The Ecuador letters, part 1

Para suplementar mis magros ingresos, que sirven principalmente para pagar deudas, hago traducciones (por eso, entre otras tareas ingratas, no salgo mucho en Twitter últimamente: tiempo es lo que no hay). Hace una media hora, hice una búsqueda rutinaria en Windows para ver si podía encontrar aquella traducción que una vez hice de un certificado de Antecedentes Personales de la Policía, que me ahorraría tiempo y me permitiría acostarme antes de las 4 de la madrugada. Al teclear "policía", o tal vez "police", me salió un fichero antiguo, que no recordaba haber visto en años. No sé, no entiendo cómo este fichero sobrevivió al robo de mi laptop hace ¿dos? ¿tres? años, al robo de otro disco duro el año pasado, a toda aquella hecatombe. Tampoco recuerdo con qué finalidad coleccioné en un solo fichero todos esos escritos inacabados, ni a qué público los quería destinar. Lo más probable es que pertenecen a una época en que todavía escribía en los newsgroups (que siempre para mí habían fungido de blogs improvisados: quien sepa buscar quizás todavía encontrará allá, desparramadas, mis visceras). Parecen demasiado personales, demasiado sinceros como para que hayan sido cartas. En todo caso, me entretuve leyéndolos. Entre las sorpresas, y las muchas y conmovedoras muestras de una inocencia ya perdida, me encuentro deseando que las elecciones generales, en ese misterioso país en que recién había aterrizado, y en el que había tenido la mala suerte de encontrar trabajo de profesor de literatura en el prestigioso colegio "Pequeños Ornitorrincos del Saber", fueran ganadas por un tal Rafael Correa, anhelo que aparentemente se basaba en el contenido humorístico de su campaña televisiva. Ah well... you live and learn.

No voy a postear ni la mitad de lo que encontré. Para hacerlo, tendría que marcar este blog como "de contenido adulto", y no me da la gana. Suffer little children, &c. Así que, allá van todos aquellos párrafos que hablan de alguna otra cosa que no sea tetas y culos, y que escribí cuando todavía... well, you decide.

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I am like a stray dog, it occurs to me as the car in which I'm a front-seat passenger swerves round another back street corner. I have no morals; I live for the day; I scavenge unnoticed; and I am as indifferent to my lameness as any three-legged dog long forgetful of the accident that caused it. Or at least, that's how I'd like to be. True, the human in me, half-remembering, still weeps quietly sometimes. But these days, not often. "Let others do the weeping," from now on.

The car pulls up, and I greet the new passenger with the usual perfunctory monosyllables before we are whisked away again. She's female, but that hardly matters: "just a colleague", and far too centrada for me to have any designs on her. Tokenly female, you might say, in spite of the rumpled and fading good looks. Most days, I don't even bother to listen to the back-seat conversation - I have lessons to plan in my head, though even this distracted last-minute planning I put off for as long as possible, until the school is almost within sight. After all these years, after all this boot-in-the-face familiarity with "work" and its mean, wizened demands upon one's attention, I still manage to resent, newly every morning, this being required to turn my mind to anything except the pregnant chaos of my own thoughts. They're not great thoughts, as you've already glimpsed, but they're mine, and they're all I've ever had: that's why I hate having to put them on hold even for a few hours.

And even after all these years of (apparently) having had the same ones over and over. Yes, I could sometimes do with a change. In fact, that's what most of my thought processes seem to be about these days: finding a way out of the labyrinth. That, presumably, was why I came to Ecuador: I found my thoughts spiralling inwards, the circles growing ever smaller, the occasional blips of surprise growing ever scarcer. I wanted to see if, faced with a new world, I could still think new things. That's what I'm trying to do right here, come to that.

And that's why (as I again remind myself every morning, at precisely the same location, speeding across the long bridge that spans the Daule) taking this job was such a mistake. It doesn't just eat up thinking time: it presumes over other areas of my mind as well: it throws me into shifting but invariably irksome and humiliating alignments with other people (students, colleagues, "authorities"); it makes me permanently embarrassed and furtive as I try to conceal my disorganisation, my lassitude, my almost farcical incompetence as a high-school teacher from officious onlookers.

To my right and almost below me, a lone fisherman in a skiff heads lazily towards the centre of the river. That's what mocks me every early morning. Fisherman is what I was meant for, that or any other employment in which you are left in peace to think whatever needs to be thought, where you can catch at leisure, just to the survival quota, without being once caught yourself. Like anyone else who grew up in suburbia, I nurture a bucolic Arcadia somewhere in the suburbs of my own mind where "in olden times" people did not have to think, still less "interact", to earn money, they just tramped around in fields, dragging or digging or heaving or shoving, all the time under a blazing sun, or in elegiac drizzle, their minds betweenwhiles soaring far above the logosphere. "Work", that is, the systematic denial of the basic right to be let alone to muse on life and sex in the middle of a river or field, "is a modern invention", according to this theory: people are put to work so they won't have time to realise, collectively, how simpler it is for everyone to not think or talk, but live off the land and water and the beer, if you just organised things a bit differently, more Lawrentianly perhaps, differently anyway.

On my first morning in Ecuador, after sleeping off the jetlag, I woke up in time to look delightedly down, from the second-floor balcony of E_'s flat, on an old man riding a bicycle from the riverfront, past the doors and dogs of Marianita, with a bloody great fish hanging from the handlebars. This is not a "thought", but it's as good as one, or better. In fact, that's what I found, am finding here: instead of new thoughts, new images, which may yet prove to be the objective correlative to thoughts too shy, too pure or puerile to speak their name directly. The fact that my then woman laughed at the delight, and perhaps, somewhere, still does, finding it picturesque that a "gringo" would find picturesque man, bicycle and fish, so unremarkable to her, ensured the immortality of that epiphany. (That the fish somehow needed the bicycle is only a bonus.)

Is it a sign of mental bankruptcy that I prefer pictures to thoughts more and more as I get older? Like any other question, I solve it with another picture. In this picture, I am a stray dog. All right, the picture says soothingly, all right, you are (have become?) a demented beast: you are lost to civilisation; no-one intelligent could possibly like you any more. But at least you are honest about being a dog, and don't presume to be anything else (except, necessarily, at work); and you are, though you say it yourself, darn good at being a dog. Quite as good as any other dog, in fact... Which in turn adumbrates an invisible confraternity of unclaimed canines, sidelong supportive and doggedly doggy: we don't just sniff each other's arses, you know. Well, we do, but we do so tenderly, in a way you could never understand. Go back to your civilisation, leave us to our tail. Me, I like tail. And poor you, for not liking it as much as I do.

The car slows down before a red light that jolts me out of this latest variation on a theme and back into the groove of work. My job requires me to teach, or at least to somehow ensure that a mysterious process called Learning occurs in my students; the problem being that I do not know how this process works or what I can realistically do to facilitate it, other than telling my students what it is that they're supposed to learn, which I do at exquisite length every day, trying all the time to conceal my uncomfortable sense of the futility of the exercise, given that the subject in question (nominally, English Literature) is of no interest or relevance to most of the kids in my classes. Let's face it, no-one needs to know about Literature these days, if they ever did, and only one person in maybe a thousand or ten thousand is mentally equipped to find the subject enjoyable or stimulating. My kids spend their classes passing notes around or drawing cartoon pictures, for which I can hardly blame them - that's what I would do if I had me for a teacher; in fact, it's what I did do, come to think of it, at least in History classes, where the teacher was, as I am now, both a harmless drone and self-evident social cripple who "taught" only because he was manifestly unfit to earn money any other way. (When he, Mr Leighton-Jones, got on to the Palatinate, this immediately became a new character in the cartoon novel I was creating: a kind of cross between a llama and a hovercraft, spouting fat bubbles of ersatz poetry. Happy days.)

What's wrong with this job, though, is not the fact that my students seem to be learning very little, or that I find myself increasingly getting the same level of attention from them as, say, a shopfloor mannequin, or one of the ubiquitous school iguanas. If this proved to be, as it maybe once was or maybe still is in some schools, the unspoken norm, I could probably adjust to it well enough. The trouble is, the school I landed in expects more, or better, and in my paranoid vision, the quality control police are on my case. To make matters worse, I appear to be the only nicotine addict in the school, and the having to duck outside the school gates every "recess" to get my fix hardly aids confidence, and sensibly interferes with my planning and preparation. But ultimately, it isn't any of this either. It's me. You see, the "authorities" presumably depend on inspiring fear ("respect") among the workers to some degree, but I think it would astonish and baffle them to know just how much and what kind of fear they inspire in me. It's the kind of fear you can only know about if you have had social phobia for a lifetime, if you are newly traumatised on a daily basis by the hateful need to "interact" with people according to mysterious rules and conventions you have never been able to more than guess at. They would, I think, be above all bemused to learn how little real dignity there is behind the reserved, cautious, mumbling facade, or how readily some hidden but important part of my psyche lends them the awful charisma of parents, and casts me in the role of supplicant child. At 45. - Yes, really.

Just to complete, or illustrate, the picture of what's wrong:

The other day, I decided I had better stop missing my weekly appointment with the school's Academic Director, Dr Haines, the Arizona-bred former rugby.player and military intelligence operative whose appointment of me as Area Head was presumably the product of a sick sense of humour combined with a keenly cultivated Schadenfreude. I mustered the pitiful sheaf of overdue Lesson Plans, and sidled leerily into his office, trying to suck the nicotine smell out of my teeth.

"What can I do for you?" Dr Haines was in the middle of a conference with a programmer, doing that thing I once thought was only done in cheap publicity shots, that is, peering together at a computer screen in ostentatious collaborativeness. He did not look up. My rusty automatic personality-machine flipped, exasperatingly, to "defensively pert and perky" mode, but all I said was "well, there are one or two things..." I delved into my bag in an absurd impersonation of an Efficient Administrator, and placed the lesson plans on the table in a placatory gesture. He did not acknowledge the gesture. "Lesson plans," the Efficient Administrator explained apologetically. They were two weeks overdue. He looked up.

"What else?" My panic rose. I had, to my certain knowledge, failed in at least four hundred and seventy-six different ways to fulfil my remit as Teacher and Area Head. I couldn't even guess which particular manifestation of my spectacular incompetence was about to be aired. I tried bluffing.

"Well, you remember we agreed to go over the draft curriculum. If it's OK it can go on the web site and then I can start doing lesson plans on that, as we agreed..."

Finally, Dr Haines looked up. "Are you fucking up?"

This was such a spookily accurate précis of my situation in the school that I was taken aback. "Um... how do you mean?"

Dr Haines then performed his trademark gesture of leaning back and glancing round slowly and wearily at an imaginary audience - presumably the patrician version of rolling one's eyes. "Oh God. What's the English for 'to fuck up'?"

"I don't think so," I offered meekly.

I could go on, but none of this is the point either. I'm here to talk about beauty, and whatever Dr Haines may be, he ain't beautiful. Which isn't to say he's any uglier than any other guy I've known. He's American, and he does being American very well indeed, better than the few other Americans I've met so far. Looking at him, and at his CV, you can see why they have an empire (I have more than once been tempted to address him as "Proconsul"). Like all Americans, he believes (apparently) in "self-esteem", but I'm not mean enough to hold that against him. There are also rumours that he drinks "too much": on this basis alone, if he wasn't my boss, I could probably even like him. As it is, though, to be suddenly apprised that I will never have to see him again, for whatever reason, is high on my Santa's list, and if he fired me I would celebrate with champagne and curry that very day.

Beauty. I started writing wanting to talk only about beauty, something that doesn't get a whole lot of press these days. Interestingly, neither of the two 1000-page coursebooks I've taught Literature from in this American school so much as mentions the concept, even in passing: my students will end their studies of literature knowing (or competently pretending to know) something about Plot, and Theme, and Motif, and Irony, but nothing at all about Beauty; compare this with the (at least) routine lip-service it gets in the Spanish syllabus, and you begin to think something strange might be going on. I would even hazard a guess that my students will have heard the word more often on the lips of their Maths or Science teacher than on mine. But not only am I not required to "teach" this concept (whatever that may mean in practice); more curiously, none of the short stories or poems I am required to wade through exemplifies it to any significant extent. The coursebook compilers have been fastidious in including only the dullest possible prose and verse, and where something genuinely inspiring slips through (Masefield, for example, or Dickinson), a battery of inane questions and cute artwork conspires to trivialise and Disnefy the experience, and "have a nice day" ends up as the only possible way of rounding off the lesson. Small wonder my students don't like Literature: I wouldn't either, on the basis of what they get to read with me.

So why don't I do a Robin Williams, hack up the coursebook, and do it My Way? Because, obviously, that would be missing the point, as well as being a manifestation of unconscionable, truly American arrogance. A teacher, practically by definition, is there to be rebelled against, or at least, a Literature teacher is: you can only understand and appreciate literature (and, by extension, "beauty") if you have first learned to despise the people who presume to control and channel your experience of it. My job, then, is to be an emetic, and that vomitory desideratum, as I gamely and po-facedly warble that "beautiful" is nobbut a "value-judgment" and hence "subjective", is what I plan my lessons around. Dr Haines claims that his "mission" is to (inter alia) "increase his students' self-esteem"; mine is to make my students throw up as long and as hard as possible... that is, if I can persuade them to stay awake long enough to do so. Anything else would be presumptuous self-deception.

Although I don't purvey beauty, I do notice it. - Something of it.

Beauty, according to me, comes at us simultaneously on a battery of frequencies, only one or two of which, if any, we're tuned into at a given time. I am tuned permanently to a particular wavelength - have been since mid-teens, and especially since 40 -, but I try, if distractedly and sometimes half-heartedly, not to miss some at least of the farthest-flung signals around the dial. Now, cultivating a sense of beauty in your life is not hard, except if you have a job like mine, one that requires you to constantly unplug the chips from your mind and replace them with other people's, one that fucks up your mental health with poisonous surges of adrenalin, one that forces you to "relate" to others on their terms. In these circumstances, beauty becomes something seen only from a distance, from a bus window, glimpsed on a telephone wire, vaguely sensed in the rustling of a hedge, as you are bounced daily around the pinball-table of your fears. Until I find an alternative to this job, I will not be able to do more than sketch some of these "other" manifestations of beauty.
[snipped: T&A stuff]