School For Patriots

by Martin Kohan

  On Fridays, for example, third year class ten has a double period of art, with no break in the middle. María Teresa looks forward to this from the morning when she is still at home, clearing away the breakfast dishes or laying the table for lunch, while the mother cooks and is busy counting aircraft. She looks forward to going into the boys’ toilet, hiding in the cubicle, waiting for a boy to come in so that she can finally catch him. She is excited by the thought, and when the time finally arrives, she enjoys it. She is not disappointed that in the end none of the pupils who has come into the toilet until now has tried to smoke, and so brought her patient pursuit to a happy conclusion.

  For the same reason, she is put out and annoyed when third year class ten has art but she is unable to follow the routine of going and hiding in the toilet. She was expecting to be able to, and is impatient for the moment to arrive. But in the previous break, when the time to go is near and her sense of anticipation is increasing with every minute, she is summoned by Miss Perotti, the art teacher. She explains that they will not be going up to the artroom because she is giving a theory class, and that since she wants to show some slides she needs María Teresa’s help with the projector. She cannot work it herself, she explains, because she will have to stand by the screen to use her pointer to show the parts of the works the pupils need to pay particular attention to. Nor can she ask a pupil to do it, because if he or she were busy showing the slides they would be sure to concentrate less on the aesthetic appreciation of the works on display. She would therefore like María Teresa, as class assistant, to stay in the room and help her with the slides. Unable to refuse, María Teresa accepts without hesitation. At any other time, the request would not have bothered her in the slightest. Every assistant is expected to collaborate fully with the teachers. And it is not that she will not carry out the task, still less refuse from the outset, but to know for certain that there will be a double period of art for third year class ten and that the pupils, as they always do in these more lenient lessons, will ask permission to go to the toilet, and that she, María Teresa, will not be there, upsets her so much she can barely hide her disappointment.

  This situation could be enough to spoil her entire day. Some things manage to ruin a day even if they are only a tiny part of the greater scheme of things. María Teresa is annoyed because she feels her whole Friday will be wasted. Fortunately for her, and to compensate for the disappointment or to make up for it altogether, the request from Miss Perotti is not the only thing that happens during the first break. Señor Biasutto, her supervisor, comes up and leads her off to a corner of the quad. He puts his heavy hand on her forearm to guide her there. His pencil moustache twists in a forced smile. Señor Biasutto tells María Teresa that he found their conversation of the other day extremely interesting. María Teresa manages to think, but not to say, that she found it very interesting too. She does not succeed in saying so because Señor Biasutto quickly adds that he would be delighted to renew their conversation, and even to extend it in a more relaxed atmosphere. María Teresa flushes, but concurs. Señor Biasutto completes the proposal by suggesting that one day they might go and have a coffee together after school in a nearby bar. María Teresa is embarrassed to the point she can feel her cheeks reddening, and is so bewildered she does not even manage to say yes. Despite that, it is plain she is accepting his invitation, and Señor Biasutto understands this.

  9

  Cándido López was a soldier in the Argentinian army during the war with Paraguay. That war, also known as the War of the Triple Alliance, lasted for five years from 1865 to 1870. Three countries (Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil) united to obliterate a fourth (Paraguay). Many people have glimpsed the hidden hand of Great Britain in the original declaration of hostilities. This historical episode has always been of particular interest to the National School of Buenos Aires, because it was Don Bartolomé Mitre, the school’s founder (more properly in this instance, General Mitre), who declared war and led the troops for the first three years. Despite underestimating the length of time the campaign would last, Bartolomé Mitre was in command of the nation’s armies in those distant regions with such sonorous names: Curupaití, Tuyutí, Tacuarí. Although Mitre prophesied he would be entering the Paraguayan capital Asunción within three months, and that three years later he left the presidency still without having done so, this inaccurate prophecy in no way tarnishes the reputation of the patriot who wrote the history of Argentina’s greatest national heroes, founded the newspaper with the longest tradition and prestige in the entire country, as well as its most important school, translated Dante’s Divina Comedia with considerable accuracy, and achieved the permanent unification of the national territory. On close consideration, it could be said that even the War of Paraguay was won in the end, and that victory can be counted among General Mitre’s laurels, as well as being one of the military triumphs of the Argentinian nation, whose flag, it is worth recalling, has proudly emerged undefeated from every challenge.

  As she is setting up the projector, María Teresa listens to the teacher. The apparatus casts a yellow light that reminds her of the one in the carriages on the Line A metro: a light that seems to come from another age. There is also a rush of warm air, like someone breathing next to her. María Teresa slots the slides into the carousel. She checks each one to make sure they are in the right order and the right way up, so that none of them appears upside down and ridiculous. She also checks that no pupil has tried the trick they sometimes pull, slipping in a slide that has nothing to do with the topic the lesson is meant to illustrate. So, for example, there may be a series of Ionic and Doric columns, or of Assyrian bas-reliefs, and then suddenly, without justification or warning, there is the shock of a family snapshot: two children with their parents smiling at the camera with the sea and the beaches of Miramar in the background. And that would not be the worst possibility. Apparently once, years earlier, when a history master was illustrating his lesson with coloured slides of Napoleon Bonaparte, all at once, between an imposing picture of the Great Corsican mounted on a white horse and another of his coronation as emperor in Notre Dame cathedral, there appeared, to general laughter, the unlikely sight of a naked woman (an American actress by the name of Raquel Welch) showing off her breasts, her hair blowing in the wind.

  María Teresa does not want anything of the sort to happen now. She checks carefully: the only slides in the carousel are the twenty-four reproductions of Cándido López’s paintings of the War of Paraguay. The projector has been set up on the second desk in the third row in the middle of the room, pointing towards the screen that Miss Perotti has pulled down over the blackboard. In order to work the projector, María Teresa has had to take the place of one of the pupils (Rubio, who is sitting at Iturriaga’s desk, because he is absent). She has never sat here before, and so has never seen things from the pupils’ point of view. The teacher’s platform seems higher, the blackboards seem to fill the whole front wall, the door and the sealed windows look a long way off. Nor is it easy to move among the desks screwed to the floor because the desk lid is joined to the back of the seat in front. The person who usually sits behind Rubio every day, and is now behind her, is none other than Baragli.

  Cándido López fought under the command of General Mitre. He did what soldiers always do in every war: tried to kill and avoid being killed. Like all the others, he did what he could to bear the rigours of the war with Paraguay, which were especially cruel. But he did not limit himself to the heroic or resigned efforts of a soldier obeying orders. He did more, he did something that was not asked or expected of him: showing a real talent and powers of observation, he made pencil sketches of scenes from the Argentinian army’s campaign, including those of the disciplined chaos of open combat. News reached Mitre that a soldier in his ranks was making sketches that he hoped later to turn into great canvases depicting the war they were fighting. Mitre wanted to meet this curious soldier-painter. He received him, saw his sketches, asked his name, encouraged him to continue
. Cándido López was very good at capturing the vast skies, the flattened earth, the wild, dank marshes, the scattered formations of the troops on the ground.

  At the battle of Curupaití he lost a hand: the right hand, the one he used to paint with. An exploding grenade damaged it beyond repair. The wound did not heal as was hoped, and after a few days gangrene set in. As a result, his whole arm had to be amputated. This made it impossible for him to continue fighting, so that he was sent back to Buenos Aires. Although to history the War of the Triple Alliance was still going on, for him it was over. From that moment on he used his other hand. He was less good at first, until he acquired the skill needed to paint left-handed and do it well. He achieved this in the same way that everything is achieved: through hard work and determination. And so he embarked on his great work: a comprehensive demonstration of what war was.

  Miss Perotti waves to María Teresa as a signal for her to start. The projector’s mechanism is rudimentary. It seems as though it is getting stuck, but this is in fact how it functions. The first slide is very blurred. It needs to be focussed, by twisting the lens between two fingers. María Teresa does this until the image becomes clear. It is a painting of a flat plain dotted with tiny figures rendered with intricate brush-strokes. The soldiers, cannons, and rifles, the sheltering tents and the glow from the camp-fires: all look like miniatures. The next slide is better: it shows the sky, the huge sky. The space looks immense. A panoramic scene from an elevated viewpoint. Miss Perotti’s pointer shows the intense green of the vegetation, the heavy trees, the slash of a river running between them. The men are painted red, with no faces. The brush-strokes bring them to life: López paints distance, but also treats each tiny detail with care. With the projector’s clunky mechanism, María Teresa shows one image after another. The pointer hovers: notice the perfect combination of the precise and the diffuse. And now, war itself. The war, Curupaití. A similar high vantage point, a panorama, the battle. Cándido López is unaware of the cinema, because it does not yet exist, but to some extent he anticipates it. A scrawl: the smoke from the cannons, fading to white, mingling at the edges with the clouds in the blue sky. In his vision of the battle, López shows he is an expert in simultaneity. This is how a battle is: the overall view, with everyone engaged in combat, the way it might be seen by a general, a strategist, an artist, or God, and yet at the same time it is each individual soldier’s combat, each one trying to save his skin: this one slashing with his sword, this one being slashed, one firing his rifle, another falling, another crouching down, another running away, another in his death agony, another already dead, this one too, and this one, this one as well. Everyone is fighting, and so is every individual: Cándido López paints them all and each and every one of them. The pointer comes to a halt, tapping the screen.

  —Look here. Don’t let your attention wander, look at this.

  What is she pointing at? A fallen man. Fallen but not dead, only wounded, in the midst of the chaos of the battle of Curupaití. He is wounded: you can see the blood, Cándido López’s scarlet. He has been hit, struck down: he is not going to die, but he is wounded. Wounded in a part of his body that is not life-threatening, but which he will miss. It is his hand that is wounded. A tiny detail in the painting of the Battle of Curupaití. It is obvious what this is: Cándido López has painted himself. Tiny, almost invisible, but a self-portrait all the same. Perhaps the most discreet, the most indirect portrait possible; but there it is. An all-embracing view of war, and at one particular point in it, Candido López himself. He himself with his wound. Marré raises his hand, asking permission to speak. Miss Perotti gives it.

  —What I like about this painter is that he was in the thick of the war, but he paints it as if he had not been there.

  María Teresa is taken aback, or perhaps simply surprised, at Marré’s observation. Not at what he has said, which she does not consider, but at the mere fact that he spoke at all. Miss Perotti had been talking so fluently and firmly it had not occurred to her that anyone could interrupt her flow. But Marré did just that. Miss Perotti listens to him approvingly, writes something down in the corresponding box in her marks book. Then she comments on what he said, with arguments that María Teresa does not entirely follow. Not that she completely ignores the progress of the lesson, even though she is the class assistant and not a pupil, and has to show the slides while making sure everyone is behaving themselves. She is interested in the topic and, besides, she likes the sound of Miss Perotti’s voice. Yet occasionally her mind does wander; she thinks about things that have nothing to do with what is being explained, precisely because she is the assistant rather than a pupil. Sometimes also she is aware of something her eyes cannot see but which her mind is only too aware of, namely that Baragli is seated directly behind her. She has no reason to suppose he is not looking straight ahead of him at the screen, the slides, the work of Cándido López. She has no reason to suppose he might be looking at her, her shoulders or her hair, as she is so near to him. Yet that is what she does think, and this thought makes her lose concentration. She imagines she is, not at Baragli’s mercy, which would be unthinkable, but at the mercy of his gaze. Perhaps he is putting his hand, apparently absentmindedly, on the surface of the desk. The wooden top is scratched, and in one corner there is a hole where the pupils once used to have ink-wells. Perhaps Baragli has put his hand in there, pretending not to notice, and is playing at moving his fingers even closer to her. María Teresa feels her neck stiffen at a possible contact, even though she knows this could never happen.

  Cándido López has also painted a proper self-portrait. Not like the distant, coded portrait of him at the Battle of Curupaití, but a conventional, straightforward one, with his face in the foreground. It is somewhat odd, however, a strange depiction of his features. There is a look of fear on his reticent face. His hair also catches the attention, because it is stuck to his head bizarrely, as if he used brilliantine in the much later style of some tango singers. López’s pose reveals anxiety, fear in the mouth and eyes, like someone who has been snapped unawares by a photographer, not a person posing for a portrait.

  —That is because López is not posing for his portrait, he is painting himself. López is looking at himself reflected in a mirror. The face expresses the impression he has on seeing himself.

  The bell rings at length, and the art lesson is over. Miss Perotti stuffs her things into her briefcase. María Teresa takes the carousel out of the projector, and removes the slides they have just seen one by one. She puts them away, also one by one, in the cardboard box where they are kept. The pupils meanwhile get up from their desks, ready to leave the room for their break. Baragli does so with the others, and as he heads for the door he passes very close to María Teresa. She is sitting down putting away the slides as he walks through the narrow gap between the two rows of desks. The edge of his blue blazer brushes against her hand. This contact brings her fingers to a halt, as if someone had suddenly called her name. María Teresa forces herself to resume her task, but cannot avoid sniffing at the scent Baragli gives off as he goes by. Possibly she is hoping to confirm the familiar smell of black tobacco, the one she remembers from her father after dinner in her childhood. But she discovers something different, which surprises her without really disappointing her. Baragli has a strong scent of men’s cologne. Although it is not too outlandish to wear cologne to school, she was not expecting it, or at least not from Baragli.

  The scent penetrates her nostrils and stays with her. Later on she brings it back, almost at will, so that it is not clear if she is actually recalling it or if it is still in her head. Before the day is over (her work day, the school day) Señor Biasutto comes up to her and confirms they are to meet the following Monday. It is better if they see each other in an out-of-the-way bar, where they are unlikely to run into any pupils from the school. The students like to fantasize and immediately invent things. They agree to meet on Monday at half-past seven in the evening in a dimly-lit bar on the corner of Ba
lcarce and Moreno, well away from anywhere the pupils usually frequent.

  As she leaves, María Teresa feels happy. It is early June and the weather is cold, more so than in other years. In spite of this, she is happy, although it is already dark when she leaves the school, and this has not been a good day as far as her investigations in the boys’ toilet are concerned. Quite simply, she is happy. She does not head straight for home as she usually does. First she has to go to a pharmacy to buy a new box of anti-depressants for the mother. She has only a few left, and has asked María Teresa to do her this favour. She is clutching one of the prescriptions that a cousin gets for them in exchange for other favours in the hospital where he works. She also has the card that entitles them to a fifteen per cent discount. It shows a twenty-year-old photograph of her mother looking as she did when María Teresa was born.

  On the corner of Alsina and Defensa there is a pharmacy that María Teresa particularly likes, because its windows, lettering, and the counter, even the coloured bottles lined up on the shelves, lend it the old-fashioned look of the old Buenos Aires chemist shops. She likes all the glass and the stylish decorative writing. She has come to buy her mother’s medication, but almost as soon as she enters she sees something she had never noticed before: the fact that this pharmacy, like many others in the city, has a section devoted to perfumes. Timidly, she goes over to have a look at this part of the shop. She sees the rows of deodorant, the pots of skin cream, nail varnishes, the unsteady piles of toilet soaps. None of this attracts her attention, but when she reaches the shelf containing the boxes and bottles of men’s cologne she comes to a halt. There are lots of them, none of which she knows. She invents a family birthday for the female assistant, and asks if it is allowed to try them.

  —You can smell them, but not try them on.