Girls of the Polar Convent School (108 pages) is Eva Moreda’s eighth fiction title written in Galician and was published by Morgante in 2021. It deals with life in a convent school during and after the Spanish Civil War and is narrated from the point of view of the schoolgirls. The book is divided into four chapters.

In the first chapter, “Stitches”, Sr Elvira returns to the convent after an absence of two years. She previously taught sewing, but left to marry the editor of a newspaper. In her lessons, the girls of the convent would make outfits they couldn’t wear at school (at school, they had to wear uniforms, nightdresses, or nothing), but which they kept jealously in their wardrobes. The girls want to know more about her marriage to the journalist and why she came back, so they send a fellow pupil, Imogen, to investigate. Her task is to sit close to Sr Elvira, especially in the dining hall. During the Christmas holidays, some of the girls think they have seen Sr Elvira wearing trousers at local festivities, but they might have imagined this. Imogen claims to know stuff – for example, that it was the nun’s brother who introduced her to the newspaper editor – but she is reticent. She tells the other girls that Sr Elvira can’t get rid of the smell of the newspaper editor inside and on her.

In the spring, when it gets warm, the girls go to bathe in a pool near the school. A few days later, they see Imogen coming out of the sewing room, followed shortly afterwards by Sr Elvira, who looks flushed. On their next visit to the pool, the other girls attack Imogen, some from above, others from below. They are then summoned to the assembly hall to explain their actions to the nuns. (At Polar, nobody really learns any languages, even though the mother superior, Sr Dolor, would like to teach the pupils English. The nuns agree that it would be useful to learn Latin and Greek, but they can’t find any teachers who are also nuns.)

In the second chapter, “The Werewolves Delgado”, when the war starts, packs of animals appear in the surroundings of the school – coatis, lemmings, minks. Sr Mariacamilla explains about them in her natural history class. The mother superior, Sr Dolor, is visited by three men who are called “the Werewolves Delgado”. They arrive and leave with a suitcase, and the girls fantasize about whether the suitcase is full of money or empty. Other people come to see Sr Dolor at this time – two men selling art objects, whom Sr Dolor receives in the Flemish chapel, or the girls’ fathers, who come to pay their tuition, but never have time to visit them. One night, the girls hear a high-pitched howl and creep along the corridor to the door of Sr Dolor’s office, where through the keyhole they glimpse one of the Werewolves Delgado, the one known as the Brother, who has turned into a wolf. They see him leaving the next morning, looking a little paler than usual. He turns and smiles at them.

Sr O’Malley, who has previously been the cook and the nurse, starts teaching the girls art history. One day, she takes them to see an exhibition on modern art at the New Cultural Centre. The girls are inspired by the exhibition, it fills them with a sense of movement, but as soon as they return to the school, their curiosity is again piqued by the fact the Brother has spent the night in Sr Dolor’s office. The girls know when the art gentlemen have been to see Sr Dolor because carvings disappear from the Flemish chapel. One day, one of the gentlemen endeavours to teach the girls about aesthetics, showing them an image of an evangelical church in America and one of Bernini’s sculpture “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”.

Of the Werewolves Delgado, the one who visits the mother superior the most is the Father. The third one is the Son. The girls are curious to know what they would look like as wolves, so they hatch a plan to make them stay the night at the school. They fell a beech tree next to the chapel, the damage to which forces the mother superior to summon the Werewolves Delgado to borrow the money necessary to repair it. Once all three Werewolves Delgado have arrived at the school, they hatch a plan to make them stay overnight. Sr Dolor is in the habit of offering them a glass of cherry liqueur, so they steal the bottle and insert three drops of laxative. The Werewolves Delgado become very ill and rush to the infirmary. They are in a hurry to leave, but the nuns insist on looking after them until they get better. The plan seems to be working. That night, from their beds, the girls hear three wolves howling in unison and stand outside the infirmary to peep through the keyhole. They stare so hard their eyes are still smarting several days later.

The next morning, they attend mass in the damaged chapel and are told not to leave the school grounds under any circumstances, since it is dangerous for them. The girls receive a letter from the Brother, who is in a soldier’s uniform, in which he blames them for the fact he is having to fight. They also receive a letter from the Son, who copies the Brother, but not from the Father. They become interested in the war and ask Ulises, a man from the local village, to bring them magazines. In one of the magazines, Estrella, they come across a report of possibly three wolves on the battlefield. They ask Ulises where this magazine has come from, but he claims to have no knowledge. To vent their frustration over the time that has passed since they saw the Werewolves Delgado, the girls take up drawing. They do drawings of aerial descent, but instead of an airplane, they draw a wolf.

The girls are given permission to go to the village again, now it is safe. They ask if they have won the war, and if it is because of the wolves. The nuns claim to know nothing of such wolves. The girls receive another letter, which this time is signed by all three Werewolves Delgado, with a photo of them in their starched uniforms. They think they can see a pile of bodies behind them. In the letter, the Werewolves Delgado write “until next time” in bad French. In the end, things return to normal. The Werewolves Delgado come to lend money again, and the girls take an interest in the repair work on the chapel. After they leave Polar, they have a more intimate relationship with the Brother.

The third chapter, “Pigs”, opens with a text in italic which refers to an unspecified “we”. In this text, the subjects referred to as “we” flee to a village up in the hills called Mútina. They think about occupying the last house in the village, where there lives an old man and some pigs. They are afraid that they will get caught and be accused of being instigators. They decide the best thing would be to disguise themselves as pigs. They enter the pigs’ enclosure and eat the food the old man gives them. The old man tells them about his life. They have the impression that he is becoming increasingly reliant on them. But then it comes time for the pigs to be slaughtered, and so they escape.

The text then returns to the girls at Polar. On their way to the swimming hole, they catch sight of the pigs among the trees and start to feed them. The food disappears, so they ransack the kitchen when Sr O’Malley isn’t looking and steal food for the pigs, which they leave by the side of the road. Six weeks later, they have their first conversation. The pigs explain that they are fleeing from a man who wants to slaughter them and ask the girls if they know him. The pigs’ appetite is never satiated, so the girls take to stealing food from the shops and market of Agromos, even though it is a time of scarcity.

In between the school and the village, there is a field where men who have died in battle are buried. The pigs take to foraging there because they are still hungry. The girls tell them not to and use the violence their bodies permit to stop them. When the pigs realize they have lost the girls’ trust, they leave that place, and the girls don’t see them again. (Meanwhile things continue to disappear from the Flemish chapel and often they turn up in churches nearby. The girls suspect the nuns are in on this, but the nuns feign ignorance.)

In the fourth and last chapter, “Elsa in Polar”, a new girl, Elsa, arrives at the school. The girls arrange to go to the mountain, purportedly in search of mushrooms, but really to relax and play lacrosse, which Elsa teaches them. They continue playing on a Saturday, and Elsa gives them instructions. It turns out that Elsa is English and has been sent by her father to get her away from the war in her country. She barely speaks their language. She says that her father has a party and is going to stop the war in a week. In the end, she stays at Polar for six years.

Elsa insists that they must found a party, so the girls get to work on membership cards, but when the local civil guard finds out, the girls burn the cards, and that is the end of the party. Because of the way Elsa emphasizes the “p” of “party”, the other girls teach her their word for “prick” (pirola), which earns Elsa a slap from one of the nuns. Elsa then persuades the girls to put on a performance in German of The Maid of Orleans by Friedrich Schiller, a play about the life of Joan of Arc. The performance takes place at Christmas, just before the girls go home for the holidays.

When she feels like it, Elsa escapes from the school. The nuns tell the other girls to keep quiet, in case word gets out and Elsa’s father, or one of their own fathers, hears about it. She always comes back, except for the last time, when she doesn’t return. Because of the war in her country, Elsa spends the holidays at the school, in the company of the nuns. She is still waiting for her father to end the war, so she can go home. Elsa becomes friends with Ulises from the village. They sit together at the back of the church, because Elsa is not Catholic and cannot take part in the services. She also has contact with the Gentleman from Agromos, the child of a lady from Lugo who grew up on his own in the forest. One day, he tells Elsa that he doesn’t believe in God because he lets the wild animals kill each other.

On one of her escapades, Elsa leaves with the Contessa, an Italian lady who has come to their country to perform Scarlatti’s sonatas on a clavichord. The Contessa rehearses for fourteen or fifteen hours a day. Elsa is going to help her at the concerts by turning the pages of the score. She leaves in the Rolls-Royce with the Contessa and her agent, Cesare. At the same time, Ulises disappears from the village. Before Elsa arrived at Polar, the girls had a game, which was to answer the phone in Sr Dolor’s office and say the name of a colour. They teach Elsa their game, but when she answers, the colour she chooses is red. Because of its political connotations, the girls leave the office, feeling very subdued.

Elsa also escapes with the Werewolves Delgado, in their Bentley, and around that time Ulises again disappears from the village. The girls have a song which says “The devil speaks English”. They think it might have to do with the era of Napoleon, when the English came to the Iberian Peninsula. (They even think the devil might be Elsa’s father, but they soon reject that idea, since Elsa’s father is under house arrest.) As a favour, Elsa asks the other girls to help her embroider badges which can be sold in London for a penny, to help her father in his effort to stop the war.

When the girls are punished by the nuns, having to walk on their knees to the village or to copy out a page from Margery Kempe 300 times, they reach the conclusion that it’s not them who are being punished, but all the girls who have ever been to Polar since it was founded in 1832 (or 1807). Another time Elsa escapes, it is with the art gentlemen. She is in the habit of sleepwalking and ends up one night in the chapel. The art gentlemen give her a choice: to go with them or to die because of what she has seen. A statue of Saint Agatha also disappears, but is later recovered. Elsa’s absence coincides with a transformation in church aesthetics.

Elsa shows them a book she has, Exercises on the Past by Charenton. One of the exercises is for two monks to retire to a cell and work in silence on the translation of two parts of the same manuscript and then to meet outside their cells. Another exercise consists in sitting opposite somebody and watching them change until their death. This exercise can be performed with a tomato instead of a person. The girls discover a camera in the attic and use it to take photos. It is one of those old cameras where you are supposed to pose for three hours, so the image can become fixed, but the girls don’t have this patience. They take photos everywhere. A favourite posture is to hitch up their skirt and stand with their leg outstretched. This turns into a classic.

When Elsa leaves, the girls pretend that she is still there. They feel a certain amount of relief. Another time Elsa escapes, it is to work for a history teacher in Santiago and to translate his articles into English and German and send them to magazines abroad, but Elsa has to return when the teacher throws himself out of the window on realizing one of the people he has studied is a Jew. There comes a time when the art gentlemen disappear, Ulises disappears (to be reunited with his other half in America), even the Gentleman from Agromos disappears. Sr Dolor announces that there will be a dance with boys from a male boarding school. The girls get all excited, thinking they will meet their future husbands, but the bus transporting the boys gets stuck in a snowstorm.

Soon after they are married, the girls realize that their years at Polar were the best of their lives. Elsa is always with them. The narrative is addressed to someone, who asks at the end what they have done with Elsa. The girls are surprised to hear that question.

This is an interesting and intricate narrative with fantastical elements – pigs don’t normally have conversations, and moneylenders don’t usually turn into wolves. There are numerous Anglicisms (“dining hall”, “town and gown”) and phrases in other languages such as German or Latin. The first chapter, “Stitches”, is available to read online in the Spring 2024 issue of Trafika Europe. The novel appears to deal with the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, as well as the Second World War, in an enclosed environment, which is a convent school, where the girls’ interests are slightly removed from external reality and the last thing they are worried about is studying. We never find out who the narrative is addressed to, and why the girls are being interviewed about their time at school and their relationship with Elsa.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne