When we arrived at her chamber, I saw that the Mother Superior’s eyes were full of tears and, taking pity, I tried to console her, explaining that madness ought not be judged by moral standards nor addressed within our usual categories of thought. After a time, the Mother Superior seemed to quiet and, as I bid her goodbye, I noticed her attitude toward me had changed; she appeared to have set aside her mistrust. However, when we parted, the unpleasant sensation remained that the Mother Superior had not told me the whole truth about the little nun.
A surprise witness would confirm this for me a few days later. Notified of my presence in the city, Dr. López, a local physician and friend to the Parra family, invited me to visit him — out of politeness to be sure, but also to discuss several matters important to the due practice of our profession, and to consult upon a few difficult cases he had been treating in the hospital. That hospital was once Jesuit and has since been restored to them on their return to America; if my information is correct, it was in those years under the charge of the Franciscans, who had, to put it one way, “annexed” the neighboring monastery. If anything can suggest the general poverty that reigned in that city, and how only a few families were spared, it is the fact that the chapter-house, the hospital, and the jail operated out of the same building, a long chorizo, as the cheeky local idiom had come to name all constructions with a plan that, vertical or parallel to the street, extended in a single long line of rooms, or in two, separating at a courtyard and meeting at the front to form the building’s main body. In this building, shaped then like a squared-off U, the façade, where the government, the administration, and a small police station were located, occupied an entire block on the main plaza, and of the two wings extending from the façade to the river, one lodged the hospital and the other, like its grimmer reflection across the courtyard, the jail and the customs-house.
Out of some fifteen patients, two or three thorny cases required a consultation — the rest posed no problem since a mere glance told me there would be no cure — and once we finished examining them, my colleague, an older man who impressed me with his clear experience and insight, glanced all around as if in fear of committing an indiscretion. He told me there was another case he wanted to submit to me, but that we would examine him in a chamber adjoining the common area, where he had his office. That said, he signaled to a male nurse who had been circling us persistently during our visit to the common area. The nurse left the office immediately and, through a window, I saw him briskly cross the courtyard toward the jail. As soon as we were settled in his office, my colleague explained the reason for all this intrigue: As everyone already knew that I had come to the city to fetch Sister Teresita for admission at Las Tres Acacias, the nurse, who was a cousin of the nun’s supposed rapist, had begged the doctor to hear the convent gardener’s version of events, which was quite different from the one issued by the ecclesiastical authorities. Only the fact of this contradiction had staved off the firing squad, but the gardener’s defenders had not managed to dispel the threat altogether. Dr. López was convinced that the gardener spoke the truth, and he had the utmost confidence in the cousin, his main collaborator for years. A small clerical faction supported him, especially among the Franciscans, but the Church refused to admit that the little nun’s conduct — the hypothesis of a demonic intervention had been rejected — was due to, as it were, natural if inexplicable causes, and preferred, perhaps in the hope that the sin of some person outside the Church might explain the events, to maintain the gardener’s guilt. The doctor told me the gardener admitted to having had carnal relations with the little nun, but he denied in the most energetic, even horrified, fashion, having violated her and particularly insisted that, if they had been found in circumstances that might be considered sacrilegious, it had been unexpected and against his will.