School For Patriots

by Martin Kohan

  Nobody, not even Señor Biasutto, has noticed María Teresa’s absences from the assistants’ room, because it is normal that they come and go to perform their duties. The cloisters are so quiet during classes that she is increasingly unconcerned about entering and leaving the boys’ toilet. She is no longer worried that anyone could catch her unawares. Once she is inside and has locked herself in one of the cubicles, she feels completely safe. She still gets nervous, especially when a boy enters the toilet, but repetition and habit mean that her confidence grows steadily, to the extent that she could be said to be enjoying doing what she is doing. She justifies herself briefly: she is carrying out her duties as an assistant to the full, and the day when she finally reaps the rewards for all her effort by uncovering the pupils smoking at school, she will be congratulated by her colleagues, and in particular by Señor Biasutto.

  Much of her time is taken up with other tasks, such as taking the register for third year class ten, making sure they line up properly in the quad, telling them to stand by their desks because their teacher is about to enter the room. While doing all this she feels slightly anxious: she wants the class to begin so that she can go off and hide in the boys’ toilet. She anticipates this moment even in the morning, when she is at home and has to leave to face another day’s work at school. Many things will happen during the day, some of them interesting but perhaps most of them neither here nor there; yet above all María Teresa longs increasingly for the moment when she can enter and crouch (although not literally) in the boys’ toilet. These minutes of waiting and watching hidden in a cubicle soon become the centre of gravity of her days at school. Anything that might happen prior to this is a kind of prelude: the tedious wait for what is truly important. And whatever takes place afterwards, in what remains of the day once she does not have to go into the boys’ toilet, seems to her no more than an epilogue: the epilogue to something that has already occurred and which therefore can add nothing.

  In her view, the only disadvantage to this is that her contact with Señor Biasutto is considerably diminished. As she is less often in the assistants’ room, where the supervisor most often interacts with his team, she has fewer opportunities to exchange any words with him beyond the usual polite greetings. However, she is convinced that her constant watch over the toilet ought to be her chief concern at this time, even as regards her relationship with Señor Biasutto, because the successful outcome of her permanent vigilance will in the end provide a reason for him to appreciate her all the more. Yet another reason for her to feel that everything else that might happen to her is of secondary importance. It is only when she is hidden in the boys’ toilet that María Teresa feels useful and at peace with herself.

  8

  The pupils who smoke in the toilets, Baragli and whoever else, Baragli or whoever else, must do so in the shelter of the cubicles. It is difficult, if not impossible, for them to try to light a cigarette at the urinals. Any smoke from there would not merely be smelled but clearly seen by anyone looking from outside. Some of the boys enter to wash their faces: they lean over the wash-basins, cup water in their hands to splash their eyes and cheeks with the obvious intention (because it is not hot) of driving away sleep and returning more alert to their class.

  Several days go by before a pupil comes in and enters one of the cubicles. Whoever it is chooses precisely the one next to María Teresa’s. At first, she strains to listen for the sounds she is hoping to hear: a match being struck, the glow of a light, the first puff on the cigarette, the first curl of smoke climbing towards the high ceiling. Soon however she realises that this is not what has brought the pupil there, but the more usual reason, and so she immediately changes her attitude, striving to ignore anything she might, even without meaning to, smell or hear, and simply listens to check whether the boy washes his hands with soap before returning to his classroom. He does.

  It is odd what happens to her: it is clear that her hopes of finding the clandestine smokers at school depend on boys going into the cubicles, and not simply to the urinal. And yet she feels a slight sense of disappointment whenever a pupil comes into the toilet to enter a cubicle rather than stand in front of a urinal. She explains this to herself in the following manner: every boy who uses a cubicle and then does not smoke (in other words, all of them so far) brings a very unfortunate consequence: she has to suffer the filthy smell and equally filthy noise of their straining efforts (the same, or similar, as with the one who came into the toilet to be sick). Those who are coming in to urinate, however, by definition cancel out any possibility they are going to smoke and therefore be discovered by her, and this gives her a certain rather vague and unconfessed pleasure. María Teresa has already noticed the strange tingling sensation in her body the moment the boys start to urinate. She quickly attributes this to the fact that hearing someone else do so arouses her own wish to imitate them, in the same way as seeing somebody else yawn makes one want to yawn as well, or that when everyone is laughing one also starts to laugh, without knowing why. Yet one day she herself feels a terrible need to urinate, and the sensation is very different. María Teresa does not consider the difference. As usual, she is witnessing one of the boys relieving himself (partly directly aware of it, partly intuiting it) when she is suddenly overcome by her own urge. She is even worried she might do it in her knickers. Desperately she controls herself until the pupil leaves, squeezing her legs together and trying to think of something else. To make matters worse, the boy takes his time leaving: he is one of the painstaking ones, who even washes his hands. When he finally goes, María Teresa tells herself she ought to get out at once and hurry to the staff toilet. It is only then that the most obvious thing strikes her: she is already in a toilet, and that if she wants to relieve herself she is in the most convenient place for doing so. Of course she does not, as she would have liked, have a toilet bowl to sit on, or any paper to wipe herself with properly. But for good or ill she is in a toilet; there is no reason to risk being found out by leaving in too great a hurry. She looks down at the ceramic base, and makes her mind up: she will urinate here, in the boys’ toilet. The idea appeals to her, and she smiles, in her opinion because she has found a solution to her problem so quickly.

  She finds she has to hitch her long plaid skirt up a little. Then she pulls her knickers down almost to her knees, but is still worried she may get them wet because of the unusual position. She yanks them down still further, almost to her ankles, but discovers that the danger of wetting or splashing them is even greater. After much hesitation, she makes up her mind and takes her knickers off altogether. She crumples them into a ball, and clasps them in her right fist like a bunch of flowers after the flowers have gone. The knickers are pink and lacy. She has never touched or seen her own underclothes this way before. All this makes her so nervous she cannot perform, although she is still as desperate as ever. She cannot use the trick of making the long hissing sound her younger brother taught her when they were little, because her main aim in the boys’ toilet is not to make any noise. All she can do is wait.

  Finally the wee comes, falling like a drop of dew off a leaf where it has been hanging for hours, as if falling by its own weight. María Teresa is pleased at what she has done, apparently because she felt such a great need to do it. She is unused to this feeling of being dressed but not having any underwear on, with a skirt but no knickers. She experiences it for what it is, another way of being naked, more intense in some ways than the only other kind of nakedness she knows, that of taking a bath or shower at home. She raises the folds of her tartan skirt a little higher, and, slightly surprised at herself, peers downwards. She has never done this before, and never thought she would be capable of it: to watch herself weeing. An opaque yellow trickle is coming from her most intimate region. Seeing everything like this, she is suddenly aware of the fact that she is using those secret parts here, in the boys’ toilet. María Teresa prevents the stream of urine falling straight into the black hole, because that would cause more noise
and might attract attention. Instead she twists her body a little to one side, so that her wee hits the curved side of the white base and makes only a soft, trickling sound. When she has finished, she stays for a few moments in the same position: bending over with knickers in hand. Then she quickly dries between her legs with a bit of paper she always keeps with her, adjusts her clothing, sees what time it is and realises she has to leave the toilet, to get away, and rushes out. The cloister she emerges into is empty; the tuck shop that will be so busy at break-time is empty and locked.

  As she leaves, she is jubilant. She does not really understand why. After all, she has not managed to catch any of the school’s clandestine smokers, which is her only objective in all this. She has not yet succeeded, but she is jubilant. She explains it to herself as being because she is sure that sooner or later she will do so. For now, she is content. Throughout these days, although the general atmosphere around her is one of great concern, she herself feels at ease. She arrives at school in a good mood, knowing there is a whole day of work as an assistant ahead of her, and leaves in an equally bright mood, knowing she will be back the next day. It is true that at night she cannot sleep properly, and that quite often she wakes up with a start or in tears due to a nightmare whose details she is unable to recall. But she always gets up in a cheerful frame of mind, even if she feels tired from the lack of sleep, and when it is time to leave for work, she does so in good spirits.

  Her father always said that life was a question of habit. As the days go by, it has become such a habit for her to hide and keep watch in the boys’ toilet that she has even got into the habit of weeing there every time. She no longer waits as she did at first to have a need to do so. She simply does it, and finds she enjoys it. Sometimes she does not even feel any urgency, apart from the tingling sensation she still gets whenever a boy comes into the toilet, but that is not strictly speaking a need to relieve herself. She goes into a cubicle and takes her knickers off, as if she were desperate, even though she rarely is. Often she manages only a few drops, out of a sense of obligation, but sometimes absolutely nothing comes; she remains completely dry. She is never dismayed by this inability to perform, nor does it make her question herself. By now it has become a way to spend her time at school: it is just another part of the routine. Nor is she upset by the fact that despite all her efforts, she has not yet been able to discover anyone to punish. The days go by, and still no-one has entered the boys’ toilet to smoke in secret. She realises that some of the boys come in for nothing, which is an infringement too, but not one that interests her. They enter the toilet and do nothing, or at most urinate briefly, as a cover-up, because what they really wanted was to get out of the class for a while to have a breather. María Teresa can sense what they are up to: they come in, walk up and down in front of the urinals, and finally go up to one in a bored fashion. They unzip their trousers, reach in and pull out their thing, squeeze out a thin stream or two, shake themselves, put it away, do the zip up again, wash their hands: those who are there simply to waste time never seem to forget to wash their hands.

  One afternoon a pupil enters the toilet and goes into the second cubicle. He has not come to smoke, and does not do so. He does not give off the smell of a match being struck or of tobacco being consumed. And yet there is not the smell of the more disgusting emptying of his bowels either. María Teresa is so close to him she knows he has undone his trousers, but all she can be certain of is her intuition that the boy’s thing is already out. She cannot hear him either peeing or getting rid of his bodily waste. What she can hear, with great clarity, is the boy’s breathing, and this pleases María Teresa. There is neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant smell, and the only sound is of his lungs filling and emptying. All of a sudden however, she does smell something, which seems to her not dissimilar to that of the cleaning bleach.

  The pupil takes some of the toilet paper, crumples it, and throws it into the black hole. He pulls the chain (the toilets are so antiquated they still have a chain, not a handle or button). He does his zip up and leaves. María Teresa is not interested in what he did, or whether in fact he did anything at all. The important thing is that he did not smoke, that he did not light a cigarette or blow clouds of smoke into the air. In fact, far from being upset, she is pleased to have witnessed from her secret hiding-place – pressed up as ever against the thin partition – this unknown pupil’s own secret. She is, however, rather intrigued by the episode, and several questions go through her mind: who was it, what did he do, why did he come, what was he there for? She ponders these questions without the need to find any definite answers. She respects his secret, perhaps sensing that this means her own secret is safe too.

  On the days when there are written tests, the number of pupils coming into the toilet diminishes considerably. Not even the most lenient teachers would permit a pupil to leave the room during a test: it is obvious they could take the opportunity to quickly consult one of those bits of paper scrawled with formulas and other answers that they usually hide in their pockets or their stocking elastic. Leaving the classroom during exam hours is quite simply impossible. If any of the boys is truly desperate, and really cannot wait, or if any of the girls tacitly alludes to that female condition that has to be discreetly dealt with, then the solution is simple: the pupil concerned may go to the toilet, but first they have to hand in their exam paper with the work they have managed to do so far, and that is what they will be marked on. If, for example, they have got halfway through the test, answering say two out of four questions, or solving two out of four equations, and have done so without making any mistakes, they will get five out of ten. The pass mark is seven. The teachers often enthusiastically comment to the assistants or among themselves how quickly the pupils’ need to go to the toilet vanishes when they are reminded of this rule.

  —You see? It wasn’t that urgent after all.

  However, there are subjects which for some reason are seen as less strict, even if failure in them means the pupils have to sit an exam at the end of the year in December, or in March, and possibly cease to be a regular attender at the school (no-one is allowed to repeat a year at the National School of Buenos Aires: instead, they are dispatched to another school, one of the ordinary ones, and that diaspora is the mark of their failure). These subjects are, for example, art or music, and occasionally Spanish as well (not the language part, but literature). The hours spent daubing on bits of card, listening to arias or reciting couplets are not viewed as strictly as the physics, maths, or history lessons (or Spanish when it comes to subordinate adverbial clauses or the correlation of verbs). During these lessons, dedicated, let’s say, to the notion of perspective or to the composition of a philharmonic orchestra compared to a symphonic one, it is far more likely for the pupils to ask to leave the room to go to the toilet, and for the teachers to give permission. María Teresa is well aware of this: she knows that is what happens, and takes it into account. On days when there are written tests, it is more probable she will be keeping watch and no pupil will come in for any reason (not even to smoke). But when one or other of the third year forms has art or music, then there is a greater chance that the second-floor toilet will receive visitors.

  It is not unimportant for María Teresa that the form having an art or music lesson is third year class ten, the one she is in charge of. When that happens, she always remembers it. Because the inexorable price to pay for the secrecy of keeping watch in the boys’ toilet is that whereas, on the one hand, it betrays some aspects of well-preserved privacy, on the other, it never reveals the identity of the pupil in question. Only when what María Teresa knows is bound to happen finally occurs will she be able to break the rule of anonymity, making public both her own presence in the toilet and her lengthy spying.

  Until that happens, she cannot give anything away, and it has not yet happened. The pupils come in and she is aware of them, in fact she is a witness to their most private functions, she can sense their relieved smiles, the way in which t
hey handle themselves, but that does not mean she has a precise idea of who they are. When third year class ten has a music or art lesson, or when they have Spanish and Mr Ilundain decides to spend it giving an improvised reading of La Celestina, she knows, waiting silently in her cubicle, that any pupils entering the toilet will most probably be from her class, in other words the ones she knows best and can put a name to. She may not know exactly who it is, but she can be more or less sure that it will be one of those whom she sees every day lining up in the quad, sitting at their desks, bending over to pack away their things, doing up their jackets as they stand up. She knows it could be Barrella or Capelán or Iturriaga or Valenzuela, that the pupil might be Baragli or Valentinis, Kaplan or Rubio. Or one of the other boys in the class. And she secretly prefers this. Yes, she definitely prefers it. She tells herself this is because she has no proof that in any of the other third year classes at school in the afternoon (third year form eight, six, nine, seven or eleven) there may be pupils who smoke on the sly in the toilet. She is certain, on the other hand, that there are some in third year class ten, or that there is at least one, Baragli by name, who does or has done so. She therefore waits with great anticipation, and often even anxiety, for her class to have these lessons, and her stealthy wait is all the more enjoyable.