Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

“Stitches

Lecumberri walked into the classroom and announced in front of everyone that she was leaving the order to get married. We almost thought she would take off her habit right there the way she was going, but she didn’t. All the better, we quickly realized, because only an immature mind would desire such a thing. Since then, we girls had started to better understand whom Elvira Lecumberri had married. He was the editor of a journal. A journal that some of us knew from our houses because our older brothers had begun to bring it home—the ones who were studying to be things like notaries, businessmen, or pilots, and wrote poems in their leisure time. When they did, our fathers scoffed and said: Let’s see what filth you’ve brought us now. You kids just love to be provocative, don’t you (our mothers didn’t say anything, because they were doing something else). But, when they got bored, the fathers would pick up the journal themselves and read it. Then they’d say: I’ll tell you what, there just might be something to this FA-SCI-SM. They said it like that. Some of us knew very well that the fathers weren’t as dumb as they looked, but they pronounced it that way to make us see that something of these modernities they’d already taken up. For us, on the other hand, FA-SCI-SM caught us too young and too uninterested in what the world of the not-too-distant future, our brothers’ world, would hold for us. The gentleman became a household name for some of us, though—a man who started as a poet and became the editor of a journal. If this was possible, anything was possible, we maintained—or would be soon enough. (Some of us thought that even a girl could become the editor of a journal; others said that was impossible.) When we returned home for Christmas, some of us began to read that journal when our brothers or fathers happened to buy it. We read it only to see if Sister Elvira Lecumberri’s name would appear (now just Elvira Lecumberri), and occasionally it did: twice, and both for her charity work. Which we also did, us and the mothers. We were disappointed by the similarity, but we counselled ourselves: Once you go out into the world, you’ll have to do a bit of everything. We also reminded ourselves that girls 155