Destiny and Desire Read Online Free PDF Page B

for hours on end with a new instructor who had just joined the faculty. Until then we had not felt admiration or scorn for the group of teachers who, with far too much discretion for our demanding spirits, taught not very imaginative classes based on acts of serial (like a crime) memorization of history, geography, and natural sciences. The biology instructor was amusing because of the subterfuges he summoned and the rough terrain he walked in order to sublimate the facts of nature by means of an explicit final reference, the crown of his reiterated discourse, to the act of divine creation, the origin and destiny of our physical realities and transcendent mortality.
    There were, no doubt, other excesses that broke the gray neutrality of our classes. The headmaster, an irascible Frenchman with unpronounceable Breton family names, whom we called “Don Vercingetorix,” regularly opened the school year by standing on a dais with a gladiolus in his hand. After perusing the assembled student body with a severe look worthy of Torquemada, he would proclaim, “This is a young Christian before he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Immediately afterward he would throw the flower on the floor and stamp on it in a kind of holy can-can until he had pulverized the innocent flower, which he would then pick up from the floor and show us the vegetable tatters in his hands, concluding: “And this is a Catholic boy after he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Of the moribund gladiolus, all that survived, with a symbolism surely not desired by the enraged Vercingetorix, was the erect stem. A pregnant silence and a final warning: “Think. Confess your sins.Break ranks.” All that was missing was for him to warn, “And don’t break into laughter,” though the formal severity of the school lent itself not to jokes but to a kind of Christian resignation when we got ready in the locker room to play basketball, knowing that at the opportune moment Professor Soler would come in, saying “Let’s see, let’s see, everybody ready?” as a pretext to look at us before we pulled on our shorts and approach, “let’s see, let’s see,” to adjust the jockstraps needed to protect our sex from blows on the court, to heft with touching reverence, on his knees or bending over, the testicles of each student to check that we were well protected as we went out to athletic encounters and, if we were lucky, sexual combat.
    We students forgave this innocent pleasure of Father Soler, whose red face was the product not of any shame but of an inheritance that can give to the product of the mixing of Indians and blonds a sanguine appearance very apt for disguising the blushes of embarrassing emotion. In other words: Collectively the students forgave the life both of the ostentatious Vercingetorix and the silent Soler, considering that they did not have many opportunities to express themselves in public, subject as they were to long hours of prayers and rosaries, early suppers, fleeting breakfasts … They would have put out the sun with the smoke of incense.
    Everything changed when the new philosophy instructor came on the scene.
    Father Filopáter (that’s how he was announced and how he introduced himself) was a small, agile man. He moved with a combination of juvenile athleticism and spiritual animation, as if in order to demonstrate one you had to celebrate the other. He walked with varying rhythms. Very quickly when he went from one task to another. Very slowly when he strolled around the yard accompanied by one or two students to whom he listened with intense concentration, offering the paradoxical idea of a short man who grew as he thought, as if his ideas—for he seemed
to think
more than
to talk
—were flying over him, creating an unusual halo, not round but long, though always shining.
    It goes without saying, you who are still alive and can contradictme with no risk or confirm everything I say out of curiosity, that Jericó and I