I realize now that my studies greatly influenced what I believed. As a child I was taught to pray before going to sleep. “Guardian Angel, sweet companion do not let me alone during the night or during the day. Amen.” Also, the nuns had mass every day before starting classes. We recited the beatitudes and the rosary so many times that I learned the Our Father and Hail Mary by heart.

Only the priest and perhaps the nuns seemed to have had access to the Bible. Instead we were taught “Sacred History”. I was surprised much later in life, when I finally started reading the Bible, to discover that most of this Sacred History was actually part of the Old Testament.

The most incredible part of my education during the time I attended the parrochial school were the confessions.

While going to school with the nuns, when we arrived in the morning, we were taken straight to mass. There we recited the beatitudes and prayed the rosary. Then we were taken to classes on Catechism where we learned to memorize questions and answers such as “Tell me, my sons, is there a God?” And we all, being girls, had to answer: Yes father, (priest) (even when the teacher was a nun) there is one. The lesson continued: How many gods are there? Answer: Only one God, no more. Where is God? Answer: In Heaven, in earth and everywhere. And so on…

Some days we were taken to the basement and we sat on long benches, with no backs, in front of a huge painting that showed brownish/red people in piles or terribly uncomfortable positions being pinched with huge forks or put into cauldrons by red beings with horns and long tails standing on black, reddish rocks. Grey and red clouds partially covered part of the gigantic painting. Obviously that was a representation of hell.

We were told that if we sinned and did not confess our sins before taking communion we would end up in hell.

Each time I went to confession the priest reminded me that if I didn’t confess my sins I would end up in hell. It seemed that every girl got the same reminder so when we were in line waiting for confession we interchanged or invented sins to confess so we would not go to hell. Most of the interchangeable sins were related to fighting with brothers or sisters. I did not have siblings so I had to use my imagination to invent my own sins like: stealing a knife from the kitchen to carve a piece of wood, or steal a piece of wire to make a hook to hang one of my dolls from a cord when playing circus in my room.

In fact, I only borrowed the silverware or the wire but “borrowing”, seems to me, not to be a sin. I also invented sins related to my cousins whenever my parents and I went to the port town where they lived.

Once I could not think of anything to confess as a sin, so I shared with the priest about the time of climbing an olive tree at my grandparents’ farmhouse. I was wearing regular cotton panties, with wool panties on top, which my mother had knitted to protect me from kidney problems, as advised by my father. I went too far and ended up hanging from a branch by my light blue wool panties, just above a barrel filled with olives in brine. I cannot recall if I screamed, but my mother eventually found me and punished me severely in the area where my panties were. She had a heavy hand. What I did not mention to the priest was that I was only 2 years old at the time.

Some were real sins, like tying one of my cousins to a tree with a rope and playing to burn her. She always wanted to be the Indian princess. I also confessed the time when I took the white juice of a papaya tree and painted our faces to play Indians and Cowboys, and then we could not wash the marks from our faces. The marks became grey and felt like chewing gum and really stuck to our foreheads and cheeks. Our mothers had to use Gomez stones to clean the marks and then we had red marks instead of white for several weeks. I had a hard time trying to explain that in school.

I could hear the priest laughing when I told him that sin, so I asked him if he would go to hell for making fun of me. He gave me many more Hail Marys and Our Fathers to recite than to anybody else in my class.