Lesson 1 How Others See Me

The Baby in the Bottle
by Benjamin Bautista
The truth was, Mr. Libre felt sorry for his wife. He was very careful to hide it from
her, of course, but day by day, through the years, as he saw her watching the shriveled
half-black baby in the bottle, he felt more and more sorry for her. She would touch the
bottle gently, once in a while, and run her hands fondly over the cold glass; inside, the
stiff, skinless body of a four-inch boy now dead for five years, would bob up and down in
the green alcohol. And then sometimes, slowly, to herself, she would smile.
Mr. Libre‘s wife was a plain woman with high cheekbones and a sad mouth, who
was only twenty-nine years old but whose eyes were no longer young. Mr. Libre himself
was thirty-three but graying hair and some thick corded veins on his hands made him
look older. He was a small man and thin, and long hours of bending over receipts had
given him a stooped posture and made him appear even smaller and thinner.
Very often, whenever he could, Mr. Libre would try to walk to his wife to get her
to start talking too, but it became harder and harder for them to find things to talk about.
The talk always turned to the past and how different it might have been if they‘d had
children. Mr. Libre didn‘t want to talk about those things but his wife did, and gradually,
the pauses stretched longer and made them both uneasy. But he was always patient
with her; even if he was tired or irritable he never showed it in any way. By now he had
learned to put up with many good things.
He was married when he was twenty-two and just out of high school. He had
been alone in the city for four months when he met her. She understood his dialect and
they got along well together. At first he wanted to go on to college but when he thought
it over again, he felt that it wasn‘t fair. That would be asking too much from his wife.
They moved into a rented room which the owner said was the ground floor of a
two-story building, but it was just a room actually, with thick cardboard walls to divide it
into smaller rooms. They planned to move out after a few years because they thought
the room would be too small for the children to come, and they hoped to have many
children. But five years passed before they had their first child, and when it was only
four months in the womb, it was prematurely born.
It was a boy but it didn‘t even look like a baby. It had eyes and ears and arms
and its skinless body had been formed, but it was only four inches long and looked cold
and raw as though it was just a piece of peeled flesh that never had life at all. Mr. Libre
felt it to the nurses but his wife asked to keep it and take it home with her; he didn‘t
know why, until the doctor told him that his wife knew that she could never have any
more children. After that neither of them talked about it much and they slipped back to
the routine of everyday living. Still he took it on himself to try to make it easier for her
through the days.
Grade 7 English Learning Package 63