How I Became A Nun (8 page)

Anyway, the inexplicable presence of that singer in some deep recess of my memory, some
deep recess of the radio and the universe, is the strangest thing in this book. The
strangest thing that has happened to me. The only thing I can’t account for. Not
that my aim is to explain the tissue of deeply strange events that is my life, but in
this case I suspect that an explanation exists, really exists, somewhere in Argentina,
in the mind of one of her children, one of her nephews or nieces, or an eye witness
… Or the mind of the Tone Deaf Singer herself … perhaps she is still
alive, and remembers, and if she is reading this … My number is in the telephone
book. My answering machine is always on, but I’m here beside the phone. All you
have to do is make yourself known … Not by name, of course, your name
wouldn’t mean anything to me. Sing. Just a few notes will do, a phrase, however
short, from any of those songs, and I will certainly recognize you.

THE RADIO HELPED ME to live. The repetition that didn’t always
happen gave me a measure of life: a surprise gift for me to unwrap, mad with joy, as the
flow of sound made up its mind whether to be the same or different … 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 …

I don’t know if this is something that my readers have noticed, but time is always
double: one kind of time always conveys another, as its supplement. The time of the
radio’s live repetitions conveyed the time that was passing. The palanquin carried
the elephant. 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.

And that is how, for once in my life, I ended up doing something typical of a girl my
age: identifying with the teacher. All girls go through a phase of busily giving lessons
to their dolls or the imaginary children who inhabit them. How absurd for someone who
knows nothing to throw herself so eagerly into teaching. But what a sublime absurdity.
What catechisms of feral pedagogy await the perspicacious observer. What lessons in the
primacy of action.

As I had no dolls, I had to make do with make-believe children. And as I didn’t
have any already made up, I used real ones, reimagining them as I pleased. They were my
classmates, the only children I knew, and they were ideal for my purposes, because I had
no idea of their lives outside school. For me they were absolute schoolchildren. To make
the game more fun, I gave them twisted, difficult, baroque personalities. Each one
suffered from a different and complicated kind of dyslexia. Being the perfect teacher, I
dealt with them individually, attentive to their particular needs, setting tasks adapted
to their capacities.

For example … In order to explain this game, I have to fall back on examples. This
means switching levels, because until now I have managed to avoid the pernicious logic
of examples. I’m making a brief exception here solely in the interests of clarity.
For example, then, one child’s peculiar dyslexia consisted of putting all the
vowels together at the beginning of a word, followed by the consonants. He would write
the word “consonants” as “ooacnsnnts”. That was a relatively
simple case. Others got the shapes of the letters wrong, writing them back to front
… The first example is purely imaginary, no living being has ever been dyslexic
in that way; the second is more realistic, but only because it happens to coincide, by
pure chance, with a real possibility. I didn’t know what dyslexia was; I
didn’t suffer from it myself, nor did any of my classmates. I had reinvented it
all on my own, to make the game more fun. I didn’t even suspect that such a
disorder might really exist, and would have been surprised to learn that it did.

There were forty-two of us in the class (forty-three including me, but the teacher never
included me in the roll-call or acknowledged my presence in any way); so my imaginary
class consisted of forty-two children. Forty-two individual cases. Forty-two novels. The
idea of leaving even one of them out to lighten the burden would have been inconceivable
to me. And the burden was colossal. Because for each kind of dyslexia I had also come up
with a unique and appropriate family background and etiology, couched in the somewhat
deranged terms at my disposal, but displaying remarkable intuition on the part of a
six-year old. For example, in the case of the boy who wrote letters back to front, his
dad was a woman and his mom was a man. This affected his performance at school, either
because he had to help his mom prepare the meals (being a man, his mom didn’t know
how to cook), leaving no time for homework, or because the family lived in wretched
poverty (his dad, being a woman, couldn’t get a proper job). I had to make sure
that the cooperative provided the family with stationery, pens, pencils, etc. And every
one of the other forty-one cases was just as involved. It was hellishly complicated. No
real teacher would have taken on a task of such magnitude.

The situation was aggravated by the inflexible pedagogical principles I had imposed on
myself: the complication could never be simplified, it could only progress. Although my
system of teaching was labyrinthine (because of the number of students), it was a
one-way labyrinth, with valves all facing in the same direction. The idea wasn’t
to correct each student’s dyslexia, not at all. I wanted to teach them to read and
write on their own terms, each according to his particular hieroglyphic system: only
within that system was progress possible. For example, the boy who wrote back to front
might begin by writing the word
mother
that way and go on to write a
thousand-page back-to-front book, a dictionary, anything. I hadn’t invented
disorders so much as systems of difficulty. They weren’t destined to be cured but
developed. I’m using the word “dyslexia” here only because the
condition is familiar and happens to bear a purely formal resemblance to my systems.

I would read out a dictation passage (in my head, of course, in imagination) then I would
collect the (also imaginary) exercise books, and with that absolute honesty only to be
observed among children at play, I conscientiously examined forty-two hieroglyphic
texts, correcting each according to its unique and nontransferable rule.

As if that wasn’t enough, for each kind of dyslexia I also had to determine as best
I could how it would affect the student’s performance in subjects other than
Spanish: Mathematics, Physical Education, Drawing, and so on. To use the simplest
example again (others were far more complex), the boy who wrote back to front not only
counted using numbers written backwards, but also reversed the functions, so that two
plus two made zero, and two minus two made four; the Argentinean nationalists demanded a
closed
meeting of the council in May 1810, Columbus discovered Europe, the
fruit came before the flower; as for his drawings, I had to imagine them.

I had to imagine everything, because I gave my classes without props or materials of any
kind, not even a piece of paper to take notes on (in any case, at that early stage in my
stumbling education I wrote so slowly that there was no way I could have taken notes on
the fly, like a stenographer, and I had to keep moving quickly in order to make any
progress with so many students). I did it sitting still, concentrating hard, with my
eyes open, and some idle part of my mind listening to the radio. My house of cards was
always on the point of collapsing; the slightest distraction and I could lose the thread
irretrievably. A diagram would have been my salvation. I came to long for a diagram. Had
I been able to play aloud it wouldn’t have been so hard, but I didn’t,
because secrecy was essential to the game’s aesthetic. So Mom never knew that I
was giving lessons. What can she have thought, seeing me sitting there frozen stiff,
still as a statue …

I had to fall back on a mnemonic system. My memory was perfect, but it wasn’t
enough. I had gotten myself into a situation where I needed something more. I needed a
method, and my method made use of an image of the classroom full of children. To compose
this image I needed the figures to be still and silent. Now, in that classroom, and I
suppose it would be the same with any class of forty-two six-year-olds (not counting
me), it was rare for all the children to be sitting quietly in their places. The only
time it happened, in fact, was when the teacher read out the roll. It was like a litany,
first the surname, then the first name (mine, which should have come second, between
Abate and Artola, was missing). By dint of repetition, I had learned the roll by heart.
And in my mind it was like the soundtrack for the mental image of the classroom, each
child in his place like a memory peg … Unfortunately the combination meant I
couldn’t use the image in a straightforward way, because the alphabetical order of
the children’s names on the soundtrack didn’t coincide with the order of
their places in the room. So I was forced to zigzag laboriously; one order was
superimposed on the other …

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. Activities and instructions were indistinguishable. If I was walking I would also be
instructing a ghostly disciple in how to walk, the best method for walking … It
wasn’t as simple as it looked, nothing was … Because true efficiency was a
kind of elegance, and elegance required minutely detailed knowledge, so detailed it was
peculiar to me, an esoteric idiosyncrasy that only I could pass on … though to
whom, I didn’t know, maybe no one, but then again … 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. Our necessity wasn’t deep, it didn’t have roots or ramifications.
It was a casual, provisional necessity. It would be hard to find two beings with fewer
affinities than Mom and I. We weren’t even complementary opposites, because we
were alike. She was a dreamer too. She would have preferred to hide it from me, but some
tiny sign gave her away. Our secret personalities are revealed by furtive actions, but
they were what I noticed first of all, so poor Mom had no hope of pretending with me. My
monstrous, piercing eyes prevented any living being from merging into the background of
my life.