Читать книгу The President’s Room - Ricardo Romero - Страница 11

When I said the president had never come to our neighbourhood, that wasn’t entirely true. Our school is in our neighbourhood, and the president visited a boy from our school once. Or at least, that’s what people say. Everyone says it, because there’s not much else to say about the president, although nobody dares to ask the boy, who is slightly older than me, if it’s true. The boy lives in a different neighbourhood but he goes to our school, like lots of children from other neighbourhoods. That’s normal. It’s a big school, and there aren’t enough children in our neighbourhood to fill it. And a school should be full.

We’re not jealous of him. The boy’s no different to any of us. There’s nothing about him to make us think he’s special, or that his family’s different. He walks around the playground with his tie loose and his sleeves rolled up, he laughs and gets angry as quickly as any of us. He’s tall and skinny and always well-groomed. He is pale. But then, lots of us are pale. Sometimes I bump into him in the toilets and he’s always slicking his hair back with a comb he keeps in his back pocket. I’ve never dared talk to him because he’s older than me. But I’ve heard him talking to boys his age, and he doesn’t seem to stand out for any particular reason. He laughs at anything, gets angry at anything, nudges his friends when one of the pretty girls walks past. Like my friends and I do. I don’t know why, but at school we’re all like that. We act as if we were younger, as if we enjoyed being with other people, even though when we’re alone at home we’re overwhelmed by an anxiety that makes us want to hide away, to be even more alone. I don’t know where the others hide, where the boy the president visited hides, but I hide in the attic.

There’s no proof and nobody’s asked him about it, but I’m sure what people say is true: that the president went to the boy’s house. At school events or when the headmistress is making her speeches, at moments when we all have to be quiet and pay attention, I’ve seen him, I’ve watched him, and I’m certain that while we’re all sitting there, bored stiff, our minds wandering, he’s thinking only about one thing. He’s thinking about the president. There’s a worried look on his face, as if it’s suddenly become the face of an adult. Because he’s thinking about the president a lot, much more than we are.