The Werewolves Delgado

Would you believe that we hardly noticed the war in all the years it lasted? It was being fought, but far away from us. All that changed at Polar was that packs of animals would occasionally appear in the surroundings: coatis, lemmings, minks, that sort of thing. We could almost always see them when we stood on tiptoe at the dormitory window and looked down, a dark splotch stretching and contracting at the foot of the mountain, near Agromos. They never climbed up, which was a good thing. They picked at the blueberries and blackberries, unenthused, and then went away. We couldn’t say for sure, but we didn’t think they came around as much before the war started; we think they only appeared after.

They were usually rodents, which we knew because we were studying them in the natural history class with Sister Mariacamilla. She saw them too, from the window of the Community Room, we supposed. The other nuns, no. They never spoke about them and got irritated if we asked. But Sister Mariacamilla would sigh, ‘Oh, the creatures, the creatures! What in the world could possibly be as fascinating.’ Her face would fill with curiosity, and her curiosity delighted her. Sister Mariacamilla must have been the only nun at Polar like that. (We attended Sister Mariacamilla’s class a bit more eagerly than the others, because we thought it might have some purpose in the outside world. Sister Mariacamilla hadn’t studied natural history in a secular school, or anything else for that matter. None of the nuns had. She taught natural history the same as she could have taught anything, but she applied herself and subscribed to journals and encyclopedias that Ulises—someone from the village—brought her at the end of every month.)

We’d known the men we’re going to tell you about for almost as long as we’d lived at Polar but, as was often the case, we didn’t really start learning things about them until we’d reached a certain age. They’d come to Polar once a month, or twice, and always met with Sister Dolor in her office. Sometimes Sister Dolor lent them money, and other times they lent her money, because the Werewolves Delgado—that was the name we’d always known them by—had a bank in their village, and in other villages too. That’s how they kept up on where the most money was changing hands, who could make loans, and who needed them. Sister Dolor knew about money too, perhaps even more than the Werewolves Delgado did. One time, when Polar’s books weren’t adding up and the school almost had to close, she came up with the idea that saved it. As a last resort, she lent the back-then government what little money Polar had left (to pay for other wars they used to fight). They paid it all back at once with interest, and that’s how Polar survived. Once in the clear, Sister Dolor kept playing around with the money; Anglophile as she was, she enjoyed certain activities that the other nuns—especially Sister Mártara Junior—disapproved of (but only in whispers; the era of novices entering Polar with substantial dowries was long past).

The Werewolves Delgado—the Father, the Son, and the Brother, as we called them—arrived in a Bentley, though not all three of them came every time. Sister O’Malley would lead them down the corridor to Sister Dolor’s office, where they conversed and then left. They always carried a leather briefcase, but we could never quite tell when it was full and when it was empty. We ran outside when we sensed that they were finishing up, stood behind the beech trees at the entrance, and studied them, searching for some expression, some vacillation, that would reveal whether they had brought money this time or were taking it away. But we never found any (perhaps we weren’t so good at that sort of thing).

‘Why are they called the Werewolves Delgado?’ we asked Sister Mártara Junior once, while she escorted us to the dining hall.

‘For the same reason anyone from a village is called anything. Don’t any of you live in villages when you’re not at Polar?’ She thought that counted as an answer, but we still had plenty of doubts to mull over. We weren’t very familiar with the customs of the places where we lived when we weren’t at Polar. Honestly, in a certain way, we were perpetual strangers around the fathers or the mothers or the brothers.

The visits from the Werewolves Delgado were just another of Polar’s many peculiarities, and we didn’t think much of them at first. We weren’t going to worry over everyone who came to visit Sister Dolor—and there were many during that time. For a while, for example, two men came to see her, one after the other, who said they traded in art objects and spent time with her in the Flemish chapel (not the ordinary chapel for Sunday mass, but a smaller, older one, considered the original nucleus from which Polar grew. It was almost never open). The fathers also came to see her sometimes. They paid our tuition and asked about us, then they went away, almost always in a rush, without coming to see us in the hall or the dormitory, because they never had time. They were busy with other things.

One night, when we were already asleep in bed, we felt the sharp prick of a wail in our ears. It sounded like a howl, virile, and we thought: it must be the dogs in Agromos. We tossed and turned in bed, but none of us could rid our ears of that howl. It had to have come from a bigger animal than a dog, we reasoned. (We didn’t suspect the Gentleman from Agromos in the slightest; he disappeared during the war). We swung our feet to the ground and started out in our nightgowns, through the corridor in a single-file line, being careful not to wake the nuns—not that it was too difficult. The nuns were abnormally deep sleepers, and even more so at this time of year, when it was starting to get warmer. At the door to Sister Dolor’s office, we stopped. We knew to go there because our ears told us so—our ears and something else inside of us. Some of us, the younger ones, could still hear high-pitched sounds that the others couldn’t, because we were older, even if by only one or two months. Some things get lost with age; we’d learned all about that in natural history with Sister Mariacamilla. It must have been one of the few things we learned at Polar that would be useful to us in the outside world.

We stood outside the office door in a semi-circle and waited and held our breath so we could hear everything. Then, one by one, we approached the door and lowered our eyes to the keyhole. Out of respect for each other, we didn’t reveal what we saw on the other side of the door. That way, we all got to be surprised when we saw the Brother seated on Sister Dolor’s table. We knew it was the Brother because he was wearing the same starched herringbone suit and shirt that we’d seen him in the evening before, when he’d come alone to talk to the mother superior. If it hadn’t been for the suit and shirt, we wouldn’t have recognized him. Normally, the Brother had a shiny beard that hung down to his heart and a clear forehead, and we considered him one of the most handsome men we’d ever seen. But now, he’d grown a snout, his eyes had shrunk, his ears had risen, and he was totally covered in a strange fur the same color his beard had been.

That must be why the villagers called them the Werewolves Delgado, because they turned into wolves. What Sister Mártara Junior had said about it being only a nickname—that wasn’t true. We took turns at the keyhole for a long time, peering at the Brother on the other side, well behaved and howling. He only seemed to get upset a few times, and when he did, he’d turn to one side and rub—yes, rub—against one of Sister Dolor’s table legs. But it was all so tame that we pitied him. ‘He’s rubbing his weenie!’ one of us exclaimed, one of the dimmer ones, and that ruined the esprit. Then we returned to the dormitory in our single-file line; it wouldn’t be long until daytime and we wanted to rest at least a little. When we got into bed, the moon shone in our eyes. It was high and full, but we fell back asleep quickly.

We awoke again before sunrise. Though we couldn’t have slept for more than one or two hours, none of us felt tired, because traces of the night before still roiled inside us. We were usually reluctant to put on our uniforms, but that morning we dressed quickly and stepped into the corridor. ‘What do we have here?’ said Sister Mártara Senior from the other end when she noticed us. Our presence took her aback—we could swear it—as if she’d suddenly become frightened of us. ‘Where are you all going so early? Sister O’Malley hasn’t even started frying the scratchings yet.’ The word ‘scratchings’ made us all want to vomit, as if their very name conjured the absence of our appetite. We stopped near the end of the corridor, at the top of the grand staircase. By the entrance, the Brother was saying goodbye to Sister Dolor. He was aloof as always, but a bit paler, we noticed. A vein strained against one side of his skull, which some of us thought made him more attractive—less handsome, but more attractive.

We stood there a while, dazed, and some of us felt that howl ringing inside of us, so sharp and virile, even though we couldn’t hear it, until Sister Mártara Junior appeared behind us clapping and saying, ‘Well, well, what are you standing around for? Move along to the dining hall before your scratchings get cold. You’re bothering poor Mr. Delgado.’

‘But what happened to Mr. Delgado?’ we dared to ask in a whisper, and the nun answered, ‘Can’t you see that he suddenly took ill yesterday? Sister Dolor had to have an emergency bed made up for him, and now here you are being a bother. Look ahead and, more importantly, move forward. It’s getting late.’ We did, because we were used to being obedient, but we still noticed the Brother half turn and half smile at us. With that, we were satisfied, and we watched him cross the threshold between Polar and the outside world.

There was another reason why we didn’t care too much about the Brother leaving – we knew that Sister O’Malley was going to take us to see an exhibition that week called ‘Modern Art’ and our anticipation was consuming us. The nuns had never taken us anywhere before. Sister O’Malley had only been teaching art history for less than two years. Before that, art history wasn’t taught at Polar, but Sister Dolor decided it was necessary in order to—as she would say—develop our personal taste. Sister O’Malley was selected as the teacher though she had previously just been the cook and nurse, the only nun who didn’t teach anything. Sister O’Malley would come lumbering down the corridor every Wednesday, lugging the Leitz projector, dripping sweat; we felt bad for her, but didn’t know how to offer help, her being a foreigner and all, Irish. We suffered with her every time we watched her laborious trek down the corridor.

With her, all we did was look and observe. We didn’t understand the material at first, but art history soon became our favorite class. One day, Sister Dolor came in and made an announcement, with Sister O’Malley nodding along beside her: ‘Next Wednesday you won’t have class, because Sister O’Malley insists on taking you to an exhibition called MODERN ART. Sister O’Malley says, and the experts agree, that art should be a living thing—something you make and look at—and that’s why we’re letting you go. What do you think? You won’t need to ask your parents for permission; we’ve already written to them and they’ve all already given it, so prepare your eyes and bring a clean handkerchief.’

Wednesday of the following week finally arrived, and away we all went on the Castromil bus. We usually sang on the bus, but this time, out of respect for Sister O’Malley, we sat quietly. A few hours after we’d left Polar, the bus stopped and dropped us off at some place called the New Cultural Center. We arranged ourselves in our single-file line to enter. The guard greeted each of us with a nod while we read the painted letters on the wall before us:

MODERN ART

That was all. There was no other writing, though the hall was spacious enough. The first paintings held such a sense of movement that they elicited a desire to do something, a desire to open our eyes wider. The movement was overwhelmingly downward, a descent over things, over the world; there was an airplane descending over the Colosseum, a parachutist falling over a square plaza, a plane with its wings folded, like an angel, landing over a bay. We looked and looked until we’d seen all the paintings. We liked the exhibition, even though we knew deep down that what it contained didn’t entirely belong to us. On the bus ride back, some of us started to murmur amongst ourselves, looking sidelong at Sister O’Malley, who seemed to be asleep (she was probably dreaming, we thought, of the fields and sheep of Ireland). Meanwhile, we felt as though the more we spoke, the more we awakened. We wondered how we would blossom, how we would earn a place in an exhibition like that, which was so much about war and about looking. For all our desire, we were just girls. And arriving at Polar on the bus, the itch inside us reemerged – laced with rage, like a reproach for forgetting about it so soon – for the sounds of the Brother during the night he spent in Sister Dolor’s office.

(We should note that Sister Dolor also had other people come to see her. The fathers, for example, came sometimes, not often, when they were in the area for business or politics, and it wasn’t too much of a hassle to stop, to pay our tuition and ask how our studies were going. The art gentlemen also visited. We knew because the nuns spoke about them and because carvings disappeared overnight from the Flemish chapel. The carvings, which were all very old, may have been stolen by bandits or the Gentleman from Agromos—that did happen sometimes.

We only saw the art gentlemen face to face once, when they gave a conference in the assembly hall. Only one of them spoke. He was small and older than the fathers. Sister O’Malley and Sister Mártara Junior set up a screen on the stage and Sister Chinta fiddled around with a film projector that had been gathering dust in the attic until then. We sat down and were shown images of people in a church. They were all very excited, falling on the floor in their fervor. The gentleman said that it was an evangelical church in America, and a muted fluster arose among us, because other religions were never discussed at Polar, never even acknowledged. Then the gentleman showed us an image that we already knew: Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.’ Some of us had seen it in Rome. The gentleman was quiet for a moment and then said matter-of-factly, ‘Look at the two images. Look and tell me: what do they have in common?’ We didn’t answer, first because we were almost never asked anything and second because we didn’t see anything in common. Behind the gentleman, Sister Mártara Junior got irritated, as if communicating with her eyes: ‘Now this man is going to think that we don’t teach you how to see the world, and it’ll be all your fault.’ The gentleman was quiet. He looked at us for a bit, and then said, ‘Don’t forget what I’m about to tell you. The difference you see between Saint Theresa’s body and the madness in Florida is what we call “aesthetic.” For us, in our line of work, it is very important. For you, whatever work you do in the future, it surely will be too. This is aesthetics. What rises. What goes up.’ That was one of the few useful things that we learned in Polar and could apply to our secular lives.)

Until the following events took place, the Father was the Werewolf Delgado who spoke to us the most. When he walked the halls with Sister Dolor—sometimes alone, sometimes with the Son or the Brother—and it so happened that our single-file line crossed his path, he stopped and watched us, nodding his head in a minimal greeting. ‘Like a grandfather,’ some of us said. ‘Like a Frenchman,’ said others (though not many of us girls met our grandparents when they were alive, and of the ones who did, few could imagine how they would have been in their prime). He had a beard, shorter than the Brother’s, whiter, and the skin of his face was rosier; the Brother’s skin was more coppery. After what happened with the Brother, we were consumed by a desire to know how the Father would look as a werewolf. We wanted to see the Son too, even though the Son had always been the least interesting to us. He had a cabbage-like face with wobbly cheeks, and when he came alone, without the other two, he stared at us, entranced. We suspected that he wasn’t a good person, but even so, we were curious to know how his clean-shaven face would look with a wolf snout.

So, we started to talk and scheme in the darkness of the dormitory, once the nun on duty turned out the lights. Some of us had started to draw unenthusiastically after the exhibition; we wondered if we might be able to put on our own at Polar one day, like MODERN ART. But we had no qualms abandoning our efforts and focusing on our new plans instead. We agreed that we’d have to lure the three of them together on the night of a full moon; besides that, we had little interest in the Werewolves Delgado. We reasoned that all three of them would only come if they needed to lend or borrow a lot of money at once; Sister Dolor was known for being a tough negotiator, and they would have an easier time with her that way.

Near the entrance to Polar, just inside the gates, there was an old beech tree. It boarded the apse of the chapel—the everyday one, not the Flemish one—which backed out towards the garden, making an elegant curve. We studied the tree, remembering what we’d learned about parabolas from Sister Radegunda, and concluded that if the beech tree fell towards the north, it would land right on top of the chapel’s slate roof, and Sister Dolor would have to figure out how to raise the money to repair it. So, we went to work. During our free hour, we would run around the grounds of Polar, as Sister Dolor always called them, and when the monitor nun got distracted, we would take a rope that we found in the attic and loop it around the beech’s trunk. Some of us would hold one end and some would hold the other, and we would all pull together towards the north, little by little, so nobody noticed the beech’s roots lifting out of the soil. We didn’t have to be that careful, though, because the nuns were too worried about the war to pay much attention to what we were doing. (All they did was speak amongst themselves, mumble while reading the newspaper, and leave us alone.) So, we would pull and then go eat dinner in silence. In the dormitory, before bed, we would massage each other’s sore arms.

We calculated that the beech would have to fall five days before the full moon. That way, Sister Dolor would have one day to despair, another to crunch the numbers with Sister Radegunda, another to call the Werewolves Delgado, another to wait for them, and another for them to arrive. On the chosen day, we were fortunate that the wind was blowing from the south-southeast. We were a bit worried that it would send the beech in the wrong direction, but it soon pulled away from the earth with its roots intact and less trouble than expected. The centuries-old beech fell sideways, and though the apse didn’t completely collapse, at least half of the roof caved in unceremoniously. We all ran to Sister Chinta, who was looking after us that day, and when she saw what had happened, she was astounded. ‘What did you girls do?’ she asked. Just then, a gust blew Sister Chinta’s veil over her eyes and tangled the buttons of her habit. She too collapsed unceremoniously (which gave us the impression that something was protecting us from above at times like these—important, but not matters of life or death. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing).

Then everything progressed as expected: Sister Dolor despaired, crunched the numbers, called the Werewolves Delgado. Some of us claimed to have upset stomachs and took turns leaving class. Instead of going to the bathroom, we stopped outside Sister Dolor’s office, where we could hear her battling to convince the three of them to come. The next day, all we could do was wait. It must have been one of the longest days we ever spent at Polar. We entertained ourselves by going to see the apse from the outside. Through the cleft that the beech had made in the chapel, we saw that the statue of Saint Agatha was missing an eye and had fallen from her pedestal. We entered through the opening and set the statue of Saint Agatha upright. We always admired her during mass and all had a certain affection for her (even though we knew perfectly well that she was just a cheap carving of the sort they churned out wholesale in the workshops of Segovia or Castile. The good carvings were all in the Flemish chapel. Years later, though, the statue of Saint Agatha disappeared along with all the good ones). We moved aside four slates, four rocks, and four chunks of the rose window. Some of the nuns were lingering, watching us and nodding their approval. Besides Sister Dolor, none of them seemed too bothered by the destruction, probably because they believed that you can pray anywhere.

That’s how we spent the day—mourning the loss of the beech, not having been able to tilt her over without felling her completely. We arrived tired at bedtime and went to sleep early. The next day, which was Saturday, there would be no class, and the Werewolves Delgado would arrive. We’d hatched a separate plan for them, to force them to spend the night at Polar so we could witness their metamorphosis into their true form. We knew that Sister Dolor always served them a cherry liqueur that Sister O’Malley made and stored in the kitchen, in what the nuns called the cabinet. Years earlier, we had opened the cabinet out of curiosity, but had been disappointed to find only bottles of liqueur and Irish whiskey that Sister O’Malley brought with her when she came to live at Polar. (It wasn’t good whiskey, and it was only ever served to the fathers if they came to pick us up for the holidays—but they almost never did, and we usually took the bus).

Now, though, the cabinet once again commanded our interest. ‘Let us take care of that, Sister O’Malley,’ we said, plucking the bottle of cherry liqueur from her hand. ‘Leave it to us; you’re busy with the colcannon. Keep cooking, go on.’ We scurried away with the bottle of cherry liqueur in our hands. On the way, we stopped to add three drops of the purgative that Sister O’Malley kept in the infirmary and retrieved when we went to her with a stomach ache in the evening. We knocked on Sister Dolor’s door and she opened it. ‘But why are you…?’ she stammered in surprise. ‘Why are you…? And Sister O’Malley…?’ But she must have been very busy with the Werewolves Delgado, because then she took the liqueur from our hands and went back inside. (She was a very assertive woman, Sister Dolor, one of the few we could look up to with respect in the world we had to live in.) Shortly thereafter, almost before we’d even returned to the dormitory, a great commotion broke out all through Polar, which was usually so quiet. We crept up to the staircase, careful to see without being seen. The Father rushed through the corridor, white as a corpse, with Sister Dolor supporting him from behind. The Son and the Brother were escorted by two nuns each, and Sister Mártara Senior shuffled about behind them, trying to make herself useful.

The seven of them looked like something out of a painting—not the paintings we saw in MODERN ART, but rather those by the Alte Meister that Sister O’Malley showed us (we can’t remember any specific names). Like a painting, we mused, but better, because the movement emanated unfiltered from the nuns’ skin, while paintings always seemed a bit distant to us. We watched them parade towards the infirmary together, full of purpose. Then we shut ourselves inside the dormitory and went every so often in groups of four or five to see what was going on. We listened from behind the door, silent, still, and thinking.

In the middle of the afternoon, Sister Mártara Junior came to see us in our room, all upset. She was usually so even-keeled, and we all jumped to our feet at the sight of her. ‘Why doesn’t one of you go to Agromos to get the doctor?’ she asked. ‘Why haven’t you gone already?’ ‘But what do you mean, sister?’ we protested. ‘Don’t you remember that Dr. Raúl left ages ago? There was no one left to cure in Agromos, so he went somewhere else.’ ‘You’re right,’ she answered simply and went about her business. That was the only time we could remember leaving Sister Mártara Junior speechless. She had scared us, though; we just wanted the Werewolves Delgado to get sick for one night, that’s all. But what if…?

Impelled by our guilt, some of us silently followed Sister Mártara Junior to the infirmary and put our ears to the door. It became clear that the commotion wasn’t due to any sort of mortal danger. Rather, there were two main issues: first, the presence of nuns who didn’t fully understand the situation, and second, that the Werewolves Delgado were in a great hurry. They insisted that they had to leave Polar by five o’clock. The nuns, on the other hand, contended that they still hadn’t recovered properly and that they couldn’t let them leave in good conscience under the circumstances. Their lives weren’t in danger, but still. To our great fortune—we’ve already mentioned that we considered ourselves the beneficiaries of a certain privilege—it rained like mad for ten minutes while they argued. We’d never seen so much rain at once before in all our years at Polar and, with all that water falling from above, Agromos Creek overflowed. That changed everything. From behind the door, we heard the Werewolves Delgado resist less and relent more while the earth soaked up as much water as it could hold and flooded. ‘And won’t you let us take care of you, treat you?’ said Sister Dolor. ‘It’s the least we could do…’ We knew that they had let themselves be convinced, because from the nook in the corridor where we were standing, we watched the nuns gradually exit, one by one, until only Sister O’Malley was left inside, serving cups of broth to the werewolves.

We took advantage to go down to the grounds and check that the water wasn’t damaging Saint Agatha or anything else. As we were doing so, we felt ourselves, silently, waking up inside. We heard the Werewolves Delgado on the top floor. Sometimes they spoke quickly, and a bit of a howl was beginning to infiltrate their voices, the same one we’d heard twenty-eight days earlier from the Brother. They were still debating whether to stay or go, but it was too late; the nuns were already preparing the beds on the floor below. So, the color of night gradually descended upon Polar, the color of bedtime, which we liked but rarely got to see properly at school. We must have slept for an hour or two, because at midnight, we heard wolf howls to gladden the heart, same as the first time, but three at once, and they moved together, a bit like the voices of the twelfth-century organum in Paris, according to Sister Priscila: one deeper voice, slower, more morose, and others higher and faster.

We jumped delightedly from our beds, descended the steps in a line, and stopped outside the infirmary. This time we did push and shove for our turn at the keyhole. Never had we looked so hard. Our eyes still hurt five, six, seven days later from the intensity of our looking. In hindsight, we believed that to be one of the most glorious nights we ever spent at Polar. At the same time, there was a sense that our beings, our vision of the world, these things that are supposed to change very gradually, changed all at once, as if we were suddenly able to see paint dry on the wall. We had an intuition that, even though it was ok to feel this way for one night, we couldn’t expect that it would last forever.

The next morning, the Werewolves Delgado left first thing. We slept until nine. It was Sunday, and none of the nuns came to wake us up like they did on weekdays. We awoke happy; it was already past breakfast time, but we weren’t hungry, not even for crackling (especially not for crackling). We sighed—mass. Today was Sunday, and we had to go. So, we got dressed, went down to the dining hall, and smelled the burnt crackling from the doorway. There at the head of the table, Sister Mártara Junior was waiting for us, and she was more serious than normal. (By then, we’d already started to realize that Sister Mártara Junior, as her name suggested, really was quite young. She mustn’t have been more than five or six years older than us, but we knew that those five or six years were the ones that mattered.) ‘Sit down and don’t say a word,’ she said. ‘Today you’ll have porridge for breakfast, the kind Sister Dolor gets from Scotland. It’s nothing special, but there are worse things. Then you’ll run straight down to the chapel without making a peep. Last night, our side lost a very important battle in the war and you won’t be able to leave Polar until things get better. It’s not safe, especially not for girls like you.’

We sat down and ate in silence. We didn’t care about the porridge, because the previous night had filled us with richer nutrition. But we did care about the war. What could we possibly know about the war, much less when it was going badly for our side? That was hardly ever, but what if? We left our porridge half eaten and went to the chapel where we bowed when and how Don Gerardo asked us to. There was talk of holding mass in the Flemish chapel while the normal one was undergoing repairs, but they retracted the proposal and we hunched in the cold that entered through the breach, which the nuns hadn’t even thought to cover with fabric. Then Don Gerardo left for Agromos. It almost seemed like he was going to another country. Behind Don Gerardo, four nuns closed the gate with the latch. ‘Go inside,’ they told us. ‘Go inside. We don’t want to see so much as a hair of yours outdoors.’

That day, they didn’t even let us leave the main house, but the next day, they let us out onto the grounds with the promise that we wouldn’t even think of stepping through the gate. We walked frantically, nervous for the Werewolves Delgado—because their memory was already fading, as if it dripped from our imaginations with each step we took—and nervous for the war, which was still far away, but not as far away as it had been. Sometimes we thought, ‘What are the fathers doing? What are the brothers doing?’ But we weren’t meant to worry about that.

In class, we recited our times tables, the capitals, the oceans, the elements, without thinking, punching each syllable, but the nuns didn’t care either. They weren’t concerned with us. The only one who made a bother was Sister Priscila, who defied the war and came from A Coruña to teach us one day. She let us sing some Gershwin songs and a Shakespeare sonnet, which were always on the tips of our tongues though we’d never listened to or learned them and she didn’t really like them. But not even those, the only songs we knew well, came out properly. Afterwards, she said, ‘Go have your snack. I see it’s not going to happen today. You girls, as soon as you reach that age, your voices go and there’s nothing to be done about it. They’ll come back, of course. They will.’

That night in the dormitory, we all felt that the war was right at the foot of our beds, under the mattress, inside of us. The night of the Werewolves Delgado, the universe’s mechanisms were laid bare, but we couldn’t see anything anymore. Everything trembled and pulsed, and that was all we could say with certainty. The next day, a letter arrived addressed to all of us. That had never happened before. Of course, the fathers and mothers wrote to us, and also the brothers sometimes, but always one by one, not to the GIRLS OF THE POLAR CONVENT SCHOOL. That’s what it said on the envelope. Sister Chinta delivered it to us at lunch time. She almost never meddled, but in that instance she made a sour face and said, ‘What could you girls be up to? Why might you be getting all these letters?’ (Her reaction gave us the impression—not for the first time—that all the nuns were starting to resemble Sister Mártara Junior more and more, as if it were their destiny.)

We finished our lunch, went to class, returned, and opened the letter. It was from the Brother. He signed with just the initial of his surname and nothing else, but the letter was written on the back of a photo of him in his military uniform. ‘Girls of the Polar Convent School,’ it read. ‘Here I am, and it’s all your fault.’ In his soldier’s uniform, the Brother was quite handsome. ‘More handsome than he was as a wolf,’ thought some. ‘Less handsome than he was as a wolf,’ thought others. But we all agreed that he was indeed handsome.

A few days later, the Son sent us a letter too. ‘GIRLS OF THE POLAR CONVENT SCHOOL,’ it said. Our hearts went wild, but we were soon disappointed that it wasn’t the Brother, and that the Son had so little sense that he had to copy everything the Brother did, even when it made him look bad. In the photo, he was all cinched into his soldier’s uniform. At least the Father had the good judgment not to send us anything. The first few times we inspected the photos, we only paid attention to the two of them, the Son and the Brother. Then we started to notice the background also. Maybe some of us were hoping to pick up some trace of a father, of a brother, but we obviously didn’t. After that, we became curious about the war. It had never interested us before, but now it did. ‘That must be,’ we thought, ‘one of the consequences of growing up—especially growing up around the Werewolves Delgado.’

How were we going to find out about the war, we wondered, now that we weren’t even allowed to leave Polar? How could we learn about it? We’d never been concerned with those issues, but now we were. We reflected and eventually decided to bribe Ulises, who came to Polar from Agromos to do odd jobs that required the strength of a man. (We called it a bribe for lack of a better name; Ulises didn’t need much convincing). One day we said to him, ‘Next time you come to Polar, bring us magazines from Agromos.’

‘What magazines?’

‘Magazines! Magazines, magazines that talk about the war. That must be all of them these days. Go to the store or the parish church; they must keep old magazines there.’

And that’s what Ulises did. He’d been to war, and the nuns said that he came back changed. We don’t know how much, because we never paid attention to him before. A few days later, he brought us the magazines. We took them to the dormitory, put them on a bookstand that we’d taken from the attic, and read. We’d never read so much before, and the next day in class, the whites of our eyes were all red. Luckily, the nuns were also upset about the war and they didn’t pay much attention to us. It wasn’t just the act of reading that turned our eyes red, but also not understanding what we were reading. We weren’t used to reading things like that, things written by men, not at Polar and not at home. After we’d finished reading seven difficult pages, or eight, we comforted ourselves with the notion that it must be the male style of writing. Even our brothers probably wrote that way, especially them. We had some regrets about not having paid more attention to them, to them and their writing, when they were still close by. Some wanted to stop, but by now we knew ourselves; we knew we’d keep going, as always, and that’s what we did. There were hard times, but we knew that we were going to find what we were looking for, as always, and we weren’t wrong. One night, our eyes landed on a headline that said:

WOLVES ON THE BATTLEFIELD?

With a question mark at the end, just as we’ve copied here. We kept reading, intrigued, our chins trembling. The article only had one phrase after the headline in block capitals:

WE’VE RECEIVED REPORTS FROM OUR COMRADES (MULTIPLE) WHO HAVE SEEN WOLVES (THREE?) ON THE BATTLEFIELD.

That was enough for us. We closed the magazine unceremoniously on the bookstand and went to sleep. We didn’t fully understand what it said, but we did understand that it put us on the right track. Those words echoed in our mind all day. It was the first kernel of truth we found in a magazine. ‘That isn’t usually how they usually write,’ we thought to ourselves, ‘not our brothers, not any of them.’ At night, when we returned to our room, we picked the magazine up off the bookstand and read the title. Estrella. We’d never seen it before. ‘Estrella,’ we repeated to ourselves, storing the name inside. When Ulises returned to Polar, we caught him in the kitchen while Sister O’Malley was distracted for a moment and asked him, ‘Tell us something: this Estrella, what is it? Why haven’t we ever heard of it before?’ He went pale and answered, ‘I don’t know. Someone else must have brought that one; it wasn’t me.’ We knew that Ulises sometimes brought things he shouldn’t to Polar—out of necessity or vice—and we thought that Estrella must be one of those things, because it was the only magazine Ulises ever brought us that spoke about the war that way. There were never wolves or other animals in any of them. We didn’t press Ulises any further that day. We weren’t about to lose his trust, especially now that he could go out into the world and we couldn’t.

We cut the article out of the magazine, though we still didn’t entirely understand, and took turns keeping it tucked into the bosoms of our uniforms each day. We were afraid that the nuns would notice and confiscate the scrap of paper, but all they noticed was that we were agitated. ‘What are you so nervous about?’ they asked us every so often. ‘And why are you talking to Ulises so much? You’ve never been so interested in him before.’ The nuns never found out about the scrap of paper or Estrella, or about the wolves either. (Every so often, in the corridors, in the dining hall, we went up to each other out of nowhere and whispered: ‘the wolves.’ Matter-of-factly: ‘the wolves.’) They weren’t concerned about us speaking to Ulises per se, but they didn’t like us speaking to people from Agromos in general. The nuns were never pleased when we got too friendly with the locals, and they would always move us along if they saw us lingering for too long over the display cases in the stores. (The memories of the people were branded with the knowledge that, when Polar was built, it was built on the backs of the people of Agromos, the same as the universities in England. ‘Town and gown,’ murmured Sister Dolor to herself sometimes with disagio when she thought we weren’t listening. ‘Town and gown.’)

Around then, we started drawing again. Our favorite subject was still aerial descent, but now it was a wolf, not an airplane, that glided down over the houses, the beach, the square, all the people. (We didn’t even know where we learned to draw wolves. Sister Mártara Junior found the drawings one day while she was inspecting the dormitory when we were in class. At lunch, she gathered us together, sat us down at the table, and said, ‘How dare you waste your nights making hogwash like this? I don’t remember there ever having been drawing classes at this school, do you?’ Out of solidarity, we all brought our hands to our chests, where one of us—we could no longer remember who—had the cutout hidden at that very moment. But what upset Sister Mártara Junior so much wasn’t that the drawings were of wolves per se, it was just the fact of the drawings. She wouldn’t have cared any less if they had been snowy landscapes.

We picked up our drawing pencils again the next night with renewed passion. As we did so, we realized that it was the night of the full moon. Four weeks had already passed since we’d seen the Werewolves Delgado, and eight since we saw the Brother alone. We had never bothered to mark time before, but we did now. Deep down, we understood that we only cared because those two nights were starting to escape us. As much as it stung to admit, we knew that everything dissipates in the end; everything loses its impact. So, that night, we were more driven to draw, to murmur, to work ourselves up into a frenzy, than to fantasize about a future visit from the werewolves. We all drew together on the same paper, and this time we drew three wolves, not just one, all three charging towards a field made of nothing.

Sister Mártara Senior was already waiting when we went down to the dining hall for breakfast in the morning. ‘Today you can go to Agromos. This afternoon, we’ll let you go,’ she said. ‘Are we winning the war again?’ we asked. ‘That’s right. We’re winning the war again,’ she answered. She was quiet for a moment and then added, almost nostalgically, ‘That’s how it always goes in the end.’ We dared to ask, ‘Was it the wolves who won the war?’ (The question escaped almost without our allowing it to, as if its words fell from our mouths on their own). ‘I don’t know the answer to that,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Ask Sister Mártara Junior. She’s younger and she knows more.’ Sister Mártara Junior entered the corridor just then, and as soon as she heard what we were talking about, she snapped, ‘Wolves? Wolves? What are you talking about? Don’t you girls know that there haven’t been wolves near Polar for four or five centuries, or more? Like in England. They hunted them all a long time ago. That’s how people are. Stop talking nonsense and start eating.’

We sat down and ate our crackling, which had already started to get cold. The rest of the day we spent in a stupor, going through the motions. We felt as if we’d just lost something important to us and we’d never get it back. We sat blankly through Don Gerardo’s mass, and in the afternoon, we walked to Agromos arm in arm. We hid from Ulises when we saw him; a bit of remorse niggled at us for having behaved the way we did towards him. We hardly bought anything at the shops and then we returned in a very somber mood, more than normal. Even Sister Mariacamilla, who was walking with us, got moody. ‘What am I supposed to do with you girls?’ she said, starting up the steep hill. ‘What is it that you want, exactly? We’re not going to punish you, if that’s what you’re hoping for. That must be what you want, so we’re not going to do it.’ We arrived at Polar and Sister Mariacamilla took us to the dining hall, where we ate dinner in silence. We went right to bed, and that must have been one of the few nights at Polar that we slept properly, without waking up, without deliriums, and without falling out of bed. (We slept properly more often when we were no longer girls.)

We were sure that we hadn’t heard the last of the Werewolves Delgado, and we were right. A few days later, another letter arrived, addressed to the GIRLS OF THE POLAR CONVENT SCHOOL, and this time it was signed by all three. All three of them appeared in the photo this time, rigid in their starched uniforms. There was something behind them. We looked at it, examined it, and decided that it was most likely a pile of bodies, although we couldn’t tell for sure. Below, full of a youthful vigor they apparently hadn’t lost, it said, ‘JUSQU’A LA PROCHAIN (sic) FOIS!!’ We thought it seemed impossible for the Werewolves Delgado to express themselves this way, in French, no less, which was an old language, a language that the mothers spoke. But it also seemed impossible, we thought, that they would waste their incredible ability to be something else, something other than what they were, fighting in that war we cared so little about. (As close as the war might come to our lives, it was never going to change them). That night, we wondered amongst ourselves if we should ask the fathers about the werewolves. They were informed about the war and they must know something. But we decided it would be better to ask the brothers than the fathers. As much as it pained the fathers, the brothers knew more; they were more up to date on matters of modern life.

In the following days, we tried again with the nuns. We asked Sister Dolor in class, ‘Tell us, can a wolf win a war? Has there ever in the history of the world been a time when a wolf won a war? Or three wolves?’ We’d caught her off guard. Sister Dolor looked at us, then turned around and started writing on the chalkboard. She liked to write on the chalkboard so hard that the chalk squeaked. While she wrote, she said, ‘What’s gotten into you girls? Why would you come to me with this nonsense? Where did you even learn what a wolf is? Have you ever seen wolves here at Polar? Ever? Or in Agromos, or anywhere? No? Well then, what are you talking about? You’ve never even seen a mink, or a coati. You girls don’t see animals.’ Sister Dolor seemed entirely convinced. She didn’t know what was truly going on in this war. Neither did the other nuns, nor the mothers, surely. We did, but we weren’t as interested anymore. Our interest was renewed when the Werewolves Delgado started lending and borrowing money at Polar again, but only in the same way that everything from outside Polar initially interested us. We were more interested, for example, in the construction to fix the hole in the chapel and redo the roof. We went out onto the grounds, pretending that we were doing something, when all we were really doing was watching the laborers work, barely speaking. (They were already old, the fathers’ age, because the young, capable men from Agromos had all gone to war.) And that’s how life as usual returned to Polar. Werewolves, war, yes, war, yes—things that were just there, like the crackling. We occasionally came to interact with the Brother, and him alone, a bit more intimately during the years after Polar.

Pigs

We fled on the road that led up to Mútina. Few people lived there, and those who did kept to themselves. They didn’t have much to do with each other. We thought that we could spend some time there if a revolt broke out in Frauz after what we’d just done without wanting to. They might accuse us of being instigators, and then we’d attract attention. They’d start routing around and uncover our whole story. In Mútina, we arrived at a hamlet of just five houses up on a hill and a sixth a bit farther on, all of them set in a swaying patch of eucalyptus. Right away, our eyes were drawn to the lone house at the edge of the forest. We could live there for years, we thought, if we could just figure out how to get inside. We ruminated—we must have spent months there ruminating—and that whole time, we lived rough and studied the house from every possible angle while we tried to figure out a way in.

We found that an elderly man lived in the house with his pigs, and we only knew about them because of their grunting. It made our lives in the forest slightly more agreeable, like an ever-present, barely noticeable refrain. Sometimes, a consciousness solidified inside of us that the sound came from the mouths and tongues of living beings. The man seemed to cling to certain old ways of life—but not all of them—like creatures we’d observed clinging to rocks.

In the forest, we deliberated. Nature made us hostile. Everything caused us to flinch and argue, and we even suspected that our flight was coming to an end, that we’d soon be discovered. We agreed on one thing, and that was what saved us: we had to get into the house, and the best way to do so was to become pigs. So, that’s what we did. At night, we approached the house from the barn side and opened the door. Two shadows came running out and darted into the forest. We occupied their spaces, closed our eyes, and slept. When we woke up, we scarfed down the cabbage leaves and rice that the man had left for us overnight, and at midday we ate again. We had no trouble getting used to life as pigs, maybe because we never gave in to the clichés that come to mind when you think of swine (almost never, anyway).

The man talked all the time about his life and what he’d done with it. Eventually, the notion started to take shape in our heads that one of the traditions the man perhaps clung to was slaughtering pigs by hand. It also occurred to us that pigs always know—even if they don’t know that they know—the day they’re going to die.

Meanwhile, the man kept speaking to us, and we got the impression that he relied on us more and more with each passing day. Sometimes we thought, ‘We might get to spend our whole lives like this.’ Of the paths we had before us, that was probably the most attractive or the richest in possibility. The longer we stayed, the more the man spoke to us and the more kisses he gave us, nuzzling so close that we smelled his foul breath, as if something were rotting in his guts. Still, we continued that way for a while more. Then Monday arrived, the day he decided that the pigs must die.

We waited until dawn, and then we escaped again.

They arrived at a time when we were weary of life, wilted (but then again, that wasn’t so uncommon at Polar). It was a long while before we could appreciate the élan they awakened in us. All those years ago, so much happened in such quick succession that our ability to feel all of it was hampered. It started like this: we were on our way to the swimming hole one day, walking down the path from Polar to Agromos, when we saw them asleep in the distance, sprawled out under a grove of sycamore trees. (The local peasants normally chopped everything down, but they left those intact.) One of us saw them and gestured. We glanced over, but then refocused our gaze inward and kept walking. The swimming hole was what interested us most, and that’s where we went. When we returned, our hair dripping as usual, they were still there, and more than one or two of us were startled (that’s how brief our memories were when we were girls, but we already had a vague intuition that they would lengthen as we grew into women).

The next Saturday, on the path to the swimming hole, some of us caught some others taking crusts of bread from our jacket pockets, along with chunks of pancetta or half-eaten apples, and leaving them discreetly by the side of the road, near where they were sleeping. (We realized they’d been sleeping there since the previous Saturday. They’d walked a lot and fled even more, as we’d soon learn. Having rarely left Polar, we imagined that must have been exhausting.) When we returned from our swim, they were still sprawled there, but the supplies we’d left had disappeared: the crusts of bread, the apples, the grated carrots, but not the pancetta (not ever). That was the first time we recognized them for what they were: pigs. Being from our types of families, we knew little about pigs. We knew that they used to do the slaughter at Polar in the past, but things like that became impractical with the comings and goings of the Carlist Wars. (Polar was a Carlist endeavor, but the Carlists were always fighting amongst themselves, one faction against another). The nuns who were there during our time held a certain amount of ancestral memory, as everyone did, but not about the pig slaughter. Not in their fingertips, anyway.

The second week, we all assaulted the kitchen together. We say ‘assault’ for lack of a better term; what we did was wander and distract. We’d enter to ask for a glass of milk, for example, because our throat hurt (which was always true; in Polar the draughts were sneaky), and snatch everything we could, except for slices of pancetta and strips of ham. Our instinct was to grab those too, because we had to be quick and swipe as much as we could before Sister O’Malley caught us. We’d reach out a hand, hesitate, stare for a moment, remember, and retract it. The days dragged on until the next Saturday. We barely spared a thought for the swimming hole, and more than one of us forgot to put a swimsuit in our packs before setting out. When we were approaching the sycamore trees, we started walking more and more slowly. We didn’t see them, but we left the supplies by the road anyway. On the way back, we glimpsed them in the distance. That was the first time they looked at us, we believed. Still today, we wonder how they saw us, how they recognized us.

We’d have to wait six more Saturdays to actually start talking to them.

How many of them were there? Maybe as many as of us, but we couldn’t say for sure. What we can say for sure is that, from the very first time we met, we clicked. We never knew it was possible to get along with strangers like that. Our conversation was vivacious, curious. Those first few meetings, they told us a lot about a man they were fleeing from because he wanted to slaughter them. ‘Do you know him?’ they asked us. ‘How could we know him?’ we answered. We knew each other and we knew the nuns. Who else could we possibly know if we never left? (We never told them any more about life at Polar. What would have been the point?) They thought for a moment. ‘The man spoke a lot about a war he’d fought in when he was younger. Didn’t you mention a war? Could it be the same one?’ they inquired, staring deep into our eyes, and that’s how we realized they were more naive than we were.

During that time, anything anyone said about pigs, no matter what it was, aroused chaos and confusion inside our heads. Of course. One night, in the dormitory, one of us got up after we were already tucked in, stood on the bed, and started speaking in a very serious tone. She said that, during the war, they fed a live man to the pigs in her village. We listened, nodded our heads, and fell asleep. We weren’t sure whether or not such a thing was possible. Maybe one of us asked the nuns, out of curiosity, if it was true that pigs are slaughtered on Saint Martin’s Day. (We would have asked Sister Mártara Junior, who knew something about everything, or Sister Mártara Senior, who looked like she was from somewhere where they kill pigs. Neither of them said anything worthwhile.) Someone theorized that a pig’s internal organs are more similar to a man’s than any other animal’s. Another answered, ‘You’re probably right. Probably a man’s, because I doubt they’re like a woman’s and certainly not a girl’s.’

We came to believe that we would go on living like that forever, despite their jokes about us never fully satisfying their appetite. Sometimes it kept us up at night, wondering what they meant by that. We really enjoyed raiding the kitchen right in front of Sister O’Malley’s nose. There were two ways to do it: silently, so she wouldn’t notice us at all, or openly, by entering in a group. Some of us would grab everything we could get our hands on while others made threatening gestures from the entrance, suggesting they were prepared to meet obstacles with violence. Sister O’Malley relented; how could she not? She sat perched on the step, poor thing. We didn’t think she told Sister Mártara Junior or Sister Dolor anything about those incidents, even though she should have, because we were breaking the rules. We could only steal so much, however; Polar wasn’t exempt from the prevailing scarcity of those times. Since what we stole from the kitchen wasn’t enough to satiate them, we started to venture into the stores and market of Agromos. There we had to use other methods besides discretion and violence. We were able to lift some things, but not too much (because the Gentleman from Agromos had already taken his share before we arrived). We thought our rendezvous would last a long time.

(Sometimes, they dropped vague hints that we should leave with them. In pairs, and later all together. The idea had its appeal in theory, but what were we going to do so far from Polar? At the time, we didn’t think much of it, but now we think that was when the general uplift started to drop. We’ll tell you about that in a moment.)

Near Polar, heading towards Agromos on a secondary road, there was a field where men who died in the war were supposedly buried. We won’t get into whether or not it was true. We’ve already told you that there were no battles near Polar, but we did remember a scuffle in our area near the end, and it could have reached that field. The coatis and the other rodents stopped appearing around then. We asked Sister Mariacamilla about it and she answered, peeved, ‘Well, all the coatis in the world must be extinct, then. Everything has to die sooner or later, right? I taught you that.’ Later, all the nuns ever said about the field was, ‘Don’t go there. Go the long way around. You girls are young; you can walk.’ But they said things like that so often that we no longer knew when to take them seriously. The world around Polar—and Polar itself, inside the walls—was full of places where hinc sunt leones. That’s what Sister Chinta said in grammar class. We translated in silence, knowing that leones could be anything.

That field was leones. Sometimes we came upon leones without meaning to, other times intentionally. Sometimes the nuns found out, sometimes not. Sometimes they punished us, sometimes not. There was no order. And so, one day, when we didn’t find them in their normal place, we kept walking towards Agromos for some ten, fifteen minutes. Off in the distance, we saw the field and, to our surprise, they were in it. There they were, the bastards, routing in the dirt. Now we understand that they routed because they were pigs and didn’t know any better, but at that point, we still didn’t have the wisdom to understand, so we acted on our reflex to run over to them and demand, ‘What are you doing? What’s going on?’ We were taken aback to see them foraging when, ever since we’d first met, we’d taken such care to feed them. That day, the matter was resolved quickly; as soon as they saw us, they stopped what they were doing. We all returned to our spot, and everything went back to normal. ‘Where are you coming from?’ Sister Mártara Junior said when she saw us enter the gate on our way back. But she was often suspicious that way. She probably had no reason to be alarmed, to think that age would soon be upon us, though some of us felt that it would, in our shoulder blades when they dug into the iron bedframe at night. During the day, we forgot about it, but we soon found ourselves paying more attention to things.

We’d become so sensitive to scents, types of touch or looking. We could spend hours watching a pill bug. If an apple fell from the tree before it was ripe, it may as well have been the whole world that fell. We watched the water filtering through the stones of the wall of Polar and would have gladly stood there until the water tunneled through everything: the wall, Polar, Agromos, Earth. We preferred to spend more time alone, with ourselves and without them. One Saturday, making excuses about the sudden unseasonable cold, we didn’t even go to the swimming hole. Then, the next week, we were itching to feel the water on our skin and we went earlier than usual. We slipped along the paths, so determined that not even the Gentleman from Agromos could have stopped us if he had jumped out and blocked our way. We arrived at the fields; they weren’t there. Some mumbled about returning to Polar, that it was getting cold. Others still wanted to go to the swimming hole; we’d come to swim and nothing more, after all. But most of us headed towards the field where we knew they would be, and we were right. We found them there routing around, eating things they shouldn’t. They ate ravenously, with relish and a certain sort of frank elegance. They ate—how can we say it?—like pigs. And by that we also mean free of malice.

They must have noticed our presence, because they raised their heads and looked at us, still eating all the while. They didn’t understand. When we asked them to stop eating, they did, but then they lowered their heads and started again more gingerly. When we employed against them the tiny amount of violence our bodies could muster, they were shocked. ‘But don’t you get it?’ they said. ‘We’re hungry. We’re pigs. The food you bring us doesn’t go very far once we’ve shared it between us. We just found out that there was food here, so here we are. Is this one of the fields where a war was fought?’ They didn’t wait for us to answer. They kept eating, kept snuffling, their snouts opening and closing. We tried to get them to stop, now using our fists. It wasn’t a fight. They didn’t do much besides eat, and we didn’t manage anything. Defeated, we looked at them one last time and left. We’d never see them again. It wasn’t until some weeks later, back at Polar alone, when our normal routine resumed (mass, math, the washing-up water, sewing with Sister Elvira Lecumberri, which was losing its luster), that we gained an inkling of why we were so eager to protect those men below the field. They were men we didn’t know, and we’d never be able to know them as men. That was as much understanding as we could muster at that point. Later, after Polar, some of us tried to find out more about them.

There was nothing left to be done with them now that we’d lost their trust. The next day, we woke up early in the morning and left that wasteland. We kept going.

Text © Eva Moreda

Translation © Lindsay Semel