He was humiliated in the middle of the Praça das Acacias, punched as if he were a stray dog at the mercy of some ferocious gang. His white jacket was splashed with red, and he spun around inside the bandstand, his hands blindly searching for support, his swollen face turned up towards the sun, his body twisting aimlessly, staggering, stumbling down the steps until he fell at the edge of the pond in the square. The booing and the protests of the students and teachers from the lyceum had no effect on the police. Laval was dragged to an army vehicle, and the doors of the Café Mocambo were immediately closed. Many doors were shut when two days later we heard that Antenor Laval was dead. All this was in April, the first few days of April.

The morning the teacher was hunted down, I picked up his battered briefcase, dropped at the edge of the pond. Inside the case were his books and sheets with poems, full of blotches.

These were my memories of Laval: the lessons he gave, his accomplished calligraphy, the letters almost traced out; his words, carefully weighed and then weighed again. He had no desire to be called a poet; that wasn’t his style. He detested pomposity, and laughed at the provincial politicians, the butt of his jokes in break time, but he refused to talk about such things in class. He said: “Politics is for the break; in class, we’ve higher things to discuss. Let’s go back to what we were saying the other night …”

It rained a lot, a fearful downpour, on the day of his death. Even so, Laval’s pupils and ex-pupils gathered in the bandstand, lit torches, and we all had at least one of the master’s handwritten poems. The bandstand was full, lit by a circle of fire. Someone suggested a minute’s silence in homage to the martyred schoolmaster. Then, an ex-pupil of the lyceum began to read one of Laval’s poems. Omar was the last one to recite. He was moved and unhappy. The rain underlined the sadness, but it also incited rebellion. There were bloodstains on the bandstand floor. Omar wrote one of Laval’s lines in red ink, and for a long time the words stayed there, firm and legible, a homage to the memory of one man, and perhaps of many more.

For once, this once only, I felt no anger towards Omar; I couldn’t hate him on that rainswept afternoon, with our faces lit by torches, our ears attentive to the words of a dead man, our gaze fixed on the facade of the lyceum, on the black cloth hanging from the eaves down to the threshold. The school was in mourning for a master who had been murdered: that’s how that April began for me, and for many of us.