The Most Beautiful Place in the World

by Ann Cameron

  The customer said, “Oh, that’s okay.” He was going to pay me anyway.

  But my grandmother said, “No, it’s not okay. He has to do them right, all the time. He has to work well, all the time. If he can’t do that, he’ll never earn a living.”

  “Okay,” said the customer. So I got his shoes perfect.

  “Can you do that every time?” my grandmother asked, and I said yes, and she went back uptown to her rice.

  So I shined a lot of shoes, and pretty soon I earned about a dollar every day. Grown men only earn two dollars, so I was doing great.

  And I talked to people when I shined their shoes, and asked them where they lived, and what they did, and if they had kids. Working was fun. And I gave all the money to my grandmother. She always gave me a hug and a big smile, and let me keep ten cents for myself.

  The only thing was, it got bad when I saw kids who were going past me on the way to school. I was sitting in the dust all smeared up with shoe polish, and they were all neat and clean, with their pencils and their notebooks, going to school.

  A lot of kids don’t go to school because their parents want them to work. The law is, they are supposed to go to school until they are twelve. But the school really doesn’t have space for everyone, so nobody makes them go.

  Most kids who work, work out in the country, in the onion fields, so I felt alone when I watched the school kids going by.

  And after a while I started wondering why my grandmother didn’t send me to school. I started thinking, if she really loved me, she’d send me to school and not just have me shine shoes.

  I wanted to ask her to let me go, but I was scared to. I was scared she’d say no. Then I would find out she liked me only because I was earning money for her. I’d find out she was like my father and mother and stepfather, who never cared about me. I’d find out she was just acting like she loved me.

  Then I told myself that my grandmother was good; she couldn’t help it if she needed money more than I needed school. I decided school didn’t matter. I decided I could learn to read by myself.

  I asked my shoeshine customers what the letters were on the signs downtown, and pretty soon I could read every sign around: COCA-COLA, BANK OF GUATEMALA, TOURIST OFFICE, and even the writing under the picture of San Pablo.

  When I ran out of signs, somebody gave me a newspaper, and I worked on reading that, and the customers helped me. I tore the newspaper into pages and always carried a page in my back pocket to work on. And I got so I could read almost the whole thing. But when I wasn’t reading, I was just sitting around, waiting for customers, wondering what kids did in school and whether my grandmother really loved me, and it got to be like life had stopped, because that was all I thought about.

  Finally, I decided that I had to do it—go ask my grandmother about school. I got a friend of mine, Roberto, an orphan who lives in the street, to guard my shoeshine stuff, and I went up to the market to talk to my grandmother.

  She was surprised to see me, since I was supposed to be working.

  “What’s going on, Juan?” she said.

  I said, “Grandma, I want to go to school.”

  “School?” She said it like I’d said I wanted to go to Mars. “You can’t go.”

  “Yes, I can!” I said. “All you have to do is take me!” I had thought I was ready for her to say no, but I wasn’t.

  “But you’re too young,” she said. “You’re five.”

  “Grandma,” I said, “I’m not five, I’m seven!”

  And it turned out there were so many of us around, she had lost track of how old I was.

  “Seven! Why didn’t you tell me? There are too many of you. There’s too much to remember. You should have told me!

  “How long have you been seven?” she said, as if I had done some trick on her behind her back.

  “Six months,” I said.

  “And you waited all this time to tell me!

  “It was so important, I couldn’t,” I said.

  “When something’s important, that’s when you’ve got to say it!” my grandmother said. “You’ve got to stand up for yourself. It doesn’t even matter if you lose. What matters is that you never stop trying to get what you really want. Of course,” she added, “I mean important things, not things like hot water and electricity.

  “Well, if you really are seven, you must go to school,” my grandmother said. “You should have been there long before this.”

  The next morning I put on my clean clothes, not my shoeshining clothes, and before school started, my grandmother and I went to see the first-grade teacher, Doña Irene.

  “I want to enter school,” I said.

  “How old are you?” Doña Irene said.

  “Seven and a half.”

  “You’re more than old enough,” Doña Irene said, “but you can’t begin now. Next year.”

  She smiled good-bye and started looking through some papers on her desk.

  My grandmother didn’t move.

  “He wants to go to school very, very much,” she said.

  Doña Irene looked up politely, as if my grandmother had missed the point and should have left already.

  “He’s three months late for starting. The other children are doing arithmetic.”

  “He knows arithmetic,” my grandmother said. “He’s worked with me in the market.”

  “The others can read a little,” Doña Irene said. “He’ll never catch up.”

  “He is ready for school,” my grandmother said. “He will catch up.”

  Doña Irene looked my grandmother in the eye, as if to say she knew who ran the school and it wasn’t my grandmother.

  “No,” she said.

  “But I can read!” I said. And I pulled out the piece of newspaper from my back pocket and started reading it out loud.

  Doña Irene looked very surprised. “Well,” she said, “in that case …”

  So I was admitted to first grade. I went to school from eight in the morning till two in the afternoon, and later I shined shoes. I had the money to buy books and notebooks and everything because my grandmother had saved what I had earned shoeshining, in her iron box.

  When I’d been in school two months, Doña Irene sent me home with a note to my grandmother. I showed it to her after supper, and she got my aunt Tina to read it to her, even though I told her I could read it myself.

  “No, Juan,” my grandmother said. “It’s about you, so you’re not the one to read it.”

  The note said that, with my grandmother’s permission, the teachers wanted to move me into the second grade. Doña Irene said that they had never had a student who had learned to read like I did, by myself, before ever starting school. She said that it would be a tragedy if such a good student had to leave school, and that if my grandmother ever could not keep me in school, the teachers would help to keep me there.

  When Aunt Tina stopped reading, she looked at me as if she had never really seen me before, and was looking to see what was so special about me, and still couldn’t see it, and gave up.

  “Well, congratulations!” she said.

  And I thought my grandmother would congratulate me too. But she didn’t, she started to cry, and threw her arms around me.

  She said, “When I was seven, the teachers went from house to house, looking for children to enroll in school, but when they got to my house, my parents hid me in the woodshed. I watched between cracks in the boards, and listened. They told the teachers that they didn’t have any school-age children, not one. They did it because they were afraid if I went to school, I wouldn’t learn to work. They did it for my good, and I didn’t say anything or complain, but I always knew it was a mistake.”

  She dried her eyes, and she told me she would help me study even all the way to university in the capital. As long as she lived she would help me, she said, if I did my best.

  And she looked at me as if I were a man already, and said that maybe by studying I could find out why some people were rich, and some were po
or, and some countries were rich, and some were poor, because she had thought about it a lot, but she could never figure it out.

  And I felt very proud, but also scared, because just more or less by accident I had taught myself to read, but that didn’t mean I was so smart.

  I said to my grandmother, “I might not always do everything special.”

  “You don’t have to do everything special,” my grandmother said. “Just your best. That’s all.”

  I was proud, but I wasn’t so sure I wanted to do my best all the time. I thought it could get pretty inconvenient. If people started expecting a lot of me, I would have to do more and more.

  “You ask more from me than Doña Irene and all the teachers,” I said. “They don’t expect so much.”

  My grandmother glared at me. “They don’t love you the way I do either,” she said.

  Then she said, “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

  She put on her best shawl, and she and I went down the street together, and she walked the way she always walks, taller and straighter than anybody else. And I walked with my arm around her.

  We walked all the way to the Tourist Office. Then we stopped a minute and looked at the photo of San Pablo with all the houses of our town, pink and turquoise and pale green, and behind them the blue lake and volcanoes and the high, rocky cliffs.

  My grandmother looked at the writing under the picture. She touched it with her hand.

  “What does it say?” she asked.

  I read it to her. “ ‘The Most Beautiful Place in the World.’ ”

  My grandmother looked surprised.

  I started to wonder if San Pablo really was the most beautiful place in the world. I wasn’t sure my grandmother had ever been anyplace else, but I still thought she’d know.

  “Grandma,” I said, “is it?”

  “Is it what?” she said.

  “Is San Pablo the most beautiful place in the world?”

  My grandmother made a little face.

  “The most beautiful place in the world,” she said, “is anyplace.”

  “Anyplace?” I repeated.

  “Anyplace you can hold your head up.

  Anyplace you can be proud of who you are.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  But I thought, where you love somebody a whole lot, and you know that person loves you, that’s the most beautiful place in the world.

  Also by Ann Cameron

  Julian, that quick fibber and wishful thinker, is great at telling stories. He can make people—especially his younger brother, Huey—believe just about anything. Like the one about the catalog cats that come in the mail. And the one about the fig leaves that make you grow tall if you eat them off the tree.

  But some stories can lead to a heap of trouble, and that’s exactly where Julian and Huey end up all too often!

  ISBN: 0-394-82892-5

  Available now from Yearling Books

  Also by Ann Cameron

  The star of The Stones Julian Tells is back, and he has more great tales to tell. There’s the one about the day so hot, even frogs wore shoes. And the one about the time his best friend, Gloria, really made the sun move. Sometimes, though, Julian’s way with words can backfire. At least that’s what happens when he calls his brother, Huey, a name—and their father overhears.

  How can a few little stories get him into so much trouble? And when will he ever learn to talk his way out of it?

  ISBN: 0-394-82454-7

  Available now from Yearling Books

  Also by Ann Cameron

  It isn’t easy being Julian’s younger brother. When Huey has bad dreams, Julian says his are even scarier. When Huey’s trout dinner is served whole, with a big, sad eye staring straight at him, Julian reminds him that he has to eat it all. And when Huey wants to study animal tracks, Julian says he’s too young.

  But Huey isn’t a little kid. He’s an adventurer, a chef, a tracker, and a scout. And he’s about to show Julian—and the world—all that he can do.

  ISBN: 0-679-88559-5

  Available now from Yearling Books

  Also by Ann Cameron

  Huey is now a match for his big brother, Julian, and he’s not going to be pushed around. Not if he can help it, anyway. He’s got sunflowers to save, basketball shots to make, and fifteen billion stars to count—with or without his brother by his side.

  But some problems can’t be solved alone, no matter how brave you are. And when a treasure hunt leaves Huey trapped at the bottom of a crumbling mine, it’ll take more than Julian to help him escape.

  The narrator of The Stories Huey Tells returns with five new adventures and plenty of trouble. Look out, world, here comes Huey!

  ISBN: 0-679-88363-0

  Available now from Yearling Books