Free Good Prose by Tracy Kidder Page B

were true, with complicated structures leading invariably to a moral.
    A frequent lesson of the elders’ stories was the importance of discretion. Pacifique came from a culture that values silence, and so by training he was disinclined to tell his new schoolmates much about his past. Moreover, he worried that American students and teachers would be afraid of him if they knew about the violence in which he had grown up. They might think that it had left him violent too. But as he learned more English, he began to set down some of his experiences. When his teacher told him that some of what he had written was “damn near publishable,” Pacifique said he only wanted to improve his English. The very idea of making his stories public seemed to frighten him. He worried that his stories were unfit even for his teacher to read because they contained so much horror. His teacher tried to reassure him, telling him that art had the great power to transform the experience of suffering and injustice into something beautiful. This idea made a strong impression on Pacifique.
    In one of the stories he wrote—he called it “The Color of a Sound”—Pacifique begins with a glass breaking in the dining hall at Deerfield. The sound triggers a memory. His native village is being attacked—on “one of the days my mother apologizedto my brother and me for having given birth to us.” The family’s house is burned down. He and his mother and brother spend the night hiding in the forest. In the morning, standing near a clearing, Pacifique witnesses the killing of a young schoolmate named Patrick. The boy has been tricked into approaching a rebel soldier. The soldier is holding a glass. The soldier drops it on purpose, and the glass shatters. Pacifique explains a superstition in his country, that if you drop something you are eating or drinking, you may blame a person near you for wanting it. The soldier accuses Patrick of having wanted his drink, then orders him to pick up the shards of glass and put them in his mouth. The soldier forces Patrick to chew, then shoots him in the forehead. The story ends this way:
    Because I had seen so many killings and would see ones even more horrifying, I thought I would forget Patrick’s, but eleven years later, when I arrived at Deerfield Academy, Patrick returned. In the dining hall whenever I heard a glass shatter, I did not think of the superstition. I thought of Patrick’s mouth full of glass and would see him trying to bite. My mouth would be full of food and I could not take a bite. It was as if the food in my mouth had become the pieces of glass.
    When my fellow students heard a sound of a glass breaking, they knew someone dropped a glass and they would laugh at that person’s clumsiness. When I heard the sound of a glass breaking, I would not laugh. I would see a red color instead. The color of blood in Patrick’s mouth. A color no one else could see.
    During his first year in America, involuntary memories were an important problem for Pacifique—the dreadful things he could not banish from his mind, gusts of memory that could come at any time. Two years later, he felt that something important had changed. While writing, he said, he had discovered a partial defense against his memories: “That’s how it started. I wrote a story and I felt relieved. I could control it. In the head, I could not. It’s as if you had your hands on it and you could control it and make it beautiful. So instead of it having power on you, you had power on it. When it comes as a memory, it dictates to you, it controls you. After I wrote that story about the breaking glass, I would hear a glass breaking but it never came back that way. I mean, I would remember what happened, but it was never as before. I would think of making some modification in the story, to make the story better. Then if a memory woke me up, I could get back to sleep by writing it down, thinking I could turn it into something beautifully written. I