Farías pointed one out to me; it was large and recent. After a few days of exposure to the powerful ammoniac fumes of the bathroom the chalk began to darken. These letters were so white they shone — so they must have been fresh that day. They were capital letters, fiercely legible, though not for me; all I could see were horizontal and vertical sticks in a senseless tangle. Until that moment I had thought that the graffiti in the bathroom were drawings, incomprehensible drawings, runes or hieroglyphs. Farías waited for me to “read” the inscription, then he laughed. I laughed with him, in all sincerity. What a funny drawing! I really did find it amusing. What an idea! I thought. Incomprehensible drawings! But something prevented me from expressing this thought; my hypocrisy had recesses that were obscure even to me. Farías, however, spoke his mind; he made some smug and insinuating remark … I can’t remember what. It was something about a mother. That was all it took, unfortunately. I understood, and it felt as if the world was crashing down on me.
I understood what it meant to read. Mothers were mixed up with that too! What I had mistaken for drawings, or some kind of recondite algebra in which the teachers specialized for reasons that were none of my concern, turned out to mean the things that people said, things that could be said anywhere, by anyone, even me. I thought it was just school stuff, but it was the stuff of life itself. Words, silent words, mimicry, the process by which words signified themselves … I understood that I didn’t know how to read, and the others did. That’s what it had all been about, all that I had suffered in ignorance. In an instant I grasped the enormity of the disaster. Not that I was particularly intelligent or lucid; the understanding happened in me, but I had almost no part in it, and that was the most horrible thing. I stood there transfixed, staring at the inscription, as if it had hypnotized me. I don’t know what I thought or decided to do … maybe nothing. The next thing I remember is sitting at my desk, where I vegetated day after day. I opened my virgin exercise book, picked up my pencil, which I still hadn’t used, and reproduced that inscription from memory, stroke by stroke, without a single error or any idea what I was writing:
YOFUCKNSONFABITCHPUSSY
I should say that Farías had not read it out aloud, so I didn’t know how those drawings translated into sound. And yet, as I wrote, I knew. Because knowledge is never monolithic. We know things in part. For example, I knew that they were swear words, that it was a conglomerate, that the mother was implied at some level; I knew about the violence, the fights, insulting the mother, the fury, the blood, the tears …There were other things I didn’t know, but they were so inextricably entwined with the things I did know that I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. As it happens, in this case there were things I wouldn’t discover until much later on. Until the age of fourteen, I thought children came out of their mothers’ belly buttons. And I discovered my mistake, at the age of fourteen, in a most peculiar way. I was reading an article about sex education in an issue of Selecciones, and in a paragraph about the ignorance in which young girls were kept in Japan, I found this scandalous example: a fourteen-year old Japanese girl had professed her belief that children came out of their mothers’ belly buttons. That was exactly what I, a fourteen-year old Argentinean girl, believed. Except that from then on, I knew it wasn’t true. And, rightly or wrongly, I pitied my Japanese counterpart.
That day back in first grade, when I went home, I couldn’t wait for Mom to see what I had written. But the reason I couldn’t wait was that I was terrified. I knew that something terrible would happen, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t take the exercise book out of my school bag; I didn’t show it to Mom. She got it out herself and looked at it. Why? After the repeated disappointment of finding it blank, she had given up checking regularly and hadn’t touched it for weeks. I must have given her some kind of signal. When she read it, she screamed and went pale. She was indignant for the rest of the day; she went on and on about it. That inscription was just what she had been waiting for; it unleashed her characteristic fighting spirit, which recent events had kept in check. It was an outlet for her. The next day she came to school with me and had an hour-long meeting with my teacher in the office. They called me in, but naturally they couldn’t get a word out of me. Not that they needed to. From the veranda where I was waiting (the secretary had been sent to take care of the class for the duration of the meeting) I could hear Mom shouting, hurling abuse at the teacher, arguing relentlessly (always coming back to the fact that I didn’t know how to read). It was a memorable day in the annals of Rosario’s School Number 22. Finally, just before the bell rang, the teacher came out of the office, walked along the veranda and through the first door, into the classroom. As she went past, she neither looked at me nor invited me to follow; in fact, she didn’t speak to me or look at me again for the rest of the year. Mom left during recess, but what with the chaos of kids and teachers, I didn’t see her go. When the bell rang again, I went into the classroom as usual and sat down in my place. The teacher had recovered a bit, but not much. Her eyes were red; she looked terrible. For once, a dead silence reigned. Thirty pairs of childish eyes were fixed on her. She was standing in front of the blackboard. She tried to talk, but all that came out was a hoarse squawk. She stifled a sob. Moving stiffly, like a tailor’s dummy, she stepped forward and tousled the hair of a boy sitting in the front row. The gesture was meant to be tender, and I’m sure that’s how she felt, perhaps her heart had never been so full of tenderness, but her movements were so rigid that the boy cringed. She didn’t notice and tousled his louse-ridden mop all the same. Then she did it to a second boy, and a third. She took a deep breath, and finally spoke:
“I always tell the truth. I stell it trueways. I children. I am the truth and the life. I trife. Strue. Childern. I am the second mother. Thecken smother. I love you all equally. I equal all of you for mother. I tell you the truth for love. The looth for trove. Momother love mother! For all of you! All of you! But there is one … bun their is wut … air ee wah …”
Her voice had gone all shrill and scratchy. She raised a vertical index finger. This was her only gesture during that memorable speech … The finger was steady but the rest of her was shaking; then, and simultaneously, the finger was shaking and the rest of her was steady as a block of metal … Tears ran down her cheeks. After this pause she went on:
“That Aira boy … He’s here among you, and he doesn’t seem any different. Maybe you haven’t noticed him, he’s so insignificant. But he’s here. Don’t be fooled. I always tell you the true, the theck, the trove. You are good, clever, sweet children. Even the ones who are naughty, or have to repeat, or get into fights all the time. You’re normal, you’re all the same, because you have a second mother. Aira is a moron. He might seem the same as you, but he’s a moron all the same. He’s a monster. He doesn’t have a second mother. He’s wicked. He wants to see me dead. He wants to kill me. But he’s not going to succeed! Because you are going to protect me. You will protect me from the monster, won’t you? Say it …”
“…”
“Say, ‘Yes, Miss.’”
“Yes, Miss!”
“Louder!”
“Yeess Miiisss!”
“Say, Yis Mess Rodriguez.”
“Yis Mess Ridróguez.”
“Louder!”
“Yossmessriidroogueez!”
“Loouuder!!”