by Nino Ricci
The black-haired boy took the lunchbox from me and held it before him as if to admire it. Then finally he opened it and unwrapped one of the sandwiches inside, split it open, brought it to his nose to sniff it. He screwed up his face.
“Mu-cho, mu-cho,” he said, thrusting the sandwich away to one of the other boys and pinching his nose.
The sandwich began to pass from hand to hand. The other boys sniffed it as well, clutching at their throats, pretending to swoon into the aisle. Finally one of them glanced quickly up to the front of the bus, then slipped the sandwich out through an open window. From where I sat I saw it flutter briefly through the air and then fly apart as it struck the road.
They began to pass the second sandwich around. I tried to leap up to pull it away, but the black-haired boy’s arm shot out suddenly in front of me and pinned me to the seat, and then his fist caught the side of my head hard three times in quick succession, my head pounding against the glass of the window beside me.
“No, no, paesano.”
I avoided the older boys after that, but I carried my humiliation with me like an open sore, always aware of it; and that awareness, more than the humiliation itself, seemed to be what gave the persecutions by the boys on the bus their meaning, what marked me. I thought there could be a way in which what they did to me, then and after, could stay outside me, have nothing to do with the kind of person I was, that I had only to find the right way to act. But each time it was the same, I’d fill with the same anger and hate, and my humiliation seemed then no longer simply a thing they did to me but something I always carried inside. The boys who picked on me had found the right way to act – they were perfectly detached, indifferent, didn’t pick on me because they hated me or were angry but only because they could see the humiliation already inside me, as if I were made of glass, and if I’d been different they’d have left me alone or been friendly.
After school the boys would stake out seats for themselves and choose who they’d let sit beside them, and often then I’d have to sit with one of the girls or with George. George lived out near Goldsmith, in a rambling, broken-down farmhouse where in the fall and spring chickens and sometimes even pigs could be seen scavenging on the front lawn and in the laneway, roaming without restraint, as if they’d taken over the farm; and he had the unkempt, wild-eyed look of an idiot, his teeth gapped and protruding and his hair always awkwardly crew-cut, some patches longer than the others, some shaved too close to the skin. From up close I could see he was strangely large and robust, his hands almost the size of a man’s and the muscles of his arms bulging against his sleeves; but the way he hunched himself made him seem shrivelled and deformed. When he boarded the bus in the morning he’d lurch up the aisle and fling himself into one of the centre seats with a kind of satisfied violence, then huddle up tight against the window and stare out it the whole trip like someone seeing a landscape for the first time, his head turtled down into the collar of his coat.
“Hey Georgie,” the older boys would say, “tell us about the time your face caught on fire and your father beat it out with a crowbar.”
Sometimes then he’d glance furtively toward the back of the bus. But his face would be screwed up in what seemed like a grin, as if he were shyly pleased that the boys were paying attention to him, or as if he hadn’t understood them at all, had only turned at the sound of his name. The girls and the younger boys made fun of him as well, crossing their fingers and drawing away from the aisle when he got on the bus and passing on Georgie-germs if he should brush against them. Usually George seemed not to notice them; but once when a girl drew away as he was coming up the aisle he lunged toward her suddenly and made a face, and afterwards he seemed strangely pleased at what he’d done, settling into his seat with an air of impish self-satisfaction.
My own feeling about George was simply that I didn’t want to be like him, didn’t want other people to think I was like him; but whenever I was forced to sit beside him I’d feel a kind of rage build in me at his stupidity and strangeness. When other kids had to sit with him they’d call attention to themselves by making fun of him or by touching other people in the seats around them to pass on his germs. But I couldn’t do these things, didn’t have the right feeling inside to do them, and I knew my failure made me seem more like George to the others, even made me, in a way, more despicable than he was, because George was protected at least by the severity of his strangeness, had no one beneath him whom the others expected him to make fun of. I’d cross my legs under the seat sometimes the way the others crossed their fingers, furtively though, so that not even George would know I’d done it. But this useless concession made me feel worse than if I’d done nothing at all, made me think that it was only fear that kept me from making fun of George, fear that George too was stronger than I was, because of the way he flung himself into his seat each morning with a force that wasn’t angry or bitter but almost carefree and gay, or the way he hummed quietly to himself sometimes as he stared out the window as if even he guarded some secret place inside him, a place that was his alone and could not be touched.
At school we went from the bus to the church, a sudden shift from the bus’s strange containment into the wider containment of St. Michael’s, the little world it formed with its huddled white buildings, its chain-link fence, its special logic and rules. Sister Jackson, the vice-principal, presided over our arrival from the bottom of the church steps; two other sisters stood at the fonts at the foot of the aisle. The girls sat in the left-hand pews, the boys in the right, in order of class, our heads rising in a gradual slope toward the back of the church. During the service the sisters on duty hovered in the side aisles like sentries; some of them, the older ones, carried long wooden pointers, and reached out quick and silent to rap you on the back of the neck if you whispered to your neighbour or fell asleep.
The church rose up to a high, arched roof that gave it the sense of an emptiness that couldn’t be filled, that hung over us during the service as if we’d made no impression in it. In the church in Valle del Sole the pews had stood so close to the altar you could see the beads of sweat on Father Nicola’s upper lip as he preached; but here the chancel was raised up four steps from the nave, separated from it by the low marble rail where people knelt for communion and by the wide expanse of the transept. The altar, of green and brown marble, was flanked by two ceiling-high mosaics of sworded angels, one clad in purple and the other in blue, staring out at us each morning like stony sentinels; for a long time I thought that the purple one, his feet wrapped in the coils of a serpent, was not Michael but Lucifer, so stern did he seem, so defiant, that he was challenging Michael across from him as in the primal battle of the angels in heaven.
The services alternated between Father Mackinnon, the school principal, brisk and nimble and efficient, and Monsignor Phelan. With the monsignor the service seemed to go on forever, because he was old and spoke in a slow monotone, and because there were long pauses between each portion of the service while his finger scanned the lines of his great red missal. At the end, when he etched a sign of the cross in the air with a trembling hand, the church seemed almost to hum with suppressed energy. But I didn’t mind those morning services, the crackly thin drone of the monsignor’s voice over the loudspeakers, the high, arched hollowness of the church, because the church seemed the one place where my language wasn’t held against me, and I could relax into the familiar sounds of the Latin responses like a fist slowly opening. Sometimes when we sang or recited together I’d feel that I’d crawled up out of myself and into the sound of our voices, that I was floating inside them above the pews as pure and unburdened as air; and then in the hush afterwards a pleasant aloneness would settle around me, make me feel for an instant as if everything inside the church existed only for me, the tall stained-glass windows that the sun lit up like candy and that dappled the pews with coloured light, the stations of the cross that hung like tiny sculpted worlds along the walls of the nave, the candle-glasses for the dead that
flickered red and blue on their tiered metal stands in the transepts. There were always some candles burning there when we came in for morning service – perhaps the sisters lit them, though it was odd to think that the sisters, too, might have their own dead to remember.
Afterwards we walked single file to our classrooms, past the glass showcase in the main hall housing ribbons and silver trophies, past the portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Pope John that hung near the principal’s office like a benevolent mother and father, past the big bulletin board that the sisters and the older classes did up every month with pictures and art, on religious themes or on topics like Switzerland or Christopher Columbus. It always made me feel strangely warmed to see these things, as if they could protect me somehow, and to see how the sun glinted brightly off the floor and varnished desktops of our classroom, how the blackboards had been scrubbed clean and fresh pieces of white and coloured chalk had been lined up in the ledges. There seemed a mystery in things then, a sleepy morningtime promise, beautiful and frail as the stillness that settled over the school after a bell had rung; but it teased me like a remembered smell and then passed, seeming to hold itself from the day.
I’d been put back two years, to the first grade. Every morning our teacher, Sister Bertram, stood before us as we sang “God Save the Queen” as tall and straight-backed as the angels on the chancel wall of the church, then clapped her hands twice when we’d finished to make us sit and stretched her thin lips into a smile that held no warmth in it. For the first week or so that I was in her class I spent the first lesson of the day in the corner for failing her morning inspection of ears and hands, my own hands still cracked and discoloured from working in the fields; and after that I seemed to become that first person she’d seen me as, perpetually delinquent, always the example of error. I’d track dirt into the classroom, let my attention wander, went so far once as to fall asleep at my desk; and then suddenly Sister Bertram’s voice would ring out with the strange name she had for me.
“Vic-tur!”
And her anger would seem to focus in on me like a light beam, as if she were inviting the other children to see how different they were from me.
If I’d been more intelligent, more myself somehow, Sister Bertram might have been kinder; but everything about me proclaimed my ignorance, from my stained hands to my awkward clothes to my large hulking conspicuousness amidst the other children in the class. When I talked I couldn’t get my mouth around the simplest sounds, felt my tongue stumble against my palate as if swollen and numb; when we did assignments my exercise book was always filled with the same hopeless errors, though Sister Bertram had explained a dozen times, so that sometimes she’d take a ruler in hand and simply rip out whole pages from it with a single swift jerk. And I didn’t pay attention: even though I knew that Sister Bertram would catch me out, that I wouldn’t learn if I didn’t pay attention, still I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering, because the moment Sister Bertram began to talk I’d feel the classroom slipping away from me the way a dream did in the first moments of wakefulness, and I couldn’t force myself then to hold the world in focus, to try to get inside the meaning of Sister Bertram’s words. I’d stare out the window sometimes at the old folks’ home across the street, drawn there perhaps merely because it was different from the school, with its dying ivy and coloured leaves, its tall, spired turret like a tower in a fairy tale, the old people who came out stooped to the gazebo and benches; sometimes a face would be etched in a window against a whispery curtain and I’d imagine the lives inside, this other world going on beyond us, the old women and men stretched out on their beds with their tired faces and withered limbs.
Then in the spring Sister Bertram fell ill and was replaced by someone new to the school, Sister Mary. Sister Mary was not much taller than the grade-eight boys, with a pale round face that seemed held in the circle of her wimple like a moon; yet she gave the impression of being larger somehow than Sister Bertram, transforming the room with the simple bright force of her energy. Her first day she taught us to sing “He’s Got the Whole World,” coming around to each of our desks and bending to hear if we’d got the words right. When she came to my own I thought she would simply shake her head at my garbled English and move on, as Sister Bertram had always done; but instead she paused and crouched down beside me, with a smile that seemed so friendly and well-intentioned, so misdirected, that I flushed in embarrassment.
“E di-fficile, no, parlare in-glese,” she said.
I thought she was trying to trick me in some way or that she didn’t know she shouldn’t speak Italian in the classroom because she was new; but the class had fallen silent.
“Sì,” I said, still awaiting laughter that didn’t come; and in the reverent silence afterwards it seemed the first time in that classroom that the air itself hadn’t felt malevolent and strange, something set against me.
I began to spend lunch hours with Sister Mary studying English. With her lessons and explanations English began to open before me like a new landscape, and as it took shape in me it seemed that I myself was slowly being called back into existence from some darkness I’d fallen into, that I’d been no one till I’d had the words to be understood. Later on, when I saw how I continued to make mistakes, how my tongue still refused to form around certain sounds and how my brain still fought to make sense of the things people said, it seemed that I hadn’t learned English at all, hadn’t got inside it, or that I could never see any more than a part of it, would always feel lost in it the way I felt in the flat countryside that surrounded Mersea; but that initial surge of understanding was like a kind of arrival, the first sense I’d had of the possibility of me beyond the narrow world of our farm.
For reading practice Sister Mary gave me a book called The Guiding Light that told the story of the bible in pictures and captions. At home I’d sit with it at the kitchen table and slowly sound out the captions, its English easier for me now than the long-worded Italian of the Lives of the Saints I’d brought from Italy, and its stories seeming more important because they came from the bible and were in English. Scattered throughout it were colour pictures by famous painters, gloomy and strangely rendered and harsh, the beheading of John the Baptist, the blinding of Samson, the judgement of the woman who’d sinned. But I couldn’t pierce their mysteries, preferred the more rustic pictures that went with the stories, the sense they gave of a world that was magical and benign. I read the stories through and then I went back to some of them, the story of creation, with its double-paged picture of Eden, the story of Jonah, of the young Christ in the temple; and I took a special furtive pleasure at making these stories my own, at entering into them as into some secret private world.
That pleasure seemed to draw something at first from the lunch hours I spent with Sister Mary, from the quiet closeness the empty classroom took on then, the warmth that lingered in my shoulder after she’d placed a hand there, the way her clothes rustled intimately when she leaned in beside me as if she were about to whisper to me some secret about herself. But after a few weeks students from other grades began to join us in these lunch-hour sessions – a yellow-haired Belgian girl kids teased because she never talked, a boy who’d failed grade three and been expelled once for smoking, a boy from grade eight, Tony Lemieux, who was taller than Sister Mary and who’d been to reform school – till finally there were more than a dozen of us, even George from my bus route, Sister Mary moving among us all with a democratic efficiency, assigning us each our separate tasks; and I began to nurse a small resentment toward Sister Mary then, angry that I’d been grouped with people like George and the Belgian girl, that Sister Mary didn’t see how we all hated each other, hated having our strangeness multiplied and reflected back at us. Even Tony Lemieux, who was tall and broad-shouldered and whose nose was set back in his face so that his nostrils stared out like second eyes, appeared awkward and small among us, coming into class every day with the same defeated lope, as if being put in with us had stripped his infamy of its distincti
on; and I didn’t understand why the other teachers thought he was bad or why he’d been to reform school when he didn’t seem strong enough inside to be mean like some of the boys on the bus were, seemed merely crippled and out of place like the rest of us. Because he was too big for the grade-one desks Sister Mary had him sit up at hers while he worked; and occasionally she’d have him help her put things up on the bulletin board, standing beside him then and handing him things one by one with an odd intimacy and trust. But whenever Sister Mary was near him Tony would twist his shoulders awkwardly like an animal trying to shake off a yoke, and it seemed that Sister Mary didn’t understand how things were with him, how her attention humiliated him. She’d make me think then of my Aunt Teresa, whose energy appeared to wrap her so safely in its tight space sometimes that it held other people out like a wall, and of Father Mackinnon the school principal. Father Mackinnon came to the grade-one class about once a week to talk to us and ask us questions, smiling even when we got the answers wrong, his trim greying hair and blue eyes giving him a look of infinite compassion and wisdom. But in the schoolyard I saw how he’d laugh and joke with the same boys who picked on me on the bus, because they played on the school teams he coached, and his kindness then seemed merely a sort of stupidity, something that kept him from seeing the things that were most important about people.
Or perhaps I was the one who missed what was important, the simple goodness of Father Mackinnon, of Sister Mary, a way things were that my own contamination kept me from understanding. There seemed a realm of things other people took for granted that I couldn’t enter somehow, that appeared to reside in the school’s ordinariness, the mystery of it, the bulletin boards, the varnished desks, the games children played at recess, some normal life unfolding there untroubled and pure that remained as foreign and unknown to me, as inaccessible, as the first dull sounds of Sister Bertram’s English; and it was my own failure to enter it that accounted somehow for the casual insults in the schoolyard, the sudden quick elbows in my ribs on the bus, the fear I carried always now that behind every simple gesture was the threat of some new humiliation. But still sometimes the same small bright hope would surge in me that everything could magically change, be different, that all these things that held me out could finally offer up their essences, reveal some secret about themselves that would take away my humiliation and hate, that would bring me up into the warm, sure sphere of their goodness the way Jesus cured the lepers in The Guiding Light, and brought Lazarus back from the dead.
