by Gonzalo Barr
Mrs. Griffith screamed. The headmaster arrived. Ugo’s mother was called.
The dentist replaced the cap and warned Ugo not to use his front teeth for anything. “Bite with the side of your mouth,” the dentist said, demonstrating with his own finger. But Ugo was not hungry. He was in love.
At home recovering, he thought about Mayra. He had seen his mother preen when she stood in front of the mirror trying on different necklaces. He had seen her brim with satisfaction when she opened the velvet-lined box on her dresser where she kept her rings. His mother had so many rings, she would not notice if he took one and gave it to Mayra.
That night, he ate dinner by himself in the upstairs dining room (a lukewarm soup, a truffle omelet, which he mostly picked at with the tines of his fork, pushing the little black flecks to one side). Ugo’s mother was out having dinner and would not return until late. When he was finished eating, he folded his napkin and pushed himself away from the table. He went to his mother’s bedroom, got the jewelry box, and opened it.
There were pearl, diamond, and emerald necklaces. There were necklaces made of stones Ugo had never seen. He held them around his neck and looked in the mirror. All were too big. He picked through the rings and found a small one with a round, red stone the color of cherry syrup. Mayra had said cherry was her favorite.
Ugo took the ring. He tore a sheet of drawing paper, selected a crimson pencil, and wrote, “Mayra,” in block letters, many times, until he covered the sheet. He wrapped the ring in the paper and tied everything together with string he found in his mother’s night table. It wasn’t as pretty as the gifts he got at Christmas, but it would do. Then he hid the wrapped ring in his valise, a supple leather bag with Ugo’s five initials in gold on the flap. The gift made a bump in the valise the size of a baseball. He pushed the valise under the bed and waited for Mrs. Norcross to come and tuck him in.
When Ugo returned to school the following day, his friends circled around him before class and asked him about his tooth. Did he ride in an ambulance? Did he get stitches? Did it hurt? He saw Mayra enter the classroom and slip her purse and books under her desk.
He sat in his place, behind her. And as the teacher called roll, her hand reached for the back of her neck and dropped a small piece of wide-ruled paper, folded in half. He picked up the paper from his desktop and opened it. On it was a smiley face that Mayra had drawn carefully. He was dizzy with excitement.
The teacher called out Ugo’s name a second time, louder, before he answered, “Present.” The teacher glared at him and moved down the list. Ugo’s mind was fixed on Mayra’s note. He thought of handing her the ring there, but that was too risky. The teacher would catch him, and he would be sent to the headmaster’s office.
At recess, Mayra sat with some girls on the bench under the oak tree. Ugo sat at another bench nearby with two boys who were arguing about whether men would make it to the moon within the next three years. One boy said he expected the Russians to pull some stunt at the last minute, even if they had to crash-land and abandon one of their cosmonauts on, the moon, just to say they got there first. “Your father’s a commie working for Castro,” the other boy said. Ugo sat holding a paper bag containing the wrapped ring, as if it were lunch, summoning the courage to walk across the yard and give it to Mayra. But the two boys got into a fight and wrestled on the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust. Mrs. Griffith pulled the boys up by their ears, blew her whistle, and signaled the end of recess. Ugo walked to class clutching the paper bag.
It wasn’t until the last period of the day, while the teacher wrote the homework assignments on the board with his back to the room, that Ugo got his chance. He leaned forward and handed the bag to Mayra, making sure to keep it out of sight. She slipped it under her desk.
The bell rang and the teacher dismissed the class. Mayra took the paper bag and placed it on top of her books. Before she left, she turned, smiled, and made a little wave.
The next morning, Mayra ignored Ugo. If their eyes met, she looked away.
At lunchtime, Ugo was called to the headmaster’s office, where besides the headmaster himself, he found his mother and a man he had never seen before.
The headmaster began by quoting Aristotle and Cicero, speaking about the duties of a good citizen, which he called civitas, enunciating each syllable, kee-wee-tahs, he said, glancing at Ugo’s mother for approbation, áting the school’s commitment to inculcating bonhomie in the students. He spoke so much about the school that an uninformed observer would have assumed, quite reasonably, that the old man had gone into his sales pitch and that Ugo’s mother and the other man (ceremoniously introduced by the headmaster as Señor Bonnet) were one of the many well-to-do parents who inspected the school before deciding whether to enroll their child.
The headmaster spoke about Our Troubled Times, the vulgarity of it all, sanctioned as it is by the permissive vacuousness of psychologists and social workers with insipid the-o-ries, he said, who, shall we be frank, have introduced into the stream of history the hissing water serpent of moral relativity and cultural equivalence, which, like an undetected cancer, is a malformed notion, a half thought, an idea so insidious that they have managed to replace virtus with fame and celebrity with notoriety as if they were one and all the same. “Great for advertisers, but poison for the soul!” the headmaster said. He showed no signs of slowing down.
Instead, he went back, all the way back, to the first “dysfunctional” family, he called them, to Cain’s envy of Abel, to the moral miasma of Sodom and Gomorrah, to Paris snatching the beautiful Helen. “Damned hubris!” the headmaster said, tapping the top of his desk, pronouncing the foreign word so carefully that Ugo thought the old man would uncap the lovely gold and lacquer pen on his desk and write it out for them in Greek, as he liked to do on the blackboard when he spoke in class. “In short, persons lacking good citizenship,” the headmaster said.
That would have been the perfect moment to conclude this little monologue, this bumper car ride through canonical myth, but instead of explaining the purpose of the meeting—“You’re probably wondering why we have summoned you”—the headmaster digressed again, and Ugo felt as if he were strapped in a carnival ride, the one where the car spins on two axes at once and you lose all sense of up or down.
The headmaster’s monologue spun past the humanists like Vittorino da Feltre, Leonardo Bruni d’Arezzo, and Petrus Paulus Vergerius, the old man savoring the names the way he sucked on cough drops. It took his mother, growing visibly impatient, to state telegraphically the purpose of their meeting, the raison d’être of their petite réunion, which was a phrase she liked to use with her friends, as in—We must have another one of our petites réunions—but in the headmaster’s office, the two words were heavy and thick and maybe a little sour, like eating the leftovers of Mrs. Norcross’s Christmas Eve fruitcake on Epiphany.
“The purpose of our petite réunion,” Ugo’s mother said. “Forgive me for interrupting you, Dr. Locasto.” The headmaster bowed. “The purpose of our gathering here, Ugo,” she said, “is to ask you one question: Why did you take my ring?”
Ugo looked at his mother, then at the floor, then out the window at the erasure of a cloud on the horizon. The grandfather clock in the corner ticked unchallenged.
“If I may say something,” Señor Bonnet said, his voice meek, as if he were embarrassed for breaking the silence. “I was taken aback when Mayrita brought home such an extravagant gift from Master Ugo.” He talked directly to the boy. Although thin and neat in a dark, tailored suit. Señor Bonnet had none of Mayra’s arresting beauty. He was pale, and his face was drawn, as if from sipping too many early-morning magnums of the old Dom. “So I called the lady last night,” he said, one hand opening in the direction of Ugo’s mother, “surprised as I was to have found the telephone number in the phone book, grateful that you have such unique last names. And although we were not able to talk until late this morning, I explained the situation, and she quite graciously agreed to meet h
ere.”
Señor Bonnet had called her Mayrita, Ugo thought. Ma-hee-ree-tah, like the sound of wind blowing open an unhooked screen door to a single bright birdsong of a note, before the screen door slapped closed against the wood frame. Ma-hee-ree-tah.
“Why did you take my ring?” his mother said, in six flat basso notes.
“Young man,” the headmaster spoke, “have you anything to say that might elucidate, at least adumbrate, this situation for us?”
Ugo’s front tooth started to throb. The bell rang. For an instant, he felt relief as he thought the headmaster would call the meeting to a close. After all, classes were resuming and we must never be late for class. Didn’t the headmaster say that when he caught you in the hall? But he remained silent. Everyone stared at Ugo.
I love her. Ugo thought he heard himself blurt out the words. I love her. I love her. I love her. I—
“My dear Señor Bonnet,” the headmaster began again, “I do thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Apparently, the child is under the influence of one of the darker muses, nowhere near the midpoint of his life and already well on his way down la via smarrita, if you get my drift. But we shall take it from here.”
Señor Bonnet nodded to the headmaster. He said goodbye to Ugo’s mother, who said she was so sorry, so je ne sais quoi.
To which Señor Bonnet raised his hand, as if to say “No hay de qué, my dear lady.” At the narrow oak door. Señor Bonnet turned to look at Ugo and winked. Then he stepped out.
The headmaster ushered Ugo into the waiting room, “Much to discuss, yes?” and remained behind with his mother for another hour.
During the ride back to the house, Ugo’s mother warned him not to tell anyone, not a soul, what he had done. He would be moved to the back of the class again, seeing as it was abundantly clear that his interests lay not in his school lessons but elsewhere. And he was not to talk to that girl. “I don’t want any more trouble,” she said. But the admonishments did not stop there.
“I am getting a lock for my room,” his mother said. “It is difficult for me to accept the notion that I should have to lock myself in my own bedroom, in my own house, but there it is. And you will never step inside my room for anything. You will never go through my things, either. You will have your own things and I will have mine.”
What his mother did not tell Ugo during the short ride was that she had negotiated with the headmaster the terms under which he would be allowed to remain at the school. He had been caught stealing. The headmaster knew about it.
“Dear lady, please,” the headmaster had told her in his office behind closed doors. “It isn’t as if I can feign ignorance and thus transmogrify myself into an accomplice.”
But she managed to persuade him that the matter need not become officially one of theft. “The ring has been returned to its rightful owner, n’est-ce pas?” she said, holding up her hand. The ring with the cherry red stone was on her smallest finger. “If only we could look at this as a case of one preternaturatty hormonal garçon taking too close an interest in a beautiful young girl. Not exactly a crime, is it? Of course not. Kind of cute, isn’t it? After all, the girl, I have been told, is quite beautiful. If anything, we should celebrate his good taste, no doubt the result of having absorbed so much fine culture in these august halls,” she said, turning in her chair as if she were only now taking in the art on the walls of the headmaster’s office, mostly reproduction English hunting scenes. Ugo’s mother knew how to play the game as well as the headmaster, who, frankly, preferred not to have to exercise his authority and expel the child when there were other, more fruitful ways to resolve the issue.
“The school could use an arts center,” the headmaster said, “for the students to stage plays. The dramatic arts, while a base means to earn a living, when used judiciously in the pedagogical context, could be a salutary adjuvant to the traditional curriculum. A substantial contribution would go a long way to making the center a reality.”
Ugo’s mother agreed. And so numbers were discussed. The donation would be made anonymously, naturally, and the center named generically.
“I shall make note of it right away,” the headmaster said, as they were concluding. He looked on his desk for his gold and lacquer pen. He patted the pockets of his jacket, like a smoker looking for his lighter. He opened the top drawer. “Oh, dear,” he said. Finally, he settled on a disposable pen, one of those throw aways with the school name and coat of arms, and wrote a note to himself, frowning at the pen when he clicked the point out with his thumb.
At home, Ugo’s mother instructed Mr. Norcross to furnish one of the bedrooms at the other end of the floor with whatever he thought a young boy like Master Ugo would like. Meanwhile, Ugo would sleep in one of the other bedrooms that were reserved for guests.
Mr. Norcross bought a modest bed, a dresser, and a desk, furnishings that Ugo’s mother would have considered beneath her son’s station, even (why not say it?) utilitarian or belonging to some other unpalatable cult, except she never entered his room. He never entered hers again. When Ugo’s room was ready, Mr. Norcross moved his things in. Ugo’s solitary life began in earnest.
Every day, Bettina arrived at Ugo’s house in the late morning and stayed about two hours. She spent most of the weekends there, lying by the pool or sitting in the library talking to Ugo. Weekday nights, he sat alone in the library and read for hours, taking notes, if not copying entire passages. He used a beautiful gold and lacquer fountain pen that he kept in the center drawer of the desk. He wrote in the same leather-bound books his father had used. There were stacks of blank notebooks in the cabinets behind the desk. Bettina came over one Thursday afternoon, excited and out of breath.
“I just pledged a ridiculous amount of money to the museum of art,” she said. “Now we’ll be invited to all their special events and meet interesting people.”
“But I know nothing about art.”
“What about these paintings?”
“They’ve been there all my life. I wouldn’t know if they are good or bad.”
“Art is not about good or bad anymore. We’re going to the cocktail tonight. Each first Thursday of the month, during the season, the museum holds a wine and jazz cocktail.”
“Bettina, I don’t like going anywhere.”
“I love it when you use my name, even if you think you’re going to have an argument with me.”
“We’re not arguing. And I’m not going.”
But he did go. He agreed to accompany her because he felt a strange sensation in his chest, a minor oppression, like an invisible hand bearing down on the uppermost portion of his sternum, as if he had done something wrong and needed to make amends. Bettina had assumed the day-to-day management of the house. She had hired Paola, the gardeners, and the pool guy. She had called a telephone repairman to replace the black rotary phone with one that had a keypad and numbers that lit up so you could see them even when the room was dark. She had found a silversmith who reproduced the stolen utensils. She had the ancient Rolls-Royce repaired. And she hired a driving instructor. The instructor gave Ugo one lesson before he quit when Ugo refused to drive out the front gate to the street. Bettina had done so much for him already. In return, she had asked him to accompany her to the museum one night a month for a couple of hours. How could he refuse her?
The museum was more pleasant than he expected. The wine was unremarkable and served in plastic glasses, but after a few drinks, it became easy to swallow. In the corner of the large entrance hall was a jazz band. The trumpet and trombone were very loud in the mostly empty space and made conversation difficult. Bettina steered him from one group to another and introduced him as her “neighbor,” her “gentleman-friend,” and her “confidant.”
“Why did you call me that?” Ugo said loud enough to be heard over the music.
“Because I tell you everything,” she said before kissing him on the cheek.
The evening would have been a complete success had Ugo not committed a
small faux pas as they toured one of the last galleries. By then, he had drunk three glasses of wine and his stomach was groaning with hunger. A middle-aged woman talked very loudly to the man next to her, as if she were lecturing a hall full of students, so no one but Ugo heard his stomach groan. The woman said, “Now that one I like.” Or “Now that one I don’t like.” Ugo stayed close to the woman to avoid any embarrassment.
Then he saw a pile of wrapped candies in the corner of the gallery and walked over. On the wall above the candies was a card with the name of the artist and the title of the work. Portrait of My Lover, the card read. Ugo assumed that the card referred to the blank space on the wall next to it (there was a small smudge on the wall, about the size of a finger, that could have been the lover captioned on the card). When his stomach groaned again, he bent down, took a couple of candies, unwrapped them, and popped them in his mouth.
“Ohmygod!” a woman gasped.
“I think it’s performance art,” someone said.
It’s stale, Ugo thought.
“Sir, sir,” an old man in a guard’s uniform stepped in front of Ugo. “You can’t eat the art,” the guard said, pointing at the pile of candy on the floor.
Bettina, who had drifted away for a few moments, returned. “What happened?”
“This man says I was eating the art,” Ugo told her.
“This is definitely performance art,” the same someone said.
Someone else shushed her.
“He didn’t know,” Bettina told the guard.
“I appreciate that, ma’am, but I’m going to have to report this,” the old guard said before speaking into a tiny mouthpiece hidden under the lapel of his jacket. More guards arrived.