School For Patriots Page 6

  Now comes the second part of the inspection. She is barely able to maintain her recently recovered composure, and still cannot understand what happened to her. Perhaps, she tells herself, it was sudden low pressure, one of those momentary blackouts that occur when someone bends down too quickly – or more correctly, when someone straightens up again too quickly after having bent down. María Teresa thinks that is what it must have been, her sugar levels must be low: she decides she will make herself a nice cup of lemon tea as soon as she gets back to the assistants’ room.

  These reflections help calm her, but the Head of Discipline has called out for the second part of the inspection to begin, and that is enough to fluster her again. Checking the length of hair is also far easier with the girls: it is enough to cast a cursory overall glance to make sure they are wearing hairbands and slides, that their hair is tied neatly, that everything is as it should be. The boys’ hair, however, demands much closer attention. The regulation states it must be no less than four centimetres above their shirt collar: this distance is usually measured by the width of two fingers of a normal adult hand. In many cases this is quite clear, because the nape of the boy’s neck is completely shaven, and looks like a field burnt by fire. There can be no possible doubt. Nor is there any when locks of hair are so long they brush the shirt collar, or worse still, are actually touching it. In these cases also the offence is obvious. Between these two extremes, however, there is a fairly wide range of ambiguous cases, which are hard to resolve at a simple glance, and require the measurement of the distance between the hair and the boy’s shirt collar. María Teresa is not happy about touching any of the boys’ necks at the moment. She does not feel up to it. She thinks about it and does not want to, so she examines their haircuts with suppressed anxiety. She is genuinely relieved to find that Baragli’s hair is clearly too long: she will not have to go any closer to him.

  —Your hair needs cutting, Baragli.

  —Yes, Miss.

  She writes in her register: ‘Baragli: haircut.’ The same goes for Cascardo, Bosnic, Tapia and Zimenspitz. There are no dubious cases until she comes to Valenzuela. Valenzuela, the last in the line. The pupils are trying the same sly tricks as always: leaning their heads forwards, pulling the collar down behind, in an attempt to reach the four centimetres demanded by the regulation. Valenzuela is bound to try to do so, he is in fact wriggling around, but without success. María Teresa watches and calculates, hoping she will not have to intervene. But it is by no means certain she will be able to fit her two fingers in between his hairline and collar. Possibly yes, possibly no. And María Teresa cannot run that risk. If later on, or even during the inspection itself, the Head of Discipline or Señor Biasutto were to discover the infringement, as the assistant for third year class ten she would be responsible for the oversight. She is forced therefore to carry out the measurement as stipulated in the regulation, by placing two fingers on the back of Valenzuela’s neck. The good thing about him being the tallest, and so the last in the line, is that none of the others will see what she is doing: no-one will be a direct witness. María Teresa goes up to Valenzuela. She will have to raise her hand a little to reach the back of his neck: it is imperative that when she does so it should not tremble, or that if it does, there is no way he can notice. She finally places two fingers on the pupil’s nape. The skin is warm, and touching it feels strange. It is covered by a sort of down that is not exactly hair, although there is nothing else it could be, which makes the skin soft to the touch. Her two fingers: the index and the middle finger of her right hand, on Valenzuela’s neck.

  Her index finger is not touching the curls that cover Valenzuela’s head like a wig, as if they were not part of him. María Teresa cannot hurry the procedure, quickly brush against his neck then remove her fingers as if she had come into contact with an electric cable or a pan full of boiling water. She must not let her anxiety show; she has to measure the gap calmly and make up her mind in her own time. So the contact between them lasts for one or two seconds, perhaps three. Only then does she withdraw her fingers from the nape of Valenzuela’s neck. She is certain now that there is no need to sanction or warn the pupil.

  —All right, Valenzuela. But don’t let it grow any longer.

  María Teresa is out of sorts for the rest of the day. At times she feels annoyed; at others distressed. She cannot wait to get home. As she travels in the metro, the darkness of the tunnel leaves her claustrophobic, as if there were no air. But although she was desperate to arrive home, once she is there she does not feel any better. Her mother’s company is not much help: she spends hours on end watching television, and occasionally has the radio on at the same time. Bombarded with speculation rather than actual news, she has become an unrecognised expert in diplomacy and international negotiation. When nine o’clock comes round and it is time for supper, María Teresa has no appetite. She is not hungry at all. Her stomach churns, she feels revolted by the food. She stares at the tiny piece of chicken on her plate. To her eyes it looks like an extraordinary mess of torn flesh and indigestible bones: something difficult enough to contemplate, let alone eat. The mother says she should try anyway, arguing that a nauseous feeling often comes from not having tasted anything in a long while, and that the sickness will disappear as soon as she takes her first mouthful. Persuaded by the argument, María Teresa lifts a forkful of food to her mouth. She chews it for several minutes, but finds it hard to swallow. When she finally forces herself to do so, it is simply so that she can stop chewing. She leaves the rest of the chicken on her plate. Says she is going to bed.

  —Without having a bath?

  The idea of taking a bath repels her as much as eating. All she wants to do is to go to bed and close her eyes, to be sleeping already, to be asleep. She leaves the mother eating alone, shaking her head, while she undresses and takes refuge in her bed so that she can finally sleep. But she cannot. The very desire to plunge into sleep is what keeps her awake. She is unable to find sleep. At best, she reaches the threshold of falling asleep, as if she were rehearsing what it meant to sleep, but it is impossible for her to escape the waking world, and so she finds herself once more with her eyes wide open, the brightness filtering through the shutters hurting her eyes. Images flit through her mind: perhaps she really has fallen asleep and they are part of a dream, perhaps they are a trick her mind plays (a trick that will not let her sleep or which as soon as she does so, wakes her up again). These images jumble together Baragli’s leg and the back of Valenzuela’s neck; the two merge together to produce very odd combinations (for example, a nape with leg hair, or a shinbone with the down from the back of a neck, or two fingers stretching out to touch a leg). María Teresa appeals to the resource which ever since she was a little girl has helped her get to sleep peacefully and feel calm and protected; tonight though not even the rosary clutched in her hand brings her the peace she needs.

  Weary from her insomnia, she decides to get up. She finds the mother sitting staring at the television, with all the lights off. The bluish light from the set gives the room a strange hazy glow.

  —What are you watching?

  —The news.

  She sits in the other armchair and starts to watch as well. At first she cannot concentrate: her mind wanders to other things (for example, whether or not they will ever get a colour television), so that it takes her several minutes to realise that the strange quality of the news bulletin is not due, as she had thought, to her lack of sleep or the odd time she is watching it, but because there is no sound: wordless images, pure gesticulation.

  —Don’t you want to hear what they are saying?

  —They always say the same.

  —But if you’re watching it, don’t you want to hear what they’re saying?

  —When I want to listen, I switch on the radio.

  On the screen a singer is clutching a microphone. He is singing with his eyes tight shut, but his mouth opens and closes in an exaggerated fashion. The lack of any sound makes it seem a
s though he is pulling faces. At the bottom of the screen is a strap-line that reads: ‘Festival of Solidarity’. Every so often the camera cuts to views of small Argentinian flags being waved in the air. Then the news presenter comes on. He is not one of the star presenters – they are always on the main eight o’clock programme; in the middle of the night they use a less important figure, either a young person just starting out, or an old man about to take retirement. The next item is an interview with a black-bearded youth who is talking to the journalist, a thoughtful expression on his face.

  —Who is he?

  —I don’t know; a singer, I think.

  A sign appears at the foot of the screen: ‘Julio Villa’.

  —Ah, no. I thought it was Gianfranco Pagliaro, but it isn’t.

  The following images indicate that Julio Villa is a footballer. He is seen controlling a ball, then kicking it, wearing a shirt with sky-blue and white stripes.

  —He plays for Argentina, doesn’t he?

  —It looks like it.

  María Teresa dozes off in the armchair as the news programme ends and a film comes on (Argentinian cinema from the 1940s: the mother does not bother to increase the volume now either). María Teresa falls asleep without realizing it, overcome partly by tiredness, partly by boredom. The mother decides not to wake her up, in case moving her brings back her insomnia. Instead she fetches a blanket and covers her, taking care not to disturb her.

  María Teresa wakes before sun-up. She has shooting pains in her neck and back. For the first time ever, she wishes she did not have to go to school. Of course she does not take the idea seriously; she knows she will go in, but this is the first day she has felt she would prefer not to go, that she would like to keep her distance from that world where she has to take the register, make sure the pupils line up properly, carry the text books, punish any infringements, stay permanently vigilant, avoid any lax behaviour, clean the blackboard, provide chalk, keep the school authorities informed, safeguard the school’s proud tradition.

  She is tired when she arrives at school, already wishing the day were over when it has barely begun. She can feel the lack of sleep in the way her eyes smart and her knees are creaking. Even the least insistent voices sound cavernous to her, as if they are echoing round a large room, and it is this echo that catches her attention more than what they are saying. When she takes the register for third year class ten, it is as though she were hearing their surnames for the first time, and more than once she confuses ‘Present’ for ‘Absent’. Fortunately her bad day is not made worse by any extra complications: Calcagno is wearing nylon socks, Valenzuela’s are blue, Baragli, Bosnic, Cascardo, Tapia and Zimenspitz have had haircuts, and Valenzuela has taken the precaution of having his cut too. Capelán appears to have forgotten about Marré when they step apart in the quad. None of the teachers is absent: Miss Pesotto teaches Physics for the first two periods; the third and fourth are Latin with Mr Schulz; Mr Ilundain comes for the fifth lesson, which is Spanish, and the sixth is Geography, taught by Miss Carballo. María Teresa’s tiredness helps her ignore Baragli and whatever he may be up to. Apart from verifying that he has had a haircut, she pays him no attention all afternoon. She carries out her inspection of the toilets from a sense of professional pride, reluctantly and with no real expectations, but discovers nothing new. She hardly sees Señor Biasutto all day, and this somehow unsettles her. The supervisor is holding constant meetings with the Head of Discipline and the Deputy Headmaster – perhaps in order to finalise the details of the patriotic celebrations soon to be held on 25 May, Independence Day, and so is hardly to be seen in the assistants’ room or in the quads at break-time. Her exchanges with him do not go beyond a superficial greeting from afar; although she would like to, she has nothing to report. The day ends with the habitual singing of the ‘Aurora’ anthem while the Argentinian flag is lowered and folded in the central quad. The pupils, who usually do no more than murmur the words of patriotic songs, including the national anthem, now sing them with greater determination and much clearer diction. They can be heard singing out loud, rather than as usual leaving everything to the recorded soprano voice playing over the loudspeakers. They sing: ‘High in the sky/ A warrior eagle/ Proudly rises/ In triumphant flight.’

  For some reason María Teresa cannot even explain to herself, she completes her daily duties, but instead of heading for home at the first opportunity, finds excuses to stay on in the school. This is hard to understand, because today more than any other she had no desire to come to work, and would have preferred to have stayed in bed and do nothing; if she did come in it was out of her clear sense of duty and responsibility. She has done her work as required because she feels she has no other choice: it is part of the education she has received and the values she believes in. By now it is almost half-past six: the pupils of third year class ten have all left, the other class assistants as well, and she herself has finished everything she had to do – she has filed the attendance sheet, checked the teachers’ signatures, made sure there was enough chalk in her classroom (which at ten past seven the next morning will be occupied by third year class five). She can go home whenever she wishes, she could be out in the street by now, she could be approaching the metro. Yet she stays on. Just as she had not wanted to come to school in the morning, now she has no wish to go home, and so she lingers. It does not occur to her to go somewhere else, anywhere else, apart from her own home. The idea does not even occur to her. Her range of choices is much simpler: she does not want to go home, so she remains at the school. Objectively, there is no reason for her still to be there, so she invents her own excuses to postpone the moment of departure. She checks registers she has already checked, reads the teachers’ subject notes, files cards on punishments already carried out, puts pieces of chalk away in cardboard boxes, unrolls maps of Asia and Africa, only to roll them up again.

  At ten to seven, she leaves the assistants’ room. The school appears deserted. None of the third year forms have been kept back for the seventh hour, so there is absolutely no-one in the cloister. María Teresa is on the point of leaving: it could almost be said she is forcing herself to do so. She is going to leave, but wants to make one last detour. The shortest way out would take her towards the stairs at the end of the corridor, the ones next to the Headmaster’s study. Without understanding why, today she decides to go down the staircase in the block furthest from her, the stairs by the library. To do so she has to cross the whole school: first her own quad, then past the tuck shop, the toilets, reach the other quad and cross that one too. Only then will she reach the staircase she wants.

  The tuck shop is closed, and therefore shows what it really is: a kiosk made of corrugated iron. María Teresa comes to a halt outside it, as if she wants to inspect it. After a moment though she is more honest with herself, and looks behind her: nobody there. She looks in the opposite direction: no-one there either.

  The silence inside the school is complete: there are not even any sounds in the distance. María Teresa lays one hand on the solid wood of the green swing doors. It would only take a slight push to open one side. She feels strangely calm, almost happy. She looks down at her hand on the door of the boys’ toilet, and her hand transmits a certainty, a decision: she is going to open that door and go in.

  6

  The toilet door creaks as it swings open. During the day, when the cloisters are noisy with footsteps and conversations, the sound goes unnoticed. But now in the total silence the door emits a squeaking noise that sounds almost like an accusation. Already with one foot in the boys’ toilet, María Teresa pokes her head inside. This is enough to make her senses spin. As sometimes happens in films, it is as if she has leapt into an unreal world: a world with different laws (gravity or child-free, for example), or a world in another time, where things are the same but have a different meaning. Despite this sudden transformation, she manages to take a very sensible precaution: instead of letting go the swing door after she has stepped inside, allowing it to sw
ing back into position of its own accord, she keeps her hand on it, and eases it back alongside the other one, so that it does not protrude into the corridor and become visible to any prying eye.

  In the same way as the quads, the toilet has glazed tiles up to a certain height, which María Teresa calculates must be about two metres; above that, the walls are painted as far as the distant ceilings. The only difference is that the colours in here are brighter: the tiles are ochre-coloured rather than dark green, the walls are painted a light yellow or white. There are four windows in the far wall. They are very high up, and are as firmly shut as all the other windows in the school. To open any of them you need one of the long metal poles with a special hook on the end which have to be fetched from the janitor’s office (following written authorization by the Head of Discipline). María Teresa concludes that any smoke produced by clandestine smoking in the toilet could not drift out through them, and that they would not permit any welcome renewal of the air in the atmosphere by allowing a fresh breeze to enter. No opportunity for concealment there. But as she peers round her, she also concludes that the space is so big, the walls so distant and the ceiling so high, that if there were any smoke from black tobacco floating in the air, it would soon disperse and become diluted, and that this would greatly reduce any chance of her detecting it. She cannot decide which of these contradictory factors would be more important if the case arose. Even now that she is no longer sniffing the toilet from outside, but has boldly gone in, she is unable to say with any certainty just what smell predominates. It is definitely not that of black tobacco, either in the foreground or underneath the rest; but it does not seem clearly to be that of other toilets either – the smells of human waste, or even that of bleach used to clean it at the end of the day.

  Against the far wall, but not directly opposite the entrance, there are five cubicles separated from one another by thin partitions. Each of these cubicles also has a door painted green. Everything about them is on a smaller scale: the doors do not come to the ground, and the walls do not reach the ceiling. They are enclosed areas, aimed at protecting a certain intimacy, but they are not entirely private, sealed off from one another. On the floor of each there is a white ceramic base. In the centre of this base is a hole, made doubly dark because it is surrounded by whiteness, and in the front part are two feet-shaped outlines that are ridged to prevent anyone slipping. María Teresa peers inside one of the cubicles: it is the first time she has seen any installation of this kind. She imagines what it must be like to use the toilet, and thinks it must be difficult to keep one’s balance, hard not to topple backwards while bending down far enough to defecate without soiling the clothes around one’s ankles. It seems to her very uncomfortable, and very demanding as regards directing one’s aim. There is one way in which the boys’ toilet is similar to the girls’: the separation of these relatively private spaces. This confirms to her that everyone wishes to be completely alone to carry out certain functions. Apart from this, the girls’ toilets are different because they have a toilet bowl in which to relieve themselves. Somewhat primitive ones it is true, and some of them lacking not only the lid but also the seat to sit on; still, they are much more modern and adequate than this other kind of toilet she has stumbled across. The boys must find it difficult to stay upright, and often miss the target. Completely lacking experience in the matter, María Teresa speculates about this in the abstract, and yet her deductions are correct. She proves this by peering inside another cubicle and finding a situation that is far from hygienic. This is not what is important to her, however; it is not what she is looking for. Struggling with her disgust, she searches for any trace of a cigarette butt trodden on the floor, or any sign of ashes. She carefully examines all round, but can find nothing. She looks inside every possible hiding place, but discovers no clues. Only two of the toilets are still dirty; the other three are fine, with no sign of being used. She steps into one of the clean ones. She feels the same strange mix of determination and doubt as she experienced when she entered the toilet in the first place. Once inside, she closes the door. She draws the bolt – the door is locked. She immediately calculates to what extent it offers her privacy. On the one hand, she is completely on her own, safe from anyone’s prying eyes behind the locked cubicle door. On the other, she can see that the door only reaches down to her knees, and there are no roof or walls to contain any noises.