***
Number 34’s behavior was not what you would expect from someone who was repeating a grade. You’d think that a kid who gets held back would be sullen, out of step with their new class, reluctant to join in, but 34 was always willing to experience things right along with us. He didn’t suffer from that attachment to the past that makes kids who repeat grades into unhappy and melancholic characters, perpetually trailing along behind their classmates from the previous year, or waging a continuous battle against those who are supposedly to blame for their situation.
That was the strangest thing about 34: he wasn’t resentful. Sometimes we would see him talking with teachers who were unknown to us, teachers from other seventh-grade classrooms. They were happy conversations, with hand gestures and pats on the back. He maintained cordial relations with the teachers who had failed him, it seemed.
We quaked every time 34 showed signs of his undeniable intelligence during class. But he never showed off; quite the contrary, he interjected only to suggest new points of view, or to give his opinion on complex subjects. The things he said weren’t written in the books, and we admired him for that, but our admiration for him frightened us: if someone so smart had failed, it made it seem all the more likely that we would fail too. We speculated behind his back about the real reasons he’d been held back: intricate family conflicts, long and painful illnesses. But deep down we knew that 34’s problem was strictly academic — we knew that his failure would be, tomorrow, our own.
Once, he came up to talk to me unexpectedly. He looked alarmed and happy all at once. It took him a moment to start talking, as if he had thought for a long time about what he was going to say to me. “You don’t have anything to worry about,” he finally blurted out. “I’ve been watching you, and I’m sure you’re going to pass.” It was so comforting to hear that. It really made me happy. It made me irrationally happy. 34 was, as they say, the voice of experience, and knowing what he thought about me was a relief.
Soon I found out that the same scene had been repeated with others in our class, and a rumor spread that 34 was messing with us. But then it occurred to us that this might be his way of instilling confidence in us. And we needed that confidence. The teachers tortured us daily, and we lived in fear of our report cards. There were almost no exceptions. We all felt we were headed straight for the slaughterhouse.
The key was to figure out if 34 was communicating the same message to all of us, or only to a chosen few. There were seven students who still had not been absolved by 34; they went into a state of panic. 38—or 37, I don’t remember his number well — was one of the most worried. He couldn’t stand the uncertainty. His desperation grew so intense that, one day, defying the logic of the nominations, he went up to 34 and asked him directly if he would pass. 34 seemed uncomfortable with the question. “Let me study you,” he proposed. “I haven’t been able to watch everyone — there are a lot of you. I’m sorry, but until now I haven’t paid very much attention to you.”
You have to understand, 34 was not putting on airs. Absolutely not. There was a permanent note of honesty in his manner of speaking. It was never easy to doubt what he was saying. His frank gaze helped too: he made sure to look you in the eyes, and he spaced out his sentences with brief but suspenseful pauses. A slow and mature rhythm beat within his words. “I haven’t been able to watch everyone. There are a lot of you,” he had told 38, and no one doubted this. Number 34 spoke oddly and he spoke seriously. Although perhaps back then we believed that in order to speak seriously, you had to speak oddly.
The next day 38 asked for his verdict, but 34 answered only with excuses, as if he wanted to hide — we thought — a painful truth. “Give me more time,” he said. “I’m still not sure.” By then we’d all given him up for lost, but a week later, after completing the observation period, 34 went up to 38 and told him, to everyone’s surprise: “Yes, you will pass. It’s definite.”
We were happy, of course, and we also celebrated on the following day, when he rescued the remaining six. But there was still something important to resolve: now all of the students had been blessed by 34, and it was unusual for everyone to pass. We did some investigating and we found that never, in the almost two hundred years of the school’s history, had all forty-five students in a seventh-grade class passed.
During the following, decisive months, 34 noticed that we had begun to doubt his predictions, but he didn’t acknowledge it: he went on faithfully eating his carrots, and he regularly spoke up in classes, volunteering his brave and attractive opinions. He knew we were watching him, that he was in the hot seat, but he always greeted us with that same warmth.
At the end of the year, when final exams came, we learned that 34 had hit the bull’s-eye with his predictions. Four classmates had jumped ship early (including 38), and of the forty-one who remained, forty of us passed. The only one who didn’t pass was, once again, 34.
On the last day of classes we went over to talk to him, to console him. He was sad, of course, but he didn’t seem beside himself. “I was expecting it,” he said. “I’m really bad at studying. Maybe things will be better for me at a different school. They say that sometimes you have to just step aside. I think this is the moment to step aside.”
It hurt all of us to lose 34. His abrupt departure was, for us, an injustice. But then we saw him again the next year, falling in line with the seventh graders on the first day of class. The school didn’t allow students to repeat a grade twice, but for 34 they had, for some reason, made an exception. Many students claimed that it was unfair, that 34 had gotten help from friends in high places. But most of us thought it was good that he stayed — even though we were surprised that he would want to go through that experience a third time.
I went over to talk to him that same day. I tried to be friendly, and he was cordial too. He looked thinner, and you could really see the age difference between him and his new classmates. “I’m not 34 anymore,” he told me finally, in that that solemn tone that by then I knew well. “I appreciate that you’re asking about me, but 34 doesn’t exist anymore,” he told me. “Now I’m 29, and I have to get used to my new reality. I’d rather be part of my new class and make new friends. It’s not healthy to get stuck in the past.”
I guess he was right. Every once in a while we’d see him from afar, hanging out with his new classmates or talking with those same teachers who had failed him the year before. I think that time he finally managed to pass the class, but I don’t know if he stayed at the school much longer. Little by little, we lost track of him.
2
One winter afternoon, when they came back from gym class, they found the following message written on the board:
Augusto Pinochet is:
a) a motherfucker
b) a son of a bitch
c) an imbecile
d) a piece of shit
e) all of the above
And underneath it said:
IOP
They were going to erase it, but there was no time, because right then Villagra, the Natural Sciences teacher, entered the room. There was a nervous murmur and some timid laughter, and then absolute silence — the silence that always accompanied Villagra’s classes. Villagra looked at the board for a few long minutes, his back to the students. That writing, with its firm strokes and perfect calligraphy, was not that of a twelve-year-old boy. Moreover, it wasn’t very common for seventh graders to be members of the IOP, the Institutional Oppositional Party.