"Sister Aparicion."

Emilia Pardo Basán.

Summary: Sister Aparicion is a nun in a convent. She is eighty or ninety years old, now. When she was young, called Irene, she was beautiful. Besieged by a young lover, a poet, she resisted him. But he set his goal to make love to her. He made a bet that he could.

When she finally succumbed, he raised a banner behind the bed where a group of young men assailed her with laughter. Naked, she ran through the streets to her home and then entered a convent where she did brutal penance, year after year. Even in old age, because she was doing penance for two, including herself and her young lover whom she had never seen again.

Comment: I went to a school in a Catholic elementary school taught by nuns. I never thought much about them as individuals with a past, but this story makes me wonder about their pasts. RayS.

Spanish Stories and Tales. Ed. By Harriet de Onís. The Pocket Library, 1956. Pp. 94-99.