Free In a Glass House by Nino Ricci

name she had for me.
    “
Vic-tur!
”
    And her anger would seem to focus in on me like a light beam, as if she were inviting the other children to see how different they were from me.
    If I’d been more intelligent, more myself somehow, Sister Bertram might have been kinder; but everything about me proclaimed my ignorance, from my stained hands to my awkward clothes to my large hulking conspicuousness amidst the other children in the class. When I talked I couldn’t get my mouth around the simplest sounds, felt my tongue stumble against my palate as if swollen and numb; when we did assignments my exercise book was always filled with the same hopeless errors, though Sister Bertram had explained a dozen times, so that sometimes she’d take a ruler in hand and simply rip out whole pages from it with a single swift jerk. And I didn’t pay attention: even though I knew that Sister Bertram would catch me out, that I wouldn’t learn if I didn’t pay attention, still I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering, because the moment Sister Bertram began to talk I’d feel the classroom slipping away from me the way a dream did in the first moments of wakefulness, and I couldn’t force myself then to hold the world in focus, to try to get inside the meaning of Sister Bertram’s words. I’d stare out the window sometimes at the old folks’ home across the street, drawn there perhaps merely because it was different from the school, with its dying ivy and coloured leaves, its tall, spired turret like a tower in a fairy tale, the old people who came out stooped to the gazebo and benches; sometimes a face would be etched in a window against a whispery curtain and I’d imagine the lives inside, this other world going on beyond us, the old women and men stretched out on their beds with their tired faces and withered limbs.
    Then in the spring Sister Bertram fell ill and was replaced bysomeone new to the school, Sister Mary. Sister Mary was not much taller than the grade-eight boys, with a pale round face that seemed held in the circle of her wimple like a moon; yet she gave the impression of being larger somehow than Sister Bertram, transforming the room with the simple bright force of her energy. Her first day she taught us to sing “He’s Got the Whole World,” coming around to each of our desks and bending to hear if we’d got the words right. When she came to my own I thought she would simply shake her head at my garbled English and move on, as Sister Bertram had always done; but instead she paused and crouched down beside me, with a smile that seemed so friendly and well-intentioned, so misdirected, that I flushed in embarrassment.
    “
E di-fficile, no, parlare in-glese
,” she said.
    I thought she was trying to trick me in some way or that she didn’t know she shouldn’t speak Italian in the classroom because she was new; but the class had fallen silent.
    “
Sì
,” I said, still awaiting laughter that didn’t come; and in the reverent silence afterwards it seemed the first time in that classroom that the air itself hadn’t felt malevolent and strange, something set against me.
    I began to spend lunch hours with Sister Mary studying English. With her lessons and explanations English began to open before me like a new landscape, and as it took shape in me it seemed that I myself was slowly being called back into existence from some darkness I’d fallen into, that I’d been no one till I’d had the words to be understood. Later on, when I saw how I continued to make mistakes, how my tongue still refused to form around certain sounds and how my brain still fought to make sense of the things people said, it seemed that I hadn’t learned English at all, hadn’t got inside it, or that I could neversee any more than a part of it, would always feel lost in it the way I felt in the flat countryside that surrounded Mersea; but that initial surge of understanding was like a kind of arrival, the first sense I’d had of the