed him had caused him no alarm. After he had left the convent she had returned to her room, dropped in bed and burst into tears because he, the only person in the world whom she trusted, had not believed her. She was certain of his kindness, admired his intelligence, believed he was fair, and therefore she had to blame herself for not having made him understand. She had buried her head in her pillow and sobbed with frustration because she knew that there was something evil about the child in the suitcase even if she could not convince anyone else.

While she had sobbed she had realised that she was no longer driven by her mistrust of the Mother Superior but by her deep faith in God. She reproached herself for not having expected that her task would be testing. She had to apply herself, observe carefully, think very hard about how to solve the mystery, and only then could she hope to defeat the demons that were laying siege to the convent. And so she had stopped sobbing, wiped her tears and begun: ‘
The Lord is my light and my salvation…
’ She had prayed gladly, and then had blown her nose on her sleeve and regained her poise with the promise not to shed another tear until she had triumphed over evil.

On her easel was a canvas she had started only days earlier, Saint George slaying the dragon, but she was not in the mood for painting. What she wanted to do was rest a little before resuming her search for the truth about the child. She had just lain down in bed when there was a knock on her door. Sister Teresa walked in.

‘What do you want?’ Sister Ana asked.

‘I wanted to borrow the gramophone. I thought I could play my records.’

‘The Mother might hear.’

‘She’s gone to the city.’

‘No doubt to see His Excellency,’ Sister Ana said.

Ever since the incident with the crying child, when the Mother Superior had chastised her for singing, Sister Teresa had not played her records, terrified that if the Mother Superior caught her again she would excommunicate her. Sister Ana waved her to the desk, where the gramophone was, but then changed her mind. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Bring over your music instead.’

It had taken Sister Teresa years to build up her record collection with the money that the Mother Superior gave each nun every month, their share of the small profit from the selling of the altar breads. Sister Teresa returned a moment later with a stack of records, cranked the gramophone and took off her shoe to put her sock into the horn. Sister Ana said: ‘You don’t need that. No one will tell the Mother that you were playing music.’

The music sounded loud and melodic in the room with its bare walls. Sister Teresa tapped her feet to the rhythm and began to hum.

‘If you want to sing, sing,’ Sister Ana said. ‘I don’t mind.’

The other nun began to sing in a low voice. When the record ended, she asked Sister Ana for permission to put the needle back to the beginning and gave the crank a few turns. This time she sang better but still blushed with embarrassment, standing up with her eyes shut, imitating her musical idols, whose photographs she hid between the pages of her religious books. She had never sung popular songs in front of anyone before, only hymns in the chapel, but soon her embarrassment passed and she was pleased to have an audience. She asked for a little water, changed the record and started another song.

She believed that her voice was a gift from God and it would have been a sin not to use it, even if the words of her favourite songs were admittedly too bold to be uttered by a nun. She knew that she would never convince the Mother Superior but was happy that at least Sister Ana was on her side. She liked her for it, despite the woman’s lack of humour, her meanness, her manic persecution of a little child who had no one in the world. Sister Teresa continued to sing as best she could, reaching the high notes without difficulty, switching with great ease from festive
bulerías
to solemn
malagueñas
.

Soon after the Mother Superior had left in the Ford that morning, it had begun to rain and it still had not stopped. The rain soaked the empty nests on the chimneys, turned the courtyard into a pool of muddy water and slaked the thirst of the dead waiting under the mossy gravestones of the convent cemetery for the Second Coming. Sister Ana listened to the songs. Although she did not approve of them, she said nothing. Sister Teresa finished a song and asked: ‘Would you like to hear another, Sister?’

‘Go ahead.’

The younger woman picked up another record from the stack, and Sister Ana went to the window. The courtyard was starting to flood. It would remain flooded most of the winter and when it snowed the rainwater would turn to thick ice. A nun with an umbrella passed under the window and crossed the courtyard, walking between the puddles. Sister Ana watched her indifferently. She felt something hit her cheek and looked above her head at the dripping ceiling. She put a bucket to catch the leak and the drops fell noisily in it. Music played on the gramophone and Sister Teresa continued to sing. Sister Ana concentrated her thoughts on the events of the previous weeks. She tried to remember everything that had happened from the moment the Mother Superior announced the discovery of the child on the steps of the convent: the old suitcase, the bloodied bed sheet, the mopped-up floor in a corner of the abandoned school for novices. She rearranged the events over and over again in her mind and tried to recall any peculiar incidents that had taken place days, weeks, even months before they had found the child…anything that might have been important. To her surprise it was not too difficult to do, for life in the convent was regimented with a simple routine that made it easy to identify any unusual event. While all that went on inside her mind, the lines on her forehead deepened and she held her breath. Then suddenly her eyes opened wide and she gave a loud gasp that made Sister Teresa stop in the middle of her song.

A few doors away Sister Beatriz had been swaddling the child when the music had begun. She recognised the flamencos of the placid Sundays from before the trouble began, when she used to sit at her desk reading while the notes from the muffled horn of the gramophone next door travelled into her room and dissolved the words of the Church Fathers she was trying to memorise. When she heard Sister Teresa’s voice, hesitant and low, she was pleased: the convent was at last returning to some semblance of normality. She finished wrapping the child in the strips of cloth, covered him with a blanket and observed him with affection. The Mother Superior had not asked her opinion but Beatriz liked the name she had given him. She decided to take the child to listen to the music. She pulled up the blanket to cover the top of his head and left the room with him in her arms. She walked in the direction of the music but after a few steps understood that it was not coming from Sister Teresa’s room but Sister Ana’s. Disappointed because she knew that there was no way Sister Ana would let the child in, she turned back. At the refectory she picked up an umbrella and went for a walk with the child round the convent.

She crossed the courtyard under the rain, her shoes getting wet and the cold wind passing through her habit. She was confident that the Mother Superior would convince the Bishop to let them bring up the child in the convent. Renato coughed a couple of times and she wrapped him more tightly in the blanket. She took him to the garden, where the last flowers of the season were sinking into the mud, and passed near the spot where Sister Ana had found the buried bed sheet. On her way back from her walk, she heard the bell ringing for midday prayer.

It was time to feed the child. That morning the Mother Superior had instructed her to pray in her room and not take the child to the unheated chapel, where he might catch a cold. She would be angry if she found out that she had taken him for a walk in the rain. But it was not the first time that the young woman had disobeyed her: whenever she had the chance she did not feed him from the bowl. Today she did not have to worry about being caught. The Mother Superior was away and the sisters would be in the chapel. She waited until the prayers began and made her way to her room, where she placed the child in his cradle and then began to undress.

All that time Sister Ana had not stood idle. She was confident that she had found the answer to the riddle but wanted to keep it to herself. Ending the truce in her war against everyone, she dismissed Sister Teresa brusquely: ‘Enough music for now. I have a serious matter to attend to.’ When she was alone, she took another look at the bloodied bed sheet and could not believe that the truth which now seemed so obvious had not come to her earlier. She put the sheet away and went to the Mother Superior’s room; she entered without knocking. Sister Beatriz and the child were not there. She looked for them in the refectory, the kitchen and the chapel but could not find them. She walked in the rain without an umbrella looking for the young nun until finally, when the bell rang for prayer, she caught a glimpse of Sister Beatriz going to her room with the child in her arms. Soaked by the rain, Sister Ana followed her from a distance. A moment later she was pushing open the door and the truth which she had guessed a little earlier was now confirmed: seated by the window and dressed only in her undergarment, Sister Beatriz was breastfeeding her child.

D
espite her successful conjectures, which she had no doubt were the result of Divine Inspiration, Sister Ana never, in fact, managed to guess the whole truth. Its origins went back almost three years, when Bishop Estrada had decided to become confessor to the nuns of the convent of Our Lady of Mercy, not knowing that the Devil was setting him a trap. No one denied that he had a deep-seated faith in God and a great skill in diplomacy, which he had studied so carefully in his youth, but it was wrong of him to feel so confident of his own ability to fend off sin. In the event, evil did not ask him whether he truly believed in God or invite him to complex negotiations for his soul, but instead it struck him a single decisive blow when he least expected it.

The time he had spent with the deserter sentenced to death had shaken his belief in the natural kindness of the world and had set him off on a search for sanctuary. To counter his recurrent sleeplessness, he took to carrying in a secret pocket inside his cassock a silver snuffbox filled with pills that made him shut his eyes the moment his head touched the pillow and sleep without interruption and without dreams. The problem was that he could only take them at night because they caused him to oversleep. And so his siestas remained an ordeal he had to endure awake every afternoon, when he undressed and lay in bed for a brief rest before returning to his desk. His bedroom was in a corner on the top floor of his palace. Both his official residence and the administrative seat of the diocese, the palace had windows that overlooked the river and the distant tiled roofs of the Orphanage of San Rafael the Healer, his proudest achievement. At its opening he had been asked to cut the ribbon in acknowledgement of his efforts, without which the orphanage would not have been built. Then he had delivered a passionate speech about the need for society not to turn its back on the innocent victims of its own recklessness, but to look after them with compassion and generosity. He had said: ‘When people stop playing dice with human lives, there will no longer be a need for places like this. I pray that I am wrong, but fear that the moment will not come either in our or, alas, in God’s lifetime.’

In the middle of the room was a big rococo bed made of Brazilian mahogany that still smelled of the jungle. It was the bed in which he was conceived, in which he was born and in which his parents had died quietly a few years apart of old age. Motivated less by sentimentality than the desperate hope of curing the torment of his siestas, Bishop Estrada had it brought over from his ancestral home and lay under its velvet canopy embroidered with the coat of arms of a family line that was bound to end with him. But the happy memories of his childhood preserved under the layers of varnish did not cure him. Without the sleeping pills to save him, he tossed and turned in the magnificent bed all afternoon and rose even more tired than when he had lain down. Unknown to everyone, he had begun to visit a hypnotist in the capital who tried to hypnotise him with a pendulum, but even though Bishop Estrada believed in modern science the treatment failed.

So when he started to go to the convent of Our Lady of Mercy, he was glad of the chance to leave the city of his afternoon ordeal and breathe the pure air of the mountains, but did not expect that in fact his Sundays there would turn out to be the answer to his prayers. Soon, to his great surprise, he discovered that his sleep became more peaceful, he rested well and his dreams were no longer the plaything of demons but had an innocence and optimism he had not felt in years. He was no longer miserable; he stopped taking the sleeping pills and looked forward to his monthly visits to the convent which had become his fountain of youth. He would arrive in his Model T Ford, one of the first to be shipped from America, and find the Mother Superior and the nuns waiting on the steps, alerted to his coming by the scared birds flying ahead of the explosions of the car exhaust. The women would wait with a jug of iced water, of which he would have several glassfuls before giving them his ring to kiss and entering the convent.

One Sunday morning, soon after he had appointed himself confessor to the nuns of the convent of Our Lady of Mercy, he set out from the city at the same time as always and in a good mood, looking forward to his visit. The car left behind the last vestiges of civilisation and began to climb the road used mostly by lumbermen who had transported wood from the forests since the age of the caravels. Wearing his coat, his airman’s helmet and leather gloves, Bishop Estrada passed the monotony of the journey humming the songs of the
zarzuelas
by Amadeo Vives, Pablo Luna and Jacinto Guerrero, which were popular at that time all over the country and which one could not escape even in one’s sleep. The cold wind beat against his face, the wheels bumped along the rough surface of the track and he was happy.

Some time later, as the Ford was coming out of a sharp bend, the engine puttered and gave out. Thinking that the car had just stalled on the uphill bend, he jumped out and gave the crank a turn. The engine did not start. He had tried the crank several times before he noticed, panting, that the radiator was leaking and when he looked inside he discovered that there were only a few drops of water left. Angry at himself for not having checked the car before setting out, he looked at his watch and guessed that he was closer to the convent than the city, although still a long way away.

The mishap had changed his mood and he no longer hummed as he walked in the direction of the convent. He was still far off when he saw someone on a donkey coming the other way. The animal was walking cautiously along the edge of the track while the rider, sitting side-saddle, was tapping it gently on with a switch. Sister Beatriz had seen him first and he had reminded her of a tireless and determined missionary plodding across some wilderness. She greeted him.

‘At least Our Lord has answered my prayer in part,’ the Bishop said. ‘I had asked Him for a car mechanic.’

The nun got off the donkey and kissed his ring. ‘We were very worried about you,’ she said and fetched her canteen from the saddle. While taking a few dignified sips of water, the Bishop looked in the direction he had come from. ‘Perhaps the radiator would not have rusted if I filled it with holy water,’ he said. ‘Are we far from the convent?’

Sister Beatriz nodded. ‘Do not worry, Your Excellency. You will ride.’

The Bishop glanced at the old donkey. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But only half the journey, Sister. Then promise me that we will swap.’

He gathered up his coat and cassock, sat on the donkey and looked at his feet with amusement: they almost reached the ground. He patted the animal’s head, and the donkey swung its tail a couple of times like a greeting. ‘What is its name?’

‘Midas.’

‘Of course,’ the Bishop said. ‘He bears an obvious resemblance.’

They set out, Bishop Estrada holding onto the pommel and Sister Beatriz walking a few steps ahead of him. It was almost midday in early spring, already warm in the lowlands, where he had begun his journey that morning but still cold in the mountains, where life was only beginning to awake from a deep winter. There was a little snow on the highest peaks of the sierra but none on its forested slopes, which resonated with birdsong. A short while later, as they rounded another bend and the landscape opened up, there was a view of the interminable plain very far away, gleaming in the sunlight, a patchwork of green and brown fields. The Bishop stood mesmerised by its immensity until the track changed direction again, and animal and humans continued their ascent with their backs to the plain. It had been impossible to notice any of this on his previous journeys behind the clouds of dust, the noise and the smell of petrol. Shivering a little inside his coat, Bishop Estrada observed the young woman. He said: ‘Remind me of your name, Sister.’

‘Beatriz, Your Excellency.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Far from here.’

‘Everywhere is far from here,’ the Bishop said light-heartedly. ‘Is it colder than this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you must come from the North Pole.’

They said nothing else until they arrived at the convent late in the afternoon. The nuns received him with great shows of joy, kissing his ring and asking what had happened to him, offering him glasses of water, plates of fruit, handkerchieves sprinkled with eau de cologne to hold under his nose, cold compresses to place on his forehead in case he had suffered a heatstroke, despite it being a cold April day. Tired from the journey, Bishop Estrada said: ‘Enough, Sisters, please. I think you mistake me for the Messiah because I came on the donkey.’ Then he remembered that he had not switched places with Sister Beatriz during the ride. ‘Thank you for your deceit, Sister,’ he told her. ‘But if we make any agreement again, promise me to honour it.’

His room had been prepared but he did not wish to rest and went straight to the chapel to hear confessions while there was still light. He had suggested that the women should always draw lots to decide the order in which they would come to confession. The system he had devised meant that he did not know who was speaking to him from the other side of the lattice and the nuns would feel freer to speak without qualms, without fear and without shame. The only voice he thought he recognised was the Mother Superior’s.

Later, at the altar, he felt a nervousness he had not felt since the early days of his priesthood, when he occasionally celebrated Mass while still a student of ecclesiastical diplomacy. He now did his duty without difficulty but could not stop wondering why he felt this way. He could only attribute it to his tiredness after the biblical journey on the donkey. Whenever he turned away from the altar to face his small congregation, his eyes sought, as if of their own volition, the young woman who had come to his rescue earlier that day.

It was almost evening when the Mass ended and it was too cold to eat outside. The Mother Superior invited the Bishop to have dinner in the refectory. The food had long gone cold but he insisted that he did not wish it warmed up. He ate without appetite, keeping his eyes fixed on his plate while repeating his regular jokes, which, no matter how many times he said them, never seemed to lose their ability to entertain. He finished his food before everyone else and declined the repeated offers of a second helping. Sister María Inés escorted him to her room for their customary discussion about the affairs of the convent and his last cup of coffee before leaving for the city. It was almost dark when she opened the ledger where all the business matters of the convent were recorded. ‘I am afraid you will have to stay the night, Your Excellency,’ she said. ‘It is impossible to take you to your car in the dark.’

The Bishop, grateful for her hospitality, accepted. He sipped at his coffee, paying no attention to the ledger. ‘That sister of yours,’ he said, after a while.

The Mother Superior raised her eyes from the book.

‘The one who came in search of me with the donkey earlier today,’ the Bishop continued. ‘She was extremely kind to let me ride all the way.’

‘She has not been here very long. Beatriz came shortly before we lost our old confessor. So far I am very pleased with her. She is very capable. She could well become my successor.’

The Bishop asked no more questions but leaned over the ledger and pretended to listen while the Mother Superior went through the accounts line by line. When she finished, more than an hour later, he asked for a lamp to light his way to the guesthouse and said goodnight, promising the Mother Superior to say Mass again the following morning before returning to the city. Although he was very tired, he slept very little. He lay in bed watching the moon through the windows, listening to an owl hidden in the roof and thinking of the young nun. He regretted no longer carrying the snuffbox with the sleeping pills. A little before dawn he finally drifted off and dreamed of the young nun coming to his room. She wore a loose nightdress, which she unbuttoned standing in the middle of the room and let it drop like a feather to the floor before joining him under the covers. Not long afterwards the first shafts of sunlight woke him up with a sudden jolt. Full of remorse for his impure dream, he knelt and prayed with his eyes shut, hoping that his having yielded to temptation in his sleep would be the end of it. But in his most secret and true thoughts he already knew that it was merely the beginning.