— They’ve reacted! he exclaims. The mother and the boy have reacted positively!
— Congratulations, Adam tells him, winking to his left at Quiroga, who chokes back laughter.
But the Principal waves an energetic hand above his brow, as though refusing an invisible crown of laurel leaves.
— Just doing my job, he concedes. All in a day’s work.
Drying his tears with a coloured handkerchief, he turns and flees down the hallway.
Emptiness of soul, solitude, and ice. The two lines are now still, and Adam Buenosayres, tearing himself away from the spectacle of his own desolation, looks at thirty childish faces looking back at him, faithful mirrors of his own face. They mustn’t notice anything! And, as so many times before, a revivifying echo awakes in his heart at the sight of this new world waiting for him. To approach their world, to go back up the stream of their newborn language, grasp that burgeoning new life pliant to the mere weight of his voice or gaze! So he puts his right hand on Ramos’s shoulder and his left on Falcone’s, each of them at the head of a line.
— Did you bring your composition? he asks Ramos, the boy with the golden head.
— Yes, Ramos answers. It was a hard subject.
— Did it turn out all right?
In the boy’s blue eyes there is a glint of restless creativity.
— Hmm! he says. The description of Polyphemus…
— Sir! interrupts Falcone, rubbing his hands together. Today we’re doing Pythagoras’s theorem!
Adam looks at him, and smiles again at how the well the bird’s name suits the boy: his lean profile, bushy brows, and keen gaze are somehow as fierce and avid as intelligence itself.
— That’s right, Adam admits. Were you looking forward to learning it?
— Yes, answers Falcone.
— Why?
— The kids in the other sixth-grade class say they didn’t understand it.
— How tragic! Ramos mocks.
— I always understand, Falcone says confidently, blinking like a bird of prey.
Adam hugs the two heads, golden and hawkish, to his chest. Then, sought by many eyes, he begins his habitual walk between the double file.
First he comes upon Bustos, who stops him with his sharp voice, his perfidious clown smile, and his puddle-coloured eyes that look about ready to pop out of his head.
— Sir, announces Bustos. Another miracle!
— What happened?
— Cueto laughed!
Adam turns to Cueto, the sphinx of the class, and contemplates the child’s immutably serious face.
— No! he exclaims. It can’t be true!
— Cross my heart and hope to die! Bustos assures him.
Amid singing laugher, Adam moves on, pausing in front of Gaston Dauthier, a bundle of nerves.
— Bonjour, Dauthier.
— Bonjour, monsieur, Gaston answers. Are we going to play against the other class today?
— Hmm, Adam prevaricates dubiously.
He turns to the orator Fratino who, like Gaston, is already peering up at the sky.
— What do you think? he asks the boy.
Teseo Fratino raises a professorial hand and suggests in an exquisite voice:
— Should the weather conditions be favourable…
— Will we get rain in the fourth period? Adam insists.
— Sir, I cannot say. I have not consulted the barometer.
Fratino’s vocabulary provokes more laughter. But the orator’s cold eyes nail his mockers, and a sneer of disdain breaks the impeccable line of his mouth. Then Adam abruptly sticks two fingers into the ribs of Terzián, the actor.
— Hands up! he says.
Terzián raises his arms, as if terrified. His mercurial face reflects fear, then fury, then a furtive attempt at resistance. His arm begins to creep down to draw an imaginary revolver. But Adam keeps him covered, and the actor soon gestures his compliance before the inevitable.
Fatso Atadell has been watching the farce, his mouth full, eternally ruminating the pleasant fruits of the earth. He is vast in flesh, in clothing, in smiles.
— Fatso! Adam accosts him, pretending to be deeply concerned. Chewing on something again? Is man born only to encase himself in a horrible layer of fat? No, Fatso, no! The spirit has its needs, too. If you stopped chewing for a minute, you’d hear — oh, Fatso! — the voice of your soul asking for its lunch.
Serenely impervious, not ceasing to chew and smile, Fatso Atadell pretends to ignore Adam’s chiding.
— Sir, he announces. Papucio is sad.
Adam turns to look at Papucio, who has the look of an adolescent malevo overcome by melancholy.
— What’s wrong? Adam asks him.
— Nothing, grunts Papucio. My flowerpots are too tight.
— Your what?
— My shoes, sir. They’re gonna bring on my loquats again.
— What loquats?
— My corns. And if we play against the other class today — oh, brother!
Américo Nossardi is standing at the end of the line, apparently wrapped up in his own little world. He’s examining a model airplane, the patient work of his own hands.
— Does it fly? Adam asks him.
The young man raises perplexed eyes.
— No, he says. The motor’s too heavy.
The review is finished, and youthful squirming is making the lines wobble. Adam Buenosayres, detached from himself, is now one more member of the noisy phalanx.
— Heads up! he shouts. Look to the future!
Thirty childish smiles respond to his joke.
— Forward, march!
Beneath a sky of tarnished brass proceed thirty smiles.
The classroom is on the top floor, olive-coloured, with a big corner window overlooking the intersection of two little suburban streets. The rows of desks are all oriented toward the light of the window. On the right stands a wardrobe; on top of it, displayed for the world’s amazement, rests a cardboard planetarium, Nossardi’s ingenious construction. The nine planets, dyed a demonic red, revolve by means of a clockwork device around a happy sun within a space of violent indigo. Facing the pupils’ seats is the teacher’s desk, its only decoration a globe of the world with a cracked and fissured surface (a symbol?). Two chalkboards extend their black expanse across the front and lefthand walls. The former has a right-angled triangle drawn on it. On each of the triangle’s sides, Falcone has just drawn a square in different colours, to wit: a yellow square on the hypotenuse, and on the two adjacent sides a green and a blue one. At the other blackboard, Núñez is concluding the arithmetic demonstration.
— That’s it, sir, he says. A difference of only twenty-six square millimetres.
— Very good, Adam Buenosayres approves from his desk. He turns then to Falcone, who has just completed the graphic demonstration.
— What does that demonstrate? Adam asks.
— It demonstrates, recites Falcone, that in every right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
— Good. You can both return to your seats.
As Falcone and Núñez go back to their desks, Adam addresses the class:
— Has everyone understood?
— Yes, sir.
— So this is the famous Pythagorean theorem? Falcone says, without hiding the disappointment already gnawing at his voracious mind.
— Nothing more, nothing less, Adam responds. Let’s see, now. Who was Pythagoras?
— Sir, answers Dauthier. He was a Greek philosopher and mathematician.
Fratino the orator lets his melodious voice be heard:
— The story goes that Pythagoras discovered his theorem in the bathtub and that he ran out into the street, completely naked, crying “Eureka!”