I'm learning to breathe - The Gym Teacher

My lungs were protesting, oppressed, with a slight whistling sound that rose up my throat and drew each of the branches of my bronchial tree on my chest. Asthma. That suffocation that had accompanied me since I was a child like a bothersome friend, became more piercing on two particular occasions: when spring exploded with grasses and when I was forced to perform extreme exercise.

At that moment, both coincided at the same time.

It must have been noon, almost at the end of the course, and my legs were trotting on the cement of those public high school tracks. From our boring route, you could barely distinguish the ugly brick building, the white and red goalposts, the worn-out basketball hoops, and a fence that separated us from the outside, from the small provincial town that, deep down, was just another prison.

As I ran, I couldn't wait to escape to Madrid to study. Since the play ended - with great success, apparently - and with only the selectivity and hundreds of exams in sight, the world had become even grayer. The theater director had left the city after the premiere, and my history teacher continued to feel guilty and insecure, hardly looking me in the eye and avoiding any approach. His faith, his professional ethics, or that oppressive provincial atmosphere kept him repressed, and if I had discovered something those months, it was that I didn't want to end up like him. Madrid would be my liberation, my coming out, the end of the mediocrity of the institute, and the beginning of a new life.

But meanwhile, I still had to endure the nonsense of the didactic guide and the tyranny of teachers who didn't seem to have more than two neurons. One of them was the gym teacher, Pepe. You see? Even the name was ridiculous. He was the opposite of the elegance of my history teacher or the sexual energy of the theater director. A fifty-year-old man, somewhat hard of hearing, with a belly and an eternal tracksuit that seemed to have been in fashion back in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He wasn't tall or short, handsome or ugly, bald or hairy. His only purpose in life was to time us while we did the warm-up laps and then throw us a soccer ball - to the boys - and a basketball - to the girls - for us to play with for the rest of the class.

In addition to the stupid separation by sex, not just of the students, but of the sports themselves, it infuriated me that he didn't even try to teach us anything new. It's true that neither my asthma nor my personal tastes led me to be very interested in sports, but if he had nurtured it, maybe I could have found something to feel good about. I don't know, something like tennis, fencing, or horse riding. All too expensive for private lessons and impossible to investigate in school. There, only soccer and basketball.

I hated and hate soccer with all my soul, not just the boredom of practicing it, but the whole hetero euph...