Jon Bilbao - Still the Same Man

He was driving along a straight stretch when, in the distance, he spied two people on the shoulder. One of the figures was standing watching the traffic. The other was sitting on something he couldn’t make out. It looked like they might be hitchhiking, and yet they weren’t making any effort to catch the attention of the passing vehicles; instead, they just stood there, unmoving. When he drove past them, he saw that it was a man and a woman; she was in a wheelchair. Joanes’s eyes met the man’s for a fraction of a second.

He continued on some twenty or thirty yards before slamming on the brakes. The car behind had no choice but to swerve violently to avoid crashing into him. The driver showed his irritation with a long honk of his horn. Joanes moved to the shoulder, where he sat stock-still, his hands on the wheel, staring into his rearview mirror at the two figures behind him.

The man, in fact an elderly gentleman, was now looking in the direction of the car. The woman, wearing a straw hat, hadn’t changed her stance at all, her body was hunched and her head bent.

But all of Joanes’s attention was fixed on him. On the elderly gentleman.

He was wearing slacks and a short-sleeved, white, button-down shirt. He’d put on a good number of pounds. What had once been a stout stomach was now a serious belly hanging over his belt. The man’s double chin was now a triple. And the large, square-framed, black-rimmed glasses reminiscent of old TV sets had now been replaced by a more modern pair. But his imperious air was the same as ever.

The elderly man moved guardedly toward the car. Joanes got out.

“Hello,” he said.

“A compatriot!” responded the man with great satisfaction, holding out his hand.

As he took it, Joanes scrutinized his face, but there was nothing in it to suggest that the other man recognized him.

“Hello, professor.”

The old man’s smile immediately vanished.

“I don’t think you remember me. I was your student. At the School of Engineering.

He added his name and the year it had been.

The professor looked at him, creasing his forehead, and shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember you. But in any case, I’m incredibly pleased to see you.”

“What’s happened?”

The professor pursed his lips.

“We’ve been the victims of a mutiny,” he said, containing his rage. “We were on the bus, on our way to one of those shelters, when the other passengers ganged up against me and my wife, forcing us to get off. They threw us out. Kicked us to the curb and then just went on their way. We should be thankful they didn’t hurt us.”

Joanes shook his head, confused.

“But, why?”

“Intolerance, my friend. Because they gave in to the irritation produced by a minor inconvenience and let their nerves get the better of them. Because of her condition, my wife requires a little more space than other people. A hard, narrow, straight-backed seat is terribly tiring for her. This fact, in a bus with more passengers than seats and a faulty air-conditioning system, was enough to incite the uprising.”

“And there was no one to defend you? A hotel rep, the driver. .?”

The professor gave an emphatic shake of the head.

“Only the driver, but the last thing he wanted was to get involved. He obeyed those savages without so much as a word when they ordered him to stop. Just imagine the scene. They lifted my wife up in midair and set her on the curb! As if she were a piece of luggage!”

“Is that your wife over there?” Joanes asked, pointing to the woman in the wheelchair.

“Forgive me. I should have introduced you. My manners are melting in this heat.”

Joanes followed him to where his wife was sitting.

“Darling, you won’t believe the stroke of luck we’ve had!”

When her husband introduced her to Joanes, she simply looked at him meekly. She barely shifted the pained look on her face, as if smiling took an unbearable effort. Her eyebrows were plucked bald, and her dress — white, no belt or frills — looked like a hospital gown. When the professor added that Joanes had been a student of his, her response was, “In that case, I’m not sure we are so lucky.”

A trailer whizzed past, and she shut her eyes tight to protect them from the dust.

“Where was the bus supposed to be taking you?” asked Joanes.

“I don’t know,” answered the professor. “I heard someone say the name of the city, but. .”

“I’m going to Valladolid.”

“That could be the place. I think it might have been, yes.”

“Would you like me to take you?”

The professor replied with an enormous smile and shook his hand again, now more firmly than before.

“You can’t imagine how grateful we’d be if you would. I didn’t dare ask you myself.”

“It’s not a problem. But we ought to get going. It’s already a little late.”

Joanes watched as the professor threw his travel bag over his shoulder and pushed his wife toward the car. The chair was motorized, but she needed help there along the rubbly shoulder.

The whole story about the mutiny on the bus seemed strange to Joanes. He found it hard to believe that the other passengers would have thrown them off the bus simply because of a space issue. Something else had gone on, surely. The professor must have provoked the others somehow, which, knowing him, wasn’t hard to imagine.

They settled the woman into the back seat and put the wheelchair in the trunk.

Joanes sat down at the wheel but didn’t turn on the engine right away. He wanted to fix that place firmly in his memory — that nasty stretch of Mexican highway, the roadside hawk perched and watching them from a signpost. .

He had imagined this moment countless times since leaving college. In his fantasies, the professor always appeared in some desperate situation where he had no choice but to ask Joanes for help, recognizing, implicitly, that he’d made a terrible mistake in underestimating him as he had. And Joanes always helped him out, making a point of being sober and efficient. He’d make it clear that things were going great, that he ran a prosperous business, that he had an enviable family, and, ultimately, that the professor’s harmful influence hadn’t had the least effect on him.

“Is something wrong?” asked the professor.

“No, nothing,” answered Joanes, starting up the engine. “Everything’s in order.”

The professor belonged to a family of dentists. His grandfather, father, and two of his uncles had all practiced dentistry. Out of all of them all, the professor’s father had enjoyed the most prolific career, having made a small fortune from the patents of various professional instruments — two endodontic clamps, a drill burr, a barbed broach, and, most significantly, a dental milling cutter universally praised by his colleagues in the field.

The professor’s students liked to point out the appropriateness of him being part of a family who’d made their money inflicting pain on others, and they considered the professor’s move from dentistry to teaching math as a sign of his loyalty to the family tradition, and his personal refinement of it.

He specialized in algorithm theory and recursive mathematical functions and was not exactly up there among the most popular professors in the School of Engineering. He owed his less than favorable reputation to the excessive demands he placed on his students, along with his penchant for upsetting and intimidating them, inciting such levels of insecurity that, for a few, the problem became congenital.

In one of the first of the professor’s classes Joanes attended, the former took the whole lecture hall by surprise with an inflammatory speech defending the duodecimal system. According to him, various strong cases could be made for replacing the modern decimal system with a duodecimal one. Calculations would become far easier, he assured them. Multiplication and division would be far more practicable, owing to the duodecimal system having four factors — two, three, four, and six — while the decimal system, to its detriment, only had two — two and five. Another of the arguments he put forward was the widespread acceptance — both historical and geographical — of a base 12 numeral system, as demonstrated by the existence of the twelve signs of the zodiac, the division of the year into twelve months, and of the foot into twelve inches. He concluded by pointing out — in case more or clearer explications were necessary — that human anatomy lends itself to counting in divisions of twelve — four of their fingers have three phalanges, and four times three is twelve. The thumb serves as a pointer when counting the phalanges on the other fingers.