Esperanza
My IQ1 is unknown, and so it will always remain. When I was about fifteen, the maths teacher gave us one of those tests in class. We were all supposed to do them wrong on purpose, signalling to each other to answer the same thing on every section. Yet some of them were just pretending and filled out the test seriously, since the maths teacher (named, very presciently, Esperanza: Hope) showed up the next day to take the gifted ones away and tell them I don't want to know what. As for me, the test must have confirmed to this teacher that I was completely retarded.
One day, she met with my mother to share her conclusions — at last, scientifically validated. She seemed sympathetic towards my mental retardation and all the torment this disability must be causing me, and committed to helping me choose the most appropriate path, which, according to her, consisted of renouncing any intellectual ambition and focusing on what was then called Formación Profesional (literally: Professional Training — for rather manual and totally minor and unwanted jobs —, which everyone used to understand as a way out for the stupid).
My mother recounted this meeting to me in detail. I don’t know if the teacher had instilled this view of me in her or if my mother had already had reservations about the scope of my intellectual gifts. I was deeply disappointed to see her so genuinely hesitant and concerned (although, in front of the teacher, she had disagreed, responding that I might not be a genius, but neither was I the imbecile Esperanza had portrayed me to be).
Armed with a confidence that heaven knows where it could’ve come from, since until then I had only shown sporadic flashes of cleverness, I more or less said to my mother what would nowadays be called a hold my beer moment.
At the time, I was studying for a Scientific Bachillerato, aiming to become a mechanical engineer. I liked cars. But I had been dazzled by philosophy and became very keen on subjects considered ‘social science’ or ‘humanities’ — albeit my record in these subjects at the time was almost as poor as my science record.
I decided to drop out and continue attending classes, but merely as an auditor, until I finished the course and enrolled in the Social Sciences Bachillerato.
The natural thing would have been to choose the pure ‘humanities’ way (with Latin and Greek, instead of economics and mathematics), but taking maths was absolutely essential to my plan, even at the risk of having Esperanza as my teacher again. So I continued attending every class even though I had dropped out.
In maths, Esperanza never missed an opportunity to refer to me with all the mockery and contempt in the world, without even looking at me, alluding to:
‘The listener.’
Eventually, I would receive the highest grade in every subject, including maths: a first-class honour.
Not until I went to pay the tuition for my first year at university did I learn that my first-class honour exempted me from paying tuition entirely — I would never forget the expression on the face of the clerk who told me this, with genuine pleasure and touched surprise at my ignorance.
Nor have I forgotten the look on Esperanza’s face a year earlier, as she stood among the rest of the teaching staff when a man I hadn’t met yet, who had chaired the literary competition’s judging panel, announced my name and publicly praised my winning short story.
Many teachers I had never met before, from a wide range of subjects, also came over to introduce themselves, congratulate me and offer their help with anything I might need.
My mother remained silent. Her expression revealed absolutely nothing: no joy, no relief, no pride, no excitement, no surprise. Not even satisfaction at having proved the teacher wrong — the teacher with whom she’d clashed at that meeting, Kantianly defending the honour of an intellect and a future she probably neither believed in nor cared about, despite the fact that they belonged to her own son.
My mother’s cousin said to her one of those days, in my presence:
‘I told you the lad was worth a lot!’
She did not even flinch. She was consumed by her troubled relationship with her firstborn. A year earlier, from my bedroom, I had overheard her cousin say to her in the sitting room, as they talked about my mother’s disappointment in my brother:
‘If it’d been one of the others, that would have been one thing… but him!’
Shortly after I’d started university in September, she was diagnosed with a metastasis that proved fatal. Her last words, on 15 October, were her firstborn’s name.
I was taking practical driving lessons at the time too, right before driving instructor’s daughter gave up on me and referred me to her father.2
Once again, I earned first-class honours, this time on my first university examinations — which entitled me to another reduction in my tuition fees the following year.
My classmates and I went on a trip to Segovia. I was the only one who already had a driving licence and a car. By chance, we ran into one of the teachers who had served on the judging panel of the literary competition. He turned out to be the brother of one of our lecturers in the Faculty of Philosophy.
I also attended an extracurricular seminar on Nietzsche, entitled Nosotros los apátridas.