The drama started later on … Why is it that drama always starts late? Whereas comedy always seems to have started already. Except that later on we come to see that it was the other way around … The drama was triggered for me by the realization that the mute scene I was witnessing, the teacher’s and pupils’ abstract mimicry, affected me vitally. It was my story, not someone else’s. The drama had begun as soon as I had set foot in the school, and it was unfolding before me, entire and timeless. I was and was not involved in it; I was present, but not a participant, or participating only by my refusal, like a gap in the performance, but that gap was me! At least I had finally realized (and for this I should have been grateful) why I was missing out on the mental soundtrack: I couldn’t read. My little classmates could. By some sort of miracle, they had learned how to in those first three months; an abyss had opened between them and me. An inexplicable abyss, a void, precisely because there was no way to account for the leap. They couldn’t say how or exactly when they had learned to read, nor could I, of course; not even the teacher could have explained it. It was simply something that had happened. For the teacher (who had forty years of experience with the first grade) it was routine: it happened every year. It was so familiar, it had become invisible, a blind spot.
The curtain went up for me one day, in the boy’s bathroom at school … But first I need to explain the circumstances, otherwise the anecdote will be incomprehensible.
We lived on the outskirts of Rosario, in a modest neighborhood, and most of the children at the local school came from humble families, often living just above the poverty line, or below it. At the time, children from what would now be called “marginal” families all went to school, at least for a few years. There were no special schools or educational psychologists … It was a very rough, very wild environment, a Darwinian struggle for life. The fights were bloody, and the vocabulary that accompanied them was brutal. I knew about swear words; I even knew the words themselves, but for some reason I had never paid them much attention. It was as if I registered them with a second sense of hearing and transferred them to another level of perception. I had come to the conclusion that they functioned as a set and their meaning was a kind of action, which wasn’t too far from the truth. There was only one element that stood out from the set. Usually, when the boys at school were arguing, the transition from verbal to physical abuse was signaled by one of them suddenly saying, in the midst of what was, for me, a nebulous mass of swear words, “He insulted my mother.”
I didn’t find this detail bewildering in itself, because the mother figure was sacred for me too, and I had noticed that “mother” was often included in the flow of swear words. Had I been asked, I think I could have even repeated the whole sentence, having heard it so often: “Your mother’s a bitch.” Now, except for that central word, the rest was meaningless noise to me. I was almost unimaginably vague, not because I was stupid, but because nothing really mattered to me. This is an enormous paradox, because everything mattered to me, far too much; I made a mountain out of every molehill, and that was my main problem … I might have seemed indifferent, but nothing could have been further from the truth and I knew it. This incident was a case in point. I must have noticed that sometimes a kid would say “He insulted my mother” without the word “mother” having been pronounced, but I let it pass, and thinking back over the whole incident, I concluded, for my own convenience, that “mother” must have been said, I must have missed it. On one occasion, however, I was forced to abandon this explanation. There was a fight at playtime, near the windmill at the back of the schoolyard. Whenever there was a fight, everyone went to see, gathering round in a circle two or three deep; there was no way it could go unnoticed. Then one of the teachers would come to break up the feral boxing match. But plunging into those mêlées was not for the faint-hearted, and only a small group of “tough” teachers dared to intervene, one especially, a strapping young lady, and she was the one who came this time. The contenders were two boys from the third grade, covered in blood, their smocks torn, both of them in a mad frenzy. The teacher pried them apart, not without difficulty. The bigger of the two went back to his gang of friends. The other one began to bawl. He was hiccoughing through his tears … one of my specialties. The teacher demanded an explanation at the top of her voice but he couldn’t speak. It was as if the fight was still going on in his heart. He looked so wretched, the teacher took him in her arms and hugged him tight. She guessed the explanation, which he finally managed to utter between violent sobs, “He insulted my mother.” She calmed him, hugged him … As a tough teacher she could understand; they lived in the same world, after all. The other boy was watching from a distance, surrounded by his friends, fury and resentment flaring in his eyes … Meanwhile, for the first time, I felt a note of boundless bewilderment resonating: Mother? What mother? What was he talking about? Why did everyone seem to accept what he said?
I had witnessed the brawl from the very start, I was certain I hadn’t missed anything and I knew that at no point had the word “mother” been pronounced. The other words, yes, but not that one. It was so clear, I could only conclude that “mother” must have been implied somehow. And of all the things I might have fastened on, that was what intrigued me most of all; I couldn’t get it out of my head.
Anyway, one day, in the middle of a lesson, I asked the teacher for permission to go to the bathroom. I was always doing this; we all were. I asked without needing to go or having carefully chosen my moment (I guess it was the same for the others). I did it on impulse. It’s the only unalloyed triumph I can remember from my childhood. As soon as the teacher saw the little hand go up, she would briefly consider what the pupil was going to miss (it was always something trivial like when to write b and when to write v) and then shout: All right! But this is the last time! The last time! And the kid who had been visited by the brilliant idea of asking at precisely that moment, which had turned out to be the last, ran out of the classroom, deliriously happy, under the hateful, bitter gaze of all the others, who felt they had missed their last chance … But the chance was repeated, identically, and seized, four or five times in every one-hour period. For us it was always now or never and the teacher always repeated her ultimatum, although she never said no, because the first-grade teachers, who were immune to other kinds of anxiety, lived in fear of the kids wetting themselves. But we didn’t know that. We were just kids. The amazing thing is that I managed to join in the game. It would have been much more like me to hold on until my bladder burst. But no. I asked without needing to go, like all the others. I wasn’t backward in that respect, at least.
My anomalous behavior can perhaps be explained by a magically repeated coincidence. Every time I asked for permission to go to the bathroom, two or three times a day and always on the spur of the moment, as I was crossing the deserted yard, I met a boy heading in the same direction, a boy from another grade, I don’t know which. We ended up becoming friends. His name was Farías. Or was it Quiroga? Now that I’m trying to remember, I’m getting the names mixed up. Or maybe there were two of them.
This time, he was there, as usual, although we had never dreamed of arranging to meet. The dark grey walls of the bathroom were covered with graffiti. The kids were always stealing chalk so they could write on them. I had never really paid much attention to the inscriptions.