School Year 1975-1976
My Grade Two experience was not as vivid or as warm as Grade One had been.
The teacher rarely acknowledged my efforts, and a quiet sense of being overlooked followed me through the school day like a heavy blow.
Yet the moment I stepped through our front door each afternoon, that weight was being lifted. Home was where joy lived, and no teacher, no bully, no indifference could reach me there.
In Grade Two, I was placed in Section 3, morning classes this time, in the same building as before, but at the far opposite end of the corridor.
My teacher was Mrs. Fausto. I can still conjure a vague image of her face: eyeglasses perched neatly on her nose, a composed bearing, a woman who carried herself with quiet, almost distant authority.
By this point, something had changed in me. The scattered, restless boy of Grade One had begun, almost without noticing, to grow into a student.
My memory had sharpened considerably, and I could recite our entire book about Dr. Jose Rizal, every page, every passage, from beginning to end without so much as glancing at the text.
Mathematics, once a fog of confusion, had begun to clear. I had mastered addition and subtraction, and I noticed that some of my classmates would lean over and peer at my answers during seat work.
I did not mind, at first. There was something quietly satisfying about being someone others relied upon. But I was also, in those days, a boy with a mischievous streak.
Sometimes I would let them copy my work, the wrong answers, and then, when they were done, I would calmly erase mine and write the correct ones.
I do not know if any of them ever realized what I had done. If they did, they never said a word.
Despite my growing confidence and genuine effort, Mrs. Fausto never seemed to notice. There was no word of encouragement, no nod of recognition, nothing that told me she saw what I was trying to do.
In time, a quiet realization settled over me like a chill: she had her favorites, and I was not among them.
One morning, she singled me out in front of the class. Her voice sharpened as she called me dirty, disgusting, even.
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I froze, heat rising to my face, searching for whatever had provoked such words. I looked down and found my answer: a dark stain of corn coffee had spread across my shirt, spilled during breakfast and forgotten in the rush to school.
It was a child's careless accident. But the way she said it, loudly, deliberately, with the whole class watching, made it feel like something far worse. Like a verdict.
I said nothing. I swallowed the humiliation whole and sat back down.
That is what you learn, at seven years old, when the person in authority has already decided not to be on your side: you swallow, and you carry on.
Then there was Jose.
He was smaller than me, thinner, and by any physical measure, far less imposing.
Yet I feared him, a deep, irrational, stomach-tightening fear that I could not explain then and can barely explain now.
Perhaps it was because the teacher, whenever a conflict erupted between us, invariably sided with him. Her protection of him was its own kind of power and he wore it like armor.
One afternoon on the playground, the tension between us finally broke open.
We exchanged punches. I cried, not quietly, not privately, but with the full, heaving, helpless grief of a child overwhelmed. So overcome was I that I wet my pants, and the shame of that only made me cry harder.
My older brother, Artemio Jr., was nearby with his own classmates. He saw everything. From across the yard, he shouted: "Fight, you coward!"
His words landed like a second blow. Still weeping, I threw punches, wild, reluctant, half-hearted swings that connected with nothing and convinced no one.
Least of all myself. I do not remember how it ended. I only remember how it felt: the burning eyes, the damp clothes, the ringing echo of my brother's voice, and the terrible knowledge that I had failed some test of boyhood I had never asked to take.
Not everything about Grade Two was marked by disgrace and shame. There was also Edgar.
Edgar Umbay was both a friend and a relative, the son of Belinda Umbay, my father’s niece.
His family ran a stall in the public market, and their home stood just behind a place we called Villa Tambis.
I visited often. His parents welcomed me, often leading me straight to the kitchen and offering food as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
In their home, I felt at ease, not the problem child, well behaved. I was simply a relative’s child, welcomed warmly because of their high regard for my parents.
Because our morning classes ended early, the afternoons were often devoted to school gardening. Our teacher had asked us to bring fertilizer, so I walked to Edgar’s house to collect some horse manure. There were many horses in their neighborhood, and I believe they owned one as well.
We planted onions in the soft, freshly turned soil. They grew with a quiet, unhurried persistence that I found fascinating. Their success depended largely on the fertilizer itself, especially the dried horse manure, gathered and carried without a second thought by a seven-year-old boy.
There is something deeply grounding about placing a seed into the earth and watching life emerge from it.
Even then, though I lacked the words to name it, I could feel it, the small, stubborn lesson the garden was teaching: that growth does not require ideal conditions, only patience and the right kind of nourishment.
It was beside the school garden that we made the strangest discovery of the year, perhaps of our entire childhood.
Half-buried in the soil lay clusters of peculiar crystalline stones, unlike anything we had ever seen: dense, glinting, and strangely beautiful.
We gathered around them the way children gather around mysteries, with a blend of reverence and reckless curiosity.
In the earnest, self-important manner of children, we gave them a name: living stones.
The name felt deserved. When you cracked one open and held its freshly exposed surface close to your hair, something uncanny occurred.
Your strands would lift and draw toward it gently, but unmistakably, as though guided by an invisible force.
There was a faint sting, just enough to make you flinch, but never enough to make you stop.
We stood in the afternoon sun, laughing and wincing in equal measure, pressing the broken stones to our heads again and again, marveling at a force none of us could explain.
To this day, I have never encountered anything quite like them.
Were they naturally magnetic? A quirk of volcanic geology? Or simply the kind of wonder that reveals itself only to children?
I do not know. I know only this: they were real. And for a brief season in Grade Two, they were ours to marvel at.
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