Authors: Bernardo Atxaga
Obabakoak (3 page)
Esteban Werfell laid his pen down wearily on the table and raised his eyes to the window, though without seeing anything in particular, without even noticing the din the swans by the lake were making. One of his “batty ideas” had just flitted across his mind, interrupting him, obliging him to consider the meaning of that twelfth notebook. What point was there in remembering? Wouldn’t it be better to leave the past well alone, rather than stir it all up?
“Only the young really enjoy looking back,” he thought. But when they talked about the past, they were really talking about the future, about the fears and desires they had about that future, about what they wanted from life. Moreover, they never did so alone, as he did. He didn’t really understand his urge to remember. Perhaps it was a bad sign, a sign that everything was over once and for all, that he was tired of life.
He shook his head to drive away such thoughts and finally noticed what was going on outside. By the side of the swans’ house someone had stopped to shelter from the rain and to throw pieces of bread into the lake. The swans were swimming back and forth, honking like mad things. “Their first visitor of the day,” he thought, “they must be hungry.” Then to himself he said: “Back to the choir loft.”
The moment I entered the choir loft, the canon got up from his seat at the organ and stretched out his arms. Almost sweetly, he said:
“Young Werfell is finally among us. Let us all rejoice and give thanks.”
Putting his hands together he began to pray out loud and all my companions followed suit.
“Welcome, Esteban,” he said afterward, assuring me that: “From now on you will belong to our community, you will be one of the chosen.” My companions stared at me as if they were seeing me for the first time. Andrés was in charge of distributing the books of psalms. The copy he handed me was almost brand new.
“Don’t worry, Esteban. A few more Sundays and you’ll be as good as us. You’ll probably end up being the best of all,” he whispered.
The pages of the book were very thin and had gilded edges. A red ribbon marked the psalms for that day.
When the canon asked me to sit at his side, the gaze of my companions became even more fixed. I hung back. I realized that it was an honor to be asked, but feared the physical proximity of the canon. The disagreeable smell emanating from his clothes was still fresh in my memory.
“Don’t be frightened, Esteban. Come and sit up here with me,” said the canon, as he began to play. The floorboards of the choir loft vibrated.
I was puzzled to see that the organ had two keyboards and that in order to play it, one had to move one’s feet. Sometimes the melody grew unpredictable with abrupt highs and lows and the canon seemed to be dancing sitting down, rocking back and forth on the bench and bumping up against me. I found it difficult to follow the melody of the psalms we sang; I couldn’t concentrate.
By the third psalm, I had closed the book and simply sat looking at the scene before me. There were my companions opening and closing their mouths and down below were the kneeling women; a little farther off, the candle flame burned, giving off orange lights.
Suddenly the flame began to rise into the air. At first it seemed to be moving of its own accord, as if propelled forward by something at its base. But then, when it was already hovering above the altar steps, I saw that this was not the case, that the flame was not traveling forward on its own but was held in the hand of a young girl with fair hair. She was the one hovering there, gently, unhesitatingly.
“She’s coming toward me,” I thought. The light from the flame was blinding me now.
The young girl flew across the whole length of the church and came to a halt in front of me. She hovered in the air, about a yard above the floor of the choir loft. The organ had fallen silent.
“Do you know what love is, Esteban?” she asked sweetly.
I replied with a nod and tried to get up from the bench in order to see her face. But the candle flame kept me riveted to the spot.
“Could you love me?” she asked and for a moment I glimpsed her nose, her half-open lips.
“Yes,” I said. It seemed the only possible answer.
“Then come and find me, Esteban. Come to Hamburg,” she said. “My address is Maria Vockel, 2 Johamesholfstrasse, Hamburg.”
Having said that, she turned and began to move off toward the altar. I cried out that yes, I would come to Hamburg and find her, but asked her not to go just yet, to stay a little longer. Then I heard someone say: “It’s all right, Esteban, it’s all right. Calm down.” I was lying on the floor of the choir loft with the canon bending over me. Andrés was fanning me with the pages of a score.
“Maria Vockel!” I exclaimed.
“Calm down, Esteban. You must have fainted.”
There was a gentle edge to the canon’s voice. He helped me to my feet and asked Andrés to take me outside to get some air.
“You’d best not go to the cinema, Esteban. Better safe than sorry,” the canon advised me as we said good-bye. “You won’t go now, will you?”
But the image of the fair-haired young girl still filled my mind and I did not feel strong enough to reply.
Andrés answered for me, reassuring the canon: “Don’t worry, Father, he won’t go and neither will I. I’ll stay with him, just in case.”
The canon said that would be fine and returned to the organ bench. The service had to go on.
I felt better as soon as I got outside and my mind grew clearer. Very soon the image of the young girl with fair hair began to grow tenuous, to disappear, the way dreams do, the way specks of dust vanish the instant the ray of sun illuminating them moves on. But by my side was my school friend, Andrés, to ensure that the scene I’d witnessed in the choir loft was not entirely lost. He was two or three years older than me and much preoccupied by affairs of the heart; he would never forget a woman’s name.
“Who’s Maria Vockel?” he asked at last.
It was then, when I heard her name again, that the image returned to me. Again I saw her flying from one part of the church to the other and remembered her questions. Hesitantly, I told Andrés all that had happened.
“It’s a shame you didn’t see her face,” he commented when I had finished. He seemed very interested in that missing detail of the girl’s portrait.
“No, just her nose and her lips. But I’m sure she’s prettier than any of the girls in Obaba.” I spoke as I thought, with the slightly ridiculous vehemence of my fourteen years.
“She can’t be prettier than the girl who works in the bar,” he replied gravely.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said.
I had forgotten how touchy Andrés could be on the subject of female beauty. From his point of view—which, even then, at the height of my adolescence, struck me as slightly absurd—no woman could compare with the waitress he was pursuing. He spent every free moment scrounging enough money to enable him to spend Saturday evenings drinking at a corner of the bar where she worked. Drinking and suffering, of course, because she, the prettiest girl in the world, spoke to everyone but him.
“You do forgive me, don’t you?” I urged. I didn’t want him to go; I needed someone to talk to.
“All right,” he said.
“Do you fancy a stroll?” I suggested. I didn’t want to go straight home, I needed time to sort out the feelings at that moment thronging my mind.
“We could cycle.”
“I’d prefer to walk, really. I’ve got a lot to think about.”
We set off along a path which, starting from the church, encircled the valley where Obaba’s three small rivers met. It was narrow and somewhat ill-suited to two walkers like us with bikes to push, but I felt very drawn to the landscape you could see from there. It was green and undulating, with a scattering of white houses, the sort of landscape that appears in every adolescent’s first attempts at poetry.
“It looks like a toy valley,” I said.
“Yes, I suppose it does,” replied Andrés, rather unconvinced.
“It looks like those cribs you make at Christmas time,” I added, stopping for a better look. I was starting to feel euphoric. The strange vision I’d had in the choir of the church had made my heart drunk.
It had stopped raining at last and the swans were taking advantage of the lull to seek out scraps of food along the edges of the lake. The friendly passerby who had been throwing them bread was now walking away toward the city along the main path of the park, his empty white bag folded beneath one arm.
Attracted by the new turn the day was taking, Esteban Werfell left his notebook and went over to the window. “I was so young then!” He sighed, recalling the conversation he’d had with Andrés.
Yes, very young, and tormented by the remarks made about Engineer Werfell and about his own mother, tormented and confused, seeking in picture books the affection and security he failed to find at school or in the streets of Obaba. His heart then had been like a small Cape of Despair, fertile soil for a fantasy figure like Maria Vockel. He wanted to believe in the reality of that fair-haired young girl, he wanted to believe in her words. The way in which she had appeared to him was, after all, not so very different from the methods employed by the heroines in the novels he read.
Even after all these years, Esteban Werfell still felt it right to consider Maria Vockel his first love. Walking along the path encircling the little valley, he grew melancholy, dreamy, just like Andrés. For the first time in his life, he felt he understood how his companion suffered over his waitress.
“At least you can see her. I’ll never see mine.”
He remembered his words now with a smile. They were ridiculous, like most of the words recorded in his personal journal of the time. But to deny the past was mere foolishness.
“Why don’t you go to Hamburg? That’s where your father’s from, isn’t it?” reasoned Andrés. He was concerned with details, but not with the apparition in itself, nor with the likelihood of such an occurrence. On the contrary, it seemed quite reasonable to him. He knew of lovers who had communicated in much stranger ways than that. By becoming owls, for example. Maria Vockel must have had some reason for choosing that particular method.
Leaving his memories for a moment, Esteban Werfell opened the window and leaned out over the park. The sky was growing steadily bluer and late evening visitors were out walking their dogs or throwing bread to the swans. On the other side of the lake, a group of some twenty children were playing football.
“Anyway,” he thought, leaning on the windowsill and returning to his memories, “Andrés was no exception. People in Obaba had no difficulty in accepting even the strangest events. My father used to make fun of them.”
“They have crude minds, Esteban,” his father would say. And he always came up with some humorous anecdote to illustrate that point of view. But he had disliked the anecdotes and it seemed to him that his father was unfair to the people of Obaba, that he was wrong to despise them.
“I was a true Werfell for all that, though,” he thought, closing the window and returning to the table. “However much I wanted to believe in that apparition, my mind refused to do so. This was real life, not a novel. It seemed ridiculous to accept even the possibility that what had happened was real. No, Maria Vockel could not be real, she could not possibly live at 2 Johamesholfstrasse.”
Esteban Werfell closed his eyes and saw the fourteen-year-old Esteban on his way home, full of doubts, telling himself that his head was full of stories about Hamburg, full of women’s names, the names of singers and actresses, and that they must be the source of the words he had heard in the choir.
Before continuing, he counted the number of blank pages left in the notebook. There were quite a few left, enough for him to be gripped by a desire to finish that last part of the story as quickly as possible. If he finished early, he would still have time to go out into the park and watch a bit of the football match the children were playing. But the desire lasted only a moment. He must tell the story with all its details just as he had decided to do before returning home from his visit to Hamburg.
He dipped his pen in the inkwell. A final glance at the park revealed a small boy wagging an umbrella threateningly at the swans.
“What are you doing home so early?” my father asked as soon as I opened the front door.
“I didn’t go to the cinema after all.”
“Why not?”
“Because I fainted in church,” I confessed, shamefaced.
I saw that he was alarmed and quickly explained that nothing untoward had happened. The darkness in the church and the flickering candle flame had been to blame. I shouldn’t have stared so hard at it.
Sighing, my father gestured toward the library.
“Esteban, if it’s spirit you want, you’ll find it in those books in there, not in the darkness of a church,” he said. After a silence, I stammered: “Can I ask you something?” I couldn’t go on talking to him and still keep my secret. I needed to know what he thought about the Maria Vockel incident.
“Of course.”
He sat down in an armchair and indicated that I do likewise. He appeared nervous and it seemed to me that he no longer saw me as a child but as an adult, capable of making my own decisions.
I described everything that had happened from the moment I entered the church: the conversation during the fainting fit, my feelings at the time and my subsequent doubts. He listened attentively, without interrupting. When he saw that my story was over, he got up and began to pace about the room. He stopped by the window, plunged in thought. “Now he’ll go to the library and look up some book that will explain it all away,” I thought. But he didn’t move.
“Could something like that really happen?” I asked. “Is there any chance Maria Vockel might be real?”
“There’s only one way to find out, Esteban. By writing to that address,” he said, smiling. I was glad to find him so understanding. “I’ll help you write the letter,” he added, still smiling. “I haven’t quite lost my grasp of my own language yet.”
Despite their friendly tone, his words made me lower my gaze. My father had not been successful in his attempts to teach me German. Even at home, I preferred to speak as I did with my friends and I grew angry when he refused to use “the language we both knew.” But that Sunday everything was different. Repenting of my earlier attitude, I promised myself that I would make up for lost time, that I would not offend him like that again.
But my father was happy, as if the events of the afternoon had revived pleasant memories. He put his hand under my chin and made me look up. Then, spreading out an old map of Hamburg on the table, he started to look for Johamesholfstrasse.
“Look, there it is. In the St. Georg district,” he said, pointing to it on the map, adding: “Shall we write the letter now?”
“Yes, I’d like that,” I replied, laughing.
Now, after all these years, I realize that the letter marked the end of an era in my life. I, who had never been like the other children in Obaba, was about to become, from that moment on, a complete foreigner, a worthy successor to Engineer Werfell. I would no longer go around with my school friends and I would never again return to the church. Furthermore, I would begin to study, to prepare myself to go to the university.
The sending of the letter was followed by a period riven by doubt. One day I’d be certain that a reply could not be long in coming, the next I’d think such a possibility ridiculous and grow angry with myself for cherishing such hopes.
That state of uncertainty ended one Friday, when my father came running into the room where I was reading and showed me a cream-colored envelope.
“Maria Vockel!” I shouted, getting up from my chair.
“Maria Vockel, 2 Johamesholfstrasse, Hamburg,” replied my father, reading out the sender’s address.
A shiver ran down my spine. It seemed impossible that such a thing could happen. But there was the proof that it had. The cream-colored envelope was real, as were the two handwritten sheets it contained. “Ask me anything you don’t understand,” said my father before leaving the room. I picked up the dictionary he’d given me for my birthday and began to read the letter.