Vow of Darkness

By Rodrigo Parra Sandoval

Originally published in Spanish as Voto de tinieblas, this is a translation by Kieran Tapsell. Among the stories and characters of Vow of Darkness it unfolds a reflection around the prohibitions and dangers that a nun living the confused and violent period of independence from Spain must face when she decides to be a writer in a world where writing is an exclusively male activity. Alongside these adventures is woven a reflection about personal and collective memory. It outlines how the indigenous population extinguishes destroyed by war, smallpox and shame. And yet, there are characters trying to give sense to their own lives through generosity, compassion, understanding the other, identifying with their memory, diluting cultural distances, changing the roles and transforming the victorious on defeated or trying to solve the antagonisms that the nun draws in the written geographies of her body throughout philanthropy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eLibros
• Release date: Oct 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9789588732862

Book preview

Piglia

MONOLOGUE

OF A MODERN WOMAN

Epithelium:

The Aesthetics of the Body

Yes, I’m the anthropologist. I say it again so that you will start to understand before opening your eyes. Yes. The anthropologist. You remember? I came to take you to your father’s house in Ciudad del Sur, and to prove that the trunks are in the cells of the nuns who have made their vow of darkness. Everything is in order. The fifteen hundred skeletons are in a perfect state, well wrapped and tied down. The little nuns have done an excellent job. It’s not easy living in the darkness surrounded by so many bones. But your time in Hell has already ended. How are your eyes going? Can you see things without pain? Open them slowly, there’s no hurry. Your father has left his house to both of us, and a tilbury to travel like ladies – that’s what he said. He also said that one day you would leap over the wall, to write something that you must write, and the best place to do this would be in the tower. So, within a few hours, when you are physically and emotionally ready to confront an insolent and uncertain world, we’ll set off in the tilbury. But first, you’re going to eat something soft in a restaurant, squinting with your half opened eyes. You’ve been living on that miserly nun’s diet for years, and you’re as thin as a rake. You must’ve lost your appetite. And when we arrive at Ciudad del Sur, I’m going to give you a modern hair cut because what you have on your head seems to be a ball of wire that flows down in a mess to your buttocks, and I’ll get some ordinary clothes made for you, so that you can put this filth you’re wearing into the rubbish bin. You can get rid of your smell of mildew, of fermented humidity and of the devil. For now, I’ll put some drops in your eyes, and clean your eyelashes with a soft handkerchief, moistened with sunflower balsam so that you can see comfortably. And I’ll clean your face, neck and armpits with a towel moistened by distilled water to refresh you, and to relieve you of the heat under your arms. During the journey, I’ll slowly unravel your hair with rose water and my tortoise shell comb, and then I’ll cut it. I’ll prepare some gargles for you to clean the spider webs out of your mouth, so you can recover your voice, and start to tell me about your exciting life as a recluse. Do you have any idea, even approximately, how many years you were locked up, turned into a blind, monstrous woman, deaf and dumb, walled in, where not even a ray of light could enter your cell? And you lived in the darkness of your own volition? You became a white, flabby killjoy, buried below the overheated desert sand. And without hearing a human voice except the same three ritual words of the sister who brought you food twice a day and a jar of water every week. A cushy job for thirty years. Thirty years! No one has the right to squander a life this way, so irresponsibly, without a cuddle, without your eyes, exhausted by darkness being able to see the colours of the evening, without hearing a love song, without a new word to glisten like a gold coin in your writer’s mind. What have you done? Have you written whatever you have written with your small collection of old words, like spent, archaic and devalued coins, the result of your pigheadedness in being locked up? I know that you have a rich store of words that come from your faith, that you have acquired a few words that come from reason and science, and that you use them precariously like a new recently starched dress that is still too big for you. Why did you do it? What interior darkness has pushed you to look for darkness outside? How were you able to write in the darkness? Think about it. Because by returning to your father’s house in Ciudad del Sur, you’ll have returned to the future. You’ll understand this apparent contradiction. You’ll understand that I’m your future, and I’ll speak to you until your ageing ears are burning, about the future and about modernity, a word, which, naturally was unheard of in the convent. A day long journey in a two-horse tilbury, without stopping for a break will kill anyone. What had thirty years done to your body, mistreated every day by the unchanging silence of your cell? I’ll heat up the water to fill the bathtub, so you can soak yourself for at least a few hours in water foamed up with palm oil. It’s necessary to soften the fossilized grime that you have acquired in your own right. Then I’ll scratch your skin with a blunt knife. Don’t put on that sour face, it’s a joke, my dear little nun. While the bath water is heating up, I’ll give you a massage with almond oil and a cream made from finely cut apricot seeds. Give me your body so that the massage can repair, clean and refresh you, make you healthy, sweeten your body, make you beautiful and above all, to caress, love and pamper you. Let me have your body to stretch, and to loosen up every bump, every protected corner, every damp secret, and every mystery. Let my rubbing and massage open your body like a flower that offers itself to the rays of the sun. And when the bathwater has heated up, I’ll soak rosemary leaves and throw them in the bath to speed up your blood circulation that has become lazy from hibernating for so long in abstinence. I’ll put in rose petals, pine branches and purifying lavender. Orange leaves, orange blossoms, sandalwood perfume, and geranium flowers to rejuvenate your skin, drops of oil of Aloe Vera, and jasmine to return sensuality to your curves, laurel leaves as a reward for leaving the Middle Ages and making a timid step towards modernity: a journey in time. You will then see how you can relax, how you can feel the sweetness of the body of a woman who smells great, with tight skin, lubricated with sunflower oil that I will rub in with my own hands. You’ll enjoy a bed with a mattress and clean sheets, silk pyjamas, and a doona with cotton covers, embroidered with yellow thread. No more of that wrinkled and hostile bed of basalt, on which you’ve mistreated the fragility of your body. Isn’t it comforting to know that you’ll not sleep anymore over the tomb of a girl nun, surrounded by trunks full of human bones, tirelessly accompanied by the disturbing presence of death? Because I imagine that you don’t want to sleep in the tower. The tower? Settle down. First the body, then the spirit, because you’ve been spending so much time looking after the spirit that you’ve neglected your body. In the end, they’re all the same thing. Let’s get out of the water and scrub you with this sponge of vegetable fibres, especially around the neck, the stomach, the legs, feet, and, my God, your feet look like the claws of a bird of prey. Let’s go then, and, get out of the water now I’ll rinse you off, and dry you with this floral towel. For a start, kneel down and rest your head on the edge of the bath. I’m going to apply a homemade hair conditioner for you: a mixture of banana, sabila, avocado, lemon and egg. I’ll apply deep circular massages to your hairy scalp, and to your braided hair, dead as a half burned log, and let the mixture stand for an hour. Better to leave it two hours to increase its effectiveness. I’ll wash your skin again, dry it, and there it’s finished. Look at yourself in the mirror, caress your hair, and it’ll start to recover a certain freedom, a bit of the silkiness that it once had, and it will become brilliant and manageable. How do you want it combed? What kind of cut would make it better? A cut to the height of your neck to allow the beauty of your long white neck to jump out and with a fringe to smooth out the excessive wideness of your forehead? A cut to your shoulders, from your waist, your coccyx. You should think about it. Try to imagine your face with different haircuts. Start to think about your image, your beauty and how others will see you. Cast a glance up to the tower. Come.

MY LIFE ON THE OUTSIDE:

THE FATHER

(Written on the Face)

The Tower

1

After an absence of thirty years, I look out from the church entrance at my father’s house situated in Ciudad del Sur’s central plaza. A yellow dog draws a tree on the white wall with his urine, and continues on his journey insolently, as if he had invented not only the tree but also drawing and botany.

That dog and that tree remind me, and I don’t know why, of the French anthropologist’s book that my father read to me on countless nights when I had finished primary school. He read to me for one hour every night, the approximate time for sleep to overcome me. And every night before he started, I said to him: Start from the beginning. And so these were the gifts I have from my father: he read me books that he wanted to read. But it was as if I had chosen them. I believe that from that time, I have liked anthropologists and the books they write. They’re like novels. Reading books was his way of showing me the dark and luminous things that made up his interior life. I still know off by heart the first paragraph that I made him repeat so many times because I found in it something that chilled my heart:

I hate travelling, and I hate explorers. And behold, I’m here to tell you about my expeditions. But how much time it took to make this decision! Fifteen years ago when I left Brazil for the last time, and since then I have been telling myself to start that book. But a kind of shame and distaste always stopped me.

That’s how Levi-Strauss starts off his The Sad Tropics and that’s how I started to understand, although through a glass darkly, that the stories that are worth telling are those that are told with distaste and shame. What else is an autobiography except a reflection on guilt? What else is writing, except talking about shame and distaste? And it is not important that others have told those stories a thousand times before. Nor does it matter that others have told this story a thousand times better than me. We have to stop them falling into oblivion. That’s what it is all about. That shame is not forgotten. Yes, perhaps. I’m writing about this, about how wonderful it is to write, about its eroticism, its capacity to give meaning and also, in the end, its futility, its silence and the dark side of words.

With these contradictory ideas swimming round in my head, I’ll go into my father’s house. My only luggage is a potbellied bottle full of black ink, duck quill pens, and a decent pile of writing paper. Yes, it’s true, I came to write, or more precisely, to transcribe. I immediately go to the tower.

2

After so much time in the dark when it didn’t matter if my eyes were open or closed, I feel free. I lie naked on my back on the floor, I mean completely naked, watching the clouds, fluffy like lamb’s wool, passing over the skylight. I can’t deny that there’s something new in my body, a bit of the slowness of those clouds. Perhaps for that reason, I spend hours watching them. I also spend hours feeling my body, reading what’s written there, my experiences and the things that are missing. The tower of dark fired bricks rises up four meters, and is camouflaged in the center of the house. The top is covered by plain glass, like a skylight, making it waterproof, and, on the other hand, allowing the disorderly entrance of the sunlight. As a precaution, I lock the door with the bolt. The anthropologist had gone on one of her usual excursions, with her mules, her bags, her strings and half a dozen spades for digging. Half of the circle that forms the tower on the floor is covered by hundreds of the anthropologist’s bound packages. On top of the tied packages, she has placed a mountain of coffee sacks. The aroma of smooth coffee, grown on the hills of the island, permeates the place. It’s the aroma of life here: the house smells of coffee, the people smell of coffee, and the coffee camouflages my body’s true smell. For that reason, I have to wage war against the aroma that invades everything. I need isolation and privacy that the tower offers me, to read calmly what is written on my body. I also need the purity of the air, the silence and the sky that passes unhurried over my head. I stay there, on my back, naked, looking at the clouds, thinking about the anthropologist’s packages, and looking for the moment in which I can start to transcribe the story that keeps me naked. The sun falls onto the table with seven legs, created by a mad carpenter. The wind sieves out a big ash grey cloud. The pile of paper sheets gleams on the table, the potbellied bottle full of black ink, and in a ceramic container, ten ducks quills ready for writing. But I can’t start yet. First, I have to say that the anthropologist was my father’s companion in his last years, and that, despite us being more or less of the same age, she has often been like a mother to me. At other times, she’s been like a sister accomplice or like a teacher who has tried to teach me the art of thinking rationally. Most of the time she failed, but that’s not always been her fault. Now she doesn’t try to meddle in what I have to write on paper with the well sharpened duck feathers. But her curiosity is obvious: she’s part of the story. The ash coloured cloud abandons the skylight, and continues its voyage to uncertainty. The anthropologist taught me this strange idea of mixing clouds with uncertainty.

3

Turning those things over in my head, I discovered that I have several bodies. The childhood body without a history about which almost nothing has been written. The wounded body of the adolescent wife, short, brilliant, tragic and with needs. The chaste body of the widow, in Christian denial, spending numerous years in the convent of nursing nuns. A body in love, at various times, with different men, but sharing something that I can call essential. Essential for falling in love with them. Particularly one of them, perhaps the most unlikely, but the one I loved so deeply. That’s my body, a body mistreated by the island’s sterile political struggles. A body consumed by a sensual hell for a decade. The frayed body of an almost geriatric nun, but still brimming with energy and the joy of living, a body that I now see naked in the loneliness of the tower. All those bodies live in me simultaneously, almost as if I was still all of them, as if I were a multitude of bodies. Because I’m a child, an inexperienced young girl, the failed wife, the adolescent nun with desires, and the adult nun who had to imagine how to survive, and who had written notes and entire chapters of stories on the body of each one of these women so as to create a spurious memory of the events that she never lived. One can understand the difficulty of coming to an agreement with myself over how to organize and transcribe the essence of the torrent of words that I’d written over thirty years of being in the convent, locked up in the darkness. I am, essentially, a handful of contradictions that aspires to order, although I know that order will destroy me.

I took a note intuitively of the stories that relate to different subjects in different parts of my body (body, torso, and extremities, just like my human anatomy texts at school). I will keep this initial way of organizing the stories to save me from chaos. The stories of my childhood and adolescence, the maps and the meaty love of my father and husband during my life on the outside are on my face and neck. On my shoulders, under the armpits and on the sides of my torso, are the stories of darkness in the convent with my nursing nun companions. My failed attempts to cure smallpox with the herbal medicines of Hildegard von Bingen are on my back and buttocks. The wild adventures with José Salvany y Lleopart and the Royal Philanthropic Vaccination Expedition are on my chest, breasts, and stomach. On the left arm, I have written stories on memory, death and the ephemeral writing of the island’s inhabitants. On the right leg, the tortured epic journey through the brothel inside, and the role of laughter in the construction of meaning in life. The feminine body as architecture for stories. How can a woman write in any other way?

4

And so, I’m trying to translate and transcribe my writings, naked in the tower.

If you’ve written your autobiography on your body for almost your whole life, with layers of writing superimposed like geological ages, and now you have to translate the unknown language written on your body, and to transcribe it onto paper, you have no other choice, but to remain naked. True? Well, that’s what I’m doing. I’ve done that for almost my whole life as a nun: writing while naked. I start, then, with the face, the neck, the eyelashes, the ears and the tongue.

5

Before starting to transcribe the writing, I get dressed, and go out to walk through the central plaza as a way of preparing myself. I feel in my feet the misshaped paving stones on the ground. I fill up my lungs with the thin air of the morning, with the oily and astringent perfume of the eucalyptus trees. The stone fountain splashes a torrent into the air, in the form of a dahlia of water, and falls over into disorder. In front of the white wall of the house, I see a yellow dog pissing on the tree that another dog had drawn with his urine.

My Father’s Rules

1

Living in a mandala, says my father, is the only acceptable way of living. All the rest is emptiness. So think about it. This is the first rule: every history that is respected must happen in a mandala.

2

In the beginning I’m a little girl.

I think and think about a disappearance.

That disappearance is my first important memory. One day she’s here and the next day she’s not. The first thing I saw on waking was the rounded white face of my mother. I assume that she dressed me, and took me on a walk to Sunday Mass. I remember that she made my clothes with many printed patterns and coloured bows. That I remember. But one morning, I woke up, and saw my father’s face. It was big, unshaven, with a bitter and evasive look, a remnant of sadness on his narrow lips. I never saw my mother again. I only remember her pale round face, although sometimes I think that the face I remember now is a reconstructed one. My father made a bonfire with the daguerreotypes of my mother, and with her clothes that she left behind on the day she fled the house, so that I couldn’t refresh my memory by smelling her clothes that had been in contact with her body. But I remember her deep sounding, almost masculine voice. It was like the buzzing of a blowfly flapping its wings. That buzzing caressed me and entertained me. However, the words she said to me were not recorded on my memory, not one word of it. I don’t remember her hands or whether she was tall or short. I don’t remember my mother’s gaze, or her mothering arms. I remember the smell of the magnolias that she left in the bed, but now I don’t know if I have invented this smell, or if it’s an honest and genuine memory. The morning of her disappearance turned me into the only daughter of an only father. And without knowing why, I started to suspect that I would never have a child.

3

My father spends his life obsessed with mandalas. I think he once told me the mandala is a circle. The circle is a perfect figure. It only needs a good dose of imperfection, disorder and perversity. He said something like that, using many words I don’t recall. I don’t think I understood very well what he was saying to me. Apart from the mandalas, my father likes two things that have to be done patiently, making up stories and establishing rules, without them becoming entangled by the haste and intolerance of youth. Without rules, things don’t work very well, he says, and his face blooms with a thousand but slightly mocking smiles. And so, we began to clarify the matter of the rules. The rules do not refer to the way in which one should live but how stories should be told. When I understand this difference, I experience a feeling of relief. I’ll talk a little about my father’s rules. I think they’re useful for telling stories. Although some people think that they’re old hat. I’ll try to carry them out as best I can. However, I know that obedience has always been hard for me. But it’s not a problem now because he died a long time ago. That’s what I think, although I have my doubts because he continues to live inside me.

4

The umbraculum, he says, the umbraculum, is the second rule. Yes, yes, I tell myself. It’s a Latin word that means a shadowy, dark, circumscribed, silent and a suitable place to reflect and write. The umbraculum about which my father speaks is what a woman writer will later call, her own room. The medieval monks had discovered the benefits of that shadowy place before my father thought of it, and before this writer. And now, I’m about to find it. Writing in the shade house, a shade house for writing, means never seeing the light of day, and not being exposed to the elements. Daylight attracts the enemies of writers.

5

How can you live in a mandala if you don’t draw a map from the inside? It’s a physical geography with living beings. My friend, Humboldt calls them thermal floors. An unfurnished house is not a home. If we are going to live in that house, we have to furnish it. That’s the third rule. You have to draw a map on