School For Patriots Read online

  María Teresa tries out what the boys must have to do: she puts her feet on the ridged outlines and bends as if she were going to sit down, although the lack of a seat means she has to remain crouching in mid-air. She discovers that one possible way of gaining stability is by stretching her hands out to the side walls and pushing against them. All of a sudden she feels exhausted, and her legs begin to tremble. This could of course be due to her lack of sleep the previous night. The hole beneath her, or rather behind her, repels and attracts her at the same time. Of course it is a place for filth, and yet simply because of their shape these holes are mysterious: they have the form of mysteries. And María Teresa realises for the first time that boys are not like girls: their bodies are different. This is obvious, but she had never thought of it before. Any female – herself, for example – could crouch down in this complicated fashion and simultaneously perform the two necessary bodily functions. Males though (this much she does know) have a round floppy thing on their front (she has never seen one, but knows they do, because everybody knows that), and so she finds it impossible to explain how a boy could carry out both bodily necessities at the same time, aiming them both at the mystery of this hole where everything disappears.

  Writing on the toilet walls in the National School of Buenos Aires is strictly forbidden. The walls seem clean in that respect. In other public toilets, for example, those in bars or bus stations, it is common to see all kinds of inscriptions, many of them extremely rude. María Teresa remembers one instance from her childhood, in a toilet at the Río Cuarto bus terminal, when she was going for six days’ holiday in the trade union hotel at Villa Giardino. Their bus stopped for forty minutes in Río Cuarto so that they could have dinner. When María Teresa asked to use the toilet, her mother did not accompany her, merely pointing to a scuffed door and stuffing a damp wad of toilet paper into her pocket. María Teresa went in and sat down, and while she was silently relieving herself tried out her newfound skill of reading whole phrases. Most of the slogans scrawled on the wall were attacking General Onganía or supporting Boca Juniors football club. This was in 1969: in May there had been widespread political demonstrations in Córdoba, and in December Boca Juniors had won the national championship. In the midst of these phrases, though, she found another, smaller one, written in black ink that was perfectly visible to anyone looking for it. It simply read: ‘I lick cunts’, and beneath it was a telephone number. Even at that age, she knew what that word meant, although her mother never used it and she was forbidden to ever say it. It was a word men used. If necessary, women had to refer to ‘vagina’, but it was better to avoid any reference to the topic at all. María Teresa was shocked to find this male word inside the women’s toilet; she was worried it might be possible for a man to come in and find her there, with her knickers round her knees and her mother a long way off. She dried herself hurriedly, and rushed out of the toilet. She was impeded at every step by unforeseen obstacles, as if in a nightmare: the door would not open, she slipped on the floor, two big fat ladies prevented her leaving, she could not see her mother or brother.

  Now, many years later, María Teresa remembers this episode, perhaps because she is a woman who has entered the boys’ toilet. Of course she is there because she is the class assistant for third year form ten, and there is at least one pupil in the class, by the name of Baragli (but possibly more), who is smoking at school, which means he or they must be doing it in these toilets. Despite her association, the toilet walls here are impeccably clean. Nobody writes on them, there are no phrases or drawings to offend anyone, partly because the teaching at the school discourages that kind of thing, and partly because the glazed surface of the tiles makes any writing on them not only extremely difficult but means they can easily be erased by wiping them with a damp cloth.

  On the wooden door, however, María Teresa can see scratches. At first sight these seem to be random cracks in the wood, splits caused simply by the passage of time. When she looks more closely, however, it becomes evident that these shapes are not fortuitous, that they have been made by a human hand, that these lines and curves once formed or were intended to form letters, and that these letters combined to make words. Looking more closely still, María Teresa realises they were dug into the wood, perhaps with a penknife or possibly, considering implements more directly related to the school environment, by the metal point of a compass, and not something simply produced by the contraction or wear and tear of the wood itself. Someone once wrote something on this door, and did not do so with ink or lead pencil. It was not done with anything that could be wiped off, but by a more drastic intervention, in the hope of making it indelible, like an engraving or carving: removing slivers of wood from the door, gouging them out, getting rid of them, in order to create words and phrases. In vain: the answer the school authorities came up with was to paint the doors again, smoothing over the surface of the incised wood and removing once and for all the existence of the slogan someone or other had written. The perfect solution: a coat or two of the same green paint, and the words disappeared forever.

  And yet, as the years went by, there seems to have been a slow shift: the wood has absorbed the paint. The minute, unhurried incorporation of one substance into the pores of a different one, with each drop of paint assimilated by invisible cavities that insensibly draw them in. And so this toilet door, the door to the boys’ toilet of the third year of the National School of Buenos Aires, has gradually recuperated part of what was written on it many years before. There is no longer any clear outline, but it is definitely still there. On close inspection, there is a slight depression, a difference of levels so minimal that it is easier to make it out with the fingers than with the eyes. That is why María Teresa touches, reaches out and feels the inside of the toilet door with her fingertips. Gradually she makes out shapes, as if she were blind and reading Braille. Shapes: a circle, a line going up and down, up and down, a tight curve that remains open at the top: shapes that form words. María Teresa tries to read, as if in Braille, the secret legend of the toilet door. She cannot understand the first word. She can follow some of the letters: an ‘r’, perhaps an ‘f’, but not the whole word. Then there is an ‘o’: a round, printed ‘o’. Then – that is to say, beneath that – five letters she deciphers one by one, until she realises that together they make the word ‘death’. Intrigued, María Teresa tries again with the first word, urging her tired fingers to feel the letters and understand. It is no use: in this part, the paint is still winning out over the wood. It has smoothed everything over to such an extent that the wood has not so far been able to overcome or reverse the process. The first word is still lost, incomprehensible. All she can read is ‘or death’.

  María Teresa moves away from the door and returns to the black hole of the toilet. She wants to find out if it is possible to see whatever may have fallen down there: used matches or half-smoked cigarettes. She presses her hands against the side walls as she did earlier, although this time she does not bend down or look towards the door.

  She peers into the hole cautiously – the last thing she wants to do is lose her footing. She cannot see anything. Absolutely nothing. The hole disappears into utter blackness, as if evoking the rural origins of this kind of lavatory: not the ceramic base, nor the drain-pipe, the sewer, the city beyond, but the pit, the bottomless pit, the cesspit, the pit disappearing into darkness and the void of the earth. If, when they smoke, the pupils throw the matches, the ashes, and whatever is left of their cigarettes down there, there will be no way she can find any trace unless they make a mistake. One further reason for taking the course of action María Teresa has already chosen: to catch them red-handed.

  She unbolts the door, opens it, and steps out of the cubicle. She is back again in the general area of the boys’ toilet. Opposite her stand four quite small wash-basins, their age evident from the fact that they have two separate taps, one for cold water and the other for hot, instead of one mixer tap that can easily demonstrate the advantage
of having warm water. In contrast to this anachronism, there is a modern touch: coloured soaps shaped like big eggs hang from metal hooks fixed in the wall above the basins. As wet hands rub them, these soaps gradually become thinner, until they disappear completely and reveal the secret of their metal skeleton. Until this happens, their plump rotundity yields to the boys’ dirty fingers, their size slowly diminishing, but not their shape or colour. In all these respects, the boys’ toilet is exactly the same as the girls’. So too in the pair of mirrors on the wall above the wash-basins. Since she is not very tall, María Teresa has to stand on tiptoe to see herself in one of them. She does so, and stares at her reflection. It is odd, it has been days or even weeks since she has stopped to look at herself in a mirror, and here she is doing it at the school where she works, in the boys’ toilet of the school where she works. She stares at herself: the geometric fringe, permanent glasses, her round face, weak mouth, pallid complexion. She thinks she looks as she always does: slightly insipid. She knows she is not attractive, and has always known it, and yet when she tries to think of herself as ugly, she is not convinced either. Ugly women can attract people – she knows this from that singer, Barbra Streisand, whom her brother likes. Not being pretty, María Teresa could have been ugly, but she is not. She considers herself again: she looks tired. She is paler than normal, and has violet-coloured patches beneath her eyes. Two lines at the corners of her mouth make her look severe. She smiles into the mirror: she wants to know if she looks better serious or smiling. She cannot make up her mind. When she is serious, she looks old-fashioned: not old but old-fashioned, like a woman from an earlier age, possibly a figure from a medieval painting. But when she smiles she shows her teeth, which are too big, and she thinks she looks stupid. An intermediate solution, neither one thing nor the other, is what lends her the usual insipid look.

  Her feet are aching from standing so long on tiptoe: her toes and also the insteps, where she bends her feet upwards. María Teresa wonders whether she ought to wash her hands before she leaves: she has been inside the dirtiest cubicles, and has touched their doors and walls. She decides she will, and is about to do so, when the two ends of the toilet catch her attention. She has neglected them until now, even though they were the most visible section, the most obvious even from outside the toilet. The real feature of the boys’ toilet, what most distinguishes it from the girls’, is precisely what she now discovers: the row of urinals. At each end of the toilet are ranged five urinals, making ten altogether, although they are so similar on both sides, so perfectly symmetrical, that there could well be only five of them, opposite a big mirror faithfully reproducing them. María Teresa knows of course that boys do not sit down to urinate. Not simply because everyone knows that, but also because her mother was always scolding her brother at home for getting the toilet seat wet when he was too lazy to lift it. This is where boys behave differently from girls: they get out whatever it is they have dangling down in front and perform standing up what girls do sitting down in private. It is also here that boys openly reject all idea of privacy: they line up alongside one another, as if they were passersby pausing to look in a shop window, or on a metro platform waiting for the train to arrive. But it is not a window in front of them, or the empty metro tracks, it is the row of urinals, and they are standing there with their thing in their hands. María Teresa walks over to examine the five empty urinals where all this goes on, as if those actions withheld a secret that the place where they occurred could reveal. The urinals are tall, smooth and made of marble like headstones; they descend more or less from chest level to the floor. Thanks to some automatic device, they are flushed with water at regular intervals. They are drained by a handful of holes at the bottom. María Teresa bends forward to examine this area more closely; everything suggests the system is inadequate, or that the holes get blocked up too easily, because instead of being clear, there is a small swampy area around them. This is where traces of hours-old urine collect in a thick deposit that seems unlikely ever to drain away. The colour of this muck is equally thick: dense and muddy, a stagnant, motionless pool. Objects are floating or have sunk into these microscopic lakes: scraps of paper, matted strands of hair, soft drink bottle tops, shavings from a sharpened pencil. But no cigarette ash, no butts. Nor is there any sign of those gold bands that come off cigarette packets when they are opened. María Teresa studies all this closely, without realizing she has crouched down once more. Just then the urinals flush. Trails of white water flow down the side of the vertical marble. She stares at these trails as if they were the slender waterfall in a stream that has not been fed by rain in many months. When this water reaches the bottom, it stirs the swampy mess a little without creating any bubbles, and the stale urine and whatever is floating in it sways a little. The colour of the tiny pond lightens several degrees. Its volume increases, although it does not threaten to overflow, and then very gradually subsides. This proves that some of what is collected there does go down the drain, that not everything is completely blocked.

  From her crouching position, María Teresa is at an ideal height to see that halfway down, the white surface of the urinals changes colour. It becomes ochre-coloured, in some places almost brown, and the reason for this stain is obvious – this is the exact spot at which the boys’ urine hits the back of the urinal. Again, it is different here to what happens with the girls: the boys’ urine does not fall directly into the water, but is launched into the air as brazenly as those things they use to propel it. The shiny jet rushes out and hits the white slab of the urinal with great force, rather than merely sliding down it. Where it strikes the hardest, the white surface becomes stained, in a blotch with lines radiating out from the centre. The colour is not the same as urine, but reminds her of it. Without really thinking, but without any feeling of revulsion, María Teresa stretches out her first finger and touches the back of the urinal. She touches it, then starts to rub her finger to and fro. Perhaps she wants to test how permanent the stain is, to see if by rubbing hard she can make it disappear so that the slab comes up clean again. Or possibly it is the opposite, the reverse, and that what she wants to see is whether the liquid is so strong that if she rubs, it will come off on her fingertip.

  María Teresa withdraws her finger, stares at it, sniffs it: there is no difference. Yet as she straightens up, she remembers the reason for her being here in the first place, before she was sidetracked in this way: she turns on the tap of the wash-basin next to her and starts to wash her hands. She rubs them in a circle on the smooth, soft soap where the boys usually rub their own hands. Then she rinses them, preferring to use cold water. She has nowhere to dry them, and so pulls out the small handkerchief she always keeps in her sleeve since she caught a cold. That gets rid of most of the wet, although she knows her hands will not be completely dry.

  It is only now, as she is about to leave, that she suddenly wonders whether one of the cleaning staff might not be coming in to do their work. The cleaners are always very quiet: they wear blue overalls, no-one knows their names, and they are hardly ever seen during class-time. It is precisely at the end of the day that they fan out through the school with their big, bearded brushes to sweep the floors clean, remove any growing cobwebs, or sluice down the toilets with buckets of water.

  María Teresa pokes her head out: no cleaners are in sight. She leaves the toilet without hesitating. Now she is in the corridor: a public space. By the time she is out in the street, it has gone half-past seven. She is inclined to think it is not as cold as it was at mid-day, although this might be just her personal impression. She could not swear the temperature has not dropped at nightfall.