How I Became a Nun by César Aira (translated by Chris Andrews).
Title: How I Became a Nun.
Author: César Aira (translated by Chris Andrews).
Genre: Fiction.
Country: Argentina.
Language: Spanish.
Publication Date: 1993.
Summary: The novel chronicles a year in the fantastic internal and external life of an introverted six-year-old called César, who sees herself as a girl, but is referred to by the rest of the world as a boy. When taken for ice-cream for the first time with their father, César's life goes off the rails when they receive cyanide poisoning from the ice-cream, and their father kills the ice-cream vendor in a rage. Coming back from the hospital to their father imprisoned, and having difficulty connecting to other children in a new environment, César sinks deeper and deeper into the world of imagination and child fancy.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ We made our way on foot to an ice-cream store that we had noticed the previous day. In we went. Dad ordered a fifty-cent ice cream for himself, with scoops of pistachio, sweet cream, and whisky-kumquat; for me he ordered a ten-cent cone with a single scoop of strawberry. I loved the pink color. My frame of mind was positive. I was a devoted daughter. Dad could do no wrong in my eyes. We sat down on a sidewalk bench, under the trees (there were plane trees back then in downtown Rosario). I watched how Dad was doing it; in a matter of seconds he had disposed of his scoop of green ice cream. I dipped my little spoon in with great care and lifted it to my mouth.
No sooner had the first particles dissolved on my tongue than I felt physically ill. I had never tasted anything so revolting. I was rather fussy about food and had mastered the art of feigning disgust when I didn't feel like eating, but this went beyond anything I had ever tasted; it more than justified my worst exaggerations, even the ones I had refrained from acting out. For a fraction of a second I considered pretending. Dad had set his heart on making me happy, which was unusual, given his distant, irascible nature, averse to displays of affection, so it seemed a sin to spoil the occasion. I briefly envisioned the horrific prospect of eating the whole ice cream just to please him. It was only a thimbleful, the tiniest, kiddie-size cup, but at that moment it might as well have been a ton.
I don't know if my heroism would have stretched that far, but I didn't get a chance to put it to the test. The first mouthful provoked an involuntary grimace of disgust; Dad couldn't help but see. The grimace was almost exaggerated, expressing both the physiological reaction and its accompanying emotions: disillusion, fear, and the terrible sadness of being unable to bond with my father, even
in the pursuit of a simple pleasure. Trying to hide it would have been absurd; even today, I couldn't hide it if I tried, because that grimace is still there on my face.
"What's wrong?"
Everything that was going to happen was audible in his tone.
♥ Dad had already given up hope of getting any satisfaction form the outing. Sharing a pleasure and a moment of companionship: it was too late for all that now, and he must have been wondering how he could have been so naïve, how he could ever have thought it possible. And yet, just to rub salt into his own wound, he set about trying to convince me of my mistake. Or to convince himself that I was his mistake.
♥ My father was a statue, a block of stone. Shaken, trembling, tear-sodden, holding the ice cream cone in one hand and the spoon in the other, my red face twisted in an anxious wince, I was paralyzed too. More so in fact, since I was fastened to a pain that towered over my childhood, my smallness, and my extreme vulnerability, indicating the scale if the universe. Dad had given up.
♥ But nothing lasts forever. Something else always happens.
♥ "I don't believe this. Son of a bitch..."
He was slightly hesitant. He must have been wondering how he was going to take me home. Poor Dad, he didn't realize that he would never take me home again. Although I'm sure that if someone had told him right then, he would have been relieved.
♥ But then the situation turned around. He screwed up his face in a grimace of disgust and spat emphatically. It was revolting! I was staring at him pop-eyed (I was pop-eyed already from the retching), seeing double or triple. I should have been exulting in the triumph of the weak, a sentiment I knew so well, the triumph of those for whom vindication always comes too late. And perhaps there was an element of that, since the habit was deeply ingrained. But I didn't feel exultant. In fact I didn't really understand what was going on. Instead of accepting the obvious explanation, as any person in their right mind would have done, I was so caught up in the disaster that I was looking for something more baroque, another turn of the screw that would not cancel out what had gone before.
♥ There was that stalling of imperceptible movements that precedes the swing into action. He wasn't a man of action; in that respect he was normal. But sometimes action has to be taken. He didn't look at me. Throughout the rest of that ill-fated afternoon, he didn't look at me again. Although I must have been quite a sight to behold. Not once did he look in my direction. Looking would have been a kind of explaining, and it was already too late for explanation to bridge the gap between us.
♥ At that moment two teenagers walked in. The ice cream vendor turned to them with a look of triumph on his face.
"Two one-peso cones."
The one-peso ice creams were big: four scoops. At the time two pesos was a considerable sum. The scene underwent a radical change. It was transformed by a new light, the light of prosperity and normality; the wide world had entered the shop in the form of those two teenagers. The sinister figure of the madman complaining about some nuance in the flavor of a ten-cent ice cream had been swept aside. This opening up of the situation called for new rules. Rational rules, which had been lacking. Any relationship, even (or specially) mine with Dad, has its rules. But there were also the general rules for the game of life.
The ice cream vendor was quick to realize this, and it was the last thing he realized
♥ I lost consciousness, my body began to dissolve... literally... My organs deliquesced... turning to green and blue bags of slime hanging from stony necroses... with no life but the cold fire of infection... and decomposition... swellings... bundles of ganglia... A heart the size of a lentil, numb with cold, beating in the midst of the ruins... a faltering whistle in my twisted trachea... nothing more...
I was a victim of the terrible cyanide contamination... the great wave of lethal food poisoning that was sweeping Argentina and the neighboring countries that year...
..I got off lightly. I survived. I lived to tell the tale... but in the end I had to pay a high price... like they say. Buy cheaply, pay dearly.
♥ I kept my eye to the keyhole, hypnotized by that unreal scene... But there they were in the midst of that unreality, my parents, it really was them... Not just their masks, but also their expressions, their tics, their style, their stories... That was how I saw my parents, especially Dad... it was different with Mom... I didn't see Dad's outward appearance as other people did... I saw the way he was, his past, his reactions, his reasoning... it was the same with Mom, now that I think of it... not that I was especially insightful, but they were my parents, so they had no form, or didn't reveal it to me... or wouldn't... that was the tragedy of my childhood and my whole life... My vision couldn't be satisfied with what was visible, it had to go rushing on, beyond, into the abyss, dragging me along behind...
♥ 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; 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.
♥ 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 so that the answer was a simple yes or no. If I had always lied, he would have started translating every answer into its opposite. I considered it my duty to lie every time; so in order to protect myself, I had to proceed in a roundabout way, which isn't all that easy when you have to reply yes or no, without hedging. On top of this, I had resolved never to mix any truth with my lies. I was afraid that if I lost track, chance would be able to intervene.
♥ But the doctor and Mom were hardly more than a brief distraction in the course of the day, which stretched before me, majestically impassive, rolling out from morning to night. It didn't seem long, but it filled me with a kind of respect. Each instant was different and new and unrepeatable. That was the very nature of time, ceaselessly realizing itself, in every life... My malicious little strategies seemed so petty, I was overcome with shame...
♥ It's funny, now that I think of it, that no mime artist, not even the best, not even Marcel Marceau himself (who is the hardest of all to understand for me), has ever tried to mime a dwarf... Why should that be? In the language of gestures, the dwarf must be the unsayable.
♥ The first weeks were a stream of pure images. Human beings tend to make sense of experience by imbuing it with continuity: what is happening now can be explained by what happened before. ..The drama started later on... Why is it that drama always starts late? Whereas comedy always seems to have started already. Except that later on we come to see that it was the other way around... The drama was triggered for me by the realization that the mute scene I was witnessing, the teacher's and pupils' abstract mimicry, affected me vitally. It was my story, not someone else's. The drama had begun as soon as I had set foot in the school, and it was unfolding before me, entire and timeless. I was and was not involved in it; I was present, but not a participant, or participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the performance, but that gap was me! At least I had finally realized (and for this I should have been grateful) why I was missing out on the mental soundtrack: I couldn't read. My little classmates could.
♥ Now, except for that central word, the rest was meaningless noise to me. I was almost unimaginably vague, not because I was stupid, but because nothing really mattered to me. This is an enormous paradox, because everything mattered to me, far too much; I made a mountain out of every molehill, and that was my main problem... I might have seemed indifferent, but nothing could have been further from the truth and I knew it.
♥ But something prevented me from expressing this thought; my hypocrisy had recesses that were obscure even to me.
♥ I understood what it meant to read. Mothers were mixed up with that too! What I had mistaken for drawings, or some kind of recondite algebra in which the teachers specialized for reasons that were none of my concern, turned out to mean the things that people said, things that could be said anywhere, by anyone, even me. I thought it was just school stuff, but it was the stuff of life itself. Words, silent words, mimicry, the process by which words signified themselves... I understood that I didn't know how to read, and the others did. That's what it had all been about, all that I had suffered in ignorance. In an instant I grasped the enormity of the disaster. Not that I was particularly intelligent or lucid; the understanding happened in me, but I had almost no part in it, and that was the most horrible thing.
♥ Until the age of fourteen, I thought children came out of their mothers' belly buttons. And I discovered my mistake, at the age of fourteen, in a most peculiar way. I was reading an article about sex education in an issue of Selecciones, and in a paragraph about the ignorance in which young girls were kept in Japan, I found this scandalous example: a fourteen-year old Japanese girl had professed her belief that children came out of their mothers' belly buttons. That was exactly what I, a fourteen-year old Argentinean girl, believed. Except that from then on, I knew it wasn't true. And, rightly or wrongly, I pitied my Japanese counterpart.
♥ We took a bus. Halfway there I had a panic attack for no reason and burst into tears. Up went the curtain of my private theater. Mom looked at me, unamazed. Yes, unamazed.
♥ "Mom, where's Dad? Why doesn't he come home?"
I adopted a tone of voice that signified: "Stop lying to me. Let's behave like adults. I might look like I'm three years old, but I'm six, and I have a right to know the truth."
Mom had told me the whole truth. I knew he was in prison, waiting for the verdict: an eight-year sentence for homicide. I knew all that. The only reason for these untimely doubts of mine was to make her tell the story for the benefit of perfect strangers. How could her daughter be capable of such an idiotic betrayal? She couldn't believe it (nor could I). But the panic that I was exhibiting was all too real As usual, I had managed to confuse her. It was easy: all I had to do was confuse myself.
"He's sick," she said in another inaudible whisper. "That's why we're going to visit him."
♥ But my magic started acting on me: a melancholy fantasy suddenly transported my soul to a region far, far away. Why didn't I have any dolls? Why was I the only girl in the world who didn't have a single doll? My dad was in prison... and I didn't have a doll to keep me company. I had never had one, and I didn't know why. It wasn't because my parents were poor or stingy (when did that ever stop a child?). There was some other mysterious reason... And yet, although the mystery remained, poverty was a factor. Especially now. Now we were going to be really poor, Mom and I: abandoned, all on our own. And that was why I felt the need of a doll so sharply, so painfully. True to my dramatic style, I surrendered to a nostalgic lament, rich in variations. The doll had disappeared forever, before I learnt the words with which to ask for it, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of my sentences... I saw myself as a lost doll, discarded, without a girl...
That was me. The inexistent girl. Living, I was dead. If I had died, Dad would have been free. The judges would have been merciful to the father who had taken a life for a life, especially since one was the life of his darling daughter and the other the life of a complete stranger. But I had survived. I wasn't the same as before, I could tell. I didn't know how or why, but I wasn't the same. For one thing, my memory had gone blank. I couldn't remember anything before the incident in the ice-cream store. Maybe I didn't even remember that properly. Maybe, in fact, the ice-cream vendor's life had been swapped for mine. I had begun to live when he died. That's why I felt like I was dead, dead and invisible...
♥ Once I was in there, I kept quiet. I sat down on the floor. I thought: I'm going to spend the whole night here. It was four in the afternoon, but for me the night had already begun. I couldn't go any further, because it was a dead end. And it didn't occur to me to go back... In that respect I was consistent. Even if my parents didn't always say it, their eternal refrain was "This time you've gone too far." Never "You've come back from too far away," I guess because once you've gone too far there's no way back.
♥ The experienced liar knows that the secret of success is to pretend convincingly not to know certain things. For example the consequences of what one is saying, so that others will seem to discover them first.
♥ Women's voices, the social workers... Mom's voice too... I even thought I heard Dad's voice-my heart skipped a beat-that beloved voice, which I hadn't heard for so many months, and then I really did wish I had wings to fly away... But I couldn't. This was always happening, so often that it literally was the story of my life: hearing a voice, understanding the orders it was giving me, wanting to obey, and not being able to... Because reality, the only sphere in which I could have acted, kept withdrawing at the speed of my desire to enter it...
In this case, and maybe in all the others too, I had the marvelous consolation of knowing that I was an angel. This knowledge transformed the situation, turning it into a dream, but a real dream. It was a transformation of reality. The cruel delirium I had suffered as a result of the fever was a transformation too, but the opposite kind. In the real dream, reality took the form of happiness or paradise. The transformation could go either way, reality becoming delirium or dream, but the real dream turned dreamlike in turn, becoming the angel, or reality.
♥ The third soap opera, which started at eight (they were all half an hour long) was definitely for adults. It was about love and featured all the stars of the day. In a sense, this serial connected with reality itself, while the others skirted around it. One proof of this-I saw it as a proof in any case-was the complication of the story. The reality that I knew, my reality, wasn't complicated. On the contrary, it was simplicity itself. It was too simple. I can't summarize the Lux serial as I did with the other two. It didn't have an underlying mechanism; it was pure, free-floating complication. There was a given that guaranteed its perpetual complication: everyone was in love. There were no secondary characters playing supporting roles. They were like molecules with love valencies reaching out into space, into the sonorous ether, and every one of those little yearning arms found a hold. The tangle was so dense, it created a new simplicity: the simplicity of compactness. Space was no longer empty, porous and intangible; it had become a solid rock of love. By contrast, my life was so simple it hardly existed. Deprived as I was, the message I seemed to be receiving from the "radio drama of the stars" was that growing up was a preparation for love, and that only the multitudinous night sky could make a totality, or at least something, out of nothing.
♥ It's inexplicable. It is the inexplicable. The mass media provide an ultimate refuge for the truly inexplicable.
♥ This calmed my overactive memory... I felt I was no longer beginning to live, with the furious cruelty of beginnings, but simply going on with my life...
♥ And time really was passing, slowly and majestically. The catastrophe turned out to be a mere possibility, and was left behind. This gave me the impression that there would be no more catastrophes in my life: I would have a life, like everyone else, and look down on catastrophes from the superior vantage point afforded by the consciousness of time... and this was what seemed to be happening. At school the teacher went on ignoring me, which was just as well. Mom didn't take me back to the prison. I was in good health. I didn't mind the simplicity of my life. A certain peace had come over me. I was discovering that time, long-term time made of days, weeks and months, and not of horrific moments as before, was operating in my favor. Nothing else was, but that didn't worry me. Time was enough. I clung on to time, and consequently to learning, the only human activity that makes time our ally.
♥ I found this pastime absorbing. So absorbing that it began to give me pleasure, the first lasting and governable pleasure of my life. It was an aching, almost overwhelming pleasure-that's just the way I was. And soon it underwent a sublimation, transcending itself... Almost independently of my will, it created a supplement, which my imagination seized upon with a mad voracity. I transcended school. I began to give instructions. Instructions for everything, for life. I gave them to no one, to impalpable beings within my personality, who didn't even take imaginary forms. They were no one and they were everyone.
The instructions I gave could refer to anything at all. In principle, they were instructions for something I was doing, but they could also be for an activity in which I was not and would never be engaged (such as scaling a mountain peak), which didn't stop me prescribing a method for it in the minutest detail. But mainly my instructions referred to what I happened to be doing; that was the default case, the model. It got to the point where everything I did was doubled by instructions for doing it.
..The game took over my life. How to hold a fork, how to raise it to one's mouth, how to take a sip of water, how to look out the window, how to open a door, how to shut it, how to switch on the light, how to tie one's shoelaces... Everything accompanied by an unbroken flow of words: "Do it like this... never do it like that... once I did it like this... be careful to... some people prefer to... this way the results are not so..." It was a rapid flow, very rapid, with never a pause for me to catch my breath, because keeping up the pace was essential to getting it right, and I was setting an example. There were so many activities for which I had to issue instructions... no end to them... and some were simultaneous: glancing slightly to the right at a point just above the horizon, controlling the movement of the eyes and the head (and this glance had to be accompanied by some elegant and appropriate thought, or it would be worthless!), at the same time as picking up a little stone with a precise movement of the fingers... How to manipulate cutlery, how to put on one's trousers, how to swallow saliva. How to keep still, how to sit on a chair, how to breathe! I was doing yoga without knowing it, hyper-yoga... But it wasn't an exercise for me: it was a class. I took it for granted that I already knew everything, I had mastered it all... that's why it was my duty to teach... And I really did know it all, naturally I did, since the knowledge was life itself unfolding spontaneously. Although the main thing was not knowing, or even doing, but explaining, opening out the folds of knowledge... And so curious are the mechanisms of the mind and language, that sometimes I surprised myself in the role of pupil, receiving my own instructions.
♥ Mom was my best friend. it wasn't one of those choices that defines a personality, or any other sort of choice, but a necessity. We were alone, isolated. What did we have left to cling to but each other? In such cases we make a virtue of necessity, which doesn't mean it's any less virtuous. Or any less necessary.
♥ ..Mom had no hope of pretending with me. My monstrous, piercing eyes prevented any living being from merging into the background of my life.
♥ Like everything else about him, his courtesy was over the top. He never missed an opportunity to celebrate my virtues, the towering superiority of my intellect relative to his... And perhaps he was right, without realizing. For a start, I kept my inner life to myself, while he revealed his. Concealment means you have something to conceal. I had nothing but concealed it anyway, stepping onto the world's stage like someone who has just buried a treasure. ..And then I didn't follow his example in matter of style. He was no help to me in that regard. The hallucinatory style of which I was the supreme mistress remained pristine within me, immune to his influence or any other. Style-wise, Arturito represented another world, the world of wealth... His hallucination threw mine into relief... being rich meant jumping to a whole new level, beyond style, provision and refinement: life became one radiant, compact mass, without the halftones and subtle differential movements that gave my life sense. So without really meaning to, without malice, I concealed myself entirely from Arturito. I concealed a small part of myself and that part concealed the rest... I betrayed my one, irreplaceable friend. How could I have done it? I don't know. Or maybe I do. It was as if I had put on a mask, to shield the twists and turns of an ever-changing subject.
♥ I was worried, uneasy: Arturito was so impulsive, so wrapped up in his own world... What would he come back with? He might offend me without meaning to. I had a twinge of dread, but it didn't last long. I trusted my impassivity, which was supernatural.
There was no need to be worried. All he came back with was a cardboard nose. He had used it for one of the jokes he was always playing... His philosophy began and ended with the idea that a busy social life could only be fuelled by large quantities of humor, and humor, as he understood it, consisted of practical jokes, the sort that are funny to look back on.
♥ He came back clacking something in his hand. His grandmother's porcelain false teeth. I wasn't surprised that he'd been able to steal them; she didn't wear them all the time... The clack-clack sound he was making resonated in the silence, that silence in which anything could be stolen...
♥ He looked at me and I looked at myself in his terrified eyes, as I wriggled free of his grip and ran away... as fast as I could, in panic... Where was I going? Where was I running to? If only I had known! I was running away form jokes, from humor and future anecdotes... I was running away from friendship, and not because I disdained it or had something more important to do, as Arturito thought, in his innocence: it was pure, darkest horror that gave my feet wings.
♥ It was as if everything had worn thin and become transparent... I clung to that transparence, but without anxiety or pain, as if I wasn't clinging but moving freely through it, like a bird. I felt the pull of open spaces, like those I had known in Pringles, although I had no memory of Pringles; a total amnesia cut me off from my life before Rosario, before the invention of my memory. But the spaces of Pringles were not a memory. They were a desire, a kind of happiness that could exist anywhere: all I had to do was open my eyes, hold out my hand...
That space, that happiness had a color: rose-pink. The pink of the sky at sunset, a vast, transparent, faraway pink whose absurd apparition represented my life. I was vast, transparent and faraway, and my absurd life represented the sky. Living was painting; coloring myself with the pink of the inexplicably suspended light...
♥ Mom was a village girl, and though not completely ignorant (she had done a year of secondary school), she was naïve, easily taken in... So different from me! She not only believed what she read in the gutter press (if it came to that, I probably did too), but applied it to her own real life. That was the key difference, the abyss that separated us. I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, form the common reality made up of shared beliefs...
♥ Suddenly reality, the reality of the kidnapping, hit me. And I wasn't prepared for it. I couldn't believe it. My politeness was sheer idiocy. For the sake of manners, I was giving up everything, even my life. From that moment on I was seized by an immense fear. But the fear remained hidden beneath my manners. Wasn't that typical? Any other reaction would have amazed me.
"I'll take you back home afterwards. I want to say hello to your Mom, it's so long since I've seen her." She anticipated my answer with an intensity multiplied a thousand-fold.
"Ah, all right them," I said theatrically, exaggerating my willingness. It was the least I could do, to thank her for making an effort to clear away the impediments.