Obabakoak (8 page)

“It’s nothing special. At least it didn’t smoke, that’s the main thing,” he replied, with a gesture dismissing the importance of his achievement. His tone had grown serious again.

The young servant spent the morning looking through the stove’s inspection window, keeping an eye on the fire. Because, needless to say, the fire was always ready to surprise you and the worst thing you could do was to trust it. One minute it could be blazing away merrily and the next have burned so low it looked as if it might die down altogether. If you didn’t watch it all the time, the fire could easily just burn itself out.

“Turn to the arithmetic section in your encyclopedias,” the schoolmistress said, having left the younger ones practicing their handwriting.

The servant pulled a face. He disliked arithmetic anyway and felt a special hatred for the problems they were made to do at the end of each lesson; he found them totally incomprehensible.

But the schoolmistress was already reading out the problem they had to solve that day and he tried to look as if he were really paying attention.

“A man had six horses. He sold three of them for 1,000 pesetas each. He sold another two for 1,300 pesetas each. The last horse, on the other hand, broke a leg and had to be slaughtered. Question: Bearing in mind that he received a total of 7,300 pesetas, how much money did the butcher give him for the sixth horse?”

“How did the horse come to break its leg in the first place?” wondered the servant boy. That stupid encyclopedia always left out the most important bits.

Then he heard a voice ask: “How much money did the butcher give him, Manuel?” The blood rushed to his face. He liked the fact that the schoolmistress said his name out loud in front of everyone but he didn’t like what that fact implied. Having to answer caused him intense embarrassment.

“We don’t eat horse meat in these parts, Miss,” he blurted out. The pupils in the back row burst out laughing and the schoolmistress had to threaten them with the ruler to silence them.

“Now come on, Manuel. How much money did he give him?” she asked again.

“I don’t know. About seventy-five pesetas I should think!”

“Two hundred pesetas!” shouted a girl with her hair in a braid.

The schoolmistress nodded.

“Did anyone else get that answer?”

Everyone in the back row put their hands up. But the servant boy didn’t agree.

“What do they know?” he declared to himself, looking at the others with scorn. “You try going to a butcher with a clapped-out old horse and see if he gives you two hundred pesetas for it. Not a chance!”

Then he got up to get firewood for the stove and, as he passed the schoolmate who had laughed loudest at his reply, he crouched down and said: “If I catch you on the way out from school, I’ll kill you.”

The boy who had laughed so heartily went pale. He knew all too well that no one had yet managed to better the servant boy in a fight. He could beat everyone, even boys twice his age.

Post tenebras spero lucem:
at six in the evening it was already dark in Albania and so, all the lights on the boarding-house stairs having gone out, with the banister for support, the schoolmistress had to feel her way down the twenty-three stairs—five plus ten plus eight—that led to the hallway cluttered with the leather bottles of wine and oil.

But, as well as that outer darkness, there was the other darkness lodged in Her Confused Heart and it was, without a doubt, the darker of the two, a darkness that obliged her to stop and stand still when, after the first fifteen stairs, she had reached the main landing. From there she could clearly hear the conversations of the laborers drinking and laughing in the boarding house immediately below her. To begin with, that pause had simply been a rest, then an innocent entertainment, then suddenly, when midwinter was upon them, a habit she didn’t even dare confess to her diary.

“They’re always so cheerful and yet they’ve spent the whole day working in that trench,” she thought.

At first, Her Confused Heart listened with equal interest to all the men (masculine plural). But as soon as she was able to distinguish the different voices, her interest in their plurality abruptly disappeared. She wasn’t interested in the ten or twelve laborers gathered around the bar, nor even in half of them, nor even in half of that half. She was only interested in one. She saw him every morning, working near the washhouse; he was a dark man with curly hair and a tattoo on his right arm. Some nights, those nights when she slept in the nude, that tattoo—in the form of a ship—even penetrated her dreams.

Sometimes she felt like inventing an excuse to go into the bar, for example, going in and asking for a volunteer to help move the blackboard, or for a glass of water, or for advice on the leaking roof. But instead she always walked on toward her house on the outskirts of Albania. And it wasn’t just a matter of shyness, it was also because the tattoo reminded her of a real ship: the blue and red ship Her Best Friend worked on.

The night before her twenty-third birthday—it was the second of December, a Friday—she remained standing on the stairs for longer than usual. The place seemed to be packed and, above the customers’ chattering and whistling, she could hear the strains of a harmonica playing.

“I expect they’re dancing,” she thought, recalling a scene she had witnessed shortly after her arrival in Albania, where it was not unusual for the men to dance together.

Then she heard someone say: “Right, I’m going to do it!” The doorway lit up and the man with the tattoo came out, followed by two friends. They were all laughing and his friends kept tugging at his shirt.

The schoolmistress swallowed hard when the man began to unbutton his fly. It occurred to her that she might be discovered there.

“Come on, mate, cut it out, we believe you!” pleaded his two friends. She couldn’t take her eyes off the opening in his trousers. She saw a lump of swollen flesh and the liquid that flowed from it formed small black streams among the flagstones.

“God, you’re a pig!” his friends said, laughing, and she had to hold tight to the banister rail to keep her balance.

Plunged into darkness again, the schoolmistress continued slowly on down the final eight steps to the main door. Once there, her foot sought out one of the streams still wet on the flagstones, and then, very deliberately, she stepped in it. She reached her gray and white house feeling light and strong and, as she changed her clothes, she almost danced, swaying her body and her arms. An intense joy flooded her heart.

Had the schoolmistress been a mature, experienced woman, the scene she’d witnessed from the landing would have passed into her life as a trivial anecdote one only recalls later at some get together, to amuse one’s friends. But she’d only just left her city on the coast and—as far as that aspect of life was concerned and apart from her nighttime fantasies—she had only the brief experience of that one night in June, the night Her Best Friend had invited her to walk with him in the dunes. She thought, therefore, that she’d done something of great significance. The wet sole of her shoe symbolized, beyond all doubt, that she had passed the Great Test set for her in Albania.

After supper, galvanized by that new state of mind, the desire to write to Her Best Friend was reborn in her. She looked for her writing pad, pale blue in color, and opened it resolutely. A cup of coffee steamed on the table.

“And here it will stay if I get no word from you tomorrow,” she thought, mentally addressing Her Best Friend.

“I do hope you haven’t forgotten my birthday!” She sighed.

That night she slept more peacefully than she had for some time.

The following day—it was Saturday and her work at the school finished at midday—she didn’t feel like going straight home to have lunch and decided to take a long detour before returning to her gray and white house, taking seven hundred steps to the cemetery, then three hundred to the hermitage, and finally five hundred to the door of her house; and once that distance was traveled, one thousand five hundred steps in all, she looked up and saw the letter the postman had left stuck in a crack in the door.

It was a postcard covered with signatures. Her parents and brothers and sisters wished her a happy birthday and sent their love.

She decided then that she still didn’t feel like eating and continued walking, as far as the mountain this time, and took seven thousand steps all in one go to the source of the river, then another five thousand to the hill from where one could look down onto the church and the streets of Obaba and, later, back in her own part of the village, the same number of steps again plus two thousand more. At last when—if my sums are correct—she had taken twenty-six thousand steps, she went into her kitchen, exhausted and hungry, and began preparing a special meal.

Making the cream sponge cake took her the longest, but once she’d put it in the oven, she picked up her notebook and sat down to write.

She went across to the window and wondered if she should add something more to that paragraph. But she didn’t feel like going over the feelings provoked by Her Best Friend’s neglect. She didn’t want to wallow in despair.

At last she wrote: “The moon is playing hide-and-seek in the sky.”

She was just about to take the cake out of the oven when she heard someone knocking at the door.

“Manuel, what are you doing here?” she exclaimed, surprised to find the little servant boy there.

“I’m very worried about something, Miss,” replied the boy, keeping his eyes on the ground.

Once in the kitchen, the schoolmistress noticed his bruised, swollen lip and thought she understood the meaning of what he’d just said.

“What happened to your mouth, Manuel?” she said, alarmed. “It’s nothing, Miss. I just had a fight with a pig weighing one hundred thirty pounds more than me. You probably know him. He’s one of the men working on the drains.”

“The one with a tattoo on his arm?”

“No, not the dark one. One of the others, a much fatter bloke.” The schoolmistress felt relieved to hear that.

“But why were you fighting?”

“Because the other day he tried to take the school key away from me and I kicked him. And of course this morning he came to get his own back. But he didn’t stand a chance with me.”

“He didn’t stand a chance with you, eh?” laughed the schoolmistress. The boy’s confidence in himself amused her.

“He’s a coward, that fat bloke. At first I fought clean, then I had to back off because the brute was just too heavy for me. But because he’d hurt my mouth, I picked up a stone and bashed him one right on the head. You should have seen his face, Miss!”

Now it was the servant boy’s turn to laugh.

“And,” he went on, “I told him that he’d better not come near me again, if he does he’ll pay for it. I know you shouldn’t really use stones but there’s a huge weight difference between us. What do you think, Miss?”

“I think you did very well,” replied the schoolmistress with a broad smile. She felt proud of the way the boy had acquitted himself.

“But I didn’t come here to tell tales, Miss. Like I said, there’s something I’m worried about.”

“Wait a minute, Manuel. First, I’m going to ask you a question. Have you had your supper?”

The boy shook his head.

“And have you noticed the good smell coming from the oven today?”

This time he nodded. It was impossible not to notice.

“There’s a cake in there. Have you ever had cake?”

“Twice.”

“Well, today will be the third time. But first we’re going to eat some other nice things. To start with, croquettes. Do you know what they are?”

“I think so,” said the servant, his eyes widening a little. Then he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of cigarettes. “Would you like one?”

She was going to refuse, but the despair lodged in her heart rebelled against the negative. She was fed up with being what her mother called “a nice girl.” There was no point in being a nice girl. And she was, after all, celebrating her birthday and Manuel was keeping her company at the only party she was likely to have.

“I will have one, but after supper. First things first. And while we eat you can tell me what you’re worried about.”

“Well,” the boy began, not even touching the croquettes she set before him, “the thing is that next week I won’t be able to come to school because we’ve got masses of work to do at home. And I’m worried about the stove, because no one else knows how to light the fire and the school will just fill up with smoke, I know it will.”