The Schooldays of Jesus (28 page)

‘Did you escape, Dmitri?' says the boy. He is excited; his eyes sparkle in the moonlight.

‘Yes, I escaped,' says Dmitri. ‘I had unfinished business, I had to escape, I had no choice.'

‘And are they searching for you with bloodhounds?'

‘This weather is no good for bloodhounds,' says Dmitri. ‘Too wet for their noses. The bloodhounds are back in their kennels, waiting for the rain to stop.'

‘That's nonsense,' says he, Simón. ‘What do you want with us?'

‘We need to talk, Simón. You were always a decent fellow, I always felt I could talk to you. Can we go to your place? You have no idea what it is like, having no home, nowhere to lay one's head. Do you recognize the coat? It's the one you gave me. It made quite an impression on me, the gift of your coat. When I was universally excoriated, for what I did, you gave me a coat and a bed to sleep in. That's something only a genuinely decent fellow would do.'

‘I gave it to you to be rid of you. Now let go of us. We are in a hurry.'

‘No!' says the boy. ‘Tell us about the salt mines, Dmitri. Do they really whip you in the salt mines?'

‘There is a lot I could say about the salt mines,' says Dmitri, ‘but it will have to wait. There is something more pressing on my mind, namely repentance. I need your help, Simón. I never repented, you know. Now I want to repent.'

‘I thought that was why we have salt mines: as a place of penitence. What are you doing here when you should be there?'

‘It's not as simple as that, Simón. I can explain it all, but it will take time. Do we have to huddle here in the cold and the wet?'

‘I could not care less if you are cold and wet. David and I have an appointment to keep. The last time I saw you you said you were off to the salt mines to surrender yourself for punishment. Did you ever go to the salt mines, or was that another lie?'

‘When I left you, Simón, I fully intended to go to the salt mines. That was what my heart told me.
Accept your punishment like a man
, said my heart. But other factors supervened.
Supervened
: nice word. Other factors made themselves felt. Therefore no. I have not actually been to the salt mines, not yet. I'm sorry, David. I let you down. I told you I was going but I didn't go.

‘The truth is, I've been brooding, Simón. This has been a dark time for me, brooding on my fate. It was quite a shock to discover that I didn't have it in me after all to accept what was due to me, namely a spell in the salt mines. Quite a shock. My manhood was involved. If I had been a man, a real man, I would have gone, no doubt about that. But I wasn't a man, I discovered. I was less than a man. I was a coward. That was the fact I had to face. A murderer and on top of that a coward. Can you blame me for feeling upset?'

He, Simón, has had enough. ‘Come, David,' he says. And to Dmitri: ‘Be warned, I am going to telephone the police.'

He half expects the boy to protest. But no: with a backward glance at Dmitri the boy follows him.

‘The pot calling the kettle black,' Dmitri calls out after them. ‘I saw the way you looked at Ana Magdalena, Simón! You lusted after her too, only you were not man enough for her!'

In the middle of the rain-beaten street, exhausted, he turns to face Dmitri's tirade.

‘Go on! Call your precious police! And you, David: I expected better of you, I really did. I thought you were a stout little soldier. But no, it turns out you are under their thumb—that cold bitch Inés and this man of paper. They have mothered you and fathered you until there is nothing left of you but a shadow. Go! Do your worst!'

As if gathering strength from their silence, Dmitri emerges from the shelter of the doorway and, holding the coat on high above his head like a sail, strides across the street back to the Academy.

‘What is he going to do, Simón?' whispers the boy. ‘Is he going to kill señor Arroyo?'

‘I have no idea. The man is mad. Fortunately there is no one at home, they have all gone to the Institute.'

CHAPTER 22

THOUGH HE pedals as hard as he can, they arrive late for the lecture. Making as little noise as possible, he and the boy sit down in their wet clothes in the back row.

‘A shadowy figure, Metros,' Moreno is saying. ‘And like his comrade Prometheus, bringer of fire, perhaps only a figure of legend. Nevertheless, the arrival of Metros marks a turning point in human history: the moment when we collectively gave up the old way of apprehending the world, the unthinking, animal way, when we abandoned as futile the quest to know things in themselves, and began instead to see the world through its metra. By concentrating our gaze upon fluctuations in the metra we enabled ourselves to discover new laws, laws that even the heavenly bodies have to obey.

‘Similarly on earth, where in the spirit of the new metric science we measured mankind and, finding that all men are equal, concluded that men should fall equally under the law. No more slaves, no more kings, no more exceptions.

‘Was Metros the measurer a bad man? Were he and his heirs guilty of abolishing reality and putting a simulacrum in its place, as
some critics claim? Would we be better off if Metros had never been born? As we look around us at this splendid Institute, designed by architects and built by engineers schooled in the metra of statics and dynamics, that position seems hard to maintain.

‘Thank you for your attention.'

The applause from the audience, which nearly fills the theatre, is long and loud. Moreno shuffles his notes together and descends the dais. Arroyo takes the microphone. ‘Thank you, Javier, for that fascinating and masterly overview of Metros and his legacy, an overview which you offer to us, appropriately, on the eve of the decennial census, that orgy of measurement.

‘With your consent, I will briefly respond. After my response, the floor will be open to debate.'

He gives a signal. The two Arroyo boys rise from their seats in the front row, strip off their outer clothes, and, wearing singlets and shorts and golden slippers, join their father on the stage.

‘The city of Estrella knows me as a musician and as director of the Academy of Dance, an academy where no distinction is made between dance and music. Why not? Because, we believe, music and dance together, music-dance, is its own way of apprehending the universe, the human way but also the animal way, the way that prevailed before the coming of Metros.

‘As we in the Academy do not distinguish between music and dance, so we do not distinguish between mind and body. The teachings of Metros constituted a new, mental science, and the knowledge they brought into being was a new, mental knowledge. The older mode of apprehension comes from body and mind moving together, body-mind, to the rhythm of music-dance. In
that dance old memories come to the surface, archaic memories, knowledge we lost when we voyaged here across the oceans.

‘We may title ourselves an Academy, but we are not an academy of greybeards. Instead our members are children, in whom those archaic memories, memories of a prior existence, are far from extinguished. That is why I have asked these two young men, my sons Joaquín and Damián, students of the Academy, to join me on the stage.

‘The teachings of Metros are based on number, but Metros did not invent number. The numbers existed before Metros was born, before humankind came into being. Metros merely used them, subjecting them to his system. My late wife used to call numbers in the hands of Metros ant numbers, copulating endlessly, dividing and multiplying endlessly. Through dance she returned her students to the true numbers, which are eternal and indivisible and uncountable.

‘I am a musician, ill at ease with argumentation, as perhaps you can hear. To allow you to see how the world was before the arrival of Metros I will fall silent while Joaquín and Damián perform a pair of dances for us: the dance of Two and the dance of Three. Thereafter they will perform the more difficult dance of Five.'

He gives a signal. Simultaneously, in counterpoint, one on either side of the stage, the boys commence the dances of Two and Three. As they dance, the agitation stirred up in his, Simón's, breast by the confrontation with Dmitri dies down; he is able to relax and take pleasure in their easy, fluent movements. Though Arroyo's philosophy of dance is as obscure to him as ever, he begins to see, in the dimmest of ways, why the one dance is appropriate
to Two and the other to Three, and so to glimpse, in the dimmest of ways, what Arroyo means by dancing the numbers, calling the numbers down.

The dancers conclude at the same moment, on the same beat, in mid-stage. For a moment they pause; then, taking their cue from their father, who now accompanies them on the flute, they embark together on the dance of Five.

He can see at once why Arroyo called Five difficult: difficult for the dancers, but difficult too for the spectators. With Two and Three he could feel some force within his body—the tide of his blood or whatever he wants to call it—move in accord with the boys limbs. With Five there is no such feeling. There is some pattern to the dance—that he can faintly apprehend—but his body is too stupid, too stolid to find it and follow it.

He glances at David beside him. David is frowning; his lips move wordlessly.

‘Is something wrong?' he whispers. ‘Are they not doing it right?'

The boy tosses his head impatiently.

The dance of Five comes to an end. Side by side, the Arroyo boys face the audience. There is a polite if mystified ripple of applause. At this moment David leaps from his seat and runs down the aisle. Startled, he, Simón, gets to his feet and follows, but is too late to prevent him from clambering onto the stage.

‘What is it, young man?' asks Arroyo with a frown.

‘It is my turn,' says the boy. ‘I want to dance Seven.'

‘Not now. Not here. This is not a concert. Go and sit down.'

Amid murmuring from the audience he, Simón, mounts the
stage. ‘Come, David, you are upsetting everyone.'

Peremptorily the boy shakes him off. ‘It is my turn!'

‘Very well,' says Arroyo. ‘Dance Seven. When you have finished I expect you to go and sit quietly again. Do you agree?'

Without a word the boy slips off his shoes. Joaquín and Damián make way; in silence he begins his dance. Arroyo watches, eyes narrowed in concentration, then raises the flute to his lips. The melody he plays is right and just and true; yet even he, Simón, can hear that it is the dancer who leads and the master who follows. From some buried memory the words
pillar of grace
emerge, surprising him, for the image he holds to, from the football field, is of the boy as a compact bundle of energy. But now, on the stage of the Institute, Ana Magdalena's legacy reveals itself. As if the earth has lost its downward power, the boy seems to shed all bodily weight, to become pure light. The logic of the dance eludes him entirely, yet he knows that what is unfolding before him is extraordinary; and from the hush that falls in the auditorium he guesses that the people of Estrella find it extraordinary too.

The numbers are integral and sexless, said Ana Magdalena; their ways of loving and conjugating are beyond our comprehension. Because of that, they can be called down only by sexless beings. Well, the being who dances before them is neither child nor man, boy nor girl; he would even say neither body nor spirit. Eyes shut, mouth open, rapt, David floats through the steps with such fluid grace that time stands still. Too caught up even to breathe, he, Simón, whispers to himself:
Remember this! If ever in the future you are tempted to doubt him, remember this!

The dance of Seven ends as abruptly as it began. The flute
falls silent. With chest heaving slightly, the boy faces Arroyo. ‘Do you want me to dance Eleven?'

‘Not now,' says Arroyo abstractedly.

From the back of the hall a call reverberates through the auditorium. The call itself is indistinct—
Bravo? Slavo?
—but the voice is familiar: Dmitri's. His heart sinks. Will the man never cease to haunt him?

Arroyo bestirs himself. ‘It is time to return to the subject of our lecture, Metros and his legacy,' he announces. ‘Are there questions you would like to address to señor Moreno?'

An elderly gentleman stands up. ‘If the antics of the children are over, maestro, I have two questions. First, señor Moreno, you said that, as heirs of Metros, we have measured ourselves and found we are all equal. Being equal, you say, it follows that we should be equal in the eyes of the law. No longer should anyone be above the law. No more kings, no more super-men, no more exceptional beings. But—I come to my first question—is it really a good thing that the rule of law should allow no exceptions? If the law is applied without exception, what place is left for mercy?'

Moreno steps forward and mounts the dais. ‘An excellent question, a profound question,' he replies. ‘Should there not be room for mercy under the law? The answer our lawgivers have given is, yes, there should indeed be room for mercy, or—to speak in more concrete terms—for remission of sentence,
but only when such is merited
. The offender owes a debt to society. Forgiveness of his debt must be earned by a labour of contrition. Thus the sovereignty of measure is preserved: the substance of the offender's contrition shall, so to speak, be weighed, and an equivalent weight
be deducted from his sentence. You had a second question.'

The speaker glances around. ‘I will be brief. You have said nothing about money. Yet as a universal measure of value, money is surely the principal legacy of Metros. Where would we be without money?'

Before Moreno can reply, Dmitri, bareheaded, wearing his, Simón's, coat, plunges down the aisle and in a single movement mounts the stage, bellowing all the time, ‘That's enough, that's enough, that's enough!

‘Juan Sebastián,' he shouts—he needs no microphone—‘I am here to beg your forgiveness.' He turns to the audience. ‘Yes, I beg this man's forgiveness. I know you are occupied with other matters, important matters, but I am Dmitri, Dmitri the outcast, and Dmitri has no shame, he is beyond shame as he is beyond many other things.' He turns back to Arroyo. ‘I must tell you, Juan Sebastián,' he continues without pause, as if his speech has been long rehearsed, ‘I have been through dark times of late. I have even thought of doing away with myself. Why? Because I have grown to realize—and it has been a bitter realisation—that never will I be free until the burden of guilt is lifted from my shoulders.'