Someone Like You

1 A Mysterious Person

A Mysterious Person

I’ll never forget the first time I noticed you.

“I’ll bet you anything that she won’t come to class tomorrow,” he murmured.

“What do you know?” I responded in an even lower voice.

Maybe I wouldn’t have seen you, watched you leave before it was time to, if Axel hadn’t come up with that bet.

“From the way they’re leading her away, Gina isn’t coming back.” We watched through the window, and seeing how you held hands with that man with the serene walk, he added, “Not at least until Monday.”

“You two, in the back . . . Do me a favor and quiet down.”

The school librarian wasn’t in the mood for excuses.

He was the philosophy teacher for the older kids, and even though he had to warn us over and over again, we were lucky that he still hadn’t learned our names.

In fact, the nine-year-old kids only had permission to enter the literary paradise one day out of the week, Wednesdays after lunch.

Some wise pedagogue had thought that, if we viewed it as a forbidden place, we’d be even more excited to go hold the books and poke through all those volumes and series of fantasies until we found a story that captivated us, the capital B book—everyone had their own—that awakened us to the pleasure of reading.

But for Axel and me, the library had become the perfect place to mess around.

No doubt that at the back of the library, from floor to ceiling, from one end to the other, there were shelves and shelves of books, organized, lined up with the spines facing out, and classified by Ayuso’s rules, which must have been precise, but we preferred sitting right on the other side, next to the bay window.

We would place an open book, any would do, on the table, and we’d spend an hour whispering and watching the courtyard with the three pine trees while Ayuso, sitting at the head table and helped by small glasses that rested upon the tip of his nose, archived his collection of ancient Barcelona postcards.

Axel and I had discovered that the library window was the most strategic position to watch over the whole school.

The view spanned the whole length, from the door that led to the gym and lockers for boys and girls to the school’s main inner door, which, if you stretched your neck, let you see a slice of Bellesguard Street, a cul-de-sac where the teachers and early bird professors could park their cars diagonally.

On the other side of the enormous library window was the art classroom and, next to some bougainvillea that were having trouble sprouting, was the secretary’s office, which by chance of a scrape or a headache, also became an infirmary, a refuge, or a place of consolation.

On Wednesdays, from three to four, the three pine trees experienced a moment of rest. They no longer functioned as goalposts or as a place to tie a jump rope.

Practically no one walked through the courtyard once the students were all in class.

After washing the plates and pans, the lunch ladies left, trudging wearily.

The lunchroom monitors, more desperate to enjoy the evening and life itself, climbed up on their bikes and shot straight down Bellesguard.

Sometimes, on some Wednesdays from three to four, while students in the C third-grade class were in the library, we’d see some parents arrive to discover directly from their teacher whether their child was guilty.

That swampy Wednesday, a day in May that made our uniforms more annoying than usual, at the hour when the wind and calm passed through the courtyard, we watched a mysterious person arrive.

A taxi braked in the very front of the entrance of the school, and immediately, a man who looked to be our fathers’ age but didn’t look like any of the fathers at the school stepped out. He was wearing a tie. A dark suit and a tie. Those types of guys who wore ties rarely entered our school.

“Look, Biel.”

Axel pointed him out to me, but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to look at.

“The taxi isn’t leaving.”

How I loved the yellow-and-black taxis of Barcelona, an eyesore of a color combination that gave them a lot of personality for a car. You look at a taxi like that and you think . . . surely even in Buenos Aires the taxis are yellow and black.

The man with the tie had a black tuft of bristling hair; he climbed up the stairs from the street to the library without too much work.

The school principal walked out from the secretary’s door to receive him with a grave expression.

Axel pointed out that it couldn’t be just any prearranged visit.

The head honcho, Mrs. Ramos, only appeared, reluctantly, on serious occasions.

They shook hands, entered the office, and for a few minutes we lost sight of the action.

It must have been short, because the head honcho came out alone, and with a stiff walk and a tense posture—whether from a pinched disc or from putting on airs like a stubborn ballerina—she limped to the art classroom.

While those of us in the C third-grade class had to go to the library every Wednesday after recess, the B third-grade class had drawing or art class.

That week we had to copy Joan Miró’s farmhouse in Mont-roig that Mr. Torío had hung up on the board.

No small feat: copying a Miró in an hour.

And with paints that were so dry that by the time we had softened them by mixing them with water, we had to turn in the illustration to Mr. Torío.

He was a cool guy, Mr. Torío. Maybe it comes with the territory of being an art teacher.

That Wednesday, however, when he walked out of the classroom with the head honcho, he also looked serious.

And they went back in, and soon Axel, who was better positioned, said: “Look, Biel, look. They’re leaving with Gina. ”

And Mr. Torío stood there, with the design classroom door open, and you and the principal walked toward the secretary, and I thought that was weird.

“What do you think she did?” I asked Axel.

You still hadn’t reached the secretary’s office when the mysterious man and your teacher, whose name I can’t remember, came out, and she slipped your backpack onto your shoulders, and maternally, if I’m allowed to say so, she gave you two kisses.

And the head honcho, who had never given anyone two kisses, limited herself to touching your tiny face, in a rather cold way.

And the man firmly took your hand, and slowly led you toward the street.

As you passed by the art classroom, Mr. Torío waved goodbye with a paintbrush, and from what I could tell from afar while craning my neck, smiled at you.

“Do you think she’s been expelled?”

“Gina?”

“I mean, why else would they take her?”

“That man isn’t her dad . . .”

“Then who is he?”

“Her dad has a mustache, and I’ve never seen that man before.”

And from that moment onward, while Ayuso was distracted by some delinquent returning Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees late, Axel and I speculated over why you might have been expelled.

“She stole money,” one of us asserted.

“Money from where?”

“From the class,” we speculated, for example.

“Or she entered the boys’ locker room,” and we started to want to laugh.

“Yeah, she entered and got naked and showed all the boys in B third grade her vagina.”

Ayuso, from the doorway, yelled at us. We pretended to read as if nothing had happened, and in super low voices, we continued to weigh different options.

In that moment, you and the taciturn man who had come to take you left the school and got into the taxi.

The driver, waiting with the counter running, had taken advantage of the moment to make a U-turn to come out of the alley and head down Bellesguard again.

“Maybe her parents died . . .”

“You must mean her grandparents. How could her parents have died?”

In that exact moment, on a hot day in May, around four in the afternoon, in front of the window of the library, with a view of the courtyard from the three pines of a school with the name of some saint, and with Ayuso turning into a phantasmagoric character who didn’t stop grumbling in the background, my world came tumbling down.

I realized that moms and dads could also die.

No one had told me that before. I had never thought about it.

And suddenly, everything I had thought was true blurred.

A new threat had appeared in my life. A new one, unknown and deep.

“Are you sure, Axel, that if we’re kids, our parents can die?”

He told me how it had happened to his cousin.

And he confirmed that it wasn’t true that parents only died when they were old.

Not strictly, anyway. I was hesitant to believe it, and when my parents picked me up, as soon as I got into the R5 and asked my mom if it was true that .

. . I pushed the thought out of my head, hoping that it was one of Axel’s jokes.

And I don’t remember the exact response, but I learned that anyone could kick the bucket at any age and at any moment.

Like the three goldfish that we had at home who kept dying, may they rest in peace, in the fishbowl, without our knowing the cause.

Do you know what a debacle that was for me for several months?

That’s why I told you I’d never forget the first time I noticed you.

Until then, I knew who you were, of course.

Gina, the girl in the same grade but in another class, who was maybe the best when it came time to do somersaults in gym but whose last name I didn’t know.

The next day, in school, our teacher, Núria, in C third grade told us about it.

Standing up in front of the blackboard, she told us that in what was left of the school year, we had to help Georgina Castro, if we saw she was sad, because her mother had died.

Never had a classroom of boys and girls listened to Miss Núria so attentively.

Never, in her thirteen years of teaching, had Núria seen little faces so receptive to the story she was telling.

Around me, I saw more than one pale face of someone who, like me, had just learned of a fate never before contemplated.

And someone even sobbed. It must have been one of your friends.

And we felt so bad for you. Axel, who might have been on the verge of signing up for journalism school, asked Miss Núria if your mother had died suddenly or if she had already been sick.

“It was a stroke,” Gina responded, who, holding back her nostalgia, had listened to Biel’s cathartic monologue.

“They didn’t explain it to us quite like that.

They told us that she had felt sick and had died suddenly.

Since then, every time my parents felt sick, or they looked a little sickly, I never told anyone, but I suffered silently and hoped that a doctor would come to the house to check on them.

And listened to see if they were breathing normally. And if . . .”

“Biel, can I tell you something?” Gina had started getting cold.

“Of course . . .” Biel, at her side, with his eyes glued to some spot on the ceiling, caressed the hair on her arms. “I would only hope . . .”

“You discovered the dangers of life. And I’m so sorry. Your innocence snatched away. But I was the one who suffered. My mother died. At thirty-one. From one day to the next, it was goodbye forever.”

“Hey, I . . .”

“She takes you to school in the morning, and your uncle comes to pick you up in the afternoon and takes you to his house in a taxi, and while he gives you a glass of milk for your evening snack, he tells you why.”

“Come on, Gina . . . I didn’t mean to . . . I said all of that because Axel would have won the bet. He could’ve saved his neck . . . If that happened on a Wednesday, it’s true you didn’t come back until Monday.”

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything about those days.

It’s like it never happened. In fact, you know what the worst part is?

That I don’t remember my mother. Not her voice, her scent, nothing at all.

How can that be when I was nine years old?

If it were my choice”—she smiled to make Biel feel better—“I would have preferred to have shown all the boys in third grade my vagina.”