Four by Four

by Sara Mesa

  And fragile.

  So incredible I can’t help but sense just how fragile it is.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 18TH

  Weekends here are strange. Slow and tedious. People disappear, or retreat. There’s an unhealthy stillness, something crouching behind the silence. I’m flattened by inertia, this glacial slowing of the hours. Am I complaining? Do I dare complain?

  Certainly not.

  No one has forbidden me from taking my old SEAT León and getting out of here. Only the students are restricted as to when they can or cannot leave. We faculty have to cover our on-call duties, but otherwise have the administration’s permission to take time on our days off.

  But I don’t plan on leaving at the moment. I wouldn’t know where to go. And so here I remain, at this colich.

  I succumb to boredom and manage to get through the compositions I have left to grade. I go slowly, but when I finish, I still have much of the day ahead of me. I watch TV for a while. Start a new book. Look out the window.

  It started raining today. The leaves on the trees swirl capriciously in the wind, knotting together before pulling apart again. I spend a good deal of time watching them, but avoid trying to make sense of their movements.

  I grab my umbrella and decide to take a walk hoping to come across a colleague, but it’s hopeless: the place is deserted.

  I stroll the tidy grounds, a thoughtful, well-planned combination of arbors, small green plazas, benches. A verdant lawn extends beyond the gardens, always mowed and smelling of fresh-cut grass. The mastiff is always running out there, demented. Something isn’t right with that dog: some kind of nostalgia, some memory of wildness. I call her, but she doesn’t trust me and runs away.

  My umbrella blows inside out every few minutes, but I keep my balance, careful not to step on the soaking wet grass. My feet slosh anyway. I make for the library, quick as I can.

  The door is open. A Persian cat sits squarely in the lobby, its eyes on me. The silence is unsettling; not thick, exactly, but thickening, as if I myself were becoming slower, or heavier. There’s an abnormal quality to the shadows. A sickly, intemperate temperature.

  I leave immediately.

  I circle around the dormitory buildings, which are divided into two wings, like the whole colich, and get as far as the colorfully painted annex they built for the scholarship students. Opposite is another annex, more sober, where the workers’ dorms are located. Set on the top of a high slope, the houses of Señor J. and the assistant headmaster loom in the distance: ceremonious, red bricks, and gabled roofs.

  I think I’ve gone too far. I turn back.

  I walk along the forest’s edge, alongside the metal fence punctuated with security cameras. Night descends over pine trees and eucalyptus. Fragrant and sinister, the trees conceal large, ugly birds that hoot, cackle, shriek.

  I know nothing about ornithology. I can’t tell them apart.

  But maybe the birds can distinguish me from the school’s other inhabitants. Maybe I’m the one being watched.

  With wet clothes and muddy shoes, I return to my room. It’s been cleaned in my absence. Someone has picked up my dirty laundry and changed the sheets, too. It’s disconcerting that I still can’t put a face to the person who does these things. This notebook was left open on the table. Anyone could have read it.

  It’s my mistake. I should be more cautious.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 19TH

  Night again.

  Still raining.

  It falls with violence, soaking the dirt paths, dripping from tree branches. Louder than one would expect water to be.

  The wind has died down.

  I watch the rain fall in sheets, continuous.

  Sundays seem to never end at this school. All this time in my room—all this TV and all this solitude—is affecting the quality of my skin, and maybe my spirit.

  The sky cleared in the evening, the clouds thinning enough to admit the last rays of sunlight.

  I decided to get outside and stretch my legs.

  The earth smelled damp. Strange ants with green wings had sprung up all over the place, endeavoring to crawl through the grass, hectically climb tree trunks.

  I spread a handkerchief out on a bench and sat down with my book.

  I concentrated on reading, even though I wasn’t really following the story of the obsessive man who locked himself in a limestone quarry with his paralytic wife so he could finish a scientific treatise on auditory perception. What a novel, I thought. Torture, imprisonment, insanity, illness. And yet, I was struck by the notion that this was all somewhat familiar to me: an indeterminate, disquieting similarity I couldn’t place.

  That’s when he appeared.

  That he would approach me so quietly was already strange in and of itself: only his shadow gave him away, once he was standing right next to me. I looked up. It was Señor J., smiling and observing me, stroking his goatee.

  The conversation started out mundane. He asked me why I was out in such awful weather. I explained more than was necessary:

  “I’ve been shut up in my room all day. I even ate lunch in there, alone. I needed to get some air.”

  “You don’t leave on the weekends, then?”

  “No, I haven’t yet. I’ve only been here a few days. And I don’t have a wife or children, as you know.”

  “No family at all?”

  “Well, my sister, but she lives far away.”

  I hesitated briefly at this point. Since I was usurping the role of my ex-brother-in-law, my sister would have to be my ex-wife. Would marital problems among the Wybrany staff be frowned upon? Divorces happened everywhere, but would Wybrany accept it as commonplace, or oppose it in favor of building a different, more pleasant world? Señor J. looked at me askance.

  Intimidated, I cleared my throat.

  “I’m recently divorced, as you know.”

  He still didn’t speak. Uncomfortable with silence, I felt obliged to continue.

  “It isn’t what I would have chosen … I’m not in favor of divorce as the default. These days, people will separate over the littlest things … they don’t have the skills to cope. But sometimes, when love is gone, it’s the only thing left to do. Fortunately,” I sighed. “we don’t have children.”

  This was all true. They hadn’t had children, a fact they mutually blamed on each other. The disgrace of infertility, turning away before the taboo: that was their life, every day of their life. The truth is, they should have congratulated one another: to have kids in families like mine just means producing more unhappy people.

  But Señor J. wasn’t interested in anything I was telling him. He crushed the winged ants with his shoe and resumed his questioning:

  “I saw you out by the perimeter fence yesterday. Peculiar rounds you were making, Bedragare. You looked like a caged animal. Where were you going?”

  It sounded like an accusation. I laughed, astonished.

  “Nowhere,” I said, adding: “But I didn’t see you, sir.”

  “Naturally, Bedragare. It was raining. Under those circumstances, I behaved normally and stayed indoors. I saw you from my window. I was home with my wife, who was visiting.” He paused, arched his brow. “I haven’t gotten divorced.”

  I didn’t know where this was leading. Uncomfortable, I patted the bench, offering him a seat. If this conversation were to continue, we had better be on the same level. He declined to give up his position of dominance. I made as if to stand up and he stopped me. It was clear he wanted us to continue as we were: him looking down on me, and me looking up. I noticed him eying my book, my filthy shoes.

  “How are your classes?” he asked.

  A simple “fine” wasn’t an option. Flustered by my own lies, I described my intentions, teaching plans I came up with on the spot. He watched me with an ironic smile the entire time I was speaking, sizing me up. When I finished, he patted my shoulder and walked away in silence, leaving me with my last words on my lips.

  I watched him lumber away, his
enormous feet leaving deep prints in the muck.

  And when he passed by her, I saw the mastiff shy away.

  I returned to my room. The conversation had left me unsettled.

  All of my clothes for the week were on my bed, washed and ironed. On the floor, I could still see the last damp passes of the mop. I had stashed my notebook away carefully this time. At least I hadn’t forgotten to be cautious.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 20TH

  It’s true that I had wanted to be a writer, but I lacked talent and courage.

  Several years ago, a few of my stories were published in a magazine. They ran alongside stories by other, well-known writers, and so I thought I was just like them. I bought all the copies I could and passed them out to my co-workers, explaining that this was a big deal. They took the magazine in their grease-stained hands, looked at me without comprehension, and congratulated me as if I had just won back what I’d paid for a scratch ticket. I was perfectly aware that they didn’t understand: this fact was precisely what made me feel like even more of a genius. An endless, tempting future awaited. I was intoxicated with myself.

  But afterward, I couldn’t write anything new, nothing longer than two or three pages at a time. All my stories lacked both coherence and an ending. Scenes bunched together, the characters were mostly incapable of action, the plot lumbered toward a halting, senseless denouement.

  I protected myself with indifference and avoided facing hardship and failure. I began to keep a diary because I didn’t have to make anything up. A simple log, a methodical, factual record. If I see rain falling outside my window, that’s what I write. The only decision I have to make is whether to be concise or to describe the rain in detail. I can note how it changes over time, how heavy it falls, who gets wet and who doesn’t. Or, I can simply write: it’s raining. That’s it. I write about what happens to me, why I think it happens, how I feel about it, what people tell me, how I respond. If something doesn’t interest me, I don’t write about it. Or I write a summary, strip it of meaning. I never have the urge to make anything up or change my story. I wouldn’t be capable. My creativity has dried up, or maybe I destroyed it. Who knows.

  Crazy Lola knew this and she made fun of me for it. I didn’t let her read my diaries, but I know she studied them in secret.

  “Do you actually think your life is interesting?” she would mock.

  No, no it wasn’t. Hers, on the other hand, might have been. An unstable, out-of-control woman tearing through the world like a tropical storm, exuberant and destructive. Always between tears and laughter, always on the edge: she’d had her punk, mystic, vegan, and promiscuous phases, her try-to-have-a-baby-at-all-costs phase.

  That’s where we left things.

  She accused me of being a coward, resistant to change, manipulative. A repugnant, dull person. To top it off, the day I left with my clothes stuffed in grocery store bags, she bitterly added:

  “Piece of shit wannabe writer.”

  Well, that was something. A writer—wannabe or not, piece of shit or not—was better than nothing at all.

  When I arrived at the colich, my sister suggested maybe here I would find the peace I needed to write my novels.

  “Novels, plural?” I laughed.

  But behind my question was real excitement: Could I try? Would I have the peace, the courage?

  Clearly, I do not. In this notebook, I’ve only written things that have happened since my arrival. This is not a novel. My imagination is still dormant. I’m paralyzed by reality. But this place is certainly a relief from the chaos of Cárdenas. I only have to worry about keeping up the façade, not showing my fear of being discovered. It doesn’t seem like much, but this keeps me in a state of constant tension.

  I’m not sleeping well. The slightest thing sends me reeling.

  After a week, the school should feel familiar, and yet everything is still strange.

  It’s their way of acting, all of them—the teachers and the students, the employees and the administration, even the mastiff and the Persian cat.

  In their own way, each one of them points to me as an intruder.

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 21ST

  Lately, I’ve had the impression that the students regard me with more than the usual disdain. They wait for me in class with mocking, observant faces. Always polite, of course, always restrained, but they’re judging me. And they find me wanting.

  In the older group, one boy sits in the back. His name is Ignacio, and he’s the one who disturbs me the most. Scrawny, gimpy, very smart, he seems to exert some sort of unshakeable authority over the others.

  I have a feeling that he draws little caricatures of me, or does impressions. Sometimes, he just sits and stares, like he’s trying to transmit some kind of message. I can’t punish him for looking at me, but there is undeniable insolence there. The kids all laugh quietly when I address him, or when he addresses me. I haven’t been able to determine why that is.

  I assign them a new composition and try not to obsess. Maybe I’m wrong about them. Maybe I’m using them as a way to reflect my own flaws, attributing thoughts to them that—deep down—represent what I think of myself.

  It can be hard to gauge whether someone disapproves of us. Whether they’re suspicious. Whether we’re being snubbed. I sense disrespect, but maybe it’s simple curiosity, or boredom. What am I to them but another teacher, after all? A boring, unimaginative teacher. A teacher who clearly isn’t going to last long.

  The boys look up from their papers now and then, chew their pens in thought. They pass notes between them, pencils and erasers. A sound of little dings, accompanied always by stifled laughter. A constant putting of hands in pockets, a silent typing I pretend not to see.

  During class, time slows down and expands in such a way that these details carry more weight. I check the clock every five minutes. Ignacio is always the first to hand in his work. His compositions are long and well-written, unsettling, and cruel—a blunt violence is always present in his dreams, power struggles, hierarchies, submissions. He is deliberate and cold. I never dare to make any comments.

  As a budding writer, he is undoubtedly better than me.

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22ND

  I’ve started to converse with other teachers this week. I’m making an effort to see them as normal people, no more peculiar or inscrutable than I am. Nevertheless, our conversations are banal. We sit in the dining hall and discuss the students, the incessant rain. I laugh along without really knowing why. I try to fit in, interpret their codes. Sometimes I get the impression that certain topics require a secret language, oblique signals, winks or watchwords, but I quickly dismiss the thought. We must all seem strange, from the outside.

  Even Marieta stopped me in the hallway to chat. Marieta who is always in her own world, a step above the rest of us.

  I was leaving class, a pile of papers under my arm. She looked me in the eye at first, and then at an indeterminate point somewhere above my head. The students watched us. I thought I saw Héctor elbow Iván, or the other way around.

  It was the first time she spoke to me alone. Unfortunately, she only inquired about the basics: how things were going, if I was getting on okay, if I had any trouble with my classes.

  I feigned nonchalance, even daring to make a bad joke that I would now rather forget. At one point, I took a miscalculated step backward—I was planning to lean against the wall—and all the essays fell to the floor. Embarrassed, I bent to pick them up, apologizing all the while. When I stood, she was already gone.

  She rattles me, Marieta. Her grace, her obsessive efficiency. Vivacity and petulance coursing through her small frame. She smiles, and her smile has all the beauty of a mask.

  Her lack of interest in me is abundantly clear.

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 23RD

  I spend the most time with Martínez. Yesterday, I had lunch with him and we wound up in his room, playing chess.

  Martínez is good-natured but competitive; he likes to win and can’t help beating
me quickly. The matches only last a few minutes: just enough time to show off his arsenal of express checkmates.

  His room is bigger than mine, and his windows look out on the other side of the grounds. It’s brighter. Neater and more comfortable.

  He explains that he’s worked at the colich from its earliest days, hence the privilege of a better room. He also tells me he’s a widower, that his children live far away—which is fortunate, he adds—and that his life at Wybrany is the best thing he’s got.

  When he speaks, his eyes are so shrewd that I’m left doubting everything: his widower status, his children, even his thoughts on the colich.

  Otherwise, he seems like a relaxed, canny old guy, a promising pal.

  He tells racy jokes, goes on about fútbol and politics, doesn’t hide his Andalusian accent. He seems like a different man from the one I’ve seen at meetings. He even goes so far as to poke fun at the assistant headmaster, whom he refers to as “Softy.” He explains that Softy used to be the colich guidance counselor. That in other times, he was called the Advisor.

  “Nice little nickname, eh? The Advisor. Softy was always trying to climb the ladder. He angled hard for that promotion.”

  He also has words for Señor J. According to Martínez, Señor J. is the colich’s principle investor. In the past, he’s held political office, run a credit union, directed a foundation or two. He currently controls several lobbies.

  “He isn’t just anybody,” Martínez assures me. “There are people very high up who back him, who are prepared to do what it takes to keep him happy. Same goes for the school counselor. They all come from high places.”