The Carnivorous Lamb (Little Sister's Classics) by Agustin Gomez-Arcos

Author:Agustin Gomez-Arcos [Gomez-Arcos, Agustin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781551523019
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2007-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapters 12 & 13

At times, when I knew everyone in the house was busy and my absence wouldn’t be noticed, I started opening the little garden gate and slipping out into the mysteries of the town. I carefully avoided making any friends during those escapades; I didn’t want any eventual pals to come knocking on our door, asking if I wanted to go out with them. I was careful to keep the world of the town separate from that of the house, my family apart from everyone else.

As it was, my childhood had taught me not to mix things up, to keep all my experiences to myself—in short, to live a secret life. Just as I had special places in the house where I would go to hide from the others, or to think my own thoughts, I now preferred certain parts of the town that I knew Clara and Antonio didn’t go to—and they weren’t the kinds of places where the invisible coterie was likely to spot me, and say that my face looked familiar. (I was looking more like Mother every day.)

In that way, I got to know the town by myself, without a guide, and almost illicitly. Over time, that taste and hunger for everything illicit would become a symbol for me. In my own town, I could watch and observe without being recognized or called to; a kind of guaranteed impunity.

At the same time, my education, both religious and profane (to use don Gonzalo’s word) was proceeding apace, but required more hours of study and much more concentration. Don Pepe and don Gonzalo, knowing that together they were masters of practically all my time, vied with each other to see who could make me spend the most hours in the old dining room upstairs, which Mother had fixed up for my homework and my catechism sessions with don Gonzalo. Thanks to a conspiracy perfectly engineered by Mother, the priest never did cross paths in the house with “that disciple of the Devil, your teacher for other matters.” In that one sentence, don Gonzalo balanced scorn and hate so precariously, he could have been crowned the king of melodrama.

War was now being waged on three fronts. The first consisted of señor specialist and me, by now almost traditional enemies. Mother’s confessor and I formed the second, but since neither of us had learned the other’s fighting style yet, we wasted a lot of time in skirmishes. The third front, finally, the one that shaped the three of us into a perfectly defined social unit, consisted on the one hand of me, the taught, and on the other hand of the two of them, the teachers. Hating each other as they did, I never understood how they managed to be in such perfect accord on their work methods and how to apply them.

I had my way of getting revenge, though. When they got too nasty with me, I would always remark with a look of surprise:

“Yes, señor. That’s just what don Gonzalo” (or don Pepe) “says.

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