Times of small wars

We all have stories from when we were kids in school. Here is one of mine.

So far we do not know which school authority came up with such an idea, but he must have regretted it later, as much or even more than the principal.

    That poor innocent man must have said more or less the following: "Teachers, respected principal, it is time for us to unify the primary and secondary of our beloved school, that project that has been postponed so many times. We cannot persist in separating what should be an unbreakable unity. Our elementary and high school must generate fraternal, deep, lasting bonds that strengthen the feeling of a great Catholic school family that we aspire to be. Therefore, I believe that the promotion of the sixth grade of primary school should be transferred to the secondary school, so that our students, gradually, will be united in one place in the future". 

    The teachers' applause must have resounded for long minutes inside the academic coordination room. Surely there was even a small toast and the usual sharing of snacks. The director, as was often the case, must have been showered with flattery: dear little director here, dear little director there. Anyway, as it usually happens, it is possible that the excess of optimism and flattery prevented them from foreseeing the imminent war: on one side, a group of children who were rapidly approaching puberty; on the other, a group much older in age and size, made up of teenagers who were beginning to feel the fire of infatuation and to distrust the younger ones, from whom they wished to distance themselves and, above all, to distinguish themselves. 

After that decision and as soon as the school year began, we went to the headquarters of the older ones, to the kingdom of the secondary level, whose wide esplanade, soccer and basketball courts, athletics track, carpentry workshop, library, dressing rooms, gardens and other facilities, left us ecstatic, with our mouths open, prisoners of an emotion that our little bodies could not bear. We had left our small elementary school classrooms and now we were close to the high school boys, about to conquer their building, which was two or three times bigger and more imposing than ours. What would go through our tiny, restless heads during those decisive moments is a mystery. That must have been what two fifth-grade boys must have thought a few days after our arrival, whom we greeted by throwing ketchup and mustard on their shiny shirts. We would steal the creams from Abel, a chubby young man, with a face of few friends, to whom his mother used to say: "Abel, for f**k's sake, take care of the little ones quickly, don't be late". Those impatient and hungry "little ones" were us. How many times Abel had to replenish the ketchup and mustard in his kiosk, is a figure we can't calculate. We're sure Abel didn't either.

    The first few months of our high school induction were a severe test of our teachers' patience. The head of standards, a middle-aged guy, with thinning hair, thick glasses and small stature (we nicknamed him tun tun, because he reminded us of the most famous dwarf in Mexican cinema), we kept him on edge, worried, evaluating the possibility of resigning the position he held at the school. We were not only indomitable kids, but also quite resistant; picking up the papers thrown in the yard, making frogs and lizards, bursting our arms making chicks, were punishments that we easily overcame, without complaining, even between jokes. Whether it was under the powerful sun or shivering in the winter, it was all the same to us. After completing the punishments, we would return to the chacota with more determination, with new mischief, with more subtle tricks to avoid the punishments and remain in absolute impunity. We had declared war on all the teachers, and also on the fifth year teachers, the big, fat, dumb ones, as we used to call them. The latter, for some inexplicable reason, were our final objective; defeating them on their territory meant our supreme victory. United under that slogan, all of us sixth grade boys formed a single, compact human block, which did not exceed one meter fifty in height.

    The critical phase of the war occurred in mid-1998, almost at the end of the second bimester. The playground had been turned into a battlefield. The garden near the chapel of the Virgin of Guadalupe was the scene of bloody hand-to-hand fights, where several of us went face first into the ground and some fifth graders tested the tips of our shoes on their shins. For several weeks, avoiding at all times being captured by tun tun, we fought in countless confrontations, in which we always tried to outnumber the fifth years and ambush them while they were studying, talking or trying to make love to some little girl. In spite of everything, and this was something we had to recognize, the fifth years were worthy rivals: they never went to the head of standards to accuse us (Tun Tun, by then, had chosen to turn a blind eye) and even less did it occur to them to propose a truce. In silence, in complicity, the big, dumbed-down big boys had accepted the war and were fighting it with the double responsibility of winning it and of measuring their strength so as not to break us completely.

    I remember exactly the moment when we decided to use our weapons and stop the melee. It was because of what happened to one of us in the bathroom on the second floor. The humiliated fellow told us in detail what had happened to him: he was in the bathroom, distracted, satisfied after having relieved his bladder, when a group of fifth-years surprised him from behind, leaving him with no chance to defend himself or run. Fright, he told us with no small amount of embarrassment, seized him and paralyzed him completely. They immediately carried him and plunged him into the urinal, but not before administering a good dose of punches and knees. The damage, in the end, was atrocious. Not only was our companion bathed in a disgusting mixture of urine, but he was badly bruised, so much so that we saw him limping for at least three days.

    Although the magnitude of the attack had been brutal, that friend of ours remained unperturbed, for he had a strong character and build. The blows to his body had not broken him, for his desire to fight had not disappeared; on the contrary, it had increased. However, his pride had been wounded. We even saw him shed a few tears as he told us about the attack he had suffered. For that reason we decided to unilaterally change the rules and reconfigure the modality of our attacks. If there was one thing that characterized us, it was solidarity and limitless creativity in the art of being a pain in the a*s.

    After that terrible event, when we saw the fifth years distracted, we began to take off our leashes and chase them with the intention of whipping them until we got tired. The fourth and fifth year girls would look at us with tenderness, as if our straps were just the simple taps of playful children. They even used to come to our defense: "You barbarians, how can you even think of hitting these kids? Nevertheless, the torn shirts, the bruised skins and the wounds on the hands of our victims were evidence of the excessive violence that at some point we had unleashed against them. Our weakness, therefore, was only apparent. The filthy urine bath to which our companion had been subjected had to be avenged, and so we did, and more than avenged.

The struggle reached its peak in December, after the fifth-years abruptly reduced their attacks and cancelled their resistance. We were surprised, but mostly disillusioned. Then we learned that they were preparing for the end-of-year activities. But what was this nonsense of thinking about graduation and prom, about trips to Huaraz or Cusco, we said to ourselves; how those idiots would prefer to look for partners for their little crappy dance and stop beating and torturing us as usual. Due to our young age, we could not understand the differences in our interests, let alone foresee the beginning of the end: our rivals would leave the school, they would leave behind the uniform, they would never come back. Out there, behind the school walls, they would begin another life, the life of adults, a world that was alien to us and that we could not even imagine. It was at that moment that, hurt and indignant, we decided to intensify the war.

    That afternoon, during the second recess, Fat Rodriguez took off his leash and took a close look at his victim, who was not too far away. It was Rubén Taype, a tall, thin boy, who used to wear his sleeves rolled up, something that the fat Rodriguez, we don't know why, hated. At that moment he was talking to Ana María, one of the prettiest girls in the fourth grade. The romantic scene mattered little to the fat man, because when he chose a victim, he used to look at her like a hamburger, like an ice-cold soda, like a huge bag of potato chips.

    Rubén Taype caught sight of the fat man just as the end of the leash was about to reach his shoulder. He made a very quick feint; the strap snapped in the air and went straight to the ground. A group of fifth graders, friends of Rubén Taype, saw the scene and came to his aid. The fat Rodriguez started to flee, but his enormous mass prevented him from advancing with the necessary speed. Faced with such an effort, we saw how the pants gave way, leaving the fat man's a*s exposed. Without saying anything to each other, we joined in to support him, because we would not let them kick the s**t out of him, as had happened the last time: "They grabbed me like a ball. Don't laugh, you s***s". 

The chase was intense. The fifth graders managed to catch the fat guy and slap him in the face, but it wasn't long before we came to his aid. The amount of kicks and punches we dealt out was unbelievable; we broke all records. The bald guy, one of our toughest companions, was dragged along the ground as if he were a doll. While we were trying to rescue him, the fifth graders were making fun of him, deciding whether to smash him against the garbage can or leave him lying in the middle of the yard. I, on the other hand, could only manage to hand out slaps and call out to the others, who were up on the platform, not so far from where we were breaking our souls. I called them again and again, while I resisted elbows and dodged multiple spits. At such insistence, a group of five joined the fray. All were met with kicks; however, no one was deterred. 

    The battle went on for a long time, perhaps too long, until we saw the principal arrive with a slow but determined step. During the whole year he had not been directly involved in the matter, but in view of the proven incompetence of tun tun, it is possible that he had had enough and decided to put an end to our war himself. His face, still unforgettable, was red, tense; all the wrinkles that furrowed his forehead and eyes were contracted. Despite his short stature, he looked fearsome. In less than an instant we were all standing still, with our arms straight, glued to our thighs. The director, standing in front of us, annihilated us with his gaze. Staring mercilessly at us, with his arms folded and his huge head bent forward, he said, "All of you, to my office".

He spoke to us for more than an hour. He assured us of a disastrous future in case we decided to prefer violence and idleness instead of study and effort. He told us that, in the face of big problems, the solutions had to be radical, so he would not be afraid to expel us, even if we brought him the pope or the president. He continued speaking, very serious, with a firm, deep voice. Each of his words hit us like a sledgehammer and hurt us more than the punches and kicks we had given each other a few hours before. The fifth year students were even more frightened: they were sweating profusely and lowered their eyes without daring to raise them. On them, the director's fury fell like a rain of fire. With total calm, without hesitation, he listed one by one all the damages caused: the inconvenience caused to the school's cleaning workers, the huge loss of creams in Abel's kiosk, our lack of empathy with students from other regions of the country, who did not have our luck and suffered the material precariousness that we did not know about.

    After the reprimand, an uncomfortable silence enveloped us. We were all standing next to each other. No one was moving. It must have been well after two o'clock in the afternoon. The dismissal bell rang in the distance; its intense sound combined with the murmur of students hurrying out of the classrooms. The principal, sitting at his old wooden desk, kept writing what we assumed was a very long report on our misbehavior. At no time did he look up at us.

The last day of school came rather quickly. The fifth graders were celebrating and hugging; some were crying. They were signing their shirts with colored markers and exchanging all kinds of memories. We watched from our classroom window, no longer in the mood to fight. Besides, that war had ended by express order of the principal. On the other hand, in a few months we would be leaving elementary school and would be students in the first year of high school, a matter that demanded more seriousness on our part. It was at that moment that the school ceased to look like an amusement park and suddenly took on an unmistakable severity. We saw for the first time the faces of the teachers, the cleaning staff, the assistants. A different reality was dawning in our minds. We realized that soon we would have to carry heavier backpacks, with more notebooks and books to read.

    Rubén Taype was no longer our enemy. I remember chatting with him one hot day, in a full bustle because of the approaching New Year's Eve. He was drinking an ice-cold lemonade while a thin bead of sweat rolled down his tanned forehead. We discovered in him a nice guy, with refined manners, whom the culmination of high school had endowed with an air of wisdom that impressed us very much. While he was fixing his hair, before saying goodbye, he told us something that resembled a prophecy: "It's going to be your turn, chibolos. Go adjust your asses". Those words were enigmatic, but left us with a feeling of uneasiness that we hid with laughter. Why would we have to adjust our asses? One adjusted one's a*s due to fear, to tension, to the suspicion that something dangerous was about to happen. But we had only heard those sensations, and always on the fly, without paying much attention to them; we had never really felt them.

    Those words proved true years later, when the principal died of a heart attack, just a week before our fifth-year high school graduation. His funeral services were held at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, and were attended by almost the entire student body. Some, those who had studied with us in elementary school, were no longer part of the graduating class; their parents had not been able to continue paying for the school, whose pensions were increasing year after year, as well as the prices of food. Part of the school had been closed; a lawsuit with a company had taken away the gymnasium and a considerable portion of the esplanade. Before we finished high school, we already knew what the term "inflation" meant, and many other even more terrible terms. Then, Rubén Taype's words were joined by more vigorous, more serious words, which came back like an uncontainable tidal wave that returned all the blows and kicks we had dealt to our older classmates. The principal told us, five years ago, just after finishing that report he wrote for the association of Catholic schools, in which he said that in our school everything was going very well; and that, during his administration, he had not had the need to resort to severe sanctions against the students. In other words, that man with the prominent skull and perfectly trimmed gray hair, now dead and locked forever in a drawer, had spared our lives. And how can we forget that advice or threat (threat before, advice now), if its effects still persist in this time, now distant and difficult, in which each of us took our own course: "All those punches and kicks, save them for the future, for when you come to life. Believe me when I tell you that you're going to need all that energy. Out there you will fight, kids, and I assure you that whatever you do, at some point, you will know what it is like to lose". 

    And that's the way we're going.