—for Jorge Luis Borges

For centuries, it is customary for well-to-do families to send their youngest children to convents as oblates, and one such child of low-status nobility offered in service to a ramshackle nunnery embraces her calling with such passion that on her seventeenth birthday she announces to the community of sisters that she will become an anchorite dedicated solely to prayer.

And so it is that her family attends her burial ceremony, in which she and the young girls chosen as her attendants are enclosed in a modest stone hut by the convent gardeners. "I renounce the world!" says the anchorite, "Goodbye!" Rocks and mortar fill in the door, leaving only a small, grated opening through which parcels can be passed hand to hand. Henceforth they subsist on scraps from the nuns, and on holy days they receive gifts from their families. Entombed, they are wholly dedicated to God.

Dead to the world, the anchorite surrenders herself to contemplation. The attendants beg the nuns for vellum and ink. "The anchorite is transcribing notes from God," they whisper through the grate, handing the nuns serialized treatises on natural history, alchemy, and philosophy that the nuns then deliver to their astonished Abbess. The anchorite writes polyphonic musical tracts, builds entire invented languages. She writes lectures on esoteric scriptures, though she knows she'll never recite them to an audience. Her pursuit is knowledge, the freedom to write ceaselessly: happiness.

When the Abbess dies, the nuns elect the anchorite as their new leader. She forbids anyone from opening her enclosure, but accepts the administrative role. She develops new accounting systems and governance policies. She adjudicates contentious land disputes with discrete mathematics, makes predictions for the harvests that consistently come true Ð all delivered on rolls of vellum through the grate of the hut's single opening.

As her influence grows, infants are passed through the grate and into the hut, fresh oblates offered to attend to the recluse Abbess. Within her lair, she writes as if in a trance: she is the navel of the universe from which the silken thread of existence is cast. The convent no longer has sufficient space for her written output. A new library is built using the allowances provided by the wealthy families of the oblates.

The Abbess is now very old, a reputable mystic and oracle. Kings and ministers write to her for counsel. These men wait years for her replies, debate them like riddles once they arrive:

"Yes."

"No."

"Ask again later."

The custom of giving one's youngest to God falls out of fashion; the final baby is passed through the grate. That baby grows old, caring for the Abbess. And one day, that baby, an old woman herself, does not come to the grate when called. Alarmed, the great-grandchildren of the convent gardeners break through the walled-up door and enter to find neat piles of bones, lovingly cleaned, skulls gleaming in the wash of daylight. The final oblate sits at her endmost resting place, the Abbess's writing desk, her sunken cheek cradled in the crook of her arm, pen between her ink-stained fingers, a silken thread suspended within a constellation of dust motes.




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