My Nemesis

She had blond, curly hair and a freckled face, the legacy of some Visigothic invader tangled up in the roots of her family tree, and to me she was as alarming as if she had been a warrior complete with horned helmet and assegai. To be fair, it didn’t take much to alarm me in those days. Having had little contact with other children before starting school, I found most of my classmates, except for the unfortunates who hung out with me at the bottom of the pecking order, frightening.

Grownups, even the stern German nuns who ran the school, I could handle. They were for the most part logical, polite, and reliable. But the girls in my class were as alien to me as zoo animals. They whispered and giggled and passed notes during lessons. They broke in line, shoving and pushing. During recess I watched in bafflement as they ran around yelling at the top of their lungs, chasing each other and forming mysterious alliances.

Of all these incomprehensible beings, la Soler was the worst. (We all went by our last names. I was la Benejam, sort of like la Callas.) Daily she was reprimanded for talking in class, making noise in the halls, laughing in the chapel. “Du böses Mädchen!” the teacher endlessly chided her.  Yet despite her misbehavior, la Soler had lots of friends. How, I wondered, was this possible?

I had not entirely wasted my hours on the playground, however. I had been listening to my classmates the way one listens to the natives of a foreign country, trying to figure out their motives and learn their dialect. And I had heard girls ask each other “me estás amiga?” are you my friend? (If you know Spanish you may note the use of the verb estar, which indicates a passing state, as opposed to ser, indicating permanence—a hint of the fragility of these alliances.)

I thought that if I used that same sentence it would not fail to bring results. After all, nobody in  my life—meaning no adult—had ever turned down my overtures. So one day during recess I approached la Soler.

“Me estás amiga?” I whispered.

“No,” she said, and walked away.

But that was not the end of my sufferings at the hands of la Soler. Soon after that I was diagnosed with a “lazy” eye. To keep from losing vision in my left eye, I had to wear glasses with a black cup-like arrangement over the right eye. As soon as la Soler saw me in those weird glasses she informed her friends, who then told their friends, that I had a dangerous and extremely contagious eye disease.

My mother, when I sobbed out the story, sympathized but told me simply to ignore la Soler and company. Needless to say, life at school became even lonelier and more angst ridden.

And then, unexpectedly, things changed. La Soler told her father, a doctor, about my supposed disease. He was appalled and demanded that she apologize to me and set the other kids straight about my glasses. La Soler did as she was told. I can still remember the look in her face as she apologized—the mockery was gone, replaced by gentleness. To my surprise, instead of  resenting me and ratcheting up her attacks, la Soler became my friend.

At this point, I feel a moral coming on—something along the lines of, what didn’t kill me made me strong, or, the episode of the glasses gave me confidence in my ability to navigate social perils. But that did not happen, and I’m happy to say that I have never again had to face the kind of ostracism engineered by la Soler. Instead, the experience instilled in me a sense of the complexity of human beings, of the tangle of meanness, kindness, and sheer craziness that we all carry in our hearts. La Soler’s overnight transformation from tormentor to friend taught me that people, no matter how well you think you know them, will still surprise you, so it makes sense to delay judgment indefinitely.