The Awakening of Miss Prim

by Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera

intelligence, this wonderful gift, grows in silence, not in noise. It was here too that she learned that a human mind, a truly human mind, is nurtured over time, with hard work and discipline.”

“We know lots of parts of poems and stories by heart—it’s the first thing we do with all books,” said Teseris in her gentle voice. “He says it’s how you learn to love books; it’s got a lot to do with memory. He says that when men fall in love with women they learn their faces by heart so they can remember them later. They notice the color of their eyes, the color of their hair; whether they like music, prefer chocolate or biscuits, what their brothers and sisters are called, whether they write a diary, or have a cat . . . ”

Love this description of how a man begins to love a woman

The Redemption is nothing like a fairy tale, Miss Prim. Fairy tales and ancient legends arelike the Redemption. Haven’t you ever noticed? It’s like when you copy a tree from the garden on a piece of paper. The tree from the garden doesn’t look like the drawing, does it? It’s the drawing that’s a bit, just a little bit, like the real tree.”

The skill of remembering at all times who one was and where one came from rather than bothering, as modern people did, with trying to guess where one was headed.

You simply have well-meaning opinions. And people of an optimistic outlook, as you seem to be, not only don’t improve things but contribute to their decline. They convey the false impression that everything is going well when in fact—don’t deceive yourself—it is going hopelessly badly.

Young people today extend childhood well beyond the chronologically allotted time. They’re immature and irresponsible at an age when they should no longer be so. But at the same time they lose their simplicity, their innocence and freshness early. Strange as it sounds, they grow old early.”

“Skepticism has always been considered an affliction of maturity, Prudencia, but now that is no longer the case. Those children have grown up unfamiliar with the great ideals that have shaped people for generations and made them strong. They’ve been taught to view them with contempt and, in their place, to substitute something cloying and sentimental that even they quickly find unsatisfying and even repellent. They lose the most valuable thing—I’d say the only truly valuable thing—that youth possesses and maturity does not.

You can’t rely just on your own experience. The experience of a single human lifetime constitutes a narrow field of study,

“Because, fundamentally, nothing changes, you know. The huge old mistakes emerge time and again from the depths, like cunning monsters stalking prey. If you could sit at the window and watch

human history unfold, do you know what you’d see?” A little apprehensively, Miss Prim said she did not. “I’ll tell you. You’d see an immense chain of mistakes repeated over the centuries, that’s what. You’d watch them, arrayed in different garb, hidden behind various masks, concealed beneath a multitude of disguises, but they’d remain the same. No, it’s not easy to become aware of it, of course not. You have to stay alert and keep your eyes open to detect those evil old threats, recurring endlessly. Do you think I’m raving? No, my dear. You can’t see it—most people no longer can—but it’s growing dark, and I sense night falling. Those poor children, what do you think they get in schools?”

“The yearning you all display to prove your worth, to show that you know this and that, to ensure that you can have it all. The yearning to succeed and, even more, the yearning not to fail; the yearning not to be seen as inferior, but instead even as superior, simply for being exactly what you believe you are, or rather what you’ve been made to believe you are. The inexplicable yearning for the world to give you credit simply for being women.

She’d given up trying to achieve perfect virtue on her own. She’d realized how exhausting, how inhuman and wrong it was to live enslaved by this goal. Now that she was aware of her overwhelming imperfection, her fragility and contingency, she no longer bore the burden of the hammer and the chisel on her back. It wasn’t that she’d accepted imperfection, or grown accustomed to it, but she no longer carried the load alone, she no longer shouldered the yoke with only her own strength, she was no longer shocked when she struck a bad patch. She also knew that none of this would last, that after the joy there would be dips, caverns, tunnels, and ravines. But for

now, everything was a gift that she was learning to accept.