After that day, my fever broke and my vision started to blur. I went back to school a few weeks later. The teacher took attendance and Cristián responded to his name, monstrous and alive. I eventually got used to his presence there. We grew up together. I learned to separate the things my mind had fused. But whenever the corner of my nearly sightless eye caught a glimpse of Cristián’s still-long or just-cut hair, whenever I accepted a pencil from his clammy, clumsy hand, my fever returned. Whenever he spoke in front of the class, whenever he hit a weaker classmate on the playground, whenever he mocked his best friends as we filed out of the building for the day, I remembered what had died along with that character in the park, at the foot of the slide, in the arms of a maid who’d just arrived from the village. I discovered this as he obsessively tackled difficult math problems, when he declared his interest in economy, when the size of his bank account determined that he would attend a prestigious American college and get married, it didn’t really matter to whom.
I couldn’t even forget it when I went completely blind. I never got to see him kiss the wife he’d selected for the biography he’d calculated as meticulously as a screenplay, or to confirm whether his children were the spitting image of the Cristián branded onto my retina. But when I offered each of them my condolences at the funeral, I felt the same damp fingers leave their sour scent on mine.
The Student
When I returned to the university, convinced I’d left the nightmare behind, I sank into the armchair in my office. There was a knock on the door. I sighed. It was his mother. She sat down on the only other chair, facing me from the other side of the desk, exactly where the student himself had sat, moments before he’d fallen to the ground, dead. I offered her a box of Kleenex to feign discomfort. She tugged a tissue out and dabbed at her eyes, glancing sidelong at the boarded window, the bullet hole still visible. I was the last person to see him as she would have wanted him to be seen, she explained. Now it was impossible: the legal process, the photos, the morgue, the rash of newspaper articles. She described what had happened in recent months, avoiding any information that didn’t correspond to the image of the beaming student on the protest signs. She wanted to know the details. I paused for a moment, collecting the papers that had lain scattered all over the desk for months now. I touched my wedding band. Suddenly exhausted, my brain hunted for any intentions she may have concealed in her furtive visit. Her son’s last words—how could I explain this to her without everything else tumbling out of me like a waterfall?—hadn’t emerged from his mouth. They were more like projectiles fired by his eyes, his hand.
Last semester I had to teach a class in which we were supposed to talk about a vast array of issues and nothing in particular. More than a course, it seemed like an excuse to kill time and give grades. It was certainly the easiest class for his fellow students. And so, having moved to this country a few months earlier for a teaching job with some decent health insurance and, therefore, a chance to heal from my mysterious ailment that no doctor had managed to diagnose, I’d pause to talk about politics in hopes of exorcising the image of the Great Wall that tormented me at night and followed me on my daytime walks along the cicada-dense New Jersey streets. These topics immediately divided the classroom. Only a few students listened in silence, staring down at the distracted lines they traced in their notebooks. Some spoke in support of state laws that forbade immigrants from living and working in the area. They even supported militarization as a way to do away with the protests in the city. Others seethed as they recounted how hard it was to commute to school without getting stopped and registered by the police. A group of students had decided to confront the situation head-on and swiftly ended up in jail or hospitalized with tear gas exposure. Two from the group were in our class.
I couldn’t say it was because of me. It was the noise that filtered in through the classroom window, the blue police uniforms, the security barriers, the constant ID checks, how the word “terrorism” proliferated and suffused the halls. The student assembly issued a statement against the possession and use of firearms. Fear, the letter argued, had prompted many young people to keep guns and razors in their dorm rooms, triggering massive raids. Several of my students were subjected to them, mainly first-generation immigrants. And him, as I recall. Even so, the student was muted in his opinions, almost crushingly levelheaded in the face of it all.
During this time, a group of protestors held a rally at the entrance of our building, right outside the classroom window. Less than two hours later, a police car with tinted windows parked on the front walkway. Tensions rose when another group of young people gathered nearby with banners calling for freedom and the right to bear arms. From then on, our conversations centered on freedom, its roots and definitions, its limitations and uses. On whether it meant something different in our own everyday context. By that point, no one remained apathetic, and our intense debates in Spanish encompassed radically divergent opinions. The student spoke up that day. For them, he explained, freedom was defined by whoever pulled a weapon first. The classroom seemed to embody that freedom for a couple of weeks, the student said on another occasion, as we heard the periodic rumble of bombs and explosions beyond the buildings and courtyards.
Until the gun appeared. It was the day I couldn’t make it to class because the security guards who searched us at the entrance decided that my faculty ID was inadequate. They demanded to see my passport and my visa. Unconvinced, they compared the colors in the photo to the hues of my face. The student and some of his classmates had leaned out the windows for a better view, their bodies all but hanging in midair. When I finally reached the classroom, covering my face, coughing from the tear gas that had sent several protestors into spasms outside, we watched together as the police continued to disperse the protesters, now with physical force. The young people’s bodies were hauled off by four police officers and stuffed into a truck like rag dolls, watermelons, sacks of hay. In an impromptu staff meeting in the hallway of the Spanish department, we decided to resume our classes and talk about Latin American food, traditions, and regional dances, steadying our own tremors and paranoia with our heads lowered and our traps shut. When I returned to the classroom and started in again, I felt the student’s look of disappointment like a mirror.
He followed me. Standing in the hall outside the Spanish department, we watched in silence as a strange woman inspected my file cabinets. Without crossing the threshold, he handed me his essay, which he’d revised according to my feedback. I reached for the papers as my eyes tracked the woman. But the student wouldn’t let go of them. He waited for my gaze to rest on the essay, on his hands, and rise up his arm, his neck, the taut muscles of his face, all the way to his eyes. For an instant, he seemed older. Only then did he release his grip, turn away, and walk out of the building.
A deathly silence governed the last week of the semester. My colleagues’ text messages and email notifications rattled my phone. That afternoon, the student appeared a few minutes before I left my office to go home. He sat down across from me, on the other side of the desk. It took him a while to locate the zipper on his backpack. Another email alert cut into our silence, then the secretary’s voice on the phone outside the office. When I looked up, the student had a gun in his hands. He placed it gently on the desk. It’s my treasure, he said to me in Spanish, and he moved my phone away from me. The door was barely ajar enough for me to see people moving around at the end of the hall. It was about the topic of his final paper. That was what he’d come to discuss. I heard the fragile filament of my own voice. I didn’t have to finish my sentence. There were no bullets in it, he said. Suddenly, the ambient noise returned, my ears unplugged, bombs blasted again in the distance. With my vision re-focused, I noticed the police lights shifting across the office walls, slinging light onto his face and white T-shirt. My fingers instinctively touched the ring on my left hand. He interrupted my gesture with his right, whispering, Okay, maybe just one, and held out the papers to me. I took th
em, slowly peeling myself away from his touch, but the student didn’t let go until my foggy eyes met his once more.
The crack of the gun surprised us both. I touched my neck and felt the shrill pain of embedded glass. Blood trickled. The student had taken his hand off mine. His weight and the force of the impact firing in through the window had thrust the chair away from my desk. He was slumped to one side and his arm was flung up over his face, a hand still clutching his Spanish-language essay.
I left the office. The people who’d thrown themselves under tables called an ambulance as soon as they saw the blood streaming down my neck. Given the clashes and the barricades, the vehicle took over two hours to arrive. Sitting in the secretary’s chair, where I’d been asked to wait, I looked down at the red-spattered floor. I was wrong: he hadn’t covered his head. The impact had torn it off. In the days that followed, the police had demanded I clarify this part of my testimony, but I found myself unable to rectify what I saw, to make it make sense. It was a jumble, the violence. What I didn’t tell them is that I’d walked over to his body, carefully wrapped his gun in a handkerchief, put it in his backpack, removed the papers from his languid fingers, and slipped them into their folder.
Those were the things that came to mind as my mouth refrained from telling his mother the details of our semester. No one ever brought up the gun in his backpack. I was too scared to mention it and the police never asked. The silence was a conspiracy. The student had been the victim of a stray bullet, fired by an older man of unknown origin who had, in a trance, taken advantage of the chaos. That was the official version, as reported by the press.
My hands closed into fists on the desk as the mother flipped through all the papers that had earned the student high grades. They all involved regional dishes, traditional dances, or Latin American myths. All of his words matched the white teeth and innocent eyes displayed by the paltry crowd railing outside the courtroom doors. Just one man would be judged. The mother offered me her hands, which were cold as iron, and stroked mine in a gesture of gratitude. Then my vision blurred and the sounds faded away. In the secretary’s chair, where I tried to steady my breath, I considered giving her the last essay the student had written.
The Head
In memory of Susana Rothker and Tomás Eloy Martínez
A memory sprang to mind as she sat down in her office chair. It was something that had happened the day before, but it transported her to decades past. She opened the sliding door and stepped out onto the deck, as she usually did on Sundays. She picked up the newspaper and her tea mug, looking out at the roofs of the houses that sprouted up like orderly mushrooms in the woods of the highest hill on the highest plot of land in the New Jersey suburbs. She recalled her satisfaction as if it were the backdrop for a hard-earned act of revenge, but the feeling dissolved at the sight of her neighbors’ red car. They were Russian, and they’d just moved into the most opulent house in the neighborhood, settled grandly among the cypresses and American elms. She immediately wrote to her sister, the only person—they say—who ever understood the essays of interiority encoded in her texts. Receiving no response, her sense of complacency shifted into something external, morphing slowly into a shadow in the window, over her shoulder, behind her back. It appeared as often as it escaped her when she tried to look at it head-on. She couldn’t be sure—which drove her crazy, they say—whether the shadow wore the familiar face and smug look she’d so often observed in the mirror hanging in a corner of her office.
Her steps echoed through the old house where the Spanish department was headquartered. Every so often, colleagues, students, secretaries, administrators, and technicians would peek in to see if she was still pacing around. People on the first floor attested to the reliably peculiar attitude of the department head: she’d ask in passing if they hadn’t by any chance received a message from her sister by mistake. The boldest among them even returned the question: When did you write to her? Or, where is your sister? Or, what did you write her about? Or, did you use the right keyboard? The department head was inconsistent in her answers. Although, some explained, the head sometimes replied that she—sometimes her sister, sometimes her—had just gotten on a flight to Mexico. Or she—sometimes her sister, sometimes the head herself—had just returned from a trip to Peru.
Just after 1 P.M., everyone saw a PhD student venture through the door of the Spanish department and hurry upstairs, carrying seven books and a truly enormous umbrella under various handbags and vests. She barely acknowledged the staff, congregated on the first floor like an audience on the verge of uncovering a secret, or the racket on the second floor. The young woman’s air of nonchalance raised more than a couple eyebrows. Only once she’d reached the top of the stairs did the PhD student excuse herself with a downward glance: she was late for a meeting with the department head. On the first floor, everyone held their breath. Some swore they didn’t exhale until the PhD student came back down the stairs less than an hour later.
Later that day, ashen faced, the PhD student sat down in the miniscule conference room, surrounded by her purses, books, coats, notepads, papers, wool scarves, feathers, and other useless accessories. In her testimony, which was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed, she recounted how the head had waved her into the office without lifting her eyes from an old newspaper announcing the destruction of the Berlin Wall. The head asked if the PhD student understood how it had changed the world. But then she backtracked. Of course, she said, the PhD student couldn’t know much at all, because she was very young and still didn’t have any sort of well-informed political perspective. The student responded that she had actually been paying quite a lot of attention when the Wall came down. In fact, it had radically transformed her own life. The head nodded, not listening. She asked the PhD student if she knew any protest songs, and then she herself began to hum and wander around the office. The young woman glanced at the clock and gathered her nerve to ask whether there was any other way the head could offer her another year of financial support. The head shook her head no.
An uncomfortable silence filled the conference room, where these events were described. Meanwhile, the PhD student mentally calculated how she was going to pay for the health insurance that had forced her to leave her home country for a place as sinister as New Jersey, and whether she’d even be able to feed herself as she frenetically cranked out articles and talks and the dissertation she always presented with the blank look of someone who’d had her fill.
“Well,” the head interrupted, “there are very few alternatives. And all are for American candidates with acceptable but imperfect Spanish.”
Then, the testimony continued, the head tried to interest her in taking a few classes on literature and social movements that were offered by a competent professor on staff, the very same professor who was finally going to publish a fascinating and consequential study on poverty in Spain. These classes would be accessible for an in-state fee. The PhD student reminded her, not without shedding a tear that everyone in the miniscule conference room and the curious onlookers peering in through the windows interpreted as a tear of guilt, that she was finishing her dissertation and didn’t need to take any more classes. So the head offered to put in a good word so she’d get the class that nobody wanted but everybody needed, except for the head. Besides, the head insisted, no one should leave New Jersey without trying the organic mushrooms that grew on the highest point on campus. Everyone in the conference room suddenly felt a pang of hunger.
That afternoon, the secretary was the last to leave the building. The next day, she testified, once she’d finished cleaning up the lunch leftovers that the professors had left behind after the PhD student’s interrogation—an event that more than one had mistaken for some kind of party—she’d gone upstairs to shut the windows. She cautiously brought her ear to the office door. The sounds were otherworldly. She heard, instead of the ceaseless click-clack of the head’s shoes, a pack of small animals, as if the squirrels that inhabited the American elm
s had suddenly invaded the small wooden house where the Spanish department was headquartered. The pack went silent when a floorboard creaked under the secretary’s weight. She grazed the office door with her pinky finger and it swung open. The head was sitting bolt upright in her leather chair and smiling radiantly. The secretary testified that they laughed for a long while. She took it, of course, as a good omen.
Cars on Fire Page 2