Teacher Man. Frank McCourt

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СКАЧАТЬ I was six, the schoolmaster in Ireland told me I was a bad boy. You’re a very bad boy. He said all the boys in the class were very bad boys. He reminded us that he was using the word very, a word he would use only on special occasions like this. If we ever used that word answering a question or writing a composition he’d have our scalps. On this occasion, it was allowed. That’s how bad we were. He had never seen such a collection and wondered what was the use of teaching urchins and amadauns. Our heads were filled with American trash from the Lyric Cinema. We were to bow those heads, pound our chests and say, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I thought it meant, I am sorry, till he wrote on the board, “Mea culpa. I am guilty.” He said we were born in Original Sin, which was supposed to be washed away with the waters of baptism. He said it was clear that rivers of baptismal water had been wasted on the likes of us. One look at our darting little eyes was proof of our wickedness.

      He was there to prepare us for First Confession and First Communion, to save our worthless souls. He taught us Examination of Conscience. We were to look inward, to search the landscape of our souls. We were born with Original Sin, which was a nasty oozing thing marring the dazzling whiteness of our souls. Baptism restored their white perfection. But now we were older and there were the sins: sores, gashes, abscesses. We were to drag them wriggling, squirming, putrid, into God’s glorious light. Examination of Conscience, boys, followed by the mea culpa. Powerful laxative, boys. Cleans you out better than a dose of salts.

      Every day we practiced Examination of Conscience and confessed our sins to him and the class. The master said nothing, sat at his desk, nodded, fondled the slim stick he used to keep us in a state of grace. We confessed to all the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth. He would point the stick and say, Madigan, confess to us how you committed the Deadly Sin, Envy. Our favorite Deadly Sin for confessing was Gluttony, and when he pointed the stick at Paddy Clohessy and told him, Clohessy, the Gluttony, Paddy described a meal you could only dream about: pig’s head with potatoes and cabbage and mustard, no end of lemonade to wash it down, followed by ice cream and biscuits and tea with loads of milk and sugar and, if you liked, you could rest awhile and have more of the same, your mother not a bit put out by your appetite, because there was enough for everyone and more where that came from.

      The master said, Clohessy, you are a poet of the palate. No one knew what palate meant till three of us went around the corner to see if the Andrew Carnegie librarian might let us look at the big dictionary near her desk. She said, What do ye want to know palate for? and when we told her that’s what Paddy Clohessy was a poet of she looked up the word and said our teacher must be losing his wits. Paddy was stubborn. He asked her what palate was and when she said it was the center of taste sensation he looked delighted with himself and made clucking noises with his tongue. He even did it going through the streets till Billy Campbell asked him to stop as it was making him hungry.

      We confessed to breaking all the Ten Commandments. If you said you committed adultery or coveted your neighbor’s wife the master knew you didn’t know what you were talking about, Don’t get above yourself, boy, and moved on to the next penitent.

      After First Communion we continued Examination of Conscience for the next sacrament: Confirmation. The priest said Examination of Conscience and confession would save us from hell. His name was Father White and we were interested in him because one of the boys said he never wanted to be a priest at all. His mother forced him into the priesthood. We doubted that boy, but he said he knew one of the maids at the priests’ house and she said Father White got drunk at dinner and told the other priests his only dream was to grow up and drive the bus that went from Limerick to Galway and back but his mother wouldn’t let him. It was strange to be examined by someone who became a priest because his mother made him. I wondered if the dream of the bus was in his head while he stood at the altar saying Mass. It was strange, also, to think of a priest getting drunk, because everyone knows they’re not supposed to. I used to look at buses passing by and picture him up there, smiling away and no priestly collar choking the life out of him.

      When you get into the habit of examining your conscience it’s hard to stop, especially when you’re an Irish Catholic boy. If you do bad things you look into your soul, and there are the sins, festering. Everything is either a sin or not a sin and that’s an idea you might carry in your head the rest of your life. Then when you grow up and drift away from the church, Mea culpa is a faint whisper in your past. It’s still there, but now you’re older and not so easily frightened.

      When you’re in a state of grace the soul is a pure dazzling white surface, but your sins create abscesses that ooze and stink. You try to save yourself with Mea culpa, the only Latin words that mean anything to you or God.

      If I could travel to my twenty-seventh year, my first teaching year, I’d take me out for a steak, a baked potato, a pint of stout. I’d give myself a good talking to. For Christ’s sake, kid, straighten up. Throw back those miserable bony shoulders. Stop mumbling. Speak up. Stop putting yourself down. In that department the world will be happy to oblige. You’re starting your teaching career, and it isn’t an easy life. I know. I did it. You’d be better off as a cop. At least you’d have a gun or a stick to defend yourself. A teacher has nothing but his mouth. If you don’t learn to love it, you’ll wriggle in a corner of hell.

      Somebody should have told me, Hey, Mac, your life, Mac, thirty years of it, Mac, is gonna be school, school, school, kids, kids, kids, papers, papers, papers, read and correct, read and correct, mountains of papers piling up at school, at home, days, nights reading stories, poems, diaries, suicide notes, diatribes, excuses, plays, essays, even novels, the work of thousands—thousands—of New York teenagers over the years, a few hundred working men and women, and you get no time for reading Graham Greene or Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald or good old P. G. Wodehouse, or your main man, Mr. Jonathan Swift. You’ll go blind reading Joey and Sandra, Tony and Michelle, little agonies and passions and ecstasies. Mountains of kid stuff, Mac. If they opened your head they’d find a thousand teenagers clambering all over your brain. Every June they graduate, grow up, work and move on. They’ll have kids, Mac, who will come to you someday for English, and you’re left facing another term of Joeys and Sandras, Tonys and Michelles, and you’ll want to know: Is this what it’s all about? Is this to be your world for twenty/thirty years? Remember, if this is your world, you’re one of them, a teenager. You live in two worlds. You’re with them, day in, day out, and you’ll never know, Mac, what that does to your mind. Teenager forever. June will come and it’s bye-bye, teacher, nice knowin’ you, my sister’s gonna be in your class in September. But there’s something else, Mac. In any classroom, something is always happening. They keep you on your toes. They keep you fresh. You’ll never grow old, but the danger is you might have the mind of an adolescent forever. That’s a real problem, Mac. You get used to talking to those kids on their level. Then when you go to a bar for a beer you forget how to talk to your friends and they look at you. They look at you like you just arrived from another planet and they’re right. Day after day in the classroom means you’re in another world, Mac.

      So, teacher, how did you come to America and all that?

      I tell them about my arrival in America at nineteen years of age, that there was nothing about me, on me, in my head or suitcase, to suggest that in a few years I’d be facing five classes a day of New York teenagers.

      Teacher? I never dreamed I could rise so high in the world.

      Except for the book in the suitcase, everything I wore or carried off the ship was secondhand. Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland’s sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.

      The brown suit I wore came from Nosey Parker’s pawnshop, Parnell Street, Limerick. My mother bargained for it. The Nose said that suit would be four pounds, and she said, Is it coddin’ me you are, Mr. Parker?

      No, СКАЧАТЬ