The Lonely, Good Company of Books
Richard Rodriguez
From an early age I knew that my mother and father could read and write both Spanish and English. I had observed my father making his way through what, I now suppose, must have been income tax forms. On other occasions I waited apprehensively while my mother read onion-paper letters air-mailed from Mexico with news of a relative’s illness or death. For both my parents, however, reading was something done out of necessity and as quickly as possible. Never did I see either of them read an entire book. Nor did I see them read for pleasure. Their reading consisted of work manuals, prater books, newspapers, recipes. …
In our house each school year would begin with my mother’s careful instruction: “Don’t write in your books so we sell them at the end of the year.” The remark was echoed in public by my teachers, but only in part: “Boys and girls, don’t write in your books. You must learn to treat them with great care and respect.”
OPEN THE DOORS OF YOUR MIND WITH BOOKS, read the red and white poster over the nun’s desk in early September. It soon was apparent to me that reading was the classroom’s central activity. Each course had its own book. And the information gathered from a book was unquestioned. READ TO LEARN, the sign on the wall advised in December. I privately wondered: What was the connection between reading and learning? Did one learn something only by reading it? Was an idea only an idea if it could be written down? In June, CONSIDER BOOKS YOUR BEST FRIENDS. Friends? Reading was, at best, only a chore. I needed to look up whole paragraphs o words in a dictionary. Lines of type were dizzying, the eye having to move slowly across the page, then down, and across. … The sentences of the first books I read were coolly impersonal. Toned hard. What most bothered me, however, was the isolation reading required. To console myself for the loneliness I’d feel when I read, I tried reading in a very soft voice. Until: “Who is doing all that talking to his neighbor?” shortly after, remedial reading classes were arranged for me with a very old nun.
At the end of each school day, for nearly six months, I would meet with her in the tiny room
that served as the school’s library but was actually only a storeroom for used textbooks and a vast collection of National Geographics. Everything about our sessions pleased me: the smallness of the room; the noise of the janitor’s broom hitting the edge of the long hallway outside the door; the green of the sun, lighting the wall; and the old woman’s face blurred white with a beard. Most of the time we took turns. I began with my elementary text. Sentences of astonishing simplicity seemed to me lifeless and drab; “the boys ran from the rain. … She wanted to sing. … The kite rose in the blue.” Then the old nun would read from her favorite books, usually biographies of early American presidents. Playfully she ran through complex sentences, calling the words alive with her voice, making it seem that the author somehow was speaking directly to me. I smiled just to listen to her. I sat there and sensed for the very first time some possibility of fellowship between a reader and a writer, a communication, never intimate like that I heard spoken words at home convey, but one nonetheless personal.
uneventful
One day the nun concluded a session by asking me why I was so reluctant to read by myself. I tried to explain; said something about the way written words made me feel all alon
e — almost, I wanted to add but didn’t, as when I spoke to myself in a room just emptied of furniture. She studied my face as I spoke; she seemed to be watching more than listening. In an uneventful voice she replied that I had nothing to fear. Didn’t I realize that reading would open up whole new worlds? A book could open doors for me. It could introduce me to people and show me places I never imagined existed. She gestured toward the bookshelves. (Bare-breasted African women dance, and the shiny hubcaps of automobiles on the back covers of the Geographic gleamed in my mind.) I listened with respect. But her words were not very influential. I was thinking then of another consequence of literacy, one I was too shy to admit thinking then of another consequence of literacy, one I was too shy to admit but nonetheless trusted. Books were going to make me “educated.” That confidence enabled me, several months later, to overcome my fear of the silence.
In fourth grade I embarked upon a grandiose reading program. “Give me the names of important books,” I would say to startled teachers. They soon found out that I had in mind “adult books.” I ignored their suggestion of anything I suspected was written for children. (Not until I was in college, as a result, did I read Huckleberry Finn or Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland.) Instead, I read for extra credit. Each time I finished a book, I reported the achievement to a teacher and basked in the praise my effort earned. Despite my best efforts, however, there seemed to be more and more books I needed to read. At the library I would literally tremble as I came upon whole shelves of books I hadn’t read. So I read and I read and I read: Great Expectations; all the short stories of Kipling; The Babe Ruth Story; the entire first volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica ( A-ANSTEY); the Iliad; Moby Dick; Gone with the Wind; The Good Earth; Ramona; Forever Amber; The Lives of the Saints; Crime and Punishment; The Pearl. … Librarians who initially frowned when I checked out the maximum ten books at a time started saving books they thought I might like. Teachers would say to the rest of the class, “I only wish the rest of you took reading as seriously as Richard obviously does.”

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