Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

“Stitches

O’Malley to raise a pig outside the kitchen and Sister O’Malley, who was mute and Irish, raised him well and we were fond of him, but then on the day of the slaughter, since Sister O’Malley was inexperienced, all the meat was lost and Sister Dolor exclaimed: Never again, I swear. By San Martiño, we’d already grown tired of buying the journal, but we still wanted to know more about everything: about the gentleman, about the married life he’d had with Sister Elvira Lecumberri, about why Sister Elvira Lecumberri had left us and then returned. (Deep down, we wanted to believe that Sister Elvira Lecumberri had returned for us, because, like us, she’d missed our sewing classes). During the first weeks of the course, we studied Sister Elvira Lecumberri in the dining hall. Sister Elvira Lecumberri was serious and pale (before she’d had a caramel tone; she’d lost her color— during her marriage, before, or after, we’ll never know—and she never got it back). She wasn’t quiet. At the table she spoke plenty and the other nuns spoke back. About what, we didn’t know; what the nuns talked about between themselves was always a mystery to us, but we had the impression that Sister Mártara Junior spoke to Sister Elvira Lecumberri with an air of condescension, the same way she spoke to us when we got back from bathing in the swimming hole on Saturdays: What on earth were you thinking, going to the swimming hole alone without your bloomers? We spied on Sister Elvira Lecumberri away from the table too. We took notes about what she did: that she walked down to Agromos alone, that she came back at unusual hours (though to be fair, we didn’t know how she behaved before, so). We took notes, but we learned very little for all our hard work. The idea began to congeal among us that something more needed to be done; we would need to make more of an effort if we wanted to find out anything worthwhile about Sister Elvira Lecumberri. If we were to get close to her, one of us would have to undertake the mission alone. Since the day we entered Polar, we had always done everything together, 161