That man had cost the village 42,318 pesetas. According to his calculations, justice still owed charity 82,677 pesetas — more or less.
FULL STOP
DON ELOY MILLÁN walked into the classroom. It had felt rather cool out in the corridor and, as he went in, a warm incubator smell wrapped about him. It was a sweet, soft blend of pencils, stale, innocent pee and dried soap behind young ears. The boys got to their feet. Don Eloy Millán went straight to his desk without looking at them.
“Good morning, Don Eloy.”
“Good morning, Señor Millán.”
The class was split like that every day. Some called him Señor Millán, others Don Eloy.
“Right, let’s get down to business. Please be seated!”
He always felt awkward saying that, rather than simply “Sit down”, but he wanted to instil in them both good grammar and good manners. While in the classroom, he must be a stickler for the rules and thus avoid confusing the children. He must be a shining light to them, at least for that hour. When he spoke, his most important duty was to be an exemplar of grammar and politeness, a steadfast, infallible chronometer.
The boys sat down. Then two of them approached his desk. Every day, at least one boy was sure to come up, although generally for no good reason. One impassively, dumbly held out an open exercise book. Don Eloy looked at him. Then he remembered. During the last class, he had said to the boy: “Tomorrow, bring me your exercise book.”
“Silence!” he said, fixing them all with a stern gaze.
Good, the boy had done his homework. Don Eloy took out his mark book and wrote something next to the boy’s name.
“All right, go back to your desk… And what do you want?”
The other boy waiting approached cautiously. He was very polite, in a fresh, spontaneous, joyous way. He said confidentially, almost brushing Don Eloy’s ear with his mouth:
“Good morning, Don Eloy.”
“I see,” Don Eloy thought, “a personal greeting. Very nice.” Then he said: “Today is Friday and therefore dictation day. You should have your workbooks ready on your desks.”
He heard the rustle of pages being turned. Frowning, he searched meticulously through the contents of his briefcase. No, the “Pedagogical dictation texts” were not there. He had left them at home. He pondered what to do. He pushed out his lips and gnawed the inside of his lower lip. What could he use as a text?
“Silence!” he said, raising his voice, when he heard the inevitable rising wave of murmuring. “I’m just trying to find…”
He had all kinds of bits of paper in his briefcase. The fourth-year book wouldn’t be any use for this class. There was an old newspaper. “No, definitely not the newspaper,” he said resolutely, as if guarding the children from something bad. Suddenly he remembered. There was a letter he had spent several days over. He had typed out a few versions, all slightly different. He was really pleased with the way certain paragraphs had turned out. Yes, why not? Azorín, Pereda, Bécquer, Leandro Fernández de Moratín, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Palacio Valdés, Benavente, Rubén Darío, Perrault, Pérez Galdós… And Eloy Millán. Yes, why not? After all, some years back, he’d had a number of articles published in his home town, which, at the time, already had a population of more than eighty thousand. Yes, why not? He would simply dictate part of his letter, and the boys would assume that it was some special test, created expressly for them, perhaps drawn from a book, or invented, a “lie” taken from some literary text.
“Right, Martínez Lago, come to the front, will you? As usual, you will write what I dictate on the blackboard. The rest of you, without looking up, must write what I dictate in your workbooks. I don’t want to see anyone looking at the blackboard. Just concentrate on your own work.”
He leafed through the various versions of the letter, looking for an appropriate paragraph.
“What’s the title?” asked one boy.
Don Eloy hesitated.
“No title. Just ‘Dictation’. Let’s begin.”
“Wait!” cried a shrill, anguished voice.
“What’s wrong now?”
“Nothing, sir. It’s just that I can’t find my pen. Can I do it in pencil?”
“Right, I’m going to start now.”
He stood up. He glanced out of the window and then, in a slow, clear, sonorous voice, he dictated the following paragraph:
“Things are not the same now. Behind those poplars one used to be able to see the cathedral tower, the besieging swifts at evening and, beyond that, the mountains and the pure colours of the fields, picked out by the sun. If I could choose a tree in which to be as happy as the birds, you know very well that I would choose a poplar. Even if it was the one I can see from my window, in the doomed garden, on the building plot that will soon be filled with bricks. They offered us a fringe of shade each afternoon, and the constant chatter of their leaves made you say those words I did not dare to think about until much later. Until only recently. Do you remember? I wonder.”
“Full stop.”
The class stirred. Some boys huffed and puffed, flexed their wrist or furiously shook their supposedly weary right hand. They did this whenever the dictation lasted even a little longer than usual. They were playing at “overwork”, at “exhaustion”.
“All right, let’s check for any mistakes.”
Martínez Lago had spelt “poplars” with “er” not “ar”, reversed the “i” and the “e” in “besieging” and left out “fringe” altogether.
“And no elision of ‘I would…’”
Don Eloy read out the phrase with particular emphasis:
“You know very well that I would choose a poplar…”
He remained sunk in thought for a moment. His heart, pointlessly, kept time: tick-tock, tick-tock…
“Sir! Sir!” came a small, insistent voice from the back row. “This boy says you can have a capital letter after a comma.”
“As I was saying, in prose there should be no elision of ‘I would’. All right, go and sit down again.”
Don Eloy Millán also sat down. A hearty, anonymous hubbub began to fill the classroom. Don Eloy looked up at the window. The sad, towering mass of clouds grew darker in the distance. An ashen light cast shifting, bruising shadows on things, threatening to impose a Messianic law of boredom and loneliness, of damp, defenceless, endless hours, thunderous and monotonous a melancholy frame to the day-to-day tasks. A day of light bulbs prematurely lit, a day when the entrance hall would fill up with anxious mothers, with prattle and umbrellas and raincoats. A day like a vast, inexplicable cloud of smoke that left the eyes red with solitude.
“Have you finished correcting your work? All of you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, not yet. Just a moment. Right!”
“Sir, shall I clean the board?”
“No!”
He felt crushed, invaded. “Lord,” he thought, “was there no respite! Why that insatiable need for change and agitation, why the rush? They were always wanting to move on to the next thing, and those now old words on the board stood in their way, words that only a moment before had been unknown to them and even distant and worthy of respect, with their possible lurking orthographical traps. They want to erase them, to erase me, to discard the tender, unctuous, white splendour of those words, to reduce them to dust, to cast them to the winds like so many dead cells hampering their growth, like the steam on a window that obscures their view of the road, like an old horse fallen in the race, and all because of that need to write and get on in life, to erase and write again, to grow and erase and write again and to become men.” And where was he in all this? Buried beneath a cold heap of dead verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns and prepositions?