The Sisterhood

Chapter 5


Las Golondrinas Convent, Spain, April 2000





The convent was a maze of corridors. The mountain wind whistled through the gaps between the walls and ceiling, and birds flitted in and out, chirping and making nests under the roof. The only light came from small barred windows set high in the thick walls. When her eyes adjusted to the gloom, Menina saw the walls were crowded with faded religious cards, dried flowers, garishly colored Madonnas, Saint Teresa of Avila, the Sacred Heart, lithographs of various popes, and badly executed paintings of saints. Menina guessed most of the artwork was mid-nineteenth or early twentieth century, and of little value. She knew enough to know her limits, but Holly Hill had trained her eye. This stuff looked like junk.

She went along one corridor after another, past doors that hung open to reveal other rooms like hers, with a narrow bed and a table and chair and crucifix on the wall. They must have been filled with pilgrims once. Menina’s nose wrinkled. She had never smelled anything like the dank odor of age and mildew and rot.

She hoped she would find the chapel or see one of the nuns, but the corridors were deserted. She emerged into a room with deep stone sinks around the walls and an old-fashioned iron pump. Patched nightgowns hung drying on a wooden rack. She opened a door to a larger room with tiles on the walls and floor and another stone sink, a pump, and a few pots and pans hanging crookedly on iron hooks in the low ceiling. There was a huge fireplace at one end and a scarred wooden trestle table. On it were wicker covered jugs labeled “Vino” and “Aceite de oliva”—wine and olive oil. There were ropes of garlic and onions, a basket of eggs, another of baby artichokes and another of potatoes with dirt still on them, some lemons, and a piece of honeycomb on a plate. Some bunches of dried herbs hung by the fireplace, and there was a stack of wood, and an iron pot simmering on the embers. She bent and lifted the pot’s lid, and a garlicky steam rose from whatever was cooking that made her realize that she was very hungry indeed. The sweet bread at breakfast had been delicious but there had only been one piece. She replaced the lid and looked for something, anything, to nibble on.

Under the sink she spotted a large basket labeled “pollos.” It was full of bread in various stages of staleness from slightly dry to hard as a rock. Menina found a large broken loaf fresher than the rest. Feeling guilty, she dipped a piece of it in the honey and ate it. She broke the rest in two and stuffed the pieces in her jacket in case there was no lunch, then went on with her exploration. The kitchen gave into a larger whitewashed room with a life-size cross of dark wood. Beneath it was a lectern with a book propped open and three long tables with benches. The nuns’ dining room?

Beyond that, a door gave into another dim, silent, low-ceilinged room. Menina entered, then cried, “Excuse me!” The room was full of people. Unnaturally quiet people, all wearing hats and holding perfectly still—then she realized not people but plaster saints, with chipped halos. Crocheted antimacassars hung raggedly on the arms of chairs, and dusty glass cases covered with old spiderwebs lined the walls.

Weird. Like everything had been frozen in time, Menina thought. The dust made her sneeze and it sounded very loud in the silence.

A blue-and-white enameled medallion of the Madonna and Child hung over an empty font for holy water, set low in the wall. Looking around, she saw the walls were full of small carved images—Madonnas, angels, putti. She wished that she had brought one of her notebooks and a pen, to make a list. There were a few tapestries, dirty and moth-eaten, and a few paintings dark with age—she could make out a baby Moses in the bulrushes, another with cherubs playing with a lamb, a fat baby John the Baptist wading in ankle-deep water holding up a tiny cross, and a large composition of the Virgin and two other women watching a group of children playing at their feet. Childhood seemed to be the theme here—had this room been part of the orphanage?

She swiped away cobwebs and dust and pressed her nose against the first glass case to see what was inside. It was stuffed with toys. A host of dolls with blank faces and glassy eyes stared back at her. Most were dressed in nuns’ habits of one kind or another, and there was another case of dolls of different sizes dressed in plain gowns that had once been white, each with a wimple held in place by a tiny brown scrap of something that might have been flowers. Brides of Christ dolls. To Menina, raised in the Baptist church, they were foreign, exotic, and a little bizarre.

The lower shelves held doll-size dishes, plates, and cups. On closer inspection, what she thought were dolls’ tea sets were miniature altar fittings—small silver and gold crucifixes, chalices, and monstrances. There were small altars of marble and alabaster with miniature altar cloths, doll-size confession booths and fonts for holy water, and miniature images of Christ and the Virgin and different saints designed to screw onto a small replica of the float Menina had seen in the procession the previous day.

Another case held ivory-covered missals to fit a child’s hand, dolls’ rosaries of seed pearls, small palm branches, tiny scourges, and whips of tarnished silver with thorns so tiny they were nearly invisible. There were little gilded altar screens a foot high—Menina thought they were called reredos—painted exquisitely, and miniature gilt candlesticks holding wisps of real candles that leaned crookedly.

The last case held what looked like jewelry. Then she recoiled. Tiny crystal caskets and urns, trimmed with blackened silver and gold and dusty jewels, held tiny relics in ivory and ebony—skulls, a severed hand in miniature, a human heart, John the Baptist’s tiny but grotesquely bleeding head…reliquaries, she knew they were called. She soon saw where these had been used. The big dark shape in one corner was a dollhouse-size chapel.

All these things conjured up child nuns. Child nuns? It gave Menina the creeps and she left the sala, relieved to see sunlight at the end of the passage. There she found an arch that led into a cloister garden. Weather-beaten gargoyles with broken noses crouched above a Romanesque cloister. Bees buzzed in overgrown beds of herbs between paths of faded red and blue tiles, and a fountain on a pedestal splashed feebly. It was a garden out of a medieval Book of Hours, gone to seed.

Menina perched on the low cloister wall as the convent bell broke the silence with twelve strokes for midday. Lunchtime. She broke off a piece of bread. In the sunlight it was an unappetizing gray color. She should return to her room in case there was lunch. If only there were someone to ask which way her room was. Then she heard footsteps and looked up to see a nun walking swiftly behind the arches through the shadows on the far side of the cloister. Menina called, “Momento, por favor! Then “Hola!” but the nun must not have heard because her long black skirts whisked out of sight as she disappeared back into the convent.

Menina crammed the bread back in her pocket and hurried to catch up. She heard the nun’s footsteps ahead of her, reassuring after the silence and spirits of the morning. The brightness outdoors made it hard for Menina’s eyes to adjust to the dimness inside. She felt along the wall for a light switch, and then remembered the convent had no electricity. Then she could no longer hear the nun, and the fact that she couldn’t see sharpened Menina’s other senses. She smelled something sweet and faintly musky, like Sarah-Lynn’s beeswax polish. She put out a hand and felt air, then a door frame. She felt her way along a wall, then stumbled over a large object. “Oh damn, now what?” she muttered, rubbing her shin while her eyes adjusted enough to make out a dark rectangular shape. She groped her hands over it. It felt like a chest with metal bands. Menina felt her way round the edges and made her way into the room. Daylight seeped in from under the eaves, where swallows were making their usual noises, and she saw it was another low-ceilinged room. It smelled of woodsmoke and there was an iron candelabra holding pale half-burned candles, suggesting the nuns actually used this room. She looked on the table, hoping to find matches.

A little iron box indeed held matches. Menina lit two of the candles and looked around. In the flickering light she could see high-backed chairs, a table, and a large black crucifix over a fireplace. The tile floor was uneven and sunken in places, and one wall of the room was an iron grill, like a prison cell, with a curtain pulled across on the other side. There were shelves, empty save for a collection of baskets that Menina discovered held sewing, and an alcove where firewood was stacked.

And on the walls were picture frames holding paintings blackened with age, much dirtier than the ones in the orphanage room.

Menina took a candle from its holder and held it close to the nearest picture. She squinted through the dull reflection of the candlelight, her nose inches from the surface, and was rewarded by the faint outline of a face beneath the layers of age and dirt.

She’d found a portrait. Now what?

The bread in her pocket was what. She had heard it was possible to clean paintings using bread to absorb dirt. It wasn’t a good way to do it; modern packaged bread had a lot of chemicals and bleach that would cause damage. But the bread in Menina’s pocket wasn’t Wonder Bread; it was gray, so maybe it was unbleached. Should she? Probably not, but no one had paid any attention to these paintings in years, and unless she did something, no one would. In the font she rinsed her hands in holy water, then rubbed them hard on her jeans to get them as clean as she could. She tore a piece away from the crust and worked it with her hands until it was pliable. She blew on the surface of the painting to dislodge any loose dust, then pressed the softened bread carefully at a corner of the dark canvas.

The bread turned black as it picked up dirt, and the frame looked like it was gilt.

“OK, let’s see what you look like.” Menina started on the face with another piece of softened bread, pressing gently. Heavy eyebrows over dark eyes and the bridge of the nose emerged, then slowly a face, dark eyes staring into hers. Menina moved from side to side and saw the artist had been skillful enough to paint eyes that followed the viewer. Definitely worth seeing the rest of the portrait.

As the dirt came away, Menina was surprised to find it was not a saint or the Virgin Mary, but a young woman in fine clothes. Under the dirt she could just make out an elaborate sleeve, a smudge of a flower in her hand, a sort of embroidered shift, and jewelry. And though muted by grime, the colors were crude enough to make an impact—red and black and green and blue. Obviously a portrait of a wealthy young girl, there was something exotic or primitif about it that made Menina doubt it was European.

“Where did you come from?” Menina asked the portrait to break the silence and jumped when Sor Teresa’s voice cackled, “Aha! There you are!” Menina whirled around. “You should not be here, is only for nuns,” said Sor Teresa accusingly from the doorway. “When is visitors, women from the village, they come and sit there.” She pointed to the grille. “All people not nuns, they sit on the other side. What are you doing?” There was no mistaking the suspicion in her voice.

Menina felt like a naughty child caught off limits. “It was Captain Fernández Galán’s idea! He said I must look for paintings that might be valuable, to sell, and we can take them to—”

Sor Teresa drew herself up, and there was an indignant rapid-fire response in a mixture of Spanish and English. “How dare you accuse Captain Fernández Galán! Alejandro is not thief! It is you who want to steal from us! Bah! You must leave the convent!”

“No, no, no! We don’t want to steal anything. The captain thinks the convent needs money and he wanted me to find a painting you could sell.”

“Humpff!” There was another torrent of Spanish and English about Alejandro and his bad ways, she never knew what to think of him nowadays. Menina was startled to see she had hit a nerve. Sor Teresa had a lot to say about the captain, the life he led, that he had been…something disgraceful…ever since he was a little boy, not to mention he was no better now…something, something in fast Spanish about chasing shameless girls who spent their lives attracting attention and enticing men. Alejandro attracted exactly this kind of girl. They threw themselves at him; no wonder he wasn’t married—all he knew were putas. Menina’s eyes opened wide in surprise. Sor Teresa had just called the captain’s girlfriends whores! Including Menina? Well, she was just sick to death of people calling her that!

“I’m not a puta or a girlfriend! I only met him yesterday! He made it clear he thought I was an idiot to take the wrong bus and have my things stolen—he was really rude. But since you let me stay here, I thought I should try and help like the captain asked. Sorry about being in your private area, but I couldn’t find anybody to ask. But why not let me see your paintings? Like I told the captain, I’m only studying art history at college. I know a little but not much. What I can do is clean some of the dirt off, with stale bread, and make a note of anything that looks valuable. Then a real expert can take a look and advise you about selling.”

“Humpff! We will see. Maybe we do not like to sell our paintings. Now come. You must eat and I must return to the chapel.”

“Was this room the library?” Menina asked, following her to the door.

“Old scriptorium,” said Sor Teresa.

“Scriptorium? A writing room?”

“Yes, a nun was always writing there. Convent always had a writer—a scribe. Many books, was a library, too, very special, because is not so many books then, books very precious. Not so many people could read. But in this convent all the nuns were educated, could read, so is many peoples come, want to know what books say, the scribe will find the books and tell them what they want to know.”

“Look it up,” said Menina.

“Yes. First people must get permission from the Abbess but if she give they can go to scriptorium. You see there is a locutio in here, just like in the Abbess’s parlor. The church says nuns must keep behind the locutio. So there is bars, like prison to keep nuns and the world apart. Is long time ago. Now we don’t write but sit there and work. Not too many windows broken. And fireplace is good, nice and big because scribe cannot write if too cold. Scribe is good job I think!” Unexpectedly Sor Teresa chuckled.

“I found a portrait of a girl. She didn’t look like a nun. Why would her portrait be in the convent?”

“A girl?” Sor Teresa chuckled again and shook her head. “Of course is girl! Is many girls come to Las Golondrinas long time ago. People do not remember now, but once so many girls come, we help them, save their lives sometimes,” she muttered, leading the way down the corridor. “The world was dangerous place for girls if they are alone. But it is a long story. Everything at Las Golondrinas is a long story. And old. Too old. Soon all our stories, about the nuns, about our order, about the girls, are forgotten. Unless is a miracle, no one will know what happened here. You are the last girl, I think. Ha! Maybe you can tell our stories, no?”

“Maybe you can tell me the old stories and I’ll do my best,” said Menina, hoping to placate Sor Teresa. What sort of stories would those be, she wondered.