Mouthful of Birds(30)

In high school I had another “episode.” I was still drawing, and no one touched my pictures because they knew I believed in things like good and evil, and the latter category, which is what people in general spent their time on, bothered me. The fight with Fredo had earned me some respect from the class, and they didn’t mess with me anymore. But that year there was a new boy who thought he was really smart, and he found out that Cecilia had been indisposed for the first time the day before. And at recess he came into the classroom and filled her pencil case with red paint. I saw it all from my desk, where I was quietly drawing. In the next class, when Cecilia went to get a pen, her fingers and clothes got all stained. And the boy started to yell that she was a whore, that Cecilia was a whore like her mother and all the rest, which in a way also included my mother. I didn’t have a crush on Cecilia, but I hit that boy’s head against the floor until it started to bleed. The teacher had to call in backup to separate us. While they were restraining us so we wouldn’t get into it again, I asked him if his brain was draining a little better now. I thought the phrase was inspired, but I was the only one who laughed. They filled my report card with warnings and suspended me from school for two days. Mom was mad at me, too, but I heard her say over the phone that her son “wasn’t used to intolerance and all he wanted to do was protect that poor girl.”

From then on Cecilia did everything possible to be my friend. It really got on my nerves to always have her so close, staring at me. She wrote me letters about friendship and love and hid them in my stuff. I went on drawing. My mom had signed me up for the drawing and painting workshop at school, which was every Friday. The teacher sent us to buy paper, much bigger than the kind I’d used until then. Also paints and brushes. The teacher showed my work to the class and explained why I was “so inventive,” just how I had accomplished it, and what I “wanted to convey with each brushstroke.” In the workshop I learned how to do all of the extremities of puzzle pieces in 3-D, to paint blurred backgrounds that, “against the realism of a horizon, give a sense of abstraction,” and to use hairspray on the best pieces so they would be preserved and “the colors wouldn’t lose their intensity.”

Painting was the most important thing to me. There were other things I liked, such as watching TV, doing nothing, and sleeping. But painting was the best. There was a painting competition in my junior year, and the winning work would be displayed in the lobby. The jury was the drawing teacher, the principal, and her secretary. The three of them “unanimously” chose my work as “the most representative,” and they hung my painting in the entrance to the school.

In those days, Cecilia liked to say I was in love with her, and always had been. That the red fish and the blue fish that I’d started to draw between the puzzle pieces was a “romantic abstraction of our relationship.” That one fish’s puzzle piece fit in with the other’s because that’s how we were, “made for each other.” During a break one day I found that someone had written our names over the fish in the picture; then, on the chalkboard in the classroom, I saw a giant heart pierced by an arrow with our names. It was the same handwriting as on the painting. Everyone had seen it, and they sat looking at one another with rude grins. Cecilia smiled at me, blushing, and again I felt that uncontrollable desire to hit, and even before anything happened I saw the image of her head smashing down, her scalp bashing over and over against the uneven ground, her head splitting open, the blood clumping in her hair. I felt my body lunge at her wildly, and then, for some reason, stop short. It was like an “illumination”—people who know about these things explained it to me much later. And the “illumination” helped me avoid the images I had just seen, and I had the first impulse that led to everything that came after: I ran to the drawing and painting workshop on the second floor—some of the kids, including Cecilia, followed me—and I took paints and paper from the cabinets and sat down to draw. I drew it all. An extreme close-up of the fear in one of Cecilia’s terrified eyes, a slice of her sweaty forehead covered with zits and blackheads. The rough ground below her, the tips of my strong fingers just barely in the picture, tangled in her hair, and then red, pure red, staining everything.

If I’m asked what I learned in school, I can reply only that I learned to paint. Everything else went away just as it came, and there’s nothing left. Nor did I study anything else after high school. I paint pictures of heads hitting the ground, and people pay me fortunes for them. I live in a loft in downtown Buenos Aires. My bedroom and bathroom are upstairs, the kitchen is downstairs, and all the rest is my studio, or “atelier,” as Aníbal likes to call it. Some people ask me for portraits of their own heads. They like gigantic square canvases, and I make them up to six feet by six feet. They pay me whatever I ask. Later I see the paintings hung in their enormous, empty living rooms, and I think that those guys deserve to see themselves good and smashed on the ground by my hand, and they seem very much to agree when they stand in front of the paintings. You’d have to see them to understand what kind of picture I’m talking about. I mean, they’re really good pictures.

I don’t like to have girlfriends. I dated some girls, but it never worked out. Sooner or later they start to demand more time or ask me to say things I really don’t feel. One time I tried saying what I felt, and it was worse. Another time, one of them went completely crazy, and I hadn’t said absolutely anything. She decided I didn’t love her, that I was never going to love her; she forced me to grab her by the hair and started to hit her own head against the wall. I don’t think relationships like that are healthy.