How I Became A Nun Read Online Free

fingers one by
     one …
    Yet another: I was still rigid with fear, my head propped up on a thick pillow, and my
     mother went to open the cupboard with green glass doors opposite the bed, in which I
     kept my books… To tell the truth I didn’t have any books: I was too young,
     I hadn’t learnt to read … I began to panic … I could hardly breathe
     … What had Mom gone to get from the cupboard? Could she have known? She was
     taking advantage of my helplessness to … Any moment now she would find it, my
     secret … Stop, Mom! Don’t do it! It will only bring you grief, the most
     terrible grief of your life! A grief to match my shame and terror …
    Needless to say there was no secret … I never had any secrets, although, at the
     same time, everything was a secret, but not on purpose … Delirium provided a
     model, and not just a model … Mom was rummaging through the cupboard … as
     the waters rose … instead of doing something useful, like picking me up and
     carrying me in her arms across the fields, over the flooded plains to a safe place! I
     hated her for that … She went on searching, in a daze, although the otter, who
     had suddenly become my accomplice, was gnawing at her ankles under the water …
     and I knew that she had only minutes left to live, the poison would already be taking
     effect … that is, if she had eaten the chocolate. And I hoped to God she had!
    I hoped … if only … But no. It wasn’t a matter of this or that
     happening … but of how the events were combined, or rather the order in which
     they occurred … The ordering was different … They were repeating
     themselves … Or rather, drifting free … When it was really bad, I wondered
     if I was going crazy.
    Over all these stories hovered another, more conventional in a way, but more fantastic
     too. Separate from the series, it functioned like a “background,” always
     there. It was a kind of static story … a chilling episode, with a wealth of
     horrific details … It filled me with dread, making the four-part delirium seem
     like light entertainment by comparison … Except that it wasn’t just one
     more element, a bolt of lightning in a stormy sky … it was everything that was
     happening to me … everything that would happen to me in an eternity that had not
     yet begun and would never end … I was the girl in an illustrated book of fairy
     tales; I had become a myth … I was seeing it from inside …
    From inside … I was alone in the house. Mom and Dad had gone to a wake and they
     had left me shut inside … in that little old house in Pringles where we no longer
     lived … alone with my four cartoon stories going round and round in my head
     … my crown of thorns … the two doors were locked, the wooden shutters
     closed … a safe for my parents’ living treasure: me. The realism was
     meticulous, hermetic … But when I say that I was alone, that the house was
     locked, that it was night, these are not circumstances, or sundry elements that could be
     linked in a series … The series (the flood, the otter, the chocolates, the
     secret) was out there, using up all the delirium my fever could generate… The
     only thing left in here was reality, in one great cumbersome, wildly plausible block
     …
    I had been sternly instructed not to open the door to anyone, under any circumstances. As
     if I needed to be told! My life depended on it, and not only my life. It was the first
     time I had been left on my own (this never happened in reality) but it was unavoidable
     … The first time is always frightening, because of the unknown … I was
     confident, the instructions were simple … Don’t open the door. I could do
     that. It was easy. They could trust me. Anyway, who would come, at midnight …? My
     life and my safety depended on the answer to that question … Who, who, who could
     it be?
    But someone was knocking at the front door! Beating as if they wanted to break it down!
     They