How I Became A Nun Read Free Page B

eventually stopped altogether.
     
3
     
    I NEVER KNEW HOW I got out of the ice-cream store … or was taken
     away … or what happened … 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
     … The air was thick with fear, because it struck when least expected; any
     foodstuff could be contaminated, even the most natural … potatoes, pumpkin, meat,
     rice, oranges … In my case it was ice cream. But even food lovingly prepared at
     home could be poisoned … Children were the most vulnerable … they had no
     resistance. Housewives were at their wit’s end. A mother could kill her baby with
     baby food. It was a lottery … So many conflicting theories … So many
     deaths … The cemeteries were filling up with little tombstones, tenderly
     inscribed … Our angel has flown to the arms of the Lord … signed: his
     inconsolable parents. 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.
    My illness duplicated itself. I should have expected it … had I been capable of
     expecting anything, which I certainly wasn’t. The affliction manifested itself as
     a kind of cruel equivalence. While my body writhed in physical pain, elsewhere, for
     different reasons, my soul was subjected to an equivalent torture. My soul … the
     fever … In those days it wasn’t standard practice to control fever with
     medication … They let it run its course, interminably … I was in a state
     of unremitting delirium, with plenty of time to concoct the most baroque stories
     … I had my ups and downs, I suppose, but the stories followed one another in a
     sustained rush of invention … They fused into one, which was the reverse of a
     story … because my anxiety was the only story I had, and the fantasies
     didn’t settle or hang together … So I couldn’t even enter them and
     lose myself …
    One of the forms the story took was the Flood. I was at home … back in Pringles,
     in the house we had left to come to Rosario … which was no longer ours …
     we would never live there again. The water was rising, and I was in bed, staring at the
     roof, rigid with fear … I couldn’t even turn my head to see the water
     … but reflections from the rising surface were making whitish loops on the
     ceiling … It was pure fiction, with no basis in reality, because we had never
     even come close to being flooded …
    Another form of the story: I was offering poisoned chocolates to my parents …
     Chocolate on the outside, then a very thin layer of glass, and, inside, a solution of
     arsenic in alcohol … There was no antidote … No way back … Dad took
     one, Mom too … I wanted to rewind time, I was sorry, but it was too late …
     They were going to die … The police would have no trouble establishing the cause
     of death … they would interrogate me … I decided to confess everything, to
     cry rivers of tears and let the current sweep me away … But even death was no
     consolation, since without Mom and Dad how could I live anyway? And the worst thing was
     that it was unheard of for a little girl to kill her parents … absolutely unheard
     of …
    And another (but this was an alternative version of the Flood): an animal swimming in the
     inundated house, an otter … It would bite our feet if we tried to walk in the
     rising water … If my hand slipped from the sheet it would eat my