Miss Margarida’s Way
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That’s just the way Miss Margarida wants it. The heroine of Roberto Athayde’s blistering satire on sex, school, and society is a psychotic superteacher who wants to prepare a generation of well-adjusted adults–good little consumers who won’t shake up the status quo epitomized by her beloved but unseen principal, to whom she offers a devout genuflection combined with a stiff-armed Nazi salute. By rapid turns sweet, seductive, sarcastic, and sadistic, Miss M. truly believes her brainwashing is benevolent. Sure, she sometimes lashes out at her “students”–the audience–calling us assholes and faggots; but it’s only because she loves us and wants us to be good. Striding off her dais (the stage) into the classroom (the tiny TurnAround Theatre, in whose intimate environs she truly seems larger-than-life), Miss M. fixes us with mean little eyes that peer over apple-red cheeks, correcting our posture and our politics–reminding us that she has the power, if not of life and death, at least to keep us in our seats after the bell rings.
This being the first day of the new term, she tantalizes us with the promise of sex education to come (absently fingering her crotch as she talks of how “tender” she can be), then makes us settle for quick lessons in biology (“All of you are going to die”), history (“Everyone wants to dominate everyone else”), English (“Write an essay describing your own funeral”), and math (a division problem using make-believe bananas teaches us how to get as much as we can for ourselves while everyone else goes hungry). But these subjects are just reflections of the larger truth she teaches by leading us in her classroom catechism: “The deserving ones, who are they? They are those who obey.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Isabel Raci.
