The Sisterhood Read Free Page B

we better hurry. We don’t want them thinking we’ve changed our minds about the adoption.”
    Inside the convent, Mother Superior was waiting behind her desk with its ancient black telephone. Light slanted through barred windows set high in the wall, and the room was crammed with solid old-fashioned furniture in dark carved wood. The walls held the convent’s collection of portraits. Dark-eyed girls with heavyeyebrows dressed in fine clothes and jewels, holding flowers, stared down at Mother. They were long-dead
monjas coronadas
, crowned nuns, girls about to enter a convent. Portraits of a daughter betrothed to Christ had been a status symbol among the Spanish colonial families of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In their
salas grandes
, where visitors were entertained, they were hung conspicuously higher on the walls than the betrothal portraits of daughters engaged to mere men. It had been customary to eventually donate the portraits to the girls’ convents. Mother found the silent company of the portraits restful, and often sought their imaginary advice in convent matters.
    As the parlor clock ticked, Mother began to wonder if the American couple had changed their minds and were not coming for Isabelita after all. She sighed and looked up to argue the case for the adoption once more with her serene companions. She reminded them there was another civil war brewing—stories of atrocities and foreign-trained paramilitaries with plentiful supplies of weapons had reached the convent. And she reminded them of Sor Rosario’s claim of having a vision last year, shortly before the hurricane.
    Sor Rosario, the youngest nun and somewhat giddy at the best of times, had been hurrying across the cloister, late as usual for compline, when a “vision” had halted her in her tracks. Mother had been skeptical and questioned her closely, fully expecting the vision would resemble a Renaissance statue of the Madonna to which Sor Rosario was particularly devoted. The statue had its own small chapel in the convent church, built by a conquistador’s widow to house her husband’s tomb. The daylight poured through a window above, as if from heaven, on a Madonna who was slender and blonde with gold stars on her blue gown, a red cloak trimmed with ermine, a filigree crown, and pointed golden slippers peeking from the hem of her gown.
    Sor Rosario said, “She was tall, with dark hair down her back. It had bits of gray. She had dark eyes that looked directly into mine. Black eyes. Heavy eyebrows that met over her nose. The evening wind was just beginning to blow and her dress and cloak billowed behind her—she looked like she had wings! She spoke of a warning, a promise, and a reminder. Her voice was not soft or gentle—she spoke loudly, as women do when they intend to make men listen whether men want to or not.”
    “Indeed!” It didn’t sound like any vision of the Madonna Mother knew of.
    Sor Rosario nodded. “Naturally I knelt and began saying the
Ave
, but she stamped her foot and held up her hand for silence, saying there was no time for all that and to pay attention. A terrible storm was coming. The sky would be ripped apart and the angel of death would spread its wings above us. But a blessing or a gift would come from the sea, something would be found…we must save something…but her voice began to fade and I couldn’t hear her every word, and she stamped her foot again, looking angry, but I think that was because she had not finished what she had to say and—”
    “
Stamped
her
foot
, Sister? Perhaps you were dreaming.” Mother sighed, closed her eyes and tried to massage away the beginnings of a headache. The more emotional nuns often claimed to see visions, particularly when there wasn’t enough to eat. Usually they were of Santa Teresa and roses.
    “Oh no! She was real as anything, Mother. Her cloak was brown.” Sor Rosario’s voice was tinged with disappointment. She had loved pretty frocks once.