Caroline was now in her element. With fervour she replied, ’He hasn’t got there yet. What a parent wishes for his child, and what the child accomplishes on his or her own to fulfill or frustrate that wish are two different things. It is up to the pupil to succeed or fail.’
The waiter brought the bill. Gutierrez stayed Caroline’s hand as she reached for her handbag. She protested, but he waved away both her protest and her embarrassed thanks, and then murmured a word or two to the waiter, who bowed and left.
‘Senorita, senorita, it is wealth that makes the difference. Rich people can ignore the law. I am sure it is the same in your country, but there it is not so obvious.’
‘Speaking of that, how are Enrique Lozada’s fees to be paid?’
‘Senorita, senorita.’ Gutierrez was smiling as they both rose from the table. ‘Do not worry about such things. I will take care of that. Your job is harder. Admit Enrique, and make a good man and a scholar out of him. Help him to see beyond the barrio. It is a big job. Are you up to the challenge?’
At home, from her bedroom window, in what her friends called her bijou apartment, heavily subsidized by the school in Altamira’s select residential district– all splashing fountains and gated community parks–Caroline reflected. Five floors below, uniformed mulatto maids watched their charges from the shade and flirted with the security guards in a paradise garden of palms and shrieking parrots, while the benign sun beat down upon happy children playing.
She had not acceded to the policeman’s plan, but she had not rejected it, either. She knew that to agree to his request was to compromise her professional integrity, but to refuse it was to run the risk of knowingly harbouring what she suspected was an illegal alien: alien in his own country, she wryly acknowledged, with all the embarrassment this would bring to the school, on the eve, no less, of her departure for the annual convention of the Association of International Schools of Latin America to be held this year in Sarasota.
Of course, it was in Gutierrez’s interest to keep quiet about his status as the boy’s father. Could she rely upon him to do so? Could he rely upon her? But it was really just an academic question at the moment, wasn’t it? The lad still had to be admitted….
As she crossed the apartment, she glanced at the lavish bouquet that had arrived that morning with a card in English, ’From your hapless admirer, with best wishes for success.’ Did he mean ‘hapless,’ ‘hopeless,’ or ‘hopeful,’ or was this, like his ‘mis-judged,’ yet another attempt at a pun? She folded her arms and looked out of the living-room window at the ‘panoramic view’ the developers had promised. On this side of the building in years gone by, the deep ravine or quebrada had been heavily forested, but since then, hordes of descamisados, ‘shirtless ones’ from the impoverished south had invaded, cut down and burned the wood, building mud-brick shanties roofed with corrugated tin and supplied with electricity and water stolen from overloaded public utilities. The open sewers that ran through these makeshift communities were such an affront to the nostrils of the apartment tenants that few ventured out on to their balconies. Sometimes, in the rainy season, torrents would dislodge a shanty or two and send them crashing into the gorge below, often with loss of life. She was reminded of King Lear‘s terrible insight: “Poor naked wretches… that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, how shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you from seasons such as these?”
Somewhere out there, in the sweat and stench and squalor lived Enrique Gutierrez-alias-Lozada, the fruit of his father’s fecklessness, and it was her impossible task to redeem him.
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