fiction

St. Perpetua’s Academy did not sprawl all over the landscape the way exclusive schools are wont to do when they are run by nuns who sling guitars on their backs and jump on motorcycles. Its building stood primly alert in four parallel lines, like solemn girls lined up to receive their first Holy Communion.

Our uniform consisted of a blue skirt and a white blouse, the only concession to femininity being the pleats along the collars (not ruffles, which would have betrayed a certain licentiousness) and a ribbon at the base of the throat where the collars met. But this was a ribbon which, if you pulled it loose, didn’t open alluringly into anything. We were securely confined behind a row of buttons down the front, the brown scapular around our neck, and our Sodality medal pinned to our chest. In October we would add a smaller medal with a blue ribbon to commemorate the Holy Rosary. We were soldiers in the army of Christ, or His virginal brides, depending upon which metaphor the Sisters were stressing that month.

In the era of the miniskirt we were an anachronism; while thighs boldly flaunted themselves everywhere around us, our hemlines froze with embarrassment two inches below the knees. And if we cheated by so much as an inch, Sr. Mary Alphonse ripped it down on Monday morning, Inspection Day. Ribbons on our hair were supposed to keep us neat, not frilly, so we wore only either white (for purity), blue (the school color), or preferably black (to stress its functional, not ornamental, nature).

Learning, in our school, was the opposite of thinking. We learned the discipline of obedience, humility and silence. We learned diffidence and deference. And we lived by the bell: the first meant to form our lines, the second to place our forefinger on our lips for silence, the third to file silently into our classroom three precise steps after the girl in front. (Germans are known for the hand raised, palm facing downwards; Americans for the third finger jabbing the air, we were identified by the right forefinger on our lips.)

Ora et labore – pray and work – was our motto. We learned embroidery stitches, which we did in neat rows across a piece of linen. We studied fractions, by cutting colored pieces of paper into halves, quarters, eighths, ad infinitum. I tried once experimenting with hexagons, parallelograms, and even just triangles. But my work was held up as a model of sloppiness and disobedience to instructions. You folded the paper across to produce two halves of a rectangle, and across to produce four squares, exactly. The joy of work was in doing the same things together. Ora et labore.

Blood dripped from the stories and poems as we probed mercilessly, mindlessly, for moral lessons. We reduced the English language to parsed sentences although, truth to tell, this I loved doing the most. It was not rich with ambiguity and did not trap you into alternatives. It was straightforward: the words of every sentence in one straight row and the categories of grammar they belonged to in another row.

Father reads the newspapers while Mother irons the clothes.

Compound sentence:

 

Father – subject
reads – verb
the – article
newspapers – direct object
while – conjunction
Mother – subject
irons – verb
the – article
clothes – direct object

All sentences, if they could be parsed, were correct, therefore true. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why my mother seemed to read more newspapers (and books) than my father did and why she couldn’t iron anything bigger than my handkerchief. But my mother was a strange woman, if textbooks were anything to go by. She never did any of the loving and patient things that Dick and Jane’s mother always did.

We would parse ten sentences, seriously, industriously, while our English teacher quietly poked her pinky into one ear and then cleaned out the fingernail with that of her thumb. I always finished first and I watched her, first cleaning her right ear and then her left, with the devotional look of the old woman in black who knelt before the altar after Sunday mass and murmured her prayers to Our Mother of Perpetual Help.

The ten parsed sentences lay in twenty neat little rows, final and sure, one label for every word. I loved to run my gaze over them again and again, gloating, like a Daniel who had conquered the hungry lions. Nothing, now, could be incomprehensible if you could parse sentences. And always I got perfect scores no matter how my teachers huddled together in the faculty room and asked each other for tricky sentences. She must learn humility, they whispered among each other. The English language, then, became the field of battle between vice and virtue.

As a reprieve from the seriousness of academic life, the Sisters told us horror stories. We would plead, “Story, Sister! Tell us a story!” And to keep us quiet, they would. About the ghost of a headless priest who guarded the parish convento against robbers. He had been killed, his head chopped off by Japanese soldiers who had invaded the church and taken away the gold chalice and monstrance, and the parish collection. There was the story of the souls of dead nuns who were still to be heard singing the matins in the basement of the ruins of a convent. They had been hiding when the Japanese had attacked them in the middle of their morning prayers.

Even stories about saints were horror stories. Maria Goretti had been left with a trusted family friend but he wanted her “to do evil with him” (we didn’t ask what, specifically) and when she refused, he stabbed her seven times with an awl. (Sister pronounced it “owl” and for a long time I wondered if it was live or stuffed.) Our favorite ghost story was that of St. Christopher, who crossed a raging river with the ghost of a Baby on his shoulders. The weight on his shoulders grew heavier and heavier as he pushed against the current. When he got to the shore, weak with exhaustion, the Baby told him that He was Jesus carrying the weight of the world’s sin. We never tired of hearing that story and St. Christopher was a favorite, next to St. Anthony who found our lost things for us. Five years later we mourned the loss of St. Christopher when Vatican II declared him non-existent and struck him off the list of saints.

We spent our lives equally between the classroom and the chapel. In October the class would walk, silently, with forefinger on the lips, to the chapel where we said the Rosary. We ended it with the Litany, which was a lift of ejaculation with a catch to it. You started by responding with “Lord have mercy” but somewhere along the way you shifted to “Pray for us.” If your voice rang out “Lord have mercy” while everybody else was saying “Pray for us”, then Sr. Benedicta would turn around (she knelt in front, a figure of reproach when you took the option to sit during the third decade) and glare at you because you had been either daydreaming or not caring enough to know. There would be twittering among the girls, and for a moment, the class President, who led the Litany, could not go on because her throat hurt from trying to stop giggling.

Of all the places in the world, it is in the chapel that girls are wont to giggle most. The moviehouse during the love scene was another favorite, but there is something about the sanctified air of the chapel that tickles girls’ diaphragms. It would start with one girl in the middle, whose shoulders would shake with some suddenly remembered joke. And the shaking would spread, radiate from the center, down to the outskirts, the attack of Catholic humor like a boy’s finger poking at Jell-o. It came especially when we were doing the Stations, and we giggled, as Christ fell for the third time, and we would stuff our handkerchiefs into our mouths. There would be a few seconds of respite as we shut our eyes and with an effort imagined Christ’s knees scraping against the stony path, but this would trigger another long-forgotten joke and someone from the side would explode again, with a sound that was a cross between a wheeze and a burp. And again the epidemic would raze through the air of sanctity, putrefying it.

On the first Thursday of every month, we went to the chapel for Confession to prepare for first Friday Mass. The sin we dreaded most but confessed most often, because it was all-encompassing, was having impure thoughts. Every week, I confessed, “Father, I had impure thoughts.” This covered anything between wishing my mother would mind her own business and wishing she were dead. It never covered sexual dreams. “Impure thoughts” was a phrase that did not express the evil that was sex. That was something Perpetuan vocabulary could not even conceive of.

“Father, I had impure thoughts.” When I die, my guardian angel will shake out my brain and all my impure thoughts will come flying out of its folds, where they will have gotten clogged.

On first Friday we wore our “white Sunday uniforms,” and as brides in Christ, we were ready to take Him in Holy Communion. We would all file, row by row, to the communion rail. Once, I couldn’t take communion because I had had impure thoughts sometime between my Thursday confession and Friday mass. But if I stayed at the pew, I would have been kneeling alone, while everybody else would file past me. My guild would have been as obvious as Hester Pryne’s scarlet A. so I got up along with all the others to take Communion. What I was doing was the most terrible sin I knew – it was Sacrilege. The Sisters had told us stories about how a host had burst into flames just when the priest laid it on a sinner’s tongue, or how a sinner had mysteriously choked on the flimsy wafer when it lodged in his throat.

I couldn’t, after committing that terrible sin of Sacrilege, make a clean confession again. The priest would be shocked beyond belief that a Perpetuan could mock God so. Confession and communion became an endless series of agonies; I lived in dread of first Thursdays and Fridays as my sacrilege multiplied with every month.

I would give myself Penances that went over and beyond what I had deceived the priest into thinking I deserved. I sought out the old Parish priest, whom everyone avoided because he gave heavy penances and had bad breath. I confessed all the sins I had committed and added milder ones that I had not, wishing they could make up for the one horrible sin that I longed most to confess. When he opened his mouth for the blessing and absolution, I greedily sucked in the blast of sulphur that his mouth emitted, remembering that this was the odor of hell.

The school rector was Fr. O’Reilly. All the girls had a crush on him because he was blonde, blue-eyed, and because he was a priest. After Mass, we had breakfast at the Refectory. (Early morning Communion meant you couldn’t take anything after 12:00 midnight on the eve of Mass.) We would catch a glimpse of Fr. O’Reilly in the next room with one of the nuns serving him breakfast as, the girls jealously imagined, she simpered over him.

But between Fr. O’Reilly and me was a love that, I gloated, kept all the Sisters and girls out. He was Irish, and I had read about everything on the Irish. I knew, for example, that that little brook leaping in Glocca Morra was two feet wide, and that it couldn’t possibly run down to Donnycove (because the place didn’t exist), nor to Killybegs, Kilkerry and Kildare, simply because, for all their alliteration, they were several hundred miles apart and had mountain ranges between them, which not even the most acrobatic of little brooks could leap over. The closest that the girls had gotten to know anything Irish were the Kennedys and Dr. Kildare. Green was my favorite color, Yeats my favorite poet. The sharp cutting edge of my tongue, which drove the girls away and which the Sisters declared the instrument of the devil, was to him a constant delight.

He had the Irish flair for theatre, which he used to the hilt as Retreat Master. “Do you know what you do when you commit a sin?” He would thunder from his platform, as we waited with the same thrill that we waited for Dracula to spring onto the movie screen. He would remove the crucifix that hung from his neck, fling it to the floor, raise his foot, start to stomp on it, and would stop with his foot barely an inch away from Christ’s bleeding face. A collective gasp, then a moan of delicious terror would ride the waves of shocked piety.

“If that,” he would begin with a stage whisper that would go into crescendo,” can horrify you, then you should be horrified at your own sinful deeds, because you step on God’s face, whenever you commit a sin!”

The first time our class was old enough to join the annual Retreat, I knew that it would never work for me. The girls enjoyed the Retreats, because it dramatized their personal link with God – their capacity for sin and His capacity for forgiveness. The greater a sinner you were, the closer you felt to God. It was a relationship which could be emotional in human dimensions. They engulfed themselves in the melodrama of Remorse and Penitence and reveled in it. For who can sustain a constant, burning love for an Eye that stared at you from a Triangle?

But I was looking for a pure, brilliant love that encompassed both Sin and Virtue. A flash of light in a dark room that gave me a glimpse of the place of Evil in Good. I was not looking for a Spirit that would assure me of Its constant love in spite of what I was. I was hoping for an explosion of geometric patterns that would fall, finally and always, congruent.

“Well, how did you like my Recollection talk today?” Fr. O’Reilly asked, knowing what was coming. All Irishmen are born actors, priests more so than others. And, like all actors, Fr. O’Reilly wanted applause. But how could anyone applaud him if they all took him seriously? The more convincing he was as a priest, the less recognition he got for his acting.

I crinkled my nose with distaste and replied, “Vulgar.” And he laughed, delighting in this secret that we shared. “Vulgar” was our generation’s word for anything that was strange, out of the ordinary, or imperfect, the way youthful vocabulary has now shrunk to “Weird.” Vulgar was everything that was forbidden but which we all either yearned to do or confessed to having committed the sin of. We thought it was a word rich with nuances of meaning, terse but intense. Vulgar meant girls chewing gum like goats masticating. It meant standing with feet apart or sitting with legs spread out. It meant receiving Holy Communion in a sleeveless dress. It meant dancing in a jam session with the bodies touching each other. It meant running along the corridors, or “speaking the dialect” on campus. It meant wearing a multi-colored veil, or a veil of any color other than black, at chapel. The opposite of “vulgar” was, of course, “nice.”

Fr. O’Reilly lived in a monastery a few meters from my house. One day I told him that I would watch for the last light in the monastery to go off and I knew it would be him, at last putting aside his book and going to sleep. And I would turn off my own lamp and sleep. Thus, together, we slept.

“You shouldn’t romanticize me,” he had replied seriously, this time not responding to the pun. He was afraid for me and of the Woman in me. As the woman, I was the anima, the Enemy. I was that part of him that yielded to the soft, spongy tissue of religion. Man approached religion with a love that was pure, clear and sharp, like ice. Woman searched for God and lost herself in a cesspool of sentiment, brackish and odorous, that assailed the nostrils and heaved one’s stomach, sourly, into his throat.

I had romanticized Fr. O’Reilly. I was frightened by the seriousness of what I had done. I had tried to make out of the connection between us something meaner than connections with the Religious should be. Fr. O’Reilly stood for the tongues of flame, the Holy Spirit whose mission it is to visit the temple of all humanity. I had tried to contain the dimensions of that love, to compress it into a wire strung tight between him and me. He insisted on a richness of connection, which had to be based on the pure, universal love of our religion. But it seemed, to me, to be a connection that was impoverished and thin. Ashamed, I wrapped myself in a tender, consoling embrace, and enclosed all that I had of myself.

Religion, then, was safest when it was either an orgy of theatrical frenzy or the laying down of lines with black and white certainty. We showed our love for the Sisters and priests with Spiritual Bouquets. We passed around a sheet of paper that was lined like a page from an accounting ledger. We scored the number of prayers we were willing to offer for the honoree of the day. This was the Spiritual Bouquet. We passed the paper around on somebody’s feastday, when somebody was dying or ill, when we were grateful for a donation or when Somebody Important, like the Bishop or the Mother Superior-General, visited the school.

Ejaculations 500
Rosary 5
Holy Mass 10
Holy Communion 10
Way of the Cross 1
Visits to the Blessed Sacrament 10

Ejaculations were very popular because they were particularly handy when we were in the state of aridity, they being merely short spurts of sound. “St. Perpetua, pray for us.” Dry emissions from dry souls.

Sr. Rita, our biology teacher, always got the largest Spiritual Bouquets because she was the favorite nun. She glided along the corridors, her hands clasped invisibly inside the sleeves of her habit. She never looked down, like the other nuns, who led their lives in abject humility. Head erect, she nevertheless took little notice of the world around her as her eyes focused on some distant vision.

Her face, framed by her white wimple and black veil, was of classical Greece, like the pictures of ancient Greek sculptures I had seen in The Book of Knowledge. I would stare at her, while she instructed us how to slice open bemused frogs or as she lovingly fingered nervous earthworms, and I would make her stand erect in the stiff folds of a Grecian tunic. I would remove an arm and tenderly chip off the tip of her nose. I would crown her with marble curls, like the Charioteer of Delphi, because I had absolutely no idea what her hair looked like or if she had any hair at all.

A rumor had spread that Christ had visited the stigmata – His five wounds – upon her. Everyone sought some excuse to get near her to witness her pierced and bleeding hands. Everyone claimed to have caught a glimpse of discoloration on her palms, or even tints of red, but none could say for certain that they had actually seen Sr. Rita’s holy wounds.

There were special days and special hours when the stigmata would appear. They came only on Fridays, when she did not leave the convent because she had no classes, or on Sundays. Her shoes, it was whispered, were lined with sponge and she wore three layers of thick stocking to absorb the blood that flowed out of her feet. It seemed so logical, I felt, that this should be Sr. Rita’s trial in life, that she whose face was of classical Greece, should suffer from her corporeity.

We loved Sr. Rita and everyone fought to be her favorite. We scrambled for the right to carry her books from the classroom to the convent, where at the door, our hands would touch with startling solidity as she took her books and was swallowed by the silent, mysterious womb of dry Womanity. But Sr. Rita had no favorite. She was a Catholic nun, and Catholicism meant you loved everyone with a whole, universal love. So she loved all of us, and we felt, somehow, confusedly, defeated by her Catholicity.

“Love they neighbor as thyself” was the dictum of our religion. So, one day I knew that I could love her best by loving someone else who needed it more. We had a classmate, Marilou, who was suffering from some illness that quietly but steadily disintegrated her brain. She had been in the honor roll when we were in grade school and had, like every typical Perpetuan, played Fur Elise in piano recitals and gone to ballet school. But gradually her head began to flop around and her eyes took on the vacant stare of a carabao’s as her brain searched for a world that it could fathom on its own terms. But her parents had insisted that she maintain a normal life for as long as she could.

In many ways, Marilou and I were very much alike. We were both clumsy – I had the physical stupidity of one whose thoughts were in a constant state of turbulence and so whose brain could not focus on a ball hurtling toward her face. We lived encased in our own world, and our classmates disliked us because we were “strange.” At P.E. the captains of the softball teams always chose Marilou and me last. The girls giggled as Marilou whacked the air three times and then lumbered, her head bowed, toward first base. She was always out barely five steps from first base. (So was I.)

So one day I carried Sr. Rita’s books and said, “Sister, the principle of teamwork is cruel to Marilou. Could I make her my special charge – play with her at P.E., eat with her at recess, visit her on Saturdays?”

Marilou and I became inseparable. The P.E. teacher, after a quiet word with Sr. Rita, left us alone to play ping pong, which we played placidly, hypnotically, as we listened to our own inner rhythms. On Saturday afternoons she taught me to bake barquillos and ube cake. We did our homework together. At recess time we visited the Blessed Sacrament at the chapel (that killed ten minutes of the twenty-minute period) and then silently sipped our Coke behind the canteen, letting it last until the bell rang, so there would e no reason to make tortured conversation.

The girls wanted to snicker at the odd pair we made, but Sr. Rita had broken her rule against singling out special students and one day announced to the class: “Girls, one of your classmates came to me the other day to tell me that she wanted to give up her own time so she could help another whom you all rejected. This is what it means to have God in your heart. Sacrifice is the foundation of love.” Thus, I had won Sr. Rita, and the girls’ contempt for me turned to hate.

My secret was that I was not giving up anything. I did not suffer through every minute Marilou and I spent with each other. She was my excuse for not hanging out with a barkada, the standard for adolescent normality. She was the key to Sr. Rita’s love. And she was a good friend because she demanded nothing, expected nothing. Mutual need was the foundation of our love.

In 1967 we graduated and I never saw Marilou again until seven years later. Curious to see what had become of her, I paid her a call. She was sitting on the doorstep, staring at the ground, one leg bent up, her chin resting on her knee, her body grown corpulent with drugs and immobility. She reeked of ammonia. There was a dish of rice and flaked fish beside her. She would pick up a grain of rice and roll it back and forth, back and forth, between her thumb and forefinger. Then the tip of her tongue would slither out and she would lay it precisely at the center. I had never seen anyone breakfasting so intensely, with a singularity of mind that matched St. Teresa de Avila’s piety. I had by now been caught up in a world of conviction rather than faith, action rather than prayer, and anger rather than forgiveness. So I could have turned and walked away, having now accomplished the obligatory gesture.

But in our fingers slept the strains of Fur Elise, in our toes curled frozen pirouettes, in our hearts smoldered terrors of guilt over things done or not done. We had shared a Catholic girlhood. Perhaps despite the colossal scale of chaos that was now confronting us, this memory was what brought some sense of inner order in both our lives. I was not sure whether this revelation signified faith newly won, lost, or regained; but there was the sensation of layers shifting and then, finally, settling down.

back to fiction | home