Obabakoak (9 page)

“We’ll find a way around it, Manuel. Now eat up!”

But the servant boy didn’t move.

“Who’ll be in charge of lighting the fire while I’m away?” he asked, lowering his gaze. He was clearly afraid of losing his job.

“I’ll take charge of it myself in your absence, Manuel,” said the schoolmistress. At last she’d discovered the real source of the boy’s concern.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Great! I think that’s a great idea!” he exclaimed, reaching out for his first croquette. Then, while they ate supper, he regaled the schoolmistress with stories of his life, talking with the candor, confidence, and joy of someone who sees their future as entirely unclouded. Where were his parents? No longer in this world, of course; they’d died when he was only three. And did he have any brothers? Yes, he had two brothers, much older than him, but he never saw them, they’d gone to America. What about sisters? No, no sisters, nor any need of them. What did he like doing? What he most liked doing in the world was wrestling, that and working as a shepherd with his dog. But more than anything else he liked wrestling. That was why, as soon as he could, he’d leave Albania and go somewhere where he could train seriously and get to be as good a wrestler as Ochoa.

“Where will you go, Manuel?” asked the schoolmistress, getting up to see to the cake.

“I don’t know yet, America probably, where my brothers are.”

Through the kitchen window they could see the moon submerged among the clouds. The sky had a reddish tinge to it.

“It’s started to rain,” said the young servant.

“I don’t like the rain. I like the snow,” she remarked, sniffing the cake and placing it on the table. It had turned out perfectly.

“Well, you’ll have to wait another two weeks for that. There won’t be any snow until then.” The boy spoke with the confidence of one who has often slept out in the open.

“I’ve got a little sherry, Manuel. Shall we have some with the cake?”

“If you like, Miss…”

“And don’t call me ‘Miss,’ Manuel. Forget I’m your teacher,” she said, going off in search of the bottle.

They ate their cake and drank the sherry as if performing a ceremony, in silence and very slowly, only occasionally laughing. Outside the wind and the rain joined forces to beat insistently at her window. But she and Manuel didn’t listen; they were aware only of the good cake and the good wine. The warmth of the kitchen protected them from all enemies.

“It’ll be Christmas soon, Manuel. Why don’t we sing a carol?” said the schoolmistress when they’d finished. The servant nodded.

They sang for a long time and then smoked and later drank some more. When the hermitage clock struck midnight, they were exhausted, especially the servant boy.

“I’m sorry, Miss, but I really must be going,” he said to the schoolmistress, forgetting what they’d decided earlier about forms of address. “I’ve been up since really early this morning and I can barely keep my eyes open.” He’d just given a few demonstrations of Ochoa’s famous back heel trip.

The schoolmistress—her third cigarette of the night in her hand—went over to the window before replying. The wind and the rain were still out there.

“You’ll have to stay here, Manuel. It’s a filthy night.”

The servant boy didn’t reply. He was falling asleep in his chair.

“I know what we’ll do. Do you see that mattress?”

“Why’ve you got a mattress in the kitchen?” asked the servant boy, opening his eyes.

“When it’s very cold I usually sleep in here. And that’s what you’re going to do tonight. It’s lovely sleeping in this kitchen. Come on now, don’t be silly, lie down.” The servant obeyed like an automaton.

As soon as the boy had lain down and closed his eyes, the schoolmistress’s Confused Heart began to protest. She was acting unwisely, or rather, she already had, by letting the party go on so long, by encouraging the boy to drink, and by drinking and smoking herself. She shouldn’t stand there looking down at that mattress, she should withdraw, go out and take a walk beneath the cold December rain and think it all through properly. But it was pointless. The voice with which the other forces of her inner self spoke was much stronger, more persuasive. She must not be a coward. The world was a long way from that kitchen. What did Albania matter, or her city by the coast, or anything? Anyway what was her hand doing? And was that hand perhaps wiser than Her Confused Heart?

The schoolmistress closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then she went to her room.

“Settle down to sleep now, Manuel. I’ll be in to put out the light in a minute,” she shouted from the passage. The servant boy didn’t reply.

Standing in front of the big mirror in her room, the schoolmistress unzipped her skirt and let it fall to the floor. She liked her thighs. They were twenty-three years old today as well. They were strong and smooth, not flabby like her girlfriends’ thighs. When she walked along the beach lots of people turned to look at them.

Slowly, every part of her body was paraded before the mirror. Then, wearing only a summer nightdress, she tiptoed into the kitchen.

“Manuel, you’ve gone to sleep with your clothes on,” she said half-sitting, half-lying down by his side.

The day after her birthday, the fourth of December, the schoolmistress’s feelings had changed. The confusion that had filled her since her arrival in Albania had disappeared completely to be replaced by fear. She was no longer the woman of the Confused Heart; she was the woman of the Frightened Heart.

More than anything else that change affected the way she moved about Albania, because she no longer dared take her usual route home from school, instead—in order to avoid people’s eyes—she took the long way around: one hundred and twenty steps, then eighty, then seventy-five, and finally twenty-two, making—if my sums are correct—a total of two hundred and fifty-seven steps.

Once inside the house, she turned again and again to her diary and gave expression there to the thoughts Her Frightened Heart needed to think if she were not to become even more frightened and thus lose control of her life. They were long passages, filling whole pages:

But Time seemed disinclined to clarify matters, at least not immediately, choosing instead to remain silent for several days, limiting itself to bringing the first snows, just as the boy had predicted. Nevertheless, the third Sunday in December arrived and when night had fallen, shortly after the blind accordionist had stopped playing, the schoolmistress did feel that Time was speaking directly to her, that, in response to her invocation, Time had chosen to speak to her through the mouths of two young men it had previously plied with alcohol. “Miss!” they called, having planted themselves outside her house.

She didn’t dare open the door to them, but she watched the two boys from the window. They were standing beneath the lamppost by the roadside, their arms around each other’s shoulders. All about them was utter whiteness.

“Open up, Miss!” they called.

Then gathering snow from the ground, they began throwing snowballs at her door.

“What’s wrong? Don’t you like little boys anymore? We are only little, honest!”

“It’s true. At any rate his is!”

Convulsed with laughter, the two boys lurched off.

They were the first messengers, but not the only ones, for throughout that night, as if wanting to make its reply absolutely clear, Time kept sending her drunken young men: eight of them around eleven o’clock; three more at midnight; one a half an hour later; making—including the first two—a total of fourteen messengers.

It was the last messenger, at half past midnight, who troubled Her Frightened Heart most though. Unlike the others, he didn’t shout or make a racket, he came in silence; and then he called very gently at the window, whispering: “Open up, it’s me, the one with the ship tattooed on his arm.”

The man with the tattoo repeated his plea every ten minutes. He seemed prepared to spend the whole night there in that vigil, in the midst of the darkness and the snow that the frost was gradually hardening.

But it was freezing cold now and even that final messenger gave up in the end. By three in the morning he had gone, had disappeared into the shadows of Albania.

The schoolmistress assumed that her conversation with Time was now at an end and decided her only option was to be patient and to hold out against the siege. Sooner or later they would tire of licking and biting at her story. Besides, the Christmas holidays were nearly upon her. Just a little longer and she would be back in her city by the sea, in her true home.

But Time was still there and had not yet done with her. It wanted to press home its answer, to continue the conversation. And so it was that on that same Monday, it sent two more messengers to the schoolmistress: the first of them at half past eight in the morning and the second at one o’clock in the afternoon.

The first announced himself with loud bangs on the door. And when the schoolmistress opened up, startled by such insistence, the messenger hurried into the house and went to sit down in the kitchen, with no show of good manners, neglecting even to say good morning.

“I’ve come for the key,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“What do you mean by this, Manuel? Is that any way to come into someone’s house?” She was still half-asleep and found it hard to find the right words.

“I wouldn’t say it was the right way, but you kept me out there knocking on the door for a quarter of an hour and that’s not right either.”

“I had a bad night and I’ve got a headache. And that’s quite enough of your cheek!” the schoolmistress said angrily.

“Well I’ve been working in the woods all week and I haven’t got a thing!”

Just for a moment, she thought a smile of complicity flickered across the servant boy’s lips and considered that perhaps he was just playing, just putting on that swaggering air. But Her Frightened Heart, which required a Guilty Party, told her not to be so sentimental, that she should disregard her memories. After all, who was it who had revealed her secret, who had fueled the exaggerated tales currently doing the rounds of Albania? It could only have been the boy sitting there before her. Who else if not him?

“Ah, now I understand,” began the schoolmistress, leveling a finger at him. “You’re the one who’s been spreading all these lies.”

“All what lies?” exclaimed the boy, growing serious.

“It makes no difference whether you admit it or not. As I said, I understand it all now,” said the schoolmistress with a scornful look. Then, seeing that it was growing late, she gave him the key and told him to get out of the house.

“See you later, love,” she heard him say as the door closed.

The boy’s attitude remained the same all morning, or at least so it seemed to the schoolmistress when she went over what happened in the classroom. He was continually talking, moving about among the desks, and finally, when they were about to leave, he had had the nerve to wink at her.

Back home, she reached for her notebook and added a few lines to the previous night’s entry:

Sometime later, when she was having her lunch, she heard someone tapping on the kitchen window. It was the local postman, Time’s second messenger of the day, the one o’clock messenger.

“Excuse me, Miss, but I’ve got three letters for you,” he said when she opened the door to him.