Read The Penguin's Song for Free Online Page B

believes I will spend valuable time in there, with those books of mine, and yet it will not cost us anything. There’s no doubt in my mind, in fact, that he thinks books are more lasting than other objects. After all, they’re amenable to storage and preservation. Aging does not detract from their worth.
    After breakfast each of us withdraws into our own work. My mother hoists a mass of greens into the sink. My father stands just behind or next to her as if on guard duty. They seem to find it reassuring that I’m sitting in the room reading. When the two of them, or even just one of them, walks down the hallway that runs up to its door, they are wary of the sound their feet make, lest it annoy me or distract me from my reading. They act as if I am the only one in this house whose activities should oblige others to limit the noise they make, weighing every movement and every word according to my needs. As they see it, I am the one who is working. Or I am the one who is preparing himself for work, as though I’m a student finally on the verge of mastering his chosen specialization. My father lifts his index finger to his lips, sealing them although they are already closed, so that my mother will realize that whatever she is doing is producing loud sounds. When he crosses over to the hallway I can all but see him lift his foot fully off the floor so that he can put it down slowly and precisely, as if to detach its transit from the movement of his other foot, which he will raise just like the first one but not until the first one is firmly on the floor. He believes it is possible to derive some hope from all of this time that I spend sitting and reading. It must amount to something, even if he does not know what it is, or what signs to look for that will announce this something when it does actually begin.
    You read as much in one day as students read in a month! he exclaims when he sees me finally emerge from the room. This is his way of encouraging me and making me feel I’m almost at the finish line, and that when I’m there I’ll be the winner. This does not please my mother, though. She still believes that my frail body will not be strong enough in the end to endure all of this reading. You’re making him ill! she snaps at my father, who—with a dismissive wave of his hand—quiets her before he swings his whole body and face in my direction. He is ready for action. He asks me whether there is anything I would like him to do for me.

VI
    AMONG THOSE SINGING AND DANCING on the bus, that young fellow who went off alone with her on the walk, returning at the last possible minute, monopolized her not only during the excursion but later on, too. In the long file of students winding from the recreation area to the classrooms, I saw her standing in front of the door to her classroom, waiting, and I could see the look she gave him even though there were seven or eight students between us. It was a look that did not dissolve quickly; she concluded it slowly by lowering her eyelids. She closed her eyes as though she had been met with resistance or aversion and was determined to respond, but not too quickly, by showing the same reaction. There, at the door to her classroom, she kept her eyes closed for about as long as it took for two or three students to shuffle by. When she opened them again, she seemed—in her silence—to have traveled miles away from the normal pursuits of students. She had disengaged from the others, or perhaps she had suddenly matured, and it was as if she had introduced into the school a whiff of what happens between adults, outside.
    This look that, giving it, then impeded her and impelled her to respond with like resistance. . . . In the time that separated the excursion’s end from her standing like this at her classroom door, many things must have happened between them, since they did not appear—judging from that exchanged look—to be simply