Addendum to “Sister Zero”

FROM NOTEBOOK #3

The following text was printed on a page which was attached to the handwritten story of “Sister Zero.” Light googling has confirmed that this is a text named “Rotten Sun,” written by French intellectual Georges Bataille--not by my brother or his friends.

The text attached to the pages of the notebook comes from an official Spanish translation of Bataille’s essays. Instead of translating it myself, I’ve opted to copy-paste an official English translation of the same text. On the printed page, certain words and phrases have been underlined; this has been maintained here.

The sun, from the human point of view (in other words, as it is confused with the notion of noon) is the most elevated conception. It is also the most abstract object, since it is impossible to look at it fixedly at that time of day. If we describe the notion of the sun in the mind of one whose weak eyes compel him to emasculate it, that sun must be said to have the poetic meaning of mathematical serenity and spiritual elevation. If on the other hand, one obstinately focuses on it, a certain madness is implied, and the notion changes because it is no longer production that appears in light, but refuse or combustion, adequately expressed by the horror emanating from a brilliant arc lamp. In practice the scrutinized sun can be identified with a mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epileptic crisis. In the same way that the preceding sun (the one not looked at) is perfectly beautiful, the one that is scrutinized can be considered horribly ugly. In mythology, the scrutinized sun is identified with a man who slays a bull (Mithra), with a vulture that eats the liver (Prometheus); in other words, with the man who looks along with the slain bull or the eaten liver. The Mithraic cult of the sun led to a very widespread religious practice: people stripped in a kind of pit that was covered with a wooden scaffold, on which the priest slashed the throat of a bull; thus they were suddenly doused with hot blood, to the accompaniment of the bull’s boisterous struggle and bellowing--a simple way of reaping the moral benefits of the blinding sun. Of course the bull himself is also an image of the sun, but only with his throat slit. The same goes for the cock, whose horrible and particularly solar cry always approximates the screams of a slaughter. One might add that the sun has also been mythologically expressed by a man slashing his own throat, as well as by an anthropomorphic being deprived of a head. All this leads one to say that the summit of elevation is in practice confused with a sudden fall of unheard-of violence. The myth of Icarus is particularly expressive from this point of view: it clearly splits the sun in two--the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus’s elevation, and the one that melted the wax, causing failure and a screaming fall when Icarus got too close.

This human tendency to distinguish two suns owes its particular importance in this case to the fact that the psychological movements described are not ones that have been diverted, nor their urges attenuated, by secondary elements. But this also indicates that it would be ridiculous a priori to try to determine the precise equivalent of such movements in an activity as complex as painting. It is an elevation--without excess--of the spirit. In contemporary painting, however, the search for that which most ruptures the highest elevation, and for a blinding brilliance, has a share in the elaboration or decomposition of forms, though strictly speaking this is only noticeable in the paintings of Picasso.

“Sister Zero”

FROM NOTEBOOK #3

PART IV (END)

It wasn’t so much that Tomasa and Giovana’s questions were prodding or intrusive, but rather that I didn’t know how much I was supposed to divulge. The balmy afternoon and the little garden tea set were working their magic on me, but I was still sharply aware of how bizarre the situation was. And, I have to admit, part of me was also embarrassed. What would my coworkers think if they knew what I was doing with my Friday? It’s funny how I'd spent the last few months convincing myself I was above them, and had no interest in their opinions, but now they were coming back to haunt me. I wasn’t--I’m not--like B. I can’t spend my life having little “urban adventures” with aging barkeeps, lonesome street-sweepers, and cryptic record collectors. I do have a reputation to uphold.

I allowed myself to listen to the nuns’ chatter instead, remaining at the margins of their conversation, but maintaining a friendly disposition. Tomasa was once again reminiscing about her childhood in a northern fishing village, where summers were endless and people lived in a state of what F. would probably call “honest poverty.” Tomasa’s way of telling stories was lyrical, prone to tangents which seemed to delight even her. It seemed like she never knew where exactly her anecdotes would take her, and the result was always as much of a surprise for the narrator as it was for the audience. Giovana listened with feigned interest, a kind of strained, political smile which locked her sharp features in place.

Tomasa’s aimless reminiscing reached its natural conclusion and a pleasant silence fell upon the three of us. It had probably been forty-five or so minutes since we began talking. She was wary of monopolizing the conversation, even though Giovana had made no attempt to interrupt, and I was wholly someplace else. Her narration was almost therapeutic. But Giovana’s manners were stronger and she turned to me with an open gesture. She wanted to know about my day, my job and career. My world was a bit mysterious to them; I suppose they imagined I was rubbing shoulders with “titans of finance,” and closing million-dollar deals on a daily basis. Important people in high-rise buildings overlooking the skyline. To them, whose sensory life had been reduced to the convent and whatever existed in a two-mile radius around it, there must have been some frisson to it. If only they knew how dire things really were.

I didn’t want to talk about my life, and I wouldn’t have known how to do so if prompted. I tried changing the subject back to them. I thought perhaps we had now grown close enough for me to feel warranted in asking more personal questions. After a bit of generic fluff about what it was like to work in an “important” law firm (I don’t think they were aware that a temp does nothing but data entry and espressos), I tried asking Giovana what drove her to becoming a nun. To this she screwed up her face for just a second (I did see it), but then it resettled into a polite, tense smile. She looked above me, presumably at the sun setting behind the wall, and seemed genuinely lost in thought. Tomasa was looking at her--I noticed from the corner of her eye--with a certain anticipation.

In so many words: Giovana lived in a small southern town. Dry, quiet, and mostly populated by the elderly. Her mother was a teacher, while her father occupied a certain position in the regional government. It was understood that Giovana’s family had a certain local caché, which commanded respect for their forebears. (She didn’t say that, though; I intuited it). And her hometown was notable for one thing only: a beautiful, colonial cathedral which had become a regional tourist attraction, where she had attended Mass since early childhood. All social functions of the town were, as is common, tied in some way to the parish. It was where carnivals, funerals, fundraisers, baptisms, and weddings were organized. Elegant traditional construction, lacquered pews, a robust silver goblet for communion. Stained-glass windows dating back to the viceroyalty. This was the most excited I ever saw Giovana, as she entered a kind of trance state where she seemed to access a perfect reconstruction of the cathedral which existed in her mind. She described fussy details with remarkable ease: the wainscoting, the minor characters of the oil paintings in the priest’s quarters, the number of candles usually lit on the devotional altar. And Tomasa listened on in similar rapture, not looking directly at Giovana but rather at me, as if Giovana herself were too much to bear in this precise moment.

Needless to say, the cathedral had a profound impact on Giovana as a child and adolescent; it seemed to have been etched into her mind, every stone block and artisanal flourish, forever. And she spoke of it with such obsessive adoration that at a certain point I almost felt obliged to interrupt; not because I wasn’t enjoying this, but because I was beginning to wonder if she would get to the point of the story before sundown. Giovana eventually caught on to this, and her face settled into her usual expression, as if she were slowly--but surely--coming down from her ecstasy. Then she fixed her eyes on mine and simply said this: that cathedral burned down one day, when she was still young. It burned down completely to the ground, and while there were no casualties--thank God--the loss was immense for the town. Things were never the same, and Giovana had to leave.

“And I became a nun because I wanted to rebuild that cathedral in my heart,” Giovana said plainly. Tomasa looked, honestly, like this was the first time she heard this story in its entirety.

Tati, roughly ten years ago, remember we’d all go to Salvage Beach during the summer? It was really popular, you could rent out a place for cheap, we’d spend the summer months getting tanned to a crisp without a care in the world and so on. It was roughly two hours away from town down the main highway. Anyway, I’m asking because, do you remember ever seeing a burned-down husk of a church in the distance? Because I clearly remember it. It’s been stuck to my head since I saw it, probably at age ten or so. The sun was setting and I looked at this broken skeleton of a building against the sky, which was on fire. There were people moving about, but for the most part it seemed abandoned. I suppose it could've been a building in construction, but for some reason I always knew it was a church, and that it burned down. Do you remember that? Am I going crazy?

The next time I ran into Tomasa and Giovana, they were standing in exactly the same place as always, at the bottom level of the abandoned mall, on a sunbeam. This had never struck me as weird until that moment: why were they willingly placing themselves under the sun, in the heat of summer? In those clothes? I remember the reason why it seemed so strange to me then was because they hadn’t seen me approaching, and, as I walked towards them to say hi, I noticed that they were both staring upwards, directly at the sun’s rays, as if trying to discern something in it from the depths of that condemned building.

My relationship with the nuns reached its natural conclusion in the days afterwards. We still regarded each other warmly, but my days at the firm were coming to an end, and I had no reason to ever approach the mall again. I had to find work elsewhere and get my grades up, and so on. But I did visit them once more, totally out of the blue, months after this entire ordeal. I remember I had stopped at a nearby convenience store for cigarettes--I don’t remember why I was in that part of town, it was the weekend--and I caught the convent out of the corner of my eye. And I thought, I should see them, once more. I felt a pang of guilt for the way in which our rapport completely vanished after that summer, even if it was inevitable for it to do so. It was just my luck that, at that precise moment, Tomasa was running the front desk. They were selling chocolate truffles, as always.

To be honest, Tati, she didn’t seem thrilled to see me. There was a dire change in her behavior, or maybe just in her openness towards me. First of all, her mouth froze into what seemed like it was going to be a scream for help when I walked through the door. She quickly regained composure and adopted a polite coldness which was not unlike the way Giovana treated everyone. I tried making chipper small talk with her, but she didn’t bite. She talked fast and low, like our meeting was in some way illicit, like she couldn’t wait to be done with this and never see me again.

To this day I don’t really understand. Were they reprimanded for letting me into the building on that day? For shirking their duties? Did they feel silly for revealing so much of themselves to a stranger? Did they feel resentful and abandoned? I guess those are all possibilities. I guess nuns are mysterious creatures after all.

I did ask her about Giovana, and she said she was just beyond the heavy doors, wiping the halls which led to the nuns’ quarters. I guess I was way out of bounds here, but at the time I didn’t give it a second thought: I had every intention of saying hello, and so I walked past Tomasa and swung and heavy door open, peering into the tiled halls which led beyond the front desk and into a bowels of the convent, where visitors were not allowed. I didn’t even intend to walk in! I just wanted to see her, and wave, and that would be that. And maybe I would’ve bought some chocolates as a sign of goodwill.

Anyway, there wasn’t anyone wiping the floors, though I did see a bucket of water set down, as if someone had abandoned this work part way through. Was Giovana avoiding me? Had she been listening to our conversation? I couldn’t find out because Tomasa immediately seized me by the arm with intention to cause pain, and I was bewildered, stepping back instantly and letting the door swing back on its hinges, almost hitting me in the face. I was being reprimanded at mach speed by Tomasa, who was saying something about how it was strictly prohibited for visitors to look into the private quarters, and that Giovana was busy anyway, and then something about nuns’ vows, and so on. I was so rattled that I didn’t listen. I allowed her to lead me back towards the entrance, hand firmly on my forearm like an exasperated schoolteacher with a petulant child, and with that we said our goodbyes. I was in a daze. I felt so violently rejected that I didn’t dare protest or inquire.

And that was my story with the nuns. I know you’ve never been there, Tati, and I don’t recommend visiting. After the other things I’ve learned from your friends, it’s clear that something’s going on there. Also, I did a little amateur web-searching and I can’t find the church that burned down? I imagine there would be at least a few news stories about it, but nothing matches the timeframe and location described. But I do remember seeing something like that on drives home from the beach, do you? Is it possible Giovana was embellishing the story, and this was some dinky chapel in the middle of nowhere? Or am I connecting dots that don’t exist?