"Sister Zero"

FROM NOTEBOOK #3

PART II

I had originally intended to spend six months or so in Marianne's firm while I got my certificates and diplomas in line at university. But I hated university, and kept putting it off. It's easier to justify it to yourself when you're working and always exhausted. The idea of doing something productive with the meager free time you're given seems unfeasible and frankly kind of insulting. Nobody wants to write application letters where they grovel before idiotic bureaucrats and sycophantic secretaries, especially not after spending eight-to-ten hours licking the boots of incompetent bosses who owe their position to their illustrious father or uncle. Besides, that summer was miserable: ruthless and sweltering, the first summer I had to spend in pencil skirts and thick, hand-me-down blouses. They worked us from sunrise to sunset. I have a bad habit of simply accepting horrible situations and not speaking out after a while. This was one of them.

Whenever I ran into acquaintances while doing errands or grabbing lunch--especially when I ran into high school classmates--I felt rattled, almost disturbed. Partly because of the ways in which we had changed, but also because school and everything about it now seemed like a mildly twisted dream. The vast and unknowable world of my teens had shrunk into a roughly three-kilometer urban expanse, wherein I knew every corner shop, ATM, and condemned building by heart. Not only had the mystery vanished, but something about working life seemed truly hopeless at the time. To be reminded that things used to be different was disheartening. And I guess that's why I distanced myself from the group after graduation. I told myself that it was the adult thing to do, that only sad people cling to high school memories forever, and that it was high time I got over all the Weird Shit, anyway. Such a dumb thing. All those make-believe adventures, which, even today, I'm a bit embarrassed to recall. But as a consequence of this mindset I became crushingly, comically lonely.

And so I began to spend more and more lunch breaks with Tomasa and Giovanna. It was always casual and almost incidental in my mind. A normal person would've taken advantage of their internship to network with their peers and prove their worth to their superiors, but just the thought of it made me break out in hives. I would much rather wander the halls of a semi-abandoned shopping mall, eating tasteless and questionable salads from a Styrofoam box. At least I was alone with my thoughts. And in this way, my encounters with the nuns occurred naturally. There was nowhere else nearby to hide from the sun during the deadly period between noon and early dusk, when just walking outside felt like being cooked.

Most middle-aged women eventually develop the tendency to divulge their life stories in bite-sized vignettes, and the nuns were no different. I learned that Tomasa grew up poor in the north, but had an honest and happy childhood of chasing after wild fowl, bathing in riverbanks, and crowding around black-and-white television sets with her cousins. Giovanna was quite the opposite: she had been a young promise of her school's soft tennis club, she was very careful not to divulge embarrassing or comical childhood stories, and everything about her suggested that she was highly-bred. Well, not really. I didn't believe most of what she said. For the most part it seemed like she was embarrassed of having a perfectly-normal upbringing and felt the need to put on airs around me. Perhaps she thought I was "that kind of person", simply because I worked with lawyers and executives and politicians' wives. Sometimes I thought I was "that kind of person" as well, but thankfully I snapped out of it after a few months.

It was a strange dynamic between the three of us. It took a while for me to lower my guard and no longer keep an ironic distance between myself and the nuns. It was Tomasa's unbeatable enthusiasm that drew us closer together. Giovanna was reticent to make any personal statements, or move beyond polite conversation. (For her, polite conversation included the weather, non-political current events, and Scripture, the last of which usually drove our talks to a dead end.) We were such an unlikely group, and to be honest, I would have been mortified to have been caught laughing it up with them by a coworker or boss. (Nobody asked where I went for lunch; at this point everyone had correctly assumed that I despised them.) But we grew closer in spite of it all. Eventually they started to bring chocolate truffles especially for me, and I started complaining to them about my cubicle-mates. I found myself unraveling before them sometimes, going on tangents about the uselessness of higher education, the hypocrisy of office hierarchies, the fact that my job didn't seem to exist for any real purpose. In hindsight I can only assume that, gradually, I began to look a little lost to them. Possibly in need of course-correction. Nuns tend to see people that way. It's no surprise that, eventually, they began to find excuses to invite me into the convent. It was right there, after all.