Obabakoak (12 page)

“I’m afraid your trip may have been in vain. Your friend’s in a very bad way,” the director told me when I explained the reason for my visit. He was an oldish man, gentle and softly spoken.

“But can I see him?”

“I don’t suppose we’ll lose anything by trying,” muttered the director as if to himself. And he took me to the upper floor. “I’ll go in first. And, please, when you come in, don’t make any sudden movements,” he said when we came to the last room on the corridor. The door was bolted from outside.

The room had padded walls and through the crack left open by the director I could see my friend sitting on the bed in his pajamas. When he realized he had a visitor he looked up and put his hands to his glasses. It was not a gesture I recognized. It was new in him and seemed more the gesture of a troubled child than of a thirty-year-old man.

When the director told me to go in, I approached my friend slowly. Again he put his hands up to his glasses.

“Martín, how are you?” I asked, feigning joy and walking toward him in expectation of an embrace. We were old friends and for a long time had shared a house together.

Suddenly, crouched in one corner of the room, Martín began to cry and so intense was his desire to hide that he pressed his face to the wall, crushing his glasses. Then his crying became a shout. And, like that previous gesture of raising his hands to his glasses, both the crying and the shouting seemed the actions of a child of two.

The director led me out into the corridor then went back into the room. For a quarter of an hour I listened to him talking affectionately to my friend, even singing to him now and then.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked when he came out. I was sweating by this time.

“He didn’t recognize you,” said the director.

Astonished, I asked how that was possible.

“He’s lost his memory and he’s very frightened. Up until about two months ago your name would have meant something to him. Now it means nothing.” He seemed as concerned as I was. Then he said: “How about a cup of coffee?”

We walked over to a summerhouse set in one part of the garden, a sort of break room for the doctors working at the center. With its wood-lined walls and ceilings, it was the only place that seemed to preserve the ambience of a past era.

“Everything in Martín’s head has been wiped clean, as if it were a tape. The worst thing is that he can’t record anything new on it either,” he explained as we drank our coffee.

“But there’s a chance he’ll recover.” Martín’s mother had told me that there was.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and that struck me as an opportune moment to change the subject.

“When I was a child I met another man whose mind was unhinged. But he went mad because he remembered too much,” I began. And I told him about what had happened at my aunt and uncle’s house.

“I think of the memory as being rather like a dam,” he said, after a pause for thought. “It irrigates and gives life to our whole spirit. But, like a dam, it needs overflow channels if it’s not to burst its banks. Because if it ever does overflow or burst, its waters will destroy everything in their path.”

“And, on the other hand, once it’s emptied out, it will dry up forever,” I added. He nodded, a little wearily. “I find it hard to believe that anyone could descend into such a hell,” I said, mainly to ease my own fears. And I told him what my own experience had been. I even said that, for me, the past consisted of only a few images. That when I looked back I found no guiding thread, no neatly constructed landscape, but a void scattered with islands, with memories. A sea of nothingness broken up by a few islands, that was how I pictured my past.

What I said clearly struck the director as odd. He smiled wanly and patted me on the back.

“You’re right, of course, but memory can be a tricky thing. Memory, how can I put it?… Memory, like the heart, is a bit antiquated. It pays little heed to logic.”

“So how much should you remember?” I asked, half joking, as I got up from my armchair to indicate that it was time for me to go.

“Neither too much nor too little.”

“But how many words, say?”

“Nine,” he said, laughing, and I didn’t ask him to explain further because I thought it must be some kind of private joke and that the number had some special significance for him.

We said good-bye at the door of the summerhouse. He went back to the house and I to the Chinese arch.

And that brings to an end both the second story and the introduction with which I wanted to preface my memories of the village of Villamediana, an introduction that, illustrating as it does two examples of faulty memory, should act as a lucky charm and ensure a successful end to my work. However, even with that protection, I feel afraid, I fear the dangerous places through which I will inevitably have to pass. I will, therefore, follow the advice given me by the hospital director. I will speak of Villamediana, but neither too much nor too little. Nine words will suffice for me to sum up my long stay there.

1. Looking back on my life, I come across an island by the name of Villamediana. If I were asked to choose five words from the dictionary and use them to form a kind of instant description of the village or to give some sense of what it was like, I would have to choose, first and foremost, the word
sun.
For I saw it almost every day: streaming in through the cracks in the shutters when I woke, fixed like a golden nail in the center of the blue sky when I went out into the street, and setting the brushwood aflame and painting the adobe walls bloodred as evening fell. The second word I’d choose would be
wheat field
and then I’d have to describe its colors, first green and then yellow, a yellow that, in summer, extended from the very edge of the village as far as the eye could see and beyond. The last three words would have to be
empty, crow,
and
sheep,
for most of the houses in Villamediana were empty and crows and sheep were frequently the only creatures enlivening the landscape.

While those five words would, on the one hand, be enough to give an impression of that island I call Villamediana, even perhaps of the whole of Castile, on the other hand, such a description is no more adequate than a simple schoolboy composition or the visions of poets who, judging by what one sees and reads, only go there for their holidays. Many details of my experiences there would of necessity be omitted, for example, what happened on my arrival in the village. For I arrived in Villamediana, not when the village was awash with sun and girdled by wheat fields, but on a dark winter’s day.

2. Some people proudly claim that their mood doesn’t depend on what kind of day it is outside. My happiness, they say, doesn’t depend on the color of the sky, I have my own inner climatology.

Unfortunately, I can make no such proud boast. If it’s true that we retain within us the memory of all existence and that a vestige of primeval time lives on in our cells, then I’m convinced that the ferns and mosses of the beginnings of life wield a powerful influence over my changes in mood. My spirit is essentially the same as that of plants: It revives with the good weather and is cast down by the rain or the cold. A pleasant enough dependency, of course, when I find myself in sunny climes, but most unpleasant if the forces of winter militate against me, as happened on my first encounter with Villamediana.

For, as I said, I arrived in Villamediana on a dark winter’s day. By noon the mist had closed in completely and when, after sorting out my things, I went to look out of the window, the village appeared to me as if wrapped, rather ineptly, in a length of ice-cold, off-white linen that left only fragments of landscape uncovered: a rooftop here, the bare crown of an elm there, the rounded bell tower of the church near the center. They were dim shadows, chilly ghosts hanging in the air, more intimidating than the mist itself.

It was a disappointing landscape for someone, like myself, who has allowed himself to be seduced by the sort of mirage that always accompanies a change of address. Before undertaking the journey I was convinced that the simple fact of arriving at this new place would mean that I could jettison a whole section of my past life like so much ballast; henceforward everything would be easy, luminous, different. When I imagined myself living there, the only thing I had difficulty in picturing with any exactitude was the landscape: how many roads there would be, how many houses, what those houses would be like, and if the bleak plateaus really would look like squat trapezoids. But, as regards the sky, I had no doubts. For in the sky, as if daubed there by a naive painter, I always placed the sun, the symbol of my new life. It would be a weak sun, as befitted winter, but strong enough nonetheless to cheer even a spirit such as mine, overgrown with ferns and mosses. But there was no sun, no light. I was greeted instead by that dank, rather grubby mist.

My first walks around the village did nothing to improve that first impression. There wasn’t a soul to talk to in the eternally empty streets and the silence that wrapped about them forced me back in time to confront again one of the nightmares of my infancy, that of being an abandoned child in a dead city. The only sound to be heard was that of the drips the mist formed along the gutters beneath the rooftops as it condensed; for the drips became threads of water and the threads became streams that fell at last onto the cement surface of the pavements producing an echo of applause that reverberated faintly out toward the church, the main road, and the plateaus. But that was all. No other sign of life penetrated the mist.

After only a couple of days in Villamediana, the mirage that had led me there started to fade. The old world, the one I had so longed to leave behind, began to seem attractive to me again. To my surprise I found myself lying in bed and missing the cinemas, the cafés, the noise. But I had to put up with it. For various reasons, my immediate return to the city was impossible. Furthermore I knew, from the agency that had rented me the house, that the village had two hundred inhabitants. Sooner or later, they would appear and I would meet them and speak with them.

One afternoon, it must have been on my third day there, I heard a noise other than the applause of falling water. It was the sound of music, of a strident song issuing from a radio in a house not very far from mine.

“Someone’s alive out there,” I thought, going out into the street in search of the source of that one sign of life. Then I noticed a small house with all its windows lit tucked away in the upper part of the village. That was where the music was coming from. A record player—not a radio—was playing at full blast and a series of voices, mostly female, were singing along as if to outdo it in volume. There was no doubt about it. There were people in Villamediana, real live people.

From then on the route of my daily walks changed. I circled the house, again and again, morning and evening. And there was always music playing, the windows were always lit. Such evidence of joy was in itself astonishing but it was proof too that not everyone’s spirit was overgrown with ferns and mosses. No, mood wasn’t necessarily dependent on climate.

Sometime later, when I’d been in the village for over a week, the mist lifted. The falls of applauding water ceased, the gutters began to dry up, the drop of water which, ever since my arrival, had hung from the clothesline on my balcony—in my letters I’d described it as resembling a “glass pea”—fell to earth for good. There were patches of blue in the sky, the plants stood tall again, and the square filled up with old people and children.

“It seems the worst is over,” I wrote to my friends.

My life flowed now along normal channels. I found out where people gathered to play cards or to drink and that was where I went to meet and talk a little with my new neighbors. Nonetheless, my curiosity remained centered on the house with the record player and the lighted windows. The chance nature of that first contact had forged a link between it and me. Who lived there? What lay behind that display of happiness? But I had decided to be discreet and to avoid asking any direct questions. I had to be patient and wait for someone to tell me.

I didn’t have to wait long and the answer was handed to me, so to speak, by one of the shopkeepers in Villamediana. She was a plump woman and friendly in the way all shopkeepers are when a new customer presents himself, and she was very interested in my reasons for being in the village. She couldn’t get it into her head that I had come simply to “be there.”

“I don’t believe it. You’re hiding something,” she said to me one day.

By then, after four or five visits, the ice was broken and we talked to each other with a certain intimacy.

“I wish I was, but I’m not. I’m here because I like the place,” I replied.

“Forgive my saying so, but I find that extremely hard to believe. There isn’t a sadder, more boring village to be found.”

“Well, I can’t see what’s sad about it,” I lied. “On the contrary, it seems to me that people here live very happily.”

She smiled mockingly, making it clear that she still did not believe me, that thank you for the compliment but no, she wasn’t deceived. I hurriedly explained about the house in which I’d observed that zest for life.

“Oh, you mean the shepherds! That’s the shepherds’ house!” she said, laughing and adding, with the expression of one unwilling to reveal everything she knew: “I know it takes all sorts, but those shepherds, how can I put it… they’d much rather spend their money on treats for their children than on buying them books. Look,” she said pointing out at the square where some children were playing, “they don’t even send them to school. At this hour theirs are the only children you’ll find still playing out in the streets.”

So it was the shepherds’ house. And more by her look than by anything she said, the shopkeeper explained to me how “odd” they were, how different from the rest of the community. That attitude was new to me, surprising.

Before I’d even left the shop, I’d already decided to find out for myself in what way the shepherds were different. After all I had nothing in particular to do and the good mood the change in the weather had brought about in my inner world of mosses and ferns urged me on to action. Yes, I would attempt to discover the shepherds’ secret. If I succeeded, it was quite likely that anything I learned would prove to be some universally applicable truth, not one restricted to the narrow world of Villamediana. Because in all times and in all places, indeed since time immemorial, there had been shepherds. And it was with such thoughts in my head that I turned my full attention to the goings on in the happiest house in the village.