School For Patriots

by Martin Kohan

  The mother started to tell him about her counting aircraft, but at that moment, without any sort of warning, the line went dead. All at once, while they were in midconversation, the line suddenly gave the busy tone. They did not even manage to say goodbye. The two of them, mother and son, were unable to say goodbye to each other. She sat waiting beside the telephone for a long while, staring at the little picture of the Argentinian flag in the middle of the dial, thinking Francisco would call again at least to say goodbye. But he did not call back. More than an hour had gone by, and he had not called back.

  María Teresa persuades her mother it cannot be easy to find telephone tokens down there, that the time allowed for them to speak to their families will be strictly controlled, and that there must be a really long line of Francisco’s colleagues waiting to use the public telephone. Although she can see that this calms the mother down a lot, that she goes back to watching the TV news and is no longer crying, she stays with her in the kitchen and helps prepare their supper.

  After they have eaten, María Teresa says she does not want any coffee, and yet despite this, when soon afterwards she goes to bed, she cannot sleep. She tosses and turns, her eyes wide open. She is thinking. She would like not to think so that she can finally get to sleep, but sleep does not come, and therefore she thinks. She thinks about Señor Biasutto. About the moment when he took hold of her fingers, the gallant kiss he gave her. She wonders yet again if there will be another such meeting between them. She knows, because it is common knowledge, that if there is it will be up to him to take the initiative, because he is the man and she is the woman. Despite this, she also considers what she could do to encourage this second meeting. Without behaving in a way that was unbecoming of a well-brought-up young woman, she could strike up some kind of conversation that returned or alluded to the one they had in the bar. Or when they greeted each other again at work she could call him Señor Biasutto, but with a glint in her eye which would remind him that on another occasion, at another moment, she had not called him that, but Carlos.

  She is not sure she has it in her to behave like this: she thinks not. Other girls might find it easier, or even perfectly natural, to make insinuations or purposefully have a glint in their eye. It is quite possible, however, that she will be unable to pass by Señor Biasutto without immediately blushing and looking down at the floor. She is convinced he must have found her uninspiring. She hears the mother switch off the television in the dining-room and go to bed. It is late. Still she cannot get to sleep. She wonders whether a man who finds a woman uninspiring would give her the kind of kiss on the hand that Señor Biasutto gave her on the street corner opposite the church as they were saying farewell.

  Suddenly, completely by chance, as if it were a sudden discovery made in a dream, María Teresa finds the way. That is what she calls it in her mind: the way. The way that will lead her to a second meeting with Señor Biasutto. If she catches the boys who hide in the toilet to smoke, that will give her an obvious reason for the two of them to have another conversation. And it is also obvious that conversation will be nothing like any of those they could have had before – say a week or ten days earlier – when he had not yet called her Marita and she had never called him Carlos. She will redouble her efforts to finally discover who the culprits are. This solution acts like an analgesic, and at last she falls asleep. The moment she wakes up the next morning, however, it is the first thought that comes into her head: that she has to redouble her efforts to uncover the pupils who are secretly smoking in the school toilet. Baragli or whoever else, pupils in her own class or in any others. That does not matter. What matters is to uncover them, denounce them, unleash the severe punishment that will act as a lesson to everyone else, and then receive the heartfelt congratulations of Señor Biasutto. Except that Señor Biasutto, who will congratulate her officially within the school, has already kissed her hand and called her Marita, and she has let him press his mouth (or at least his moustache) to her fingers, and has called him Carlos. So nothing can be the same as before.

  The next day, the first two lessons are taken up with a concert organised by the school authorities with the title (which is also a slogan) of ‘For Peace’. It is an organ concert under the direction of maestro De Zorzi. Together with its many other sources of pride, the school can boast the only pipe organ outside a church in the entire city of Buenos Aires. It is situated in the school’s Great Hall, a place of subdued splendour where, to give but one example, Albert Einstein in person once gave a lecture on the Theory of Relativity. The Great Hall demands even stricter vigilance than normal: it is much larger than the classrooms, the pupils are more rowdy, and the rule that a boy should never sit next to a girl may sometimes not be completely followed (look at Baragli, for example, and how he has managed to seat himself right next to Dreiman).

  Maestro De Zorzi has chosen a programme devoted entirely to baroque music. Bach is predominant, leavened with abundant doses of Vivaldi. The pupils seem to be following the music with relative interest. At least they are not openly inattentive, and during the concert there is little to admonish them over (Babenco twists on his chair at one point, Servelli squirms as if he were trying to stop laughing, Daciuk plays with the ribbons on her blouse: that is about all). Perhaps it is the fugue structure of much of the music which keeps their attention. Whenever there is a silence, the pupils all get ready to applaud, first checking the reaction of Mr Roel, in order to save themselves the embarrassment of applauding in the pause between movements in the belief that the work has come to an end.

  The concert comes to a close and the pupils return to their classrooms. The music does not appear to have calmed them, as it is said to do with savage beasts, but on the contrary seems to have excited them. This may be due to the liveliness of the baroque compositions, or the satisfaction the pupils feel at going into the Great Hall, reserved for the grandest of school occasions (the aisles are carpeted, the chairs are velvet, there are balconies round the top, and splendid ceilings).

  With the return to their classrooms, the routine of lessons resumes. So as not to waste any more time, as soon as Miss Urricarriet has arrived and she no longer has to supervise third year form ten, María Teresa hastens to the area of the boys’ toilet. Still taking all necessary precautions to avoid being seen, she enters the toilet as quickly as possible. Once inside, she feels contented. She chooses a cubicle; not the first, which is rather dirty, but the second one. She enters, and bolts the door. She gives a sigh of relief. She does not feel the need to relieve herself: neither the need nor the desire. Yet she hurriedly removes her knickers, rumpling her skirt with its pattern of squares and diamonds as she does so.

  She settles there to wait, but for a long while no pupil comes in. After missing the first two lessons because of the concert, the teachers must be more reluctant to allow any pupils to leave the room. But patience is without doubt the greatest virtue of anyone who waits, whether it be a night-watchman or an angler at a pond. María Teresa is nothing if not patient. She has always been that way. She waits completely patiently while nobody enters and nothing happens. Until at a certain moment, as she is studying the narrow gaps between the tiles of the toilet, she hears the unmistakable creak of the swing doors.

  12

  A pupil comes in to urinate: nothing new there. María Teresa readies herself to do what she has become accustomed to do. Naked (naked beneath her skirt) she is ready to urinate at the same time as the pupil. This time, however, something stops her. At first, she herself cannot work out what it is. She has to pause and consider what is going on before she finally understands. It is not something she hears, or senses: it is something she smells. Something that smells on the boy who has come in. It was not there before, and now it is: that means there can be no doubt it is the pupil who has brought the smell in with him. She does not even have to ask herself what it is: it is the scent of Colbert cologne. Men’s Colbert cologne, the one that comes in a glass bottle inside a green box. She knows what t
his scent is like; by now she would be able to tell it apart from dozens of others, as if this was a wine-tasting and she were an oenological expert. She can recognise this scent among many others, and it is what has just reached her nostrils.

  While the boy is fiddling with his clothing at the urinal, María Teresa asks herself the obvious question: if this pupil who has just entered the toilet is about to urinate and wears Colbert cologne, it is none other than Baragli. In fact, it is because of Baragli that she knows what Colbert cologne is, and what fragrance it has. That does not mean there is a logical imperative that if a pupil uses that cologne it must be Baragli, because any other boy at the school, or even any other pupil in third year class ten, could also use that cologne. Obviously, it does not have to be Baragli. Equally obviously, however, it could be Baragli. It does not have to be him, but it could be him. And whereas with all the other students she lacks any evidence that they may do so, with him, there is all-important proof: she knows for certain that he does use Colbert cologne. With him it is more than a probability, it is a certainty.

  María Teresa can bear many things, but this gnawing uncertainty is not one of them. She is pleased with the bold steps she has taken recently: getting into this toilet, staying so vigilant. She thinks this boldness is necessary to fulfil her declared aim of discovering the pupils who are smoking at school. Driven on by what she sees as a similar impulse, she now takes a bigger, even bolder step. She can no longer, it is true, consider it as an integral part of her strategy of surveillance, but she adopts it with the same determined assurance.

  With fingers as nimble as those of a surgeon or watchmaker, she draws back the bolt on the cubicle door. The door is now open. She lets go of it and allows it to swing gently inwards. Now she is able to spy through a crack. Now she prepares to truly spy. Now she is literally going to spy on someone. The ajar door not only allows her to do so, it almost demands it. She does not consider the danger she is in, or disregards it. She only wants one thing: to peep through the gap. She wants to see which boy has entered the toilet and unzipped his trousers. She wants to see who it is. She wants to see if it is Baragli. There is a gap of only ten centimetres between the door and the frame. Just enough for her to put her face to it and look. A crack to which she can only press one edge of her anxious face. As she does so, she holds her breath. She wants to be more than stealthy: she wants to be invisible. And being invisible, to see. She presses her cheek against the door, is invisible, and sees: she sees the boy who has just come into the toilet and at that very moment is starting to urinate. He does this of course into the urinal, and therefore has his back to her. But not completely. Since he is using the first one, the one closest to the swing doors, he is at a relatively wide angle to the cubicles. Basically with his back to them, but partly in profile.

  María Teresa looks, and it is not Baragli. That much is obvious. Baragli is taller than this boy, his back is broader and his hair is fairer. It is not Baragli. It is another boy. Another boy, but still a boy.

  A pupil at the school who has come into the toilet to urinate. María Teresa watches him from her hiding place. It is not one of the boys from class ten either, the one she is in charge of. As far as she can tell, it is a boy from class seven, a boy she has often noticed, although she has no idea of his name. The boy urinates. She can see the back of his head, the light-blue collar of his uniform shirt, the stripes of the blue blazer down his back. She can see his grey trousers, which hang down slightly due to the simple fact that they are undone. She can see him urinating. Sees him urinate. She also sees part of his profile: an ear, some of his face, now and then the tip of his nose. She can see the way his right arm is thrust forward. Above all, she can see the jet of urine splashing against the urinal, then curling its way downwards. The pupil’s head is pointing down too, because he is watching himself urinate. He must be seeing his thing, seeing the urine cascade out of it. She, María Teresa, the assistant of third year class ten, watches him urinate and watches him watching himself. After a few seconds, the flow of urine starts to diminish. She can tell by the amount falling and by the angle at which it falls. Then the flow stops. It seems as though this is the end, but just as that moment there is something like a colophon, an addition, a supplement: three or four more spurts, shorter than the original but no less strong, deliberately aimed by the pupil, thanks to a clever manipulation of his thing. María Teresa wonders whether she should withdraw into her cubicle and even, if it is not too dangerous, draw the bolt again. Something tells her, however, not to do so, but to wait: to go on spying a little longer. Unlike girls, boys when they have finished do not wipe or dry themselves, unless they have a problem; instead they shake their thing. María Teresa confirms this now; she sees the arm move, and the hand. As he does so, the boy turns his whole body slightly to one side, and so is more sideways on to her. María Teresa sees, at the end of the hand, that thing that boys have: a man’s thing. If she sees it, she sees it being shaken; but possibly she only deduces this. She would like to make sure, but that is impossible. She thinks she sees it, and now that the pupil is putting it away, it should be said that to some extent she thinks she has seen it. But if she had to describe it (and although it may seem surprising, however giddy María Teresa feels, she manages to ask herself how she would describe what she saw or believes she has seen), she would not know how to. She does not think a young woman like her would ever have the kind of conversation where this would come up. Instead, she imagines what words she would use to describe to someone what that thing she saw or thought she saw is like, and she cannot find any. None, nothing at all, her mind is a blank. And yet she would swear, if something of this kind could ever require an oath, that she really did see the boy’s thing.

  She pulls back and pushes the door to. After he has done up his trousers, the boy could turn round completely to go and wash his hands. He does not do so, however, but leaves the toilet straightaway. María Teresa stays a little longer sheltered in the cubicle, with the door still slightly ajar. All at once she realises she is kneeling. She goes over everything that happened in her mind, as though it were a film whose plot she has to summarise. Recovering from her confusion, she stands up, takes the rolled-up toilet paper from her pocket and then, raising her skirt, leans over and wipes herself, without noticing or remembering that this time she has not done anything.

  On the following days she resists the temptation to spy on the urinals with the door open. She dimly acknowledges that in doing so she is admitting she has considered the possibility that there is a point at which she might do it again. If she does not do so, it is because she recognises the danger as too great. She prefers not to run this risk, or rather she prefers to keep it in reserve, as if it were a scarce resource she does not want to waste, for a very special occasion which may soon occur: that a boy comes into the toilet, the air fills with a definite scent she will immediately recognise as Colbert cologne, and that boy is Baragli. Baragli and no-one else. Possibly when that happens she will do what she recently did: open the door a few centimetres and peer out. In an obscure way, she senses that if she does this each time a pupil comes in, she is reducing the possibility that on some occasion, some afternoon, it will be Baragli.

  At break-time, in the quad she often runs into the boy from class seven whom she saw in the toilet. Whenever this happens, she cannot help but watch what he is doing, and even sometimes follow him (the boy goes to the tuck shop, buys a chocolate biscuit, then renews his conversation with a couple of friends). She finds it better to follow him than to look straight at him, because that way she recognises the back of his neck and the curve of his back. What she sees and what she saw mingle in a pleasurable sensation. She hears the others call him Subán. That must be his name then: Subán. Until now she had not known what he was called, and yet she had seen him, she had seen it. He joins other pupils, becomes part of a laughing group. From a distance, María Teresa watches the casual way he waves his hand about; eventually she tears herself away and re
turns to her duties as an assistant in other parts of the quad.

  For several days her surveillance in the boys’ toilet reveals nothing new. It is plain how powerful the force of habit is: sooner or later, almost everything succumbs to it. The pupils come in and out as always, urinate or defecate, sometimes they also spit, wash their faces or hands, comb or muss up their hair in front of the mirror. What they do not do is smoke: for the moment none of them has come in for this reason, and that continues to be the case. María Teresa has become so used to taking up her position that during break-time, when the toilet fills with pupils coming in and out, she gets the strange impression that a very personal space of her own is being invaded. Over the weeks, things have become reversed: she is not the intruder in the boys’ toilet, but they are: the pupils, the boys, the ones who only spend a moment in a place which for her has become somewhere long-lasting, permanent; boys who after all are only paying a fleeting visit to a place which for her is somewhere she inhabits, a bit like the residents of a tourist destination over-run by visitors during the holiday season.