Obabakoak (14 page)

With no woman to look after him and with no desire or need to look after himself, my neighbor had plumbed the lower depths of squalor. He was perennially dirty and had gotten into the habit of eating constantly. Whenever he talked to me, I could actually see the food he was eating, chewed to a pulp, being churned around among his nicotine-stained teeth, and my face and neck would get spattered by any random fragments that escaped from his mouth. I found it most disagreeable and had to make a real effort of will not to turn on my heel and simply remove myself from his presence. An even greater effort of will was required when he offered me the very bottle of wine from which his own greasy lips had just supped or when he bade me sit down amid the eternal grime of his kitchen.

But the squalor was not restricted to the domains of his person and his home. His words were squalid too. One day he’d point to the shepherds’ house and, as I described before, take enormous delight in vilifying the women living there, on another he’d pillory the owner of the local tavern, accusing him of having got rich on the proceeds of smuggling, or else he’d inveigh against the shopkeeper in the square, warning me never to buy anything from his shop because of the astronomical markup on all the goods. Like all gossips, he was also a coward, and he addressed these confidences to me in an undertone, in a whisper, lest the wind carry his words to the ears of whoever it was he’d just defamed.

Despite all this, what one noticed first about the man was not the filth but the beauty of his eyes. He had the blue, luminous eyes of a heretic, a visionary.

One day, just to pull his leg, I said to him: “Can you remember being burned at the stake, Onofre?”

“When?”

“In the Middle Ages, when else?”

“Oh, drink your wine and shut up,” he replied, passing me the bottle. That was his favorite riposte, perfect for dealing with stupid questions.

However, the beauty of his eyes was not sufficient consolation and I did everything I could to reduce contact with him to a minimum. My front door remained firmly shut and I’d go out only when I knew he was taking his afternoon nap, and, if he asked me to join him in a game of cards, I’d claim not to know how to play.

But it was all in vain. More than anything else and whatever the cost, Onofre wanted to be my friend and never missed a chance to proclaim the good news of our friendship to the village at large.

“We’re the best of friends, we are,” he’d declare to anyone walking down our street on their way to one of the bars and then turn to me for immediate confirmation of what he’d said.

“Isn’t that right? Wouldn’t you say so? Bosom pals we are.”

I, of course, had no alternative but to concur.

More than that, he wanted me all to himself and used all the wiles of a jealous girlfriend to achieve this end. He’d follow me everywhere, interrupting my conversations with the shopkeeper, sulking whenever I asked a favor of someone else in the village.

He’d walk into my house, wearing a hurt expression, and say: “I hear you asked Daniel for firewood,” adding: “My firewood’s every bit as good as his, you know.”

Then, depositing a bundle of his own best firewood by the sitting room door, he’d depart in silence.

As time went on, he felt the need for a theory to explain the origin of our friendship and soon came up with the reason we two had ended up being such friends. The reason I’d come to live there was Luis, the bearded chap who’d rented the house before me. It was through him that I’d found out what a good sort Onofre was.

“Luis? Who’s Luis?” I asked in confusion.

He gave me a knowing look and smiled, making it clear that he knew I was only joking. Who was Luis? Why, Luis was Luis, the old priest who’d come to live in Villamediana when he retired.

“You know who I mean,” he’d insist, clapping me on the back. “You’d never have come here in the first place if he hadn’t told you about me.”

That episode gave me much food for thought and, after a while, I came to understand Onofre’s technique for dealing with reality. First, he’d invent a lie, and then, having convinced himself it was true, he’d start spreading it around until, so to speak, it gained general acceptance.

This tactic sometimes had pathetic results. For example, one day he painted two blue window frames on either side of the only aperture, a tiny kitchen window, on the otherwise blank facade of his miserable little house.

“When did you paint them? Last night?” I asked when we met. He pretended he hadn’t heard me and made me feel rather as if I’d just told a child the truth about Father Christmas. From then on, as far as I was concerned, his house had three windows, not one.

On another occasion he showed me a ring, telling me it had been a gift from his son and praising his son’s generosity. I knew, however—indeed he himself had told me so only a month before—that he’d bought it from a traveling salesman.

Very slowly, as I came to understand him better, my opinion of him improved and our friendship ceased to be just another of his lies and became genuine affection. To be honest, his behavior didn’t strike me as so very unusual. All of us, at some time in our lives, feel the need to free ourselves from some painful truth and will resort to anything, especially lies, in order to do so. For the truth should never be given priority over suffering.

If Onofre was distinguished by anything it was his enthusiasm, the sheer energy he put into the carrying out of his stratagems. And, frankly, his personal situation cried out for such deceit. He lived in the most terrible solitude, I only realized just how terrible the day I asked him to lend me an alarm clock.

“I have to go to the city first thing tomorrow morning,” I explained.

“You mean you haven’t got an alarm clock?” he said, giving me an incredulous look, as if unable to believe his ears.

No, I said, I didn’t, I really didn’t own an alarm clock.

He went back into his house, a pensive look on his face, and returned clasping a great silvery contraption. Placing it in my hands, he said, almost tearfully:

“For goodness sake get yourself an alarm clock! It really keeps a chap company!”

A shiver ran through me. I’d just heard an exact definition of solitude from the last person I would have expected it from. What else was solitude if not a situation in which even the ticking of a clock can be companionable?

I thought about the bars in the village and said to myself:

“The lives those places must have saved!”

4. There were only two bars in Villamediana. The best one, which had once been a social club, was on the main square and was furnished with special green baize card tables made from wrought iron and marble in the style prescribed by an earlier age. If one were to believe what the customers and the owners of the bar said, only those on the political left gathered there, those villagers who had sided with the Republicans during the Civil War and the young people in the village who refused to go to mass. On the other hand, and again this was only their opinion, the locals who frequented the other bar lived in servile submission to the village fascists and the priest and were supporters of the most rabidly right-wing politicians.

The other bar bore the unusual name of Nagasaki and was situated on the road leading out of the village. They played cards here too but the tables were made from aluminium and multicolored plastic. Unlike the regulars at the first bar, the customers who came here didn’t classify the village bars according to ideological criteria, for them the factor tipping the balance in favor of one bar or another was purely economic. They considered the bar on the square to be the bar of the rich, of those who owned land and property. Their bar, on the other hand, was the bar of the poor, of the simple laborer, the farmhand.

The customers of each of these bars formed two distinct groups that rarely mixed. In the village as a whole, there couldn’t have been more than ten people who frequented both bars indiscriminately. Some, among them the mayor, went to neither. They avoided taking sides and so could not allow themselves the luxury of seeming to favor one group over the other. After all, you never knew when another civil war might break out. Better safe than sorry.

In general terms, both sides were right. Although this may seem shocking to those unfamiliar with the evolution of fascism, the Nagasaki’s clientele, the simple people of Villamediana, were in favor of a hard-line military government and embraced the kind of nihilism that can as easily fall prey to anarchy as to the ideas of a Mussolini or a Perón. Their vision of the world was imbued with a pessimism underpinned by endless proverbs and popular sayings. The clientele at the café on the square, on the other hand, were members of the highest stratum of village society, whose politics were half-enlightened, half-romantic. Like every militant socialist worth his salt, they claimed to believe in reason, although, as the wife of the bar’s owner happily confided to me one day: The only good dictatorship is a left-wing dictatorship.

I spent more time at the poor man’s bar. I was treated with excessive formality at the other place and their customers always made a tremendous effort to ensure that conversation there maintained a certain level. They were convinced, moreover, that I was a journalist and were constantly plying me with questions about current affairs. What did I think about the upcoming elections? What were my considered views on Spain joining the EEC? I found the role assigned me there distinctly uncomfortable and only went there for my after-lunch coffee. But at night, with the prospect of several hours ahead of me, I always made for the Nagasaki.

The Nagasaki clientele didn’t bother me at all and only spoke to me when it was my round. They had no need of entertainment. All of them—from the owner down—were excellent conversationalists and weavers of interminable tales, mostly about hunting, that almost always ended in arguments. These arguments usually lasted until about three in the morning but, even so, rarely ended in any agreement. One of the regulars, an old shepherd called Agustín, used to take the same way home as me and always bade me good night with the same words:

“See you tomorrow, then. We can carry on where we left off because, you know, there was some real old rubbish being talked at the end there…”

I must confess that, at first, the main topic of conversation at the Nagasaki didn’t attract me. Hunting has always seemed to me a cruel pastime and my habit of giving names to animals—something I’ve done since I was a child—prevents me from ever doing harm to any creature, however repellent. Imagine, for example, that you have a cockroach living in your house and one day it occurs to you to christen that cockroach José María, and then it’s José María this and José María that, and very soon the creature becomes a sort of small, black person, who may turn out to be timid or irritable or even a little conceited. And obviously in that situation you wouldn’t dream of putting poison down around the house. Well, you might consider it as an option but no more often than you would for any other friend.

But the Nagasaki regulars were real hunters. They weren’t the sort of hunters who, like Daudet’s Tartarin, return from the forest and go on and on about their heroic deeds and exploits. Listening to them it was easy to comprehend what the old books say about hunting: that it draws down madness upon the hearts of men and that, basically, all hunters are like the unfortunate abbot who, on hearing his greyhounds barking while he was celebrating Sunday mass, simply dropped what he was doing and rushed off to give chase to the hare, pausing only to collect his rifle and his pack of dogs.

The subject of hunting took on an unusual grandeur on their lips. It seemed more an excuse to speak of man’s solitude at night, lashed by icy winds… or to describe a man’s sadness on returning home with his gamebag empty, after a whole day spent combing the forest, or simply as an excuse to recall their lost youth, for some of them, Agustín the shepherd for example, no longer had the strength to go after boars and wolves.

And beneath all the many variations on a theme, like a guiding thread, lay the idea of struggle. Not just of man against beast, but also among the beasts themselves. Snake against bird, weasel against rabbit, the bear against everyone else. It was the law—
dura lex, sed lex
—of nature, a law that not even man could escape.

“Do you know how a bear kills its prey?” the owner of the bar and one of the best hunters in the village once asked me.

I said that I didn’t.

“It kills with one blow of its paw. Just one. And do you know what it aims for?”

Again, I didn’t.

“It goes for the head. One blow and it’ll rip your brains out. Just a single clean blow. It makes no odds whether it’s attacking a calf or a man. It always goes for the head.”

Before continuing, he crossed his arms and leaned on the counter as he always did before launching into a story.

“I’ve only ever once seen a bear. Someone in the village killed it and it was left on display in the main square for a whole morning. When you see a bear close up like that, that’s when you understand what a bear is. Every one of its claws is sharp as a dagger. The same goes for its teeth. It’s a sight I’ll never forget.”

“The man who killed it died three days later,” added Agustín.

“Really? Why was that? I was only a child then so I don’t remember,” said the owner, surprised.

“I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but people say he died of shock. Apparently by the time he came back from the forest he’d gone a bit soft in the head. Just the fact that he’d managed to kill it, I suppose. Though it must be a tremendous shock suddenly coming face-to-face with a bear.”

“A shock? But, Agustín, how can you say that? I happen to know that he’d been after that bear for over a month,” intervened the group sceptic.

“You be quiet, you don’t know anything about it!” said the bar owner, cutting him short. “What’s that got to do with anything? I spent five years hunting wolves… and what do you think happened when I finally caught up with them? My hair stood on end, that’s what, because I never knew, at least not exactly, just when I might find them. That’s where the surprise comes in, that’s what shocks you.”