(excerpt from "Legally Blind: The autobiography of Duncan Stroud")
I left my small studio apartment in the nefarious Buenos Aires barrio known as Constitucion when the rent was drastically raised, and moved into a large, old apartment building across the street from Club Independencia, a well-known tango bar in the old section of Buenos Aries called San Telmo.
As most older buildings in Buenos Aires were built with solid stone, they tended to last a very long time, certainly far longer than the internal plumbing, given how often it needed fixing. Since the walls of this apartment were also stone, brick, or cement, the electrical systems dating back to the late nineteenth century, judging by their appearance, were often not-well-thought-out appendages of now decayed and exposed wires. There was no accommodation for heating except for the unventilated carbon-monoxide-spewing gas burner in the center of the apartment. Still, the style and elegance of these timeworn buildings obscured such trivial details.
My new apartment opened into a foyer from which a short hall led to the bedroom. I was living there about a week when one afternoon I lay down on my bed and quickly found myself out-of-my-body. It was common for me to have Out Of Body Experiences (OOBE) as I had been having them since IO was six years old and grew up with the idea that they were quite normal. It was not until my teen years that I began to learn they were not as common as I though. This OOBE was a pleasant surprise, as my OOBEs had dwindled down to only a few per year.
As I began to move outside my room in this OOB state, I could not help but notice something in the reflection of the full-length mirror on the hall wall. The mirror reflected a view into the foyer, so I moved my astral body to the foyer to see what was there, but I saw nothing. When I returned to the mirror, I saw in its reflection of the foyer two rather large but short nuns dressed in white gowns and habits, escorting a much larger, dark shadow of a man. I looked again into the foyer, and again saw nothing. Looking at the reflection of this foyer through the mirror in an OOBE state showed me another reality.
I got the very clear sense that the large shadow was a dying man and the nuns were caring for him in his last moments. I was so surprised at what I was seeing I didn’t even bother to explore the rest of the apartment, building, or street while OOB. I popped back into myself and immediately went downstairs to ask the doorman about the building’s history. This is what he told me (with my added historical notes for context).
The barrio of San Telmo dated back to the 1600s and, although always more of an industrial, working class barrio, began to accrue some wealth as it became the chief source of income for eastern Argentina up until the 1870s.
When yellow fever first appeared in the barrio in the 1870s, the government decided to keep this information secret as it didn’t want the many workers, mostly black at the time, to flee the area, leaving the businesses without laborers. As a result, yellow fever spread through San Telmo killing over 10,000 residents. The British, Galician, Italian, and Russian immigrants filled the rapidly emptying housing that the disease was providing. The Catholic Church took over one of the larger buildings, the building I now lived in, and converted it into a hospice. There, nuns would care for the dying by the hundreds.
The entire building was probably packed with the spirits of merciful nuns and dying patients. Having lived with spirits of the dead before, I thought it best to start our relationship off on a good foot. I removed all electrical and technological devices from the foyer, placed salt in strategic points, more to protect their space than mine, and went into a meditative state to say, “Hello, I’m Duncan. We live together now. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” I was just being a good roommate.
With that done, I forgot about it. A few days later, I got a call from Maria, my daughter. She was upset because she had her big freshman year-end test coming up and she was sure she would fail, which would require her to spend the summer in school.
I consoled her the best I could and agreed. Summer wasn’t a time for school. It was a time to be outside, in nature, among friends. Learning algebra shouldn’t take precedence over enjoying life.
Then it dawned on me that I might have access to a couple of merciful nuns who would certainly appreciate the value of joy over that of algebra. I told my daughter the story of the ghost nuns in my apartment. She was surprised when I said I would ask the nuns to come to her aid, but was totally up for it. Given that daddy had built a pyramid in the backyard, grew shrooms in the basement, would sometimes get naked and cover himself in mud, and occasionally took spontaneous naps on the kitchen floor, my idea did not sound completely loony to her.
That night I went into the foyer, entered my meditative state, and asked the nuns to please show mercy on my daughter so that she could spend the summer enjoying herself instead of learning math, which would go much further in helping her heart grow.
Three days later Maria called me to tell me she’d taken the test and failed. Her summer was doomed. As she was walking home from school down a rural town road, angry and depressed, she went into the café where kids would often go after school. She sat at the empty counter opposite a large window that faced a small road. Her bad mood was replaced with uneasy nervousness when she saw two nuns walking toward the café. When they entered and sat down next to her, she was genuinely frightened.
I was as excited to hear this as she was shocked to tell me. I asked her if she’d spoken to them, but she confessed she’d been too freaked to even move, let alone talk to them. She’d sat there frozen until they’d left.
However, this seemed odd and confusing to me. She failed the test yet the nuns appeared? Maybe it was all just a meaningless coincidence, as hard as such a concept is for me to accept, and I was, as usual, reading far too much into this.
Three days later, I got another call from Maria. Her teacher had asked to speak to her privately. Maria was expecting a lecture on her poor academic performance or her marching orders for the summer. Instead, the teacher told her that although she had failed the test, she would be getting a passing grade. The teacher, in an unprecedented act of mercy, confessed to Maria that she too believed children should be outside in the summer, and she made Maria promise to try to bone up on her own over the summer.
At this point, as far as I was concerned, it was the nuns who waited to see if they were needed before they came to Maria’s aid: they appeared to Maria only after she’d failed the test!
Diehard materialists will snicker at the absurd and irrational belief that I even had ghost nuns in my foyer, let alone that they were dispatched to come to the aid of my daughter half a planet away to save her summer vacation, but life is often absurd and irrational. That night I went into the foyer and thanked them. I even did something that I’d never imagined I’d do in this lifetime: I bought an antique picture of the Virgin Mary and hung it in the room for them.
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Duncan Stroud is a writer who can currently be found dancing tango in Argentina. His book, "Legally Blind", is available in eBook and hardcopy