That was the strangest thing about 34: he wasn’t resentful. Sometimes we would see him talking with teachers who were unknown to us, teachers from other seventh-grade classrooms. They were happy conversations, with hand gestures and pats on the back. He maintained cordial relations with the teachers who had failed him, it seemed.
We quaked every time 34 showed signs of his undeniable intelligence during class. But he never showed off; quite the contrary, he interjected only to suggest new points of view, or to give his opinion on complex subjects. The things he said weren’t written in the books, and we admired him for that, but our admiration for him frightened us: if someone so smart had failed, it made it seem all the more likely that we would fail too. We speculated behind his back about the real reasons he’d been held back: intricate family conflicts, long and painful illnesses. But deep down we knew that 34’s problem was strictly academic—we knew that his failure would be, tomorrow, our own.
Once, he came up to talk to me unexpectedly. He looked alarmed and happy all at once. It took him a moment to start talking, as if he had thought for a long time about what he was going to say to me. “You don’t have anything to worry about,” he finally blurted out. “I’ve been watching you, and I’m sure you’re going to pass.” It was so comforting to hear that. It really made me happy. It made me irrationally happy. 34 was, as they say, the voice of experience, and knowing what he thought about me was a relief.
Soon I found out that the same scene had been repeated with others in our class, and a rumor spread that 34 was messing with us. But then it occurred to us that this might be his way of instilling confidence in us. And we needed that confidence. The teachers tortured us daily, and we lived in fear of our report cards. There were almost no exceptions. We all felt we were headed straight for the slaughterhouse.
The key was to figure out if 34 was communicating the same message to all of us, or only to a chosen few. There were seven students who still had not been absolved by 34; they went into a state of panic. 38—or 37, I don’t remember his number well—was one of the most worried. He couldn’t stand the uncertainty. His desperation grew so intense that, one day, defying the logic of the nominations, he went up to 34 and asked him directly if he would pass. 34 seemed uncomfortable with the question. “Let me study you,” he proposed. “I haven’t been able to watch everyone—there are a lot of you. I’m sorry, but until now I haven’t paid very much attention to you.”
You have to understand, 34 was not putting on airs. Absolutely not. There was a permanent note of honesty in his manner of speaking. It was never easy to doubt what he was saying. His frank gaze helped too: he made sure to look you in the eyes, and he spaced out his sentences with brief but suspenseful pauses. A slow and mature rhythm beat within his words. “I haven’t been able to watch everyone. There are a lot of you,” he had told 38, and no one doubted this. Number 34 spoke oddly and he spoke seriously. Although perhaps back then we believed that in order to speak seriously, you had to speak oddly.
The next day 38 asked for his verdict, but 34 answered only with excuses, as if he wanted to hide—we thought—a painful truth. “Give me more time,” he said. “I’m still not sure.” By then we’d all given him up for lost, but a week later, after completing the observation period, 34 went up to 38 and told him, to everyone’s surprise: “Yes, you will pass. It’s definite.”
We were happy, of course, and we also celebrated on the following day, when he rescued the remaining six. But there was still something important to resolve: now all of the students had been blessed by 34, and it was unusual for everyone to pass. We did some investigating and we found that never, in the almost two hundred years of the school’s history, had all forty-five students in a seventh-grade class passed.
During the following, decisive months, 34 noticed that we had begun to doubt his predictions, but he didn’t acknowledge it: he went on faithfully eating his carrots, and he regularly spoke up in classes, volunteering his brave and attractive opinions. He knew we were watching him, that he was in the hot seat, but he always greeted us with that same warmth.
At the end of the year, when final exams came, we learned that 34 had hit the bull’s-eye with his predictions. Four classmates had jumped ship early (including 38), and of the forty-one who remained, forty of us passed. The only one who didn’t pass was, once again, 34.
On the last day of classes we went over to talk to him, to console him. He was sad, of course, but he didn’t seem beside himself. “I was expecting it,” he said. “I’m really bad at studying. Maybe things will be better for me at a different school. They say that sometimes you have to just step aside. I think this is the moment to step aside.”
It hurt all of us to lose 34. His abrupt departure was, for us, an injustice. But then we saw him again the next year, falling in line with the seventh graders on the first day of class. The school didn’t allow students to repeat a grade twice, but for 34 they had, for some reason, made an exception. Many students claimed that it was unfair, that 34 had gotten help from friends in high places. But most of us thought it was good that he stayed—even though we were surprised that he would want to go through that experience a third time.
I went over to talk to him that same day. I tried to be friendly, and he was cordial too. He looked thinner, and you could really see the age difference between him and his new classmates. “I’m not 34 anymore,” he told me finally, in that that solemn tone that by then I knew well. “I appreciate that you’re asking about me, but 34 doesn’t exist anymore,” he told me. “Now I’m 29, and I have to get used to my new reality. I’d rather be part of my new class and make new friends. It’s not healthy to get stuck in the past.”
I guess he was right. Every once in a while we’d see him from afar, hanging out with his new classmates or talking with those same teachers who had failed him the year before. I think that time he finally managed to pass the class, but I don’t know if he stayed at the school much longer. Little by little, we lost track of him.
2
One winter afternoon, when they came back from gym class, they found the following message written on the board:
Augusto Pinochet is:
a) a motherfucker
b) a son of a bitch
c) an imbecile
d) a piece of shit
e) all of the above
And underneath it said:
IOP
They were going to erase it, but there was no time, because right then Villagra, the Natural Sciences teacher, entered the room. There was a nervous murmur and some timid laughter, and then absolute silence—the silence that always accompanied Villagra’s classes. Villagra looked at the board for a few long minutes, his back to the students. That writing, with its firm strokes and perfect calligraphy, was not that of a twelve-year-old boy. Moreover, it wasn’t very common for seventh graders to be members of the IOP, the Institutional Oppositional Party.
With the same gravity, the same theatricality as always, Villagra went to the door and looked out to make sure he wasn’t being spied on. Then he picked up the eraser and slowly started to erase the options one by one, but before he got to the last one, “all of the above,” he stopped to brush away the chalk dust that had fallen onto his jacket, and he let out a cough that resounded exaggeratedly. Then, from the last row, Vergara—better known to his classmates as Verga-rara—asked if the correct answer was e). Villagra looked at the ceiling as if searching for inspiration, and his face really did take on an expression of enlightenment. “The question is poorly designed,” he said. He explained that options a) and b) were practically identical, as were c) and d), so it was obvious, by default, that the answer was e).
“So the right answer is ‘all of the above’?” asked González Reyes.
“As I said, it is the correct answer by default. Open your books to page 80, please.”
“Aaaaahhhhhh,” said the boys.
“But, sir, what do you think of Pinochet?” insisted a different González, González Torres (t
here were six boys named González in the class).
“That doesn’t matter,” he said, serenely and decisively. “I’m the Natural Sciences teacher. I don’t talk about politics.”
3
I remember the cramp in my right hand, after history class, because Godoy dictated for the entire two hours. He taught us Athenic democracy by dictating the way you dictate in a dictatorship.
I remember Lavoisier’s Law, but I remember the law of the jungle much better.
I remember Aguayo saying that “in Chile, people are lazy, they don’t want to work; Chile is a country full of opportunities.”
I remember Aguayo failing us, but offering make-up classes with his daughter, who was beautiful, but whom we didn’t like, because in her face we recognized the dog-like face of her father.
***
I remember Veragua wearing white socks to school and Aguayo telling him: “You are trash.”
I remember Veragua’s hair, and his big green eyes that filled with tears as he looked at the ground, in silence, humiliated. He never showed up at school again.
I remember Venegas, the head teacher, telling us the following Monday: “Veragua’s parents withdrew him. He couldn’t hack it.”
I remember Elizabeth Azócar teaching us to write during the final hours of each Friday. I was in love with Elizabeth Azócar.
I remember Rodrigo Martínez Gallegos, and Hugo Puebla, and Álvaro Tabilo.
I remember Gonzalo Mario Cordero Lafferte, who used to tell jokes during our free hours. If any teachers happened to walk by, he would pretend we were studying French: la pipe, la table, la voiture.
***
I remember that we never complained. How stupid, to complain—we had to bear it all like men. But the idea of manliness was confused: sometimes it meant bravery, other times indolence.
I remember when someone stole the money I was carrying so I could make the optional annual payment at the Parents’ Center.
Later I found out who stole it, and he knew I knew. Every time we looked at each other we said, with our eyes: I know you robbed me, I know you know I robbed you.
I remember the list of Chilean presidents who had studied at my school. I remember that when teachers reeled off that list, they omitted the name of Salvador Allende.
I remember saying “my school” with pride.
I remember the Subordinate Noun Clause and the Subordinate Adjective/Relative Clause.
***
I remember the vocabulary exercises, which were full of strange words that we’d repeat later, dying of laughter: commiseration, skirmish, bauble, knickknack, iridescent, vindicate, craggy, succinct.
I remember that Soto got dropped off at school by the chauffeur who drove for his father, a military man.
I remember that the English teacher gave a bad grade to a student who had lived in Chicago for ten years, and later said, ashamed, “I didn’t know he was a gringo.”
I remember stupid teachers and brilliant teachers.
I remember the most brilliant of all, Ricardo Ferrada, who, during the first class of the year, wrote a Henry Miller quote on the board that changed my life.
I remember teachers who wanted to sink us and teachers who wanted to save us. Teachers who thought they were Mr. Keating. Teachers who thought they were god. Teachers who thought they were Nietzsche.
***
I remember that gang of homosexuals in the fourth grade. There were five or six and they always sat together, talked only to each other. The fattest one wrote me love letters.
They never played any sports, and the few times they went out to recess, they got teased and hit. They stayed in the classroom instead, talking or fighting among themselves. They shouted “Bitch!” and threw their backpacks at each other’s faces or onto the floor.
I remember one morning during free time, we were warming up for a math test with no teachers in the room, and the fat one was talking nonstop with his seatmate. Little Carlos shouted at him: “Shut up, you fat faggot.”
I remember the fat one got up, furious, more effeminate than ever, and answered: “Don’t you ever call me fat again.”
I remember smoking marijuana during recess, in the basement, with Andrés Chamorro, Cristián Villablanca, and Camilo Dattoli.
***
I remember Pato Parra, one of four people repeating junior year. I remember his drawings.
I remember he sat on the first bench in the middle row, and the only thing he did during class was draw.
He never looked at the teachers—he was always hunched over, concentrated on his drawing, wearing his coke-bottle glasses, his hair falling over the paper.
I remember the quick movement that Patricio Parra made with his head to keep his hair from messing up the drawing.
None of the teachers scolded him, not for his long hair or for his absolute disinterest in their classes. And if one of them asked him why he wasn’t participating, he would apologize dryly and politely, leaving no room for discussion.
I got to know him only a little, we talked only a few times. I remember one morning that I spent sitting next to him, looking at his drawings, which were perfect, almost always realistic: comics about unemployment, about poverty, all of them straightforward, free of histrionics.
He drew a picture of me that morning. I still have the drawing, but I don’t know where it is.
I don’t know if it was in June or July, but I remember it was a winter morning when we found out that Pato Parra had committed suicide.
I remember the cold in the Puente Alto cemetery. I remember the teachers trying to explain to us what had happened. And I remember wishing that they would shut up, shut up, shut up. I remember the emptiness afterward, all year, when we looked at the first desk in the middle row.
I remember that the teacher’s assistant told us that life went on. I remember that life went on, but not in the same way.
I remember we all cried in the school bus, which we called Caleuche, on the way back.
***
I remember walking with Hugo Puebla across the playground soccer field, our arms around each other, crying.
I remember the phrase that Pato Parra wrote, on a wall of his room, before killing himself: My final cry to the world: Shit.
4
I remember the final months at that school, in 1993: the desire for everything to be over. I was nervous, we all were, waiting for the big test, which we had spent six years preparing for. Because that’s what the National Institute was: a pre-university school that lasted six years.
One morning we exploded. We all got into a fight, shouting and hitting: an eruption of absolute violence whose origins we did not understand. It happened all the time, but this time we felt a rage or an impotence or a sadness that had never before revealed itself. As a result of this outburst, Washington Musa, the Inspector General, paid our class a visit. I remember that name, Washington Musa. Whatever became of him? How little I care.
Musa adopted the same tone as always, the tone we heard from so many teachers and inspectors during those years. He told us that we were privileged, that we had received an excellent education. That we had taken classes from the best teachers in Chile. And all for free, he emphasized. “But you people aren’t going to get anywhere, I don’t know how you’ve survived this school. You humanities people are the dregs of the National Institute,” he said. None of that hurt us, we had heard that reprimand, that monologue, many times before. We looked at the floor or at our notebooks. We were closer to laughter than tears, a laughter that would have been bitter or sarcastic or pretentious, but laughter still.
And nonetheless, no one laughed. While Musa droned on, the silence was absolute. Suddenly he started to tear into Javier García Guarda. Javier was perhaps the most silent and timid boy in the class. He didn’t get bad grades, or good ones either, and his file was clean: not a single negative mark, not a single positive note. But Musa, furious, was humiliating him, and we didn’t know why. Little by little we understood tha
t Javier had dropped his pen. That was all. And Musa thought he’d done it on purpose, or maybe he didn’t think about it, but he took advantage of the incident to concentrate all his rage on García Guarda: “I don’t even want to think about the education you got from your parents,” he was saying. “You don’t deserve to be at this school.”
I stood up and defended my classmate, or, rather, I stood up and offended Musa. I told him, “Shut up, sir, shut up for once, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re humiliating him and it’s not fair, sir.”
An even more intense silence came over us.
Musa was tall, solidly built, and bald. In addition to his work at the Institute, he ran a jewelry shop, and he greatly enhanced his salary through sales at the school: every so often he would stop in the hallway to praise brooches, watches, or necklaces that he himself had sold to the teachers. With the students he was mean, icy, despotic, as dictated by the nature of his position: his reprimands and punishments were legendary. His defining characteristic was, I thought then and I think now, arrogance. But when I challenged him, Musa didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to react.
“My office, both of you,” he said, thoroughly annoyed.
I remember that on the way to Musa’s office, Mejías came over to give us encouragement. I had acted bravely, but maybe it wasn’t bravery, or it was the indolent side of bravery: I was simply fed up, I didn’t care. Despite how close we were to finishing at the Institute, I would have been happy to go back that very day to “the school on the corner.” I thought I had found an excuse to get myself expelled. But I also knew they weren’t going to expel me. There were teachers who cared about me, who would protect me. Musa knew that.
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