School For Patriots Read online

  —Very good. Collect your things.

  The pupils start leaving the room. María Teresa stands in the doorway to supervise them. Her position allows her simultaneously to monitor the cloister and the classroom, the pupils who have already left as well as those who have not yet done so. Of course, it also means they all have to pass quite close to her. One or two even brush against her (without meaning to) with their satchel or a blazer sleeve. When Baragli goes by, he does not look at her. Strangely or not (she cannot make up her mind), he does not even glance at her. He goes by quickly, apparently oblivious to everything apart from the floor and his shoes. As he passes by, however, the smell he gives off brings memories flooding into her mind. All of a sudden, María Teresa finds herself transported back to evenings in her childhood home. It takes her a few seconds to realise it is her father she is remembering: her father after supper, when she was a little girl, when they lived in a house with a back garden and flowerbeds. Startled by the association, it takes a little longer for her to link Baragli passing by with an identical smell from those long-lost nights, and to identify it as the smell of black tobacco. Her father used to smoke that kind of cigarette, which came in gold- and green-striped packets; nowadays they are not so common, but you can still buy them. Every night, the smell of the spirals of smoke filled her childhood home because they were part of an unalterable ritual. And now, as he went by her, Baragli brought this smell back to her, or rather brought her back to the smell, with the result that she stands lost in thought, or lost for thought, in the doorway, at the edge of the end of the day.

  When she leaves the school shortly afterwards, and later still as she is travelling on the metro, she cannot free herself from what has just taken place in her memory, which is acting exactly as a smell usually does: something which sticks to your clothes or in your nostrils, and which lasts beyond any rational calculation. She is dismayed at first to find she is so susceptible, to discover that a mere incident at school can affect her so much, even hurt her. Then she is also upset to realise how long her unease is lasting: she passes one station after another, leaving the school and what occurred there increasingly far behind, yet in spite of this she cannot escape from the world that sprang up out of that simple fleeting smell: the world of that house, the garden, the flowerbeds, night, childhood, her father, tobacco, the smell of smoke, Baragli.

  She manages to recover her composure only when she is able to see the incident from the point of view of her function: that of assistant to third year class ten. She should have seen it this way from the start, but it is only now she becomes aware of it. From the standpoint of the assistant in charge of discipline for her form, there is another reason for this incident to worry her. It is both simple and obvious, but until the moment she thinks of it in this way, it had completely escaped her: if the pupil Baragli, at seven in the evening no less, passed by her reeking of tobacco, that must mean he was smoking, and smoking not only inside the school, but during class hours.

  María Teresa is pleased with her deductions. She does not reproach herself for not having done so earlier, at the very moment she should have done. Rather than blaming herself for anything, she congratulates herself. Everything else is simply a question of time: this is what she decides. That is because at this precise moment, this evening, in this gloomy tunnel beneath the city, she takes the crucial decision about what will be her most important task over the coming days: to catch Baragli, and those who are behaving like him, in the act of breaking the rules: in other words, as is commonly said, and as she herself thinks of it, to catch them in flagrante.

  And so when Señor Biasutto comes up to her one quiet afternoon in the assistants’ room and somewhat to her surprise reminds her that they still have a matter to discuss, María Teresa prefers not to mention the original episode she intended to bring up – the suggestive way in which Dreiman was leaning against Baragli on the pavement outside the school when she saw them, or to inform him of her most persistent concern, which is that there are pupils who take advantage of the stepping-apart manoeuvre to slyly touch each other in prohibited ways. Instead, she refers to this more recent and much more serious infraction, namely that she strongly suspects, in fact is almost sure, that there are pupils who are finding a way to smoke during school hours, on the school premises. Señor Biasutto, who was listening to her standing up, comes and sits next to her.

  —I’m extremely interested in what you’re saying.

  María Teresa is relieved to hear this, then finds that her relief quickly changes to enthusiasm; and shortly afterwards, that her enthusiasm has turned into a sense of pride. Señor Biasutto, the supervisor in charge of all the assistants, is pleased with her work. He agrees with her, listens to her, thinks her suspicions are well-founded and worth taking into account.

  It may be that in other schools this kind of transgression is admissible, or is even seen as commonplace: that pupils hide in the toilets to smoke is a cliché. But the National School aims to be an exception, even in a matter such as this. Señor Biasutto speaks with the authority of all the time he has been in his post, and his quiet pride in the work he has been able to achieve. He has years of experience, and it is out of this experience (as if he were up on the raised platform the teachers occupy to give their lessons) that he now talks to María Teresa. She is the newest assistant, and yet despite this she has shown (and he should know) the most remarkable aptitude for her work.

  Señor Biasutto tells her these have been the most difficult years for both school and country. A period that fortunately appears to have been left behind, although to count on this would be the worst mistake imaginable. María Teresa thinks this might be the moment to ask him about the lists, to ask him how he drew them up; in the end, however, she does not have the courage, and says nothing. Señor Biasutto has come up with a comparison: subversion, he explains to her as a newcomer, is like a cancer. A cancer which first affects one organ, for example, the youth of a country, infecting it with violence and foreign ideas; but soon the cancer spreads, goes into what is known as metastasis, and although the effects may be less serious, they still have to be fought against, because the roots of cancer are still there, and cancer is not defeated until all traces of it have been cut out. Señor Biasutto slowly strokes his dark moustache, as if remembering. The time has gone, he says, when we had to uncover illegal activities and seize highly dangerous material (One of these days, he whispers in María Teresa’s ear, I’ll show you some of it: I’ve kept it all in a file on ‘ideological infiltration’). Like the country, our school has been able triumphantly to leave those days behind, but what use would it be to have got rid of the cancer if we do not continue to keep a close lookout for any chance that it might have left traces?

  Señor Biasutto makes a movement, but does not complete it, which leaves María Teresa perplexed. She might have understood it if he had gone through with it: she thinks it was intended as a move to lay the firm, wise hand of the irreproachable, experienced supervisor on her newcomer’s arm. But his hand comes to a halt in mid-air, as if overtaken by amnesia. At the same time, he launches into another comparison: subversion is a body, but it is also a spirit. Because a spirit survives and can be reincarnated in another body. What does smoking in the school toilets mean? Señor Biasutto pauses, but María Teresa has understood that this is a rhetorical question. At another time, or even in another school, he says in answer to himself, it is no more than a bit of mischief: the typical mischief of wayward adolescence. But at this moment, and in this school, it is something else: it is the spirit of subversion returning to threaten us.

  Señor Biasutto smooths down his hair with both hands, pleased because he feels he has expressed exactly what he meant to say. He knows María Teresa is starting to admire him, perhaps even before she realises it herself.

  4

  Her mother cries more frequently than ever now, sobbing and choking. Throughout the day, but especially in the morning, the radio browbeats its listeners with milita
ry marches. Another postcard has arrived from Francisco. The same picture as before: a panorama of the Obelisk in Buenos Aires. It could have been another similar photograph, but in fact it is exactly the same one. María Teresa proves it by comparing the red bus going round the base of the Obelisk. The same photo and the same joke: pretending he is far away, or that they, his mother and sister, are far off, so that this card from Buenos Aires would suggest travel. On the back, Francisco has also repeated the same phrase as before: ‘I can’t seem to make friends.’

  Francisco must have written these words on the table of some makeshift barracks, probably, but incorrectly, called a ‘canteen’, and used another postcard from a pack bought by the dozen. Since what was important for him was to make a joke, rather than that they should find it funny, he sees no problem in repeating that too. It is obvious he is amusing himself rather than trying to give his mother or sister any pleasure. What he does not imagine, or take into account, is that the postal service is also involved, and that as a result his note is considerably delayed. By the time María Teresa takes the letter from the kitchen table, when it is opened and read with unnecessary anxiety, the joke he was making has become true: he is a long way off. He is not on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in Villa Martelli now. He has been transferred. Without warning or explanation (and no reason why they should give them) he and the others were ordered to collect their things, fill their packs, and to form up on the parade ground. From there they were told to climb up onto the backs of several snub-nosed trucks, sheltered only by some poorly-tied tarpaulins. They were not going far, although it was not close by either: to a place called Azul. It took hours for them to get there.

  María Teresa tries to comfort her mother, who mostly listens but does not hear her, or else hears but does not understand, or even understands but does not believe her, with a simple but obviously inadequate explanation: that although it is true that Azul is south of Buenos Aires, it is not in the south of Argentina. María Teresa has looked at a map: she found one at school, because although year three does not do the geography of Argentina, year five does. Azul is in Buenos Aires province, more or less in the middle, further north than the sudden hills of the Sierra de la Ventana, and above all far, very far, from the sea. The mother bursts into tears anyway and wonders what on earth will happen next.

  At school the top priority is to maintain discipline and keep the pupils focused on their work. This does not mean that the possible outcomes of the events going on outside are ignored. In fact, the Deputy Headmaster has ordered that everyone, pupils and staff, must wear the blue-and-white Argentinian rosette in their lapels. However, in a place of study, that is what must be the top priority. The afternoon when, for some unknown reason, the siren on the La Prensa newspaper building went off (which, because of its proximity to the school, sounded as if were coming over the cloister loudspeakers), there were groans and a vague fear that the city was being bombarded. The expression on the faces of even the teachers, or perhaps above all of the teachers, changed to one of studied concern or outright fear, when they heard a sound they had previously only encountered in films. That afternoon, the La Prensa siren blared out for almost a minute, without anyone ever discovering why: whether it had gone off accidentally or was being tested. Usually, the only sound capable of penetrating the school’s thick, historic walls and the hermetic sealing of the constantly closed windows is the ringing of the bell signalling exactly each hour, half hour, a quarter past and a quarter to the hour, from the former city hall tower, which plays the exact same tune as Big Ben in London. Apart from this meticulous measurement of the passage of time from only a block away from the school, the days in the building flow by as though it were not situated in the heart of the city of Buenos Aires, but in the middle of a desert.

  Nothing making a noise outside succeeds in resonating within the school. But the siren of La Prensa in the famous tower that adds so much lustre to Avenida de Mayo sounded as if it were coming from right inside. Worse still, inside the school everyone fell silent, waiting for what was going to happen next. The sound lasted for almost a minute. Then there was silence once more, and nothing happened. Nothing. There was a smattering of nervous laughter, something almost unheard of in the school. Even some of the teachers laughed, or perhaps especially the teachers did so. Following that minute, lessons resumed as though nothing had occurred; no-one imagined there could be any other possibility, and in fact there was none. It was only during Rosa’s dictatorship, the worst tragedy in the entire nineteenth-century history of Argentina, that teaching in the school had been interrupted, and nothing similar could ever be allowed to happen, not even for a single day.

  María Teresa starts carrying out her plan to keep a watch on the toilets during the school breaks. Normally the assistants roam the cloisters at random, while the students spend the time chatting, going over their work, or taking the opportunity to buy something to eat from the tuck shops situated on every floor of the school. As she strolls around observing the pupils, María Teresa still gives the appearance of not going anywhere in particular: a few steps down this way, then back that way, as is typical of any patrol. In fact, though, her route is no longer entirely random: she is concentrating above all on that part of the cloister on the second floor which houses the toilets. There are two of them on each floor, one for girls and one for boys. Each toilet has two doors, one at each end. The doors have two green-painted wooden leaves that swing open and closed, like the ones in the Westerns she sees on Saturday evening television. Swing doors that do not reach the ground but only about as far as the pupils’ thighs. They have to be pushed open with the shoulder or by using a hand, and then swing back and forth as their name suggests, slowly subsiding until they come to rest exactly opposite each other.

  María Teresa focuses on the boys’ toilet. If, as she suspects, there are pupils smoking at school, this must be where they do it. The assistants always walk along slowly, calmly, but in a determined fashion. She usually speeds up a little when she goes past the toilet doors: she will have to make sure she no longer does that. Without coming to a halt (which would be improper) she has to pause outside the doors in order to be able to detect what she wants to detect. She looks down at the ground: the last thing she needs is for it to seem as though she is peering inside the boys’ toilet – something which, given the way the swing doors flap, would be quite possible. No, she does not want to look inside, but to sniff out whether the school regulations are being flouted in the secrecy of the toilets. This would of course be easier for a male assistant, because he could go inside, but María Teresa has no wish to share her suspicions with any male colleague, with Marcelo or Leonardo, or Alberto. She wants to be the one who discovers the culprit, and can present the case as solved for Señor Biasutto’s doubtless admiring consideration.

  A strong smell of bleach always wafts out of the toilets. Even though it is almost chokingly strong, it is a clean smell. As the school day progresses, this smell naturally fades, due to the continual use of the toilets and the passage of time, and yet it is never completely covered by the kind of toilet smells always present in trains or certain bars. At most, by the end of the day there is a kind of neutral situation, suggesting neither hygiene nor the lack of it: in other words, there is the smell of nothing, or the complete lack of any smell.

  However that may be, there is never anything – either at the start, the middle, or the end of the school day – that suggests the smell of black tobacco. There is no lingering trace that a pupil may have lit a cigarette in the relative privacy of the cubicles, breathing in the smoke and then puffing it out, or blowing it out without even drawing it into his lungs, as happens with many adolescents who smoke, or think they do. After her father, Francisco was the only person María Teresa has seen smoking close by her.