Habits

by Fabiana Elisa Martínez

Three times a day, twenty-five plates and fifty pieces of cutlery had to be laid. Inevitably, with proper distance and the same rigid symmetry dictated by the choreographed movements of the gray flock at the school. All the plates, except for one, were thick and made of the dirty-white clay that denounced a bad quality azulejo about to crack on the walls of Porto. There was a cobalt cross embedded in the center of each plate, a reminder of the holy miracle of nutrients being served during each meal. Twenty-five plates for twenty-three nuns, a cook, and the pilgrim in need who could appear any time asking for help but who never did. Cecília wondered evening after evening what was the purpose of keeping the extra seat. She could not imagine Sister Romé allowing a single man to sit among her virginal diners. Besides, the pilgrims passing by the school heading to Santiago de Compostela barely walked alone and would prefer without exception the noisy taverns around the school for deaf girls with its inhibiting walls to the monotonous reading of the scriptures that the sisters kept turns reciting morning, noon and evening for the solace of their minds and the salvation of their souls.

A long time ago, they had been twenty-five plates made of cheap clay and porous enamel until they became twenty-four on the stormy night that sister Carmina smashed hers on the oak table for the third time. Not a single woman raised her eyes after the offensive intrusion of noise. Sister Suzanna, the reader of the evening, swallowed her last syllable winking while Sister Romé stood up slowly pushing down the wood surface of the table with her massive hands, and brought from the adjacent kitchen the tin plate that Cecília used to place the poisonous cheese for the mice. From that evening on, Cecília smiled every time she set the tin plate on the table and, in the name of mice, thanked the progressive violence of sister Carmina who a week after her eighty-second birthday decided neither to pray nor wash her hands nor change her habit anymore unless coerced by sister Suzanna with a sacred piece of chocolate, the infallible and only gluttonous sin that could move the will of a demented nun.

Cecília loved three things about these ritualistic, parsimonious suppers. First, her deafness spared her of the repetitive passages from the Bible or from the lives of saints whose martyrdom was too cruel to be believed. Second, she was far enough from Sister Romé who acted like a black-veiled queen at the head of the solid piece of oak, showering her blessings upon the farthest Cecília and eleven nuns to her left and eleven nuns and the invisible pilgrim to her right. But Cecília’s favorite vision every evening was the bearded figure in front of her that nobody else could witness. Cecília was not able to hear, but she could draw with her eyes the shape of the pilgrim she chose to invite to dinner from the depths of her imagination.

When Cecília started her job at sixteen, her stranger guest seemed a lot like the icon of Jesus that presided over the second chapel of the Igreja do Carmo, his hair too black and his hands too bony. Some years later, the ghostly pilgrim across from Cecília became more fleshy and less bearded and resembled the muscular Saint John the Baptist depicted on a glossy page of the catechism that the new girls at school received every year. When Cecília turned twenty-eight, the pilgrim abandoned his spiritual models and the platonic soul of the trotter of cobblestones heading to Santiago. He became more human and raised his imaginary eyes to look at Cecília eating. He wore the cassock and the features of Father Paulo who was learning sign language with sister Suzanna to be able to take care of the girls’ confessions the next school year. The cassock had thirty-one buttons. Cecília had counted them as he drank thick chocolate in her kitchen. He said he liked to “listen” to the soundless words that flew out of her open dancing fingers.

Sister Carmina dented her plate for the last time one late day in the spring of 1970. Cecília felt the vibration on the wooden table and the summersault in her bowels. Possibly more due to the passes of fortune than to the prayers of Sister Romé, baby Paulina was born in a discreet neighbor midwife’s house during the burial of Sister Carmina who descended to her ready tomb with the stained habit she had refused to change for the last ten days. Cecília returned two days later, set twenty-four plates on the table, twenty-four forks, and twenty- four knives. Thanks to the magic ironies of math and an uneventful death, the plate in front of Cecília had disappeared abruptly. Exactly like Father Paulo six months ago.

Cecília looked at the empty seat in front of her and performed her second and last act of rebellion. She placed Paulina’s basket on the table and rocked her baby without ever asking with the arches of her eyebrows for the permission of Sister Romé. The reader of the night skipped a verse, Sister Suzanna hid a smile, and Sister Romé slowly swallowed her piece of lamb with extreme discomfort. For many dinners to come, little Paulina was the twenty-fifth unexpected guest. She did not need a plate, she slept on the table in a crib that smelled of hay and incense and could not know that she was the breaker of many habits, the daughter of a deaf cook, and the forbidden offspring of the last inspirator of her mother’s evening dreams.

Originally published in The Good Life Literary Journal, Issue 2, 2020.

Fabiana Elisa Martínez can be found on Instagram @Fabielisam and @12randomwords, on Twitter @FabielisaAuthor, and at 12randomwords.com