She would never
arrive late and would always leave after us. I at one point thought she lived
there. Or that she was the owner of the building. We could not leave the
classroom without her permission. And
much less so go for a stroll around the school’s vicinity. During lunchtime, we
would stay close to the classrooms, walking through the narrow hallway or
looking at the wilderness. Just a tree here or there. Wherever we were, we
would see the meadow in all its magnitude. It seemed like there wasn’t another
building, other than ours. As such, we were anxious to explore it all. Even
though we had no hope of finding anything beautiful or interesting. We wanted
to know, however, where those men that day by day passed through school, towards
the meadow, were taken. They treaded sad and with their heads bowed,
handcuffed, surrounded by armed soldiers. In the early days we would ask the
teacher who those men were and where they went. She would remain silent for a
couple of minutes, as if she knew nothing. She would then answer: “They are
enemies of the State and are under arrest”. The answer didn’t seem clear to us.
We then wanted to know the meaning of “enemies of the State”. Finally, she got
angry. She didn’t want to hear a single question about those men. Faced with
this, we went on to finding within ourselves the answers to our own questions.
“They’re thieves”, some would say. “They killed little children”, said others.
We even insulted each other, in our desire to appear wiser, each of us claiming
we know the truth. We then decided to once again turn to the teacher. Yet again
she got angry. We insisted, insisted. Finally, she answered: “They wanted to
overthrow our government”. We became even more unsatisfied. After all, we
didn’t know what government was, or where it was located, for it to be able to
be overthrown.
