加布里艾尔·罗伊 /Gabrielle Roy
Why did the memory of that dead child seek me out on this beautiful day? Till then, no intimation of sorrow had come to me through the dazzling revelations of a summer that sang.
It happened many years ago. I had just arrived in a small village in Manitoba, Canada, to f inish the school year as replacement for a teacher who had fallen ill or simply, for all I knew, become discouraged.
“When the time comes for you to apply for a permanent position,”the principal of the normal school had told me, “You'll be able to say that you've had experience.”
And so I found myself in spring in that very poor village - just a few shacks, with nothing around but spindling spruce trees. “A month,” I asked myself, “will that be long enough to become attached to the children? Will a month be worth the effort?”
Perhaps the same calculation was in the minds of the children, for I had never seen faces so dejected, so apathetic or perhaps sorrowful. I had had so little experience. I myself was hardly more than a child.
Nine o'clock came. The room was hot as an oven. Sometimes in Manitoba an incredible heat settles in during the f irst days of June.
Scarcely knowing where or how to begin, I opened the attendance book and called the roll. The names were for the most part French, and today they still return to my memory, like this, for no reason: Madeleine Berube, Josephat Brisset, Emilien Dumont, Cecile Lepine...
But most of the children who rose and answered “Present, mamzelle”, when their names were called had the slightly narrowed eyes, warm coloring and jet-black hair that told of metis blood.
They were beautiful and exquisitely polite; there was really nothing to reproach them for except the inconceivable distance they maintained between themselves and me. It crushed me. “Is this what children are like, then,” I asked myself with anguish, “untouchable, barricaded in some region where you can't reach them?”