Confusion: A Surrealistic Novella on the Struggle for Autonomy by Koenraadt Mathijs

Author:Koenraadt, Mathijs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction; Philosophy; Politics; Religion; Critique
Publisher: Morningtime
Published: 2019-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

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Teacher Curls, a not-so-very-healthy looking man with short black curly hair and a steady stubble beard, wandered toward the chalkboard. Toine just entered the classroom. He was a few minutes late. The concierge had given him a note to show to the teacher this hadn’t been his fault, but that he had been hit. He showed the note and sat down. Curls, a lenient teacher who loved his profession, didn’t mind so much. With great pleasure, he presented one after the other biological fact. He astonished the pupils but just as often forgot about the official curriculum.

— “So,” the teacher said, “when everybody has sat down, I will continue my lecture about the tomato. The tomato is really a fruit, like the banana, the apple, or the pear. The tomato is the fruit of the tomato plant. Tomatoes aren’t vegetables, but still, we find it in the supermarket among the vegetable aisle. That’s what’s called bureaucracy. These bureaucrats don’t know anything about biology.”

The pupils were listening carefully. Curls was one of the few teachers who could interest his recruits for more than half an hour. He continued:

— “What many of you probably don’t know is you better not store the tomato fruit—as you can buy it from the store—in the refrigerator. After the harvest, the farmer stores the tomato fruit in a large freezer to make sure it won’t ripen too fast. Only when the suppliers have their tomatoes transported to the market, do the tomatoes begin to defrost. From that moment on, the tomato begins to ripen again. It has all been timed in such a way that the tomato, once it arrives on the consumer’s kitchen table, reaches its best taste. After that, you shouldn’t store the fruit in the refrigerator anymore! Stupid, stupid, stupid! When you do that, it’ll stop ripening. That’s why the tomatoes at your homes taste like water.”

Teacher Curls looked around his classroom to see if everyone was paying attention.

— “Uh, Bullie?” he asked a tall boy with a small pair of prescription glasses on his nose. “Could you tell me whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable?”

Bullie hadn’t been paying attention but did his best to formulate an answer:

— “Uh yeah, uh, the tomato plant is a, uh, fruit except when you store tomatoes in the refrigerator because, uh, then they turn into vegetables, when the time is right.”

Curls shook his head and didn’t comment. At this hour in the early morning, his classroom was still too dull to laugh about what Bullie said. The teacher now handed out a stack of papers. His pupils were sitting behind their desks organized into three concentric rings circling around each other, like an onion, an inner, a middle, and an outer ring. Toine was sitting in the back, to the left, in the outer ring. He took a sheet of paper from the stack and passed the rest on while staring out the window for a moment. Here, on the first

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