The chocolate padlock

Water in a basket

The chocolate padlock

By Dalia Céspedes

HAVANA – Today my soul is in mourning because it saw a padlock on the door to a school. Needless to say, I cannot explain to an element as delicate as the soul is – which sometimes trembles in the presence of slow reasoning – the reasoning that lies behind such a folly.

One should go to school as if to a party. In fact, that emotion seizes many children on the first day of school. Except that when the costumes become uniforms, the discoveries become routine, and the paper treasures turn into innumerable sheets of paper interminably scratched, the party ends and the dance of rules begins:

Stand up.

Sit down.

Remain seated.

Remain standing.

Form a file.

Break file.

Form a circle. Ah, the circle, then the triangle, the rectangle, the rectangle formed by the iron gate. And the padlock, so square, as dense as the reasoning.

Two and two is four and if 2 plus 2 is 4 it’s because the teacher is always right. The boy sighs for a 2 plus 2 is 5 (like that madman in Tarkovsky’s film “Nostalgia.”) So sighs the teacher, very much in the depths of her heart so the child won’t notice, in the depths of her adult ignorance, an ignorance that is no longer soft and fresh as a sheet of paper with no scratches.

We can confidently mistrust the innocence of adults because it’s an innocence squared, yet it’s the innocence of someone who doesn’t know it’s unfair. But as to the padlock, that one never sighs.

Does any of us really want to be cured? Of what? Of the deadly disease that afflicts us. To put up fences: a symptom. It is not a true disease, rather, fever and aching eyes. Although it is a pandemic and world-endemic enterprise, it is a symptom with enormous results. The industrial failure of conscience.

But the febrile square grid, the arithmetical hive of grammatical bees dividing “my mother loves me” into noun and predicate, trees into syllables, horizons into segments A and B, the circle into radii, the radii into phonemes, the phonemes into digits, the digits into subjects … I mean, how come fleeing from school is not yet the true course subject?

Behold the little red-and-white dwarfs with their heavy military backpacks camouflaged with violent dolls or flowers. Flowers! Plastic butterflies! Bat men or space aliens alight on their backpacks to accompany them to the barracks turned into schools.

Is it that someone expects to be cured, really, or cure the chaos with a blow of a ruler?

I ask, and I ask the soul, already shackled to those conditions worthy of the most macabre children’s stories. Is it that someone plans to cure everything by placing on the door to the geometrical hovel a beautiful chocolate padlock?

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