My Documents by Alejandro Zambra

Author:Alejandro Zambra [Zambra, Alejandro]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Anthologies, Chilean Literature, Short Stories, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780992974787
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

I remember the phrase that Pato Parra wrote, on a wall of his room, before killing himself: ‘My final cry to the world: Shit.’

IV.

I remember the final months at that school, in 1993: the desire for everything to be over soon. I was nervous, we all were, waiting for the big test, which we had spent six years preparing for. Because that’s what the National Institute was: a pre-university school that lasted six years.

One morning we exploded. We all got into a fight, shouting and hitting: an eruption of absolute violence whose origins we did not understand. It happened all the time, but this time we felt a rage or an impotence or a sadness that had never before revealed itself. As a result of this outburst, Washington Musa, the Inspector General, paid our class a visit. I remember that name, Washington Musa. Whatever became of him? How little I care.

Musa adopted the same tone as always, the tone we heard from so many teachers and inspectors during those years. He told us that we were privileged, that we had received an excellent education. That we had taken classes from the best teachers in Chile. And all for free, he emphasized. ‘But you people aren’t going to get anywhere, I don’t know how you’ve survived this school. You humanities people are the dregs of the National Institute,’ he said. None of that hurt us, we had heard that reprimand, that monologue, many times before. We looked at the floor or at our notebooks. We were closer to laughter than tears, a laughter that would have been bitter or sarcastic or pretentious, but laughter still.

And nonetheless, no one laughed. While Musa droned on, the silence was absolute. Suddenly he started to tear into Javier García Guarda brutally. Javier was perhaps the most silent and timid boy in the class. He didn’t get bad grades, or good ones either, and his file was clean: not a single negative mark, not a single positive note. But Musa, furious, was humiliating him, and we didn’t know why. Little by little we understood that Javier had dropped his pen. That was all. And Musa thought he’d done it on purpose, or maybe he didn’t think about it, but he took advantage of the incident to concentrate all his rage on García Guarda: ‘I don’t even want to think about the education you got from your parents,’ he was saying. ‘You don’t deserve to be at this school.’

I stood up and defended my classmate, or, rather, I stood up and offended Musa. I told him, ‘Shut up, sir, shut up for once, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re humiliating him and it’s not fair, sir.’

An even more intense silence came over us.

Musa was tall, solidly built, and bald. In addition to his work at the Institute, he ran a jewellery shop, and he greatly enhanced his salary through sales at the school: every so often he would stop in the hallway to praise brooches, watches, or necklaces that he himself had sold to the teachers.

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