Isabel Allende - Island Beneath the Sea

Maurice detested the school from the moment he crossed the threshold and the heavy wooden double door closed behind his back. His displeasure lasted unrelieved to the third year, when he had an exceptional teacher. He arrived in Boston in winter beneath an icy mist and found an entirely gray world: overcast sky, squares covered with frost, and skeletal trees with ugly, numbed birds on the naked branches. He had never known true cold. The winter went on forever; he went around with pains in his bones, ears blue with cold, and hands red with chilblains; he did not take off his overcoat even to sleep and lived with one eye on the sky, hoping to see a miserable ray of sun. The dormitory had a coal stove at one end that was lighted only two hours in the evening, so the boys could dry their socks. The sheets were always icy, the walls stained with greenish mold, and to wash in the mornings he had to break a skim of ice on the basins.

The boys, noisy and quarrelsome, in uniforms as gray as the landscape, talked a language Maurice could barely decipher-his tutor Gaspard Severin had had only a smattering of English-and he had to improvise the rest in his classes with the help of a dictionary. Months went by before he could answer his teachers' questions, and a year before he shared in the jokes of his American companions, who called him "the Frenchy" and bedeviled him with ingenious torments. His uncle Sancho's peculiar notions of boxing were useful because they enabled him to defend himself by kicking his enemies' balls, and his practices in dueling served him well to emerge victorious in the tourneys imposed by the school director, who made bets with the teachers and then punished the loser.

The food had the purely didactic purpose of tempering character. Whoever was capable of swallowing boiled liver or chicken necks with bits of feathers still attached, accompanied by cauliflower and burned rice, could confront the hazards of life, including war, for which the Americans were always preparing. Maurice, used to Celestine's refined kitchen, fasted like a fakir for thirteen days without anyone's caring a whit, and finally, when he fainted from hunger, there was no alternative left but to eat what was put on his plate.

Discipline was as iron hard as it was absurd. The unhappy boys had to leap out of bed at dawn, wash off with icy water, run three times around the courtyard, slipping in pools of water, to warm up-if tingling in your hands can be called warm-and study Latin for two hours before a breakfast of hot chocolate, dry bread, and lumpy oatmeal, then endure several hours of classes and sports, at which Maurice was incompetent. At the end of the day, when the victims were swooning with fatigue, they were given a moralizing lecture for one or two hours, depending on the director's inspiration. Their calvary ended in reciting in chorus the Declaration of Independence.

Maurice, who had been spoiled by Tete growing up, submitted to that prison routine without complaint. Following in the footsteps of the other boys and defending himself from the bullies kept him so busy that his nightmares ended, and he did not think anymore of the gallows in Le Cap. He enjoyed learning. At first, he hid his eagerness for books so as not to be perceived as arrogant, but soon he began to help the others with their lessons and that way earned respect. He did not confess to anyone that he knew how to play the piano, dance a quadrille, and write poetry; the other boys would have drawn and quartered him. His companions watched him write letters with the dedication of a medieval monk, but did not openly make fun because he told them they were for his invalid mother. The mother, like the homeland, was not a subject for jokes: she was sacred.

Maurice coughed throughout the winter, but with spring it cleared up. For months he had huddled in his overcoat, with his head sunk between his shoulders, stooping, invisible. When the sun warmed his bones and he could take off his two jackets, his wool underdrawers, the mufflers, the gloves, and the overcoat, and walk erect, he realized his clothing was too tight and too short. He had undergone one of those classic growth spurts typical of pubescent boys, and from being the thinnest in his level had become one of the tallest and strongest. Observing the world from above, with several centimeters' advantage, made him feel safe.

The summer with its warm humidity did not bother Maurice, used to the boiling climate of the Caribbean. The college emptied, the students and most of the teachers left on vacation, and Maurice was left nearly alone, awaiting instructions to return to his family. Those instructions never arrived; instead his father sent Jules Beluche, the same chaperon who had come with him on the long, depressing voyage on the ship from his home in New Orleans, across the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, sailing around the peninsula of Florida, slipping along the Sargasso Sea, and facing the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, to the school in Boston. The chaperon, a remote relative of the Guizot family who'd fallen on bad times, was a middle-aged man who took pity on the boy and tried to make the voyage as agreeable as possible, but in Maurice's memory it would always be associated with his exile from his paternal hearth.

Beluche appeared at the school with a letter from Valmorain, explaining to his son the reasons why he would not go home that year and containing enough money to buy clothing, books, and any whim he might want to indulge. His orders were to take Maurice on a cultural trip to the historical city of Philadelphia, a place every young man of his position should know because it was there that the seed of the American nation had germinated, as Valmorain's letter pompously stated. Maurice left with Beluche, and for those weeks of forced tourism he remained silent and indifferent, trying to disguise the interest the trip aroused in him and to fight off the sympathy he was beginning to feel for that poor devil Beluche.

The next summer the boy was again left waiting two weeks at the school with his trunk all packed, until the same chaperon showed up to take him to Washington and other cities he had no desire to visit.

Harrison Cobb, one of the few teachers who stayed at the college during Christmas week, had noticed Maurice Valmorain because he was the only student who did not have visitors or gifts, and who spent the holidays reading alone in the nearly empty building. Cobb belonged to one of the oldest families in Boston, established in the city since the beginning of the seventeenth century and of noble origin, as everyone knew but he denied. He was a fanatic defender of the American republic and abominated nobility. He was the first abolitionist Maurice met, and he would mark the boy profoundly. In Louisiana abolitionism was considered worse than syphilis, but in the state of Massachusetts the subject of slavery was discussed constantly because the state's constitution, written twenty years before, contained a clause that prohibited it.

Cobb found an avid intellect in Maurice, and a fervent heart in which his humanitarian arguments immediately took root. Among other books, he had him read The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, published in 1789 in London with enormous success. This dramatic story of an African slave, written in the first person, had caused a commotion among European and American audiences, but few knew of it in Louisiana, and the boy had never heard it mentioned. The teacher and his student spent evenings studying, analyzing, and discussing; Maurice could at last articulate the uneasiness slavery had always caused him.

"My father has two hundred plus slaves that one day will be mine," Maurice confessed to Cobb.

"Is that what you want, son?"

"Yes, because I will be able to emancipate them."

"Then there will be two hundred plus Negroes abandoned to their fate and an imprudent boy in poverty. What is gained by that?" his teacher rebutted. "The struggle against slavery is not done plantation by plantation, Maurice, the way people think; the laws in this country and the world must be changed. You must study-prepare yourself and get involved in politics."