Life in these jungle villages had been the same for centuries, she said. These people had existed long before the French or Spanish ever set foot on the soil of South America. It was difficult to get them to trust the sisters and the doctors and the priests. She herself did not care whether or not they learnt their prayers. She cared about inoculations, and the proper cleaning of infected wounds. She cared about setting broken limbs so that these people would not be crippled forever.

Of course they wanted her to come back. They’d been very patient with her little leave of absence. They needed her. The work was waiting for her. She showed me the telegram, which I had already seen, tacked to the wall above the bathroom mirror.

“You miss it, obviously you do,” I said.

I was studying her, watching for signs of guilt over what we had done together. But I didn’t see this in her. She did not seem racked with guilt over the telegram either.

“I’m going back, of course,” she said simply. “This may sound absurd, but it was a difficult thing to leave in the first place. But this question of chastity; it had become a destructive obsession.”

Of course I understood. She looked at me with large quiet eyes.

“And now you know,” I said, “that it’s not really so very important at all whether or not you sleep with a man. Isn’t that what you found out?”

“Perhaps,” she said, with a faint simple smile. How strong she seemed, sitting there on the blanket, her legs demurely folded to one side, her hair loose still, and more like a nun’s veil here in this room than in any photograph of her.

“How did it begin for you?” I asked.

“Do you think that’s important?” she asked. “I don’t think you’ll approve of my story if I tell you.”

“I want to know,” I answered.

She’d grown up, the daughter of a Catholic schoolteacher and an accountant in the Bridgeport section of Chicago, and very early on exhibited a great talent for playing the piano. The whole family had sacrificed for her lessons with a famous teacher.

“Self-sacrifice, you see,” she said, smiling faintly again, “even from the beginning. Only it was music then, not medicine.”

But even then, she had been deeply religious, reading the lives of the saints, and dreaming of being a saint—of working in the foreign missions when she grew up. Saint Rose de Lima, the mystic, held a special fascination for her. And so did Saint Martin de Porres, who had worked more in the world. And Saint Rita. She had wanted to work with lepers someday, to find a life of all-consuming and heroic work. She’d built a little oratory behind her house when she was a girl, and there she would kneel for hours before the crucifix, hoping that the wounds of Christ would open in her hands and feet—the stigmata.

“I took these stories very seriously,” she said. “Saints are real to me. The possibility of heroism is real to me.”