Until You, Who?

By Christian Filostrat

 

I constantly regretted not considering anything that would have interfered with my love for Mària. I constantly regretted following Mària to the Congo in the quest to serve the least of these, the motto of the Perpetual Cross renunciants. Friends rarely end up in the same place unless love and sex are involved.

 

I pleaded with her that after wars like the last two inflicted on Belgium, our country was the one in need of our services. There was enough misery at home that the least of these were presently at the doorsteps of our convent in Liege, and I made the mistake of ironizing that Liege was far from Africa. That got me a stinging slap. "I didn't go to the Carmelites because I wasn't able to imagine life apart from you," I told her as she laid on the floor after I had hit her back as hard as I could on the shoulder; not on the beautiful face. "But I told you I didn't want to go slogging through Africa; the stories out of that Congo Free State terrify me. We are going to be absorbed into their brutality and become part of what's practiced over there."

 

Adamant, she wouldn't hear my plea. And that was that. She would go without me, she said; she didn't love me as I loved her. She would miss me, of course, but not being into me the way I was into her, she would manage whereas I wouldn't.   

 

Sister Immanuel recounts her life and the life of her great love, Sister Mària, from their childhood in Belgium to their service as Catholic nuns in colonial Belgian Congo in this mesmerizing, psychological drama.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PIERRE KROFT LEGACY PUBLISHERS
• Release date: Aug 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201322281

Christian Filostrat

I didn't always work as a full-time writer. I traveled the world as a semi-US diplomat for more than two decades, allowing me him to collect experiences and stories to write about when I no longer wore scratchy suits and blue-colored ties and sat down at a keyboard. I connected with the African narrative, and of all the stories I heard around the world, the ones about European colonialism and what it wrought in Africa captivated me the most. So I gathered stories about the arrival of Europeans, their outlook, policies, and attitudes before and after European women arrived on the continent, and the impact everything European had on the African people. After the Soviet Union fell apart, I worked at our embassy in Bucharest, Romania. One of my responsibilities was to obtain Holocaust-related documents from the Ministry of the Interior and the State Security for the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I once came across a letter to the State Security from wartime president/dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu about a farmer named David. A paper clip was used to secure David's picture to the letter. He was a poor farmer dressed in rags. Why would Romania's dictator write to inquire about a single farmer's transportation status? What I write is heavily influenced by those files from the Romanian Ministry of the Interior's archives.

Book preview

ALSO BY CHRISTIAN FILOSTRAT

Frantz Fanon in the U.S.A., followed by comments from Fanon’s wife

Negritude Agonistes

Containing China

PIERRE KROFT PRESTIGE LEGACY PUBLISHERS

4075 Jefferson Parkway

Lake Oswego, Oregon 97035

United States

Copyright 2022 Christian Filostrat

Publication date August 2022

All rights reserved.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, except for short passages quoted by a literary critic, without the prior written permission of the publisher

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Filostrat, Christian

Until you, who? / Christian Filostrat

p. cm

1. Zaire – DRC – Belgian Congo – Angola – Leopold II – Mobutu Sese Seko History. 2. Belgium – Colonies – History – Blacks – Race identity. 6. Cultural assimilation. I. Title 

Like all Europeans, Father Brabant declared, you're having a first-day-in-Africa letdown. That will fade as soon as you become acclimated to the Congo. Your minds will adjust, not because the Congo has changed, but because you have embraced the opportunities to change the place. And you'll thank God for these opportunities, and you'll grow even more sympathetic to the Congo; you'll become champions of your captives. You see, he continued, things are out of place in Leopoldville's Bantu sector; the people you're passing through here belong in a forest or village somewhere out there, not in a city. You're witnessing the agony of a village giving birth to a city. Such origins are always agonizing. It was said to be agonizing in Europe during the Middle Ages. It's startling in Africa."

Filostrat, Christian

Until you, who? A love story

Until you, who?

A love story

FOREWORD

When I fly, I talk to the people next to me. That helps me with my fear and advances the clock. In October 1999, on a flight from Kinshasa to Brussels, I spoke with a nun sitting next to me. Her Belgian nun life story in the Congo drew me in, especially because she was eager to share it with me. I paid close attention to what she said about the infection that was by then known as HIV/AIDS. She was sure she had dealt with it when she worked as a nurse in Wembo-Nyama in the 1950s. I also wrote down that she was heartbroken by the plight of the Congo, which she saw as doomed to an eternity in hell’s dead end. She could not have been more prescient in her assessment of the Congo. But most of what she told me was about Mària. 

SISTER IMMANUEL ENTERED the convent out of love for a classmate who aspired to be a nun. After 54 years of service as a nurse in the Congo, she yearns to share her love story.

The truth, her beloved, and the love story of her life deserve nothing less. It is therefore vital that her story be told accurately with no embellishment.

Suicide is a recurring issue in her life. An issue that like a jack-in-the-box keeps popping up again and again.

After learning that her mother had taken her own life on the day she took her vows, she began debating with herself, Is it possible to live, when there is nothing to live for? Her uncle and then her beloved followed suit. There were others.

She's left to witness the independence of the Congo on her own. Having arrived in 1945, she has a front row seat. In faithful detail, she recounts what the Congolese do and Belgium’s maneuvers to maintain control over a colony synonymous with suffering. As to the question regarding suicide, she answers by describing how her own life ends.

Chapter 1

Since Jerome, my house servant, presented them to me at the ceremony of my investiture as head nurse of the Congo's Wembo-Nyama hospital on December 12, 1949, the pillows I'm propped up on have been a blessing. Dear Jerome spent over a year collecting down feathers from rare Cameroon Scrub-Warbler nests and making the pillows out of two lion skins purchased at the Leopoldville Central Market. He kept them in his room, waiting for the right occasion to give them to me. They are the world's two most comfortable pillows. When I returned to Tournai, my hometown in southwest Belgium that I had left fifty-four years before, I brought Jerome and the pillows with me. I've been grateful for them both more than any other gift.

Supported by Jerome’s pillows, I give vent to my yearning to reach out to the world outside in my suite in Maison St Jean, Tournai's nursing home, with what I tell myself is a unique story – a story that’s neither narcissistic, nor prejudiced, nor a delirium, nor as people have told me to my face, the story of an old nun – I prefer renunciant; nun was until recently a term of address for an old cloistered woman – weaving her regrets and self-absorption into redemption for a wasted unnatural life. Of course, in the grand scheme of time, it’s not an exceptional story; but it is – where it counts – in the tale of two simple renunciants. When people read a significant story, they do not recognize it. So much the more, if it's a narrative about a nun celebrating herself. I wish people had the patience of my notebook, which can handle anything with a patient smile. Or, as young Anne Frank put it, "Papier heeft meer geduld dan mensen;" and it's true: ‘paper has more patience than people.’

In Maison St. Jean, I write about Mària and me for an hour in the morning, and if I have an evocative and heartfelt prayer without being interrupted by my friend the word before 3 p.m., I write for another hour and a half in the afternoon. I talk to myself and my notebook about what and how much I should say. Anxiously, I remind myself that I have a duty of confidentiality, which is a sworn pledge not to reveal anything that could harm my order. The tension between my anxiety and the urge to tell about my life is heightened as a result.

Fortunately, Kathryn Hulme's Nun's Story, a 1956 novel, delves into the daily life of a nun, from her first day as an aspirant to the day she takes her final vows and beyond. It follows the Belgian nun's journey from becoming a nun to leaving the convent and walking into a war-torn world. I've read many books, but this one is the most beautiful. Because of Nun’s Story, I’m less apprehensive to talk about my life as a nun. The journey that Ms. Hulme describes is so detailed that when I read the Nun's Story in one night, it reminded me of the kilometers of Priscilla's Catacombs, tunnels that run under Rome, and the Basilica of San Silvestro that I visited in 1964. In the Hulme story, even the nun's underwear is discussed. And, of course, it’s all about the Rules that everyone has to follow, which are laid out in their full glory and discussed over and over again. I keep Nun’s Story by my bed and reread it constantly as if it were my own journal, knowing that it's easier to talk about someone else than about yourself. If you are an outsider or if you live your life via the experiences of other people, you run the risk of being obsessed with facts. When the need is sharp, an insider needs to be specific, cautious, and even deceptive, and this is especially true when a person they care deeply about is involved. What else could I possibly add to this? Surprisingly, talking about Mària makes talking about myself less difficult to deal with. Fortunately, Ms. Hulme's novel is rich in the nun's self-denial and the convent's Machiavellian strategy to deceive life, or her life against nature, as Ms. Hulme puts it. That has given me the opening I needed to tell Mària's and my stories without getting bogged down in the details of a nun's convent life and betraying our vows. I figure that since Ms Hulme has already covered everything there is to know about a Belgian nun's daily life in obsessive detail and more beautifully than I could ever do, I can be perverse - not contrarian - about divulging the indulgences Mària and I didn't deny ourselves out of shame, arrogance, or delight, and don't forget the inescapable fact of old age. Then I can turn Ms. Hulme's Nun's Story on its head by telling the stories of two nuns who broke the Rules to be themselves. So, now that I don't have to worry about saying something I shouldn't, I focus on the sanctum of Mària and me instead of the sanctum of sisterhood. So, thanks to Ms Hulme's novel, ours can focus on fashioning a journey filled with personal accounts from an insider's experience, to bring knowing smiles from women or frowns from prelates, or both, from whoever takes an interest in our story. But I don't delude myself. No one will believe me, especially men whose posturing about women has nothing to do with women. Still, I worry that it will be forbidden to tell the story of two young nuns having blissful sex in the style of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But my desire to connect with the outside world is compelling, and I don't give up, even though I can't escape the fact that I'm old. I worry that my health will fail me, and I don't want to have to rely on the staff, who call me La Folle de Tournai instead of Sister Immanuel. I don't want to have to ask for their assistance. (They came up with the name after learning about the play La Folle de Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux.) So far, they say it behind my back because they're preoccupied with the inheritance they hope to receive from my estate. Next week, though, that might change. But I'm keeping an eye open. I'm not stupidly waiting to croak. My biggest fear is that I won't do right by my beloved or by the love story part of my history, or that I'll say too much and write a clunky hagiography of someone who isn't a saint. Or that I won't tell the love story of my history as it should be told

Father Brabant told us that Heaven looks kindly on love; I'm sure it doesn't look kindly on dishonest nuns.

Suicide is the thread that connects everything in the notes I've been keeping about Mària and me since fourth grade. God has willed that the word, Suicide, pulsate through my mind like a drumbeat, rudely questioning me: What is to be done when life is not worth living, ugh? A raucous word Suicide is. It keeps me awake nights, whispering life’s foremost riddle in my head. Then, for weeks, as fickle as it is loud, Suicide goes silent for no reason, making me anxious as I wait for it to come back and harass me once more to answer its question about life on my own. In 1964, a neurologist at the Catholic Hospital Salvator Mundi in Rome diagnosed me with tinnitus, which he dubbed the lonely ailment because only I could hear the sound it made. There are several different causes of tinnitus, but the most common one is that the brain is processing sound incorrectly, and this results in the feeling that one is hearing ringing or buzzing in one’s ears. He thought the suicide voice I was hearing was a result of my tinnitus caused by a hormonal shift since I became a nun. There was no cure, and he advised me to renounce my vows rather than end my life.

Since my aunt told me that my mother had killed herself, suicide has been my loud and moody friend. I was 11 when she died, but I didn't find out how until twelve years later, the day I became a renunciant, a nun.

August 17, 1945, late in the morning; it's overcast and cold enough for the smoke from the chimneys to hang wintrily over the town, making the day even surlier. I made the formal vows an hour ago, followed by the simple vows of a Perpetual Cross renunciant. Mària has been by my side since fourth grade, her more distinctive Garbo features sheathed in her wimple, the Perpetual Cross garment that covers the hair and goes around the neck and chin to distinguish the Perpetual Cross from the other orders. Having achieved her goal of becoming a nun, she exudes joy. With her completely avowed promise to Almighty God before the Virgin Mary, heaven, and the crowds of people filling our magnificent 13th century gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame de Tournai*, she dazzles like a Peter Paul Ruben angel. Every one of us newly renounced renunciants is illuminated by Mària's brightness. *Tournai is a city in western Belgium, near the French border. It’s known for the huge Cathedral of Notre-Dame, with 5 towers and a rose window.

Marching solemnly in ceremonial procession and gravely singing with all the passion of our hearts the Veni Creator Spiritu, we step out of the cathedral to receive congratulations and best wishes from the whole world, pleased for us and happy that the war is over. Les sales Boches, the Germans, have left Belgium. Mària squeezes my hand at the sight of a group of head-shaved women, collaborators, all dressed in black standing to the left, far to the side. She will not squeeze my hand again that day. Two African families have also unexpectedly gathered near the women collaborators, as if for safety. I infer it's the safety of rejection kinship.

When the procession broke up, we fell into the arms of family and friends. My aunt had taken station outside, on the right side of the main portal, better to corral me. I felt her reach for my habit's sleeve and pull as if for dear life. She is a small creature. Since my mother's death, I've discovered today why she only wears black. Her face is a dull yellow with an unsettling expression.

I have Mària's left hand in my right. But Tantie, as I call my aunt, says she needs to talk to me alone because she wants to tell me something personal.

Mària lets go of my hand, and I don't want to go with my aunt because it hurts my heart that Mària took her hand away so abruptly.

And on this cold Lord's Day of my vows in August 1945, she gives a speech on the steps of Notre Dame de Tournai. Today you can know that your mother didn't die of typhoid as your father told you, she says. She killed herself. Now, your purity and prayers are the only things that can save her. God has put you in charge of that because He is kind." Numb and like a character in an old cartoon I look left and right.

After lunch, which I don't eat, she has my uncle drive me across the border into France to the village of Forest-sur-Marque, where my mother hanged herself. This is also where my mother taught second grade.

The tree remains, looking injured or offended in some way, forlorn as an alien, lost against the overcast span of the frayed sky on the outskirts of a park named after Marshal Petain. I approach it as if it were the Cross, then kneel to pray to an Icon. This park will forever serve as a clandestine memorial to my mother's end

After I had looked at the tree for a long time and wondered why she had picked it, my uncle, whom I call Tonton, pointed out that he had cut the branch. And, using hand signals to avoid disturbing the