How I Became A Nun Read Online Free PDF

plain willfulness, of the most primitive kind; it had taken control of me, as evolution
     takes control of a species. I had succumbed to it during my sickness or perhaps just
     before its onset; I wasn’t like that normally. On the contrary, if I had one
     salient character trait, it was willingness to cooperate. That man, the doctor, was a
     kind of hypnotist who had put a spell on me. The worst thing was that, even under his
     spell, I was perfectly consciousness of being willful.
    Mom didn’t miss a single one of the doctor’s visits … She hovered at a
     discreet distance and came forward to help as soon as I became unmanageable … She
     was extremely anxious to extract information from him. He used the word
     “shock” … He can’t have been a real intellectual, because he
     showed great interest in what Mom said to him. They went away and whispered; I had no
     idea what about … I didn’t know that we had been in the papers. He said
     “shock” again, and repeated it over and over …
    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 …
    Ana Módena de Collon-Michet, the nurse, was the day incarnate. There was only one
     nurse in the ward throughout the day shift; just one nurse for forty little patients
     … It might seem insufficient and no doubt it was. Resources were rather stretched
     at the Rosario Central Hospital. But no one complained. All the patients were hoping to
     get out of there alive, one way or another, all fondly imagining that they would not be
     back. Even the children were fooling themselves, quite unwittingly.
    But the days came to rest in the big white ward and wherever I turned my gaze, there was
     the nurse. Ana Módena was a living hieroglyph. She never left the hospital; she
     had no illusions. She was a ghost.
    The mothers were always complaining about her; they fought with her, but they must have
     known it was hopeless. The mothers came and went, while she remained. Short-lived
     alliances were forged against her, and Mom was involved on a number of occasions; she
     didn’t have the strength of character to say no, even when she realized it would
     have been in her best interests. The complaints concerned Ana Módena’s
     abruptness, her impatience, her rudeness, her almost insane ignorance. Having frequented
     the hospital environment for an average of a week, the mothers formed an idea of the
     ideal nurse for the children’s ward. They imagined what she would be like, what
     each of them would have been like in her place: a good fairy, all gentleness and
     understanding … It wasn’t hard; without realizing, they were imagining how
     the ideal nurse would have been gentle and understanding with
them,
and each of
     us is the ultimate expert on the gentleness and understanding we deserve. It
     wasn’t their fault; they were poor, ignorant women, housewives struggling to cope.
     In nine cases out of ten, they were responsible for the illnesses of their children
     … They had a right to dream … They thought they knew what the perfect
     nurse would be like, and they did … Their mistake was to go one step further and
     presume that all those qualities could be combined in a single woman … The fact
     that Ana Módena, the Perón of the Pediatric Ward, was exactly the opposite
     of their ideal image, cast them into a stupor which they could only shake off, or so
     they felt, by drawing up a list of demands or devising a strategy with the aim of having
     her dismissed … All those dreams turned her into a ghost. As a rule I
     didn’t understand what was going on,