A harsh tutor, so strict that the child wants to kill her. The child did not poison her, but she herself was self-harm and killed by the madness of watching adult movies.
When we got home in the afternoon, we saw a huge sea snake nailed to the door frame, which was all black, glowing with phosphorescence . The nail penetrated its neck, looking like the curse of Gypsy . Its eyes were still moving, and its serrated teeth were exposed between its open upper and lower jaws. I was about nine years old at that time and was so scared that I couldn't make a sound by this sudden terrifying scene. My younger brother, two years younger than me, threw down his oxygen tank, mask and diving flippers, screamed and flew in a hurry. From the ferry to my house there was a winding path between the reefs, and Mrs. Forbes was climbing up the stone steps. Hearing the screams, she chased after her, panting and pale, but when she saw the thing nailed to the door, she understood the whole story. She often says that when two children are together, no matter which one does something alone, the other cannot escape. So, because of my brother's scream, both of us were scolded and accused of lacking self-control. Maybe she was frightened herself, but she just refused to admit it. Because she has been criticizing us in German instead of using English as stated in her tutor contract. But as soon as she recovered, she began to preach endlessly in her stuttering English.
"This is a Helena moray eel," she told us, "The reason why it is called that is because the ancient Greeks think it is a sacred animal."
At this time, the local boy Aurester, who taught us to dive, suddenly emerged from behind a large bush of capers . He buckled the diving mask on his forehead, wore a tight swimming trunk, tied a belt around his waist, and hung six daggers of various shapes and sizes on it. Because when you are fighting with animals in close combat underwater, there is no other way to hunt. He was about twenty years old and stayed at the seabed for longer than on land. He looked like an animal in the sea, always stained with dirty motor oil. When he first met him, Mrs. Forbes told my parents that she could not imagine anyone more handsome than him. However, his handsome appearance did not save him from criticism, and he had to accept the scolding, but it was Italian , because he hung moray on the door without any other explanation, except to scare the children. Then Mrs. Forbes ordered him to take it off the door with the respect he deserved to have for the mysterious creation and send us to change into the clothes we wore for dinner.
We did it immediately and tried not to make any mistakes, because after being ruled by Mrs. Forbes for two weeks, we already understood that nothing is more difficult than living. While showering in the dim bathroom, I found my younger brother was still thinking about the moray eel. "Its eyes are like humans," he said. I thought so, but I tried to convince him that it wasn't the case and successfully shifted the subject until I finished taking a shower. But when I was about to leave, he asked me to stay with him.
"It's not dark yet." I said.
I opened the curtains. It was the hottest time in August, and through the windows you could see the crescent-shaped plain that was about to catch fire all the way to the other end of the island, and the sun hung motionlessly in the air.
"Not because of this." The younger brother said, "It's because I'm afraid I'll be afraid."
However, when we came to the table , he seemed very calm, and everything was done very carefully, and received special praise from Mrs. Forbes, and his points rose by two points that week. But my accumulated five points were deducted by two points because I hurried over at the last moment and was still a little breathless when I arrived at the restaurant. For every 50-minute savings, we can enjoy a double-serve dessert, but neither of us has saved up fifteen points. It's really a shame, because we never encountered a better pudding than Mrs. Forbes made.
Before dinner begins, we stand and pray with an empty plate.Mrs. Forbes is not a Catholic, but her contract stipulates that we should be taken to pray six times a day, and to fulfill this clause, she had to learn our prayers. Then, the brothers sat down together, held their breath and accepted her examination of our manners, not letting go of even the tiniest details. She only rings the bell when everything looks perfect. Then, cook Fulvia Flamineya sent the noodle soup that was a must-have for the summer.
Originally, when we lived with our parents, eating was as happy as a festival. When serving, Fulvia Flamineya always talks and laughs around the table, and her inconsistent talent adds a lot of fun to our lives. At the end she would sit with us and eat a few bites from each of us’s plates. But since Mrs. Forbes began to take control of our destiny, she always maintained so absolute silence that we could all hear the boiling sound of soup in the metal pot. During the meal, we must put our back on the back of the chair, chew it with one cheek and then chew it with the other side ten times, and our eyes cannot leave the middle-aged woman with a cold and tired face, who is reciting a text about education. It's very similar to Sunday's Mass, but it lacks the comfort brought by the choir.
The day when I saw the moray eel being nailed to the door, Mrs. Forbes told us about the obligations to the motherland. Her voice seemed to make the air thinner, and Fulvia Flaminea was as silent as if floating in the air. After drinking the soup, she brought us a charcoal grilled fish fillet, and the snow-white fish meat exuded a mouthwatering fragrance. I loved eating fish at that time, better than any birds and animals. This smell reminded me of our home in Guacamayale and felt a little relaxed. But my younger brother refused to eat this dish without even trying it.
"I don't like it." he said.
Mrs. Forbes interrupted her reciting.
"How do you know?" she said, "You haven't tasted it yet."
She gave a warning glance at the cook, but it was too late.
"Moe eel is the tenderest fish in the world, children." Fulvia Flamineya said, "You will know it after you taste it."
Mrs. Forbes remained silent. She told us in a cold tone that in ancient times, moray eels were a delicious delicacy that kings could enjoy, and warriors all competed to drink its bile, because it was said that they could gain supernatural courage. Then she repeated to us again, as she said countless times in such a short time, good taste is not a talent, but it is not something that can be taught at any age, but needs to be cultivated from an early age. Therefore, there is no legitimate reason to refuse to eat. I had already taken a bite before I knew it was a moray eel, and I was in a dilemma: although it aroused my a little nostalgia, the taste was very smooth and tender. But in the end, the snake was nailed to the door defeated my appetite. My younger brother mustered up the courage to give it a mouthful of it, but he couldn't help it: he vomited.
"Go to the bathroom," Mrs. Forbes said to him calmly, "Wash it well, come back and continue to eat."
I felt very sad for him. Because I know what kind of courage it takes for him to walk through the whole house and stay in the bathroom long enough to clean himself. But he came back soon, changed into a clean shirt, pale face and trembling, although he could hardly see it. He passed Mrs. Forbes' strict cleaning inspection smoothly. So she cut off a piece of moray eel meat and ordered us to continue. I forced myself to take my second bite. But my younger brother didn't even move the tableware.
"I won't eat this," he said.
He was obviously very determined, so Mrs. Forbes avoided the topic.
"Yes." She said, "But you are not allowed to eat desserts after meals."
My brother's relief gave me courage.I put the knife and fork on the plate, which was the rule at the end of the meal that Mrs. Forbes taught us, and said:
"I don't eat dessert either."
"Not watching TV," she said.
"We don't watch TV either." I said.
Mrs. Forbes put the napkin on the table, and the three of us stood up and prayed. Then she sent us back to the bedroom and warned that we had to fall asleep before she finished her meal. In addition, all our points were cleared. Only by saving more than 20 points can we enjoy the cream cake , vanilla pie, and delicious plum biscuits she baked again, which are delicious foods we have never eaten in the rest of our lives.
Our outbreak is a matter of time sooner or later. All year long, we were eagerly looking forward to this free summer on Pantelleria , the southernmost tip of Sicily . The first month was indeed free, and my parents were still with us. Until now, I can still recall the scorching plain covered with volcanic rocks, the eternal sea, the house brushed with quicklime all the way to the steps, and on a windless night, the shiny fork markings on the African lighthouse can be seen from the window. We followed our father to explore the deep sea sleeping around the island and found a string of yellow torpedoes, which have been trapped there since World War II. We also caught a slim-necked bottle of ancient Greek , which was nearly one meter high, with petrified garlands hanging on it, and the bottom of the bottle was still filled with poisonous wine from ancient times. We also swam in a foggy stagnant water area, where the water density was extremely high, and people could almost walk on it. But for us, the most dazzling miracle is Fulvia Flaminea. She was like a happy bishop. No matter where she went, she was always surrounded by a group of sleepy cats, making her unable to walk, but she said that she did not endure these because she loved them, but to prevent herself from being eaten by mice. At night, while our parents were watching adult programs in front of the TV, Fulvia Flamineya took us back to her house, less than a hundred meters away from our house, teaching us to identify those distant sounds, such as singing and howling winds from Tunisia . Her husband is much younger than her and works in hotels on the other end of the island all summer, only going home to sleep every day. Orest lived a little further with his parents. He always came over at night with the skewers of fish he had just caught and a few baskets of lobsters and hung them in the kitchen so that Fulvia Flamineya's husband could get them to the hotels the next day to sell. Then he put on the top lamp for diving again and took us to catch mountain rat . Those mountain rats are as big as rabbits and are eyeing kitchen garbage. Sometimes when we get home, our parents are already asleep, but we are so quarreled by the rats in the yard who are fighting for leftovers. But even this trouble is an integral part of our happy summer magic.
Only my father could think of the idea of asking for a German tutor. He is a Caribbean writer with more conceit than talent. The embers of European glory made him dizzy. Whether in books or in reality, he always seemed too eager to erase the traces of his origin and fantasize that his sons no longer had any marks of his past. My mother still maintains the humility of a wandering teacher in Guahira Highlands, never questioning her husband, and any of his thoughts are wonderful. Therefore, neither of them had seriously considered how we brothers would live under the dortmund lady officer, who was determined to instill the most stale customs in European society in a five-week cultural journey with forty popular writers.
On the last Saturday of July, Mrs. Forbes came to our house from Palermo on a shuttle. When we first see her, we realize that the happy life is over.In the heat of the south, she wore a pair of militia boots, a suit-collar coat, her hair as short as a man, a men's fedora, and a monkey pee. "It's like this for Europeans, especially in the summer," said my father to us, "it's the taste of civilization." However, despite the tough dressing style, Mrs. Forbes herself was skinny. If we were older at that time, or if she could show a little tenderness, we might have sympathized with her. From then on, our world changed. Since the summer has entered, we have six hours of exploring the magical sea every day, but now it has been reduced to one hour, and often only have monotonous repetitive training. When we were with our parents, we could swim with Orest all day, amazed at his boldness, hunting octopus in the murky waters mixed with blood and ink, and had no other weapons except a few daggers. Later, although he had been driving the small motorboat with an external engine as always, except for giving us diving lessons, Mrs. Forbes did not allow him to stay with us for an extra minute. She also forbids us from going to Fulvia Flamineya's house at night because she thought we were too close to employers. We have to spend the time we used to catch mountain rats to study Shakespeare . For children like us who are used to stealing mangoes in other people's yards and smashing dogs with bricks on the streets of Guacamayale, it is really unimaginable that there is a more cruel torture than a princely life.
However, we soon discovered that Mrs. Forbes was not as strict with herself as she was to us, and this was the first rift of her authority. At first, when Aurester taught us to dive, she stayed under colorful parasols on the beach, dressed tightly, read the narrative poem of Schiller , and then gave us several hours of social behavior theory lessons until lunch time.
One day, she asked Orest to take her to the hotel's tourist shop with a motorboat and buy a one-piece swimsuit, which was black and shiny, like the skin of a seal, but she never went into the water. When we were swimming, she basked on the beach and wiped her sweat with a towel and didn't go to the shower. Three days later, she looked like a live lobster, and the taste of civilization on her body had become suffocating.
The dark night allowed her to be relieved. From the time she took over and took care of us, we felt someone walking around at home at night, even dancing. My brother felt that it was the wandering soul of the drowning man mentioned to us by Fulvia Flaminea, and was frightened and uneasy. But soon we discovered that it was Mrs. Forbes. Every night she lives a real life like a lonely woman, and this kind of life is what she severely criticized during the day. One morning, we ran into her in the kitchen, wearing schoolgirl-style pajamas, making delicious desserts, covered in flour, even on her face, and was drinking a glass of Porto wine, unconscious. This was a scandal for Mrs. Forbes during the day. It was then that we realized that after we fell asleep, she did not go back to her room, but secretly went into the sea to swim, or stayed in the living room until very late, and changed the TV to silently watch movies that children were not suitable for. While eating the whole cake, she drank the good wine that my father had collected that he was willing to take out on special days until he finished drinking a whole bottle. In contrast to her simple and restrained lying on her all day, she is so greedy and has a kind of unrestrained passion. Next we hear her talking to herself in her room, reciting "The Girl of Orleans" in pleasant German, singing, or sobbing in bed until dawn, and then her eyes appear at the breakfast table with red and swollen eyes, becoming more and more gloomy and more domineering. My brother and I have never been as miserable as we did then. But I plan to endure it until the end, because I know that my arms can't twist my thighs anyway. But my brother showed all the toughness in his personality to fight her, so our happy summer turned into hell. The moray incident touched his bottom line.That night, we lay in bed and listened to Mrs. Forbes walking around the sleeping house, the hatred that had been fermenting in his heart suddenly erupted.
"I want to kill her." He said.
I was very surprised. It's not entirely because of his determination, but because I happened to be thinking about the same thing since I was having supper. But I still tried to dissuade him.
"You will be beheaded." I said.
"Sicil has no guillotine," he said, "Besides, no one knows who killed her."
He thought of the pot we caught from the sea, which had residual poisonous wine. My father kept it and wanted to use it for more in-depth testing to explore its toxicity, because it could not be the result of time alone. It was easy to use it to deal with Mrs. Forbes, and no one would have thought that it was neither accident nor suicide. So when it was almost dawn, when we felt that she had been lying down exhausted after a night of tossing, we poured the poisonous wine from the clay pot into the bottle containing the wine treasured by my father. This dose is said to be enough to kill a horse.
Every morning at nine o'clock, we had breakfast in the kitchen on time, and Mrs. Forbes personally brought it. The sweet bread was placed in the oven early in the morning by Fulvia Flaminea. Two days after the wine was secretly replaced, my brother used a disappointed look to remind me of the bottle containing poisoned wine intact in the sideboard. It was Friday and the following weekend was the same. But on Tuesday night, Mrs. Forbes drank half of her drink as she watched the adult movies on TV.
However, she appeared at the dining table on time on Wednesday morning. Because she stayed up late, her face was as dark as ever, and her eyes were as anxious as usual behind the thick lenses. When she saw a letter with German stamps in the basket containing sweet bread, her eyes became even more anxious. She read the letter while drinking coffee, although she told us many times that she shouldn't do it. During the process of reading the letter, her face was shaking with the words above. Then she tore off the stamps from the envelope and put them in the basket with the remaining bread, and Fulvia Flamineya's husband collected the stamps. Even though it was not going well that morning, she still accompanied us to diving class. We deviated from our normal route and swam into a low-salinity sea until the oxygen in the gas tank was almost exhausted. And we went home without etiquette class that day. Not only was Mrs. Forbes feeling high throughout the day, she also looked lively at dinner than ever. My brother couldn't accept this frustrating result. Mrs. Forbes ordered the meal to start, and he pushed the noodle soup away with a provocative attitude.
"I was so fucking annoyed by this insect soup." He said.
This sentence is like throwing an grenade on the dining table. Mrs. Forbes's face turned pale and the lines on the corners of her mouth became stiff. When the explosion of smoke slowly dissipated, her lenses were filled with tears. She took off her glasses and wiped them dry with a napkin. Before she stood up, she placed the napkin on the table, with the bitterness of losing.
"You do whatever you want," she said, "Just pretend I don't exist."
She locked herself in the room from seven o'clock. But, almost midnight, she thought we were asleep. We saw her wearing a schoolgirl-style pajamas, holding half an chocolate cake and a bottle with more than four fingers of high poison wine back to her room. I had a cold war and felt sorry for her.
"Poor Mrs. Forbes." I said.
The younger brother is still angry.
"If she didn't die tonight, we are poor," he said.
In the early morning that day, she talked to herself for a long time. In her almost crazy mood, she recited Schiller's poem loudly, and finally reached the top with a scream that resounded throughout the house.Then she sighed many times, as if she had poured her entire soul into emptied her. Finally, she calmed down with a shrill and long whistle sound like a wandering boat. Because we stared at her for a long time at night, we still felt exhausted when we woke up the next day. The sunlight came in like a blade from the cracks in the blinds, but the whole house seemed to sink into a pond. We only realized that it was almost ten o'clock, and we were not awakened by Mrs. Forbes' routine schedule every morning: neither the sound of flushing the toilet at eight o'clock, the running water from the sink faucet, the sound of opening the blinds, nor the sound of the iron palm of her boots stomping on the ground, and the three death-throwing door-knocking sounds of the slave trader-like palms. My younger brother pressed his ear against the wall, held his breath, and tried to capture the subtle signs of life in the next room, and finally breathed a sigh of relief.
"Everything is good!" he said, "the only thing I can hear is the sound of the sea."
We prepared breakfast by ourselves when it was almost eleven o'clock, and then before Fulvia Flamineya brought the group of cats to clean, we went to the beach with two cans of oxygen , plus two cans of spare gas. Aurester has arrived at the dock and is ripping a six-pound goldhead bream that has just been caught. We told him that we waited until eleven o'clock for Mrs. Forbes and saw that she was still sleeping, we decided to come down by ourselves. We also told him that she cried at the dining table the night before, and maybe she didn't sleep well at night, so she would rather stay in bed. But as we expected, Aurester was not interested in these explanations. He accompanied us to sweep under the water for more than an hour, then signaled us to go up for lunch, while he drove a small motorboat to the hotel where tourists stayed to sell the goldhead bream. We stood on the stone steps and waved to him goodbye, making him believe we were preparing to go home until he disappeared around the corner of the cliff. Then we put on our oxygen tanks again and continued swimming without anyone allowing.
The sky was cloudy, and a faint thunder came from the horizon, but the sea was still calm and clear, and the light itself was enough to illuminate. According to estimates, we swam up the sea to the Panteleria Lighthouse and then swam about a hundred meters to the right, diving from where the torpedo was found in early summer. They are still there: a total of six, painted bright yellow, the serial numbers above are intact, arranged completely in order at the bottom of the volcano, which cannot be done unintentionally. Next we continued to circle the lighthouse, looking for the sunken city that Fulvia Flaminea had vividly described to us many times, but no results were achieved. Two hours later, we were sure that there was no new mysterious object to be discovered before we surfaced with the last breath of oxygen.
While we were diving, there was a heavy rain outside. The sea was surging, and the beach was full of dying fish, and a large group of carnivorous seabirds hovered in the low altitude, screaming shrillly. But the evening sun is as dazzling as the morning light, and life is beautiful without Mrs. Forbes. However, when we climbed up the reef steps exhausted, we saw a lot of people at home, with two police cars parked at the door. It was only then that we realized for the first time what we had done. My younger brother started to tremble and wanted to turn around.
"I won't go in." he said.
On the contrary, I had a vague idea at the time: as long as we go in and look at the corpse, we will not be suspected.
"Don't panic," I said to him, "Take a deep breath, just thinking about one thing: we don't know anything."
No one pays attention to us. We placed the oxygen tank, masks and diving flippers in the foyer and walked in from the side corridor where two men were sitting on the ground smoking with a pair of stretchers next to them. Only then did we find that there was an ambulance and several policemen carrying live ammunition at the back door. In the living room, women nearby were sitting on chairs against the wall and praying in tongues. The men gathered in the yard and talked about topics that had nothing to do with death. I held my brother's stiff and cold hands tightly and walked into the house through the back door.Our bedroom door was open, and the situation inside was exactly the same as when we left in the morning. Next door, Mrs. Forbes' room, there was a fully armed policeman guarding the door, but the door was open. We leaned inside with a heavy heart. Just then, Fulvia Flaminea ran out of the kitchen like a gust of wind and closed the door of the room screaming.
"For God's sake, children, don't look at her!"
It's too late. In my later life, my brother and I never forgot what we saw in that short moment. Two policemen were measuring the distance from the bed to the wall with tape measure, while the other was taking pictures like a park photographer using a camera covered in black cloth. Instead of lying on the messy bed, Mrs. Forbes lay on the ground, lying naked in a pool of frozen blood, which had dyed the floor of the room red. Her body was covered with knife wounds. Twenty-seven of them were fatal injuries. It can be seen from the number and cruelty of the wounds that they were stabbed in the frenzy of intense sexuality, and Mrs. Forbes accepted the hurt with the same passion, not even screaming or crying, but recited Schiller in her soldier-like voice, knowing clearly that this was the price her happy summer had to pay.
1976
