by Sara Mesa
Her voice is haughty, demanding. Maddening.
“I didn’t leave without telling you! I left you a note!”
“A note? Do you really think a note is sufficient? One, cold note? It’s Christmas!”
“Who cares if it’s Christmas?”
“I care!”
We’re both silent for several seconds. My head hurts. Even the pressure from the phone against my temple is torture.
“Who are you going to spend New Year’s Eve with? Are you going to leave me by myself?” she finally says.
“New Year’s Eve?”
I hadn’t realized what day it was.
I consider using my illness as an excuse, but hold back. She might decide to come see me. I can’t think of anything worse. I say I have to stay at the colich and be on call.
“On call? You’re a teacher, not a doorman. Who’d believe that on call business?”
“Me. I do.”
“Well, I think the right thing is for you to come here, with me.”
“Right? Now you’re going to tell me what’s right?”
She starts to whimper.
“Why do you have to talk to me like that? You didn’t used to be like this. What’s your problem with me?”
I don’t respond. I hear her sniveling, distorted by interference. I hang up the phone.
Gabriela is watching me placidly.
“Was that your wife, sir?”
“Oh, no. I’m not married.”
It feels good to say it. Not being married suddenly feels very agreeable. She continues to watch me without another word. She doesn’t even blink. I don’t know if she believes me. I don’t know if she doubts. I don’t know what she thinks.
I look at her tired face. A deep wrinkle scores her forehead. There are mottled spots on her cheeks. She wears her hair pulled back and I can see a few gray strands peppering her locks. She’s older than I am, possibly not by much, but she’s seen more. She’s wiser. I feel deep tenderness for her.
“What are you doing tonight?” I ask. “Will you have dinner with your daughter?”
She shakes her head.
“No, my daughter is in Cárdenas. She doesn’t have a car. She can’t come here.”
“And you can’t go see her?”
“It’s hard, sir. She shares an apartment with other girls. There’s no room for me. And I don’t have a car, either. Someone would have to drive me, and I’d have to sleep in a hotel. All of that costs a lot of money.”
“I imagine you must miss her.”
“I do, sir. But it’s okay. I can’t complain.”
I think for a moment.
“Would you like to have dinner with me, Gabriela?”
I’m surprised by her quick response. She doesn’t hesitate.
“Of course, sir. If you’d like.”
I smile and try to hide my enthusiasm. I list my conditions: she’ll have to use the informal you, stop endlessly calling me sir, she mustn’t prepare anything special, she doesn’t need to serve me. She nods, reserved. But when she goes to speak, sir slips out.
She has to stop and think, make an effort. She cuts herself off on the first sound: “s— …” almost as if she were struggling against her own nature.
Now I write and wait, while she gets ready for dinner. I’ve changed out of my pajamas, put on clean clothes, trimmed my nails, shaved, and splashed on cologne. A new year is about to begin. I’m disoriented, unnerved, and still convalescing, but for the first time in a long while, I sense a change. A smile, unbidden, comes to my lips.
Like all the December thirty-firsts of my childhood, I write down my intentions for the new year.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 2ND
Cold. A curdled sun. Gabriela’s body, ripe but sweet. We’ve spent these past days in my room.
She gives herself to me. She’s submissive. This makes me uncomfortable because I suspect she doesn’t submit to me but rather to what she believes I represent: authority, rank.
I wasn’t the first. I know that now. I’m substituting for García Medrano in this, as well.
He won’t be returning to claim what once belonged to him. Ledesma was right: Gabriela knew. Gabriela told me.
She was the one who found him. The sight of his shoes pointed down at the floor, motionless, when she entered the room. The chair knocked on its side. The little pool of urine. He had been dead for several hours.
This very room.
No one warned me that I’d been sleeping in a cursed room this whole time. The source of my nightmares. My illness, perhaps.
I don’t blame her for not saying anything.
She turns away when she tells me. Moonlight bathes her profile, makes her beautiful. I know she feels old, hates her horsey teeth, hates her gray hair. She possesses a muted coquettishness, deeply feminine but rusty from disuse.
I don’t compliment her because I don’t want her to be embarrassed. She’d think I was lying. And I don’t want to lie, either. Not the time for that, anymore. We’ve entered a new age, one in which the lies that used to make sense no longer do, and the truths that once sustained us begin to disguise themselves as lies. From now on, we will be ruled by other codes, other norms, a hostile environment to which we must adapt in order to survive.
I just want to hold her, feel her close, her deep, sharp smell and tepid warmth.
My fever still crops up in the afternoons, and to soothe its aftereffects, I doze as I listen to her talk, spurred on by my questions. Naturally quiet, she only talks because I oblige her.
She tells me about him and her voice is gentle. I think she loved him, perhaps, or misses him. It’s possible to envy a dead man. I know this because I’m jealous: an anxiety that gnaws and tarnishes what should be a pure refuge. And yet, I need to know more. What happened, why he did it.
She doesn’t know. I believe she is sincere.
She is thoughtful, then; piecing something back together inside herself. I watch as her lips move soundlessly. Then she speaks.
She remembers that García Medrano had been deeply affected by what happened to Celia. He didn’t know how to keep quiet. Maybe suicide was the only path that remained for him.
Celia. The girl who also killed herself, I say.
Gabriela raises herself up on one elbow. She’s surprised that I know the story. When it happened, hardly anyone in all of Wybrany knew the truth. And those who did were called to a meeting by Señor J., a meeting in which he made his threat perfectly clear.
“But there are always cracks, always crevices,” I say. “You were going to tell me. And Ledesma did, before you could. It was always a matter of time—more time, or less—but all shit floats to the surface in the end.”
“It was Ledesma who told you? He’s your sort,” she says, lying back down. “That’s why he couldn’t keep quiet. García Medrano, too.”
“And what sort is that?” Another lash of jealousy.
Withdrawn, weak, pensive, second-best. Those aren’t her words. Gabriela’s vocabulary is more concise. She sums up the complexity in one simple expression; she knows how to synthesize, give weight to language: the from-below sort, she says.
So above and below still exist, then. Where is Señor J., above or below? And Marieta, Martínez, Sacra? Where is Ignacio? My sister? Crazy Lola? Where is the girl, Marcela?
I utter this final question out loud.
She turns over gently. Touches my forehead, whispers that my fever is back.
I repeat the question. “Where is Marcela?” She pronounces the name slowly: Marcela.
Marcela is with them, she says at last. They took her out of school because she was hopeless. She was never going to learn anything. Now she’s with them. She’ll stay on at the colich, in another way.
Something roils in the pit of my stomach. I remember Señor J.’s account: There are girls at our disposal.
“What do her parents say?” I whisper.
“What can they say? There’s nothing they can do. It’s not like there are other
options.”
My eyelids are heavy.
I fight off fatigue, try to concentrate on Gabriela’s image. She doesn’t even look concerned. Even a compassionate, tender person such as herself can accept the existence of the sewers.
I’m tired.
I don’t say anything else and remain motionless, sheltered under the covers.
Gabriela does, too, but she no longer looks at me. She simply closes her eyes and falls silent.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 7TH
The children begin to return, and the teachers, and once again the colich fills with sounds that would seem to represent life, but which I now know represent something very different.
Yesterday, I saw Señor J., the assistant headmaster, and Marieta. They were in the dining hall, toasting the New Year with champagne. Marieta wore a green dress, long and low cut, her shoulders exposed. She has a magnificent body. Her skin glows. The assistant headmaster didn’t take his eyes off her. In contrast, Señor J. looked above their heads, his eyes at half-mast, a faint, arrogant smile.
They greeted me from their seats. I had no desire to approach them; I sensed that perhaps it wasn’t expected of me.
By now, they must know about my relationship with Gabriela. They must know that I’ve learned my predecessor’s fate.
We all know more than we pretend to.
But if they don’t tell me and I don’t ask, it’s as though nothing has happened. That’s how sewers work: occasionally, the stench seeps out, we smell it, but the sewers remain below, out of sight, unmentioned. As if they didn’t exist.
I nod at the trio’s greeting and decide to exaggerate my continuing convalescence. I take only a bowl of soup, shuffle over to a seat with an afflicted air, leave the table quickly, and return to my room. I have played my part in the performance. They pretend to believe it.
I see Martínez entering his room with an enormous suitcase, probably loaded with bottles. Pleased with himself, upbeat, he slaps me hard on the back. I stumble. I tell him I’ve been very sick and he laughs, unbelieving. His face has deteriorated since I last saw him. I don’t know where he spent the holidays. He doesn’t say and I don’t ask. There’s a wrinkle of suffering between his brows, but his chatter wipes it away. I take a more indulgent view of him today: both love and illness have made me more tolerant.
Sacra stops me on the porch. She brings her face very close to mine. Her lipstick is messy and she smells of alcohol.
“You’re pale, honey,” she says.
In contrast, her skin is flushed, a slick of sweat at her sideburns and above her lip. She asks me where I’ve been. I give a short, concise response.
“A few days here, a few in Cárdenas.”
Then I turn, leaving her at the entrance. I don’t bother to fake a reason for my rudeness.
Back to the norm, Gabriela has a full workday again. She can only come to me at night. She always comes in secret. I wait, impatient. She comes with her head bowed, a rushed expression. She’s keeping up appearances.
I, on the other hand, have reached the point at which I couldn’t care less. I don’t even have an interest in pretending to be a decent teacher.
I’ve to come to understand that—here—certain things don’t exist and aren’t a danger to anyone, so long as they’re left undefined by words.
MONDAY, JANUARY 8TH
First day of classes in the new year. The students watch me with bold, thuggish little eyes. They all received lots of gifts this Christmas; they bring them to the colich and show each other to determine whose is the latest, the most expensive.
Ignacio is back with a new leather jacket and a pair of sunglasses that make him look like a pimp. Irene is wearing long, dangly earrings, necklaces, rings, an entire hardware store on her person. She’s heavily made up—shades of red, blue, green spread artlessly over her asymmetrical face.
The whole class period is a celebration of such novelties. I don’t try to impose any kind of order. I sit back. Let them do what they want.
The gap Marcela has left is barely noticeable. She never made much noise anyway. No one asks about her. She’s been removed from my roster and I don’t utter her name, either.
We move on. Seamlessly.
(…)
I run into Ledesma in the hallway after class. I haven’t seen him since the day we talked in his room. He glances at me sideways and comes over, his head down, briefcase practically dragging on the tiled floor. He just wants to say a brief hello, but I keep him there.
I ask him about Marcela. I want to know what he thinks about the girl.
For the first time, I see distrust in his eyes. He suggests that I know as well as he where she could be.
“Of course I know,” I say. “But we’re just going to leave it there?”
I peer into his sunken eyes and see only disappointment. A long, endless, empty corridor. I’ve never seen a look so opaque, so dead.
He responds, drawing out his words.
“Do you really think you can do anything?”
I stammer. He takes a step back, puffs out his chest. He no longer seems worried about appearing disturbed. He speaks, but it’s like he’s reciting the words. As if someone else were speaking through his mouth.
“All we have left is shame, torrents of shame, rivers and seas of shame. What kind of world is this, where we’re told by a madman that we should be ashamed? The greatest evil of our time is that there are no maestros left to follow. But we must stop a moment. We must listen to all the hopeless voices.”
“I don’t understand, Ledesma. What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the insects, the insects buzzing. About things that are but are not seen. It doesn’t matter if we try to hide them. The eyes of all of humanity are on the pit into which we’re poised to fall. But I’m tired of watching. I know now, it’s better to fall. What do you think, Isidro?”
Good God, I had no idea Ledesma had become an evangelist. I pat his shoulder, tell him to get some rest. He smiles to himself and looks around anxiously, like he’s coming out of a trance.
This is the man who—according to Gabriela—is “my sort”?
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 10TH
Brito came to class today with a black eye and split lip. He could barely speak when I asked him about it. Brito, as I’ve said, is strong, big-headed. I figure he’s about to get kicked out for fighting. Tears leak from his injured eye and he grits his teeth, holding them back. I assumed he wouldn’t tell me what happened in class, but he doesn’t when I catch him alone, either. Stubborn, he buries his chin in his chest, refusing to meet my eye.
“It must have taken a few guys to do this. You’re a bull, Brito.”
His lip curls in pain and contempt. I give up.
In the dining hall, I bring it up with Martínez first, then with the assistant headmaster. Attacking his steak, Martínez shrugs, laughs, asks if I’m going to start getting involved in kid stuff. But the assistant headmaster shows obvious interest, the hint of a yellowed smile. He thinks it’s wonderful that I’m so concerned about the students. Not every teacher commits himself so fully, he says.
“Yes, Brito’s case is a sad one. He hurts himself to get attention. Afterward, he won’t point the finger at anyone because deep down he’s a good boy, he doesn’t want to make trouble. He just wants to be noticed, fussed over. But there’s no doubt, the nurse saw through it right away: he does it all to himself.”
Surprisingly, Gabriela also believes this is true. She’s known Brito since he was small. His mother died when he was seven. His father, one of the maintenance staff, is an ex-con, a recovering heroin addict, an incurable depressive who barely notices his son. Brito has no one. That’s why he hurts himself.
I squeeze Gabriela against me. I want her to stop talking.
I still don’t understand. I don’t know a thing.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 14TH
The colich’s anniversary celebration. It had never been mentioned to me before. An absolute disaster: su
rprise and improvisation have led to this miserable state, a boiling brain and double vision.
From his portrait, Andrzej Wybrany—his lifeless expression, white whiskers, benevolent, slightly crossed eyes—presided over the ceremony. The assistant headmaster—dressed for the occasion in an alpaca suit—took the stage and spoke of circular justice, the significance of the scholarship students’ presence, students he referred to as “special.” Separated by sex and grade level, the students pretended they were hearing this for the first time. Señor J. showed obvious disinterest. When it was his turn to speak, he improvised a few overly grandiose remarks, encouraged school spirit, and introduced a hymn I didn’t recognize, which the boys’ chorus sang masterfully. Their clear voices reached the ceiling, swirling on high, a preciosity perfectly suited to the great auditorium.
It was hard not to be moved.
As we applauded, I noticed Ledesma wasn’t there.
I assumed he’d slunk away from the celebration, from the obligation to clap. I also assumed his absence would not be wellreceived by the administration, unless he had a more than justifiable excuse.
Yesterday’s staff memo had made it perfectly clear that attendance was mandatory. It even detailed what we should wear, where we should sit, and included some elevated words about the spirit of the event.
Ledesma had escaped all that. He’d been spouting nonsense the last time I saw him; maybe he wasn’t aware of the seriousness of his actions. We’d soon see what the consequences were.
I myself couldn’t get away, or wasn’t brave enough to try. I listened to every speech, clapped as loudly as anyone. During the reception, however, I felt exposed and sought out a corner where I could drink my cocktails in peace.
The students were dancing together, boys and girls mixing at last. I noted the lustful gleam in their eyes, inappropriate for their age. Their fingers clenched, desirous of flesh, any flesh. Surrounded by his acolytes, Ignacio stared at Héctor. Their rivalry was a constant exchange of savage glances.
I stood watching them for several minutes. Then, I saw Señor J. signal to Ignacio from the corner of the room. Ignacio went to him quickly, not bothering to conceal his limp, and the two went out together into the garden. They returned a short time later, smiling more broadly, with almost an air of provocation. Ignacio looked like he was in an excellent mood. As he passed me, he patted my back with a familiarity I wasn’t sure how to reproach.