My twelfth winter, mother died. I had just returned from class and the moment the gates opened, I hear the maid’s shouts. She died alone with a painful expression carved on her face. By that time, all the hair on her head was gone, her lips had been almost blue and her pale skin was almost as white as a paper, so, that she died with her eyes wide open staring at the entry door was actually quite a scary sight. So scary had that been, that, that particular maid, who saw her aggrieved face resigned at once.
Her funeral, the very next week hadn’t been grand. It had been quite simple actually. Father was there and some other people I didn’t know came too. At first, I thought that it was her family or their representants, even though they didn’t come to greet me. Years later though, I learned it was actually some of my father’s colleagues and that mother’s family never came to her burial. In the end, it seemed, that hatred and contempt she held for them, the curses and blackened pages of dirty words she used to describe them, had some causes to exist. That family only sent a card to father and none of them ever came to her tombstone.
At school, that event made me stood out even more. I was made to stand in front while everyone in the class expressed his deepest condolences, even the teachers. The bullying had stopped with the passing of the years and I myself was doing my best to not talk to anyone but this actually made people went out of their ways to talk to me. Not sure if it was out of pity or not.
The manor, contrary to the busy school was calm. Without mother’s drunken antics, her shouting at the servants the house turned really, really calm and strangely noiseless. Maybe because there wasn’t anyone to criticize them, the servants grew to relax to the point where Riel dared bringing a child in the residence. For who knew what reason father came back early that day and unfortunately for the maid he saw the infant.
Riel pleaded with father, saying that she wouldn’t repeat her mistake, but she just couldn’t let her child in a room without anyone -for her aunt couldn’t help her with the child today. I thought why couldn’t she? I had been left alone in a room so many times that I couldn’t count so far.
She looked at me with pleading eyes, and what the teacher once said in class came back to my memories. ‘Helping a friend in need is the real proof of friendship’ and Riel had been my first friend, beside the other servants, so I pleaded with her. Maybe because he was annoyed with my pleading father really did forgive but went as far as to say it wasn’t good for me to mingle with the servants and from now on ordered me to talk a minimum with them.
No, that wasn’t quite right, I was ordered to stop talking to the servants, stopped befriending them. The servants, glared at by father when he caught us the next days, grew scared and avoided me like they usually did father, holding with me the barest form of conversation. They used to say to me that I was cute after helping me change in my regular attired, even that they stopped doing.
I couldn’t even talk to father; upon coming home he would always shut himself in his study coming out just for dinner.
So I entertained myself in other ways. Since I could now explore the house as pleased, I did that, playing all by myself. The manor was huge and I would usually aim for the farthest place from my father’s study so that he wouldn’t see me playing with the servants. But threatened with their posts, everywhere I went; the servants would just bow their heads and left me the road. My only company was actually the sound of my shoes on the carpeted floor, almost nonexistent since father had chosen a thick carpet.
The longest days were actually those when I wouldn’t have class then I would have to stay in a noiseless home. At that time I really thought that silence was so deafening.
The bullying had long stopped but quite stubbornly, I refused to make friends for having already grown accustomed to my own company in that place. That was a fact at school but at home, I really liked talking and playing with the servants. Now when they talked it was to greet me or to beg me to not make things difficult for them.
Seeing my father’s back as he was going out one morning, I remembered I thought at that moment “Everything was okay, just that I was tired of talking to myself”.
No comments:
Post a Comment