The Schooldays of Jesus Read online

  The door closes behind him.

  CHAPTER 15

  FROM THE roster of Spanish courses on offer at the Institute he chooses Spanish Composition (Elementary). ‘Students registering for this course should have a command of spoken Spanish. We will learn to write clearly, logically, and with good style.’

  He is the oldest in the class. Even the teacher is young: an attractive young woman with dark hair and dark eyes who tells them to call her simply Martina. ‘We will go around the room and each of you will tell me who you are and what you hope to gain from the course,’ says Martina. When his turn comes, he says: ‘My name is Simón, and I am in the advertising business, though at a lowly level. I have been speaking Spanish for well over a year and have become fairly fluent. The time has come for me to learn to write clearly, logically, and with good style.’

  ‘Thank you, Simón,’ says Martina. ‘Next?’

  Of course he wants to write well. Who would not? But that is not why he is here, not exactly. Why he is here he will discover in the process of being here.

  Martina hands out copies of the course reader. ‘Please treat your reader with consideration, as you would treat a friend,’ says Martina. ‘At the end of the course I will ask you to hand it back, so that it can become a friend to another student.’ His own copy is well thumbed, with many underlinings in ink and pencil.

  They read two specimens of the business letter: a letter from Juan applying for a job as a salesman; and a letter from Luisa to her landlord terminating the lease on her apartment. They take note of the form of salutation and the form of closure. They examine the paragraphing and the form of the paragraph. ‘A paragraph is a unit of thought,’ says Martina. ‘It lays out a thought and links it to the preceding and succeeding thoughts.’

  For their first assignment they are to practise composing in paragraphs. ‘Tell me something about yourselves,’ says Martina. ‘Not everything but something. Tell it to me in the space of three paragraphs, linked each to the next.’

  He approves of Martina’s philosophy of composition and does his best with his assignment. ‘I arrived in this land with one overriding purpose in mind,’ he writes: ‘to protect from harm a certain small boy who had fallen under my care and to conduct him to his mother. In due course I found his mother and united him with her.’

  That is his first paragraph.

  ‘However, my duties did not end there,’ he writes. However: the linking word. ‘I continued to watch over the mother and child and see to their welfare. When their welfare was threatened I brought them to Estrella, where we have been made welcome and where the boy, who goes by the name David and who lives at present with his mother Inés and his uncle Diego (Inés and I no longer share a residence), has flourished.’

  End of second paragraph. Commencement of third and final paragraph, introduced by the linking word now.

  ‘Now, reluctantly, I must accept that my duty is done, that the boy may have no further need of me. It is time for me to close a certain chapter of my life and open a new one. Opening that new chapter is linked to the project of learning to write—linked in a way that is not yet clear to me.’

  That is enough. Those are the required three paragraphs, fittingly linked. The fourth paragraph, the paragraph that, were he to write it, would be superfluous to the assignment, would be about Dmitri. He does not have the linking word yet, the word that would make the fourth paragraph follow clearly and logically from the third; but after the linking word he would write: ‘Here in Estrella I met a man named Dmitri who later gained notoriety as a rapist and murderer. Dmitri has on several occasions ridiculed the way I speak, which strikes him as overly cool and rational.’ He reflects, then replaces the word cool with the word cold. ‘Dmitri believes that the style reveals the man. Dmitri would not write as I write now, in paragraphs linked one to the other. Dmitri would call that passionless writing, as he would call me a passionless man. A man of passion, Dmitri would say, pours himself out without paragraphing.

  ‘Though I have no respect for this man Dmitri,’ he would continue, in what would be a fifth paragraph, ‘I am troubled by his criticism. Why am I troubled? Because he says (and here I may well agree with him) that a coldly rational person is not the best guide for a boy who is impulsive and passionate by nature.

  ‘Therefore (sixth paragraph), I want to become a different person.’ That is where he comes to a halt, in mid-paragraph. It is enough, more than enough.

  In the second meeting of the class Martina discusses further the genre of the business letter, in particular the letter of application. ‘The letter of application can be thought of as an act of seduction,’ she says. ‘In it we present ourselves in the most favourable light. This is who I am, we say—am I not attractive? Hire me and I will be yours.’ There is a ripple of amusement around the room. ‘But of course our letter must at the same time be businesslike. There must be a balance. A certain art is thus required to compose a good letter of application: the art of self-presentation. Today we will be studying that art with a view to mastering it and making it our own.’

  He is intrigued by Martina: so young yet so confident.

  There is a ten-minute break halfway through the class. While the students drift out into the corridor or to the washroom, Martina reads through their assignments. When they reconvene she hands them back. On his assignment she has written: ‘Good paragraphing. Unusual content.’

  Their second assignment is to write a letter of application for what Martina calls ‘your dream job, the job you most want to land’. ‘Remember to sound attractive,’ she adds. ‘Make yourself wanted.’

  ‘Estimado señor Director,’ he writes, ‘I am responding to the notice in today’s Star inviting applications for the position of museum attendant. While I have no experience in the field, I do have several qualities which make me desirable. In the first place, I am a mature and dependable person. In the second place, I have a love or at least a respect for the arts, including the visual arts. In the third place, I have no great expectations. If I were to be appointed at the rank of Attendant, I would not expect to be promoted to Principal Attendant the next day, much less Director.’

  He divides the block of prose he has written into five parts, five brief paragraphs.

  ‘I cannot honestly claim,’ he adds, ‘that being a museum attendant has ever been a dream of mine. However, I have reached a point of crisis in my life. You must change, I say to myself. But change into what? Perhaps the advertisement on which my eye fell was a sign intended for me, a sign from the heavens. Follow me, said the Star. So I follow, and this letter constitutes my following.’

  That is his sixth paragraph.

  He hands in his letter to Martina, all six paragraphs. During the break he does not leave the room but remains at his desk, watching covertly as she reads, watching the quick, decisive movements of her pen. He notices when she comes to his letter: she takes longer over it, reading with a frown on her face. She glances up and sees him watching her.

  At the end of the break she returns the assignments. On his she has written: Please see me after the class.

  He waits, after the class, until the other students have left.

  ‘Simón, I have read your assignments with interest,’ she says. ‘You write well. However, I wonder whether this is the best course for you. Do you not feel that you would be more at home in a course in creative writing? It is not too late to switch courses, you know.’

  ‘If you are telling me I should withdraw from the course I will withdraw,’ he replies. ‘But I do not conceive of my writing as creative. To me it is the same kind of writing one does in a diary. Diarizing is not creative writing. It is a form of letter-writing. One writes letters to oneself. However, I understand what you are saying. I am out of place here. I won’t waste any more of your time. Thank you.’ He takes the course reader out of his bag. ‘Let me return this to you.’

  ‘Don’t take offence,’ she says. ‘Don’t go. Don’t withdraw. I will go on read
ing your assignments. But I will read them in exactly the same way as I read the other students’ work: as a teacher of writing, not as a confidante. Do you accept that?’

  ‘I do,’ he says. ‘Thank you. I appreciate your kindness.’

  As a third assignment they are asked to describe their previous work experience and set down a resumé of their educational qualifications.

  ‘I used to be a manual labourer,’ he writes. ‘Nowadays I earn a living by putting pamphlets in letterboxes. That is because I am not as strong as I once used to be. Besides lacking physical strength I also lack passion. This, at least, is the opinion of Dmitri, the man I wrote of earlier, the man of passion. Dmitri’s passion boiled over one evening to such an extent that he killed his mistress. As for me, I have no desire to kill anyone, least of all someone I might love. Dmitri laughs when I say that—when I say I would never kill someone I loved. According to Dmitri, at a buried level each of us desires to kill the one we love. Each of us desires to kill the beloved, but only a few elect souls have the courage to act on their desire.

  ‘A child can smell a coward, says Dmitri. A child can smell a liar too, and a hypocrite. Hence, according to Dmitri, the dwindling away of David’s love for me, who have proved myself to be a coward, a liar, and a hypocrite. By contrast, in David’s attraction toward characters like Dmitri himself (a self-confessed murderer) and his uncle Diego (in my opinion a wastrel and a bully, but let that pass) he finds a deep wisdom. Children come into the world with an intuition of what is good and true, he says, but lose that power as they become socialized. David is, according to him, an exception. David has retained his innate faculties in their purest form. For that he respects him—in fact reveres him or, as he puts it, recognizes him. My sovereign, my king, he calls him, not without an element of mockery.

  ‘How can you recognize someone you have never seen before? That is the question I would like to put to Dmitri.

  ‘Meeting Dmitri (whom I dislike and indeed from a moral point of view despise) has been an educational experience, for me. I would go so far as to list it among my educational qualifications.

  ‘I believe I am open to new ideas, including Dmitri’s. I think it is highly likely that Dmitri’s judgment on me is correct: that as a father or stepfather or guide to life I am not the right person for a child like David, an exceptional child, a child who never fails to remind me that I do not know him or understand him. Therefore perhaps the time has come for me to withdraw and find myself another role in life, another object or soul on which or on whom to pour whatever it is that pours out of me, sometimes as mere talk, sometimes as tears, sometimes in the form that I persist in calling loving care.

  ‘Loving care is a formulation I would use without hesitation in a diary. But of course this is not a diary. So the claim to be animated by loving care is a large one.

  ‘To be continued.

  ‘In the form of a footnote, let me add a few words about tears.

  ‘Certain music brings tears to my eyes. If I am without passion, where do these tears come from? I have yet to see Dmitri moved to tears by music.

  ‘In the form of a second footnote, let me say something about Inés’s dog Bolívar, that is, about the dog who came with Inés when she consented to become David’s mother, but who has now become David’s dog in the sense that we speak of someone who guards us as our guardian though we have no power over him or her or it.

  ‘Like children, dogs are said to be able to smell out cowards and liars and so forth. Yet Bolívar has, from the first day and without reserve, accepted me into their family. To Dmitri this should surely be food for thought.’

  When señora Martina—he cannot call her simply Martina, despite her youth—distributes the checked assignments to the rest of the class, she does not return his. Instead, as she passes his desk, she murmurs, ‘After class, please, Simón.’ Those words, and the light waft of a scent for which he has no name.

  Señora Martina is young, she is pretty, she is intelligent, he admires her assurance and her competence and her dark eyes, but he is not in love with her, as he was not in love with Ana Magdalena, whom he knew better (and had seen naked) but who is dead now. It is not love that he wants from señora Martina but something else. He wants her to listen to him and tell him whether his speech—the speech he is trying his best to write down on the page—rings true or whether on the contrary it is one long lie from beginning to end. Then he wants her to tell him what to do with himself: whether to continue to set off on his bicycle rounds in the mornings and lie on his bed in the afternoons, resting and listening to the radio and (more and more often) drinking, and then afterwards fall asleep and sleep the sleep of the dead for eight or nine or even ten hours; or whether to go out into the world and do something quite different.

  It is a lot to expect of a teacher of prose composition, a lot more than she is paid to do. But then, for the child who boarded the ship on the far shore, it was a lot to expect that the solitary man in the drab clothes should take him under his wing and guide his steps in a strange land.

  His classmates—with whom he has yet to exchange more than a nod—file out of the room. ‘Sit down, Simón,’ says señora Martina. He sits down opposite her. ‘This is more than I can deal with,’ she says. She regards him levelly.

  ‘It is only prose,’ he says. ‘Can you not deal with it as prose?’

  ‘It is an appeal,’ she says. ‘You are appealing to me. I have a job in the mornings and classes to teach in the evenings plus a husband and a child and a home to take care of. It is too much.’ She lifts the assignment into the air as if to assess its weight. ‘Too much,’ she repeats.

  ‘We are sometimes called on when we least expect it,’ he says.

  ‘I understand what you are saying,’ she says, ‘but it is too much for me.’

  He takes the three pages from her hand and stows them in his bag. ‘Goodbye,’ he says. ‘Thank you again.’

  There are two things that can happen now. One is that nothing will happen. The other is that señora Martina will have a change of heart and track him down to his room, where he will be lying on his bed of an afternoon listening to the radio, and say, Very well, Simón, enlighten me: say what it is that you want from me. He gives her three days.

  Three days pass. Señora Martina does not knock at his door. Clearly it is the first thing that has happened: nothing.

  His room, which was painted long ago in a depressing egg-yolk colour, has never grown to become a home to him. The aged couple from whom he rents it keep their distance, for which he is grateful, but there are nights when, through the flimsy walls, he can hear the man, who has something wrong with him, coughing and coughing.

  He haunts the corridors of the Institute. He attends a short course on cooking, looking for ways to enrich his dull diet; but the dishes the instructor discusses require an oven, and he does not have an oven. He emerges with nothing to show but the little tray of spices that all the students are given: cumin, ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, red pepper, black pepper.

  He drops in on a class in Astrology. Discussion turns to the Spheres: whether the stars belong to the Spheres or on the contrary follow trajectories of their own; whether the Spheres are finite or infinite in number. The lecturer believes the number of Spheres is finite—finite but unknown and unknowable, as she puts it.

  ‘If the number of Spheres is finite, then what lies beyond them?’ asks a student.

  ‘There is no beyond,’ replies the lecturer. The student looks nonplussed. ‘There is no beyond,’ she repeats.

  He is not interested in the Spheres, or even in the stars, which as far as he is concerned are lumps of insensate matter moving through empty space in obedience to laws of mysterious origin. What he wants to know is what the stars have to do with the numbers, what the numbers have to do with music, and how an intelligent person like Juan Sebastián Arroyo can talk about stars, numbers, and music in the same breath. But the lecturer shows no interest in numbers or music. Her subject i
s the configurations assumed by the stars, and how those configurations influence human destiny.

  There is no beyond. How can the woman be so sure of herself? His own opinion is that, whether or not there is a beyond, one would drown in despair were there not an idea of a beyond to cling to.

  CHAPTER 16

  FROM THE sisters Inés receives a summons: a matter of urgency has arisen, will she and he, Simón, come out to the farm.

  They are welcomed with tea and freshly baked chocolate cake. At the sisters’ urging, David wolfs down two large slices.

  ‘David,’ says Alma, when he has finished, ‘I have something that might interest you—a family of marionettes Roberta came across in the attic, that we used to play with when we were young. Do you know what a marionette is? Yes? Would you like to see them?’

  Alma conducts the boy out of the room; they can get down to business.

  ‘We have had a visit from señor Arroyo,’ says Valentina. ‘He brought along those two nice boys of his. He wants to know whether we would consider helping to put his Academy back on its feet again. He has lost many students as a result of this tragic affair, but he is hopeful that, if the Academy reopens soon, some will come back. What is your opinion, Inés, Simón? You are the ones with direct experience of the Academy.’

  ‘Let me begin,’ says he, Simón. ‘It is all very well for señor Arroyo to declare his Academy reopened, but who is going to do the teaching? And who will take care of the administration? Señora Arroyo used to carry the entire burden. Where in Estrella will he find someone to fill her place, someone who shares his outlook, his philosophy?’

  ‘He tells us that his sister-in-law will be coming to help out,’ says Valentina. ‘He also speaks highly of a young man named Alyosha. He feels that Alyosha will be able to take over some of the workload. But essentially the Academy will become an academy of music rather than an academy of dance, and señor Arroyo himself will do the teaching.’