Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

“Stitches

the two of them already knew each other from before, through Sister Elvira Lecumberri’s brother, who’s a poet and columnist (just like ours, we thought admiringly). Or did you think that the editor of a journal, a journal like that, no less, would come here to cozy up to nun? A journal like what? the rest of us insisted earnestly. Deep down, the curiosity was consuming us; we, like Sister Elvira Lecumberri, had brothers, and some of them were poets and columnists, but how were any of them going to introduce us to their friends if we were always here at Polar? At home, we saw some of them in passing, but we usually hid because we weren’t presentable. A journal like that, says Imogen. That one that you buy at Eliseo’s store in Agromos—or did you think that the nuns don’t see you? Of course they see you, and what’s more, when they see you, they want to follow you, but they control themselves. Listen to what I’m telling you: the whole country wants to move backwards, and it will. And when it does, the country won’t turn around again like Sister Elvira Lecumberri did. Imogen’s words made the flesh inside our blouses tremble, because we knew that these sorts of things weren’t to be said, not inside Polar and not outside. Some of us even mustered the courage to respond, in voices a bit louder than necessary: Imogen, you’d better spit that filth right out of your mouth. We know that your grandfather kept pigs in the yard and killed them with his own hands; people like him, sure, they believe in all the things that this journal wants to bring to the country without shame, without thinking. We have more common sense. Imogen stretched out her legs on the bed and smiled again. That pig, we thought. What bothered us most, though, was when we realized that Imogen had stopped reporting anything new; it became more apparent as heat began to linger in the air and the days began to grow longer—finer clothes, more hours of light to think and to notice things. Contemplating Imogen—her sleeves rolled up higher 167