Kamchatka Read Free

participate in sporting activities. For this notional fee we were granted access to the engine room of our language and to mathematics, the language of the Universe; we were taught where on the globe we were situated, what lay to north, to south, to east and west; what pulsed beneath our feet in the igneous core of the Earth, and above our heads; and before our virgin eyes unfolded the history of humankind, the history of which, for better or worse, we were at that time the culmination.
    It was in these high-ceilinged classrooms with their creaking floors that I first heard a story by Cortázar and first opened MarianoMoreno’s
Plan Revolucionario de Operaciones
and learned of the part it played in our independence. In these classrooms I discovered that the human body was the most perfect machine and thrilled at the elegant solution to some problem in arithmetic.
    My class could have served as a model for any campaign promoting peace among the peoples of the Earth. Broitman was a Jew. Valderrey had a thick Spanish accent. Talavera was two generations removed from his black ancestors. Chinen was Chinese. Even those boys who were more typically Argentinian – a mix of Hispanic, Italian and indigenous tribes – were noticeably dark-skinned. Some of us were the sons of professionals, others of working men with no education to speak of. Some of their parents owned their houses; others rented or still lived in their grandparents’ houses. Some of us spent our spare time studying languages and playing sports; others helped their fathers to fix radios and televisions in their workshops, or kicked a ball around on whatever piece of waste ground they could find.
    In the classroom, none of these distinctions meant anything. Some of my best friends (Guidi, for example, who was already an electronics wizard; or Mansilla who was even blacker that Talavera and lived in Ramos Mejía, a suburb so far out of the city that it felt even more remote than Kamchatka) had little or nothing in common with me, and the life I lived. But we all got along.
    We all wore a white school smock in the mornings and a grey one in the afternoons, we drank
mate
at playtime and we jostled and shoved to get our favourite pastry, which the janitor brought in a sky-blue plastic bowl. Our uniforms made us equals, as did our youthful curiosity and energy. Our childlike passions rendered our differences insignificant.
    We were equal, too, in our complete ignorance on the subject of Leandro N. Alem, the school patriarch. With his beard and his intimidating scowl, he looked a lot like Melville. Maybe because he was tired of the two-dimensional confines of the painting in theheadmaster’s office, he seemed intent on pointing to something just outside the frame. The obvious interpretation might suggest that he was pointing to the future path we would travel. But the nervous expression the painter had given him made it seem more likely that Alem was saying that we were looking in the wrong place; that we should not be looking at him but at something else, some mystery that did not appear in the painting and, being ambiguous, could not be but ominous.
    In all the time I spent in these classrooms, nobody ever taught us anything about Leandro Alem. Many years later (by which time I was living in Kamchatka) I discovered that Alem had rebelled against the conservative administration of his time in support of universal suffrage, taken up arms and wound up in prison though he lived to see his ideas finally triumph. Maybe they did not mention Alem to us because they wanted to spare us the inconvenient fact that he had committed suicide. The suicide of a successful man can only cast a pall over his ideas – as it would if St Peter had slit his wrists or Einstein had swallowed poison while living in exile in the US.
    So it would be naive to imagine that it was only by chance that I attended the school that bore his name every day for six years – until