The Sisterhood

Chapter 18


From the Chronicle of Las Sors Santas de Jesus, Las Golondrinas Convent, Andalusia, Autumn 1551





Marisol has sulked for the past year—it is how she keeps sadness from overwhelming her. And a fifth girl, Sanchia, has joined the others. She is nine and came after the swallows left and smoke was rising from the valley, where fires burned to clear the fields. How horribly apt. When she was lifted unconscious from the closed carriage, at first we thought she was ill, possibly dying. But Sor Sophia who brought her said she was only in a deep sleep. Because of the terrible pain of the child’s burned legs and feet, she had been obliged to feed her dose after dose of a sleeping draft during the journey.

Now that she is healing and can walk again, Sanchia is restless. Her scarred legs and feet cause her pain and she cannot sit still long for her lessons. She skips, fidgets, and dances from the moment she rises until she is finally persuaded into bed for the last time. The Abbess coaxed the story from the child with the help of a plate of turrone, which she broke into little pieces and fed to her bit by bit.


The soldiers came when we were sleeping. They threw the furniture and our clothes about and ripped up the cushions. They said that where there were Jews, there was gold and jewels. They laughed when they found the candlesticks that my mother lit on Fridays when the curtains had been drawn. They were hidden behind a painting of the Virgin, together with Papa’s prayer book in Hebrew, which he promised to teach me to read someday. Then they found the silver wine cups that belonged to Mama’s family, with the six-pointed star that is a secret. Mama put her arm around me and said the soldiers were laughing and happy because they were playing a game, just like the game Papa and I played when I pretended to be the organ grinder’s monkey. Papa would pretend to grind his organ and I would dance. Then he would look up and say “Where’s the little monkey?” and I would run and hide quick as anything until my grandmother and grandfather coaxed me out with sweets, the way pet monkeys are coaxed with nuts.

And then the soldiers took us away, to the place where there were a lot of people locked together in the dark. Mama said that was a game, too. Soldiers took Papa and my grandfather, and when they came back Mama cried and I said it was a bad game and I was afraid and wanted to go home. Then they took Mama, and when she came back she did not speak to me. A man came to see Mama and Papa. They talked through the bars and Mama went down on her knees.

Mama got her voice back a little after that and told me that next morning she and Papa had a surprise for me: they knew a magic spell that would turn me into a real monkey. I would be hiding with them, and when she and Papa said the magic words, I would become a monkey and must scamper and dance away like I always did.

The next day the soldiers came again. In place of our clothes we had brought from home, they gave us horrible gowns that scratched. They made us take off our shoes and hold candles, and then everyone left the prison together. Outside there were crowds of people, pointing and shouting “Carrion!” and “Murderers!” and spitting at us.

Mama told me they did not matter because I was going to be a monkey, but the magic would not work until we were in the right place. Then she and Papa would say the spell, and I must not be afraid but scamper to the nun standing in the shadows. Mama pointed to a tall figure and said the nun would give me sweets and then change me back into a girl before I knew it. But I must not look back or the spells would not work.

She said there would be a fire and it might burn my feet a little, but a monkey could jump over it. She pointed the way I must go, and repeated what I must do over and over until I said, “I know! I know! Just there!” Then they tied Mama and Papa together with ropes, with me squashed between them. They didn’t tie me, though.

My parents pushed toward the edge with me between them when the music started. People around us were crying and begging, but beyond them was noise and cheering. I heard my mother ask my father if he were certain, and he said in a shaking voice that all eyes would be on the fire; a child would not be seen if it were quick. He told me sternly not to lose sight of the nun’s white wimple—look, she was kneeling in the shadows. “Wait for the magic spell,” he said over and over, “then run straight to her.”

“I know, I know!” I said. Then friars came with their crackling torches. When they lowered the torches to the place where we were standing I wondered why they were not more careful. Then there was a crackle. Smoke rose and people were choking and screaming, and suddenly fire was all around us. My parents were coughing, and my mother said, “Now!” and I heard my parents say the magic spell, “Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba!” Like a monkey I scrambled over the flames, but still they burned my legs and feet so badly that I ran very fast to get away, coughing and choking in the smoke. The terrible screaming grew louder and louder, and then the nun came into the smoke and covered me with her habit and we hurried away. When she took the cloak off I was a little girl again and I was crying because my legs and feet hurt so much. And she had no sweets after all!

The Abbess gave her the last of the turrone. Sanchia ate it, her troubled eyes darting from one to the other of us. Her legs and feet are horribly scarred, and she repeats the “magic spell,” the Jewish Prayer for the Dead, constantly, believing it will somehow restore her to her family. Dear God, they are ashes scattered to the winds now. And if the Inquisition’s investigator comes, asking questions and examining the children, if she repeats those words she will give herself and us away…we dare not think of it.

When Esperanza took Sanchia back to the sala de las niñas, the Abbess handed me the letter from the Inquisition. Las Golondrinas’ turn is approaching. The Abbess touched the medal round her neck.





November 1551


As the first snow of autumn began, the Abbess came to the library in an agitated state and sent Esperanza on an errand. “Sor Beatriz, I have seen the Foundress! I was in the cloister as the snow began, praying for guidance about how to protect Esperanza and the others, thinking how snow masks everything. Suddenly she was there, her cloak blowing exactly as others have described! She said ‘send them,’ ‘brides,’ and ‘Spanish America,’ but I could not hear more. Just as suddenly she was gone.”

I wondered if she had imagined it. The Abbess is quite old, older than I, under great strain, and very worried. She has insisted our five girls make themselves useful. To our surprise, sullen Marisol has proved to be very good at managing the children in the orphanage, and supervises in the sala de las niñas most days. Quiet Pia often sits with Luz, helping with the mending, and of course Esperanza works with me every day. The Abbess keeps Sanchia with her as much of the time as she can, trying to prepare her to face an Inquisition examiner without giving herself away. She tells Sanchia story after story of the saints, and makes her repeat them and her catechism and her prayers and the rosary over and over, so that Sanchia can give correct answers if interrogated. None of us think this will succeed, but we do not have the heart to say so to the Abbess.

We try to look forward to the Christmas celebrations, and after Lent is over, to the celebration when the novice Sor Serafina takes her final vows. There is to be a greater feast than usual to mark the day. Sor Serafina is the natural daughter of a rich widower with estates and silver mines in the New World. Unusually, she was not an orphanage girl, but entered Las Golondrinas from school in another convent. Sor Serafina is a lively girl who chatters constantly. Her older half brothers are fond of her. They send her letters with their news, and this year they made a special journey to the convent to visit their sister before the cold weather set in. They have traveled to the Spanish colonies on their father’s business several times, and were due to set off again soon. They left money with the Abbess for a splendid banquet to celebrate their sister’s profession.





The New Year

January and February 1552


On many dark winter evenings, when the mountain winds howl and we gather with our workbaskets and mending by the fire, Sor Serafina enlivens us with her brothers’ stories of Spanish America. She speaks so vividly that looking into the flames, we see flying serpents, gardens of gold and jewels, wide muddy rivers, endless green forests, bright-feathered birds, and in the midst of it all, the shining new cities that the Spanish settlers have built, with broad streets and churches and fine houses, and beyond them, haciendas that stretch to the horizon where mountains rise into the clouds. For us who are bound never to leave our convent, this is thrilling.

Sor Serafina also has a fund of more shocking stories, about the natives and their custom of taking many wives, and the Spanish settlers who, lacking Catholic Spanish women to marry, take mistresses and concubines among the mestiza women, who are very beautiful, and their children who go unbaptized unless the Spanish nuns or priests intervene. She insists brothels and divorce flourish. I scolded Sor Serafina for such frivolous speech, and she was silent for a moment, and then said that she had a better story, about nuns this time. I sighed and nodded. I have never been very strict with the novices.

She said that after Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors captured and executed the emperor of the Incas, the Spaniards went rampaging, pillaging the great stores of native gold and silver and jewels wherever they could find them. Drunk on riches, they went farther and farther from the coast seeking more. Finally, in the shadow of the great mountains, the conquistadors sacked a palace belonging to the so-called Virgins of the Sun, whom her brothers said were a sort of pagan nuns. The Virgins disappeared, carried off as spoils of war to undermine Inca resistance, because people there believed the Virgins were sacred. But local people insisted that the Virgins had fled to a holy fortress in the mountains, where they passed through the portals of a magic gateway into the land of their gods.

The novice mistress interrupted to say that was quite enough about pagan nuns. Sor Serafina said she was coming to the part about Christian nuns and a mystery. This of course was too interesting to resist, and we put down our sewing to hear.

Surely God sent Sor Serafina to us. Her next words were like the sun blazing in a dark winter night!


Because the king and queen wished the natives would convert to Christianity to save their souls, a Spanish bishop with a party of Franciscan friars soon followed Pizarro. He approved of the destruction of the house of the Virgins of the Sun, and insisted that to purify the place of pagan worship, the stones be reused to build a convent, complete with a grand chapel at the gate. When the bishop traveled inland to consecrate it, he was astonished and angry to find that an order of Spanish nuns had already taken possession, without his knowledge or permission. He had no idea how this could have happened, but behind his back people said the ways of the church authorities were mysterious. The only explanation was that the nuns had been conveyed in a secret hold in a ship of Pizarro’s fleet.

Pizarro never disputed the rumor. Sor Serafina’s brothers said it was probably that Pizarro feared looking a fool. He was illiterate, and if there were documents that might have shed light on the matter, he could not have read them and he was too vain to admit ignorance. The bishop never protested either, lest people think he was not in the confidence of the ecclesiastical authorities. If anyone mentioned the nuns, he assumed a tight-lipped expression, and later died waiting for an official explanation.

But according to Sor Serafina’s brothers, there was another reason for the nuns’ presence. Older sailors in the seaside taverns said that once Moorish navigators from Spain had crossed the terrible Sea of Fog and Darkness, blown by storms to a strange land. It did not do to speak of this in case the Inquisition heard of it. Catholic Spain wanted the triumph of discovery to belong only to Catholic explorers. But the sailors who knew the vagaries of the winds and the currents—the unpredictable and ferocious storms made the sea passage to the New World dangerous—believed such a thing could have happened to any ship that strayed into the Atlantic. Though nuns could scarcely have set sail themselves…it must remain a mystery!

Sor Serafina had laughed and called her brothers’ suppositions fanciful nonsense. They protested that they had not yet told her the best part. By coincidence the convent on the site of the Virgins of the Sun’s palace soon attracted great flocks of swallows, just as their sister Sor Serafina’s convent. At first it was known simply as “the Spanish Convent” and the order of nuns, the Sors Santas de Jesus de Los Andes. But later, because of the swallows, the convent came to be known as Las Golondrinas. Sor Serafina was just excusing herself saying it was perhaps untrue but a charming story nonetheless, when I stood and let out a cry.

The workbasket in my lap rolled to the floor, and I stared at Sor Serafina as if the mountain itself had spoken. Then I grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to her feet so roughly that her workbasket went flying, too, and the others looked at me with shocked expressions. It was unnecessary to discipline a novice so violently, even for such a ridiculous story. “Come with me, at once,” I ordered and began to pull her out of the room.

There was a protest from Esperanza. She must have thought I meant to slap Sor Serafina, and cried, “No! Sor Beatriz, don’t! Sor Serafina is not making it up. I, too, have read of such things…”

“Then you come also,” I ordered and dragged Sor Serafina, now sobbing that she only repeated what her brothers had said and meant no harm. The three of us went straight to the Abbess’s parlor. The Abbess looked up from her missal and frowned at the stormy interruption.

“Sor Serafina, repeat the story you told us.”

Mumbling and tearful, Sor Serafina did so while Esperanza waited, fidgeting and nervous, too. The Abbess had Sor Serafina repeat it twice more, then Sor Serafina was assured she was not in trouble and dismissed. Esperanza went to follow, but I ordered her sharply to stay.

“Now explain why you believe Sor Serafina tells the truth.”

While Sor Serafina is somewhat giddy and excitable, Esperanza is not, and her memory is both good and precise. And now she said that the tenth-century historian Al-Masudi wrote of Moorish sailors who had disappeared across the great Sea of Fog and Darkness. Years later, they reappeared with treasures and stories of a strange land where there were meadows of gold and quarries of jewels.

“And have you seen this book?”

“Of course. In my father’s library,” answered Esperanza.

“And therefore, what Sor Serafina said about conquistadors finding Spanish nuns already present in Spanish America, may be true? The ship carrying our mission party might also have been blown west?”

“If it is possible for some, why not for others?” Esperanza replied.

The Abbess dismissed her, too.

The Abbess looked as shaken as I felt. “Spanish nuns in New Spain? Our mission not drowned or captured by pirates. And the name—Sors Santas de Jesus? And the bishop knew nothing of it?”

We sat and considered the impossibilities. Finally the Abbess said that if it were true, it was a miracle. Such news, after thirty years of mourning! We dare not hope, and yet we do. As soon as the road is passable, the Abbess will send a letter to the convent that bears our name.

At Sor Serafina’s welcome feast there was much rejoicing, and more wine than usual was allocated. And drunk.

Let all who read this pray for the Holy Sisters of Jesus wherever they may be. God is great!