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inertia of the situation. By then the rest of the students had become used to my being there; they put up with me, without recognizing me, the way initiates put up with the presence of a dilettante. That day, as far as I remember, there were fewer people than on other occasions. It seemed obvious, though, that fewer of them were current students and more were recent graduates, a collage of smooth faces with a smattering of ties, the odd briefcase, a few attentive or mature expressions. The light of the lecture hall had always been insufficient, but that day one of the fluorescent tubes flickered till it went out just after my father settled his overcoat on the back of his chair. So, in the gloomy half-light of pale neon, all the faces had bags under their eyes, including the professor's; some faces (not the professor's) yawned. One of the students, the nape of whose neck would serve as my landscape during the class, caught my attention, and it took a moment to understand why: on top of his desk was a book, and I'm sure I choked--though nobody noticed--when I realized it was mine. (The title, more than legible, was insolent; my own name seemed to be shouting at me from the too colorful rectangle of the cover.) The air was a mixture of chalk dust and accumulated sweat--the sweat of so many people listening to so many lectures all day long--my father was far away, with his good hand fingering the buttonholes of his jacket in one of his Napoleonic gestures. He greeted the room in two words. He didn't need any more to generate a wave of terrified silence, to paralyze the chairs and open all eyes.
    He began the class talking about one of his favorite speeches: not only was "On the Crown" Demosthenes' best speech, it was also a revolutionary text, although that adjective is applied to other things these days, a text that had changed the vocation of public speaking as much as gunpowder had changed warfare. My father told how he'd learned it by heart when he was very young--a brief autobiographical interlude, not at all usual in this man who jealously guarded his privacy, but nothing too surprising; or that's what I thought, at least, under the strange gloom of that afternoon--and he said the best way to memorize someone else's words was to get a job far away from where you lived, as he did when he was twenty, taking advantage of simultaneous transport and oil workers' strikes, accepting a three-month job for eighty-five pesos a month, driving a fuel tanker between the Troco plants in Barrancabermeja and the buyers in Bogota. It was an anecdote that I'd already heard on several occasions; when I was a teenager, the tale had conjured up legendary images of the open road, but there was something obscene or exhibitionist in its public retelling. "On those trips I learned more than one important text by heart," he said. "I spent many hours on the road, and the assistant I'd been assigned was the closest thing to a mute I've ever met. But he wasn't an impoverished student like me, or even a miner, but the son of the truck's owner, perfectly useless, he did nothing but listen to me when he wasn't asleep. Anyway, driving a truck full of gasoline, I learned a good part of 'On the Crown,' a very particular speech, because it's the speech of a man whose political career has failed, and who finds himself at the end of his life forced to defend himself. And without wanting to, which is worse. Only because one of his political allies decided to nominate him for a prize, while another, an enemy, a certain Aeschines, opposed it. That was the situation. Demosthenes, poor guy, hadn't even wanted to be decorated. And he was faced with this terrible task--impossible for anyone, of course, except the greatest. Any senator would have been daunted. Aeschines himself would have run away in fright. Convincing the public of the nobility of one's own errors, justifying disasters one is responsible for, apologizing for a life that one might know to be mistaken,