Page 148 - A Little Life: A Novel

After that, after he was caught, he was made to go to Father Gabriel’s
office every night and take off his clothes, and the father would examine
inside him for any contraband. And later, when things got worse, he would

think back to that package of crackers: if only he hadn’t stolen them. If only
he hadn’t made things so bad for himself.
His rages began after his evening examinations with Father Gabriel,
which soon expanded to include midday ones with Brother Peter. He would
have tantrums, throwing himself against the stone walls of the monastery
and screaming as loudly as he could, knocking the back of his damaged
ugly hand (which, six months later, still hurt sometimes, a deep, insistent

pulsing) against the hard, mean corners of the wooden dinner tables,
banging the back of his neck, his elbows, his cheeks—all the most painful,
tender parts—against the side of his desk. He had them in the day and at
night, he couldn’t control them, he would feel them move over him like a
fog and let himself relax into them, his body and voice moving in ways that
excited and repelled him, for as much as he hurt afterward, he knew it

scared the brothers, that they feared his anger and noise and power. They hit
him with whatever they could find, they started keeping a belt looped on a
nail on the schoolroom wall, they took off their sandals and beat him for so
long that the next day he couldn’t even sit, they called him a monster, they
wished for his death, they told him they should have left him on the garbage
bag. And he was grateful for this, too, for their help exhausting him,
because he couldn’t lasso the beast himself and he needed their assistance to

make it retreat, to make it walk backward into the cage until it freed itself
again.
He started wetting his bed and was made to go visit the father more often,
for more examinations, and the more examinations the father gave him, the
more he wet the bed. The father began visiting him in his room at night, and
so did Brother Peter, and later, Brother Matthew, and he got worse and

worse: they made him sleep in his wet nightshirt, they made him wear it
during the day. He knew how badly he stank, like urine and blood, and he
would scream and rage and howl, interrupting lessons, pushing books off
tables so that the brothers would have to start hitting him right away, the
lesson abandoned. Sometimes he was hit hard enough so that he lost
consciousness, which is what he began to crave: that blackness, where time
passed and he wasn’t in it, where things were done to him but he didn’t

know it.