“Yiiissmooossreeedroooguiiiz!!”
“Good! Gggooood! Protect your teacher. She has forty years of experience. She could die any moment, and then it’ll be too late to be sorry. The killer is after her. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not saying all this for my sake, no, I’ve had my life already. Forty years teaching first grade. The first of the second mothers. I’m saying it for you. Because he wants to kill you too. Not me. You. But don’t be afraid, teacher will protect you. You have to watch out for vipers, tarantulas and rabid dogs. And especially for Aira. Aira is a thousand times worse. Watch out for Aira! Don’t go near him! Don’t talk to him! Don’t look at him! Pretend he doesn’t exist. I always thought he was a moron, but I had nnno idea … I dddidn’t realize … Now I do! Don’t let him dirty you! Don’t let him infect you! Don’t even give him the time of day! Don’t breathe when he’s near. Die of asphyxiation if you have to, just so long as you freeze him out. He’s a monster, a killer! And your mothers will cry if you die. They’ll try and blame me, I know them. But if you watch out for the monster nothing will happen. Pretend he doesn’t exist, pretend he’s not there. If you don’t talk to him or look at him, he can’t harm you. Teacher will protect you. She is the second mother. Teacher loves you. I am the teacher. I always tell the truth …”
And so on, for quite a long time. At some point she started repeating herself, word for word, like a tape recorder. I was looking through her. I was looking at the blackboard where she had written: zebra, zero, zigzag … in perfectly formed letters … That calligraphy was her prettiest feature. And she had reached the letter Z … She seemed upset, but I didn’t think she was talking nonsense. Everything was so real, it seemed transparent, and I was reading the words on the blackboard … I was reading … Because that day I had learned to read.
6
MEANWHILE, DAD WAS in prison for the business with the ice-cream vendor. One afternoon, Mom took me to visit him. It was logical, because I had been at the center, at the heart of the misadventure. Did they blame me? Yes and no. They couldn’t really blame me — it would have been grossly unfair — but at the same time, they couldn’t help blaming me, because I was the origin of it all. It was the same for me; I couldn’t blame them for having these feelings, and yet I did. In any case, one or both of them had decided that it would be a good thing to take me along at visiting time. To show how his wife and daughter were standing by him and all that. How naïve. The Rosario remand center was a long way from home, right across town. We took a bus. Halfway there I had a panic attack for no reason and burst into tears. Up went the curtain of my private theater. Mom looked at me, unamazed. Yes, unamazed.
“Are you going to tell me what’s got into you?”
I didn’t have anything very definite to say, but what came out took her completely by surprise, and me too.
“Where’s my dad?”
The voice I put on! It was a squawk, but crystal clear, without the slightest stammer.
Mom glanced around. The bus was packed full and the people surrounding us, hearing my cry, had turned to look. She didn’t know what to say.
“Where’s my dad?” I raised my voice.
Poor Mom. Who could blame her for thinking I was doing it on purpose?
“You’re going to see him soon,” she said, without committing herself. She tried to change the subject, to distract me: “Look at the pretty flowers.”
We were passing a house with superb flowerbeds in the front garden.
“Is he dead?”
There was no stopping me now. The other passengers were already intrigued by the story, and that excited me inordinately. Because I was the owner of the story. Mom put her arms around my shoulders and pulled me close.
“No, no. I already told you,” she whispered, lowering her voice until it was almost inaudible.
“What?” I yelled.
“Shhh …”
“I can’t hear you, Mom!” I shouted, shaking my head, as if I was afraid that the uncertainty about my dad would make me deaf.
She had no choice but to speak up. “You’re going to see him soon.”
“Yes, I’m going to see him. But is he dead?”
“No, he’s alive.”
I could sense the passengers’ interest. The cityscape slid over the glass of the windows like a forgotten backdrop.
“Mom, where’s Dad? Why doesn’t he come home?”
I adopted a tone of voice that signified: “Stop lying to me. Let’s behave like adults. I might look like I’m three years old, but I’m six, and I have a right to know the truth.”
Mom had told me the whole truth. I knew he was in prison, waiting for the verdict: an eight-year sentence for homicide. I knew all that. The only reason for these untimely doubts of mine was to make her tell the story for the benefit of perfect strangers. How could her daughter be capable of such an idiotic betrayal? She couldn’t believe it (nor could I). But the panic that I was exhibiting was all too real. As usual, I had managed to confuse her. It was easy: all I had to do was confuse myself.
“He’s sick,” she said in another inaudible whisper. “That’s why we’re going to visit him.”
“Sick? Is he going to die? Like grandma?”
One of my grandmothers had died before I was born. The other was in good health, in Pringles. We never used the expression “grandma” at home. That was a detail I added to make the scene more convincing.
“No. He’s going to get better. Like you. You were sick and you got better, didn’t you?”
“Did the ice cream make him sick?”
And so I went on until we arrived: Mom trying to shut me up all the way and me raising my voice, creating a real scene. When we got off the bus, she didn’t say anything or ask me for an explanation. I felt that my performance had come to an end, a bad end, and that she was ashamed of me … The anxiety intensified and I began to cry again, with much more determination than before. The logical thing to do would have been to stop in the square, sit down on a bench and wait until I got over it. But Mom was tired, sick and tired of me and my carrying-on, and she headed straight for the prison. My tears dried up. I didn’t want Dad to see me crying.
It was visiting time, of course. We joined the line; a lady who seemed nice enough frisked us, checked the string bag full of food that Mom had brought, and let us through. We were already in the visitors’ yard. We had to wait a while for Dad. Mom was off in a world of her own (she didn’t talk to the other women), so I got a chance to go exploring.
There were entries and exits all around the yard. It didn’t seem to be hermetically sealed, which came as something of a surprise. It’s hard not to have a romantic idea of what a prison will be like, even if you don’t know what romanticism is (I certainly didn’t). To tell the truth, I didn’t know what a prison was either. This one was steeped in an intense, destructive realism, strong enough to dissolve all preconceived ideas, whether you had any or not.
I headed for a door, drawn as if by a magnet. Subliminally, I had noticed that there were other children in the yard, all holding their mothers’ hands. A strong autumn sun bleached the surfaces. It was a sleepy time of day. I felt invisible.
Of all the places I knew, the one most like this prison was the hospital. People were shut in both places for a long time. But there was a difference. The reason you couldn’t get out of the hospital was internaclass="underline" the patient, as my own case had shown, was incapable of moving. There was some other reason why you couldn’t get out of prison. I wasn’t sure what it was: force was still a vague concept for me. I blended the ideas of prison and hospital. There was an invisible exchange between the two. Sickness could disappear and sick thought be transferred to others … It was the perfect escape plan … Perhaps Dad could come back home with us. In that excessively realist building, I was radiating magic … Since it was my fault that Dad was there …