MARTÍN. My life as always. I just came from explaining my Precepts class. A real hell. It was a beautiful lesson: “Concept and definition of Harmony”, but the children are not interested at all. And what children! As they see me as useless, they respect me a little bit; sometimes a pin on the seat, or a little toy figure on my back, but they do horrible things to my classmates. They are the children of the rich and, as they pay, they cannot be punished. That’s what the director always tells us. Yesterday they insisted that poor Mr. Canito, the new Geography teacher, was wearing a corset, because his body tilts backwards, and when he was alone in the yard, the big boys and the boarders got together, stripped him from the waist up, tied him to one of the columns in the corridor and threw a pitcher of water at him from the balcony.
TÍA. Poor creature!
MARTÍN. Every day I enter the school trembling in anticipation of what they are going to do to me, although, as I say, they are rather respectful of my misfortune. A while ago there was a huge scandal, because Mr. Consuegra, who is an admirable Latin teacher, had found cat excrement on his class list.
TÍA. ¡They are the enemy!
MARTÍN. They are the ones who pay and we live with them. And, believe me, the parents laugh at the infamies, because as we are the interns and we are not going to examine their children, they see us as men without feeling, as people placed in the last step of people who still wear a tie and an ironed collar.
TÍA. Oh, Don Martin, what a world this is!
MARTÍN. What a world! I always dreamed of being a poet. They gave me a natural flower and I wrote a play that could never be performed.