A few minutes later I heard, in greater detail, that version of events from the gardener’s very mouth. Despite suffering months in prison, his appearance was that of a vigorous man and his manners those of an honorable person, and he must have been younger than his air — that of being overwhelmed by the situation — made him appear. His story seemed all too plausible, especially his description of the little nun’s behavior, so well did it coincide with several similar cases I had treated with Dr. Weiss, and the gardener could not have invented certain characteristic details of that type of derangement on his own. In the transcript I made of his words I will address the obligation, as I believe I have already warned above, of using several terms and turns of phrase that might sound overly harsh to certain listeners who — with all due respect — consider themselves decent, but it is necessary to keep in mind that, in mental illness, the afflicted subjects’ vocabulary and conduct differ completely from those of healthy persons. (The use of Latin borrowed for the scientific tract seems out of place in the case of this personal report, which addresses hypothetical readers. I cannot prejudge if they will or will not be men of science, a detail, for its part, that is secondary to the present manuscript. But as a more general reflection: What can be the aim of putting certain parts of the body and certain acts into Latin that, without Latin or any language at all, humans and animals use and carry out every day?)
The gardener, from the very start of his story, proved his sincerity in several ways, acknowledging his carnal relations with Sister Teresita for example, and also always referring to the nun without the slightest animosity, as if despite all that happened and the precarious situation he found himself in, he had preserved the liveliest sympathies toward her. For the gardener, it was the Mother Superior who was refusing to see the facts as they had truly occurred. And another important detail that seemed to confirm the gardener’s sincerity was the justification he gave for his conduct: According to him, it took a long time to realize the little nun was acting strangely, and that things she said or did, if he had attributed them at first to an unbridled lewdness, must have actually been caused by madness. The gardener stated that all the while it was he who had felt himself under the little nun’s influence and that sometimes he even had the feeling she was subjecting him to a sort of violence. That inability to recognize madness is in no way unusual, and I would even dare assert that he is nothing out of the ordinary, that such inability was no phenomenon of isolated individuals, but rather of entire nations which, as history has already repeatedly shown, may be under an influence like the gardener, and driven into the abyss by the seemingly flawless logic of delusion, when in fact all logic has been abandoned.
The gardener said he had been working in the convent for a few months without even noticing the little nun, who, aside from youth, lacked any special charm, and that things would have doubtless continued that way if her insistent glances, which became most suggestive when they were alone — the gardener told us this in slightly coarser language than I now employ in writing thirty years later — hadn’t attracted his attention, first intriguing him without a thought for what would happen later, but then drawing him in that direction. When he confided this to his cousin, who worked in the hospital, a fact that the cousin confirmed immediately, the cousin told him the little he knew of Sister Teresita: namely that, among their principal tasks, the Handmaids of the Blessed Sacrament cared for women of ill repute, and a few gossiped in the city — where young girls, as in every city, think they know everything even when they do not — that the young nun, who was overly familiar with women of ill repute and was sometimes peculiar in word and bearing, had a tendency to overstep the bounds of her mission. But everyone acknowledged her to be genuinely kind, and she was quite popular among the poor, especially those who had given themselves over to fallen ways — not just camp-following prostitutes or the harlots who plied their trade in shacks along the outskirts, but also deserters, cattle thieves, robbers, vagabonds, murderers. Some said they had seen her sitting in a hovel doorway, smoking a cigar, talking and laughing with a couple of whores. Others said she didn’t decline to take a pull if someone thought to offer, and two or three even claimed to have seen her once, habit-sleeves rolled up, playing jackstones with a cluster of gauchos and soldiers on the porch of a general store. But they were only rumors. Of all those who circulated the stories, not a single one had, if pressed, been able to provide a witness for what was said. The gardener said the little nun was simply kind to him at first, but that one day, when he had gone into the chapel on a whim, he’d seen her climb the altar and rub the crucified Christ’s drapery across his groin. On taking in the scene in the dim chapel, which he’d entered while still a little dazed from the brightness outside, he thought the little nun had been cleaning the statue, but he then saw her rise up on tiptoe from the chair she’d clambered up on to better reach the desired height, and the little nun began to lick the drapery in the same spot she had just been rubbing. The gardener had made a small, inadvertent noise that made her turn, peering into the half-light until she found him at the end of the chapel. The gardener said he was afraid that the little nun was going to dress him down on being caught, or become angry at the intruder who’d spied on her, but that, to his surprise, she didn’t show the slightest alarm and smiled at him, and perched on the chair as she was, signaled to him to come closer. When the gardener told me this, it reminded me of the little nun’s crooked index finger and innuendo-filled smile some days earlier, urging me to take a few steps toward her.
With the abrupt and evidence-filled sincerity of one who plays his final card to champion himself, the gardener told us, with the support of continued approving nods from his cousin and Dr. López, of his relations with Sister Teresita, which commenced within five minutes of their first meeting, on the little chapel’s very floor, at the foot of the altar. According to the gardener, he’d resisted at first, precisely because of where they found themselves, but the little nun had convinced him, saying that nowhere in the Gospels or Church doctrines was the act they were about to perform — or, in particular, the fact of carrying it out where they were preparing to do so — condemned by any text. She might be certain of this, though it is necessary to add that, due to the enormity of such acts, even the most punctilious Fathers of the Church, whom few possible circumstances of sin eluded, would have deemed it superfluous to condemn these acts explicitly. Further: According to the little nun, Christ had ordered her many times to consummate both carnal union with the human creature and divine union with the Holy Spirit. This would allow her to attain perfect union with God, for Christ’s divinity and his human nature had been separated anew upon his ascent to the Kingdom of Heaven, his divinity seated at the right hand of God and his humanity dispersed among men.
It is obvious that the gardener had been unable to express the above in such terms, so I should clarify that, to compile these details, I base them upon Sister Teresita’s own writings: a roll of papers bundled together with blue ribbon that the nun secretly entrusted to the gardener when the scandal broke, and which the unlettered gardener left to his cousin the nurse, who brought it, finally, to Dr. López’s study. The little nun’s manuscript, titled Manual for Love, detailed a period of mystical delirium a few months before the episodes related by the gardener, and is a mix of prose and poetry in which Sister Teresita describes the passion she and Jesus Christ had shared ever since he first appeared to her in Upper Peru. It is worth noting that mental patients, when educated, can never resist the chance to express themselves in writing, trying to make their ramblings conform to the shape of a philosophical treatise or literary composition. It would be wrong to take them lightly, for those writings can be an invaluable source of significant data for a man of science; in the written word, he has at his disposal, safe from the transience of spoken ravings and fleeting actions, a series of thoughts preserved like insects fixed on a pin or a dried flower in an herbarium to be pored over by the naturalist. Hence, it seemed quite natural for my colleague to permanently entrust Sister Teresita’s writings to me. (The matter of mysticism, even if we start from the hypothesis of its causal object’s nonexistence, still warrants study, for if indeed the object is imaginary, the state that arouses belief in its reality is indisputably authentic. As in the fear of ghosts, for example, ghosts are of course nonexistent, but the fear is quite real, and as such merits thorough study, just like optics or the positions of the stars.)