Leonardo Padura - Havana Gold

The caretaker looked at Conde and Conde looked at the caretaker and, for a second, the policeman felt he’d been caught in the act. An elegant man with stylish hair, well into his sixties, his bright eyes sparkled at the lieutenant with an I-know-him-from-somewhere look. Perhaps if Manolo hadn’t introduced him as a policeman, the caretaker might have asked if he wasn’t the little bastard who used to escape his clutches every day at twelve-fifteen by jumping over the wall in the PE yard.

A gentle buzz reached them from the classrooms and the inside playground was empty. The Count decided conclusively that this place, where he’d now returned after an absence of fifteen years, wasn’t the one he had left. Perhaps his memory did retain the unmistakeable smell of chalk dust and the alcoholic aroma of stencils, but not that reality intent on confusing him by distorting every dimension: what he thought would be small turned out to be too big, as if it had burgeoned in the intervening years, and what he thought would be huge turned out to be insignificant or non-existent, since it perhaps existed only in his most emotional memories. They walked through the secretariat to the headmaster’s office, and he found it impossible not to remember the day when he’d followed the same route to hear himself accused of writing idealist stories which defended religion. Fuck the lot of you, he’d almost shouted, when a young woman came out of the headmaster’s office and asked them why they’d come.

“We would like to speak to the headmaster. Our visit is related to the case of the teacher Lissette Núñez Delgado.”

“It’s often said that teaching is an art, and there’s a lot of literature and fine words written about education. But the truth is that the philosophy of teaching is one thing, while exercising it every day, year in year out, is quite another. I do apologize. I can’t even offer you a cup of coffee. Or tea. But please do sit down. What people don’t say is that you must be rather mad to teach. Do you know what it’s like to manage a Pre-Uni high school? Better you don’t, for it’s just that, madness. I don’t know what’s happening but young people are less and less interested in really learning. Do you know how long I’ve been in this trade? Twenty-six years, my dear colleagues, twenty-six: I started as a schoolmaster, and now I’ve been a head for fifteen and I think it only goes from bad to worse. Something’s not working properly, and if the truth be told, young people now are quite different. It’s as if the world was suddenly going too fast. Yes, it must be something like that. They say it’s a symptom of postmodern society. So we too can be called postmodern in this heat and our jam-packed buses? The fact is I leave here with a headache every day. I don’t mind the fact they’re obsessed with their hair, shoes and clothes, or that they all want to be shafting like crazy at the age of fifteen if you’ll excuse my French, because that’s all quite predictable, isn’t it? But at least they could care a little bit about their schooling. Every year we expel a number who have all but dropped out of society and, according to their lights, drop-outs don’t study, work or make demands: they only want to be left in peace, you know, to be left in peace to make love not war. Just like the good old Sixties, you see?… But what most upsets me is that if you get hold of a twelfth grader now, with only three months to go to graduation, and ask him what he’s going to study, he won’t know, and if he does, he won’t know why. They’re eternally adrift… But do excuse my harangue. Luckily, you aren’t from the Ministry of Education, are you? Yesterday morning we were paid a visit and told about dear comrade Lissette. I really find it hard to believe. It’s hard to get your head round the fact that a young person who you’d see looking healthy and cheerful every day is now dead. Yes, she started here with the tenth grade, and, to tell the truth, neither I nor her head of department had any complaints: she did everything demanded of her and did it well. I think she’s one of the few young people to come to us with a real vocation to be a teacher. She liked her work and was always coming up with ideas to motivate her pupils. She could just as easily go camping with them as help them revise at night, or she’d do PE with her group, because she played volleyball very well and I think her pupils really liked her. I have always been of the opinion that there should be a degree of distance between teachers and pupils, and that distance is created by respect, not by fear or age: respect for knowledge and responsibility. But I also think each teacher has his or her approach and if she felt all right always being with her pupils and results in class were good, who was I to object? Last year her three classes all passed chemistry, with an average of ninety per cent, and not everybody can manage that, I told myself: if they’re the results she gets, then let her get on with it! That might sound like Machiavelli but it’s not Machiavellian. I did talk to her one day about the over-familiarity, but she just said she felt better that way and we never brought it up again. It’s a pity this has happened, and yesterday we had attendance problems in the afternoon because very many pupils went to the vigil and cemetery, but we decided to turn a blind eye to their absence… And as an individual? I’m not sure. I didn’t know that side of her so well. She’d a boyfriend who’d come to pick her up on his motorbike, but that was last year, although at the vigil Mrs Dagmar said she’d seen him waiting outside for her for three days. You know, Dagmar can tell you about her, she was her head of department and I think her best friend at Pre-Uni, but she’s not in today as she’s been really hit by what happened to Lissette… Yes, that’s true, she dressed very well, but I’d understood her stepfather and mother frequently go abroad and it is quite natural they’d bring her a few things back, isn’t it? Just remember she was also very young, this same generation… What a great pity, and she being so pretty…”

The bell brought an end to his oration: the previous gentle hum turned into the raucous shouting of an overflowing stadium and, youths rushed down corridors in search of the cafeteria, their boy or girlfriends and the lavatories where they’d inevitably indulge in a spot of clandestine smoking. While Manolo jotted down some details from the murdered woman’s work-record, and the address of the teacher by the name of Dagmar, Conde went out into the playground longing to smoke a cigarette and inhale the ambience from his memories. He found the corridors packed with white and mustard coloured uniforms, and smiled liked someone cursed. He was going to kill a friendly ghost, by lighting up right there, in the most forbidden place, in the middle of the playground, on the compass of winds that marked the heart of the school. But he held back at the last moment. Downstairs or up on the first floor? He hesitated for a moment about where to do it. I preferred upstairs, he concluded, and went up to the male lavatories on the top floor. The smoke escaping through the door was like a signal from the Sioux: he could read “here we smoke pipe of peace” in the air. He entered and caused an inevitable stir among the clandestine smokers; cigarettes disappeared and everyone suddenly had an urgent need to pee. The Count quickly raised his arms and said: “Hey, I’m not a teacher. I’ve come for a smoke too,” and tried to look relaxed as he finally lit up, the focus of the youths’ suspicious gazes. To compensate those who’d been cut short by his appearance he passed round his packet of cigarettes, although only three took up his offer. The Count kept staring at them, as if wanting to see himself and his friends in those students and once again he thought there’d been a change: either they’d been very small or these fellows were very big; they’d been smooth-cheeked and innocent and this lot had full grown beards, adult muscles and over-confident stares. Perhaps it was true that they were only interested in getting laid; so what? It was their prime time. At the age of fifteen had they ever worried much about anything else? Perhaps they hadn’t, for in those same lavatories, above the first sink, a famous piece of graffiti had captured the irrepressible desire of a sixteen-year-old: I WANT TO DIE DOING IT: DOING IT, EVEN UP AN ARSE. That legend had declared its basic erotic philosophy, now covered by paint, alongside generations of more intellectual graffiti like the one the Count now read: DO COCKS HAVE IDEOLOGIES? He decided to put a question to them when he’d put his packet of cigarettes away: “Were any of you Lissette’s pupils?”