I should have been afraid. I’d never been taken to the headmistress before, it was the last resort in the school discipline code. To start came the notes sent home, green (first warning), blue (second), and pink (third and final, almost a crack of the whip) — they all had to be returned to school the following day signed by both parents. If these notes weren’t enough, there was the office, the scary interview with Mother Michael, which nobody ever talked about because it was in the realm of the awesome. I wasn’t at all afraid of Mother Michael, of course I’d be incapable of disobeying her, of being rude toward her, but no way was I going to have consideration for anyone in the state I was in, seething with rage…I don’t know how the teacher pulled me off without bringing a mouthful of flesh with me.
Mother Michael opened the door and started speaking. I told her about the glasses, the new satchel Esther had bought the previous afternoon, the incomprehensible words they shouted at my sister to define her Mom, repeating them singly, as I remembered them. Mother Michael looked me straight in the eyes. “I’m going to have to punish you,” she said, “otherwise all the girls will start biting their friends, but you did the right thing. Stay with me. Teacher, pink note for those who jumped on the satchel.” I stayed with Mother Michael. No sooner had the teacher shut the door than she looked at me again, spoke to me in English, her mother tongue, for a long time, for a very long time, taking big strides as she paced up and down. I’d never known her so talkative and didn’t understand what had made her like that. She left her office and left me there waiting for the home-bell.
Did I go to sleep in Mother Michael’s office? The drawers in her enormous wooden bureau creaked in a loud voice when I was bored of waiting. They creaked and creaked, one by one, and right away I heard the same old footsteps inside her bureau, the steps that Enela mentioned sowed a seedbed of terror. I couldn’t leave the office, I had to obey Mother Michael, I was trapped, the steps were there, next to my legs that hung limply from the chair, they’d come and I started crying telling them: “Alright, please don’t make a sound, I’m afraid of you, please take Enela instead.”
I don’t know how I dared say that. The fear I felt is the only explanation.
The sound stopped immediately.
Next morning, after entering the classroom with my friends, under my desktop I found a message perched on my books. Who could have put it there? It was adult handwriting. Before I’d finished reading, I shut the desk, rolled the message into a ball and put it away in my knapsack. Could it have been my teacher? The footsteps again! Enela asked for permission to go to the bathroom and the teacher refused: “Go to the bathroom when you’ve just walked in?” You sneak on Enela…that was the first line of the message…You sneak on Enela…and the steps sounded in the classroom, nobody seemed to hear them except me and evidently Enela, a terrified Enela asking to go to the bathroom.
“Look, Miss!” shouted Rosi behind me. She pointed to a puddle on the classroom floor under Enela’s desk. “Look…” Enela fainted, head on desk, skirt soaked, her eyes staring like a dead woman’s. “Enela!” She didn’t respond to the teacher’s cry. “Rosi, run to nurse.”
How did they take her out of the classroom? I didn’t notice. She didn’t come around. My head was spinning.
I didn’t hear Dad’s joke as he drove along. When I reached school, I got out of the car and waited impatiently for Enela. The day before, the school had called in her parents, who went to fetch her and take her home. I didn’t think it would last. I promised myself I would be brave and talk to Enela about the footsteps. I spoke to her silently. I wasn’t sure, perhaps we could oppose, even defeat, a fate I didn’t fully understand but was beginning to glimpse desperately.
I waited for her on subsequent mornings. Enela never returned to school. I never dared ask teacher about her.
I tried to forget her and regretted not reading the message someone placed on the books I kept in my desk. I never found out how I lost the piece of paper. When I got home, I locked myself in my room to unfold and read it, but I couldn’t find it, it was no longer in my knapsack. I was afraid I’d dropped it, that someone else would read it before I did and blame me in public for what I knew I was guilty of, because it was true. I had sneaked on Enela, but, why had I felt the need to sneak on her?
“Looking at the lion, which he had been delivered over to like a young lamb, he replied: ‘What are you doing here, fierce beast? There’s nothing in me that belongs to you; I’m going to Abraham’s bosom where I’ll be welcomed in a few moments.’
“Suddenly his face glowed like an angel’s. He went to his heels and rested like a dove by the soles of his feet. But the time to receive the reward for his labors had come. He began to feel great weakness and lack of strength and before the infidels’ astonished eyes he passed over to a better life.”
Mother Michael read with her strong accent in religious education class, the one subject for which she assumed personal responsibility. The headmistress shut the book of the lives of the saints and started to talk excitedly in her halfway language, mixing English and Spanish, exhorting us to think what a sacrifice the saint had made!
Well, I thought, I must be a coward. I sold out Enela, blabbed about Enela…I didn’t need to compare myself to the flesh of the martyrs, as my schoolmates were doing, to know how puny I was…I didn’t need to test myself in order to fail the test and know my shameful weaknesses. I felt more afraid than ever and the steps fed on my fear, ate into it, grew on it, swelled out, turned into the monument to the remorse-ridden cannon fodder I hadn’t realized I’d become.
2
I never knew how I passed the end-of-year exams. If I were to try to endow my story with any kind of logic, I should describe how the Enela episode created real problems for me in my studies. Tormented, remorseful, guilty, punished merely for being who I was…I should have found it impossible to concentrate. But it was this inability to concentrate that earned me the merit medal, the prize awarded as first place for achievement.
I learned in a state of distraction. Learned what? Who knows! I don’t remember a single word. I don’t know what the subjects were. I was absolutely outside myself, who knows where, getting ten-out-of-ten in subjects as a result of not being anywhere, mentally skipping out, retreating to small islands that — as they didn’t come from my imagination but from study plans concocted by bureaucrats — faded, leaving not even a trace I could cling to as I did at the time. The topics made me a Robinson Crusoe of unknown islands where I wandered, not sharing with anyone, not knowing how to return to familiar territory, islands that escaped the destructive hurricane that had devastated my world.