His huge belly with a school of worms like that of an unborn kangaroo and his ability to sleep with his mouth open in the living room, led the whole class to call him Mr. Deputy.

His name was Viriato Bernardo Maposse. It was a sight to see him sleeping with his mouth open and the flies landing buzzing on the hint of his bad breath. From time to time he would wake up to moisten his lips with a brush of his tongue and go back to sleep. Longing for you, Viriato Bernardo Maposse.

…led the whole class to call him Mr. Deputy. His name was Viriato Bernardo Maposse.

He was a sick boy, and so, like the deputies, he had many perks: he didn't pick up papers in class, he had total immunity from the rulers of the multiplication table, and he had grade allowance on tests and essays.

Sometimes he would not set foot in school for months and to justify his absences an old man would come along, barefoot, with a bundle of recipes tied up in a rubber band, and talk to our teacher. It was the deputy's father, you could tell by the hunger scales on his dry lips. Mr. Deputy was evacuated from hospital to hospital, spent days in healers' clinics, and always came back the same; with remnants of health spilling out of the room when he breathed. And he always cracked from pills and roots.

He was a sickly boy and therefore, like the deputies, had many perks

And the whole class made fun of him. Zeferino was always the first; he laughed at the small buttocks of Mr. Deputy that were amputated by syringes in the hospitals and spiced up the joke: "the wheels on Mr. Deputy's Mercedes are out of air. And he would threaten us with a punch that he couldn't throw, a punch full of bones in his hands. Sometimes you cried, but you always had an answer: "you have benefits and yet you cry as if you were suffering.

You failed four times for absences and when you were about to fail for the fifth time you lowered the few eyelashes you had, opened your mouth and died at the Hospital Geral José Macamo. It was the first time that the Deputy was missed. When he died, the whole class mourned; it was like the whole country. Heads of other classes sent their condolences to me, because I was the head of the class of the Member of Parliament.

...and when he was getting ready to fail for the fifth time he lowered the few eyelashes he had, opened his mouth and died at the José Macamo General Hospital.

"Didn't you have medical insurance after all?" the head of class 7, in the fifth grade, asked me. I don't remember what I told him, but I do remember seeing, three months later, the report card that announced that he had failed for the fifth time. A school of injustice, so injustice that it even failed dead Members of Parliament.