Prevod

Following the convent’s time-honored custom, the little nuns of the Most Holy Blood prepare and adorn the Nativity scene—the manger and grotto of Bethlehem—and set it on the high altar for the faithful to adore at Midnight Mass. There one may admire the figure of the Christ Child, the marvelous work of an unknown sculptor.

The nuns’ Child seems less a lifeless wooden image than a living creature. His charmingly naked torso has the soft, firm contours of flesh. Plump folds at neck, legs, and arms; rosy dimples in cheeks, elbows, and knees; angelic mischief in the expression of his eyes and his innocent laughter; an astonishing naturalness in his pose, as though he were reaching toward his mother’s breast... Such is the Child, and so, whenever the little nuns dress and swaddle him, whenever they lay him on the straw and fragrant hay of his humble cradle, they exclaim, tenderly entranced: “Oh, my divine Lord! Why, he’s a real little baby!”

The little nuns take strict turns in the duty and honor of attending little Jesus—and that year the lot fell to Sister María, a professed nun, the youngest and prettiest of them all. Sister María had left the world, not, as other nuns sometimes do, because of thwarted or unhappy love, suffering, disillusionment, or poverty, but in the full bloom of her twenty years, her spirit as virginal as her body, and her body as beautiful as the future that surely awaited her beside her loving, wealthy parents, in a world where everything flattered her and smiled upon her. Not a cloud had crossed her serene brow; no man’s breath had brushed her temple, and her heart had beaten for God alone. Her mystical vocation had been so steadfast that it withstood the determined, vigorous opposition of a family unwilling to see so much youth and beauty buried in the cloister. But Sister María showed such joy on taking the veil that even her parents came to envy her, believing she had reached a haven of peace.

Sister María felt an inexpressible joy at being entrusted with the pleasant task of dressing the Child before laying him in the manger. To play with that sacred doll had been the young nun’s dream throughout the five years since she had taken her vows. “When it’s my turn to have the Child, you’ll see how lovely I make him!” she would often say. The moment had come: the Child belonged to her for a few hours, and already her hands trembled with emotion at the thought of possessing the image of the heavenly babe.

How carefully Sister María ironed the swaddling clothes she herself had embroidered and adorned with openwork! How diligently she gathered late roses and fresh dark violets in the garden to scatter over the Child’s little bed of straw! With what respect she touched the sculpture; with what reverence she undressed it, how eagerly she gazed upon its innocent form, and with what sudden surge from deep within her she bent to kiss it, almost biting its cheeks, its shoulders, its round little belly!

Some of the nuns, among the more enlightened and kindly, agreed that little Jesus had never looked so sweet or been so prettily adorned; but the nasal-voiced old women, prim and enslaved to routine, grumbled that he lacked trinkets of beads and mica and colored ribbons. And when Sister María withdrew to her cell and knelt to pray before stretching out on the bare wooden bed where, without comfort and almost without covering, she slept the sleep of angels, she suddenly felt profoundly sad. It seemed to her that a deep black abyss was opening before her, and she was seized by a vehement longing to die. Do not think ill of Sister María, you skeptics. Do not imagine her a wanton nun!

It was not profane love and its delicious cup that the tempter held swirling before her eyes, brimming with fiery tears. Rest assured that Sister María’s purity went so far that she did not know whether, in renouncing love, she had sacrificed any happiness. In love she suspected only ugliness, disillusionment, humiliation, and vulgarities unworthy of a refined and chosen soul. What made the nun sob at that moment was the maternal instinct, awakened with irresistible force by the sight and touch of that adorable little Jesus...

And despite herself, bewildered by the insidious temptation—only the Accursed One could have put such belated and untimely thoughts into her head—Sister María was within a hair’s breadth of renouncing her vows, her veil, and the duties that bound her to the convent. Never would she clasp a tender, curly head to her barren breast; never would she kiss a pure and heavenly brow; never would soft little arms encircle her neck. The only creature she had been allowed to hold in her arms and lavish tenderness upon was a little wooden child, hard and cold, who neither answered her caresses nor stammered out the name of mother. And Sister María, sinking ever deeper into despair, remembered, in that fatal hour, the home she had abandoned, and thought how rapturously her father would love a little grandson. She wept still more bitterly, with tears of blood, as a virgin of Israel condemned to death might weep over the barrenness of her womb and the eternal loneliness of her heart, sentenced never to taste the deepest and fullest of a woman’s loves...

But behold: when Sister María was quite beside herself, on the verge of rebelling impiously against her fate and breaking her oath of fidelity to the Divine Bridegroom, the chronicles relate—I do not know whether those of you whose eyes are covered by the mole’s membrane of unbelief will protest—that the cell filled with a soft white light. Suddenly the Child from the Nativity scene, no longer stiff and motionless in his unchanging pose, but alive, made flesh, smiling, cooing, caressing, emerged from a light cloud and came hurrying into the nun’s arms.

“It is I, your little Jesus, who was born today at midnight,” the child seemed to babble, gently caressing Sister María. And as she repaid his caresses with kisses, the little boy began to cry softly, and the nun, forgetting her own tears and her recent anguish, began to dance to amuse him, to croon to him, sing to him, tell him stories. At last she tucked him into her bed, drawing him close to the warmth of her own body and laying him against her warm breast, which surged with currents of life and love. And there the poor little babe spent the night, until the white dawn, which scatters shadows and drives away temptations, cast its first light through the grating, and the bell summoned the nuns to the chapel. They were astonished by the ecstatic radiance shining in Sister María’s beautiful face...

Since then Sister María has performed prodigies of austerity, mortification, and penance. Her knees are bloodied, the hair shirt flays her sides, fasting pales her cheeks, and silence tightens her lips. But every year, after Midnight Mass and the Nativity scene, the Child’s visit to that melancholy, solitary cell is repeated, and for a few hours Sister María believes herself a mother.