Obabakoak (2 page)
Authors: Bernardo Atxaga
He never got off to a good start. The words refused to give faithful expression to what was demanded of them, as if they were lazy, or as if they lacked the energy to do so. His father used to say: “Thought is like sand and when we try to grasp a fistful of it, most of the grains trickle out between our fingers.” And it was true. For example, here he was proposing to write a memoir, but it would have been more exact to describe it as a meditation, because that in fact was what he wanted to write: a fine meditation on the events of one afternoon in his adolescence. And that wasn’t the only blunder, there were others.
He could, of course, cross out what he’d written and start again, but he didn’t want to. It was against his rules. He liked his pages to look immaculate, his as well as other people’s, and he felt proud that his scrupulousness had led his students to nickname him after a well-known brand of soap. Anyway, why worry about finding a good beginning? He’d make mistakes on the second attempt too. There would always be mistakes. It was better to press on, getting it right as he went along, gradually making amends for his poor beginning.
He looked out at the park again. There were no swans on the lake now, they’d retreated to their house. No, they didn’t like the February rain either.
However—he wrote—any attempt to select out special moments of our life may prove a grave mistake. It may be that a life can only be judged as a whole,
in extenso,
and not by its parts, not by taking one day and rejecting another, not by separating out the years like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, in order to conclude that this bit was very good and this very bad. The fact is that everything that lives is like a river, with no shortcuts and no halts along the way.
But, while that is true, it is equally true that memory tends to behave quite differently. Like all good witnesses, memory takes pleasure in the concrete, in selected details. If I had to compare it with anything, I’d say it was like an eye. I would never, on the other hand, compare it to a bookkeeper who specializes in taking inventories.
For example, right now I can see the swans’ house, covered from ground to roof with ivy, which is by its nature dark and darker still on rainy days like today. I see it but, strictly speaking, I never see it. Each time I look up, my gaze slides over the monotonous green and black of the leaves, and doesn’t stop until it finds the reddish stain on one of the corners of the roof. I don’t even know what it is. Perhaps it’s a scrap of paper or a primrose that’s chosen to bloom there or a single tile that the ivy has left uncovered. As far as my eyes are concerned, it doesn’t matter, for they shun the dark and unerringly seek out that one point of light.
Esteban Werfell stared out at the reddish stain, but still failed to assuage his doubts. It could as easily be a primrose as a scrap of paper or a tile. In the end, though, such a detail was of no matter. What did matter was what he had just written about memory. To say that memory took pleasure in the concrete was inexact. It was a question of necessity, not pleasure.
That is how the eye behaves—he went on—and, if my idea is correct, memory does too. It disregards the ordinary and instead seeks out remarkable days, intense moments; in my own case, it seeks out one particular far-off afternoon of my life.
But enough of this. It’s time to begin the story itself.
Once he’d ruled a line to bring to a close that first page of his notebook, Esteban Werfell felt relieved. There it was, he had managed to outline an introduction to what he wanted to say. He didn’t know quite why he went about things that way, with all those detours and delays, but it was certainly very typical of him, it always had been. He never wrote or spoke directly, he never dealt frankly with the people around him. After all these years, he accepted his timidity, his cowardice, as a character defect, but the opportunities he had let slip by because of it still hurt him. His whole life had been one of silence, passivity, withdrawal.
But he was getting sidetracked again. It wasn’t a question now of how he lived his life, but of how he wrote, and it was a matter of indifference whether he took a circuitous route to get there or not. No one would ever read his personal journal. He did occasionally allow himself to fantasize about some imaginary future reader—sitting at that same table after his death—poring over his notebooks, but he could never really bring himself to believe in him or her. No, there would be no such reader. There was, therefore, something slightly ridiculous about his preoccupation with style.
As he dipped his pen in the inkwell, he looked across at the park. In the rain, without the usual walkers, the area around the lake looked more solitary than ever. The little streams that sprang up among the grass rippled as they flowed over the pebbles.
Hic incipit
—he wrote—here begins the story of the afternoon when, for the first time in my life, I was taken to church. I was fourteen years old and I lived with my father in a place called Obaba.
It was Sunday and I’d arranged to meet up with some school friends and go to the cinema that had been built some three miles from Obaba near the railway. But for the first time, and contrary to the rules governing our friendship, my friends turned up at the house long before the agreed hour and, as soon as I opened the door to them, made a most unexpected request. “Come to church with us this evening,” they said, “come and sing in the choir. Ask Mr. Werfell to let you come. You can tell him it’s just a matter of singing some psalms, you don’t have to believe in anything.”
Such behavior was odd in them. Such boldness, I mean. And the word
boldness
is apt on this occasion, since in Obaba paying social visits—insofar as that implied seeing the interior of someone else’s house—was considered to be in distinctly bad taste, in the same league as turning around to stare when someone was getting undressed. Moreover, my father was a foreigner, a stranger and an enemy, and everyone knew how much he hated the church and religion in general.
Looking back, I have no doubt that the person behind that proposal was the canon of Obaba, a Jesuit. In his eyes I must have seemed a soul in mortal danger, a child who, lacking a mother—she had died when I was born—was at the mercy of a hateful man, a man who would not hesitate to drag his own son into the abyss in which he himself lived. The canon must have thought there could be no better way of attracting me than through my friendship with my schoolfellows.
The hatred between the canon and my father was not, so to speak, purely intellectual. It had its roots in something other than the iconoclastic approach adopted by my father from the moment he was put in charge of the mines at Obaba. That something was my existence. To use the words I heard on the lips of the schoolmaster one day, I was not the “legitimate fruit of a marriage.” And I wasn’t, for the simple reason that my parents had joined together in free union, without recourse to the church, a fact which at that time and in that place was deemed inadmissible. But that’s another story and has no place in this notebook.
The park was still deserted and the trees, oblivious of the coming spring, seemed listless. Not even the swans gave any sign of life.
He looked away from the window and reread what he’d written. No, his parents’ story had no place in that notebook, perhaps in the next notebook, the thirteenth. It would, above all, be the story of a young woman who chose to live with a foreigner and, because of that, was slandered and condemned to be ostracized. “Your mother would sleep with anyone. Your mother didn’t wear any knickers. Your mother died young because of all the wicked things she did.”
The words heard during playtime at the school in Obaba still wounded him. He wasn’t sure whether he would write that thirteenth notebook or not, but, if he did, he knew how difficult it would be. But he would face that when he came to it. The task in hand was the story he had brought back with him from the trip to Hamburg.
Esteban Werfell bent over his notebook again. His school friends’ unexpected visit once more filled his imagination.
Seeing my astonishment, my friends proceeded, rather clumsily, to argue their case, studiously avoiding all mention of the canon. According to them, it was wrong that they and I should have to go our separate ways on Sundays. It was a sheer waste of time, because sometimes they finished their singing ten or fifteen minutes earlier than usual, minutes that could prove vital if we were to get to the cinema on time, minutes that, in fact, were never put to good use; all because of me, of course, because I was their friend and they had no alternative but to wait for me.
Summing up, one of them said: “We always arrive after the film’s started, and it seems stupid to me to cycle three miles only to miss half the plot. It would make much better sense to stick together.”
Their arguments were, as I said, rather clumsy; in fact the service tended to finish later rather than earlier. I said nothing to contradict them, though. Deep down I wanted to go to church. Not just because it was forbidden territory, and therefore desirable, but also because of the need I felt to be a normal child, to be one of the boys. Apart from my father, I was the only person in Obaba who had never set foot in that building and, naturally—I was after all only fourteen—I didn’t like being marked out as different.
Their proposal was in line with my own desires, therefore, and I didn’t argue with what they said. I simply indicated the door of the library, where my father was working. It was his permission they required. No, I didn’t dare to ask him, it was best that they should do so. Not that I thought he would agree. I expected my father to dismiss them in a loud voice, declaring that he had no intention of going against the principles of a lifetime on that or any other Sunday.
Instead I heard him say: “If he wants to go, let him.” I felt first surprised, then frightened; it was as if every pane of glass in the window had suddenly shattered. Why did he say yes? I couldn’t even begin to imagine why.
A swan stood at the door of its house making loud honking noises, as if to reproach the continuing rain. It rained on and on, flattening the grass and forming puddles that grew ever deeper. Soon the whole park would be awash.
Esteban Werfell clasped his hands and rested them on the notebook. No, at fourteen he couldn’t possibly have understood his father, because at that age, he saw him not with his own eyes, but through the eyes of others, through the eyes of those who, he later realized, were his father’s declared enemies. In Obaba it was said that Engineer Werfell was a proud, intractable man and that’s what he thought too. It was said—a little girl who played with him in the square told him this—that he was so cruel he beat the mine workers; and Esteban would simply smile and nod. Indeed he accepted that image because he had no other. What was his father? Just that, his father. And beyond that? Beyond that, nothing. Well, apart from being a mining engineer.
But that time had passed. He was a grown man, not a rather unsympathetic adolescent. He thought now that he understood why his father had accepted his school friends’ proposal.
“Sheer weariness,” he sighed. He was beginning to enjoy the rain. It was helping him to remember.
Engineer Werfell had indeed grown weary, he regretted having left his native city of Hamburg to move to a place where all his ideas seemed ridiculous. At first, he dreamed of returning. “We’ll go back, Esteban, and you can study at the same university I went to.” Those words ran like a refrain throughout his childhood.
But then the bad news began to arrive. One day it was the mine closing down; the next it was the failure of the bonds he’d bought on the Stock Exchange, leaving him almost penniless; then came the letter from his best friend, Theodor Steiner, telling him that the association to which they both belonged—the Eichendorff Club—had been banned in Germany and that his ideas were now outlawed even in the country of his birth.
By the time Esteban was fourteen, his father had given up hope. He would die in Obaba, he would never return to Germany. His son would never study at a German university. It was logical then, given the circumstances, that he no longer had the strength to fight for his son’s education. What did it matter? “If he wants to go, let him.” The battle was lost anyway.
The swan standing at the door of his house honked again, this time managing to get all the other swans inside to join him. The din distracted him from his memories.
“Be quiet!” he shouted, and went on to wonder: Why was he so proud? He didn’t want to cut the thread at that moment joining him and his father.
If he’d been more humble, Engineer Werfell would have been better able to accept life in Obaba. If he’d been more intelligent too. Yes, that was what real intelligence was, the ability to adapt to any situation. A man able to adapt would never know that descent into hell. On the contrary, he would achieve happiness. What use had all his books, reading, and ideas been to his father? In the end he’d been defeated. “Only the mean of spirit adapt to life,” his father used to say. But he didn’t agree with him anymore. Nor did he agree with the old maxim coupling knowledge and suffering, or with the one that says the more a man knows, the more he suffers. As he used to say to his students, that unfortunate consequence came only after climbing the first rungs up the ladder of knowledge. As a man climbed higher, he had to learn to triumph over suffering.
The swans seemed to have quieted down. Esteban Werfell dipped his pen in the inkwell and covered the first lines of a new page with his neat writing. He was determined to note down these reflections in his journal.
Even in the most difficult situations there comes a moment when giving up the struggle becomes something desirable, even pleasant. Thus, for example, the victim of a shipwreck ultimately becomes reconciled to the sea, even someone who has sweated blood trying to save his ship and has spent the whole night beneath the stars, encircled by fishes, in the most utter solitude, defying the waves. It doesn’t matter what he’s done, or how dearly he clings to life, the end is always sweet. He sees that he can do no more, that no one is coming to his rescue, that no coast is in sight, and then he accepts the situation, he rests, he gives himself up to the sea like a child wanting only to sleep.
But my father was too proud. True his ship had foundered and he had no option but to submit, but he wouldn’t accept that, he didn’t want the final pleasure of defeat. He replied brusquely: “If he wants to go, let him,” and shut himself up in his library, the “only place in Obaba that he liked.” When I knocked to ask him for money to go to the cinema, he didn’t answer. He simply slipped a coin under the door. Now, I think, I regret the joy I showed then.
For as soon as I had the money, we all rushed off, pushing and shoving, the way we did when the teacher let us out at break time. Then we wheeled our bikes up the hill known in Obaba as Canons’ Hill.
It was a spring day of unsettled weather, with almost continual showers and squally winds, and the ditches by the roadside were full of water. Where they’d overflowed, the fallen apple blossom carried along by the current almost covered the ground. We trod on it as we passed, and it was like treading on carpets of white.
We walked briskly along, pushing the bikes, which, as Andrés, one of my friends, quite rightly remarked, seemed much heavier going uphill. At the end of the road, on the brow of the hill, stood the imposing spire of the church.
We all felt really cheerful. We laughed for no reason and rang our bicycle bells to compare the different sounds they made. “Are you happy, Esteban?” I told them I was, that it was an event of real importance for me, that I was bursting with curiosity. “Aren’t you a bit nervous too?” I told them I wasn’t. But I was and my nervousness was growing minute by minute. The time was approaching. As my father would have put it, I would soon be on the Other Side.
A moment later I was entering the church for the first time.
The massive door was extremely heavy. I had to lean the whole weight of my body against it before it yielded.
Andrés said to me: “Before going in you have to make the sign of the cross.”
I told him I didn’t know how to. So he wetted my fingers with his and guided my hand in its movements.
“It’s so dark!” I exclaimed as soon as I went in. I was blinded by the contrast between the brightness outside and the shadowy depths inside. I couldn’t see a thing, not even the central aisle immediately in front. “Don’t talk so loud,” said my companions going in ahead of me.
Far away, where I imagined the end of the aisle to be, a large candle was burning. It was the only point of light in the whole building. I took a few steps in that direction, only to stop again. I didn’t know which way to go and my friends seemed to have disappeared.
My eyes remained fixed on the flame at the other end of the aisle but gradually I began to make out a few other things. I noticed the stained-glass windows, which were blue, and the golden reflections on a column near the candle. But still I didn’t dare to move. Then I heard a voice behind me say: “Don’t be frightened, Esteban. It’s only me,” and, despite the warning, I jumped.
Before I had time to recover, a long, bony arm had encircled my neck. It was the canon. Bringing his face closer to mine, he said:
“Come now, Esteban. Don’t be frightened.”
His clothes smelled very strange to me.
“The flame of that candle never goes out, Esteban,” he whispered, pointing ahead with his free hand. “When we have to light a new candle, we always light it from the dying flame of the old one. Just think what that means, Esteban. What do you think it means?”
I was so scared I was incapable of thought and I felt ashamed every time the canon said my name. I kept silent.
“It means,” he began, “that the light we see today is the same light seen by our grandparents and our great-grandparents; it’s the same light our ancestors gazed upon. For hundreds of years, this house has united us all, those alive now and those who lived before us. That’s what the church is, Esteban, a community that transcends time.”
This argument clearly took no account of the circumstances of my own life. The Church not only united, it also divided; the fact of my being there was but one example of that. I said nothing, however, to contradict the canon. In fact, I felt humbled, as if my exclusion from that community were a personal defect or stain. I broke out in a cold sweat.
Smiling, the canon remarked that since there were still some minutes before the service was due to begin, I should take the opportunity to have a look at the altar and to visit other parts of the building. And, leaving me alone, he moved off toward a side door that led to the choir loft. I heard the rustle of his clothes even after he was out of sight.
We tend to think that things are in themselves either big or small, failing to realize that what we call size is in fact always relative. They are only big or small in relation to other things and that is why I can still say now, in all honesty, that I have never again seen anyplace as big as the church at Obaba. It was a hundred times the size of the school, a thousand times bigger than my bedroom. What’s more, the shadows blurred the edges of walls and columns and made the bosses and the ribs of the vault seem even more remote. Everything seemed larger than it really was.
One of the picture books I used to read at the time recounted the adventures of an expedition that had become trapped inside a hollow mountain and I associated the pictures in that book with the place I saw before me. Not only because of the obvious physical resemblance but also because of the asphyxia that was beginning to afflict me as it had the characters in the story. I continued on up the aisle but with the growing conviction that I would surely suffocate before I reached the flame burning on the altar. Then I noticed an old lady dressed in black approach the foot of the altar and lift a lever. Immediately the whole church was filled with light.
That change from darkness to light made me feel better and I began to breathe more easily. With some relief I thought: It isn’t a hollow mountain, it’s more like a theater, like the ones my father used to go to in Hamburg, like the places where they put on operas.
Most of my father’s memories revolved around the theater and I knew by heart the plots and choreography of everything he had seen at the opera house on Buschstrasse or at the Schauspielhaus, as well as many stories about the actors and actresses of the time. Comparisons between what I’d imagined in those conversations with my father and what I saw then seemed unavoidable. Yes, the church was a theater with a large central stage, images of bearded men, and seats and benches for the audience. And everything was golden, everything shone.
A deep, almost tremulous sound ran through the whole church and when I turned my head toward the choir loft, I noticed some twenty women kneeling at their pews. They were moving their lips and staring at me.
Oppressed by so many eyes, I ran toward the door the canon had entered and a moment later I was taking the stairs two by two up to where my companions would be waiting.