Medardo Fraile - Things Look Different in the Light & Other Stories

“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?

“Shall I clean the board?”

“No, I said ‘No’.”

He was defending his words now like a cornered animal. He called for silence. The boys could already sense that it was time for the end-of-lesson bell to ring. The proximity of that moment made them restless. They kept looking out of the window, at the boys at the back of the class, at the coats hanging on the coat-rack… Don Eloy Millán was a kind man. He was distracted. Perhaps he had a headache or was tired. There was a flash followed by a distant rumble of thunder. The boys glanced up at the clouds for a moment, slightly pale, slightly troubled and excited, as if they were watching the approach of a majestic, silent, deadly caravel. He set them an exercise to do from their books. He asked Cubero where in the exercises they had got to. He walked up and down the centre aisle between the desks. He gazed from the back of the room at his words written on the blackboard, his own words. The clouds were stealing rhythmically, hurriedly away towards other places in the world.

“Sir, shall I clean the board?”

“Can I, Don Eloy?”

The bell rang. The boys sprang to their feet, noisily snatching up their satchels and putting away their books, scraping chairs and desks, taking their coats from the rack and calling to one another. One of them grabbed the board rubber and, tenaciously, from top to bottom, from left to right, with wild, forceful, feline gestures, cleaned the whole blackboard.

Don Eloy Millán slowly picked up his briefcase and his coat from the desk.

“Bye, sir!”

“Goodbye, Don Eloy!”

“Goodbye, Señor Millán! See you tomorrow!”

He was left alone, putting on his gloves. He thought: “They didn’t even erase me slowly.” He was looking at the black rectangular board, like a precise, deep, dark hole. The now silent blackboard. He had been written on that board and now he had been erased. And with such rancour, such haste! His heart, he sensed, was clouding over. “How many others like me,” he thought, “lie behind that board, forgotten, lost, erased for ever, just like that?”