“What has he done now?” he asked in alarm.
“He’s poured all the salt into the soup. I can’t take it anymore! I’ve been on my feet since seven o’clock this morning, and now I’ve got to start all over again. I’ll have to make another pot of soup.”
When María had left my father’s office he looked at me severely.
“I don’t like what you’ve done. María doesn’t deserve for you to treat her like that. You need to go and apologize. Then go to your room and read what I’ve told you to read. You have to have read everything by dinnertime.”
When my father looked at me severely it gave me an unpleasant scratchy feeling in my stomach, but even so I wasn’t prepared to apologize to María.
I could have done so. But I would have liked María to have told my father that I had behaved myself, that I had done my homework without complaining and had even helped Jaime do his.
My father would have been happy and would have sat me on his knee. He would have suggested that we spend some time reading one of the books from his library, which he guarded as if they were treasures. I would have enjoyed this moment of intimacy with my father because, after having read for a bit, he would have asked me about my friends, my teacher, the lessons I had learned. It’s likely that, as a reward for my good behavior, he would have let me fill his pipe and we would have made plans for the weekend. Who knows if he would have found the time to come with me and Jaime on a bike ride, or even to go and have a meal at a restaurant somewhere.
—
None of that happened. I went to my room and kicked the radio-controlled car, then sat on the floor in the middle of the chaos I had created. I had no intention of reading the story. I had a knack of getting away from my father’s questioning. I read a couple of paragraphs per page and then, when he questioned me, I would give him answers based on what I had barely read, pretending to be nervous. I didn’t care about lying to him, even if he was the only person for whom I felt any affection. That’s how I was. That’s how I am.
—
Miss Adeline was a good, if demanding, teacher. She never raised her voice and never slapped anyone. My classmates seemed to like her, but I hated her as much as I hated María. Everything about her annoyed me. Her yellowish face, the eyes that seemed to shrink when she looked at you, giving the impression that she was peering into your mind. Her monastic clothes: she always wore skirts and sweaters in dark colors, thick tights, flat shoes. She was around forty years old when I entered her class and they said she’d already been at the school for twenty years, and was bound to retire there.
She was friendly and patient with her students without being affectionate, and was always ready to repeat the day’s lesson over and over until she was sure that we had all understood her explanations.
I regularly complained to my father about Miss Adeline. I said that she was out to get me, that she scolded me for no reason at all, that she didn’t explain the lessons well. My father believed me and from time to time asked my mother to talk to the teacher. Her reply was always the same: “I would, but as it’s Thomas, if he’s being scolded it’s because he deserves it. You’d have to be a saint to put up with our son.”
I prepared my revenge meticulously.
One morning, during recess, I deliberately beat my head against the wall. I hurt myself and immediately began to get a swelling that turned my forehead red. Before recess ended I went up to the classroom, knowing that Miss Adeline would be there correcting our homework. When she saw me come in with my red face she got worried.
“What happened? Did you fall over? Come here and show me.”
I went over to her slowly, while my fellow students were coming up the stairs and going to their classes. I timed things so that when the door to our class opened the teacher was holding my head and looking at the bruise. At that moment I started to shout at the top of my voice.
“Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!”
My classmates, coming into the class, didn’t know what was happening. Miss Adeline seemed to be holding me while I was shouting, and I shouted so loud and so long that Miss Ann, the teacher in the class next door, came into the room to see what was going on.
“She’s hitting me! I didn’t do anything!” I shouted, in the face of the other teacher’s incredulous stare.
“Good Lord, Adeline, what’s going on here?”
“Nothing, I swear. Thomas came in with a bruise on his forehead. I was just looking at it.”
“Please, stop her from hitting me again,” I whimpered, as though I were afraid.
Miss Adeline looked at me in confusion and let go of my arm. Which let me perform one final trick: I fell to the floor as though I had been pushed.
“But, Adeline!” Miss Ann exclaimed without much understanding what was going on. “Come on, Thomas, get up. We’ll take you to the school nurse. She’ll make you better. And you, Adeline…I think we’d better go to the principal to sort this out.”
For all that my teacher swore to Mr. Anderson, the principal, that she had not hit me, and although my classmates could not say for certain who was telling the truth, the bruise served as evidence for my case.
Mr. Anderson called my mother at the hospital and asked her to come to school right away. Meanwhile, I whined and complained about how much the bruise hurt. My tears were as heartfelt as those of Miss Adeline, who had collapsed when she saw that the principal seemed prepared to believe me more than her.
“What happened?” my mother asked in alarm as she came into Mr. Anderson’s office.
“Calm down, your son is all right,” the principal replied, agitated. “Although we don’t really know what happened.”
“But how can you doubt my word?” my teacher said.
The principal didn’t reply, and at that moment I knew that I had won the battle.
My mother listened in silence to Miss Adeline’s explanation. My teacher swore what was in fact the truth: that I had already had the bruise when I came into the class, and when she had tried to see what had happened, I began to shout and accused her of hitting me.
“Well, I don’t know what to say. I am sorry about this incident, and I assure you that nothing of this kind has ever happened in my school. Miss Adeline is a teacher whom the children love and we’ve never had any complaints about her behavior, but…I don’t know, maybe Thomas made her more nervous than usual; you know that he is a slightly unruly child.” As he spoke, the principal wrung his hands.
“What happened, Thomas?” my mother asked me in a tired voice.
I could tell that she did not fully believe that Miss Adeline had hit me. She guessed something had happened but was unsure exactly what it was.
I didn’t answer, but I cried all the harder and hugged her around the waist. My mother pulled me to her and tried to console me. I looked at Miss Adeline out of the corner of my eye and knew that she had been beaten.
I thought it better not to utter another word and just to keep crying, in case I contradicted myself. By this time, my face was almost entirely red and my eyes were swollen from crying. It was an extraordinary piece of theater, a professional actor couldn’t have done any better, and in spite of her initial doubts my mother ended up believing me. She knew me well, but not well enough to believe me capable of such villainy.
“I hope that you will take this seriously. What has happened to my son is unforgivable.”
“Yes, yes…of course we will have to do something. I will call a meeting of the entire staff.”
“You’ll have to do more than that, Mr. Anderson. I don’t think that the parents of the students will be able to remain calm once they know what happened to my son. Today it was Thomas who was the victim, tomorrow it could be any one of their children.”
For the first time I saw that my mother was moved by my tears, perhaps because it was hard for her to see me crying. That was what convinced her.
The next day I did not go to school. My mother didn’t even wake me up in the morning. When I
opened my eyes it was already midmorning and I saw her sitting on the edge of my bed, looking at me closely. I was shocked, but I calmed down when I saw her smile and she took me by the hand. I think she felt guilty that she hadn’t trusted me from the start.
“You won’t have to go to school until Mr. Anderson sorts out what he’s going to do with Miss Adeline. And better for him if he decides sooner rather than later.”
“Didn’t you go to work?”
“No, I’m staying with you today. We’ll go out for a walk and then go and find Dad in his office, is that a good idea?”
“And what about Jaime?” I wanted to know if I would have to share my parents with my brother.
“María will look after him. Today it’ll be just the two of us.”
—
When I went back to school Miss Adeline was no longer there. She had been fired. Not just that, but the school had passed her case along to the state education authorities, which meant that she would be punished and her career as a teacher was over.
I congratulated myself on my success. She was a very stupid woman to try to stand up to me.
I heard a couple of teachers complaining about Miss Adeline’s bad luck. I found out that the woman who had been my teacher was a widow with a disabled daughter. If she didn’t go back to work then both of them would be forced to rely on charity. None of this gossip affected me.
Do I regret what happened? It was so long ago! I have never been blind to the cruelty of my behavior. If only I could live through that moment once again…I know that I could have protected Miss Adeline from her punishment.
When my mother asked me, “What happened, Thomas?” I should have told the truth:
“Mama, I’m angry with Miss Adeline. She gives me a lot of homework and she’s very demanding. I wanted to hurt her. I gave myself the bruise. I’m sorry, Mama, sorry for lying.”
I can imagine the stunned look on Mr. Anderson’s face, the relief on that of Miss Adeline, the anger in my mother’s eyes.
“So you tried to fool us all…What you’ve done is difficult to forgive, you almost got Miss Adeline into a lot of trouble. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, you little devil!” she would have said, trying to stop herself from giving me a slap right there, in front of the principal and my teacher.
For his part, Mr. Anderson would have scratched his head, which is what he usually did whenever he had to make a decision, and looked at me severely.
“Young man, what you have done is very bad and will naturally have consequences. You must understand that we will have to take severe measures. And as for you, Adeline…Well, I hope you will forgive us for this difficult incident, but you must understand…Thomas’s accusation was so serious, and with the bruise as well…Who would have thought that a child could go so far as to hurt himself!”
“I am sorry, I am very sorry, Mr. Anderson. I hope that Miss Adeline can forgive us. Knowing my son, we shouldn’t have doubted her version of the events. I don’t know how I can apologize, or how I can make amends…”
Miss Adeline would have wiped away her tears with one of those spotless handkerchiefs she always carried in her bag and, with great relief, would have accepted my mother’s apologies, although I suppose she would have looked at the principal fairly reproachfully. As for me, I am sure she would have looked at me in terror, as if I were the devil himself.
“I think we adults should talk about this disgraceful incident. Thomas, go to your classroom, and we’ll call you in a while.”
I know that I would have cried even more fiercely then, as fiercely as I cried to support my lie, begging forgiveness from my mother, my teacher, the principal.
—
Yes, that’s what I should have done. What would have happened? My mother would doubtless have scolded me, and they would have punished me at school and at home, but I’ve never cared about being punished. No, if I didn’t tell the truth it was not because of cowardice but out of sheer wickedness. I know that’s how it was.
—
My mother always compared me with Jaime. Perhaps that is why I hated my brother so much.
“Look at your brother. He’s only six but he’s much more responsible than you are.” “Look at Jaime, he cleaned his room without needing to be told.” “What good grades Jaime gets! Straight A’s, and you…you’re a problem, Thomas. You don’t study, you behave badly, you’re completely disorganized; I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.”
Those were some of the phrases my mother used most often. And every time she held Jaime up to me as an example, my hostility toward him only increased.
I must have been about twelve when I decided to get rid of him, and it was all my father’s fault. I had grown accustomed to my mother’s scolding, now that she was incapable of hiding how much I irritated her and how content she was with Jaime’s behavior. She kissed him and enjoyed hugging him, and smiled, whereas I would not allow her these gestures of affection and she would scarcely brush my cheeks with her lips and then move away as if I disgusted her.
But not only my mother gave my brother her brightest smiles. My uncles and aunts, my cousins, my parents’ friends: all of them always had words of praise for Jaime. It is true, I gave them no cause to praise me. I was unfriendly, I didn’t let anyone kiss me and I tried to ruin everyone’s visit. One afternoon when my aunt Emma, my father’s sister, came to visit, I opened her bag and emptied it by throwing its contents out the window. The porter came up to tell us that various flying objects had come from one of our windows: a packet of tissues, a purse, a wallet, some keys…Of course, this was not the worst thing I did: on another occasion I kept myself busy cutting the sleeves off her coat. She often told my father that I was a very problematic child and that I should see a psychologist. But all her advice went unheeded. I think my father thought that his sister Emma didn’t know much about children. She had married young and had soon been widowed, before having children. Her husband had been afflicted with a raging leukemia, and after his death she had never married again.
My father scolded me but without much conviction, and my mother would often slap me.
“This child will be the death of me!” she used to shout.
I have already told you that I thought I could rely on my father’s unconditional support. In fact I was convinced that he was the only person who loved me more than Jaime. One Sunday morning I found out that I was mistaken.
Sunday was María’s day off, and so my mother got up to make breakfast while my father finished getting dressed. While they had breakfast in the kitchen, Jaime and I were allowed to sleep in a little.
That Sunday I woke a little early and, after checking that my brother was still asleep, I went to the kitchen, knowing that I would find my parents there. At last I could be alone with them, without Jaime around! But I didn’t go into the kitchen, as I heard my father talking about me.
“The poor boy is a disaster. He’s not handsome, he has no special talents, he hasn’t got the mind for studying. What are we going to do, Carmela? He is how he is, but he is our son and we should accept him. At least we have Jaime to make up for him. Thank God that boy’s got everything.”
If he had slapped me it would have hurt less than the words I had just heard. Up to that moment, nothing had really hurt me. Not the punishments at school, not the blows I got when I fought with some boy from my class, not my mother’s scolding…Nothing had provoked the sense of pain that started in my stomach and expanded until I could barely breathe.
It wasn’t that my father was complaining about me: I could have withstood that. He was pitying me, and that was a humiliation I did not know how to deal with.
It took me a few seconds to be able to move again. I decided to continue listening, but I saw my mother looking toward the door as if she guessed there might be someone there, so I walked backward silently and went to my room.
Jaime was still asleep and I stood next to his bed in order to look at him. My father was right. We wer
e not alike. Jaime’s face reflected the goodness of his character and, yes, unlike me, he was handsome.
I felt the need to punish my parents for their obvious lack of love for me. I could no longer fool myself into believing, as I had up to this point, that I was my father’s favorite. I had been convinced that this was the case; everyone else preferred Jaime and made no attempt to hide it, but my father was always pleasant to me and showed me affection. Now I knew that he did so because he felt he had no choice.
The idea came quickly into my head. My parents would be unable to bear the pain of losing Jaime. I had to get rid of him but I didn’t have much time. The routine was always the same on a Sunday: at any moment my mother would come and wake us up and tell us to go to the kitchen while she got dressed.
I took the pillow from my bed, my mind made up that I would press it over Jaime’s face until he stopped breathing; but that would have consequences for me, and I thought that it would not be fair that I would also be punished for the death of my brother. I had to find another way to get rid of him.
I don’t know why I looked toward the window, but I immediately smiled. I had found the way.
I opened the window and looked down to the street. Our apartment was on the ninth floor. If I could get Jaime to lean out, then it wouldn’t be hard for me to give him a push. He’d fall, and at this height there was no way he could survive.
I woke him up by pulling his duvet off and pinching him.
“Get up! There’s a cat out on the window ledge. It’s very small and it’s about to fall.”
I knew that my brother would not be able to resist taking a look. He liked animals, especially cats.
Jaime jumped out of bed and walked barefoot to the window. He stood on tiptoe to take a look.
“I can’t see it. It must have fallen down. Poor little thing.”
I just needed him to lean out a little more so that the push I was going to give him would be barely noticeable.
“You won’t be able to see it like that. You need to lean out a little farther.”