How I Became A Nun Read Online Free PDF Page B

but this was something I understood, because
     I was a dreamer … and because Ana Módena was a ghost in other ways too.
     She was always in a rush, extremely busy, as any nurse would have been in that
     situation, looking after a forty-bed ward on her own. But she was never available for
     anyone. She was invariably busy with the others, and it was the same for all of them
     too. As I lay there, I got used to seeing her out of the corner of my eye, whizzing past
     from dawn to dusk … never stopping … It wasn’t only the children in
     their beds that she had to attend to, but also those being sent off to the operating
     theatre, or for X-rays … and she did it all so badly, whispered the mothers, that
     everything kept going wrong because of her … They said she kept losing patients
     … They keep dying … as if her touch was lethal … They’re
     always dying in her ward, said the legend that enveloped me like a bandage made of
     whispering phylacteries … The children stopped living when they fell into the
     category of things she was simply too busy to deal with … But this wretched
     reputation didn’t prevent the mothers from making up to her, flattering her,
     leaving her tips, bringing her little cakes and being unbelievably, shockingly servile
     … After all, the greatest treasures they possessed, their children, were in her
     hands.
    She was a fat, hefty woman. When she bore down on me, it was like an elephant splashing
     in a puddle … I was the water. There was something sublime about her clumsiness
     … She suffered from a peculiar affliction: for her, left was right and vice
     versa. Down was up, forward was back … The meager volume of my body came apart in
     her hands … legs, arms, head … each extremity was subjected to a different
     gravitational force … I was breaking up into falls and imbalances … With
     her, there was no point pretending … she projected me into another dimension
     … yet various parts of my body, suddenly scattered far and wide, took it on
     themselves to pretend … though what, I don’t know … Her hands, with
     their lethal touch, were molding an absolute truth.
    They kept me alive with serum. Ana Módena replaced the bottles, invariably at the
     wrong time, and put the needles in my arm … She stuck them in anywhere. My nose
     began to run. Everything that went in my arm came out of my nose, in a continuous drip.
     It was an extremely rare case. To her, it seemed normal … In any case it
     wasn’t a priority. Early in the morning, before the first mother arrived, Ana
     Módena brought the dwarf, and made her recite her psalms in front of each bed,
     including the empty ones. The dwarf was an autistic visionary. Ana Módena steered
     her by the shoulders, as if she were holding the handlebars of a tricycle. The dwarf
     didn’t seem to see anything; she was a piece of furniture … She was one of
     those dwarves with an oversize head … Ana Módena would put her in front of
     a bed occupied by a listless or sleeping child … a deep silence reigned in the
     ward … Then, responding to a tap between the shoulder blades, the dwarf would
     mutter a Hail Mary, gesticulating oddly with her little arms …
    “Mother Corita will save you, not the doctors!” thundered Ana
     Módena.
    The dwarf passed like a comet … Everything happened automatically … It was
     a blanket cure: empty and occupied beds received the same blessing … Thus
     religion was smuggled into the world of sickness. Except that it was an open secret,
     and, of all that brute’s misdeeds, this was the one the mothers brought up first
     if they had any pretensions to scientific decorum … but as soon as a doctor
     seemed unsure, or a child fell ill again or began to vomit, it was: Bring the dwarf, I
     beg you … Bring her to save my little angel … The hypocrites! Severely,
     Ana Módena would reply: It is the Virgin who saves, not the dwarf … And
     the mothers: For mercy’s sake,