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I-know-him-from-somewhere look. Perhaps if Manolo hadn’t introduced him as a policeman, the caretaker might have asked if he wasn’t the little bastard who used to escape his clutches every day at twelve-fifteen by jumping over the wall in the PE yard.
    A gentle buzz reached them from the classrooms and the inside playground was empty. The Count decided conclusively that this place, where he’d now returned after an absence of fifteen years, wasn’t the one he had left. Perhaps his memory did retain the unmistakeable smell of chalk dust and the alcoholic aroma of stencils, but not that reality intent on confusing him by distorting every dimension: what he thought would be small turned out to be too big, as if it had burgeoned in the intervening years, and what he thought would be huge turned out to be insignificant or non-existent, since it perhaps existed only in his most emotional memories. They walked
through the secretariat to the headmaster’s office, and he found it impossible not to remember the day when he’d followed the same route to hear himself accused of writing idealist stories which defended religion. Fuck the lot of you, he’d almost shouted, when a young woman came out of the headmaster’s office and asked them why they’d come.
    â€œWe would like to speak to the headmaster. Our visit is related to the case of the teacher Lissette Núñez Delgado.”
    Â 
    â€œIt’s often said that teaching is an art, and there’s a lot of literature and fine words written about education. But the truth is that the philosophy of teaching is one thing, while exercising it every day, year in year out, is quite another. I do apologize. I can’t even offer you a cup of coffee. Or tea. But please do sit down. What people don’t say is that you must be rather mad to teach. Do you know what it’s like to manage a Pre-Uni high school? Better you don’t, for it’s just that, madness. I don’t know what’s happening but young people are less and less interested in really learning. Do you know how long I’ve been in this trade? Twenty-six years, my dear colleagues, twenty-six: I started as a schoolmaster, and now I’ve been a head for fifteen and I think it only goes from bad to worse. Something’s not working properly, and if the truth be told, young people now are quite different. It’s
as if the world was suddenly going too fast. Yes, it must be something like that. They say it’s a symptom of postmodern society. So we too can be called postmodern in this heat and our jam-packed buses? The fact is I leave here with a headache every day. I don’t mind the fact they’re obsessed with their hair, shoes and clothes, or that they all want to be shafting like crazy at the age of fifteen if you’ll excuse my French, because that’s all quite predictable, isn’t it? But at least they could care a little bit about their schooling. Every year we expel a number who have all but dropped out of society and, according to their lights, drop-outs don’t study, work or make demands: they only want to be left in peace, you know, to be left in peace to make love not war. Just like the good old Sixties, you see? . . . But what most upsets me is that if you get hold of a twelfth grader now, with only three months to go to graduation, and ask him what he’s going to study, he won’t know, and if he does, he won’t know why. They’re eternally adrift . . . But do excuse my harangue. Luckily, you aren’t from the Ministry of Education, are you? Yesterday morning we were paid a visit and told about dear comrade Lissette. I really find it hard to believe. It’s hard to get your head round the fact that a young person who you’d see looking healthy and cheerful every day is now dead. Yes, she started here with the tenth grade, and, to tell the truth, neither I nor her head of department had any complaints: