Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

“Stitches

control what we see; everything else is in the hands of God.

Therefore, it wasn’t fascism that was banned per se, because we couldn’t call it by its name inside of Polar, but a lot of things that came from the outside. Some things and not others; there was no hard rule, a detail that showed, for once, some prudence and intelligence on the part of the nuns. And so when Sister Elvira Lecumberri happened, the nuns didn’t comment one way or the other. Just once did we extract a remark from Sister Mártara Senior, back when she was still teaching our sewing classes. She said: This sort of thing happens in all the convents. What do you expect; she’s at that age, that Elvira Lecumberri. In the first sewing class of the new course, we did everything we could to call Sister Elvira Lecumberri by her name so she would help us with this or that. Each time we deliberately called her Sister Elvira Lecumberri. We’d already observed that she was wearing her habit again, but. Sister Elvira Lecumberri this, Sister Elvira Lecumberri that; help me with this stitch, please, Sister Elvira Lecumberri. She did everything we asked—not with a smile, but she hadn’t smiled much before either (in Polar, only the older nuns smiled). We could only conclude that she was a nun once again, and that is how we came to know someone in the flesh for the first time who had been married and now wasn’t. When we went down to Agromos on Sundays after mass, we bought that journal (when they had it) to see if we could find out anything else about the man with whom Sister Elvira Lecumberri had been married; we wanted to know who he was, how he was, if Sister Elvira Lecumberri had also cut his clothes against his body like she had us do. In the journal, we never found anything about him besides his name printed on the masthead—which wasn’t helpful, but it was enough for us to understand that the gentleman did, in fact, exist. Soon San Martiño arrived and, with it, the first and last time that a pig was slaughtered at Polar. Sister Dolor had ordered Sister 159