The Opposite of Melancholia
“The nuns know they’re worthless,” said my taxi driver, “that’s what makes them better than all of us.”
This work originally appeared in Image. Partially reprinted here with permission. Read the entire piece here.
“The nuns know they’re worthless,” said my taxi driver, “that’s what makes them better than all of us.”
I was looking out the window at the sand-colored and clipped facades, eyes smitten and mind distracted by Rome, glorious even when dressed in piles of curb trash. My chauffeur was a middle-aged man who kept the radio up as he made voice messages on his phone. He was taking me from my tiny studio rental in Furio Camino to Roma Termini, where the train to Jesi would leave at 11:15 a.m. The plan was to work in a monastery in exchange for food and housing for one month.
I had meant to finish my oral exams before leaving. And I should have since there was only one left and I had been studying for weeks, but I read the time wrong and missed Women in French Medieval Literature by four and a half hours. The irony was that I had been locked in my room in quarantine, studying ceaselessly. I could picture the professor, somehow inside her laptop, waiting for me at 12:30 p.m., while I lay lazily in the old washroom-turned-rental on the trundle bed, which touched the desk, which touched the kitchenette, which touched the bathroom door, which almost touched the shower that was turned on by pressing a digital button on a plastic remote. If you went backwards, from the remote-controlled shower to the bathroom door, to the kitchenette, to the desk, there was my laptop, closed. And touching it, the trundle bed. And touching that, me. And during the twelfth hour, my professor was waiting for me, growing angry. While I was just one foot away, isn’t that funny, kicking my legs, stomach-down with the pigeonhole window open, rereading my highlights on an article about Marie de France, wishing the exam could be sooner so I could get it over with. When I logged on at 4:59 on the dot, I was confronted with my tardiness in front of other students. Maybe it was the fact that I had been living in isolation. Or that I had put off this exam for two years. Maybe I just felt bad for disappointing the professor because I had planned on asking her to be my advisor. Well, I started to cry. I cried on the video chat, and as I apologized, the faces of two students and one professor stared back at me from the screen.
“What? Am I crying in an American accent?” I asked, before shutting the laptop.
But now that was over, and I was in a taxi driving past ancient ruins, feeling fresh and full of life as I refocused on the world and moved away from myself. I rolled down the window a little more and thought about how to respond to the taxi driver who said that nuns think they’re worthless. What about the laypeople who also consider themselves worthless? I built the question in Italian.
“Well, they become taxi drivers,” he answered. “You know, I studied to become a dentist. I went to a trade school for dentistry.”
“What happened?”
“What happens only once to everyone in life, there was a chance—”
“—to get free?
“Yes. Exactly. I really didn’t like being in an office all day. So, here I am.”
I looked at the back of his head in real life and his eyes in the rearview mirror. At that moment, we passed an old palazzo divided into businesses. I imagined one as a dentist’s office. The dentist was operating on someone and, for a moment, would look out the window, tools in a patient’s mouth, to catch a sunny glimpse of a taxi driver, windows down, with a woman in the backseat, his hands on the wheel, living his little freedom.
Anna was an atheist until one month ago. Now she wants to become a nun. She is thirty years old and from a small town in Italy called Staffolo. She studied literature in college, and although she finished, her grades were bad. She hated studying. But she liked to read in the garden. She also liked to work in the garden, and she was good at it. The paths she pulled weeds from were immaculate, carved straight in perfection. Her dad was Dutch and her mom Italian. She lived with them during college. Her face was youthful, her limbs long, her shoulders square. She was a vegetarian. She lived with her parents after college too. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She liked reading and gardening. And singing. She sang in a choir, and she was trying to teach herself piano. Then, one day, something changed inside of her. She couldn’t explain it. She just saw, for the first time, all the gifts in the world. Like singing. And she realized there must be a giver—right? There must be a Giver.
She remembered that three years prior, her mother had found a convent where one could work in exchange for food and housing. You should go, her mother proposed to her father, but he declined. They’re divorced now. Anna remembered this place, and now she wanted to go. Her desire made her curious about herself. Maybe this was what she was supposed to do.
She found the phone number and called. As it rang, she nervously brushed crumbs off her desk.
“Hello?”
“Hello. Good morning. My name is Anna, and I’m calling because I’m wondering if you could just answer a quick question I have.”
“Yes, dear?”
“How long does it take to become a nun?”
“Seven years, dear.”
“Seven?”
“Yes. Of training and studying.”
“Longer than an American PhD?”
The nun paused before speaking again, “You can seek discernment, dear. Talk to a local priest and you can find out if the sisterhood is your calling.”
“Thank you.”
Anna hung up. She packed a suitcase and left.
In the early mornings at the monastery, she swept the courtyard, which she liked. In the late mornings, she pulled weeds from the garden, which she also liked. After lunch, she would wash her work clothes in the sink and hang them to dry, then read in the garden. She liked it there. No one cared that she was thirty and still didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. She could breathe easy in the silence, in the deep blue lack of other people’s thoughts.
Anna arrived at the monastery on a Sunday, and I arrived on a Tuesday.
You can read the rest of this essay in Image Journal.
[or copy and past this: https://imagejournal.org/article/the-opposite-of-melancholia/]
this is really good and i really enjoyed reading it