The Sisterhood Read Free Page A

distance the snow-capped Andes rose clean and remote against a hard blue sky.
    The Americans turned their map this way and that, looking around, ignoring the people around them. “There! I recognize it from the posters!” exclaimed Sarah-Lynn suddenly, pointing ahead to a whitewashed bell tower, one that was featured on a famous travel poster of the 1970s when trains still ran to this remote corner of South America. Then, souvenir sellers had done a brisk turnover in clay swallows, cheap silver bracelets, and gourds decorated in the native style.
    Now the tourists were long gone, but a few old men still waited hopefully under the convent walls, shabby old merchandise spread on dirty blankets. “Hello! Nice souvenir?” they wheedled.
    “That’s definitely the bell tower, Virgil. I guess we found it…Oh, what a smell!” Her nose wrinkled as a gust of open sewers engulfed her.
    The man calmly opened his guidebook. “Oldest convent in Latin America,
El Convento de las Golondrinas
, home of
Las Sors Santas de Jesus de Los Andes
,” he read, testing out his newly acquired Spanish. He sensed an undercurrent of violence in the air, ready to be ignited, and instinct told him on no account to show fear, or to hurry, or these people would be on them like vultures. So he stood his ground, acting casual and interested in the sights, a tourist. “Lotta birds, listen to that racket! No wonder they call it Convent of the Swallows.
Las Golon…Golondrinas
.”
    Feeling the eyes boring into his back, he planted his feet firmly and stopped to turn a guidebook page, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. “Says here, there’s an old superstition about swallows, because of how they migrate back and forth to the same places every year. In the olden days sailors got swallow tattoos for luck so’s they’d make it home after going off, same way as the birds. And if they died at sea, they believed swallows would fly down and carry the souls of the tattooed ones straight to heaven. Ain’t that something? Big, isn’t it?” he remarked, refusing to be hurried. He took a pocket-size Kodak from his pocket and fiddled with the distance setting. “Must be the size of a city block. Wonder where the entrance is?”
    Sarah-Lynn was folding up the map and looking around for the gate. Virgil was going on and on like a travelogue because he was nervous. She understood; she was edgy as a cat herself. She jumped as a tray of shabby merchandise was thrust under her nose by an old man with no teeth, muttering “Cheap! Cheap!”
    “Virgil, tell that man we don’t want any souvenirs!”
    Her husband shook his head at the souvenir seller and, taking Sarah-Lynn’s arm, pulled her away to have her photo taken in front of the gate. He kept talking. “Before the Spanish came, the Incas had some kind of women’s building in this same site, the Virgins of the Sun or some such heathen thing. Had a garden inside, made all out of silver with gold flowers.”
    He kept talking, loud and conversational, while he snapped pictures. “Yep, the Spanish tore it down, reused the stones to build a convent for missionary nuns who came here from Spain. They had them a school and a hospital for native girls and an orphanage. Lotta illegitimate babies, the Spanish men and the Indian women—the nuns would take the children in and see they got baptized and saved. There was even a women’s jail in there…”
    “I don’t want to hear about jails, Virgil! We’re about to go in and get our child and we have to decide once and for all what her name’s going to be!”
    “I thought we planned we’d name a girl after your mama, like you wanted. And if it was a boy, Virgil Walker Jr.” Sarah-Lynn patted her husband on the arm. He had wanted a son.
    “God’s sent us to this little girl. I know she’s special. Where on earth is the gate?”
    “That’s it behind you. I’ll take a couple of pictures for that scrapbook the adoption worker told us to make for her. Then