When it was all over, the mother knocked on the door to my office. She sat down in the only chair that faced mine from the other side of the desk, in the same place where the student had been a few minutes before he fell to the floor. To mask my discomfort, I offered her a box of tissues and she wiped her eyes. I had been the last person to see him the way she would have wanted to remember him. Now it would be impossible after the legal process, the photos, the morgue, and the many stories in the newspapers. She told me about his last few months, avoiding all uncomfortable commentary. Suddenly she paused. She wanted to know what his last words had been. I inhaled deeply: his last words—how to explain without telling her the rest—had not come out of his mouth.
That semester, I was to teach the general class in which we talked about a lot but nothing in great detail. More than a class, it seemed like an excuse to kill time and get grades. Without a doubt, it was one of the easiest classes for all of his classmates. Having arrived in this country a few months ago expecting that the job would provide me with good health insurance and I would finally recover from the illness that no doctor could identify, I got caught up in talking about politics like a broken record. Immediately, these subjects created a great rift in the classroom. A few students remained silent and listened, staring at the lines they drew distractedly in their notebooks. The more passionate ones spoke out in favor of state laws that banned immigrants from working and living in the area. They even approved of militarization to suppress protests in the city. Others burned with rage when they remembered how difficult it was to move through the streets to get to the university without being searched by patrol officers. One group of students had decided to confront the situation and were soon thrown in jail or ended up in the hospital with injuries from gas attacks. Two of them were in our class.
What influence I had was unclear. There were the sounds that seeped in through the window during our classes, the blue uniforms of the police, the barricades, the continuous document checks, and the proliferation of the word ‘terrorism’ in the hallways of the buildings. The student assembly released a statement against the possession and use of arms by citizens against citizens. The letter argued that fear had caused many young people to keep guns in their rooms and had caused massive raids in all of the dorms. Many in the class were victims of these raids, the children of immigrants in particular. He was too, I remember well. Even so, the student was moderate in his opinions and demonstrated impressive sensibility in the midst of the state of things.
At that time, a group of protesters had installed itself at the entrance of the building, just beneath the window of our classroom. In less than two hours, a police car with polarized windows parked on the sidewalk out front. The tension mounted when another group of young people planted itself nearby holding up posters demanding freedom and the right to bear arms. The student took that opportunity to say that for them, freedom was defined by whomever raised their gun first. Starting then we focused on discussing freedom, searching for its roots and definitions, its uses and limitations, if perhaps it took on a different meaning on the streets of our daily lives. No one in our class remained indifferent and our heated discussions in Spanish included the most radically opposed points of view. For a couple of weeks, our classroom seemed to embody that freedom, the student once said, while beyond the patios and the high buildings we heard bombs detonating.
Until the gun came out. It was a day when I could not get to class because the guards who searched us at the entrance of the building did not think that my identification sufficed. They wanted my passport and demanded to see my visa. The student and his friends had seen the whole thing leaning out the window, their bodies almost hanging out. When I got to the classroom, we watched together as the police dispersed the protesters, first with gas that provoked asthma attacks in some and later with physical force. The bodies of the young people were carried away by four police officers and thrown into a van. In an impromptu meeting with my colleagues in the hall of the Spanish department, we decided to return to our classes and talk about Latin American food, traditions, and dances. When I returned to my class I saw the disappointment on the student’s face.
He followed me down the hallway, where, we saw a woman we didn’t recognize hovering over the filing cabinets outside the Spanish department. Without passing through the threshold of the door, he handed me his revised essay. I grabbed the papers while following the woman with my eyes, but the student did not let go. He waited as my eyes passed from the paper to his hands, moved up his arm, his neck and the tense muscles of his face until they reached his eyes. For a moment he looked older. Only then did he let go of the papers, turn on his heels and exit the building.
During the last week of classes, a sepulchral silence reigned and messages from my colleagues thundered in the telephone. That afternoon, the student arrived a few minutes before I left my office for home and sat down across from me at my desk. While he looked for the zipper on his back pack, notification of another email and the secretary’s voice on the telephone broke our silence. When I raised my eyes, the student had a pistol in his hands. He put it down softly on the desk. It is my treasure, he said to me in Spanish while he moved the cell phone out of my reach. Through the half-open door, I could barely see the people moving in the hallway. His final paper was what he had come to discuss. A whisper escaped my throat to ask if by chance—. I did not have to finish the sentence. He said he did not have bullets. Gradually, the noises around me returned, my ears reopened, and the explosions began to sound again from afar. My vision started to come back into focus; I could see the police lights that crossed the walls of the office, illuminating his face and his white shirt. My fingers instinctively touched the ring on my left hand. He stopped the movement with his right, whispering okay, just one, as I neared the pages. I grabbed them, slowly extracting myself from his grasp, but the student did not want to let go of them until my clouded gaze found his again.
The sound of the gunshot took us by surprise. I touched my neck and felt the piercing pain of embedded glass. It was gushing. The student had removed his hand from mine. The weight of his body and the force of the impact that came in through the window had thrown the chair in front of my desk. He slumped to one side with his head hidden, his final paper beneath it.
I left the office, and when the people who had thrown themselves under the tables saw the blood that was trickling down my neck, they called an ambulance. Because of the confrontations and blockaded streets, the ambulance took more than two hours to arrive. From the secretary’s seat where I had been asked to wait, I watched the floor bathed in red. No, he had not hidden his head. The impact had ripped it off. I walked toward his body, carefully tossed the pistol into his back pack, took the papers that hung languidly from his fingers and tucked them into a folder.
These images were crossing my mind as I held back any comment on the details of the last few months. No one ever spoke about the pistol inside his bag. I didn’t mention it nor did the police ask me. The student had been the victim of a stray bullet, shot by an unidentified older man who had taken advantage of the chaos; that was the official version as delivered by the press.
My hands were clenched in fists on the table as his mother looked over all of the papers that the student had received perfect marks on. All of them were about typical Latin American foods, traditional dances and myths. She extended her hands to me and stroked me in an expression of gratitude. My vision blurred and sound began to fade. In the secretary’s seat where I was recovering the rhythm of my breath, I considered the possibility of giving her the final essay the student had written.
***
Mónica Ríos was born in Santiago de Chile. She is the author of the novels Alias el Rocío (San José, 2014) and Segundos (Santiago, 2010). Her short stories have appeared in the volumes Escribir en Nueva York, Antología de narradores hispanoamericanos (Lima, 2014), Disculpe que no me levante (Madrid, 2014), Junta de Vecinas (Cádiz, 2011) and Lenguas: Dieciocho jóvenes cuentistas chilenos (Santiago, 2008). She has published essays and criticism about contemporary hispanic literature in magazines, books, webpages and academic journals. She is editor of the publishing collective Sangría Edito ra / Sangría Legibilities, and is currently completing her PhD dissertation while teaching literature and giving creative writing workshops in Brooklyn.
Translator Dana Khromov is a Brooklyn-based writer. She graduated from Ithaca College with a bachelor’s in writing and is currently translating a series of short stories from Spanish to English.