Obabakoak (28 page)

The journalist then emphasizes what he said before: “According to what his childhood friend tells me, the painter spoke of Nabilah as if he had really and truly lain with her in some lowly bed in the city of Jaddig. It is possible that Menscher died believing this to be so.… That he died or was killed, because it is still unclear as to what exactly happened.”

The journalist is, at last, back on familiar ground. He knows that readers of the article will appreciate the sincerity required in recounting such tragic events and he does his best to achieve this.

“Some months ago,” he writes, “the painter began to paint a very different image to the one described earlier. There was no longer joy in his heart. On the contrary, he seemed distressed, frightened. When anyone asked him the reason for that change, Menscher replied saying that he had seriously violated the ancient customs of Arabia, which not only forbid carnal relations before marriage but also any relationship between an Arab woman and a foreigner; he and Nabilah had been found out, and now her family was looking for him with the intention of killing him.

Naturally, no one believed his story, although many people felt sorry for Menscher and pitied his sufferings. They thought too that he would get over his bad spell and go back to being happy again.

Unfortunately the exact opposite happened. Menscher’s fear became terror and that terror caused him to cry out and run madly from one side of the garden to the other. Menscher asked for help from those who, with a feeling of impotence one can easily imagine, watched from the pavement, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. Now, however, we all know that the situation merited the second reaction, for Hans Menscher is now dead. He was found stabbed to death in his garden yesterday morning, the twenty-seventh of July. The dagger that put an end to his life was authentically Arabian, with a long blade and a damascene hilt—a detail that has been remarked upon in every café conversation.”

The passerby who made that walk to the library does not feel disappointed. His curiosity has provided him with an entertaining afternoon and he now has a story to tell at supper time. Contented, he goes down the steps of the building and is lost among the crowd. However, that passerby will not have had the luck that, purely by chance, I had; a stroke of luck, as I will now explain, that allowed me to discover how the Menscher story ended.

It happened that I was invited to the house of a retired judge and when he told me that he was writing a book on unsolved court cases, it occurred to me to ask him about the mad painter and the matter of the Arabian dagger that had killed him.

“That case,” he said, “was indeed never solved.”

Seeing that I was clearly hoping for a more detailed reply, the judge asked me to follow him. When we reached his study, he took down a file from the bookcase and placed in my hands an envelope bearing a seal. My hands trembled: The seal bore Arabic characters.

“Read what the letter says.”

The letter was written in English, a language I do not know well, but well enough to see that it was a request from the police in Jaddig for information on a German subject, Hans Menscher, giving as a justification for that request a complaint made in their offices by a woman called Nabilah Abauati. In her statement Nabilah Abauati declared that on the night of the twenty-sixth to twenty-seventh of July, 1923, three members of her family had murdered the above-mentioned German citizen.

“So,” I asked, “what really happened?”

“You’re forgetting that I deal only in unsolved cases,” smiled the judge and indicated that it was time for us to rejoin the other guests gathered in the drawing room.

TO WRITE A STORY
in just five minutes you need—as well as the customary pen and blank paper, of course—a small hourglass, which will provide accurate information both on the passing of time and on the vanity and worthlessness of the things of this life and, therefore, of the actual effort you are at this moment engaged in. Do not for an instant consider sitting yourself down in front of one of those monotonous and monotone modern walls; let your gaze lose itself in the open landscape that spreads itself before you outside your window and in the sky where seagulls and other such medium-weight birds trace the geometry of their fleeting pleasure. It is also necessary, though less essential, that you listen to music, to some song whose words are incomprehensible to you, a song in Russian, for example. Having done this, turn inward, bite your own tail, peer through your own personal telescope at the place where your entrails are silently working away, ask your body if it is cold, if it is thirsty, if it is both cold and thirsty or suffering from any other kind of discomfort. If the answer is in the affirmative, if, for example, you feel a general tickling sensation, do not fall prey to anxiety, for it would be strange indeed if you managed to settle down to your work at the first attempt. Look at the hourglass, whose lower portion is still almost empty, and you will see that, as yet, not even half a minute has gone by. Don’t get nervous, go calmly to the kitchen, taking small steps or dragging your feet as you prefer. Drink a little water—if it’s iced water, take the opportunity to splash some on your neck—and before returning to sit down at the table take a nice, quiet leak (in the toilet, that is, because peeing in the hallway is not, in principle, an essential attribute of the literary man).

The seagulls are still there, so are the sparrows, and there too—on the shelf to your left—is a large dictionary. Pick it up with the greatest of care, as if it were charged with electricity, as if it were a platinum blond. Then—taking care to notice the sound the pen makes as it scratches the surface of the paper—write down this sentence: “To write a story in just five minutes you need.”

There you have your beginning, which is no small thing, and barely two minutes have passed since you sat down to work. You not only have the first sentence, in the large dictionary you are holding in your left hand you also have everything else you require. That book contains everything, absolutely everything; believe me, the power of those words is infinite.

Let yourself be carried along by instinct and imagine that you, yes, you, are the Golem, a man or woman made up of letters, or rather, constructed entirely of symbols. And allow the letters of which you are composed to go forth—the way one stick of dynamite sets off all the others—in search of their sisters, those drowsy sisters asleep in the dictionary.

Some time has passed but a glance at the hourglass shows that not even half the time at your disposal has gone.

And suddenly, like a shooting star, the first sister awakens and comes to you, enters your head, and lies down, humbly, inside your brain. You must write that word down at once and write it in capital letters for it has grown on the journey. It is a short word, agile and swift; it is the word
net.

And it is that word that puts all the others on their guard and a noise, like the one you might hear on opening the doors of a drawing class, fills the whole room. After a short while, another word appears in your right hand. Ah, my friend, all unwitting you have become a magician. The second word grabs the pen shaft, slides down it, leaps on to the nib, and scrawls something in ink. The scrawl says:
hands.

Just as if you were opening a surprise packet, pull the end of that thread (forgive me if I seem overfamiliar, we are fellow travelers after all), as I was saying, pull the end of that thread as if you were opening a surprise packet. Then greet the new landscape, the new sentence that comes wrapped in a parenthesis:
(Yes, I covered my face with this dense net the day my hands got burned.)

Three minutes have just passed. But behold you have barely written down the previous sentence when many more sentences, many, many more, come to you like moths drawn to the flame of a gas lamp. You have to choose, it’s painful, but you have to choose. So, think hard and open the new parenthesis:
(People felt sorry for me. They felt sorry, above all, because they thought my face must have been burned too; and I was convinced that the secret made me superior to them all and mocked their morbid curiosity.)

You still have two minutes. You don’t need the dictionary now, don’t waste any more time looking up words. Pay attention to your own inner fission, to the contagious verbal sickness that grows and grows in you and will not stop. Quickly, please, write down the third sentence:
(They know that I was beautiful once and that every day twelve men would send me flowers.)

Now write down the fourth sentence as well, which comes treading hard on the heels of the previous one and says:
(One of those men deliberately burned his face, thinking that this would put us on a level, place us in the same, painful situation. He wrote me a letter saying: Now we are equal, take my action as a proof of my love.)

And the last minute is just beginning to empty itself out when you are already in the middle of the penultimate sentence:
(I wept bitterly for many nights. I wept for my own pride and for my lover’s humility; I thought that, to be absolutely fair, I should do the same, I should burn my face too.)

You have to write the last part in less than forty seconds, time is running out:
(If I did not do so it was not because I feared the physical suffering involved nor out of any other fear, but because I understood that a loving relationship that began with such a display of strength would, necessarily, have a far more prosaic ending. On the other hand, I could not let him know my secret, it would have been too cruel. That’s why I went to his house tonight. He too had covered his face with a veil. I offered him my breasts and we made love in silence; he was happy when I plunged this knife into his heart. And now all that remains for me is to weep for my own ill fortune.)

And close the parenthesis—thus ending the story—just as the last grain of sand drops into the bottom of the hourglass.

IT WAS THE SECOND DAY
to dawn in the month of September, a Monday, and Klaus Hanhn opened his eyes surprised to find that the three alarm clocks lined up on the carpet in his bedroom had just gone off, one after another, each one ringing out and demanding, as they always did, that he get up, get up, and go to work, as soon as possible.

The clocks told him that it was five fifteen in the morning. The message was strident and unpleasant.

As soon as he was fully conscious of his situation, Klaus Hanhn gave an angry sigh and closed his eyes again. There was no reason for the clocks to have woken him, not on that Monday, not on that second day of September. For that was the day he had chosen as the day on which he would Change His Life; it was both the day of his forty-seventh birthday and the day on which his Great New Era was to begin. No, the three clocks that he usually needed to rouse him from his leaden slumbers had not gone off because he wanted them to. They had done so only because of some aberration on his part the night before.

He drew his hands out from under the sheets and, without bothering to switch on the light, groped for the clocks on the carpet. But no sooner had he turned the first one off than he gave up and lay back in bed again. In fact, it rather suited him to listen to the clamor. It highlighted this moment he was living through, it made him more intensely aware of the nature—the good nature, of course—of the New Era he had just entered upon. Let them ring and clatter out the warning that it was five fifteen in the morning, that, however sleepy he felt, he had no alternative but to go to work. What did he care? He was no longer in their sway. Let them ring. He was not going to obey, not now or ever again.

“Who’s going to stop you staying in bed, Klaus?” asked his little brother, Alexander, from inside. Alexander was dead, or at least that was what they’d told him: that he’d been dead for many years, that he’d drowned among the reeds of the River Elbe when they’d gone on a trip there with their schoolfellows. But he didn’t believe them. He knew that Alexander had simply changed places. Ever since that day he had been not outside, but inside, and from time to time he spoke to him, especially at moments of importance. It filled him with joy to hear his brother’s childish voice and he almost always followed his advice. Because he loved him very much, very, very much.

“No one, Alexander. No one can,” he replied, smiling. Then he turned over and went back to sleep.

Some hours later, when the sun shone directly into his eyes and woke him from that second sleep, he felt full of contradictory feelings, sudden as the onset of palpitations. He felt excited and happy, because the manner of his waking confirmed the reality of his changed life; but, unfortunately, there was fear there too. A vague, dull fear that might well go on growing throughout the day, little by little, the way a headache grows until it becomes intolerable. What would the future bring? Would it give him everything he needed? He had no way of knowing and his brother, Alexander, didn’t have the answer either. But, despite that, he tended to the belief that all the work of the previous months would bear fruit. The important thing was not to allow himself to succumb to fear. It was the morning of the second of September. Another twenty-four hours and he would be out of danger.

Klaus Hanhn raised the blind and saw that the sky on this his Decisive Day was cloudless. It was a good sign. After white, his favorite color was blue.

“Klaus Hanhn?” he asked, leaving his bedroom and walking into the middle of the living room.

The large mirror there framed him completely, from head to foot. It was oval in shape and could be inclined forward or backward by means of a wooden hinge. That morning it was inclined forward making Klaus look rather smaller than he really was.

The image nodded, smiling.

“Well, in that case, many congratulations,” he said, bowing.

The figure in the mirror hurriedly returned his bow and then stood there looking at him, direct, serious, searching. Yes, there was no doubt about it, he was forty-seven years old. The wrinkles told him he was, the deep lines on his forehead told him, his very expression told him. And, on reflection, it seemed absurd, it was very difficult to fit all those years into the anagram of his life. For where were the events to fill up all that time? He couldn’t find them and even Alexander was not much help in that particular enterprise, since his brother—a mere child, after all—knew nothing of the passing of time. But, despite that, there was no denying the facts. He was forty-seven years old. Perhaps it was too late to change his life.