Every morning the hell started again. At about six, we’d stand on the corner of the street, waiting for the school bus. I’d see the other children and feel profound contempt for them, and at the same time pity. They were happy. They chattered away nineteen to the dozen, talked over each other, laughed. Some sang, and clapped when the wheel of the bus hit a puddle and sprayed the pitted sidewalks; what sad happiness, Consul. There are some kinds of happiness that make your flesh crawl, don’t you think?
At school I wasn’t a bad student. I didn’t like calling the teachers’ attention to myself, so I made a personal decision to be a gray pupil, an invisible pupil. One more among many. It was a stupid matter of keeping up appearances, like so many other stupid matters I had to put up with during those years. Even now, in my nightmares, I return to my childhood and realize that period of pain hasn’t finished. It’s a wound that grows and opens with time.
The teachers were horrible women with torn pantyhose, varicose veins, warts, greasy hair, and sad clothes. It’s because of them that I’ve always believed evil is ugly, even though that’s not its exclusive property. These women, whose resentment, whose hatred for their mediocre lives, could be felt from miles away, were the people who were supposed to educate us! My God, what could these monsters, who exercised power over children in order to alleviate their own miserable existences, convey to us of beauty? Why did they have to be so revolting, with their mustaches and their stooped shoulders, rather than lively and beautiful? The explanation was obvious: they were there to take their revenge. Our youth and our liveliness and maybe our dreams were an insult to them, a cruel mirror of their own debasement, the poison that inflamed their brains and their spleen. And it was these devils who were supposed to teach us the value of life, love, and friendship!
So great was my revulsion that I frequently had to go to the bathroom to throw up, clinging to the water faucet. It was the only fresh clean thing in that place. The water. I let it run to cleanse my body and especially my soul of that hemlock, and absolutely the worst thing of all was seeing my classmates, children who should have been happy, who should have had the intuition to reject them, jumping all over them, telling them things or asking them questions, or doing that typical childish thing of boasting about what you did at the weekend, we went to and such a restaurant or museum or to the country. I never did anything like that at the weekend, but even so I never understood the desire for other people to know about your life, what was the point? Just telling them about something meant ruining it, contaminating it. And there were my little classmates, the poor dummies, talking over each other to tell the teachers, and the teachers would say, that’s very nice, children, your parents love you very much, you must show your gratitude and the best way is to study, so for your assignment tonight learn about the second liberation campaign, and then they’d grab their chalk and their bags and walk off, clicking their heels, and a little while later you’d see them in the staff room sticking their mouths in cups of coffee, drinking red wine, and smoking, whispering among themselves, telling each other God knows what secrets or gossip, giving each other advice on how to humiliate us even more, how to take even better revenge on life through us happy children, because of all the things they wanted to be and never succeeded in being, having turned instead into what they were, hunchbacked old crows, because, believe me, Consul, the wickedness of the soul clings to the body and deforms it, covers it in calluses and warts and other excrescences, you can see evil and you can also smell it, I experienced it every day of my childhood and adolescence, and it’s why most of my classmates ended up joining that system, that way of living in hatred and resentment, what else could they do when that’s what they saw every day?
I had to make an effort and resist, since there was something inside me I didn’t want to contaminate, something it cost me a lot to maintain. And how did I manage? Not too badly actually, just by fantasizing, letting my mind escape from that horrible prison, which was much worse than this one, Consul. Everyone thought I was there, sitting at my desk, but in fact I was light-years away, on a beautiful planet that belonged to me, in the foothills of a solitary volcano, surrounded by deep, menacing oceans, and nobody noticed, my mask was perfect because it was constructed in their image and likeness. The mask of an idiot.
The only moments of peace I had were sometimes at recess, when I went to the sport field to watch my sister play volleyball with her friends. I loved to watch them, they were so beautiful, Juana with her chestnut skin, dancing in the air. A streak of light. That’s where I spent recess, watching the ball come and go, which for them was much more than a diversion or a sport and turned into something like the goal of their young lives. It was something clean and uncontaminated: six young girls playing and believing profoundly in what they were doing. How it hurt me to hear the bell ring! They’d play for another few seconds, waiting for the field to empty, and manage to throw two or three more balls until one of the crows came and said, that’s enough, girls, go back to your classes.
That’s how I grew up, Consul. That was my world, and the worst of it is that outside school things weren’t any better.
In the city people talked and talked without stopping, gesticulating madly, expressing stupid and ignorant opinions about everything, yelling banal phrases to make themselves heard, to stand out or get one over on the others. Such vulgarity! Everything was an absurd comedy that seemed designed to grate on your nerves. Around that time I saw two episodes of a TV series called The Twilight Zone. The first was the story of an invisible man. The second was about a young man who found a magic watch that could stop time, not his time but other people’s, so that he could move about as he liked among people who couldn’t move. The invisible man was what I aspired to be and what, deep down, I had already been for a long time, but the idea of a clock that froze other people really grabbed me: to be able to stop reality with a click! People’s breathing, their stupid chatter. To be able to stop all of it!
What silence, what peace.
I always hated the things that define life in that place: the social pretentions, the desire to impress, the hatred, the congenital stinginess, the envy, all that could stop! I dreamed of pressing a button and being alone, wiping out that gesticulating verbiage; I don’t know if there’s anywhere else in the world where so much bullshit is said simultaneously, where so much nonsense is spoken at such a frenetic pace, and all the people who believe we speak “the best Spanish in the world,” my God, as if using lots of different words had some value, as if employing a few synonyms that other people, because they’re worse than ignorant, don’t use and probably don’t understand, gives us a right to say we have “the best Spanish in the world.”
And besides, you just have to look at the TV news any day to know what such a beautiful use of the language is used for: for cutting each other’s throats, for making rude remarks and jokes and well-planned accusations, have you heard how most of our governors, congressmen, councilmen, and mayors speak? In their defense, they’re drunk most of the time, which may be their most sympathetic characteristic, they drink on public platforms, in Congress, in their trailers, at meetings held in squares filled with paid deaf-mutes, wherever, if it wasn’t so serious you could die laughing. I’m sorry to be so emphatic, Consul, they may be friends of yours and I’m offending them, forgive me, it’s what I think. In any case nobody there realizes, nobody’s bothered by all that buzzing. It’s the noise of insects, all swarming together. Only an image of hell, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, could account for that horrible sound.