had begun to portray the tree when it was still a timid shoot. With the passage of time, it became a proud willow, weeping majestically in all directions. If adjacent photos were compared, it was impossible to see any differences. But then, with an expression of childish glee, Candelario would take the album in his hands and rapidly flick through the pages. The metamorphosis of the willow caused him a spasm of tenderness. With ant-like diligence, Candelario used to say, his camera had captured the unfolding of the tree’s soul. After taking his photograph, he would stand, rapturously contemplating the willow, hunting for a tangible difference from that other tree, portrayed the day before. His perpetual failure to find one left him in ecstasy. Then he would set off for school, ready to add a pinch of education to the young minds in his charge.
He was a man of singular ideas. After the years spent studying the great masters, what could he say that was new? It seemed to him blasphemy even to attempt it; the future was set in stone. This was the basis of his decision to join the march of Villa Miserias’ progress. It wasn’t that he considered that progress to be either appropriate or desirable, but rather it was as definitive as the development of the willow he venerated and he thought it a duty to add his modest abilities to the project. Without any greater pretensions than being a single heartbeat more in the pacemaker determining the pulse of his community, Candelario put down his name for the Villa Miserias presidential election. When he was leaving the administrative office, his candidacy duly registered, Juana Mecha welcomed him to the contest with, “Skinned chickens had feathers once.” Candelario took this as an unmistakably good omen.
Neither Perdumes nor the members of the board feared for a moment that Severo Candelario would be able to beat the usual pair of throwaway candidates. They initially took his registration as an act of insolence. However, when they heard his slogan and gauged his potential for causing a breach, they resolved to destroy him without mercy.
“With your constant help, we’ll get better and better” constituted a threat on a number of fronts. The word “help” had been exiled from the collective lexicon. It was an anachronism. Time and again, it had been proven how useless it was to pull someone out of the swamp when he was determined to be there. The slime ended by soiling even the rescuer. This couldn’t be allowed in a community of high-flying individuals. Moreover, “we’ll get better and better” suggested a collective enterprise. The effort needed to get across the message of the individual’s responsibility in his destiny had been enormous…It was heresy to allude to their general impact. Candelario was a puppet of himself who could be ignored. But not his slogan. That same night, they asked Joel Taimado to start proceedings in the process of destroying the schoolmaster.
Candelario was so absorbed in his new mission that he didn’t notice his neighbors’ strange glances or the almost undetectable pauses before they returned his greetings. It was his wife who first made him understand something was wrong. On the second floor of their building, a young insurance salesman shared an apartment with a colleague. Almost every morning, he would take the same minibus as Señora Candelario to the metro station on their way to work. He began to leave a few minutes later, just in time for Clara Candelario to see him get to the main road as she set out through the asphyxiating exhaust fumes of the pedestrian walkway. One day, to clear up her concerns, she decided to wait for him. During their entire walk, the young man spoke on his phone to a client he’d woken up to remind that the policy on his old scooter was due to run out in four months. Once aboard the minibus, he refused to let Señora Candelario pay for them both—something they normally took turns in doing—despite the fact that he was clinging onto an external grab rail with just one foot on the first step. With his free hand, he managed to pass his crumpled bill to the driver, who was annoyed at having to give him change. Each time the bus stopped, he would get off to let new passengers on, without losing his place. When they arrived at the metro, he was the first to disembark and immediately disappeared into the station entrance. His neighbor saw no more of him.
Señora Candelario lost no time in discovering what was going on. The following morning, she planted herself in front of Juana Mecha and asked if she’d heard anything. Without in the least diminishing the trsssh trsssh of her broom, the latter simply responded: “People don’t like being reminded they’re people.” She pointed the handle of her boom to the façade of the building where someone had written the piece of graffiti Candelario would see repeated ad nauseum during the following days: “Candelario, you cunt, who are you going to humiliate next?” Taimado’s squad had done its job. The handwritten report detailed an incident the teacher thought had been long forgotten.
The official letter informing him he was to be relocated to a different school had stated that his only sin was naiveté. And possibly overzealousness. Each year a call went out for the Children’s Science Olympics, an event the authorities of the state primary school where Candelario worked as a fifth-grade teacher mostly ignored. In the year of the scandal, Candelario had among his students a very bright girl with a great talent for abstract thought. It was she who had brought the competition to Candelario’s attention. He began to pay her more attention in class, working with her on specifically designed tasks. As the difficulty of these tasks increased, the girl always rose to the challenge. Candelario put the case before the headmaster, who—after having made sure it wouldn’t involve any additional effort on his part—agreed to the teacher’s proposal: during the remaining month, the girl could stay behind for a couple of hours each day to prepare for the competition. The next step was to obtain the family’s permission.
The best procedure would have been to get this from the mother. The problem was that her job as a secretary prevented her accompanying her two children, so that it was their grandmother who took them to school each morning and collected them afterward. Even though Candelario’s proposal would mean taking the boy home and then returning for his elder sister, the grandmother signed the authorization without hesitation. Candelario promised to bring an extra sandwich each day so the child would not go hungry.
The children’s father had given up work at a very young age due to an accident in the laundry where he was working: he’d lost an arm in a supersonic rotary dryer while trying to demonstrate to a workmate there was no great risk involved in placing it there. The proprietors of the business had given him a modest payoff in order to avoid a lawsuit that was, in the end, completely groundless. From that time on, he’d spent his days at home, drinking in front of the television. His evenings alternated between episodes of violent behavior and yearning monologues related to the days when he’d been a whole man.
His children did their best to avoid him. Happily, he didn’t even notice the eldest wasn’t getting home from school until late afternoon. The dispute began during the week before the completion, while she was going over her exercises one night. The father staggered into her room to ask what the hell she was doing at that hour. No point in working hard just to get screwed like him. The child kept her eyes down. She attempted to defend herself from his invective by solving the problem with a trembling hand. The father tore the page from her notebook and left the room muttering incoherent insults. The child’s grandmother came out and he pushed her against the wall with his remaining arm. He then sat in the kitchen to finish off his plastic bag of pulque in giant gulps. Later, when the children and the old lady were deep asleep, it was his wife’s turn. She tried to control the explosion by explaining that the girl was preparing for a competition. Her teacher had chosen her and no one else. He couldn’t give a fuck. What did those frigging old ladies think? That they were better than him because they could ride a bicycle through the park? They were only good for one thing. His daughter wasn’t taking part in any competition.
His ban had little weight. First, because, by then, he had no practical authority. For his wife, he was like one of those intoxicated prophets of doom who shout in the streets, under the effects of a solvent-soaked rag. What’s more, he wouldn’t remember the episode the following day. His mornings were hostage to the hangovers that awaited the eggs his mother-in-law prepared for breakfast.
The tragedy was that the child had heard it all. Her mind paid no attention to the actual words and only processed what was not said: her dad had lost an arm and it was her fault. She stealthily hurried to her closet, being careful not to wake her grandmother or brother—with whom she’d shared a bed her whole life—took a plush turtle out of the plastic bag where it lived,