Translated by Oonagh StranskyOne of my students constantly changes her name. I don’t find it particularly shocking. I’ve had students enter the classroom late through the window, instead of using the door. I’ve had students who choose to sit on the floor or at the foot of my lectern while I teach, not at their desks. I’ve had to break up violent fights, with desks and chairs flying across the room as if my lessons had released some kind of paranormal energy. I’ve faced classes made up only of girls, who split into gangs and screamed insults at one another for obscure reasons. I’ve dealt with epileptic fits, mystical crises, panic attacks, kids going through puberty, kids going through withdrawal. I’ve ignored students masturbating under their desks and students silently passing gas. At least once a month, I’ve had to pick girls up off the floor after they’d fainted from the tempest of hormones going on inside them. I’ve been humiliated countless times by 16-year-old boys who wanted to arm-wrestle me just to prove how much stronger they were. I’ve had to put up with students plonking away on guitars while I taught Tasso’s The Liberation of Jerusalem. Why should I get upset if a student goes by one name one day and a different name the next? I’ve made a list of her creative monikers: Over the past week alone, she has gone by Gioia Del Colle (the name of a town in Puglia), Sibilla Salute (a play on the name of a popular contraceptive pill), Grazia Deis (a riff on the Latin phrase Dei gratia), Melissa Godano, Serena Sventura, Michela Stobene, Dolores Indolore. They’re sonorous but off-kilter names, each charged with either desire or distress, and all far more evocative than her real name, which is Ornella Zanni. She never simply tells me her chosen alias; clearly, she’d rather remain anonymous. No, I have to beg and plead with her to divulge it to me; I have to ask her friends and whine; I grow despondent and say she doesn’t love me anymore. And when somehow I manage to pry her nom du jour out of her (“Dolores Indolore!”), I go around proclaiming it joyfully to all the other teachers (“Today Zanni’s name is Dolores Indolore!”), I tell the custodians, and I repeat roll call all the way to “Indolore, Dolores,” expecting her to say, “Here.” And if she appears a bit embarrassed by it all, I turn to the class and ask, “What’s wrong with inventing a name for yourself that reflects your state of mind or how you feel?” And then I conclude by praising her: “Well done, Dolores. Keep it up.”I’ve been running my class this way, benevolently, for years. I’ve become convinced that knowledge is nothing more than a catalogue raisonné of the gratuitous horrors of the world. As students learn, they discover the most wretched things about human destiny, our planet, the universe. From ancient history to astrophysics, every new notion only reinforces the idea that being born was all a big mistake. Why should I make things worse using gruff tones, grim silences, and threats? A good educator needs to be a strong leader, to guide students down the necessary paths with care, affection, concern, and flair. I’ve been trying to be a good educator for decades. “Zanni, Ornella.” I’m doing roll call, and her name is last on the list.Complete silence.“What’s your name today?” I ask.Zanni’s friend Samantha Storano replies on her behalf. “If she tells you, you’ll end up using it.”Every single time, it’s the same thing: Storano tries to explain to me that Zanni has changed her name to avoid labels—not to have a new one stuck on her. “No, I promise I won’t use it. I just need to make sure she’s here.”Zanni and Storano confabulate. I see Zanni shake her head: No, definitely not. The rest of the class quickly grows bored with this whole pantomime. They’re just kids after all. They think that I’m too lenient and that I shouldn’t indulge their classmate just because she woke up with a funny idea. They want to see me figure out Zanni’s name for the day and then go on to entertain them, which I do well. Or, if Zanni persists and says nothing, they’d like to see me grow enraged and do something cruel.I admit that I occasionally get bored, too. Zanni really knows how to drag it out, and criminal thoughts creep into my mind. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become less tolerant of adults and more patient with kids. I know nothing will change: I’ll continue to transmit knowledge to my students and nothing can save me, it’s my rotten luck. But I will do it carefully, and try not to hurt them too much. I’m amazed at how other teachers impress their subjects on the students with such mechanical superficiality and rigorous devotion to their own role. The way I see it, Zanni and the others need comforting from the authority I wield.“Zanni: your name!”“She might tell you later,” Storano informs me. So I put on an amusing show. Every day, before starting to teach, I do something funny. I pretend to have suddenly lost my voice—I move my lips without saying a word, uttering indecipherable, halting, guttural sounds. After I get my voice back, I pretend to throw my grade book at a boy in the last row who won’t stop talking to the kid next to him. Then I run over to the window and threaten to throw myself out, yelling, “Enough! I can’t take it anymore! I refuse to spend another hour with you.” After a bit of that, I gather myself together, calm down, and start to walk across the room, only to begin lurching from side to side until I flop into an empty chair, jokingly ask a female student for a peck on the cheek, jump to my feet, rub my back, and complain: “Oh, these aches and pains, how awful it is to get old.”I make them laugh, and hard. For a while, I’m their clown. I like them when they laugh: With their healthy teeth and bright smiles, they seem like good souls, destined for happiness.But then I sharply say, “Enough.”It’s a sign that brooks no argument. They settle down, open their notebooks, and get ready to take notes. My voice grows solemn and I begin to lecture on famines, plagues, natural disasters, various kinds of hell, netherworlds, massacres, assassins, the rape of young shepherdesses, passionate adulterous liaisons, inquisitions intended to hunt down sinners, individuals who were burned at the stake, philosophers and poets who were jailed for years, local laws, universal laws, ironclad rules, errant heroes, possible errors, probable errors, lurking errors, spelling errors, errors.As I’m talking, it occurs to me that I really shouldn’t be allowed to speak to minors. And yet I’m paid a salary to share delectable nuggets of human history with these young people: stories of oppression, violence, the subjugation of the many by the few; poetry and prose that explore cruel ideas dressed up as kind ones, written by good souls who have enacted all kinds of misdeeds against bad ones.Generally, minors are protected by an unwritten agreement that says that everything that goes on in a classroom, whether true or false, doesn’t bother them: It’s either “instruction,” “classwork,” or “homework.” But, with me, there’s no way out. I know I have crucial information to communicate, and I unveil it to them as cautiously as possible.I playfully and ably seduce them with language, enchanting them. If a student looks distracted, I walk over and tickle them under the chin, coochie-coochie-coo, or find a way of inserting their first and last name into the topic I’m discussing. I draw on the subjects they care about most (music, singers, comics, TV shows, cars, women, pizza) to show them how frivolous they are. I can’t let anyone take their eyes off me, not even for a second. I have to wow them, see their jaws drop in amazement. I want them to feel the horror of living, the urgency of the future, the inevitability of existence, the untamable ferocity of their fellow human beings. No TV show, hit song, page-turner, or pop star can save them from the wave of dark humor that I evoke by quoting from this or that book. Until I’m done, when I repeat, “Enough.” To ease the tension a little, I pretend to gasp for breath and I cry out, “Please! No more! You vampires have sucked me dry!” And I run over and lie back on my desk, arms folded across my chest, and say, “I’m Sleeping Beauty. Zanni, hurry, kiss me! Or I’ll die. Do you want your poor old teacher to die, Zanni?”But Zanni doesn’t answer. Because that’s not her name. While the rest of the class laughs, invigorated and amused to see me moribund on the desk next to my grade book, chalk, and eraser, she does not. I can’t even chastise her by calling out her name of the day. She is, for all intents and purposes, absent.Because I don’t know her name. For the first time ever, I haven’t gotten her to reveal it to me.The bell rings, class is over. I get to my feet and walk up to her.“What’s your name today?” I gently ask.The answer comes from Storano. “No one knows. She didn’t even tell me.”Have I done something wrong? Zanni hasn’t told me her name in days now. And she doesn’t reply to “Zanni, Ornella!” when I take roll. She has given herself a new name.But that’s not all. Zanni has also stopped telling me things about herself. What’s going on with her parents? Did her father end up leaving them? Were they finally evicted, or did they manage to postpone it? What about her sick grandmother—did she end up dying, or not? Does her brother still need private lessons? Is her sister really pregnant? Did she dream of me again? Is she still scared of the dentist? Did she finally go on a date with that young plumber who kept asking her out? Did she finish Wuthering Heights? Is she ready to admit that Eros Ramazzotti is a lousy musician?Come to think of it, the whole class shares less with me now than they used to. They still read the books and see the movies I suggest, they still research the topics I ask them to, and they still ask me profound and intelligent questions. But when I ask, “So, what singers do you like?” they’re vague: Oh, I don’t know, they say. If I notice a book that has nothing to do with school poking out of their backpack, and I crane my neck to try and read the title, I see how they subtly maneuver things around to conceal it. Even the issues they raise feel artificial, as though they’re inventing fake problems and talking about them heatedly for my benefit.Of course, I still have a strong influence over them. Actually, I’d have to say that my authority seems to be increasing at a dizzying rate. And yet it’s as if there’s a clear split between the thoughts that they’re learning to think out of love for me, their teacher, and those that they think secretly, as if they were sins, out of love for themselves. I get the distinct feeling they’re suffering. As a result, I’ve become kinder. I sit down next to them. I eat their snacks. I even let Storano sit at my desk, which has led to confusion on a couple of occasions when the custodian came in, didn’t see me, and had to ask, “Where’s the teacher?”One day, while I was sitting at Storano’s desk and she at mine, presiding over the class from my chair as if it were a throne, I noticed a vinyl record tucked away on the shelf under her desk, hidden by some papers. I pulled it out and examined the cover.“Samantha!” Zanni screamed as if sounding an alarm. Storano jumped up, rushed over, and grabbed the album out of my hand. As she did, the record slipped out of the sleeve and hit the leg of another desk. Storano barely noticed for how flustered she was. “It’s not mine,” she gasped. “Someone lent it to me. But I’m giving it back to them today.”“It’s an interesting album,” I said in a tone they know well: informed and knowledgeable, but also kind, genuine, warm, promising. Here’s my technique: I start by saying “interesting” and then point out all the traps that have been laid for them—the lyrics, the melodies, the pitch of the singer’s voice, right down to the colors chosen by the graphic designers for the cover art—until any initial pleasure the album gave them has been substituted by guilt, a sense of inadequacy, and the need to devote more time to the things that really matter.“No, it’s not interesting,” Storano said. And when I insisted (“Actually, it’s very interesting”), she stuck her index fingers in her ears and shrieked with fake glee, “I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening!”That’s when it occurred to me that Zanni’s game was having a negative impact on the whole class. Then I remembered a dream I had in which she told me that she had dreamed of me. I was embarrassed about being in her dream. She had dreamed of me without my glasses, hairless, toothless, lungless, sexless.“Zanni, what’s your name today?” I had asked her.No reply. “What a mess,” I said, picking up a fragment of the record and throwing it away. I decided to revert to a tried-and-true lesson, one that’s always effective in such delicate moments: a lesson on the prefix dis.“We live,” I began, “under the reign of dis.”The class immediately took out their notebooks. I wrote dis on the blackboard.“Dis dismantles everything we love and appreciate,” I said. Then, coaxing them to reply, “An act of service becomes a …”“Disservice,” they said in unison. “Something we like, we may one day …”“Dislike.”“Honor becomes …”“Dishonor.”“Enchantment turns into …”“Disenchantment.”“Although I associate with others, one day I might …”“Disassociate from them.”“While I respect you now, later I might …”“Disrespect us.”I hold up my hand to silence the chorus. Dis—I explained—dissolves the bond that holds us together, that defends and protects the best parts of ourselves, or at least what we believe is the best. “Dis dishumanizes the world and disperses the shreds to all four corners of the Earth. Dis is a destructive force; it contains the pressure of opposing winds. Dis distracts, disturbs, and disquiets.”“Beware of dis,” I admonished them. “The dark star generates disaster. Order surrenders messily to disorder. Stripped of grace, we fall into disgrace. Kids, watch out for dis.”And then, suddenly, I changed tack. “Take, for example, our very own Ornella Zanni. Every day Ornella disornellas. Because of her constant disornellation, she no longer knows who she is.”I had been hoping to amuse them. I had expected them to laugh and paused for a second, but no one laughed. I felt excluded. Most of all, I wanted Zanni to laugh. So I turned and faced her with studied meekness.“Are you disornellated?”Silence.“Or disinhibited?”Silence.“Disinclined?”Silence.“Disillusioned?”Silence.“Disingenuous?”Silence.“Disinterested?”Silence.“Disarmed?”Disarmed? The girl’s dark-brown eyes flashed angrily.“Diseducator,” she said with scorn, as if hoping to disintegrate me.The whole class laughed.I have no idea what reaction they saw on my face. They may have seen shock or disappointment or even great pain, as if they’d cut open my breastplate with a pair of poultry shears. One of the shortcomings of writing in the first person is that you can never describe your own expression. For sure, it wasn’t pretty. Seeing me like that, Zanni must have realized she’d hurt me more than she thought possible. Unable to deal with it, she picked up her coat and book bag and strode out, not even bothering to shut the door behind her.I waited for everything to settle within me. When I regained my composure, I calmly said, “Go tell Zanni to come back in.”Storano stood up and went to find her friend. She returned almost instantly.“She’s gone.”Gone? Gone where? My legs took off: I ran down the hall, down two flights of stairs, through the main doors, across the schoolyard, and into the street, searching for Zanni. I saw her up ahead, dashing with agility among the passersby. The cold air hurt my lungs. Or maybe I was out of breath.When I caught up to her, I gently took her by the arm. I didn’t want her to scream. I had planned on saying things like: Now that’s enough; you’re in big trouble; you can’t just walk out of class; we’re going to see the principal; this calls for suspension. But when she turned around and I saw how pale she’d become, like a figure in a black-and-white photograph, I said things like: “What’s going on?”; “Why this behavior?”; “What did I do wrong?”; “Let’s talk about it.” But then I realized that we weren’t in the classroom anymore, that I had left the other students at their desks, frozen with shock. We stood in the street, cars came and went, an ambulance, people noticed how upset and shaken we were; they walked past, then turned around and looked back, thinking, What does that man want from her? Should I call the Carabinieri?I felt growing unease. “Why am I even here?” I asked myself and awkwardly let go of her arm. I discovered that I didn’t know what to say outside of school. I felt shy, as if I was talking to a stranger.“Sorry,” I said.She started to laugh, and a little color returned to her face.“Please don’t disappear,” I pleaded with her softly but didn’t quite know how to phrase it, which tense to use, what form, and—writing about it now—how to spell it.She laughed harder, invigorated.“What’s your name?” I asked her.“Ornella Zanni,” she said.Now I’m the one waiting to change. I want to change everything about me: the books I love, my memories, the lukewarm interests I still nurture, my vocation, choosing just the right words for a public made up of adolescents, the need to seduce them with knowledge, the pleasure of knowing they adore me and want to become like me. I realize now that Zanni used to change her name so that I couldn’t find her. Sometimes I steal looks at her, and in the young woman’s face that is emerging from the child’s, I perceive that she’s experiencing the world and its disappointments with gusto and, out of love for me, never with disgust.This story has been excerpted from Domenico Starnone's book La Scuola, translated by Oonagh Stransky.Oonagh Stransky has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone: The House on Via Gemito—which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize—as well as The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl From Milan and The Old Man by the Sea.