#21 The Dumbest Kid in the Class …

Montelobado, west of Salamanca, just off the Portuguese border, is still asleep as I walk to the fountain in the center of the village square to fetch water for tea and coffee. The fresh air bites my lungs. Boris the tiny terrier, proudly trotting beside me, bites my sweatpants’ legs. Old houses, traditionally built of rough stone, wherever I look. Similarly built, hip-high walls surround horticultural plots, huertos, between the houses as larger plots for livestock, still in daily use, surround the village. Montelobado bathes in tranquility, disturbed only by birdsong and accentuated by the vultures circling above the village.

As happens every morning since Heidi and I moved to Montelobado six weeks ago, I feel like I’m back in 1926, which, perhaps, makes sense because 1926 is chiseled into the fountain's stone casing. A bronze tap protrudes from that casing, and the water the villagers leave untapped flows into a round stone basin around which shepherds gathered with their goats, sheep, and cows until such pools—rectangular, concrete, idyllic still—were also built around the village.

Life is good in Montelobado in 1926. General Primo de Rivera’s infrastructural reforms and the absence of agricultural reform do not harm the village at all. No hunger or poverty in Montelobado since its founding in the twelfth century. No hunger in 1926 either, and poverty feels like an odd, abstract notion, though young people talk about it frequently of late. To escape the poverty in Montelobado—which no one seems to suffer from—more and more young people migrate to the city, where the big money calls.

What those young people forget is that big money is relative. In Montelobado, money is a notion as odd and abstract as poverty, so what could big money mean in Montelobado? And if all young people in the city earn big money, how big, exactly, is that money? What those young people also forget is that they must do mind-numbing, back-breaking, and sometimes dangerous work for their big money, fifty hours each week at least, while in Montelobado, no one ever works. Sure, everyone—from the apicultor, the beekeeper, to the zapatero, the cobbler—sometimes puts her or his shoulders to the wheel. But work? No, no one works in Montelobado, and what the villagers fill their days with is certainly not mind-numbing.

Housing is another problem in the city. Migrants live there como sardines en lata in poorly constructed houses. But the city, all migrants agree, eliminates the uncertainty inherent to agricultural life in Montelobado, and eh… what a strange story that is! If the weather is sometimes unfavorable or if certain insects target a specific crop, people in the city suffer the consequences; no one in Montelobado goes a bite short for it.

“But in the city,” migrants mutter as they step off the stagecoach in Montelobado just before Christmas—faces pale, cheeks sunken—after a train journey to Ciudad Rodrigo and a day in that stagecoach, “in the city we can go to the hospital. In Montelobado, we can’t.”

True. In Montelobado, however, there is rarely anyone sick. Fresh air, healthy food, exercise in the sun, laughter, making music, dancing, singing, acting, playing games, tinkering, and … there's no arguing with migrants. Life in the city is better than in Montelobado y basta! In one of the cafés, after a glass of tinto in front of the hearth—beside which a carved wooden belén, a nativity scene, sits prominently—migrants repeat and repeat that their children have more opportunities in the city. Their children, after all, can go to school in the city. Not to spoil the Christmas spirit, most villagers leave it at that. Children in the city—everyone understands it; no one says it—must go to school because parents don't have time to teach their children to do math, to read, write, and properly argue nor to tutor them in history, geography, botany, zoology, and whatnot. And family and neighbors, who normally take on some of the teaching and tutoring responsibilities, live far away.

The exodus to the city gained momentum in 1919, after the introduction of the retiro obrero, the workers' pension. Those who work as laborers in the city until the age of sixty-five receive a monthly payment without having to work for it any longer. It's incomprehensible how such a promise impresses people. To cover costs, five percent is deducted from a laborer's wages, and turning sixty-five in the city is eh… whatever. And yet, precisely because the retiro obrero is relatively high in Bilbao, many young people from Montelobado migrate there to spend long days breathing metal fumes in a foundry, lugging cargo in the harbor, riveting in a shipyard, toiling in a mine, performing the same task over and over again behind an assembly line in an armaments factory, or laying bricks, bricks, and bricks on houses for more laborers. But for what? To escape from what? Because of a belief in what? Or is it really just that big money and that workers’ pension?

Admittedly, the villagers of Montelobado sometimes worry. Three years ago, Primo de Rivera ousted the politicians who pretended to serve the people of Spain while in fact only serving the people who once made truly big money, trading overseas goods, and who now own foundries, ships, shipyards, mines, armaments factories, and construction companies. Rivera is not concerned with Montelobado, which is good because a national government shouldn't concern itself with the goings-on of villages. But how long will it be before the owners of foundries, ships, shipyards, mines, armaments factories, and construction companies—and let's not forget the owners of banks—find a way to exert sufficient influence on Rivera's officers to oust him and reinstall—democratically, of course—a regime of corrupt politicians? If young people from Montelobado are willing to sacrifice the joy of life for what they call big money, how difficult can it be to corrupt someone with political ambitions or—and let it be a pesadilla, a bad dream—to seduce young people straight out of school, groom them, and push them, saintlike, into the political arena? However anti-capitalist Rivera may be, no hay cerradura segura si la ganzúa es de oro, no lock is safe if the master key is made of gold.

More migration to Bilbao means that those villagers in Montelobado immune to the magic of the words money and retiro obrero will be forced to work, to truly work, under the pressure of a centralizing government. Who else will feed the workers in Bilbao? Reforms in the agricultural sector will then be inevitable, and … out of the corner of my eye, I see a long, steel arm moving with which an early-morning villager lowers a bucket into a well in her or his huerto. In two hours, those arms—there’s one next to every well in every huerto—will be going up and down all over Montelobado as villagers irrigate their crops.

The rain let us down over the last few months, but the crops in the huertos are thriving nevertheless. Every afternoon, villagers come and go with wheelbarrows laden with fruits and vegetables, and every afternoon, when Heidi and I return from a walk with Boris, we find a pile of fruits and vegetables on our doorstep—fruits and vegetables that taste like fruits and vegetables! Courgettes, eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, leeks, garlic, onions, pumpkins, cabbage, spinach, lettuce, pears, apples, grapes, peaches, nectarines, quinces, and whatnot. I'd never eaten quinces before, and eh… nothing wrong with quinces! During our walks with Boris, Heidi and I pick berries, figs, plums, and all sorts of herbs and gather the first chestnuts. Once the first autumn rain has fallen, we’ll search for mushrooms, which will then appear.

September 10, 2025. Water trickles from the tap protruding from the fountain's casing, which, we learned, is normal at the end of summer. Still, the water from that tap tastes better than water from the wells in the huertos, and as Boris and I patiently wait until the carafe I've placed under the tap slowly fills, my thoughts drift to a neighborhood under construction in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, where I ended up during the summer break between my last kindergarten year and elementary school.

On Sundays, around the few finished and already occupied houses in the neighborhood, people came and went with wheelbarrows laden with bags of soil, plants, and small trees they had bought the previous Saturday afternoon at a garden center in Rotterdam. Beautiful gardens took shape, and by the spring of 1971, most finished and occupied houses were bathed in a sea of flowers. But although every street in the neighborhood was named after a type of herb, no one planted anything edible in their gardens. I didn't have time to worry about it, spending long days romping among houses under construction, feigning delight each evening while eating boiled-to-a-pulp vegetables from the supermarket and, so as not to lack any vitamins, a supermarket apple or orange—not feigning delight, for, back then, apples and oranges still tasted like apples and oranges.

The Herb Neighborhood under construction was a playground paradise, and the school there wasn't yet finished. Unfortunately, the school in the adjacent Grass Neighborhood—where every street was named after a type of grass—was already finished, and all too soon the day came when I no longer spent long days romping among houses under construction but stared out the window of Ms. de Zwart's classroom or at a wall poster of Floris V, captured by the nobles, the only decoration in the classroom. Since my arrival in the Herb Neighborhood, I had been Floris, handcrafted wooden sword in hand. In Ms. de Zwart's classroom, at a table in front of her desk—so close to her she could grab me by the scruff of the neck if I moved in a way she didn't approve of—I felt captured. Her grabbing hands notwithstanding, I liked Ms. de Zwart. Ms. de Zwart, however, didn't like me at all, and that had much to do with the pace at which she taught us, a pace she adapted to the dumbest kid in the class, which I thought ridiculous, even though it quickly became clear that the dumbest kid in the class was me.

I could already do math and could read and write, but I didn't seem able to argue, and every time I raised my hand to ask something, Ms. de Zwart's face darkened. Of most other things she tried to teach us I understood little, like when she taught us—repeatedly—that children in the Netherlands, our time and age, should be happy to be able to go to school. The class nodded in agreement, and probably because my eyebrows shot up, Ms. de Zwart—her face darkening—explained that we should be happy because in the past, children couldn't go to school, leaving me feeling dumber than I already did.

Little did I know that Ms. de Zwart was confusing a comparative evaluation with a normative one, subjecting me to disciplining rhetoric and molding me into an accepting subject rather than a knowing one. Argumentum ad relative privationem. I'd never heard of it, but Ms. de Zwart—and that was worse—hadn't either.

“Miss de Zwart,” I might have said, had I read Popper instead of Karl May, “we learn by eliminating mistakes, not by celebrating small successes.”

And had I known Arendt instead of Eagle Eye—a hero from one of the book series I devoured—I could have added, “You must teach me to judge, not to accept,” to which, had I been inspired by Adorno rather than by Dumas’s Athos or Dantès, I could then have added, “Relative improvement—if sitting motionless in this dull classroom, listening to your nonsense, is better than what I would have engaged in in the past—usually masks structural deficiency.”

Ms. de Zwart, when I asked, wouldn't tell me—probably couldn’t—what vitamins were, but she enthusiastically taught us about other topics, from agricultural reform to the welfare state. It was all dandy and peaches, and I desperately wanted to understand why. But whenever Ms. de Zwart bothered to explain something, I felt so dumb. And because I didn't like to see her face darken, I bit my tongue when she taught us how dandy and peaches it was that the Netherlands wasn't a dictatorship, where only one man or woman forms the government.

"Like Mr. Hitler!" three or four children shouted in unison when I could no longer bite my tongue and shouted, "Like Floris!" immediately reading from Ms. de Zwart's face how dumb I had been once again.

"Floris V was an aristocrat," Ms. de Zwart reprimanded me, "and living in a dictatorship or an aristocracy is horrible, because people aren't allowed to choose their government like they are allowed in a democracy."

“Dictators and aristocrats who dissatisfy the people they rule will be banished or murdered,” I heard myself thinking, but just like Ms. De Zwart unfamiliar with the words false dichotomy, I felt dumber than dumb as usual.

Ms. de Zwart was pregnant. Halfway through the year, it was Ms. de Bruin, no joke—zwart means black in Dutch, bruin brown—who took over from her. Ms. de Bruin encouraged us to place a bean in a matchbox filled with some damp cotton wool. As soon as the bean sprouted a root, we had to put it in a pot with soil and drip water onto it for some days. If we did it right, we would learn how a bean grows into a plant. When I asked Ms. de Bruin why we weren't planting beans in the gardens around our houses, her face darkened.

The confirmation that doubt is my best advisor was all my backpack was filled with when, years later, the college doors closed behind me for the last time. After twelve years of education—not counting kindergarten—I entered life with a backpack practically empty. Back then, I tempered my resentment—I should have seen to it that those college doors closed behind me years earlier—with the thought that my backpack would have been filled with ballast had I not been too dumb for formal education, and … Boris puts a paw on my thigh. Lost in thought, I’ve sat down on the edge of the stone basin around the fountain. Just behind me, the carafe has filled. I grab it, get up, walk back to our house, and as Boris bites the legs of my sweatpants, I realize that I sometimes worry like the villagers in Montelobado did, back in 1926. What if those villagers could have stopped the migration to Bilbao? Can Europe still break with organizations like the EU, NATO, and the WHO before it's too late, or have our Ms. de Zwarts performed their duties so well that reason and logic have meanwhile become rudimentary? How long can we persist in what we do because tomorrow will be better than the past without attempting to discover how things really were in the past and how things really are today?

An hour of studying fallacies—whose use was once forbidden and is now mainstream—and reality looks different. We correct ourselves when we accidentally use a fallacy, stop taking heavy users like politicians, journalists, and teachers seriously, and before we know it, we're laughing again, making music, dancing, singing, acting, playing games, and tinkering while tutoring our grandchildren about the EU, NATO, and the WHO—mere footnotes in our history.

Boris jumps up at Heidi, who is standing in the doorway of our house and laughingly says, "What took you so long? You've been sitting on that fountain for an hour. You're not going to get much writing done that way."

"Whoa, whoa! Straw man and slippery slope! We can’t use those any longer because we have to get out of the EU."

"And eh... non si... non sequitur is still okay then?"

I chuckle and say, "Non sequitur. It doesn't follow. The invalid conclusion. How did you come up with that at a quarter past six in the morning? Still, I think the EU may well become a thing of the past if we truly banish fallacies from our lives, so my joke wasn't really a non sequitur. But you're right. No non sequiturs either, for if we keep using them, we'll go on believing that Russia will invade the rest of Europe because it invaded Ukraine."

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