The school has brand new merry-go-rounds, but we’re not allowed to use them. We play in the dirt yard behind the building instead, right at the foot of a favela. The poor people never come down in our direction on account of the fence and the steep rocks. But we can see them up there, women mostly, hanging out their laundry. When we look up towards the sky, we can see kites. My schoolmates claim there are bandits living in the favela who terrorize the teachers in the street. Our favourite game is cops and robbers, and most times we end up in a fight or with skinned knees. I hardly ever see my brother. He hangs around with the older boys and he doesn’t like to talk to me. So much the better. I don’t want him telling everybody at home that he saw me fighting, or that I was punished by having to kneel on corn kernels.
Our classroom is dark, with only a faint glow coming through the open windows. The teacher never turns on the lights. The desks are lined up in tight rows, and from my seat at the rear of the class, I can have my fun without attracting attention. As long as we’re quiet, the teacher doesn’t mind. She spends her time smoking or reading while we practice doing letters in our handwriting exercise books. Or we draw on our desktops, already covered with scratched graffiti or engraved with razor blades. Examining the drawings on the desktops is fun, and sometimes we change seats to get a better look: there are names, stick figures, huge pricks and hairy cunts, moon-shaped asses and other things we can’t quite figure out. There’s a pen and inkwell at every desk, so we can play with ink, or drop pieces of chalk into the inkwells until they turn blue and pasty. At the end of the day my lips are blue from licking my ink-stained fingers. I have to be careful though, because my mother can’t stand stains on our trousers.
The things some of my schoolmates bring with them truly amazes me. Their soft leather schoolbags hold veritable treasures: pens with different coloured ink, erasers, metal boxes full of coloured pencils, exercise books with heavy paper covers, compasses, T-squares and other things I’d never seen before. All I’ve got is my exercise book and my cheese sandwich. Other kids have special boxes for their lunch, with thermos bottles and little containers that hold sausages or dessert. At lunch time they turn up their noses at the school tea and buy Coca-Cola, which they drink so they can burp afterwards. Those who are like me, who don’t have anything of their own, surreptitiously watch their more fortunate friends. But some of them aren’t so shy. If they can’t get what they want by asking politely, they make outright threats, extorting the remains of a bottle of lemon soda, half a slice of cake or even an entire sausage. I haven’t tried it yet, but not for lack of wanting. If somebody offers me something, I make up an excuse and refuse. The rich kids can afford to be generous because they’ve got too much food. They’re not supposed to bring their snack back home, even if they don’t feel like eating it. Sometimes they don’t touch anything but the candies and the soft drinks, and just throw out the rest. They can buy a good spot in our games by giving their lunch to the biggest players. If no one wants to talk to them, they’ll hand over their dessert, pretending they aren’t hungry. They’re afraid someone will steal their pens, which is understandable since even I’d love to pocket one or two of them. When they lend one to me, just to try out, it’s all I can do to return it. They have so many it would hardly make a difference. It’s wrong to steal; even thinking about stealing isn’t very nice. So I imagine I have plenty of coloured pencils of my own, or that I found some that my friends lost.
Going to school is better than a Sunday stroll. Life at home seems calmer now, and my mother is less upset. As soon as the schoolbus arrives, I become a different boy, happier, full of energy. I can’t understand why some of my classmates cry or refuse to get on the bus, or don’t want to be separated from their mothers. They’re glum and gloomy all the way to school, and they huddle together fearfully at recess. Not me. To start with, no one realizes I’m tubercular, or else no one cares. The teacher doesn’t say a word when I cough. And since I’m bigger than any of my friends, they think I’m strong and chose me for all their games. I can run as far and as fast as I like without bothering anyone, because the teachers keep to themselves while we play. Some of the kids are sad. They wait in a corner until it’s time to go back to the classrooms. They’re afraid of getting dirty, and when the older kids start swearing, they edge away. Some of them look sick. They refuse to use the toilets and suffer in silence the whole day long. True, the toilets are filthy. There’s piss everywhere, no toilet paper, no seats. It’s so disgusting that everybody goes standing up. The place stinks and swarms with flies. Which gives us a good excuse to piss at the far end of the schoolyard, where we make bets on who can piss the furthest. Some of the boys hold back as long as they can so they can piss harder. If we make them laugh hard enough, they go in their pants. But no one really gets mad, and the fights never last long.
The girls don’t like fighting or the lack of respect. If a boy tries to sneak a look at them in the toilet, or if someone tosses a toad in the middle of their dance circle, they run and tell the teachers. But most of the time we settle our differences among ourselves. The girls may make fun of us, but we steer clear of them, too. Some of them, the prettiest ones in particular, are real pests. They know how to get us in trouble, and they stick out their tongues at us the moment we get back into the classroom. Others are more bashful or fearful, with nothing to make them stand out of the crowd. But one thing’s for sure: girls smell good. Even when they’re drenched with sweat. I like sitting down beside a girl at the same desk after recess. It makes you sleepy. One of my friends mentioned it to me. A strange, nearly blind kid with thick glasses who has to bring objects right up to his face, as if he was smelling them. He’s pale and skinny, but he’s also a mile-a-minute talker who’s full of funny stories. When I ask him about his eyes, he doesn’t know what to say. He thinks he sees just as well as everybody else. Often I watch him walking around the schoolyard, disoriented, colliding with the walls, then walking along them, eyes and mouth agape. The girls are nice to him because they don’t suspect what he tells us. Funny stories, true ones, too, like why girls smell the way they do, or the way they go to the toilet. I know he’s right because Lili never closes the door when she goes for a pee. Girls are another race.
Since school started, we have more fun in the evening, too. We barely have enough time to eat and do our homework before it’s bedtime. On the other hand, weekends and holidays are worse, longer and more boring than ever before. School, my classmates and the smell of girls have spoiled the pleasure of looking out the window. Only the accidents are any fun. The street is a string of human catastrophes: auto wrecks, pedestrians run down or poor people fallen from the tram. From our window we can see it all, especially since the ambulance takes such a long time to arrive and the police won’t touch a thing. The most they’ll do is call over the pharmacist to give first aid, or divert traffic around the dead body. All the while the corpse lies there, sometimes in strange positions, livid. People bustle to and from the bars, bringing the injured man ether or sugar water. The dead bodies lie there as people light little candles. No ambulance will take them. The attendant begs off in irritation, then hurries away. People bring newspapers to cover the dead man’s face, place candles all around him, then return to the bars to quench their thirst as they look on. Eventually the police leave and traffic flows around the spot. The morgue wagon takes its time, sometimes the whole day, because there are so many dead people in the city. All kinds of them.
When things calm down, the women go downstairs for a better look and their share of the gory details. They bring me along for company and, in their excited chatter, promptly forget all about me. The appearance of the dead man is fixed in my memory: his position, his contorted face, the colour of his skin as the heat of the day does its work. All around me, people are talking about the inevitable. His time had come, they say, you can’t escape destiny, somewhere it is written that God writes straight on lines that seem crooked to us. All we can do is pray; perhaps it’s for the best, the dead man has been forever freed from this vale of tears. The men stand around nodding gravely in agreement, sipping their beer alongside the distraught