“Nor the twenty latest ones. With the greatest of pleasure.”
In spite of myself I found my tongue translating the set Castilian phrases I had so long been using, instead of falling into the colloquialisms of my own land. When I was ensconced in an American armchair battered with the evidence of a long journey and of the crude unloading facilities of West Coast ports, surrounded by walls hidden under banners and photographs that seemed to turn the adobe chamber into a college dormitory transported to the wilds of the Andes, the youth went on:
“The government of Peru gives four betas, that is, sends yearly an honor student to each of four American universities, with an allowance of a hundred dollars a month....”
“That is, you had $4800 for the course at Michigan?”
“Yes, with traveling expenses. You probably had about the same allowance?”
“Fortunately not, or I should long since have been gracing some home for inebriates. And is this just a present from the government?”
“No; on our return we must serve the government for three years at the same salary. I am superintendent of schools in this and the neighboring province of Huamachuco.”
The son of a Scandinavian father, Traverso had evidently overcome the handicap of an allowance the spending of which would have consumed the entire energies of a full-blooded Latin-American, and had brought back a real education. His shelves were filled with the latest treatises on pedagogy, in several languages, and a brief acquaintance was enough to show that he was earnestly striving to instill some new life into the moribund system of his native land.
“But what’s the use?” he concluded gloomily, casting aside a carefully worked out plan of study. “A man’s wings are clipped before he can start to fly. Theoretically I have full authority over school matters in my two provinces; practically I can’t alter by a hair the benighted medieval routine of studies, interwoven at every turn by the lives of the saints, that Peru has stumbled along under for centuries. I can’t fire a fifteen-dollar-a-month numskull up in one of the mountain villages, even though he doesn’t know whether Chile is in New York or in Europe. The priests have their wires attached to every government leg and arm in the country, and I feel like a man lying by, bound hand and foot, watching our children being criminally assaulted. The money the government spends on us might as well be chucked into the Pacific.”
“To say nothing of squandering on one student what would easily suffice for three,” I put in.