My Documents by Megan McDowell Alejandro Zambra Page B

loves. I remember one student who wrote to John Paul II to explain why she no longer believed in God (her letter prompted a horrible and convoluted fight that almost came to blows, but in the end we were all better for it). By now they liked the class: the only thing they wanted to do was write letters, express feelings, explore what was happening to them—except for Pamela, who avoided me and abstained from class participation. And, despite my best efforts, we hadn’t run into each other in the metro again.
    One night, at the beginning of class, a student raised his hand and told me that he wanted to write a letter of resignation because he was planning to quit his job. He started talking, then, about the problems he had with his boss; I tried to give him advice, but I was possibly the least qualified person in the room to do that. Someone told him he was irresponsible, that before quitting he should think about how he was going to live and how he would pay for school. A weighty and serious silence followed, which I didn’t know how to fill.
    “I want to write the letter,” he told us then. “I’m not going to quit, I couldn’t, I have kids, I have problems, but I still want towrite that letter. I want to imagine what it would be like to quit. I want to tell my boss how I really feel about him. I want to tell him he’s a son of a bitch, but without using that word.”
    “It’s not a word, it’s several,” said a student sitting in the first row.
    “What?”
    “It’s four words: son of a bitch.”
    We started on the letter. We wrote the first paragraphs on the board, but because the class period was coming to an end, we agreed to pick up the exercise next time.
    Only there wasn’t a next time. I arrived on Monday just early enough to pick up the folder and go to the classroom, but the building was boarded up and there was even fresh paint on the facade. The institute no longer existed. The students explained all this to me, devastated. They had already paid their tuition that month, and a few had even paid the whole year in advance, taking advantage of a discount.
    That night I went with my students to a bar on Avenida España. They didn’t usually go out together and they’d never become friends, so while some of them spoke about their lives and got to know each other, the rest just focused on their beers and churrasco sandwiches. Pamela was at the opposite end of the table, with another group, and never talked to me, but I timed things so that, after leaving the bar, we met on the way to the metro. I went with her again to the bus in Plaza Italia, and when we said good-bye she told me that she felt overly watched by me, but that if I didn’t look at her so much, maybe she would start to like me. “But we’re never going to see each other again,” I told her. “Who knows,” she replied.
    The sessions with Juan Emilio weren’t as easy as I’d thought they’d be. He didn’t question the books I chose, but he tried to extract messages and morals from them—as most people do, it must be said. Every week I gave him an exercise to do at home, and he always arrived with a bottle of wine in apology: “I didn’t get to finish my homework,” he’d tell me, with a sort of mischievous gesture, and then off he would go, talking with a dizzying erudition about the vintage or the vineyard of the wine he’d brought, using that language that seemed as funny to me as literary terminology must have seemed to him. Juan Emilio was an executive of something, but I chose not to delve too deeply into his work, basically for the same reason I chose not to ask him what he thought about Pinochet’s return: I didn’t want to find out that he was a bloodsucking tycoon or anything like that—I didn’t want to have any reason to despise him.
    On the other hand, I came to know a lot about his family: I started to really take an interest in his children’s lives, which were in no way interesting. From our conversations