This morning, just as class was beginning, he said: "Excuse me, Teach, I need to talk to you about something." We left the classroom together and went to lean against the rusted radiator across from the coffee-vending machine. He asked me: "Listen, could you give me the street address of that slut that teaches Math? Or, maybe just tell me which car she drives? I’m fed up with her crap, and I want to set her little wig on fire." The odd thing is that there was no hatred, no resentment in his voice. He was perfectly calm: even resigned, perhaps. It was just that he couldn’t see how to avoid this new labour that the world de-manded of him. At first, I didn’t understand. When he told me (after I had delivered my short sermon to dissuade him from action) that at the very least he felt duty-bound to punch her in the nose ("otherwise, I’ll feel bad, and then it just gets worse," he confessed), I suddenly understood that "Goofy the Junky," aka Lucio, one of my students in Second Year/Class H: Adver-tising Graphics, is good-hearted and less of a savage than most of his fellow students. I said nothing. I raised both eyebrows, as if to say, "Well, this time you’d better drop it." He gave me a manly hug, suffocating me, the way friends do in the neighbourhood. He knew that he couldn’t do this to me, of all people.

There they go, back and forth, like every morning. It is always astonishing to see how incapable these kids are of spending time together unless they engage in this byplay of shouting and shoving. It is even more astonishing to discover this subterranean law: each and every one of them, and this is not negotiable, wants to have an exclusive relationship with me, in some manner or form. During the day, there must be a moment of undivided attention. That’s the way they are. At some point during the day, they need to speak to me, privately, and never in front of the others. Either outside of the classroom entirely or else, occasionally, and with a degree of anxiety, along the vague border of the teacher’s lectern, shrouded by the noise of the class. When I was younger and just starting my teaching career, I believed that my athletic, vitalistic management of the class was a test, a genuine intellectual challenge. I actually thought that it was an exercise of charisma with respect to children whom I had set out to captivate in this manner, through a form of culture fed to them indirectly, through play, closeness, mutual empathy–by means of the quick retorts that showed I was ahead of them, ready for them. Every morning, I had to conquer the classroom, capture their attention, and show them that I deserved their respect.

Today, I feel different. Tired, lonely. I’ve walked around the world, and now I just want to stop walking. I would like to be able to look at them, the way the other teachers do, without grief, with a sense of acceptance that they are going to leave this school and go out into the world, one after another, forgetting about me, and forgetting about everything I ever believed in: poetry, study, intellect. Or maybe not. I really can’t say what re-mains of the past fifteen years of teaching. I do know that Lucio, remote, intractable, remains before me eternally: that, day after day, his fifteen-year-old eyes watch me, scrutinize me, continuing to ask me everything, concealing nothing from me, playing it straight, with the unripe, overwhelming gravity of youth.

Passion is a labyrinth, it is a soul: life smolders secretly at every moment. I might have gotten more out of life, I might have had an easier time in my personal relationships, and even my teaching might have been less complicated, if I had only been able to break away for a little while from this obsession–an uncompromising work ethic, my aspiration for a shared civilization, my desire to see in reality how culture shapes the mind, how a word can teach someone to understand, to attain happiness, the substance of life. But I am wrong, even now, to think about things this way. In fact, I still see you, I recognize you the way I always have. Already, in my mind, I am running through each of your names, each of your faces, never faltering: twenty-nine adolescents locked up in a rundown little schoolroom; girls and boys, all dressed identically, with a certain sameness, a heartbreaking uncertainty, and yet still intact, not yet worn out. Sometimes I think that a teacher is nothing more than a student who is left back, year after year. A ridiculous man: a child who walked into a classroom one day and then, somehow, couldn’t find his way out, wandering this way and that through the halls, beneath the neon lighting, climbing endless staircases to countless floors, walking past the shiny, scratched metal of the locker rows. The child was a child; then he began to dream, and from that moment on he became older, more fragile–more self-aware.