Obabakoak (16 page)

Those last two details—especially the habit of walking with his hands behind his back—didn’t particularly strike me and I gave no importance to what I’d seen. I did reflect on the behavior of children, on the taste they often have for solitude, and on how, as in that instance, they’re not in the least bothered by having to walk through a place full of rats and snakes in order to be alone. I felt sure though that he must be a foreign child, for no village child would have dared to come there.

It didn’t take me long to discover my mistake. My supposition was proved wrong when I was witness, again and again, to the same scene I saw that Sunday. On almost every afternoon that I went up to the church to read I’d see the boy strolling through the empty streets. I wondered if he didn’t perhaps live there, if there wasn’t a family still living in the area. I even thought they might be gypsies.

There was only one way to clarify the matter and that was to walk those same streets at night. Just as, when I first arrived in the village, I had gone out in search of the bright lights of the shepherds’ house, so now I would seek out the lights of that family who seemed to have remained there in isolation. One window would tell me if that part of the village was truly dead or not. That same week, one night when I was on my way to the hunters’ bar, I set off instead to find that window.

And there was life there; the quarter wasn’t completely empty. But it wasn’t the kind of life I expected to find. I’d imagined a kitchen, the clatter of plates at supper time, a snatch of conversation. Instead I found only a silent, solitary light in the low window of one of the big houses.

I approached, trying to avoid trampling the nettles that grew around about. I didn’t want the people in the house, when they got up the next day, to realize that someone had been spying on them. But at the time what troubled me most, even more than the rats and the snakes, was the possibility of dogs. What would I do if two or three dogs suddenly appeared? “Steal something as I fled,” I thought in answer to my own question. That at least would lend the episode coherence.

Luckily, nothing broke the silence and I gazed in through the window undisturbed. There was the little figure, bent over a table, intently studying a book by the light of a reading lamp. From the table the eyes of a cat glinted.

“There’s a little boy I’d like to find out more about,” I remarked to Daniel. That was on a Sunday too, and we were out for a walk in the woods, he in the line of duty and I just to take a little exercise. I told him what I’d seen from the church and the explanation I’d come up with, though without mentioning my night visit. He burst out laughing.

“Yes, he certainly is an unusual little boy,” he said. I wanted to know what he found so funny. “Once we’ve checked the woodlands, we’ll go to his house. He does tend to hang around there, along with the rats and the snakes. But I didn’t know he slept there too. I’ll introduce you. Then you’ll see just how unusual he is.” Again he burst out laughing.

As usual we had lunch in the woods and then headed off down toward the village. It was six o’clock in the evening by the time we reached the empty quarter. By day the house seemed smaller to me. It had been a beautiful house once with its portico and wide balcony, rather like the palaces that often end up being made into town halls; and although the upper floor was in ruins, it was the best preserved house in the whole neighborhood. Tied to the grille covering the window I’d found lit on that other night was a bunch of thistles.

When we knocked, we heard the sound of something inside dropping to the floor, then a muffled cry. Finally, when it seemed to us that the silence had gone on much too long, we heard footsteps approaching, and Daniel elbowed me in the ribs to prepare me.

At last, the door was flung open, as if the person opening it were in a rage. I think I must have turned white at that moment, for before me stood a dwarf. From between his legs a Persian cat looked up at us, surprised, as if demanding to know our reason for coming there.

“Yes?” said the little man.

He didn’t even reach my chest but he was no ordinary dwarf. Although small, he was well proportioned, straight-legged, and had no hump. Unlike other dwarfs I’d seen before, he had a small head, small and pretty like a doll’s.

His clothes were not in the least conventional either. Like the rich young masters of yesteryear, he wore gaiters, a waistcoat, and a black jacket with tails that looked like a dress coat.

Daniel wasn’t laughing now. He seemed embarrassed.

“I’d like to introduce a friend of mine,” he began, and, no doubt because he was nervous, he made the introduction more than usually drawn out. He explained that I too was a stranger to the village and, like him, a keen reader, that perhaps we could become friends, that he lived too much alone in that gloomy neighborhood …

The dwarf looked me up and down. His eyes were just like the Persian cat’s, sometimes blue and sometimes gray. Just as I was about to speak, he turned his head and looked angrily at Daniel:

“I live in this gloomy neighborhood because I want to! And what’s more I’d like to be allowed to live here in peace!” I thought that at any moment he would slam the door in our faces. But I was not inclined to let such an occasion slip by me so easily. Here, I said to myself, was the most interesting person I had yet encountered in Villamediana and I had to get to know him. Disregarding the snub he’d just delivered, I held out my hand and told him my name.

I feared he might ignore me, even decline to acknowledge me. But no, he looked me up and down again, then proffered a limp hand, like the hand of a sleeping child.

“Enrique de Tassis,” he said.

“Tassis? Like the count?”

Suddenly I found my opening to the man: Juan de Tassis, Count of Villamediana, poet and friend of Góngora, who was slain for making fun of the king. No one thought of him as being from there, though they did his father. It was said in the village that the group of houses next to the baker’s had been the palace of the first Count of Villamediana. Now, unexpectedly, I found myself before someone bearing the same name.

“No doubt you know him,” I said. That was a mistake. He turned toward me, a hurt look in his eyes. The cat’s eyes followed exactly the same trajectory.

“Of course I do!”

In his desire to make his reply as emphatic as possible, his voice—already shrill—cracked. Then it was my turn to feel embarrassed and it fell to Daniel to break the silence that followed.

“You don’t go walking in the woods anymore, then?” he remarked, for lack of anything else to say. But such familiarities were unacceptable to Tassis.

“I do go as it happens, often, it’s just that you haven’t chanced to see me there,” he answered coldly and said, by way of an excuse: “Now you must forgive me, but I was right in the middle of some studies.” And, without waiting for us to say our good-byes, he shut the door and left us alone on the doorstep.

We both felt as if we’d made some kind of gaffe and once in the bar—perhaps regretting having been so polite—Daniel became angrier than I’d ever seen him before.

“Did you see the arrogance of the man?” he began, and from then on I found it hard to silence him. How if he ever had a child like that he’d rather let him die; how deformed people like that were born to suffer and to make others suffer; and anyway what was he doing living up there; the whole place should be pulled down and the machines that did it could get rid of the little count too while they were at it.

In order to calm Daniel down, I tried to justify the dwarf’s behavior, I tried to make him see that it was understandable, in a way, that having the misfortune to be as he was, he would naturally feel ill-disposed toward other people, that he would interpret any interest another person might show in him as merely morbid curiosity.

But the truth of the matter was that I was hurt too. The dwarf’s scorn was a new experience for me. No doubt other people had regarded me as mere riffraff before but they’d never shown it so openly and had certainly never thrown it in my face as he had done.

I didn’t go back to the empty quarter. I considered having any kind of relationship with Enrique de Tassis an impossibility. And anyway, when all was said and done, I myself saw no reason to go running after him; it made me wonder too if my behavior was not, generally, a touch frivolous: observing, chatting, taking notes, the way a naturalist collects plants. Except that I wasn’t dealing with plants, I was dealing with the people of a village called Villamediana. If the dwarf wanted to be on his own, why shouldn’t he be, no one could stop him. He didn’t exist just to answer other people’s questions.

A month later I hadn’t exactly forgotten Tassis but I had consigned him to memory. And so it would have remained, had fate not determined that I meet him again one summer afternoon when I was looking for Daniel in the forest. That’s where our relationship really began, a relationship that, unfortunately, was to be limited to the seven walks we took together.

I saw him standing on the same path I was walking along, on the edge of the forest, looking at the stream bed that ran between the two plateaus that lay ahead. The wind kept snatching at the tails of his jacket.

I said a curt good afternoon and walked on.

“I rather hoped you might drop by my house again,” he said as I passed.

That was the last thing I had expected to hear him say.

He saw my surprise and made a grimace that was clearly intended as a smile.

“I know I was rather rude on that last occasion. But, to be honest, I don’t much like these inane provincials and I count the man who was with you as one of them. Do you know what I mean? An eminent thinker, who once traveled in these parts, really hit the nail on the head when he said that the real scourge of this place wasn’t insanity but inanity. I couldn’t agree more,” and he laughed an unpleasant laugh, half-child, half-woman.

“I can’t say it’s a remark I’ve heard before,” I said drily.

“But you have heard of the Count of Villamediana, isn’t that so? I got the impression last time that Juan de Tassis was not unknown to you.”

I nodded.

“A great poet, don’t you think?”

I replied that I was no scholar and knew only two or three sonnets by him. But that, yes, he must have been a great poet for his death to have merited a poem by Góngora. And that I did know about the circumstances of his death; about how, when the palace was rife with rumors of his supposed affair with the queen, he walked past the royal couple wearing a cloak sewn with silver sovereigns and embroidered with the punning motto:
MY LOVE IS SOVEREIGN.
And how it was a shame Felipe IV had taken it all so seriously, going so far as to have the joker killed.

He laughed all through my telling of the story in a way that a local might have termed
peculiar.

Then he set off toward the forest almost at a run and, as if addressing the trees themselves, he began to declaim Góngora’s poem, which he knew by heart:

When he’d finished, he fell facedown on the grass, his arms outstretched. I was scared.

“The Tassis family have always been odd,” he said to me once he’d calmed down a little and got to his feet. But he was happy. It was clear that the story filled him with energy. Perhaps too much energy. “I do this walk every Friday at the same time. If it were just up to me I’d come more often but I don’t like leaving Claudia alone,” he added in a more gentle tone.

I assumed Claudia was his Persian cat.

“If you come here on Fridays, I’d be delighted to talk to you. You’re a cultured man. Not like those rude peasants from the village.”

I accepted his invitation and then we each went our separate ways.

The following Friday I made my way anxiously up to the woods. I wondered what we’d talk about and how I should behave toward a person like him; whether I should look at him—or rather, of necessity look down at him—or not; whether he’d like me to help him when he grew weary or whether, on the contrary, he’d consider that humiliating; and what would be the best course of action if he flew into one of his rages.

I was worried too that people would see us together. If they did, I felt sure I’d lose my good name in the village. Especially with Daniel. Because Daniel was still upset with the “little count.”

The moment Tassis saw me, he guessed what was in my thoughts and we’d barely gone two steps before he’d resolved the matter in his own fashion.

“Do you know where the word
dwarf
comes from?”

The question caught me out, because, of all the words in the dictionary, that was the one word that, right from the start, I had forbidden myself to use.

“No,” I stammered. In the words of the poet, my reply fell to earth like a stone.

“Well, it comes from the Old High German
twerc,
but has its origin in the Sanskrit
dhváras.
I don’t suppose you know what that means, do you?”

“No, I’ve no idea.” I was trying to act nonchalantly, as if we were talking about something like arithmetic.

“Well, it means a demon, something ugly and misshapen…”

“That’s certainly not true in your case. You’re not ugly,” I blurted out.

“How dare you!” he shouted, and for a moment I thought that, in his anger, he was about to hit me. “Please, no euphemisms where I’m concerned. Speak plainly.”

“I’ve said nothing that isn’t true. You’re neither misshapen nor ugly. You’re very small but perfectly well-proportioned,” I said.

“I know all too well what I look like,” he said, tight-lipped.

“What do you think you look like then?”

“I’m monstrous. That’s the only word for me. All the rest is nonsense, a waste of breath.”

I’ve never quite known what to make of people who speak scornfully of themselves and their lives. But, in general, I feel such harshness is unjustified. I’ve often noticed that the harshest people only soften when it comes to judging the actions of the very life they claim to despise; and that then—feeling, of course, even more despicable—they tend to turn their weapons on the person nearest them rather than on themselves.