A Test of History and Timelines.

It was early Autumn, but the air in the classroom of was still hot and moist like the nose of a dog suffering of a nasty cold. The white walls had big gashes that showed the armoured cement behind the plaster, and said gashes were barely covered by maps of the entire globe, plus a diagram about the inner works of a radio.

The desks and the chairs clearly weren't put with regards about order. Complete silence reigned, to the point it was possible hear the sound of a falling pin. All of these things combined created a sensation of desertion and disarray not uncommon to an High School classroom that had been just abandoned by both the students and the teachers for the Summer Break.

However, the class was not abandoned that day. In there, two girls and one boy sat down on the desks, awaiting for a teacher to come and start their recovery tests.

The boy, his name Rodrigo Moya, student of St. Catherine High School, was sitting on one of the desk nearest to the window exposed on the empty and dried-out courtyard of the school.

Rodrigo was chewing on his pen's butt nervously.


"I hope I don't mess up the dates again," he murmured to himself "I seriously don't want to repeat the year.”

As soon as he said that, there was the clicking sound of shoes on concrete and, shortly afterward, the teacher, a short man with hoary beard and silvery gray hair, wearing red plastic glasses that had been patched up with a bit of duct tape, and light brown fine clothes, entered in the classroom with his usual bag made of black leather. Rodrigo remained concentrated on munching the pen, however.

“Mr. Rodrigo, I suggest you to raise yourself from your seat.”

Rodrigo immediately took the pen out of his mouth immediately and looked up, and saw the two girls standing up and the teacher sternly glaring at him. Rodrigo, at the cue, got up and said “Good day.”

The teacher let out a grunt, as he gestured to sit down, and wait for him to give out the test sheets, thing he did only when all the three students had seated back in their places.

“Alright,” Rodrigo said to himself as the teacher handed him the paper “let's get this done. I've studied history all Summer, there's no way I can fail this!”

Once he had said do, he took the pen, as he read the sheet of questions, idly making pen tricks as he read.

“The start of the Gothic-byzantine War was in 535 AD,” he whispered to himself, as he crossed out the date in the list, not even looking at the other ones. He scanned down his eyes to the next question.

“What was the outcome of the Gothic-byzantine War?”

He saw five empty lines to fill out. He sighed, as he thought up a coherent answer to the question, trying to remember as much as possible about what he had studied, and trying his best to not mix the reality with the fantasy described in a series of books Rodrigo's brother had suggested him.

He thought, thinking to the various locations he could recall, dates and, of course, outcomes. After excluding some of the absurd combinations, like Ostrogoths losing the final battle but winning the war and viceversa, Rodrigo finally thought up a decently-written and plausible answer, and he started to write down his answer.

Once he thought he had found an answer that sounded satisfying, Rodrigo started to write it down.

“The Gothic-byzantine War, after more than a decade of fights on he territory of the Italian Peninsula, ended with the defeat of the Ostrogoths at Mons Lactarius and subjugation of all territories previously owned by the Ostrogoths under the rule of the Emperor of Byzantium. The victory of the Byzantines was brief, however, as the Langobards, disgruntled about their pay as mercenaries, and the Franks, who had interests in the territory of the current-day Provence, invaded the newly conquered territories of the Byzantines, uniting them to their kingdoms.”



Rodrigo finished to write this, re-read it, and then gave himself a thumbs up, just before going to the question below, which, once again, had boxes to sign.

“The Holy Roman Empire was founded by...”

Rodrigo looked next to the slots to fill, reading the list of available names.

“Karlommann. Charles. Adolphus II. Valamirus I. Atta III.” He read out loud to himself, slowly dawning him he could not remember the name of the founder. Rodrigo shook his feet around like a couple of rattles, like he always used to when under stress.

“Think, who was the founder? Can't be Adolphus because he was Emperor at the start of the millennium, Karlomann was the one killed in the attempt to make the Trinitarist Pope escape from the isle of Elba, I don't remember any Valamirus or Atta beyond the first living during in those times.. “

He started to tap his left foot on the ground and shake the other one, as if he was playing drums in a rock band. Of course, since he wasn't there for practice his drumming skills, he was going to need to cut that and concentrate on the question at hand.

“Let's say it was this Charles guy.” He crossed the box next to the aforementioned name, crossing the fingers of his left hand and signing the box with his right one.

Done so, he passed to the next question, which was an open question, but with three blank lines instead of five.

“What was the name of the treaty that declared that Popes had to be elected by the Holy Roman Emperor?”

Rodrigo, once again, rattled his legs around again, unsure about what to answer to it, passing several minutes in thinking about a solution. As time passed, he rose his head away from the sheet of paper and up to the wristwatch of the teacher nearby.

Ten to eleven.

He had just twenty minutes, before he had to give his test to the teacher. Somewhat panicking, Rodrigo answered.

“The treaty, signed in Rome, that declared that the election of popes was to be approved by the Holy Roman Emperor, was called the Privilegium Othonis, from the name of then-Empereor Otto I.”

He sighed, crossing his fingers again, before looking down at the next questions.

The following questions were all concerning the year 1000 and why it was an important year. He quickly wrote what he knew best about the time period in question and its economics. Rodrigo answered to them very quickly and without any effort. He then flipped the paper around, and saw the last three question, which he read aloud to himself.

“Explain, in five lines, the phases of the Gratis Städer and freien Städte.” “Who signed the Magna Charta, when and why?” “What was the casus belli of the Hundreds Years' war?”

Underneath, there were only blank lines to fill with then answers. Rodrigo felt his hearth speed up like a joyrider begin chased by the police, as he panicked at the realization that he didn't have much time to answer either. He skipped the first question and started to take guesses at the other two questions, writing the first things he could come up with.

“John Landless signed the Magna Charta in 1215 to give barons certain legal rights in exchange of money for the wars he was involved into.” Rodrigo quickly wrote in the lines under the second question, before he passed to write the answer to the second.

“The official reason for the start of the Hundreds Years' War was a succession dispute over some territories in Northern and Western France between England and France.”

As soon as he signed the full stop in the sentence, the old teacher said.

“It's time for you to give your tests to me.” He said. The two girls, almost in synchrony, got up and gave out their sheets, then signed their disclosure, before giving a little bow and saying “Goodbye and good day, professor.” The teacher answered back, nodding and raising his right hand with the palm open outwards.

Rodrigo Moya sighed, as he moved himself away from the desk by pushing it away with his legs, before getting up and shambling towards the teacher's desk, before giving his sheet in the teacher's right hand and grabbing the red pen from the teacher’s left one. He teacher was not amused.

“Be little more polite, Mr. Rodrigo, this is a state exam.” He said monotonously, as he put the sheet atop the other two sheets given by the girls. Rodrigo resisted the temptation to shrug at the teacher's phrase, as he quickly scrabbleda doodle that was his alleged signature.

“Goodbye.” Rodrigo said, as he hastily went back to his desk to pick up his pen at his desk, before rushing out the classroom towards the dusty courtyard, where he was going to pick up his motorbike.

Rodrigo walked through the deserted hallways of the school, the windows made of green glass coloring the light of the autumn’s sun, and the columns and stairs looking like ancient ruins in the silence and small whirls dust floating in the air. Rodrigo passed throguth them, until he reached the glass door of the exit, at which point he pushed with his left hand while shuffling for keys in his trousers' pockets with the other one.

He made the bunch of keys jingle a bit, before extracting his motorbike's key, which was short and with a light blue plastic body with the company logo encased on it. Once he singled that out, Rodrigo hopped onto the motorbike's seat, set the key inside and turned it right, thus turning on the motor with a roar.


-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-


The next day, Rodrigo was at school once again, but, this time, he was waiting while sitting on a chair outside the teacher's lounge, waiting to hear the results of his test. Compared to the day before, the muggy weather had waned, which made the most air more bearable, but not by a logn stretch.

Rodrigo shuffled on his chair's padded seat, his arms crossed and smirking, as if he was completely sure he had nailed it and that he was going to proceed with the year without any further hassle. However, deep down he knew that his fate was hanging by a thread. A very, very thing thread made of wet paper...
The wooden door creaked open, as it opened, revealing the figure of a burly morbidly obese woman wearing a light blue dress with white pois, which made her look less like a secretary and more like a retired professional eater.
“Moya Rodrigo, up next.”

“Oh God, let this one be good,” he said, getting up with a loud groan from his seat, before walking inside the very bare and gray teacher's lounge where, at the end of the metal and glass table, the same teacher of the day before sat, his hands intertwined together as if he was a movie villain hatching up a plan for blow up a country off the face of Earth. Rodrigo pulled his shirt's neck away in nervoussnes, before going back to apparent smugness, walkign next to his teacher.

He handed the sheet, saying “Everything is on it.”

Rodrigo snatched it out of the teacher's hands, before reading his teacher's notes. The first question had a check mark in green, but, from the second question onward.

“You will be allowed to re-take the exam when the people in Campania will speak Greek and most of the North will speak French.”

“To answer incorrectly with a known name is forgivable. To answer with the obvious distractor is insanity.”

“Get the treaty's conditions right but not the dates or the names isn't enough to mark the question as correctly answered.”

“Barely correct.”

“No answer, no points.”

“Who is this 'John Landless'?”

“You got that it was fought over the control and for France. That's it.”

Rodrigo hissed, then slammed the test on the table and stomped out of the teacher's lounge, going straight to the exit, while accusing the teacher to be a great consumer of the services of sex workers, over to be one of them. Outside, Rodrigo took his motorbike, turned it on, and rushed away, the city around him bustling with the sound of music from all around the world, from Scandinavia to Navarra, from the Manatthan Commune to Japan.

“I wish to have been born in that world..." Rodrigo mused, once he had calmed down and thus also slowed down his vehicle. "Then again, maybe I would have done the same exact errors in reverse..."