The Schooldays of Jesus Read online

Since Diego has taken on the task of passing round refreshments, there is little for him to do. He suspects that most of their guests take Diego to be the boy’s father and him, Simón, to be a grandfather or some even more remote relative.

  The party goes well, though the handful of children from the Academy are wary of the more boisterous children from the apartments and cluster together, whispering among themselves. Inés—her hair fashionably waved, wearing a smart black and white frock, in every respect a mother of whom a boy can feel proud—looks pleased with the proceedings.

  ‘That’s a nice dress,’ he remarks to her. ‘It suits you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘It is time for the birthday cake. Can you bring it in?’

  So it is his privilege to bear to the table the giant football cake, set in its bed of green marzipan, and to smile benevolently as with a single whoosh David blows out all seven candles.

  ‘Bravo!’ says Inés. ‘Now you have to wish.’

  ‘I already made my wish,’ says the boy. ‘It’s a secret. I’m not going to tell anyone.’

  ‘Not even me?’ says Diego. ‘Not even in my ear?’ And he inclines his head intimately.

  ‘No,’ says the boy.

  There is a setback with the cutting of the cake: as the knife sinks in, the chocolate shell cracks and the cake breaks into two unequal halves, one of which rolls off the board and tumbles in fragments on the tabletop, knocking over a glass of lemonade.

  With a cry of triumph David brandishes the knife over his head: ‘It’s an earthquake!’

  Inés hastens to mop up the mess. ‘Be careful with that knife,’ she says. ‘You could hurt someone.’

  ‘It’s my birthday, I can do what I want.’

  The telephone rings. It is the conjuror. He is running late, he will be another forty-five minutes, perhaps an hour. Inés slams down the receiver in a fury. ‘What way is that to run a business!’ she cries.

  There are too many children for the apartment. Diego has twisted a balloon into the shape of a manikin with huge ears; this becomes the object of a chase among the boys. They tear through the rooms, knocking over furniture. Bolívar rouses himself and emerges from his lair in the kitchen. The children recoil in alarm. It falls to him, Simón, to hold the dog back by the collar.

  ‘His name is Bolívar,’ announces David. ‘He won’t bite, he only bites bad people.’

  ‘Can I pat him?’ asks one of the girls.

  ‘Bolívar isn’t in a friendly mood right now,’ replies he, Simón. ‘He is used to sleeping in the afternoons. He is very much a creature of habit.’ And he manhandles Bolívar back into the kitchen.

  Blessedly, Diego persuades the rougher boys, David among them, to go out to the park for a game of football. He and Inés are left behind to entertain the timid ones. Then the footballers return in a rush to gobble up the last of the cake and biscuits.

  There is a knock at the door. The conjuror stands there, a flustered-looking little man with rosy cheeks, wearing a top hat and tails, carrying a wicker basket. Inés does not give him a chance to speak. ‘Too late!’ she cries. ‘What way is this to treat customers? Go! You are not getting a penny from us!’

  The guests leave. Armed with a pair of scissors, David begins to open his gifts. He unwraps the gift from Inés and Diego. ‘It’s a guitar!’ he says.

  ‘It’s a ukulele,’ says Diego. ‘There’s a booklet too that tells you how to play it.’

  The boy strums the ukulele, producing a jangled chord.

  ‘It has first to be tuned,’ says Diego. ‘Let me show you how.’

  ‘Not now,’ says the boy. He opens his, Simón’s present. ‘It’s brilliant!’ he cries out. ‘Can we take it to the park and sail it?’

  ‘It’s a model,’ he replies. ‘I am not sure it will float without tipping. We can experiment in the bathtub.’

  They fill the bathtub. The boat floats gaily on the surface, with no sign of tipping. ‘It’s brilliant!’ repeats the boy. ‘It’s my best present.’

  ‘Once you have learned to play it, the ukulele will grow to be your best present,’ he says. ‘The ukulele isn’t just a model, it is the real thing, a real musical instrument. Have you said thank you to Inés and Diego?’

  ‘Juan Pablo says the Academy is a sissy school. He says only sissies go to the Academy.’

  He knows who Juan Pablo is: one of the boys from the apartments, older and bigger than David.

  ‘Juan Pablo has never been through the doors of the Academy. He has no idea what goes on there. If you were a sissy, would Bolívar let you boss him around—Bolívar who in the next life will be a wolf?’

  Inés catches him at the door as he is leaving, thrusts some papers into his hands. ‘There’s a letter here from the Academy, and yesterday’s newspaper, the Tuition Offered pages. We must decide on a tutor for David. I have marked the likely ones. We can’t wait any longer.’

  The letter, addressed jointly to Inés and him, is not from Arroyo’s academy but from the Academy of Singing. Due to the exceptionally high standard of applications for the coming quarter, it informs them, there will regrettably be no place for David. They are thanked for their interest.

  With the letter in his hand he returns the next morning to the Academy of Dance.

  Grimly he seats himself in the refectory. ‘Tell señor Arroyo I am here,’ he instructs Alyosha. ‘Say I will not leave until I have spoken to him.’

  Minutes later the master himself appears. ‘Señor Simón! You are back!’

  ‘Yes, I am back. You are a busy man, señor Arroyo, so I will be brief. I mentioned last time that we had applied for David to enter the Academy of Singing. That application has now been turned down. We are left with a choice between the public schools and private tuition.

  ‘There are certain facts I have kept from you that you ought to aware of. When my partner Inés and I left Novilla and came to Estrella, we were fleeing the law. Not because we are bad people but because the authorities in Novilla wanted to take David away from us, on grounds which I will not go into, and place him in an institution. We resisted. We are thus, technically speaking, lawbreakers, Inés and I.

  ‘We brought David here and found a home for him in your Academy—a temporary home, as it turned out to be. I come to the point. If we enrol David in a public school, we have every reason to expect he will be identified and sent back to Novilla. So we are avoiding the public schools. The census, which is less than a month away, is an added complication. We will have to hide all traces of him from the census-takers.’

  ‘I will be hiding my sons too. David can join them. There are plenty of dark corners in this building.’

  ‘Why do you need to hide your sons?’

  ‘They were not counted in the last census, therefore they have no numbers, therefore they do not exist. They are ghosts. But go on. You were telling me you will be avoiding the public schools.’

  ‘Yes. Inés is in favour of a private tutor for David. We tried the experiment of a tutor once before. It was not a success. The boy has a forceful personality. He is used to getting his own way. He needs to become more of a social animal. He needs to be in a class with other children, under the guiding hand of a teacher he respects.

  ‘I am aware that your means are straitened, señor Arroyo. If you can see your way clear to reopening the Academy, and if David can come back, I offer you my assistance without remuneration. I can do janitorial work—sweeping and cleaning and carrying firewood and so forth. I can help with the boarders. I am not shy of physical labour. In Novilla I worked as a stevedore.

  ‘I may not be David’s father but I am still his guardian and protector. Unfortunately, he seems to be losing the respect for me that he used to have. That is part of the wildness of his present condition. He derides me as the old man who follows him around wagging a finger and admonishing him. But you he respects, señor Arroyo, you and your late wife.

  ‘If you reopen your doors your old students will come back, I am convinced of that.
David will be the first. I don’t pretend to understand your philosophy, but being under your wing does the boy good, I can see that.

  ‘What do you say?’

  Señor Arroyo has listened to him with great earnestness, not interrupting him once. Now he speaks.

  ‘Señor Simón, since you are frank with me I will be frank with you. You say your son derides you. That is not in fact true. He loves and admires you, even if he does not always obey you. He tells me with pride of how, when you were a stevedore, you used to carry the heaviest loads, heavier than any of your younger comrades. What he does hold against you is that, though you act as his father, you do not know who he is. You are aware of this. We discussed it before.’

  ‘He does not merely hold it against me, señor Arroyo, he hurls it in my face.’

  ‘He hurls it in your face and it upsets you, as it should. Let me rephrase what I said to you when last we met, and perhaps offer you some reassurance.

  ‘We have, each of us, had the experience of arriving in a new land and being allotted a new identity. We live, each of us, under a name that is not our own. But we soon get used to it, to this new, invented life.

  ‘Your son is an exception. He feels with unusual intensity the falsity of his new life. He has not yielded to the pressure to forget. What he remembers I cannot say, but it includes what he believes to be his true name. What is that name? Again I cannot say. He refuses to reveal it or is unable to reveal it, I do not know which. Perhaps it is best, on the whole, that his secret be kept secret. What difference does it make, as you said the other day, whether he is known to us as David or Tomás, as 66 or 99, as Alpha or Omega? Would the earth tremble under our feet were his true name to be revealed, would the stars fall from the skies? Of course not.

  ‘So be consoled. You are not the first father to be denied, nor will you be the last.

  ‘Now to the other matter. You volunteer your services to the Academy. Thank you. My inclination is to accept, with gratitude. My late wife’s sister has also kindly offered to help. She is—I don’t know whether she told you—a distinguished teacher, though of another school. And my desire to reopen the Academy has received support in further quarters too. All of which encourages me to believe we may overcome our present difficulties. However, give me a little more time to come to a decision.’

  The discussion ends there. He takes his leave. Our present difficulties: the phrase leaves a bad taste behind. Does Arroyo have any idea of what his difficulties are? How much longer can he be shielded from the truth about Ana Magdalena? The longer Dmitri stays on at the hospital, killing time, the likelier it is he will start boasting to his friends about the maestro’s icy wife who could not keep her hands off him. The story will spread like wildfire. People will snigger behind Arroyo’s back; from being a figure of tragedy he will become a figure of fun. He, Simón, ought by now to have found a way of warning him, so that, when the whispering begins, he will be prepared for it.

  And the letters, the incriminating letters! He should have burnt them long ago. Te quiero apasionadamente. For the thousandth time he curses himself for getting involved in Dmitri’s affairs.

  CHAPTER 19

  IT IS in this vexed state of mind that he arrives home and finds, sprawled outside his door, none other than Dmitri, dressed in the uniform of a hospital orderly, sopping wet—it has been raining again—yet smiling broadly.

  ‘Hello, Simón. Terrible weather, isn’t it? Will you let me in?’

  ‘No, I will not. How did you get here? Is David with you?’

  ‘David knows nothing about this. I came unaided: caught a bus, then walked. No one gave me a second glance. Brr! It’s cold. What wouldn’t I give for a hot cup of tea!’

  ‘Why are you here, Dmitri?’

  Dmitri chuckles. ‘Quite a surprise, isn’t it? You should see your face. Aiding and abetting: I can see the words passing through your mind. Aiding and abetting a criminal. Don’t worry. I’ll be off soon. You won’t see me again, not in this life. So come on, let me in.’

  He unlocks the door. Dmitri enters, sweeps the cover off the bed, wraps himself in it. ‘That’s better!’ he says. ‘You want to know why I am here? I will tell you, so listen carefully. When dawn comes, a few brief hours from now, I will be taking the road to the north, to the salt mines. That is my decision, my final decision. I will consign myself to the salt mines, and who knows what will become of me there. People have always said, “Dmitri, you are like a bear, nothing can kill you.” Well, maybe that was once true, but not anymore. The whiplash, the chains, the bread and water—who knows how long I will be able to endure before I fall to my knees and say, “Enough! Dispose of me! Give me the coup de grâce!”

  ‘There are only two men of intellect in this benighted town, Simón, you and señor Arroyo, and Arroyo is out of the question, it would not be seemly, me being the murderer of his wife and so on. So that leaves you. You I can still talk to. You think I talk too much, I know that, and you are right, in a way, I can be a bit of a bore. But look at it from my point of view. If I don’t talk, if I don’t explain myself, who am I? An ox. A nobody. Maybe a psychopath. Maybe. But certainly a nothing, a zero, with no place in the world. You don’t understand that, do you? Parsimonious with words, that’s you. Each word checked and weighed before you send it out. Well, it takes all kinds.

  ‘I loved that woman, Simón. The moment I laid eyes on her I knew she was my star, my destiny. A hole opened up in my existence, a hole that she and she alone could ever fill. If the truth be told, I am in love with her still, Ana Magdalena, though she is buried in the ground or else burnt to ash, no one will tell me which. So what? you say—people fall in love every day. But not as I was in love. I was unworthy of her, that is the plain truth. Do you understand? Can you understand what it was like to be with a woman, to be with her in the fullest of senses, I put it delicately, when you forget where you are and time is suspended, that sort of being-with, the rapturous sort, when you are in her and she is in you—to be with her like that and yet be aware in a corner of your mind that there is something wrong about all of it, not morally wrong, I have never had much truck with morality, have always been the independent type, morally independent, but wrong in a cosmological sense, as if the planets in the heavens above our heads were misaligned, were saying to us No, no, no? Do you understand? No, of course you don’t, and who can blame you. I’m explaining myself badly.

  ‘As I said, I was unworthy of her, of Ana Magdalena. That’s what it comes down to in the end. I should not have been there, sharing her bed. It was wrong. It was an offence—against the stars, against something or other, I don’t know what. That was the feeling I had, the obscure feeling, the feeling that wouldn’t go away. Can you understand? Do you have any glimmering?’

  ‘I am completely incurious about your feelings, Dmitri, past and present. You don’t have to tell me any of this. I am not encouraging you.’

  ‘Of course you are not encouraging me! No one could be more respectful of my right to privacy. You are a decent fellow, Simón, one of the rare breed of truly decent men. But I don’t want to be private! I want to be human, and to be human is to be a speaking animal. That is why I am telling you these things: so that I can be human again, hear a human voice issuing again from this breast of mine, Dmitri’s breast! And if I can’t tell them to you, who can I tell them to? Who is left? So let me tell you: we used to do it, make love, she and I, whenever we could, whenever there was an hour to spare, or even a minute or two or three. I can be frank about these things, can’t I? Because I have no secrets from you, Simón—not since you read those letters you were not supposed to read.

  ‘Ana Magdalena. You saw her, Simón, you must agree, she was a beauty, a true beauty, the real thing, flawless from top to toe. I should have been proud to have a beauty like that in my arms, but I wasn’t. No, I was ashamed. Because she deserved better, better than an ugly, hairy, ignorant nobody like me. I think of those cool arms of hers, cool as marble, clasped around me, d
rawing me into her—me! me!—and I shake my head. Something wrong there, Simón, something deeply wrong. Beauty and the beast. That is why I used the word cosmological. Some mistake among the stars or the planets, some mix-up.

  ‘You don’t want to encourage me, and I appreciate that, I really do. It’s respectful on your part. Still, you must be wondering about Ana Magdalena’s side of the question. Because if I was indeed unworthy of her, as I am sure I was, what was she doing in bed with me? The answer, Simón, is: I truly don’t know. What did she see in me when she had a husband a thousand times worthier of her, a husband who loved her and proved his love for her, or so she said anyhow?

  ‘No doubt the word appetite occurs to you: Ana Magdalena must have had an appetite for whatever it was I offered. But it wasn’t so! The appetite was all on my side. On her side, nothing but grace and sweetness, as if a goddess were stepping down to grace a mortal man with a taste of immortal being. I should have worshipped her, and I did, I truly did, until the fateful day when it all went bad. That’s why I am off to the salt mines, Simón: because of my ingratitude. It’s a terrible sin, ingratitude, perhaps the worst of the lot. Where did it come from, that ingratitude of mine? Who knows. The heart of man is a dark forest, as they say. I was grateful to Ana Magdalena until one day—boom!—I turned ungrateful, just like that.

  ‘And why? Why did I do the last thing to her—the ultimate thing? I beat my head—why, you dolt, why, why?—but I get no answer. Because I regret it, there’s no doubt about that. If I could bring her back from wherever she is, from her hole in the ground or scattered like dust on the waves, I would do so in a flash. I would grovel before her, A thousand regrets, my angel, I would say (that’s what I used to call her sometimes, my angel), I won’t do it again. But regret doesn’t work, does it—regret, contrition. Time’s arrow: you can’t reverse it. No going back.

  ‘They don’t understand these things in the hospital. Beauty, grace, gratitude—it’s all a closed book to them. They peer into my head with their lamps and their microscopes and their telescopes, searching for the crossed wire or the switch that is on when it is supposed to be off. The fault is not in my head, it’s in my soul! I tell them, but of course they ignore me. Or they give me pills. Swallow this, they say, see if it puts you right.—Pills don’t work on me, I tell them, only the lash will work! Give me the lash!