No Touching

by Ketty Rouf

  For once, everyone seems to approve. Good ideas always come along when you’re focused on wanting something else. We’re all ready to start the game, but the whole reason for this bout of educational theatrics is missing. Hadrien’s not here. In a few more minutes he’ll be late, and I’ll have the right—but is it a duty?—to exclude him from participating in class if he doesn’t show up with a note from the Student Affairs office. I look up at the clock like I’m praying to heaven. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Eight minutes and fifty-two seconds late. He’ll be here. Hope hums in me like a prayer. And time miraculously stops when Hadrien appears, frozen on the threshold, out of breath from running. He’s hiding something behind his back. Everyone falls silent, a few students blocking the sight of the birthday treats, striking clownish poses.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, Madame.”

  He comes toward me, his right hand behind his back, and I’m suddenly afraid. Reflexively, I take a step back, as if to sidestep the sudden exposure of my whorish life. But Hadrien, smiling, hands me a note from the Student Affairs office, justifying his late arrival. That was it, the weapon he was hiding? My first impulse is to grab him and hug him tightly, to run my fingers through his long, disheveled, darkly youthful hair and just talk to him. But I’m the teacher, so I ask him to sit down.

  I go over my answer key on the theme of responsibility, the one I put together from all their words, while they stuff themselves, mouths full, cheeks rounded like children’s, stifling a burp here and there (which I pretend not to hear) in the sleeve of a sweater, giggling convulsively. I launch into my explanations with a passion I’m not sure they’ve ever seen emanating from me. I’m floating, allowing the words to flow freely out of me:

  “We have to question the nature of the link that binds us to our own actions, the internalization of authority, and through this, the reflexive nature of all responsibility. How much of ourselves is there in the things we cause to happen? What are we responsible for?”

  Soon enough, the students tune me out; it’s not worth trying to make them jump through hoops in the hope that they’ll swallow some philosophy along with their Coke. Metaphysics can’t hold a candle to chips and cookies. A fat lot of good I’ve done them today, just because I wanted them to like me, wanted to make myself feel better in my little job, to feel a little bit of excitement at returning to the normal life I’m reimposing on myself.

  Only Hadrien tries to follow along, squinting to see the board clearly, raising a hand when all the others, backs turned, are busily making the last sweets disappear.

  “I remember that personal responsibility is closely tied to freedom . . . but I don’t really understand why. We’re not that free.”

  “That’s the whole problem. We’re not that free.”

  Demoralized by my own lesson, I fall silent. I’ve just preached a mediocre sermon without meaning to, and the students were smart enough to ignore this sorry excuse for a Sunday school class. It’s usually the reason they start ignoring me.

  The bell rings.

  Bye.

  Everyone go home.

  I stay for a few minutes to collect the empty packets, the bottles discarded on the floor beneath seats strewn with crumbs.

  2

  I’m waiting in the computer room for my turn at the photocopier. There are three of them, but only one is working today. That doesn’t happen very often; usually we can count on at least two. The stress is palpable. One colleague has started chewing on little pieces of paper. Somebody else keeps having violent coughing fits. There’s a clock on the wall just above the copier, staring down at the line stretching across the room like a worm. Will I make it, or not? A whole bunch of us have waited until the very last minute to prepare our lessons, or haven’t prepared them at all. The machine heaves out copies breathlessly. I never know on a Monday what printouts I’ll need for the week to come. After a few years on the job, you just stop lesson-planning at all. One two-hour class corresponds to up to six hours of planning. Upper-level teachers have between fifteen and eighteen hours of classes a week, not counting all the extra hours it takes to correct hundreds of papers. One essay, if read through and assessed correctly, takes between twenty and forty minutes. And then there’s educational advising, team meetings, Board of Education meetings, core curriculum meetings, parent-teacher meetings, meeting-planning meetings, staff meetings. And the blank hours during which you have to be “available,” and the hours you spend commuting, and the insomnia, and the hours emptied of any meaning or substance by anxiety and depression. School vacations are slow agony, but we quake in our boots at the prospect of going back to school. But we have job security, and people think well of us. The pay is crap, but a clear conscience and the illusion of being useful are priceless.

  It’s my turn. The machine begins spitting out copies of the quiz I’ve planned for today. I’ve laid out the concept of duty in a new way, in a table, to gauge their knowledge. The academic inspectors’ orders are very clear: “Do not make things too hard for them.” Obediently, I’ve made it as easy as I can: multiple-choice questions on philosophy, with three possible answers, and I’ll be correcting the tests using green ink, because red is “traumatic.” I’m not going to break my back over this anymore. I’m not being paid to philosophize, just to provide a sort of structured daycare. So be it.

  “Who coined the phrase Cogito ergo sum? Plato, Cyrano, or Descartes? What does Dasein refer to? The Communist Manifesto of 1848, ‘being there,’ or ‘the lack of being’?”

  The photocopier makes an ominous noise, like a death rattle, but one that sounds almost like pleasure, too. Paper jam. I hold up my hands. “It wasn’t me.” Stifled little cries behind my back, general groaning. It’s a true tragedy. Foreheads crease with anger. Eyes squint. The whole overarching failure of homo technologicus, summed up in a few sheets of paper mangled by a malfunctioning photocopier. We’re all tied up in knots. But the worst is yet to come. I get lucky; after unclogging the machine, I’ve barely managed to finish making my copies when, on the touchscreen, the dreaded message appears: REPLACE TONER. I hightail it out of the room, leaving them to deal with the apocalypse. School is where you first learn to take delight in the suffering of others, and we’ve never really left the playground and its dirty games.

  I feel around in my bag to make sure I haven’t forgotten my letter for Hadrien.

  Paris, January 10, 2006

  Dear Hadrien,

  I’m sorry for taking so long to write back to you. For reasons beyond my control, I couldn’t read your letter until we got back to school. In the meantime, life may already have given you your answers. I don’t know if you were able to reach your friend. Maybe the two of you are already back together.

  I just have one small recommendation to make. Be careful, desire is a fickle thing. And sometimes, it has nothing to do with happiness. We all have to learn not to desire what’s going to bring us suffering (read the Stoics), and we also have to learn to better understand our own desires (read Spinoza). Don’t forget that a poorly understood desire is one that pushes us toward what seems to be good for us, but is bad in reality.

  Good luck.

  Sincerely,

  Joséphine

  3

  Hadrien’s only been showing up to my class about half the time for a few weeks now. I don’t dare ask him for an explanation, much less jot a note in the log. There have been no more letters in my pigeonhole. Today he left after class without saying goodbye, head hunched. The uncertainty is killing me. Every night before I fall asleep, I relive the horror, the spectacle of my own pointless vanity: me on stage, and Kevin wandering around the room. I wake up every morning still with the same nightmarish images in my head.

  In the teachers’ lounge, it’s almost the end of the day, gazes going bleary between the lines of papers being marked or straying toward the windows. The day is limping slowly toward the last bell. As I idl
y consider straightening up my pigeonhole before I go home, I glance out into the courtyard. The PE teacher is heading for the principal’s office at a run. I can hear students shouting, but where are they? I shut the little door of my pigeonhole and, my things under my arm, I hurry out. Just as I reach the courtyard, I hear the PE teacher saying: “The area around the school falls under your purview, doesn’t it, sir?”

  “Yes,” the principal replies. “. . . why?”

  “Well, there’s a dealer. The students told me he’s selling hard drugs. Come and see for yourself so we can call in the police.”

  “But what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “What? What are you supposed to do? I just told you! Look at the facts yourself, so we can act.”

  “But I don’t see what—”

  “Is the area immediately around the school your responsibility, or isn’t it?”

  I watch the principal recoil, his face flushing, and then head for the janitor’s office. In a last feeble attempt at self-protection, he tosses a few words over his shoulder I wish I hadn’t heard: “You know . . . that area, I mean . . . the actual boundaries are rather vague . . .”

  “They’re clear when it comes to students horsing around, but vague when it comes to drugs, is that it?”

  Suddenly I see Hadrien striding toward the exit, with the measured, determined steps of a soldier. My colleague runs to catch him. I can see the anger in Hadrien’s demeanor, the risk he’s about to take, and I hurry, too, toward the school gate. I watch him as he keeps going, not looking back, grasping the metal fence and climbing it like a cat, disappearing with one final leap in the direction of the pavement, where I know he’s about to unleash his fury. Hurtling through the gate just behind the PE teacher, I hardly have time to catch a glimpse of two bundles of muscle and sweat mixed with tears of rage tangled in ferocious combat before my colleague pulls them apart and the dealer flees. I have no words, just an outstretched hand to show my affection, because I wasn’t wrong about Hadrien; I saw the depth of his emotions. The three of us walk back toward the school together, side by side, our silence broken only by Hadrien’s words: “He’s a criminal. He gave my little brother ecstasy. He waits outside the schools when they get out.”

  Hadrien could be punished for this. He left the school without authorization to fight in the street. I wonder what call the principal will make. I don’t think I’ll be able to look at myself in the mirror if I don’t speak up. I barge through the door of his office without warning; he’s putting on his coat, getting ready to leave. He puts on an expression of phony surprise and asks me if I’m all right—“You’re pale; what’s wrong?”—and then glances at his watch: “I don’t have any time right now, I’m sorry. Please feel free to make an appointment.”

  I block the door.

  “What are you going to do about Hadrien?”

  “Hadrien? I’m not going to do anything because nothing’s happened.”

  He puts a careful hand on my arm and moves me cautiously aside. “Please excuse me, Madame.” He slips through the half-open door and is gone.

  The next morning, Hadrien is loitering in the path leading from the bus stop to the school. I see him from a distance, and I know he’s waiting for me. I feel my heart pound, the same way it used to when I went to friends’ birthday parties in middle school and would stand there, not moving, not breathing, as if I were dead, waiting—in vain—for a boy to ask me to dance. Only once the party was over would I start breathing again. But you can’t die from a dance you haven’t danced. Close up, Hadrien’s face is an exact map of his turbulent emotions. The fight with the dealer has left blue bruises on his cheeks and chin, and the dark circles under his eyes speak of a sleepless night, but the light in his eyes overrides everything else.

  “Thank you, Madame.”

  “Nothing to thank me for,” I tell him. “I didn’t have to argue on your behalf. You won’t be penalized.”

  “No, I don’t mean for that. I don’t care about being punished. You came out there with me to get rid of that dealer. That’s the important thing.”

  I smile inwardly. I want so much to hug him, but I keep perfectly still.

  He looks down at his feet, then adds:

  “By the way, I’m reading Spinoza. It’s really good, even if I don’t understand it all. It’s helping. Thanks, Madame.”

  Hands in his pockets, he tells me to have a nice day and walks away.

  4

  I got three calls from an unknown number during the night. One at 2:43 A.M., one at 4:12, and one at 5:58. I leap out of bed. I can’t think about anything except who might have called me. That thought is enough to make the coffee taste less bitter; it’s enough to make me put on a pair of five-centimeter heels and some sheer 20-denier black stockings. I slip my phone into my skirt pocket.

  In the teachers’ lounge, a few pairs of eyes lift at the sound of my footsteps. Click-click-click. Martin stops talking mid-sentence. I pretend not to notice. He’s standing in front of Claire and Madame Louis, who are sitting next to each other and were clearly just listening to him. After a moment he goes on with what my arrival interrupted.

  “. . . there are a lot of egalitarian teachers who are all for streamlining the programs. There are two principles at work in their desire to dismantle schools as we know them . . .”

  I slow down to listen.

  “First, there’s what I call ‘hermeneutic castration.’ I’ll explain: students have become incapable of interpreting, unable to write essays or engage in discourse. In a world of entitlement, they’re all about consumption; they’re not about questioning, much less reflecting. They’re incapable of stepping back, seeing things from a distance. They’re all about immediateness, and, as we know, all culture—all thought itself—is really nothing but mediation. So the second principle is what I call the ‘window principle.’ Academic programs are just windows, but the mannequins are nude. We’re selling subjects of study to the customers, but chronological order has been banned since the eighties; there’s no substance anymore, only appearances, because we live in the moment now, and only in the moment. It all comes from bourgeois humanism.”

  I approach them and say only, “That’s it. That’s exactly it.”

  Young Claire’s eyes glitter with tears. Madame Louis gets up and goes off to her job. So do I.

  I string the hours of teaching together mechanically, without emotion. Not a quiver, not a qualm. I’ve promised myself. Because really, at the end of the day, it’s just a matter of habit. One day I won’t feel anything at all. No more disappointment, no humiliation, a non-life. I gather today’s meager crop of homework, only around thirty papers for two classes, sixty-three students who know I don’t have any real means of cracking down on them. We’re basically forbidden from giving out zeroes, or even marks that are too low. I’m not even sure why I still bother giving them homework. What is there left for them to gain when there’s nothing left to lose?

  Last hour of class. A few faint whistles reach my ears. They’re used to seeing me in flat shoes. Today’s five-centimeter heels give them an excuse to be inordinately excited, to joke around. Don’t react. Pretend to be deaf, blind, dumb. So much more intelligent than them. I’m laboring for their own good; I won’t be distracted. I’m the one playing the lead in this movie. I’m an actress. And what a magnificent scene this is: life in a high school! That’s what my instructor in the teacher training program used to say, back in the days when my naivete stood in for hope. I look for Hadrien’s face. He isn’t there. I keep moving and speaking, robotically. What a waste existence is, when you’re just waiting for it to be over with. I take out my notes and read aloud: “Moral consciousness arises from an ambivalence of feeling, where a prohibition leads to the concealment of a desire . . .”

  Lény, arms folded, is fidgeting in his seat. Wallen’s not taking notes, doesn’t even have a pen and paper out on her
desk. Their indifference is demoralizing.

  “I’d rather just listen, Madame,” Wallen says. “I can’t concentrate if I’m writing.”

  She snickers. She thinks I’m a skank. At the same time, Lény reels off a non-exhaustive list of their rights as students, which includes not being required to take notes, because liberty is sacred in France.

  A vibration in my pocket drowns out the echoes of their voices. The classroom ceases to exist. I pull out my phone. It’s that same unknown number. “Hello?” Silence. “Hello?” A quivering, faint, faraway voice. I listen, ear straining, mind frozen.

  Back in the room, it suddenly occurs to me to ask for their homework assignments. A pencil case lands next to my desk. Silence. Eyes flit around the room in search of an escape route: up at the ceiling, out the window, under desks, in backpacks. I don’t even try to find out who threw it. I walk toward them and ask for their papers. Eight students out of thirty-three have done the assignment. I caress the few sacrosanct pages handed over discreetly by those who actually took the trouble to do the homework, and slide them into an envelope. So that makes about thirty-eight papers for ninety-six students. The incalculable failure—is it mine, or the whole education system’s? Or France’s? Or all teachers? Or the Education Minister’s, or his wife’s?—stretches out endlessly before my eyes, which settle on the white stain of the dry erase board, a uniform blankness, emptiness. I preferred the blackness of the chalkboard, the squeak of the chalk. Now, turning my back to the class, I bid my farewells to that white expanse. Every cell in my body is aware of the enormous gravity of this moment, of this ending of an era, of my life, maybe, and I give a helpless, crazy laugh—so crazy that I gather my few things from the desk—pencil case, bag, pen—and without so much as a single glance in the students’ direction, I head for the door, which I open and then shut behind me, closing it firmly but not slamming it; that’s better. A stage exit shouldn’t be sensational, just so long as it’s memorable, original. There it is; there’s the scene my instructor was talking about. Quitting with panache. Or dying in the attempt.