Innocence Blog

The next day at the International Institute Lethe sat in the back of a sweltering classroom. There were twenty-four desks crammed into a room that would comfortably fit about fifteen. Several students went up to the windows to try to open them. Without luck, they stood by the wall complaining. The room remained between 23 and 25 degrees Celsius.

Next the professora marched into the room with a certain look of confidence, and the students sat down at once. She wore a narrow cut black dress and had a don’t-mess-with-me, lawyerly aspect to her. In crisp, declarative sentences, she spoke of deadlines, duties, tasks, and assignments. There were no introductions. The class could barely write everything down–they were writing furiously under the fire of her sharp Spanish declarations. Point-by-point she gave the guidelines for the end-of-the-semester project. Something about interviews. Something about “the Spanish culture.” Did the other students know what she was talking about? Because none of it made any sense to Lethe. And there was no sign that she would stop her constant fire of Spanish syllables.

He sat tense in his chair, with exagerated awareness of those around him. There was a knot of emotion located somewhere above his midriff that grew more ellusive and also harder to surpress, now paralyzed fear, now anger, now the desire to run straight out of the room. Lethe was familiar with these symptoms of madness and he tried his best to ignore them, but there was always the sense that the enemy inside was much bigger and stronger than him. His first impulse was to run, but he couldn’t. It would cause too much attention; the students were barricaded all around.

It was not a choice, a voluntary decision, to completely shut out the classroom, but in the next moment, that’s exactly what happened. As if a curtain had been thrown over the twenty-four desks and the professora at her podium, all Lethe could see was pitch black. He realized that he was no longer sitting in the classrom but instead, as he opened his eyes, in the plaza he had been just a few days earlier with the old Spanish gentlemen.

“What a life! What a life!” That’s what the old man was saying about the dog. He was saying, “What a life the dog has! All the dog has to do is eat, sleep and shit. But us, we’re workers, slaves, always working on something, aiming for some high goal in the mind.” The old man was speaking plain English, or at least Lethe could understand him.

“But are we allowed to opt out of it?” Lethe asked the old man. “Do we have to slave away? Are we free?”

“Of course we’re free but that doesn’t stop us from working ourselves to death. Listen, I’m retired now but I used to work 7 days a week. I owned my own shoe store.”

“Stores are closed in Madrid on Sundays. Even Saturdays, right?”

“Not el Corte Engles. It depends on the store. But I left mine open because I wanted to sell shoes to the parents who at the last minute realized their children need shoes for church. And even when I wasn’t in the store, I was working. I was balancing my numbers on a ledger and figuring out how to keep from going broke. I tell you there is no end to work! But look at that dog–look at how content it is to just sit there on its maw and drool.”

The dog wasn’t drolling, per say, but Lethe understood what he meant.

“So then, do you suggest that I don’t go to class today?” He asked, raising his arm to the back of the old man’s chair.

“Well, what they teach you kids in school is important. But if you don’t want to go to school then you don’t have to. See what happens when you stop attending classes. You never know, it could be enlightening.”

Lethe came out of his daydream and the vaguest memory of the old man who he had been conversing with for the last ten minutes disappeared. The faces of the students in the classroom revealed a shared, common expression–a sort of serene befuddlement.

“Estas cosas son las materiales de sus expediciones. Son importantes, son necessario para el projecto. Entiendes? Hay preguntas?” The professora’s loud, aggressive voice reminded him of all of the commotion in the city on his way to school. The blaring jackhammers, the throngs of pedestrians, the traffic, all of it was inside her voice.

The professora called out: “Todo esta bien alli?” And then she continued, “La cultura Espanola tiene una riqueza de personalidades y tradiciones. No hay un trabajo a encontrarlos . . .”