Black Bread by Emili Teixidor

Author:Emili Teixidor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2016-05-16T20:01:39+00:00

24

I began to suspect I’d never thought about my teachers the way I did then. Before, that is, before Cry-Baby’s revelation, I accepted the presence of teachers in the classroom as naturally and unthinkingly as I contemplated statues of saints in a church. A church was unthinkable without those images in altar niches, but saints never assumed dimensions that were more impressive than the church itself, except for miraculous or highly venerated images. We were called after saints and also had them on prints and illustrated pages in our only reference book, the Enciclopèdia Universal published by Casa Dalmau Carles Pla S.A. from Girona, and the images or saints were a humble, useful, commonplace presence, like that of teachers in schools.

What Cry-Baby had told me assigned Mr. Madern, the schoolmaster in the Novíssima, to the category of the miraculous or highly venerated because of a quality I couldn’t pin down. Strange new thoughts buzzed round my head. Thoughts that created feelings of repulsion and envy and in my delirium I even decided one of their professional tasks was perhaps to open our eyes to sexual matters, in the same way that teachers, in their pedagogic enthusiasm, often tackled subjects they apparently should never tackle, out of an excess of devotion to their pupils, like going to mass with us every Sunday, as they did now, or visiting the Eucharist chapel of an afternoon, or arranging excursions on the last Thursday before Lent or making us sing patriotic hymns and raising the flag every day and beginning class with the sign of the cross, the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary, all things that went beyond teaching us to read and write, the basics we needed to be accepted in the adult world, “the day after tomorrow,” as they all called it, or “useful knowledge to open up the path in life that awaited us,” as if our school years weren’t part of our lives and only represented an approximation to the real life we’d live later on, in years to come, when we’d know about living, when we’d discover what real life was about, which was something everybody kept saying, “What do you know about life?,” “You’ll know what life is soon enough,” “Life will teach you,” it was always life, another life, never this life, as if we were human larvae encased and entangled in the threads of a silken chrysalis drowsily waiting for life to burst out for real, the genuine, definitive article.

Don Eladio Madern, Senyor Madern, the teacher at the Novíssima, unlike the priest at the small town parish school, never hit anyone, didn’t even have a pointer—we called it a stick—like the priest had to rap you on the hands or the tips of your fingers as they tried to wriggle away. Mr. Madern was a nice man and that was obvious when he explained a subject close to his heart or did so out of duty, under compulsion. He gave us tasks, such as problem

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