excerpt
Whenever she wanted someone to erase the board, or recite a poem,
or empty the stupid wastepaper basket, or answer her latest booby trap
question, guess who got called? Not Zaccardi, the second smartest boy in
the class, not Cercchio or even Balestieri, but me, Amabile. (Anadora and
Astibianni were so dopey she gave up on them after the first few days).
So I began to have trouble with my eyes. I couldn’t read her tight
little chalk scrawl. The letters in the Italian reader made my eyes itch and
then go swimming off the page into the inkwell. Of course, I had looked up
this eye business in volume five of The Home Library of Health Knowledge,
and I practised a lot, squinting at myself in the mirror and stumbling
over the excerpts we had to read out loud to correct the vulgarities of the
Napolitano dialect in our pronunzia. Blackie caught my drift, but was not
impressed. When I asked to be moved to the middle of the room beside
Rita McCrae, her thick lips curled into a sneer. She informed me that my
debility was a spiritual asset. I must offer my discomfort up to be duly
noted in the heavenly account book beside my name, and be thankful that
I had been given this opportunity to experience the mortification of the
flesh. It would help, she assured me, to correct the sinful smirk I got on my
ratty little face whenever I asked her something she didn’t know. “Pride,”
she said, wagging her fat forefinger. “It’s one of the Seven Deadlies,
and don’t you forget it.” I nodded, trying to make the serious mouth I’d
seen that actor use on the late movie when he did that scene where the
President of the United States gets a phone call telling him about Pearl
Harbor. Blackie ignored it. And before I could beg and plead and reason
about the empty desk next to Rita McCrae, she went back to her boring
and very wordy attempt to explain page one of the Baltimore Catechism.
Even though I had not achieved my ultimate objective, I was not
discouraged. She was convinced, at least, that my eyes were bad. I had
made some headway and I had a well wrought plan, but I knew I had to
proceed with caution. Behind her puritan facade there lurked a spiteful
and unprincipled child. During the first week of December, Balestieri
had given her trouble, asking the smart ass questions he was famous for.
Blackie’s eyes narrowed and her mouth squirmed. She gave him one of her
lectures on pride and we thought that was the end of it, but during recess
one of the kids she’d kept in for detention saw her pour the filthy water
Manolis Aligizakis 