I contemplated rushing to her office and rushing back. But I knew that if I left the exiguous audience would leave as well. There were no more than a dozen attendees. The fat, bald woman. The two women who had come in with her (they sat near the front, already taking notes; their pens made coleopteran scratching sounds). A boy with a blank, white face and well-greased hair. He belonged to the faction that wore dog ID tags. He was handsome; he looked, in fact, like a beardless Che Guevara. The students sat, silent or (in the case of the fat woman and her friends) whispering to each other. They avoided looking at me and I avoided looking at them. Instead, they looked through the tall windows that let out onto the quadrangle, and I looked as well. A woman passed by, wearing the sky-blue livery of the officers I’d seen at the airport. Then two men. Then another man, alone. The students seemed uneasy. One of them, I did not see who, whispered: I don’t understand, I don’t understand. His voice threatened to swell into a complaint, a howl, so I simply started talking, introducing myself and making excuses for Ana, and then launching into my presentation.
The two dark-haired women wrote down almost every word I said, at a speed I found incredible and mildly nauseating. I laid out my theories about the construction of the Butyrka. My hands sawed the air, to show the mighty sawing and chopping committed in the name of its architect, the Catherinite Matvey Kazakov. (In his absurd periwig.) Basement beneath basement, stone piled on stone. And all in full view of the city center. The Butyrka, of course, survived into the Soviet era, I said, and came into its own during the Great Terror, another thunderous and in-plain-sight occurrence. Therein — and this was the argument I had been refining — lay the true innovation of the Butyrka. Its endless adaptability, its capacious swallowing technique, identical for prisoners under the tsars and those taken by the commissars. As I made this remark, which had seemed especially moronic to me during my attempts to revise the paper, the two copyists at the front stood up and announced that they had a joint question: how could I, in good conscience, come and lecture them about the theory of prison architecture even as a new prison was being built before our very eyes? They spoke together, pens in hand, one voice alto and one soprano. Before I had even lifted my lethargic tongue from the floor of my mouth, the rest of the students in the audience began to jeer and whistle behind the copyists, or simply groan in anticipation. One called out: Don’t answer, Professor, they always do this. It was the boy who looked like Che.
The women said nothing further, their mouths hard and eyes slightly glassy. In other words the expression induced by “radical discourse.” I know student concerns. I won’t say I understand them because there is, of course, nothing to understand. Student concerns and miseries amount to nothing, but if you tell a student this he will regard it as a victory, as proof you cannot comprehend his moral greatness. The correct way to defeat students is to hear them out while wearing a grave and serious expression, to let them tire themselves, exhaust themselves and their arsenal, and then simply ignore them. You don’t even need to use the tools of authority. Beatings or tear gas, imprisonment, torture, and execution: all these only add strength to student moronism. I lowered my voice and asked them what their concern was, and the taller woman said that I must have noticed the meat bowls, no? And what did I think those were for? The first bricks in a new, metaphorical prison. The other students were really jeering now, shouting, swearing. The boy who had initially told me not to answer was calling them cunts, useless cunts.
The women started shouting a slogan: First ethics, then meat, first ethics, then meat. The other students had unplugged their headphones and the Dog Symphony — playing through six or seven tin-voiced speakers — competed with and almost obscured the four words. The boy who had called the slogan-shouters useless cunts stood up and threaded his way down the tiered floor between the desks, jerking his pelvis with Apollonian precision. The other students leaned or twisted their torsos to make room for his passage; his approach to the shouting copyists brought forth various hoarse cries of approval. The two shouters saw him approaching, but they just raised their voices and went on shouting as the whistles and yells from the spectating students grew denser, more harmonized, afloat, aloft. The boy who looked like Che had almost reached the shouters; both were eyeing him now with evident fear on their pale, lightly equine faces (I wondered if they were sisters) even as they raised their voices more and more and started to wave their soft-looking fists in the air (a diamond engagement ring caught the sunlight on one). Under ordinary circumstances I would simply have shouted for someone to go get security, but now, as these porteños displayed their youth, their student youth, I stepped off the dais, I rushed to interpose myself between the shouters and the boy. He saw me and told me to stay the fuck out of his way, and I saw that though he was much shorter than I am he was also much broader and better built. I ignored him and continued my advance. Stay back, Professor, this doesn’t concern you, he said. The women went on shouting even after I had inserted myself between them and the boy. Get out of my way, he whined, get out of my way. I told him I would call campus security if he didn’t leave, at once. Every student in attendance burst into harsh laughter as I said this. Even the shouters, who interrupted their chanting to laugh.
The boy shoved me. I did not abandon my position. I’m warning you, Professor, he said, I’m warning you one last time. I shrugged and crossed my arms, like a fool. He struck me with such speed that I never saw the blow coming. White light poured into my right eye. I stumbled over a bolted-down desk and smashed my head into the slick, dark wooden floor. First ethics, then meat, first ethics, then meat: the shouters kept up their chant through the boy’s assault on me. Shut the fuck up, he said. The taller shouter answered: No way, and especially not for you, you dickhead. Her shorter friend went on shouting. Her voice was starting to fray. I’m not going to warn you again, said the boy, you saw what I just did to the professor, so you know I’m serious. This time it was the shorter woman who stopped shouting. To spit in his face. I had regained my feet now but the boy’s blow had stunned me. An edema was already inflating where his fist had landed. The blow the floor struck, however, made my legs tremble, and so I could not reach the boy and the shouters in time, or so it seems to me from the standpoint of “historical memory.” The boy stared at the shouters and they stared back, went on shouting, louder and louder, their larynges vibrating. Violent applause filled the air (from tag wearers only) as the boy struck the shorter woman in the mouth.
I managed to force myself forward, one step, one more. Like a crawling dog, I thought. My arm extended and my hand palpating nothing, the shouter’s lips tearing, her bloody spittle starting to leak and spurt, along with the pearly human darkness behind her teeth, gaze, skin, hair, adipose tissue, the darkness lining her cunt and filling the balls of her assailant, carried by their joint bloodstream, lubricating their viscera and their brains, extending to the attic darkness above and the cellar darkness below, below the quadrangle grass, walled up in the libraries and dormitories, flooding the Paraná estuary and flooding the South Atlantic, brought to fruit among the subatomic processes of the sun. Phenomena, friends: they’re wearing me out.