Father’s affairs, after a while, became so good that bit by bit, he started improving our lives. We got better foods, better clothes and furniture started to appear. We moved to the north wing of the castle. Father even started employing people, a young maid, Riel and a young man that followed father everywhere, Marcus.
One day, father had our plantation destroyed and had a magnificent garden took its place the following days. At that time, I knew nothing about what he was doing specifically, just that it demanded his attention very much, so he was home just when the sun would start to set.
Eventually, we started using the entirety of the castle, but not before an elderly woman father had engaged instructed me about a lady’s way to behave. The day before that woman appeared, father didn’t appreciate my way of talking and acting around the people he called his friends; he even argued with mother about it, asking her to care more about her child than daydream about other things.
Mother for her part started becoming sick, having stomach pain. When she wasn’t venting at the servants or snapping at me, she was, most of the time, recuperating in her bedroom.
Maybe because he was doing so well and wanted others to see and realized this -as though it was an affirmation of a point he needed to prove-, father inscribed the me, who had never so much as seen a book in her life, in school. I wasn’t really let the choice, but far from being sad about it, I was quite joyful. Alone in the castle with mother wasn’t pleasant, all the more that she was irritable these days and, Riel the maid, had said that school was supposed to be a place to make friends.
Well, I had been disillusioned of that notion soon enough.
I had been the older one in my class; the other children were all little and younger. I had been a little nervous, more than them anyway and instead of trying to talk to them, I had actually avoided them. The chairs and tables we sat on were so little that they were uncomfortable for me; so, special ones had been brought into the class, and since I was the ‘giant’ my place was at the end of the class. At first, the children were intimidated by me too, but very soon, since I was always the one who couldn’t understand, their reserves became mockeries. These prideful children of high nobility didn't hesitate to laugh directly at my face.
In the meantime father renovated the castle little by little, changing its color, adorning paintings, airing the tapestry. We started hiring more servants too. And because mother -who recovered from her sickness-, was always arguing with father to have some money, he ended up giving her some. It was by that time that mother started been more amiable or maybe just less snappy and annoyed at the world.
For the first time in her life, she wasn’t restrained, she could go and come as pleased so she did that, every day and my father didn’t really mind. I didn’t know where she was going either, just that she was always happy when coming back home. And father kept on not minding, The less he saw of us, the better he seemed to be.
I, on the other hand, was quite depressed. I was still not doing well at school. Scared in my own side, I talked to no one in particular, just bore father’s frown when he learned of my failures. My elderly teacher was quite frustrated with me, one minute he had been shouting at me for my idiocy then the next, he was clutching his shirt, staggered and fell on the ground. That’s how he died and that’s how rumors about Satan’s wife spread like fire and mockeries turned to bullying. I never complained about that to anyone, neither father nor mother. But looking back now, I wonder what they would have done.
The bullying did stop though with the arrival of a new teacher. She had been someone really likable and upon discovering the way my belongings were treated, she made sure it stopped. She was really patient with the slow understanding me, used to take her time to teach me correctly. Very quickly my results got better. She would say I was intelligent and always encouraged me.
Yet she didn’t last.
She got fired, I never knew why. Because she had been so good to me, I cried to have her come back. So unbearable was I that they brought me back home. That evening, father quite frostily told me to behave myself, that my previous teacher won’t be coming back.
So I held everything inside once again.
The next day, as though she had never resolved that problem, my table had once again been ransacked. Written in big letters to make sure I didn’t miss them were the words: Satan’s wife. I didn’t cry that day. The one who always consoled me wasn’t here anymore. So I just wiped the chalk from my place and sat down, waiting for the class to start.
Sometimes, the world of children was crueler than the world of adults.
No comments:
Post a Comment