But if his fat, hunched shoulders and his tight short jacket had an effect on me, my bursts of laughter only managed to make him, as he pretended with great effort to forget about me, tense up even more from all that self-restraint. The antipathy that man felt for me was so strong that I hated myself. Until my laughter started definitively replacing my impossible tact.
As for learning, I learned nothing during those lessons. I was already too caught up in the game of making him unhappy. Enduring my long legs and always worn-out shoes with brazen bitterness, humiliated at not being a flower, and above all tortured by an enormous childhood that I feared would never end—I made him unhappier still and I would haughtily toss my sole treasure: the straight hair that I planned to beautify some day with a perm and that, bearing the future in mind, I’d already practiced tossing. As for studying, I never studied, trusting in my always successful idleness that the teacher took as yet another provocation from that hateful girl. He was wrong about that. The truth is that I didn’t have time to study. My joys kept me busy, being alert took days and days; there were the storybooks that I read, while passionately biting my nails down to the quick, in my first ecstasies of sorrow, a refinement I’d already discovered; there were boys I had chosen and who hadn’t chosen me, I wasted hours suffering because they were unattainable, and even more hours suffering by accepting them with tenderness, since the man was my King of Creation; there was the hopeful threat of sin, I kept busy with fear while waiting; not to mention that I was permanently busy wanting and not wanting to be what I was, I couldn’t decide which me, every me was impossible; having been born meant being full of mistakes to correct. No, it wasn’t to annoy the teacher that I didn’t study; all I had time for was growing up. Which I was doing all over, with an awkwardness that seemed more the result of a mathematical error: my legs didn’t go with my eyes, and my mouth was emotional while my fidgety hands would get dirty—in my haste I was growing up without knowing in what direction. The fact that a picture from that time shows me, to the contrary, to be a well-grounded girl, wild and gentle, with thoughtful eyes beneath thick bangs, this real picture doesn’t contradict me, all it does is reveal a ghostly stranger that I wouldn’t understand even if I were her mother. Only much later, after having settled into my body and feeling fundamentally more assured, could I venture out and study a bit; previously, however, I couldn’t risk learning, I didn’t want to disrupt myself—I was intuitively careful with what I was, since I didn’t know what I was, and I vainly cultivated the integrity of innocence. It’s too bad the teacher never saw what I unexpectedly became four years later: at thirteen, my hands clean, freshly bathed, all nice and composed, he would have seen me standing there like a Christmas decoration on the balcony of a house. But, instead of him, it was an ex-classmate walking by who yelled my name, without realizing that I was no longer a kid on the street but a respectable young lady whose name could no longer be hollered over city sidewalks. “What is it?” I inquired of the interloper with utmost coldness. That’s when I received the shouted news that the teacher had died that morning. And pale, eyes wide open, I had looked down at the dizzying street at my feet. My composure cracked like a broken doll’s.
Going back four years again. Maybe it was because of everything I’ve mentioned, mixed up and all together, that I wrote the composition the teacher had assigned, the point at which this story unravels and others begin. Or it was just that I was in a hurry to finish the assignment however I could so I could go play in the park.
“I’m going to tell a story,” he said, “and you’re all going to write it down. But using your own words. When you’re finished you don’t have to wait for the bell, you can just go straight to recess.”
The story he told: a very poor man dreamed he had found some treasure and became very rich; when he woke up, he readied his pack and set out in search of the treasure; he wandered all over the world, on and on without ever finding the treasure; worn out, he returned to his poor, poor little house; and since he had nothing to eat, he began to plant things in his poor yard; so much did he plant, so much did he harvest, so much did he begin to sell, that he ended up becoming very rich.
I listened with an air of contempt, conspicuously playing with my pen, as if wanting to make clear that I wasn’t taken in by his stories and that I knew full well who he was. He told the story without once looking at me. It’s because, in my awkward way of loving him and in the enjoyment I took in harassing him, I also hounded him with my gaze: I responded to everything he said with a simple, direct gaze, for which no one in their right mind could blame me. It was a gaze I made quite limpid and angelic, very open, like the gaze of purity upon crime. And I always provoked the same result: disturbed, he’d avoid my eyes, start stammering. Which filled me with a power that cursed me. And with compassion. Which in turn irritated me. It irritated me that he would force a lousy kid to understand a man.
It was almost ten in the morning, soon the recess bell would ring. That school of mine, which rented a building in a city park, had the biggest playground I had ever seen. It was as lovely for me as it would have been for a squirrel or a horse. It had scattered trees, extensive rolling hills and a sweeping lawn. It was endless. Everything there was big and spread out, made for a girl’s long legs, with a place for piled-up bricks and wood of unknown origin, for bushes with sour begonias that we used to eat, for sun and shade where the bees made honey. It contained an immense open space. And we’d done it all: we had already rolled down every hill, whispered intensely behind every pile of bricks, tasted various flowers, and on every trunk we had carved the date, sweet ugly names and hearts pierced with arrows; boys and girls made their honey there.
I was nearing the end of my composition and the scent of those hidden shadows was already calling to me. I hurried. Since I knew only how “to use my own words,” writing was simple. What also made me hurry was the desire to be the first to walk across the classroom—the teacher had ended up quarantining me at the last desk—and insolently turn in my composition, thereby demonstrating my quickness, a quality I felt to be essential for living and that, I was sure, the teacher couldn’t help but admire.
I turned in my notebook and he took it without even looking at me. Feeling wronged, with no praise for my speed, I went skipping off to the big park.
The story that I’d transcribed in my own words was exactly like the one he had told. Only, around that time I was just beginning to “spell out the moral of the story,” which, if it earned me reverence, would later threaten to stifle me with rigidity. With a certain flourish, then, I’d added the final sentences. Sentences that hours later I would keep reading and rereading to see what was so powerful about them that they had finally provoked the man in a way I myself hadn’t yet managed. The thing the teacher had probably wished to imply in his sad story is that hard work was the only way to make a fortune. But flippantly I had ended with the opposite moral: something about the treasure that remains hidden, that lies where you least expect it, that all you have to do is find, I think I talked about dirty yards full of treasure. I don’t remember anymore, I don’t know if that was exactly it. I can’t possibly imagine with what childish words I could have revealed a simple sentiment that becomes a complicated thought. I suppose that, by arbitrarily contradicting the story’s real meaning, I was somehow already promising myself in writing that leisure, more than work, would grant me the great free rewards, the only kind to which I aspired. It may also be that even back then the theme of my life was already unreasonable hope, and that I’d already begun my great stubbornness: I’d give away everything that was mine for free, but I wanted everything to be given to me for free. Unlike the workingman in the story, in my composition I shrugged off all duties and emerged free and poor, and with a treasure in hand.
I went to recess, where I was left alone with the useless prize of having been the first, scratching at the dirt, waiting impatiently for the kids who were gradually coming out of the
classroom.
In the midst of our rowdy games I decided to go look in my desk for something I don’t recall, to show the park caretaker, my friend and protector. Dripping with sweat, flushed with an irrepressible happiness that would have got me spanked at home—I flew toward the classroom, sprinted through it, and so carelessly that I didn’t see the teacher leafing through the notebooks piled on his desk. Already holding the thing I had gone to get, and starting to race back out—only then did my gaze stumble on the man.
Alone at his post: he was looking at me.
It was the first time we’d come face to face, by ourselves. He was looking at me. My steps, meandering, almost halted.
For the very first time I was alone with him, without the whispered support of the class, without the admiration my daring provoked. I tried to smile, feeling the blood rise to my face. A bead of sweat ran down my forehead. He was looking at me. His gaze was a soft, heavy paw upon me. But though the paw was gentle, it completely paralyzed me like a cat unhurriedly pinning the mouse’s tail. The bead of sweat went sliding down my nose and mouth, splitting my smile down the middle. That was it: with an expressionless gaze, he was looking at me. I started backing up against the wall, eyes lowered, all of me hanging onto my smile, the sole feature of a face that had already lost its shape. I’d never noticed how long the classroom was; only now, at the slow pace of fear, did I see its actual size. Not even my lack of time had let me notice up till then how austere and high the walls were; and hard, I could feel the hard wall on my palms. In a nightmare, in which smiling played a role, I hardly believed I’d ever get anywhere near the door—from which point I’d run, oh how I’d run! to hide among my peers, the children. Besides concentrating on my smile, my meticulous zeal was bent on not making a sound with my feet, thus adhering to the intimate nature of a danger of which I knew nothing further. It was with a shudder that a sense of myself came to me as suddenly as in a mirror: a humid thing backed against the wall, slowly moving on tiptoe, and with a gradually intensifying smile. My smile had crystallized the room in silence, and even the noises coming from the park slid around outside the silence. I finally reached the door, and my imprudent heart started beating too loudly, at the risk of awakening the gigantic world that slept.
That’s when I heard my name.
Suddenly nailed to the ground, mouth dry, there I stood with my back to him lacking the courage to turn around. The breeze coming in through the door had just dried the sweat on my body. I turned slowly, containing within my clenched fists the impulse to run.
At the sound of my name the room had been dehypnotized.
And very slowly I saw the whole entire teacher. Very slowly I saw that the teacher was very big and very ugly, and that he was the man of my life. The new and great fear. Small, sleepwalking, alone, facing the thing to which my inescapable freedom had finally led me. My smile, all that was left of a face, had also gone out. I was two leaden feet on the floor and a heart so empty that it seemed to be dying of thirst. There I stood, out of the man’s reach. My heart was dying of thirst, yes. My heart was dying of thirst.
Calm as if about to kill in cold blood, he said:
“Come closer . . .”
How is it that a man takes revenge?
The globe that I myself had thrown at him was about to come back and strike me in the face, one that, even still, I didn’t recognize. I was about to be struck again by a reality that wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t recklessly figured it out and thus given it life. To what extent was that man, that heap of compact sadness, also a heap of rage? But my past was now too late. A stoic repentance kept my head held high. For the first time, ignorance, which up to that point had been my greatest guide, abandoned me. My father was at work, my mother had died months before. I was the only I.
“. . . Take your notebook . . .,” he added.
Surprise made me suddenly look at him. So that was it!? The unexpected relief was almost more shocking than my previous alarm. I stepped forward, reached out my hand while stammering.
But the teacher didn’t move and didn’t hand over the notebook.
To my sudden torment, without taking his eyes off me, he started slowly removing his glasses. And he looked at me with naked eyes that had so many lashes. I had never seen his eyes that, with their innumerable eyelashes, looked like two sweet cockroaches. He was looking at me. And I hadn’t learned how to exist in front of a man. I hid it by looking at the ceiling, the ground, the walls, and kept my hand outstretched because I didn’t know how to withdraw it. He was looking at me mildly, curiously, his eyes disheveled as if he had just awoken. Would he crush me with an unexpected hand? Or demand that I kneel and beg forgiveness. My sliver of hope was that he hadn’t found out what I had done, just as I myself no longer knew, in fact I had never known.
“How did the idea of the treasure in disguise occur to you?”
“What treasure?” I murmured idiotically.
We went on staring at each other in silence.
“Oh, the treasure!” I blurted suddenly without even understanding, anxious to admit any fault whatsoever, begging him for my punishment to consist solely of suffering forever from guilt, for eternal torture to be my sentence, but never this unknown life.
“The treasure that’s hidden where you least expect it. That all you have to do is find? Who told you that?”
The man’s lost his mind, I thought, because what did the treasure have to do with any of this? Stunned, uncomprehending, and moving from one unexpected thing to the next, I still foresaw some less dangerous terrain. In all my racing around I’d learned to pick myself up after falling even when I was limping, and I quickly regained my composure: “It was my composition about the treasure! so that must have been my mistake!” Weak, and though treading carefully on this new and slippery reassurance, I had still picked myself up enough from my fall to be able to toss, in an imitation of my former arrogance, my future wavy hair:
“No one really . . .,” I answered trailing off. “I made it up myself,” I said trembling, but already starting to sparkle again.
If I’d been relieved to have finally found something concrete to deal with, I was nevertheless starting to become aware of something much worse. His sudden lack of anger. I looked at him intrigued, out of the corner of my eyes. And gradually with extreme suspicion. His lack of anger had started to scare me, there were new threats I didn’t understand. That gaze that never left me—and devoid of rage . . . Bewildered, and in exchange for nothing, I had lost my enemy and sustenance. I looked at him in surprise. What did he want from me? He was embarrassing me. And his gaze devoid of anger had started to bother me more than the violence I’d been fearing. A small dread, all cold and sweaty, was overtaking me. Slowly, so he wouldn’t notice, I backed up until I hit the wall, and then my head backed up until it had nowhere else to go. From the wall onto which I had completely mounted myself, I looked at him furtively.
And my stomach filled with a nauseous liquid. I can’t explain it.
I was a very odd girl and, going pale, I saw it. Bristling, about to vomit, though to this day I don’t know for sure what I saw. But I know I saw it. I saw deep as into a mouth, in a flash I saw the abyss of the world. What I saw was as anonymous as a belly opened up for an intestinal operation. I saw some thing forming on his face—the already petrified distress was fighting its way up to his skin, I saw the grimace slowly hesitating and bursting through a crust—but this thing that in mute catastrophe was being uprooted, this thing so little resembled a smile as if a liver or a foot were trying to smile, I don’t know. Whatever I saw, I saw at such close range that I don’t know what I saw. As if my curious eye were glued to the keyhole and in shock came upon another eye looking back at me from the other side. I saw inside an eye. Which was as incomprehensible as an eye. An eye opened up with its moving jelly. With its organic tears. An eye cries all by itself, an eye laughs all by itself. Until the m
an’s effort reached a peak of full awareness, and in a childish victory he showed, a pearl plucked from his open belly—that he was smiling. I saw a man with entrails smiling. I could see his extreme worry about getting it wrong, the diligence of the slow student, the clumsiness as if he’d suddenly become left-handed. Without understanding, I knew I was being asked to accept this offering from him and his open belly, and to accept the weight of this man. My back was desperately pushing against the wall, I shrank away—it was too soon for me to see all that. It was too soon for me to see how life is born. Life being born was so much bloodier than dying. Dying is uninterrupted. But seeing inert material slowly trying to loom up like one of the living-dead . . . Seeing hope terrified me, seeing life tied my stomach in knots. They were asking too much of my bravery simply because I was brave, they were asking for my strength simply because I was strong. “But what about me?” I shouted ten years later because of lost love, “who will ever see my weakness!” I looked at him in surprise, and never ever figured out what I saw, what I had seen could blind the curious.
Then he said, using for the first time the smile he had learned:
“Your composition about the treasure is so lovely. The treasure that you just have to discover. You . . .” he didn’t add anything for a moment. He scrutinized me gently, indiscreetly, as intimately as if he were my heart. “You’re a very funny girl,” he finally said.
The Complete Stories Page 23