Teachers       painting

We’ve had a new teacher for ten days. The new teacher speaks a hotchpotch dialect, because she comes from a city in Northern Italy called Forlì. Her face is the very same as that of the Archangel Gabriel, the one painted in the Church of the Carmine, to the right at the church entrance. Yesterday, the new teacher told us that it’s been a year to the day since they killed Vincenzino Laquaglia and his older brother in the California Bar. Vincenzino Laquaglia was a mate of ours, a funny boy who always laughed and would discretely blow raspberries at the Principal. The new teacher told us that none of the eight witnesses at the bar would tell the police they knew the killers and that we’d have to write what we thought about it. I thought a bit and then wrote: "If anyone should know anything, they must speak up." I finished quickly, so that later, I’d have time to think about her, the new teacher. I always think about the new teacher. For example, I imagine the two of us alone by the sea and I tell her dad gets drunk every Saturday night and that he beats mum with kicks and punches, and the time I told him to stop, he said I don’t show him respect, so he whips me on the back and I still have scars. So the new teacher wants to see the scars. I pull up my shirt and she starts crying and she gives me loads of sweet, sweet kisses.

On the other hand, Michele, my schoolmate, thinks that the new teacher is too skinny and he prefers the teacher we had before. The previous teacher was fat and yelled a lot. When she got angry with one of us, her face became very red and she’d yell, "Now you’ve really pissed me off!" But Michele prefers the teacher we had before, because when she sat down, she always kept her legs wide open and we could even see her underwear.