The Scent of Buenos Aires

by Hebe Uhart

  “How tacky! We’d be better off just decorating the stage with a big bouquet of red roses, or some other sort of flowers.”

  Two different styles, what can you do?

  But what Miss Irma really loved was the students, and she bent over backwards for them. When she taught her seven-year-olds about the word “air,” she used the same voice one might use when talking to baby chicks:

  “Let’s see, let’s see, who will bring me a little bit of air?”

  And the word “air” sounded imploring, as if she were begging them for a bit of air.

  They all formed their hands into little bowls to gather some air and she called on one student who, taking himself very seriously, brought some air up to the front of the class in the hollow of his hand. With Miss Irma the children smelled the perfume of imaginary roses, and when she turned around to write on the blackboard they imitated the sound of the wind and swayed like trees in the forest. Another of her exercises involved pretending to be asleep, but all the while thinking about things. Then she would say:

  “Dreaming…”

  And everyone crossed their arms on their desks and laid down their heads; sometimes they stayed like that for ten minutes. Miss Irma had always been slim, but at that time she was so skinny she seemed to quiver every now and then. When someone proposed an idea to her she said: “Of course, of course,” in a seemingly understanding tone of voice, but she was clearly distracted. She didn’t quiver at the wrong time, nothing that spectacular, but when she said: “Yes, yes,” the last “yes” ended with a short hissing sound.

  * * *

  —

  Since she loved her students so dearly, she followed them to second grade. But there were two new girls: Alejandra and Silvia. Alejandra had really big light-blue eyes; they were disproportionately large. She was pretty but her mouth turned down slightly. She barely knew how to read and at any given time in class she seemed to be yelling. Straight away both girls started to fight with the boys, although each in a different way: Silvia argued about what was or wasn’t fair. Alejandra imagined she had been hit, robbed, or insulted. She stood up to the oldest teachers at school and if they scolded her she just stood there staring at them, her rage contained within those big light-blue eyes. Miss Irma couldn’t stop saying:

  “What a creative child!”

  Alejandra learned how to accurately draw those dolls in long dresses. She drew them all day long, on any given sheet of paper instead of using it to write. When the children learned about the different school authorities, Alejandra drew a doll in a long dress and wrote underneath (with some help):

  “The principal is a queen.”

  Then she drew another doll in mourning, and underneath—also with some help—she wrote:

  “The secretary is a dead widow.”

  One day Alejandra dressed up using a piece of tulle she found just laying around and she didn’t take it off all day. It made Miss Irma think to herself: “There’s so much to learn from these children! They have so much to teach us! We’re going to put on a play in this class. I’ll get more costumes.”

  She gathered all the rags she could find and asked them to bring as many items from home as they could. Alejandra always played the blonde fairy, and Silvia—who was a brunette—always wanted to be a witch. As for the boys, only one of them liked to dress up. He pretended to be a policeman directing traffic. The traffic director would let the blonde fairy pass, but he would stop the witch. The witch told him off, she pretended to scratch him, and concluded by doing somersaults on the floor. Another important character was a thin blonde girl with translucent skin; she was mild-mannered, but also incredibly bossy. She always played the princess who was about to get married. At first no one noticed her, but then she suddenly emerged on stage with great conviction, leaving the witch, the good fairy, and the traffic director speechless. The entire class fell silent, as if it were some sort of scandal.

  The boys didn’t act, but they were absorbed by the show. The most aloof of them all was Marcelo Riquelme. He sat in the last row with a buzz cut, apparently entirely unaware of his buzz cut. Marcelo’s face was as dirty as his school smock and his notebook was even dirtier than his face and smock put together. He used a thick tracing pencil and you could barely tell the difference between real words and scribbles. As soon as he could, Marcelo hurried outside to the schoolyard to spy on the other students, or to the kitchen to ask the custodian for a bread roll. Miss Irma never noticed he was gone.

  One fine day, Alejandra started out to the schoolyard dressed up like the good fairy, with red dress-up shoes, a swim cap on her head, and a piece of tulle that framed the swim cap dragging a few feet behind her. When recess was over, instead of going back to the classroom, she was just about to walk up the staircase that led to the rooftop terrace when Ms. Bianchi saw her. Ms. Bianchi immediately sensed an infraction of school rules. She could be thinking about anything at all, distracted as all get out, but if something were amiss she noticed immediately.

  “Where are you going?” she shrieked.

  “My teacher gave me permission,” said Alejandra in her costume.

  “Get down from there,” Ms. Bianchi yelled vehemently.

  Alejandra didn’t budge so Ms. Bianchi went over and pulled the girl down by the arm. Bursting with rage, Alejandra tried to resist and then went to tell her teacher.

  The next day, wearing the same getup, Alejandra was put in charge of taking some paperwork to the principal’s office and to some of the other classrooms. The secretary, who had the voice of a telephone operator (and also spent the whole day on the telephone), said to her:

  “Child, why on earth are you dressed like that?” But then she got distracted because the phone rang and Alejandra went back out on the schoolyard and ran all around.

  “You think you’re so special?” One boy called out from a classroom.

  But she just kept running in circles, the tulle dragging behind her, her eyes fixed dead ahead as if she were on a mission.

  The next day, Luisa the custodian was furtively tanning behind the flagpole, her legs exposed to get some sun on her varicose veins. She’d wrapped a towel around her head and put her legs up on a little stool. Marcelo Riquelme went to make a deal with her.

  “Gimme a bread roll.”

  “Pick up the papers,” Luisa said.

  “Alright, but make it two rolls,” said Marcelo.

  “Deal,” said Luisa, dozing off.

  He went out to the schoolyard because it was really dark in the classroom. Miss Irma hadn’t opened the blinds and they were putting on another play. This time it was about some false gossip. There were rumors that the witch had given birth to a child. The scene went like this:

  “Who says so?”

  Two girls accused each other.

  The good fairy came and gave the witch a good push, who then fainted and fell down. The two girls spreading the rumor spun in circles from their desks all the way to the door. The circles were meant to be purifying.

  Mitropoulos, a clever boy who sat in the front row, watched it all thoughtfully, as if intrigued. Miss Irma was beaming. The principal watched the scene—she didn’t exactly think it was normal, but since it was improv she let it go. She was surprised by the musty smell in the classroom, and by how hot it was in there. She was tempted to ask Miss Irma to open the windows, but there was such a grin plastered across her face that asking Miss Irma to open the windows would have been like offering her a photograph to eat. The principal left the room with a slight sensation of disgust, which she forgot almost immediately. More pressing matters required her attention.

  That same week the inspector came, wearing big tinted glasses. She didn’t want to inspect anything and she would have given her life for a Coca-Cola, but everything was closed. When the custodian heard that the inspector was there she rolled her eyes as if to say, what do I care?

&n
bsp; “She wants some coffee,” they told her.

  “Oh, let her wait,” replied the custodian.

  It was sweltering and the custodian wasn’t thinking straight.

  The inspector said, “I want to see a nice class.”

  She wanted to sit down inside a cool, peaceful classroom and listen to the teacher discuss cattle and take out lots of little cows from all over. What she wanted more than anything was to see something green, lots of grass. She was also willing to listen to a mellow song—as long as the children didn’t sing too out of tune—or sit in on a geography class to see the sea painted on a map.

  The principal said, “A nice class? Let’s go to Irma’s room then.”

  “Alright,” said the inspector.

  Miss Irma’s class was dramatizing Queen Isabel bestowing her jewels upon Columbus. Queen Isabel was played by Alejandra, who wore the swim cap on her head and the long piece of tulle that had been dragged around the schoolyard all afternoon. Columbus wore tennis shoes, red socks, and a colorful visor hat, looking more like an Apache.

  When the inspector arrived, the windows were shut airtight. Miss Irma was unfazed by the inspector’s arrival, greeting her as if the woman’s presence were entirely natural, as if she had always been a fixture in the classroom. Miss Irma continued to focus on the dramatization.

  The children who were acting spoke in low voices, and Miss Irma—practically bent over—cued them anxiously about what to do. The Queen’s crown was an elastic band on Alejandra’s head. There were delays because Alejandra couldn’t remove the band and Columbus couldn’t figure it out either. Columbus said:

  “What should I do with the rubber band?”

  “With the Queen’s crown!” corrected Miss Irma, thereby converting it into an extremely valuable object. Timidly, Columbus stood there with the elastic band in his hand, and then Miss Irma said:

  “Now, the Queen’s silver tureen.”

  The silver tureen was actually an enormous tin kettle used to serve an infusion of mate cocido to the whole class.

  “Here’s the kettle,” said one girl readily.

  “Look how the Queen’s silver tureen shines!” said Miss Irma enthusiastically.

  Columbus held onto the kettle as if it were a watering can. Miss Irma readjusted his hands, placing them underneath it as she said: “It’s such a beautiful gift!”

  But the kettle was too big and Columbus couldn’t manage to hold on to it. It fell to the floor and Miss Irma said, in a lively voice:

  “Alright, alright, let’s start over.”

  When Miss Irma said “Let’s start over,” the smell of pee wafted into the inspector’s nose. She was sitting next to Marcelo Riquelme and she asked to see his notebook. She looked at the first page and that was enough: she could tell exactly what the rest of them would be like. She didn’t want to look at the same old notebook again. She said to Miss Irma:

  “I’d like to see how your students read.”

  Miss Irma said: “No, they can’t read right now because we’re in the middle of our play. If they start reading it will confuse them.”

  “They could read the play out loud. How about that?”

  Grudgingly, Miss Irma handed out their books and the children read in low voices. Columbus was especially hard to hear.

  “I can’t hear,” the inspector called out from the back.

  “These are seven-year-old children reading,” said Miss Irma. “Not television hosts.”

  The children became even more confused as they read. Miss Irma whispered from behind, but she whispered so loudly that her voice was the only one to be heard, saying emphatically—voluptuously—as if it involved something that could be eaten:

  “The Queen’s necklace.”

  The inspector left without a word and she told the principal in a dull voice, as if mildly disgusted:

  “She’s crazy.”

  Her tone also conveyed that this wasn’t so out-of-the-ordinary; it was a fairly common circumstance, just another ingredient in the inspector’s discomfort, added to the heat, the lack of Coca-Cola, and the coffee that had never arrived.

  “I’d like to speak with her later,” she said. “She encourages the confusion of roles. The children are going to mix up queens with beggars.”

  Miss Irma came in to speak with the inspector, her eyes were on fire. The inspector lit a cigarette and said:

  “Upon observing your class, Miss (stressing the word ‘Miss,’ as if she were naming the servant who worked in her house), what is your last name?”

  “Irma Santini,” came the heated reply.

  “Upon observing your class, Miss Santini, I noticed that you create confusion with regard to roles; the children are going to have a distorted view of history. The entire play would lead one to believe that Queen Isabel was a beggar.”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” said Miss Irma curtly.

  “Just a moment,” said the inspector. “I’d like to add that the cleanliness of those costumes could be improved upon because…”

  “I won’t hear it,” said Miss Irma and she walked out in a rage.

  “Where is she going?” the inspector asked the principal.

  “I don’t know,” was the answer.

  The two of them waited for her to come back.

  Miss Irma returned carrying a cardboard box filled with costume skirts. She started to pull them out one by one, her eyes flashing. There were at least twenty skirts, all of them long and faded.

  “Is this dirty?” she said, her eyes looked as if they could take a bite out of the inspector. Finally, she threw the contents of the box on the desk and disappeared.

  “She should be removed from the classroom,” the inspector said. “She can’t teach.”

  “She’s extremely dedicated to teaching,” said the principal. “She doesn’t have any friends, she lives alone. She puts everything she’s got into her students…Besides, you should see some of the other things she does…”

  “No,” said the inspector, “Please, don’t ever take me back to her classroom again.”

  It was stifling hot and the inspector was tired.

  She sent for someone to buy her a Coca-Cola.

  The principal insisted, “She’s so dedicated to teaching.”

  “Since the moment I stepped inside this school,” said the inspector, “that blonde girl has been just standing there on the staircase all dressed up. That’s something I don’t care for one bit.”

  “I’m going to tell her to stop with all that. Her service record…”

  “How was she rated the last time?”

  The inspector checked and all the reports on Miss Irma were filled with praise: nothing less than a sublime teacher.

  She decided to write a moderate report. Just then she remembered that she’d parked her car in a bad spot and by now it would be blazing hot inside.

  “Well, just tell her to stop all that nonsense,” she said.

  And she left.

  The next day the principal saw Miss Irma arrive, her eyes smoldering. The principal tried to calm her down.

  “Irma,” she said, “look what a nice report the inspector gave you.”

  Miss Irma didn’t want to read it. She said:

  “What do I care? If she left a good report then she’s crazy. Why would she say one thing and write something else entirely? I don’t care about reports anyway, that’s not why I do this job.”

  And she thought to herself, with profound anger and contempt, that the world was just one big prison.

  The Boy Who Couldn’t Fall Asleep

  ONCE upon a time, there was a boy who couldn’t fall asleep.

  Every night his mother left a table lamp on, a very beautiful lamp with a light bulb as small as a chickpea.

  First, he called his mother, saying:

  “Momm
y, I’m thirsty!”

  His mother got up and brought him a glass of water. Then he closed one eye and left the other one open. He called her again:

  “Mommy! Do you remember when we went to that place? That place! What was it like?”

  “Go to sleep, now,” said his mother, who wanted to go to sleep because mothers need rest too.

  He looked at the chair and it didn’t look like the chair he saw everyday. Now it looked like the chair was wearing a long dress with a little head on top. It kept getting easier and easier to see through the darkness.

  “Mommy!” he called.

  But his mother had gone to sleep. So he closed his eyes. When he closed his eyes he saw hundreds of little circles float by like grains of rice, they passed by and by. There were so many it was as if the whole world were covered in grains of rice. When he opened his eyes, the rice disappeared.