God's Callgirl (18 page)

When I woke in the dark, aware that some of the others in the dormitory might have listened in, I wondered if I could still become a nun.
But it was only a dream
.

Mother Mary Luke, who used to be my headmistress at primary school, smiled knowingly at me the next morning
as I scanned the faces around me to spot who might have heard me in the night, panting secretly with nervousness. She must have heard it all before. But I was clear about my choice to devote myself solely to Jesus, to God the Father and to the Holy Spirit; the Trinity that was mysteriously all One, according to Christian belief, but which, alas, had no physical reality for me to relate to.

The hacking of my hair continued, accompanied by grunts and gasps. The dismal thought suddenly entered my head that I would never have a baby. I had this thought again during the years that followed, and each time I let in this grief, something seemed to dry up in my body.

The nuns were done, finally, and my spiky head was covered with a bonnet. We re-entered the chapel encased in our heavy black serge gowns and white caps, feeling so strange and looking so unearthly that some people burst into tears.

After the brave ceremony, my family was there to congratulate me. My father held me tight and kissed me on the mouth until my mother whispered urgently for him to stop. With his mouth still on mine, I opened my eyes and saw my mother’s agitated face. She was looking around to see who might be noticing this tableau. In that strange unconscious moment of collusion with my father, I felt all the desperate collusions of the past paying off. My father was proud of me at last. I had finally succeeded! His daughter’s achievement had excited him sexually. It wasn’t appropriate, but I wasn’t used to thinking things through. My desperate need for love and approval had kept me in sexual collusion with him since the tender age of three—though, as the young novice I was then, I had no idea of that.

When the hullabaloo of the party in the main parlour was finally over, everyone went home. The shiny tresses of my
thick blonde hair—which looked a lot like Grace Kelly’s after they had been kept for six months in a little net—were given to my mother. She placed my hair in a silk-lined box near an enlarged photograph of me and often put it on her lap and wept. When my younger sisters saw her weeping, they thought I had stolen her affection and that they were only second-best. I was both venerated and despised.

Little did anyone know about the welter of less-than-holy reasons in my subconscious mind pushing me to be a nun. My social, financial and emotional status in the world could hardly have been less promising. If I’d had any self-assurance at all, based on a sound knowledge of the world and a good self-image, I might have faced the future with confidence and excitement—but I felt bankrupt. By joining the nuns, I was doing what a politician does, who associates with famous and powerful people to further his or her career and reputation. To be a bride of Christ wasn’t such a bad connection. To be a bride of Christ in the FCJ camp was an even better prospect! But I was conscious only of sacrificing ordinary life to take up a life of obedience, and was admired and congratulated for this. I was like an innocent young soldier, ready to obey without question.

I make this comparison because years later, one evening in 1992, a TV documentary about a young soldier had me suddenly glued to the screen. It was about Franz Lang, a German officer who could not disobey an order from his superior. It told how Franz’s absolute allegiance to the Führer allowed him to coolly shoot his long-time friend Klaus, who had joined the Communist Party. Klaus was in a line with other captured Communists and recognised his erstwhile buddy, Franz. He thought he could safely make a dash from the group, since it was rearguarded by Franz. He died with Franz’s bullet in his head, disbelief etched on his
face. Franz had acted without question; he didn’t think he had a choice.

A few days after my initiation, I met a little girl who was distressed and lost on her first day at school. I knew the direction she had to go in. I knelt down beside her to tell her, when I remembered the rule of silence. I felt sad that I couldn’t help her but I didn’t speak. I just got up and went on my way, believing I had done the grander thing for having obeyed a rule. The urge to obey a command was stronger than kindness, and much stronger than common sense. It was not until 1967, well into the reforms instigated by Pope John XXIII, that the spell broke for me.

I had vowed obedience as a Faithful Companion of Jesus, after the style of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits, whose rules formed the basis of our own. Our superiors carried the air of infallibility, much like the Pope. I was unaware then of the strange and dark history of the Catholic church, often led by Popes of dubious character and downright worldly ambitions. Nor was I aware that the Jesuits had been born in answer to Luther, the arch-critic who had caused so much defection in the church because he had dared to publicly point out institutionalised corruption. Added to my ignorance was my emotional dependency and immaturity, which helped the situation along nicely. Dependency was everywhere encouraged. Young sisters were addressed as ‘child’, and we naturally addressed our superiors as ‘mother’.

I was now Sister Mary Carla, the name I had asked for. No male saint for
me
. So many of my sisters had buried their femininity even further by adopting a male saint’s name.

Life as a novice was a quantum leap in strictness. Our new life had begun in earnest. Letters to my parents, written in Dutch but always translated so they could be censored, were now allowed only once a month instead of once a
week. Breaches of the rules, from ignorance or carelessness, were dealt with more harshly. The reprimands were more humiliating and the punishments more severe. Humility was often taught by reducing novices to tears. Experienced nuns seemed to be experts at shredding our impressionable souls to pieces.

‘Get out of my sight!’ was a common way of telling us we had done something wrong. ‘Go and clean the kitchen and make sure you do something useful for a change.’ ‘What are we supposed to think of you? Are you too dull to understand that a rule is a rule, even when you don’t feel like following it?’

The more rules we learned, the greater the chance of failure now. We were made hypersensitive, reprimanded for looking around, for using two sentences when one would have done, for being a few moments late, for making a noise in chapel, for not doing chores perfectly, for having a stain or lint on our voluminous black clothes or unshined shoes, or for not addressing the superiors with enough decorum.

I was given a whip made of five stiffly knotted lashes, to scourge my legs and punish myself for certain breaches, such as for being late. Whippings made my legs wobble at first, but in the winter it warmed them up in a pleasant sort of way. I kept the same whip for the rest of my years in religious life, and used it as part of my normal list of punishments, especially to quieten sexual urges. The normal list also included kneeling with arms outstretched until they and my knees ached and ached.

PRAYING AT THE
fourteen Stations of the Cross was a daily obligation. There we worshipped the suffering, dying and dead Jesus. Every one of the billions of crosses made
around the world bearing the agonising body of Jesus, is testimony to this worship of suffering.

The weeks before Easter and Christmas were times for additional self-inflicted punishments. Penances were creatively dreamed up, shown to the superior for her blessing, then written up in a tiny pocket booklet called the Permission Book. We took to eating bread without butter, drinking tea without sugar or milk, adding salt instead, and doing without salt and pepper on food—as well as going without water.

Melbourne in the summer is notorious for an inverted air pattern that traps the heat so there is often no relief at night after an asphyxiatingly hot and humid day. My tight-fitting black woollen bonnet made me so hot I’d reel and almost faint. Perspiration stained the white starched linen around my face and continually prickled my scalp. Even just breathing was difficult under all those layers of black serge over a petticoat and lisle stockings. Imagine doing without water in such circumstances, by way of punishment. One predictable result was that my colon literally dried out (not that I knew then what or where my colon was). I did not connect the lack of water with the relentless constipation I suffered.

On one very hot day, we were given the relief of an extra shower. It was the summer of 1959, the hottest in fifty years, and we’d suffered 40°C and over for days on end. Normally we took only one bath or shower a week (dressed in a chemise so we wouldn’t see our own bodies); otherwise we washed ourselves in a basin of cold water in the morning and hot water in the evening, so this extra shower was an extraordinary concession. The only pity of it was that we had to step back into our perspiration-soaked underclothes and black serge. It was in the middle of that summer that our habits were at last changed to creamy white for the season.

Sleep in the summer often happened just out of sheer exhaustion. We wore a nightdress and nightcap to bed. A basinful of water for our morning ablutions was on the locker by the bed, and a glass of water for brushing our teeth. I hallucinated about that glass of water, and woke up several times to find my arm travelling in its direction. But I had an iron will, so I succeeded in this penance of water-deprivation, time and time again.

For ten years I didn’t have a normal bowel function because of dehydration, on top of nerves and anxiety. I hated
toilets, for starters. Back in Holland, I had often kept in what wanted to come out, rather than go through the excruciating ordeal of the thunderbox toilet. At Genazzano, toilets were desolate places for other reasons. They were built six in a row on plain cement floors and had clackety wooden doors that shut with a big iron latch. The doors were painted grass green, appropriately enough because they were outside. The area was open to bitter winds, and the Melbourne winter rains splashed around our feet on our way there and back. It was also a peculiarly forlorn experience using the ancient pullchains. I avoided them, and paid the price.

I had been on occasional laxatives before I went into the convent, and now it had become a daily need. Sometimes the laxatives didn’t work and then it was time for cascara, a herb that no bowel can withstand. It gave me tremendous stomach cramps, and then I had to run, while SisterVictoire, who had given me the potion, gently laughed at me.

Sister Victoire. In the face of all the medical crises that happened over the years, her smile and little chuckle often reassured me. It was worth getting sick just to get Sister Victoire’s attention. Now and again I would do just that, running a temperature and a sore throat for a few days so I could get a special bed in the infirmary, a high-ceilinged ex-parlour, also used as a music room at other times. It had beautiful tall windows on one side, and was much more private and cosy than the dormitory. Sister Victoire would make a concoction of honey and lemon, infused with her constantly humorous and loving nature. It was always a shame to get better and move back to normal life.

THE PERIOD OF
penance called Lent was coming to an end, the children had gone home for the Easter holidays and
we were all very busy making the place look festive and extra clean. Sister Victoire was in charge of the flowers for the chapel, and she taught me how to make hydrangeas and gladioli last by crushing the stems and plunging them in hot water. My father grew chapel flowers in a special patch beside the nursery. There was never a shortage. Beautiful arrangements were the order of the day, and on special feast days the altar was smothered with exquisitely arranged vases.

On Good Friday I was cleaning in the corridors, shining the brass knobs on every door along the way, having already polished the floors to a beautiful shine with the electric polisher, when an arresting sound came from around the corner near the Vicar’s office. I stopped in my tracks to listen and figure out what was happening.

Around the corner, supported by the big frame of the Reverend Mother, came the wizened old Vicar. She was perhaps eighty-five by then and very rickety on her feet. She was being very noisy, wailing aloud and lamenting the sorrow of the Virgin Mother at the foot of the cross, all the while fingering her rosary. As she shuffled closer, I could distinguish her words: ‘Holy Mother of God, how she must have suffered! To see her son Jesus so cruelly treated! Holy Mother of God!’ The old biddy had observed almost a lifetime’s rule of silence, and now she was making a vocal spectacle of herself. It did not go down with me as genuine spiritual empathy with the Mother of God; instead I thought her histrionics smacked of the worst kind of attention-seeking in a feeble old age that had never transcended childhood. I stood silently by, mop upright, as the pair passed by into the chapel, where the commotion stopped.

Was this supposed to be a demonstration of great piety? I wondered. As a dutiful novice I should have total respect
for my elders but I could not control my thoughts. The old bat was simply trying to impress us all with her so-called extraordinary sanctity. The display did not convince me. The Vicar was feeble, yes, but strong-minded enough to always interfere with any decision-making processes that she happened to overhear. Her position had become honorary when she was no longer able to act as regional superior; everyone sensed that she was likely to suffer a severe identity crisis if the role were fully taken from her.

Later that day, the Vicar insisted on kneeling on the refectory floor and eating her meal from the seat of her chair. Once more, she caused no end of commotion, with people struggling to find out what she needed. ‘Salt? No. Pepper? Water? Butter? Too many potatoes, are there? More peas instead? Oh, your fork dropped, please let me get it for you…’ My disdain for the old nun was complete. Even her old pal, the Reverend Mother, stopped responding after an initial concern for her old knees on the cold bare floor, and remained silent with eyes cast down as the circus went on. I wasn’t even ashamed of myself when I felt pleasure when she finally died and we were no longer treated to her endless platitudes.