Obabakoak (10 page)

“Three letters?”

“Yes, three of them. They must have got lost because look…”

The postman showed her the letters one by one. Not one of them bore the name “Obaba.”

“That’s why they’ve taken so long to reach you. Because they didn’t put the name of the village, only the name of the quarter.”

The schoolmistress nodded her agreement, stunned, unable to utter a single word. She’d recognized the writing on the envelopes. There was no doubt about it, it was that of Her Best Friend.

That paragraph, the final one of the third letter, merited five or six readings, and, like the grain of mustard seed in the parable, it put down roots in the schoolmistress’s heart ready to grow into a great, leafy tree. But, in fact, every line written by Her Best Friend was important, not just that one paragraph; every line comforted her, contributed something to the joy which from then on would constitute her strength. After reading those three letters, the notes and thoughts she’d written down in her diary seemed mediocre and insubstantial.

“They’re not going to beat me,” she thought, remembering the events of recent days. “I won’t allow their calumnies to continue. I’ll make them respect me.”

The people of Albania didn’t frighten her anymore.

Before going back to school, she selected a postcard with a
Nymphalis antiopa
on the front and scribbled a few lines in reply to Her Best Friend:

“I hope this letter doesn’t get lost as well! Try and make sure it arrives before I do!” she said to the postman when she went to deliver it.

She spent the afternoon teaching the children Christmas carols and singing along with them. Afterward, while she was putting away the school things, she considered her new situation, promising herself that she wouldn’t let this opportunity pass her by, that she would hang on with all her might to this happiness that had appeared in her life just when she’d least expected it. In other words, the tree that had put down roots in her heart was not going to let any weeds or bushes grow up around it.

The next day, the Tuesday before Christmas, dawned clear and cold in Albania, with a blue sky and a brilliant sun, and the schoolmistress waited at her window for the arrival of the servant boy. Immediately opposite her, in the distance, rose seven white mountains—two plus three plus two.

The boy arrived a little before half past eight.

“You stay right there,” the schoolmistress ordered when he made to come into the house. “I presume you want the key,” she said. And without giving him time to reply went on: “Well,
I’ll
give it to you today, but this is the last time.”

The boy looked down and had to swallow hard before he could say anything.

“But why?” he managed to stammer out in a dull voice.

“Do I really need to tell you why?” answered the schoolmistress, pushing the door to.

“You could leave the key outside and then I wouldn’t have to bother you.”

“No, Manuel. You’ve lost the job.”

The door of the gray and white house closed.

The boy took the two hundred and fifty steps required to reach the school and once there, he started slowly up the stairs as if he were very tired, stopping first on the sixth stair, then on the tenth, then on the seventeenth, and so on until he reached the last of the twenty-three steps. But, once inside the school, he seemed suddenly to recover all his energy and in a matter of seconds, almost without realizing what he was doing, he had trampled into nothingness a large part of the lands of Africa and Asia.

“Why take it out on Egypt, Hannibal?” Moro asked accusingly, for that was the country that had suffered the fiercest attack, adding: “Now what are they going to do, with the Nile in ruins?”

He had to admit his adjutant was right and he was doing his best to repair that longest of rivers when he heard the hermitage clock strike nine and he fled to his house, to the mountains, abandoning the Egyptians to their fate.

IF I COULD
, I’d go out for a stroll every night, except that I don’t dare, I’m too frightened. Sometimes, when I’m feeling braver, I go down to the front door of my house and I walk as far as the station, telling myself over and over: Katharina, don’t be silly, it doesn’t matter if the streets are empty, just walk quietly along and don’t think about all those things they write about in the papers, because the newspapers exaggerate everything, they almost seem to enjoy talking about murdered women and all that. But I’ve barely finished thinking this than I’ve turned around and I’m back home.

The other thing is that I feel a bit embarrassed going out for a stroll on my own. A neighbor told me I should buy a dog and that way when someone said to me: “What are you doing out for a stroll at this time of night?” I could reply: “It’s the dog, you see, I can’t let this lazy lump just lie around all day and get fat and ugly.” And the dog would act as protection too, because when it came to buying one I’d choose one of those specially trained dogs, the ones that go straight for the throat, a Doberman, or something like that.

If it didn’t rain so much in this city, that’s the solution I’d opt for, the dog I mean. I’d call it Clark and it would want for nothing, it would have rice and meat to eat and a comfortable place to sleep in. But the days here tend to be rainy and cold and it’s impossible to keep pets, and I don’t want to buy a dog only to have it fall ill for lack of exercise.

So I have no alternative but to forget about going for a walk and go to bed instead, but not to sleep, just to lie quietly and enjoy the last breath of the day from there. In fact I have my time very well organized. First I correct the exercises from the private math lessons I give the children. Then I turn on the radio and I read one of those magazines that tell you all about the love life of the Aga Khan and things like that. Daft magazines, I know, and terribly superficial, but just the thing when you don’t want to think about anything serious. Later on, at about two o’clock, I start knitting a sweater, knitting it or unknitting it, because I’m one of those indecisive types and I find it very hard to stick with whatever color or size I’ve chosen.

Even when the radio programs finish, I still find lots to do, I get on with my own things, with my knitting or whatever, in no hurry to go to sleep because, since I give private lessons in the afternoons, I don’t have to get up early. And anyway there’s the train, above all there’s the train.

I often deny it to myself but, if I’m being honest, it’s true, I am usually waiting for the train, and in the end I do what I do because of the train, that’s why I don’t sleep and all that.

The train passes through the city at twenty-five to four. Up to that moment I’m usually on the alert, listening to the noises of the night, the voices and sounds that have grown familiar through repetition. So, for example, the last bus stops on the corner shortly after three and its one passenger gets off, a man, it seems, who loves to whistle, and sometimes he whistles the same tune all week. Then, at about three fifteen, the street sweepers arrive. At half past three it’s the turn of the man I call Fangio, because he usually speeds by about then and the noise his car engine makes is first like a roar and then later, when he’s far off, like the moan of an animal that’s wounded or in pain. Then, at last, after a few more minutes, the train arrives.

The iron bridge warns me of its arrival. Up to that moment I can’t be completely sure, because you can be mistaken and confuse the train with the sound of the wind or with something else. But the iron bridge never lies, it acts like a loudspeaker, and, besides, the train makes a loud hammering noise when it crosses it.

Mostly it arrives on time, at twenty-five to four. But there are days when it’s late and then I can’t help but get nervous. I start counting every second, I listen as hard as I can, and even get up to look out of the window. One day it didn’t turn up until eight in the morning and I was in tears and everything because I felt sure there’d been an accident. Later I learned that the delay had been caused by nothing more serious than a landslide, or so I read in the paper.

The train usually has about twenty carriages and its destination is Hamburg. I don’t know if it always carries the same cargo but the day I traveled on it, it was carrying horses. I was told they were bound for America and that was why they were unloading them at the port. What will have become of those horses? I don’t know and the truth is I’d rather not. It might be that after that long journey all that awaited them was the butcher.

The train reduces speed when it crosses the bridge and that’s the most important moment of the night. That’s when I light the cigarette I usually keep on the bedside table; and that’s when I start imagining.

First I imagine the two drivers at the engine. I imagine them both silent, each one immersed in his own thoughts. At first, when they started working together, I’m sure they had loads of things to tell each other, but once that first stage was over, after they’d talked about their family and their friends, they’d find it difficult to come up with new topics of conversation. Of course they could talk about football and stupid things like that, but I don’t think so. People do talk about those things but not at four o’clock in the morning, not when they’ve been working for five hours.

I imagine, then, that they’re both silent, watching the lights on the control panel or looking ahead at the rails. Especially looking at the rails. Or at least that’s what I did that day. The horses in the wagons kept neighing and neighing, they were frightened and the truth is so was I until I got used to the speed, because it seemed to me that at any moment the rails were going to fly apart. But when I got over my fear I kept looking straight ahead, because the same thing happened to me as when I go to the sea, I was sort of hypnotized, I couldn’t take my eyes off those rails continually coming together and moving apart, because that’s what happens when you travel in a train at a hundred miles an hour, that’s what the railway lines do.

And the rails aren’t the only frightening thing when you travel in the engine of a train, because you suddenly realize that another train could emerge out of the darkness, coming from the opposite direction, I mean, and crash into you. But engine drivers aren’t like me. They’re not afraid. Perhaps they were on their first journey, but not now, now they’re used to it, and I imagine them feeling bored, looking indifferently out at the villages that appear along the way.

Each of them immersed in his own thoughts, that’s how I imagine them. One of them is married and has two children and thinks of them whenever he sees the lighted windows of a house because he assumes there must be some child in the house who’s ill or who won’t go to sleep. And then he feels like phoning his wife to find out how his children are, because, of course, they too could be ill or be having trouble sleeping, and he probably will do that, phone home I mean, as soon as he gets to Hamburg, and even if he doesn’t it won’t matter, at least he thought of it.

And I stop thinking about the first driver and I start imagining what the second one, Sebastian, is doing, what’s going on inside his head. And then I imagine that he’s thinking of me, that he’d like to come to this room where I lie smoking my cigarette, and that it grieves him not to have his wish.

But in imagining these things, I’m only fooling myself. Sebastian’s forgotten about me. If he hadn’t he’d blow the train whistle three times, two short blasts followed by one long one, as soon as he crossed the iron bridge, the way he used to do night after night for the forty-four days that followed our journey together with the horses.

IF I COULD
, I’d go out for a stroll every night because the night is so lovely, just like the last hour of evening, which is lovely too, and that’s what the four of us used to do, Grandfather, Toby, Kent, and me, we’d finish our work just before the sun went down and set off for the valley to go for a walk. Grandfather would ride Kent and I’d carry the miniature white walking stick they give all the children at the village fiesta every year and Toby would be running and leaping about, and, because he’s pretty stupid, he’d keep barking at the swallows, but the swallows would make fun of him by flying right past his nose at full pelt, screaming as they went, because, as you know, when evening comes the swallows do scream when they’re out hunting for mosquitoes. They catch the mosquitoes and store them in their wings and among their feathers and they work really hard, especially in the spring, for their young, I mean, because they usually have families to keep, and whenever it was that time of year, Grandfather used to help the pair that lived in our stable, he’d open the babies’ beaks and feed them breadcrumbs soaked in milk because that particular couple had a lot of mouths to feed, five babies in all, quite a responsibility, anyway that’s what they always say in my house, that life’s expensive and that our farm, for example, will never make us rich, and that I won’t be able to go on to college, even though I’m an only child, but I don’t really mind that much and anyway I’m only eleven and it’s years yet before I’d go.

So that’s what we’d do, leave the farm when the swallows came out and set off very slowly toward the valley and grandfather would take with him the tape measure my mother uses for sewing because my mother’s a seamstress and from time to time makes dresses and once she made a bright red one for the village schoolmistress and I really, really liked it but that idiot Vincent didn’t, Vincent made fun of the dress and said the teacher had bought it because she was in love and that she looked like a tomato in glasses, and he even made a drawing on the blackboard and then the teacher punished the whole class.