Here is Faith's essay for Lesson 4.
"Write a comparative essay about the roles Tom and El Patron play in Matt's life. Do you think they are both equally dangerous to Matt?"
In Nancy Farmer’s novel House of the Scorpion, the main character, a boy named Matteo Alacrán, lives in a very sheltered environment. He mostly only interacts with the same few people and hardly ever meets anyone new. Two of these people are Tom, a boy Matt’s age, and El Patrón, the elderly drug lord whom Matt was cloned from. Matt hates Tom and loves El Patrón, however, both characters seem immoral, and even downright evil, based on what we, the readers, have seen and what other characters have said about them, and both seem quite dangerous to young Matt, and a negative influence on his life.
Both characters act charming while hiding a more despicable personality on the inside, Tom slightly more so than El Patrón. Tom acts like a sweet little boy on the surface, but underneath is a lying, evil, and all around horrible kid, attempting to drown a dog in a toilet, nailing frogs to the ground by their feet, and constantly taunting Matt with insults. He’s an “unnatural little weevil,” as Matt’s bodyguard, Tam Lin, put it. El Patrón might seem like a jolly old man at first glance, but in reality is commanding, greedy, possessive, and even slightly sadistic. He doesn’t love in the traditional sense, instead treating people like objects in his possession. “Once El Patrón decides something belongs to him, he never lets it go,” as the character Celia said.
However, there are several differences between these characters, one being in their relationships with Matt. Tom and Matt have a mutual animosity for each other, while El Patrón treats Matt as one would a prizewinning pet, even referring to him as his “little fighting cock,” and Matt seems to hold El Patrón as a sort of role model, despite other characters’ warnings about the old man. Matt also only sees El Patrón once a year, on the celebration for both of them on the elder’s birthday, while living in the same house as Tom and seeing him nearly every day. Other differences lie in their general personalities, as El Patrón only seems to care for himself, with little thought of other people at all, while Tom acts almost exclusively out of jealousy, specifically wanting all to himself the object of both his and Matt’s affection, a girl named María.
In conclusion, I believe that both Tom and El Patrón are quite dangerous to Matt, both with their behaviors influencing Matt’s and things they may do to physically harm him. However, since Tom is more active in Matt’s life, interacting with him almost every day as opposed to El Patrón’s only seeing his clone once a year, I believe that Tom would have to be the most dangerous person in Matt’s life.
