Selected Cronicas

A MISCHIEVOUS LITTLE GIRL (III)

I was finishing my composition and the scent of the hidden shadows was already beckoning me. I hurried. Since I only knew how ‘to use my own words’, writing was simple. What also made me hurry was the desire to be the first to walk down to the front of the classroom — the teacher had ended up banishing me to the back row — and to hand in my composition defiantly, just to show him how quick I could be, a quality which struck me as being essential in order to live and which, I felt sure, the teacher could not fail to admire.

I handed him my notebook and he took it without even looking at me. Offended that he should not have praised my quickness, I skipped out into the big park.

The story which I had transcribed into my own words was exactly the same as the one he had narrated. Except that even then I was beginning to ‘extract the moral of the story’, which made me feel virtuous but later threatened to smother me, I was becoming so inflexible. Anxious to impress him, I added on several phrases of my own at the end. Phrases which hours later I read and re-read to see what there was in them that had finally succeeded in provoking that man when I myself had so far failed. Probably what the teacher had wanted to make implicit in his sad tale was that hard work is the only way to make a fortune. Facetiously, I drew the opposite moral: something about the hidden treasure, which exists where one least expects to find it, which is only waiting to be discovered. I think I talked about squalid backyards with hidden treasure. I cannot remember, I do not know if those were my precise words. I cannot imagine with what childish phrases I expressed a simple idea which somehow turned into something complicated. I suppose that by wilfully contradicting the real meaning of the story, I had somehow promised myself in writing that idleness rather than work would yield me many gratuitous rewards, the only rewards to which I aspired. It is also possible that even then the theme of my existence was irrational hope, and that my perverse stubbornness was already manifest. I would give everything I possessed for nothing, but I wanted everything in return for nothing. Unlike the labourer in the story, in my composition I shrugged off all responsibilities and came away free and poor and carrying treasure in my hands.

I went out to play, only to find myself alone with the useless reward of having been the first to finish, raking the soil with my foot, waiting impatiently for my classmates who, one by one, emerged from the classroom.

In the midst of our rowdy games, I decided to look for something or other in my satchel to show to the park-warden, my friend and protector. Dripping with perspiration, flushed with an irrepressible happiness which, had I been at home, would have earned me a few slaps — I fled in the direction of the classroom, crossed it at a run, so flustered that I did not see the teacher leafing through the notebooks piled on his desk. The object I had gone to fetch was already in my hand and I was just about to run out again — when my eyes met his. Standing alone by his desk, he looked at me.

It was the first time we had come face to face on our own. He was staring at me. My steps faltered almost to a standstill.

For the first time I found myself alone with him, without the whispered support of my classmates, without the admiration that my insolence aroused. I tried to smile, feeling the blood rushing to my cheeks. A bead of sweat ran down my forehead. He was looking at me. His look was like a soft, heavy paw resting on me. But if that paw was soft, it froze me like a cat’s paw as it quickly catches a mouse by the tail. The bead of sweat ran down over my nose and on to my mouth, cutting my smile in half. Just that: his face drained of any expression, he was staring at me. I began to skirt the wall with lowered eyes, taking refuge in my smile, the only feature left in a face which had otherwise become blurred. I had never noticed before just how long the classroom was; only now, at the slow pace of fear, could I judge its real dimensions. Lack of time had not allowed me to perceive until that moment just how bare and high and solid those walls really were. I could feel the solid wall against the palm of my hand. In a nightmare, in which smiling played some part, I scarcely believed that I could reach the doorway — from where I would run, oh, how I would run! and hide amongst the other children. As well as concentrating on my smile, I was most careful not to make any noise with my feet, and thus I adhered to the intimate nature of a danger about which I knew nothing more. With a shudder, I caught a sudden glimpse of myself as if in a mirror: a perspiring thing pressed against the wall, advancing slowly on tiptoe, my smile becoming brighter. My smile had frozen the room into silence and even the sounds that came from the park reverberated on the outer shell of silence. I finally reached the door, and my unruly heart began to beat so loudly that it threatened to awaken the immense world from its sleep.

That was when I heard my name.

Suddenly rooted to the spot, my mouth parched, I stood there with my back to him, much too scared to turn round. The breeze which came from the open door had dried the perspiration on my body. I turned round slowly, restraining within my clenched fists the urge to run.