There were forty-two of us in the class (forty-three including me, but the teacher never included me in the roll-call or acknowledged my presence in any way); so my imaginary class consisted of forty-two children. Forty-two individual cases. Forty-two novels. The idea of leaving even one of them out to lighten the burden would have been inconceivable to me. And the burden was colossal. Because for each kind of dyslexia I had also come up with a unique and appropriate family background and etiology, couched in the somewhat deranged terms at my disposal, but displaying remarkable intuition on the part of a six-year old. For example, in the case of the boy who wrote letters back to front, his dad was a woman and his mom was a man. This affected his performance at school, either because he had to help his mom prepare the meals (being a man, his mom didn’t know how to cook), leaving no time for homework, or because the family lived in wretched poverty (his dad, being a woman, couldn’t get a proper job). I had to make sure that the cooperative provided the family with stationery, pens, pencils, etc. And every one of the other forty-one cases was just as involved. It was hellishly complicated. No real teacher would have taken on a task of such magnitude.
The situation was aggravated by the inflexible pedagogical principles I had imposed on myself: the complication could never be simplified, it could only progress. Although my system of teaching was labyrinthine (because of the number of students), it was a one-way labyrinth, with valves all facing in the same direction. The idea wasn’t to correct each student’s dyslexia, not at all. I wanted to teach them to read and write on their own terms, each according to his particular hieroglyphic system: only within that system was progress possible. For example, the boy who wrote back to front might begin by writing the word mother that way and go on to write a thousand-page back-to-front book, a dictionary, anything. I hadn’t invented disorders so much as systems of difficulty. They weren’t destined to be cured but developed. I’m using the word “dyslexia” here only because the condition is familiar and happens to bear a purely formal resemblance to my systems.
I would read out a dictation passage (in my head, of course, in imagination) then I would collect the (also imaginary) exercise books, and with that absolute honesty only to be observed among children at play, I conscientiously examined forty-two hieroglyphic texts, correcting each according to its unique and nontransferable rule.
As if that wasn’t enough, for each kind of dyslexia I also had to determine as best I could how it would affect the student’s performance in subjects other than Spanish: Mathematics, Physical Education, Drawing, and so on. To use the simplest example again (others were far more complex), the boy who wrote back to front not only counted using numbers written backwards, but also reversed the functions, so that two plus two made zero, and two minus two made four; the Argentinean nationalists demanded a closed meeting of the council in May 1810, Columbus discovered Europe, the fruit came before the flower; as for his drawings, I had to imagine them.
I had to imagine everything, because I gave my classes without props or materials of any kind, not even a piece of paper to take notes on (in any case, at that early stage in my stumbling education I wrote so slowly that there was no way I could have taken notes on the fly, like a stenographer, and I had to keep moving quickly in order to make any progress with so many students). I did it sitting still, concentrating hard, with my eyes open, and some idle part of my mind listening to the radio. My house of cards was always on the point of collapsing; the slightest distraction and I could lose the thread irretrievably. A diagram would have been my salvation. I came to long for a diagram. Had I been able to play aloud it wouldn’t have been so hard, but I didn’t, because secrecy was essential to the game’s aesthetic. So Mom never knew that I was giving lessons. What can she have thought, seeing me sitting there frozen stiff, still as a statue …
I had to fall back on a mnemonic system. My memory was perfect, but it wasn’t enough. I had gotten myself into a situation where I needed something more. I needed a method, and my method made use of an image of the classroom full of children. To compose this image I needed the figures to be still and silent. Now, in that classroom, and I suppose it would be the same with any class of forty-two six-year-olds (not counting me), it was rare for all the children to be sitting quietly in their places. The only time it happened, in fact, was when the teacher read out the roll. It was like a litany, first the surname, then the first name (mine, which should have come second, between Abate and Artola, was missing). By dint of repetition, I had learned the roll by heart. And in my mind it was like the soundtrack for the mental image of the classroom, each child in his place like a memory peg … Unfortunately the combination meant I couldn’t use the image in a straightforward way, because the alphabetical order of the children’s names on the soundtrack didn’t coincide with the order of their places in the room. So I was forced to zigzag laboriously; one order was superimposed on the other …
I found this pastime absorbing. So absorbing that it began to give me pleasure, the first lasting and governable pleasure of my life. It was an aching, almost overwhelming pleasure — that’s just the way I was. And soon it underwent a sublimation, transcending itself … Almost independently of my will, it created a supplement, which my imagination seized upon with a mad voracity. I transcended school. I began to give instructions. Instructions for everything, for life. I gave them to no one, to impalpable beings within my personality, who didn’t even take imaginary forms. They were no one and they were everyone.
The instructions I gave could refer to anything at all. In principle, they were instructions for something I was doing, but they could also be for an activity in which I was not and would never be engaged (such as scaling a mountain peak), which didn’t stop me prescribing a method for it in the minutest detail. But mainly my instructions referred to what I happened to be doing; that was the default case, the model. It got to the point where everything I did was doubled by instructions for doing it. Activities and instructions were indistinguishable. If I was walking I would also be instructing a ghostly disciple in how to walk, the best method for walking … It wasn’t as simple as it looked, nothing was … Because true efficiency was a kind of elegance, and elegance required minutely detailed knowledge, so detailed it was peculiar to me, an esoteric idiosyncrasy that only I could pass on … though to whom, I didn’t know, maybe no one, but then again … The game took over my life. How to hold a fork, how to raise it to one’s mouth, how to take a sip of water, how to look out the window, how to open a door, how to shut it, how to switch on the light, how to tie one’s shoelaces … Everything accompanied by an unbroken flow of words: “Do it like this … never do it like that … once I did it like this … be careful to … some people prefer to … this way the results are not so …” It was a rapid flow, very rapid, with never a pause for me to catch my breath, because keeping up the pace was essential to getting it right, and I was setting an example. There were so many activities for which I had to issue instructions … no end to them … and some were simultaneous: glancing slightly to the right at a point just above the horizon, controlling the movement of the eyes and the head (and this glance had to be accompanied by some elegant and appropriate thought, or it would be worthless!), at the same time as picking up a little stone with a precise movement of the fingers … How to manipulate cutlery, how to put on one’s trousers, how to swallow saliva. How to keep still, how to sit on a chair, how to breathe! I was doing yoga without knowing it, hyper-yoga … But it wasn’t an exercise for me: it was a class. I took it for granted that I already knew everything, I had mastered it all … that’s why it was my duty to teach … And I really did know it all, naturally I did, since the knowledge was life itself unfolding spontaneously. Although the main thing was not knowing, or even doing, but explaining, opening out the folds of knowledge … And so curious are the mechanisms of the mind and language, that sometimes I surprised myself in the role of pupil, receiving my own instructions.