excerpt
“Yes, those are really oranges hanging there,” Olivia told him. At home, oranges had only appeared in the fruit bowl or the refrigerator. Now, the hot, steamy air filled his nostrils with scents of flowers—he didn’t know what type—he supposed roses because that’s what they had back home, although these smells were more like cinnamon toast. After grey Montreal, the grass was the greenest he had ever seen and as he started up the flagstone walk, his heel came down hard on something that crunched. He looked at the bottom of his shoe and there was slime on it.
“Ooooh, yuk. That’s a snail,” said Olivia.
He was fascinated with the tiny chips of snail shell and was still picking them off when Grandmother Yvonne, his mother’s mother, rushed out to meet them. She was a tall, tanned woman with scarves of yellow, red and blue tied in her hair. Her face was wrinkled like a peanut shell, and her hair had a streak of white through it, but she didn’t act like an old woman.
“Welcome! Welcome!” she bellowed. Her movements were eager as she enveloped Paul in a huge embrace and pulled him into her life.
Grandmother Yvonne’s house was pink. (In Montreal, no one had pink houses.) It sprawled all on one level—a huge living room with a piano, built-in bookshelves, large paintings with little lights above them, a dining room with cabinets of silver utensils and more bookcases. At the end of a long hall was a solarium and swimming pool. Even the bedrooms were strange—their walls covered in cowboy paintings with scenes of the desert and bleached skulls. She lived alone, having been widowed and divorced, and there was plenty of room for him. He would stay there until his father came to get him. At least that was the early pretence. Paul’s father did not come to get him. Nor did Paul want him to. He hardly knew the man.
Life with Grandmother Yvonne was rich. She set tasks for him—he went to school, of course, but she ran her own educational program. On the Memorial Day weekend he was set the task of learning to play two simple tunes on the piano. In June, he was assigned to research the artists whose paintings dominated Yvonne’s home. During summer vacation he read an entire shelf in his deceased grandfather’s collection of physics texts. Finally rebellious, he demanded to get out of the house like the other kids and learn how to surf. By the time the surfing music craze hit America, Paul could ride a wave as well as any of the other
Libros Libertad 