Small Memories by José Saramago Page B

but the teacher must have interpreted it as an indication of future behavior and he warned me at once that he was going to mark me down. This was a shame, because I hadn't done anything so very wrong. Later, however, he realized that he did not, in fact, have a professional agitator in his class and amended his earlier suspicions. As new recruits into the first year, we didn't know the teachers' names and so were disconcerted when the mathematics teacher, without introducing himself, merely informed us that he was the author of the book we would be studying from. Of course, no one dared to ask: "But what's your
name,
sir?" It was a porter who came to our rescue. The teacher's name was Germano. I can't remember his surname.
    During my first year, I was a good student in all subjects, with the exception of Choral Singing, which I only ever scraped through. My reputation reached such heights that, occasionally, older students would come into our classroom and ask which one was Saramago, I presume because they'd heard their teachers mention me. (This was the happy time when my father would always carry a piece of paper in his pocket to show his friends, a scrap of paper with my marks typewritten on it, beneath the heading "My champ's marks." In capitals.) My reputation reached such extravagant proportions that, at the beginning of the second year, when there were elections to the Academic Association, I was elected, if you please, to the post of treasurer. At the age of twelve. I remember being handed a pile of papers (subscriptions and balance sheets) which I barely understood and which, in fact, served no purpose whatsoever. My second year went badly. I don't know what was going on inside my head, maybe I'd begun to suspect that my feet were not intended for that road or perhaps I'd exhausted the store of energy I'd brought with me from primary school. Also, my father had started to work out the cost of it all, of a complete secondary school education, and to what end? My marks that year were generally low. In mathematics, for example, I didn't get a single pass in the first term or the second, and if I got quite a high mark in the third term, that leap—which would allow me to take the exam—was not, I can assure you, due to some final, desperate flurry of activity on my part. Not at all. On the day when he announced the marks he intended to give us, the mathematics teacher had the very nice idea of asking the class as a whole if they thought I knew more about the science of numbers than my low marks would seem to indicate, and my classmates, in a display of solidarity and unanimity, replied: "Yes, sir, he does." Although the fact is, I didn't.
    The entrance to the Liceu Gil Vicente was via a ramp that ran parallel with the narrow road that connects Largo de São Vicente to Campo de Santa Clara. The main door opened immediately onto a large walled area which was where we gathered at break time. I remember it as an enormous space (I don't know what it's like today, or if, indeed, it still exists) and have the idea that all the students, from first year to seventh, would have fitted in with room to spare. Once, as I mentioned earlier, I took such a tumble in the yard that I cut open my knee and bore the scar for many years. I was taken to the doctor's, and the male nurse (there was always a nurse on duty) applied a kind of clamp, known as a
gato,
to the wound. I described this
gato
earlier and I'll just give a few more details here. It was a small, narrow, rectangular piece of metal, which at first sight resembled an ordinary piece of tin, with the ends bent at right angles, and these would be pressed down on the edges of the wound and then gently squeezed until the edges met, thus helping the torn tissues to heal more quickly. I vividly remember the impression it made on me to see (and feel, although it wasn't that painful) the metal pressing into the skin. Afterward, I had to walk around with a bandaged knee and a