5

I fear nothing. I am in my third year of classical studies in high school. This is what my family wanted. I had no idea what I was doing. Mom attended Classical Lyceum. Dad attended Classical Lyceum. Grandma is the personification of Classical. Only our dog hasn’t gone there.

It opens your mind, it broadens your horizons, it gives structure to your way of thinking, it makes you more flexible …

And it breaks your balls from morning to night.

That’s the way it is. There is no reason for establishing a school of this kind. The profs, for sure, never explained it to me. First day of the new school year: introductions, orientation, and meeting the profs. A kind of excursion to the zoo—the profs, a protected species you hope is going to become definitively extinct. …

Afterward, some required entrance exams to verify the placement level of each student. And after this warm welcome … hell: turned into shadows and dust. Class assignments, explanations, oral exams like I had never seen before. In middle school, I would study about half an hour, if at all. Then, off to soccer anywhere that resembled a field, from the hallways of our house to the parking lot below. When worse came to worse, soccer on the PlayStation.

At school, it was a whole different story. If you wanted to pass the year, you had to study. Still, I really didn’t study much at all, because you only do things if you really believe in them. And no professor had ever convinced me otherwise. And if someone who dedicates his life to studying can’t convince you to do so, then why should I do it?

I go on the blog of The Dreamer. Yes, the substitute for History and Philosophy has a blog, and I am curious to see what he writes on it. Profs do not have real lives out of school. Out of school, they do not exist. So I wanted to see what somebody who had nothing to speak of would say. He spoke about a film that he had already seen for the umpteenth time: Dead Poets Society. He was talking about how he shared the same passion for teaching as the protagonist of the film. He was saying how this film had shown him what his role was on this earth. He went on like that, with a phrase both mysterious, but beautiful: “To grasp beauty wherever it may be, and give it to whoever is beside me. This is why I am in this world.”

You’ve got to admit that Prof Dreamer knows how to say things. In two sentences, anyone can see that he has understood his life. Sure, he is thirty, and, therefore, it is understandable that he has. But it isn’t often that someone says it with such clarity. At my age, his dream had ripened. He had a vision of his goal, and he has reached it.

I am sixteen, and I have no particular dreams, unless they are those I have at night but don’t remember in the morning. Erika-with-a-k maintains that dreams derive from reincarnation, from what we were in another life. Like that professional soccer player who says that in his past life he was a duck, and this perhaps has helped him develop his soccer finesse. Erika-with-a-k says that she was jasmine, and this is why she always smells so good. I like Erika-with-a-k’s perfume.

I do not believe in ever having been reincarnated. Anyway, if I could choose, I think I would prefer an animal to a plant: a lion, a tiger, a scorpion … Sure, reincarnation presents a problem, but it’s too complicated to think about now, and besides, I don’t have any memory of having been a lion, even if I have retained the mane and I can feel all the strength of a lion in my blood. This is why I must have been a lion, and that’s why my name is Leo. Leo in Latin means “lion.” Leo rugiens: “roaring lion.”

Anyhow, I am in the first year of Classical Lyceum, and I have passed the fourth and fifth terms of the school year almost intact. In the first year, Greek and math are obligatory. Second year, only Greek. Greek is like the vegetables of school. Bitter, and useful only for bowel transit, which means shitting your pants on the day of oral exams. …

But it is all Massaroni’s fault. The most nitpicky and merciless prof of the whole school. She wears dog fur—always and only that. She dresses in two styles: with a heavy dog-fur coat in winter, autumn, and spring; in summer … a lighter dog-fur coat. How can someone live like this? Maybe she was a dog in a past life? I have fun assigning past lives to people, because it helps me understand their character.

For instance, Beatrice must have been a star in her past life. Yes, because stars have a blinding luminosity all around them; you can see them from millions of light-years away. They are a concentration of red matter, incandescent and luminous. Beatrice is like that. You can see her from hundreds of yards away, and she shines with her red hair. Who knows, maybe one day I will be able to kiss her. By the way, in a short time, it is going to be her birthday. She might invite me to her party. This afternoon I am going to the bus stop in front of school—this way I’ll see her. Beatrice is red wine. She inebriates me: I love her.