Lesson 1 How Others See Me

One afternoon in the last busy week of January, Mr. Libre was looking over some
old files in the Recorder‘s cubicle when all of a sudden he remembered that on that day
the baby in the bottle was five years and seven months old. He thought no more about it
but kept it in the back of his mind to tell his wife that night; she wanted to hear him talk
about the baby. He went on checking the old files but when he was almost finished, his
eyes hurt again and he had to go back to his desk.
Mr. Libre was a clerk in the freight department of an import-export corporation
and all day he had to sit behind a high desk and sort out receipts and record them. At
was not a hard job but it kept him constantly busy because there were so many receipts
and he was so very careful about his work, he seldom found time to leave his desk from
eight-thirty to five o‘clock every day.
He had been with the firm for nine years now and he knew his work well but still
did not find it easy. It demanded so much concentration from him and there were days
when it all seemed to be painfully hard but it only made him try even harder. May times
he would have to focus his eyes on the pink, yellow and blue receipts and make an
explicit act of the will to follow the items on them. Usually he would have to strain his
eyes excessively so that often the muscles behind his eye sockets tightened and he
would feel a smarting throb in his eyes. He would stop work at once and close his eyes
as tightly as he could. The he would force a smile until his jaw hurt because, although
that didn‘t ease the pain any, it always held back the tears. Tears always embarrasses
him. They made him feel helpless.
He did not rest his eyes long because there were many late receipts that he had
to go through and he went back to work on them. But after a few minutes he grew
restless with the papers and he wanted to go over to the window and get a breath of air.
But the window was across the room and the assistant manager was talking to a typist
only two or three feet away. He tried to sit still on his high chair. He shut his eyes and
took a deep breath and continued to line up the figures on the record sheet but his
fingers shook and the pencil point broke under his hand. He grew annoyed with himself
for being upset over a little thing like that. He was sure his wife was not having an easy
day either.
Concentration always came hard to Mr. Libre because sometimes in the middle
of the day he would find it impossible to keep his thoughts off the many unrelated little
things that came into his mind. He would catch himself thinking of his wife eating lunch
alone every day or the cardboard walls of their room that seemed to close in on them or
perhaps the dead baby submerged in its bottle of green alcohol. He thought of his wife a
lot but many times he thought of the baby, too.
II
During the first few months and on to the end of that first year, the bottle had
seemed too small for the baby. It looked as though it needed a glass jar with a lid
instead of that bottle with a wide mouth; it floated limply on the surface and slumped
against the glass sides. But after a while the alcohol seeped through it and hardened it,
and it sank stiffly to the bottom. Then little by little it blackened and shriveled up and it
would neither float nor sink but bobbed up and down in its green world of alcohol and
Grade 7 English Learning Package 64