Four or five days later, now back in Chile, he called again. It was seven in the morning, and I was fast asleep in the office. “I want to know if you’re okay,” he told me, and we got caught up in a conversation that would have been normal if we had been two teenagers becoming friends, or two old men trying to combat the inertia of a Monday at their retirement home. I thought Juan Emilio was pretty crazy, and maybe I felt proud to participate in his madness. “Pax very friendly, calls for no reason and thanks me again for the service,” I wrote in his file. But really there was a reason for his call, although I think that it occurred to him only as we were talking: he asked me to be his teacher, his guide in reading. “I need to be more cultured,” he said. It seemed simple: I would recommend books for him to read, and then we would discuss them. I accepted, of course. I proposed a monthly sum and he insisted on doubling it. I offered to go to his house or his office, although I didn’t really see myself taking the metro and a shared taxi to cross the entire city every week. Luckily, he wanted the classes to take place at my apartment, every Monday, at seven in the evening.
Juan Emilio was short, redheaded, dandified. He dressed with awkward elegance, as if his clothes were always new, as if his clothes wanted to say in a loud and energetic voice: I don’t have anything to do with this body, I’m never going to get used to this body. We made a reading list that I thought might interest him. He was enthusiastic. I liked Juan Emilio, but the warmth I felt toward him was tempered by an ambiguous, guilty feeling. What kind of person could allow himself, when he was of working age, such a long European vacation? What had he done all that time, besides take his grandchildren to all the ice cream parlors in Paris? I tried to imagine him as one of those millionaire Chileans who flew to London to support Pinochet. I tried to see him as what I supposed he was: a full-on cuico, conservative, bourgeois, Pinochetista or ex-Pinochetista, although he didn’t talk like a cuico and his opinions weren’t so conservative and inflexible: at least you could talk to him, you really could. He was also discreet: he looked around my small apartment on Plaza Italia without revealing that it seemed a poor and rundown place to him. Later I thought, to mollify myself, Manichaean-style, that no Chilean executive would have a daughter studying in France, that France was the worst place in the world for the daughter of a Pinochetista.
The classes at the technical training institute, meanwhile, improved. I started to use my glasses so that I could pay more attention to Pamela. A pair of dimples insinuated themselves into her cheeks, and the way she did her makeup was odd: she drew a too-thick line around her eyes, as if fencing them in, as if she wanted to keep them from jumping out of her skull and escaping. One night we had to go over the various kinds of letter-writing, and I rambled on ineloquently until I had the idea to give them an exercise. I asked them to write a letter that they would have liked to receive, a letter that would have changed their lives. Almost all of them did predictable things, but there were four who took the exercise to its extremes and wrote texts that were savage, devastating, beautiful. One of them, as he read his letter aloud, ended up crying and cursing his father, or his uncle, or a father who was really his uncle — I think we were all uncertain on that point, but we didn’t dare ask him to clarify.
I saw that moment as my chance to change the course of things. I devoted the next few classes to lessons on letter writing, always trying to get them to discover the power of language, the ability of words to influence reality. Some of the students were still uneasy, but we started to have a good time. They wrote to their parents, to childhood friends, to their first loves. I remember one student who wrote to John Paul II to explain why she no longer believed in God (her letter prompted a horrible and convoluted fight that almost came to blows, but in the end we were all better for it). By now they liked the class: the only thing they wanted to do was write letters, express feelings, explore what was happening to them — except for Pamela, who avoided me and abstained from class participation. And, despite my best efforts, we hadn’t run into each other in the metro again.
One night, at the beginning of class, a student raised his hand and told me that he wanted to write a letter of resignation because he was planning to quit his job. He started talking, then, about the problems he had with his boss; I tried to give him advice, but I was possibly the least qualified person in the room to do that. Someone told him he was irresponsible, that before quitting he should think about how he was going to live and how he would pay for school. A weighty and serious silence followed, which I didn’t know how to fill.
“I want to write the letter,” he told us then. “I’m not going to quit, I couldn’t, I have kids, I have problems, but I still want to write that letter. I want to imagine what it would be like to quit. I want to tell my boss how I really feel about him. I want to tell him he’s a son of a bitch, but without using that word.”
“It’s not a word, it’s several,” said a student sitting in the first row.
“What?”
“It’s four words: son of a bitch.”
We started on the letter. We wrote the first paragraphs on the board, but because the class period was coming to an end, we agreed to pick up the exercise next time.
Only there wasn’t a next time. I arrived on Monday just early enough to pick up the folder and go to the classroom, but the building was boarded up and there was even fresh paint on the facade. The institute no longer existed. The students explained all this to me, devastated. They had already paid their tuition that month, and a few had even paid the whole year in advance, taking advantage of a discount.
That night I went with my students to a bar on Avenida España. They didn’t usually go out together and they’d never become friends, so while some of them spoke about their lives and got to know each other, the rest just focused on their beers and churrasco sandwiches. Pamela was at the opposite end of the table, with another group, and never talked to me, but I timed things so that, after leaving the bar, we met on the way to the metro. I went with her again to the bus in Plaza Italia, and when we said good-bye she told me that she felt overly watched by me, but that if I didn’t look at her so much, maybe she would start to like me. “But we’re never going to see each other again,” I told her. “Who knows,” she replied.
The sessions with Juan Emilio weren’t as easy as I’d thought they’d be. He didn’t question the books I chose, but he tried to extract messages and morals from them — as most people do, it must be said. Every week I gave him an exercise to do at home, and he always arrived with a bottle of wine in apology: “I didn’t get to finish my homework,” he’d tell me, with a sort of mischievous gesture, and then off he would go, talking with a dizzying erudition about the vintage or the vineyard of the wine he’d brought, using that language that seemed as funny to me as literary terminology must have seemed to him. Juan Emilio was an executive of something, but I chose not to delve too deeply into his work, basically for the same reason I chose not to ask him what he thought about Pinochet’s return: I didn’t want to find out that he was a bloodsucking tycoon or anything like that — I didn’t want to have any reason to despise him.
On the other hand, I came to know a lot about his family: I started to really take an interest in his children’s lives, which were in no way interesting. From our conversations I deduced that his marriage was complex but stable; I’m sure there had been infidelities, but he and his wife were too old by then to separate, and maybe they lived in that world where people don’t separate even if they hate each other. But Juan Emilio didn’t hate his wife (who had a terrible but, to me, literary-sounding name: Eduviges), nor did she hate him. They seemed to tolerate each other, and maybe every once in a while she waited for him with a pisco sour in hand, and they sat on the sofa to talk about the fates of other, less-fortunate couples, about how good they themselves had it, together and happy after all this time.