How I Became A Nun Read Online Free Page B

prompted by an idiotic optimism
     … ? Would I believe them?
    How could I tell? That was the worst thing: there was no end to it … Or rather:
     there was. Because if the only thing missing had been the end, in a way I could have
     stayed calm, waiting for it … putting it off, leaving it for later … But
     the waiting
was
the end! It was and it wasn’t … It almost seemed
     like nothing at all. Because I couldn’t see anything, the delirium wasn’t
     strong enough, or it was too strong … I couldn’t see the house in which I
     was trapped, I couldn’t see the horrendous mannequins besieging it … the
     souls of Mom and Dad … It wasn’t a hallucination … If only it had
     been: what a relief! No, it was a force … an invisible radiation …
    It lasted a month. Amazingly, I survived. I could say: I woke up. Coming out of the
     delirium was like being released from prison. It would have been logical to feel
     relieved, but I didn’t. Something had broken inside me, a valve, the little safety
     device that used to allow me to switch levels.
     
4
     
    WHEN I REGAINED consciousness, I found myself in the pediatric ward of
     the Rosario Central Hospital.
    I opened my eyes and found myself in a world that was new to me: the world of mothers.
     Dad didn’t come to visit me once. But every single day I waited for him, with a
     mixture of longing and apprehension that prolonged my delirious trains of thought in a
     milder form. Mom came, though, and the scent of terror she brought with her was like
     Dad’s shadow. There was no escaping it, because now I was locked into the system
     of accumulation, in which nothing is ever left behind. I didn’t ask her about him.
     She was different. She seemed distracted, worried, anxious. She didn’t stay long;
     she said she had things to do, and I understood. The other beds were attended
     twenty-four hours a day by mothers, aunts and grandmothers taking turns. I was alone, a
     daughter abandoned in a maternal realm.
    There were about forty children in the ward with me, with all sorts of conditions, from
     broken bones to leukemia. I never counted them, or made any friends; I didn’t even
     speak to any of them.
    It took them forever to discharge me, so all the beds were vacated and reoccupied during
     my stay, ten times or more in some cases. There were all sorts, from kids who seemed to
     be in excellent health and made a phenomenal racket, to others who were listless, lying
     still or asleep … I was in the second category. I was so weak I couldn’t
     move, and permanently drowsy. A kind of lethargy would set in mid-afternoon and last for
     hours. I didn’t even swivel my eyes. Sometimes it went on for whole days or weeks;
     I could feel myself falling back into that state without having come out of it, at least
     not consciously … And it was a very long way to fall …
    Every day, just at the worst time, or the beginning of the worst time, the doctor came to
     visit me. He must have been interested in my case; survivors of the cyanide poisoning
     were rare. I once heard him pronounce the word “miracle.” If there had been
     a miracle, it was entirely involuntary. I was not cooperating with science. An urge, a
     whim or a manic obsession that not even I could explain impelled me to sabotage the
     doctor’s work, to trick him. I pretended to be stupid … I must have thought
     the opportunity was too good to waste. I could be as stupid as I liked, with impunity.
     But it wasn’t simply a matter of passive resistance. Doing nothing at all was too
     haphazard, because sometimes nothing can be the right response, and I was determined not
     to let chance determine my fate. So even though I could have left his questions
     unanswered, I took the trouble to answer them. I lied. I said the opposite of the truth,
     or the opposite of what seemed truest to me. But again it wasn’t simply a matter
     of saying the opposite … He soon learned how to formulate his questions