In those days, Sr. Peter had one big worry, which she prayed over every day. It was the single defect, the one weakness, she could confess to. There were some moments when she felt as if she were being lifted by giant hands and thrust inside a bathysphere which sank and negotiated dark, treacherous reefs on automatic pilot, beyond the reach of everybody, God inclusive. Once in there, traveling at incredible speeds, she lost all control. She felt like a wingless eagle dropping from the sky. By the time she became aware of her lower back, her armpits and her olfactory system, it was too late, the consequences a marvel even to herself.
It had all started long ago, on the day when she decided to fight back. She had grabbed a stick and hit her younger brother Mbale very hard on the shoulder. She went on hitting him even when he fell down. She would have gone on punishing him if two village men had not intervened, grabbing the stick and pulling her away. That was one of the reasons her parents had welcomed her nunly vocation, because peasant men, from whose ranks her suitor would probably emerge, would either maim or kill her if she ever did that to them.
Nowadays the attacks, or “flashes” as she called them, came only occasionally. They were usually triggered by an incident in which her anger was aroused and her temper inflamed. Gravity of transgression did not matter: a boy breaking another’s nose, trespassing in the convent garden or coming late to church could trigger the explosion. She would hear sounds and feel lifted up, and automatic action would ensue, followed by sweatings, purgings and the bursting of lemon odor on her whole skin.
It was the purgative effect of those attacks which both intrigued and worried the otherwise no-nonsense Sr. Peter. The explosion, like a holy fire, would pulverize all her inner tension and for a moment bring her bliss. In the midst of it, when onlookers saw and heard only wailing children, an orchestra would be tearing down her walls with music. At such moments of stormy bliss, everything revolved round her and she became the center of that raging, frothing, primordial, infernal world.
As a way of dealing with the resultant fear, she took the view that what occurred at such moments was a revelation, a holy fuse God had left smoldering inside her for His holy purposes which she, in her simplicity, was yet to understand. So she prayed for enlightenment and asked for answers to that mystical riddle. She fasted. She wore a strip of gunnysack on her skin. She worked harder than the rest, feeding the pigs, washing their pens, smelling their shit. She disinfected all the convent bathrooms and washed all the toilets. She won praise all round, and the fuse seemed to die a natural death.
Yet when she reduced the prayers and curtailed the work sessions, she discovered not only that the fuse was still alive, but also that its purpose was still a mystery. She turned to Holy Scripture. Elijah slaughtered four hundred fifty prophets of Baal; Jesus lashed the people who had turned the temple into a den of thieves; God unleashed snakes on His people and massacred thousands to extinguish His anger. But what was the purpose of her fuse? She was only a simple nun.
She finally concluded that the fuse was a test of the strength of her character and her commitment to the call. She started looking forward to the attacks in order to fight them. As a tribute to the lucidity of this new vision, she forgave defaulters, content to let them escape with verbal warnings buzzing in their ears. Sometimes she gave them light punishment, like collecting straw for brooms, raking mango leaves in the compound or helping the cook wash the porridge boilers, but soon she realized that, in the end, she could not spare the rod without spoiling the children. She picked it up once again and wielded it just like everybody else. This time, though, she tried to control herself. She was only partly successful. What happened in the end was that the pupils who got beaten first got off lightly, and those who came last, when the falling-eagle phenomenon had come into play, took the brunt, as if she were compensating for earlier leniency. The children were quick to remark that Sr. Peter had gotten worse, for, if they were all being punished for the same misdemeanor, why were some getting beaten harder than others?
During her week as duty mistress, in charge of school liturgy and general discipline, the inevitable happened. She hurt seven children so badly that in the end, in order to keep the affair out of court and out of the greasy hands of scandalmongers and church-haters, Sr. John Chrysostom, in her capacity as Mother Superior, promised the angry parents that she was going to take swift and decisive action. A few hours later, she disrobed the otherwise industrious Sr. Peter and, in one stroke, thrust her back into the world she despised so much.
The disgraced nun went down on her knees and begged and promised never to touch the children again, but to no avail. In desperation she pleaded that she had nowhere to go. To which her former superior replied, “Everyone has got a place to go. Remember, foxes have their own holes, too.” Paralyzed by shame and blinded by rage, Sr. Peter took refuge in the home of Mbale, the brother she had nearly maimed at the beginning of it all.
Within a few days, Mbale’s iron-roofed house was oppressed by the cataclysm of his sister’s depression. She locked herself in the guest room with a jerry can of water and a plastic basin, and refused to come out. She refused to eat, surviving on two mugs of water a day. She cried and prayed all day, and, spent, she slept all night. In mortification, she slept on the bare floor, and scratched the earth with her fingers till her nails bled. She asked Death to come for her. She rattled heaven’s door with poignant novenas to St. Jude Thaddeus, helper of desperate cases. Each morning she scribbled a message on a piece of paper to the effect that she was still alive, and that no one should get alarmed or attempt to interrupt her prayer-and-mortification sessions.
On the seventh day, Mbale knocked on her door with the intention of starting some form of dialogue, but she sent him away. He threatened to break the door with a hammer, and she replied that he would regret it for the rest of his life. Afraid that she would die in there, he hurried to his aunt, a good-natured character whose negotiating skills he hoped would help. They arrived on the ninth day, and found the former Sr. Peter washed, fed, wearing a blue dress and relaxing in a wicker chair on the veranda. A hen or two was pecking at her toenails, mistaking them for maize grains. She agreed to go with her aunt, who found her a job as a filing clerk in a small cotton-buying firm in a nearby town.
Sr. Peter, as she still thought of herself then, attended her first wedding just to get out of her aunt’s house. All she was hoping for was a lingering sense of disgust, generated by the dancers’ pelvic gyrations and the people’s profanity, to buoy her home at the end of the evening. She did not look at anyone. She did not drink anything. She did not participate in any festivities. She would have preferred to hover above the crowd, unseen, and watch foolish people disgrace themselves by rolling in the muck of their lust. She stood outside the booth, arms across her chest, stared into space and let the noise, the cheering, the drumming pour over her like water washing a rock. This went on until a face crossed her line of vision. It disappeared and appeared again. It was the face of a young man who looked as lost as herself. He seemed to be trembling, quaking, as if experiencing something as quaint as a miracle. Looking closely, he discovered that she was radiating sublime calm and perfect solitude with such force as he had never seen before. He was hooked by the fathomless intensity pouring out of her frail bosom. Her apparent sanity in the face of the one hundred and one madnesses around her spoke eloquently to something so deep within him that he could not avert his eyes. It was this sudden awareness of her powers, powers she hitherto believed to have left behind the cold walls of the convent, that made her tremble and almost panic. Afraid that her loss of control had been witnessed by a second young man who came and stood next to the first one, she turned and left, melting into the excited crowd.