Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

“Stitches

We were all watching Sister Elvira Lecumberri on tiptoe from the window as she climbed up the steep path that led from Agromos, the village, to Polar, the school. Sister Elvira Lecumberri, we called her, even though the last time we’d seen her she already hadn’t been a sister anymore; she’d left the order, left Polar, to marry. Yet there she was, climbing with that gait that we’d always admired, more dainty than we ourselves were ever likely to manage—time would tell—even though she was a very, very tall woman. It was already getting dark, but we didn’t feel like going upstairs. Sister Elvira Lecumberri had been absent from us for two years but, as we now observed from the window, there wouldn’t be a third. In the darkness, squinting our eyes, we could tell that she was wearing a hat—the kind that ladies wore, our older sisters, for example—but we couldn’t tell if she had her habit on underneath, even though some of us were so anxious to see that we stuck half our bodies out the window. We were still young and could do things like that. That was the sort of thing we did at Polar.

The other day, Sister Mártara Junior read us the schedule.

Third period, sewing, she said.

Sewing? we asked. Sewing was what Sister Elvira Lecumberri

taught when she was still a nun.

She answered: That’s what I said. Or are you girls going deaf? And so we copied it down by hand, even though our pencils were trembling: Sewing. Sister Elvira Lecumberri would put us in pairs—never the same ones. We took each other’s measurements and cut the cloth right against our bodies. These were not pieces that we could wear in Polar—we could only wear the uniform: the smock or nothing—nor at home, but we hung them in our closets and kept them there like treasures. We were at that age, after all.

Two years earlier, on the last day of the course, Sister Elvira 153