Obabakoak (18 page)

“How’s life treating you, Tassis?” I said by way of greeting.

“Much the same,” he replied. But he was considerably thinner and, unusually for him, his hair had become long and disheveled.

He began to apologize for not going to the forest anymore. He said it was too cold now to go out walking and that he didn’t like leaving Claudia on her own. I suggested we find another place where we could talk.

“It would be best to leave it till the spring. Anyway, talking doesn’t solve anything.”

It seemed to me that he was anxious to close the door again so I bade him good-bye saying that, if he wanted to, we could resume our talks once the winter was over. But I myself knew that was impossible. I’d decided to leave Villamediana that Christmas.

“Do you know when the word
desolation
first came into use?” I heard him say as I walked across the portico.

“No,” I said, stopping.

“In 1612.”

“You shouldn’t be bothering yourself with words like that,” I said.

He smiled, then closed the door.

The following spring, when I was already far from Villamediana, I received a letter from Daniel. It began with a joke, assuring me that the village girls had been most upset by my departure and all sent me their love. Toward the tenth line, however, the tone changed. “I have something else to tell you. The dwarf’s cat belongs to me now,” he wrote. And what I read from then on only confirmed what I’d suspected on that last visit.

7. All the young girls from Villamediana lived in other towns or villages, either studying or working as maids, and they only came back to their parents’ house during the holidays. As Daniel said, “It just wasn’t fair,” the young men of the village lacked opportunities for romance.

However, there were others who could take their place and of them, Rosi was the one who best filled the void left by the young girls. Although she was nearly forty, she knocked ten years off nature by sheer willpower, a miracle made possible by the fact that she still considered herself to be of marriageable age. In the village they called her Rita Hayworth—behind her back, of course—and she always wore gay, flowery dresses.

She was from quite a rich family, the owners of a market garden, and was in charge of selling the produce and dealing with the customers, spending her days among the carrots and sacks of potatoes in a place that was half-warehouse, half-shop. She moved gracefully through this world, not allowing the rustic nature of her surroundings to influence the care she took over her appearance; she seemed more like an air hostess than a shopkeeper. I never saw her with a hair out of place, a button undone, or a wrinkle in her colored stockings.

“Now how may I be of assistance to you?” she would ask whenever I went to buy something there. She favored such polite, roundabout phrases.

Sometimes I had the feeling that it hurt Rosi having to sell those rough products of the earth and that she envied the owners of the shop in the square, who, thanks to a refrigerator, sold a different kind of product, for example, butter and yogurt, “a better class of product” to use her own words.

Perhaps driven by such feelings, she was constantly sweeping and dusting the shop to expunge every last trace of soil that might be clinging to the beetroot, so that no one could ever say that in Rosi’s shop they’d once stepped on a rotten apple, and so that her counter was as highly polished as a jeweler’s.

Sometimes she’d sit down at the shop door, quite still, and gaze out at the main road. When would she get the chance to change her surroundings? Sad to say, never. She was irremediably tied to those vegetables. She couldn’t just abandon her family. After all, someone had to look after her father, the old market gardener.

“Rosi asked me an odd question today,” Tassis said to me once, having first explained to me that the word
shop
came from
scopf
meaning “
porch.
” “She asked me how long it would take the average family to get through a bottle of tomato concentrate.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said it would probably last a family about a week. Well, I had to say something.”

“It’s not really such an odd question. I don’t know, maybe she wants to start stocking some new products. She’s always saying how fed up she is with selling potatoes.”

“I don’t think I’ve made myself quite clear. An unforgiveable error,” admitted Tassis in his usual acid tones. “To tell the truth, what was odd wasn’t the question so much as what she did afterward. She started making calculations about how many bottles there were to a crate and all that and then she turned to me and said that it would take six months.”

“Six months?”

“That’s just what I said, six months for what? And then she explained that that was how long it would take to sell a whole crate of the stuff in Villamediana.”

“I still don’t see what’s so odd about it,” I said just to provoke him. But he let it pass.

“That wasn’t necessarily so, I said, because if she started selling tomato concentrate to the signals unit on the hill, she’d need much more, at least a crate a week. And when she heard that, she could hardly contain herself for joy.”

“But they don’t buy their supplies in Villamediana,” I said.

“That’s why her behavior seemed so odd to me. Why should that story about the barracks make her so happy? And then I had a hunch,” Tassis continued after a pause. “It seemed to me that the only reason she was asking me that question was because I have no dealings with the other villagers. Not, as a mature person would, because she considers me to be intelligent. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Rosi is not the most mature of people.”

For him maturity was a synonym for perfection and he considered its lack, where obvious, to be a grave defect.

Tassis’s hunches were never wrong, still less when, as in this case, they were painful to him. I thought that probably all his assumptions were right. But even so, it was still no more than just another of the many anecdotes, one among hundreds, that came up during our walks and we both soon forgot about it.

However, the things one forgets are never completely lost. They go into hiding somewhere, in some crevice of the memory, and stay there, asleep but not dead. And they can, of course, wake up. Sometimes, a smell is enough to provoke it. At other times, a gesture. What helped me on this occasion was a hat.

I saw a man in a hat standing next to a van and I stood for a while watching him. I thought the hat suited him. He was a tall, good-looking man of about forty-five. “He must be a lawyer,” I said to myself. But no, he most certainly wasn’t; it seems that the van was his. He was just opening the back door.

He emerged bearing a crate embellished with a drawing of a tomato. That was when it all came flooding back to me: what Tassis had told me about Rosi’s odd behavior.

I didn’t really need any confirmation but, nevertheless, I followed him into the shop.

“Ah, there’s our crate!” exclaimed Rosi as soon as she saw the man. She was wearing a print dress in a reddish color and her eyes and lips were discreetly made up. On the counter was a vase of flowers.

“Vitamins for the soldiers,” said the man.

“If you wouldn’t mind waiting just one moment, I’ll serve this other gentleman first,” Rosi said, excusing herself.

“That’s okay, I’m in no hurry,” declared the man, taking out a cigarette.

The back room was in darkness but in its depths I could just make out a pile of something covered with a sheet of white plastic. There, no doubt, lay all the unsold crates of tomato concentrate Rosi had bought.

8. In sunless December, all living things flee the land of Castile, and a man out for his daily constitutional will find no one to accompany him and no one to talk to. He will look ahead of him and to either side but to no avail. The plain is frozen hard, as is the sky, and between the two there is no one, not one arm raised in greeting. The peasant long ago finished preparing the ground for the next sowing, and now he doesn’t even leave the village but passes the day at the bar or by his own fireside. As for the shepherds, there’s no knowing where they’ve gone. There’s not a sign of them anywhere; not in the bars, around the village, not even in the forest. They must be somewhere, of course, but they spend the whole day wrapped in blankets the same color as the earth and it’s as if they’ve become invisible.

The cold is intense but, despite that, the walker wants to walk, so off he goes, striding along some path that disappears into the sky. Stopping at a crossroads, he pauses to clap his hands and jump up and down, stamping hard on the ground. But all in vain; this isn’t the month of August and now nothing stirs in the fields; the flocks of birds that would normally fly up at the least noise have gone elsewhere. Even the snakes—like “flashes of green green lightning”—that would slide from one field to another in the winking of an eye, are all in their nests, frozen, hibernating. No, there’s nothing on the plain. Or, what’s perhaps worse, there are only hungry crows, grown more listless than ever.

His walks grow ever shorter and finally even he gives up. He stays at home and spends half the day in bed because he has scarcely any wood left for the fire and, because the time to say good-bye is drawing near—he doesn’t want to go begging for any more. He even forces himself to sleep. And he does sleep and he dreams.

He dreams he’s inside Rosi and that a little blue light the color of butane gas is guiding him on his journey. And he sees that the inside of Rosi is all made of glass, of a glass that grows thinner and thinner, so thin in the end that it breaks if you touch it. Still walking, still following the blue light, he reaches a small room, the most secret room, and he sees a cupboard and in the cupboard a row of bottles and on the bottles drawings not of tomatoes but of hats.

Then he wakes up and sees through the window that it’s snowing. But a quarter of an hour goes by and he’s sleeping again and dreaming again.

He dreams that he’s walking across the snow to the bakery and that his friends from Villamediana, Julián, Benito, Daniel, and even Tassis are there to greet him but they don’t dare speak to him. They’re all wrapped in blankets and stamping their feet on the pavement.

Numb with cold, he reaches the square, and, since it’s the Christmas holidays, he finds it odd not to see any children there. But this isn’t the moment to stop and think and he starts running toward the bakery.

“Ah, paradise!” he exclaims as soon as he goes in. But it isn’t just the pleasant smell coming from the wood-burning stove, nor is it a reference to the weather. At least it isn’t only that.

He cries out to protect himself, to mask the other more compromising cry rising in his throat. For, among the baskets of bread and wrapped in the smell of freshly baked flour is a girl of about twenty reading magazines and the girl is wearing only the briefest of silk nightdresses with a low-cut neck that reveals a breast the size of an apple.

9. In accord with the belief that one has to say good-bye to places as well as people, I asked Daniel to go with me and take one last long walk before I left Villamediana forever. I wanted those places to remain in my memory so that later I could more easily remember all the times I’d spent there.

That day, though it was only three days before Christmas—the clear blue sky seemed utterly springlike and, unusual at that time of year, the windows and doors of all the houses stood open. The snow was melting fast and by the afternoon all that remained were a few white patches in the hollows of the rocks on the plateau. As Daniel said when we set out, this wasn’t Castile, it was the Mediterranean.

The weather—so different from the winter in which I’d arrived—did wonders for the ferns and mosses of my inner self and lessened that sense of sadness that crops up in all the popular songs about good-byes.

Slowly we walked through all the places I’d visited that year: Valdesalce, Valderrobledo, Valdencina, Encomienda, Fontecha, Ramiel… and sometimes, in Valdesalce for example, I’d tell Daniel things that I’d kept from him until then. I wanted to leave things between us absolutely clear.

“I never said anything to you before, but I did actually make friends with the little count. He’s a most unusual person as you know,” I began, and then told him all about our Friday meetings.

“I know you think I hate him and that’s why you never told me. But I really don’t. I feel sorry for him. Maybe it’s worse to feel sorry for someone than to hate them, but that’s how it is. Right now, I’m almost sure he’s run out of firewood. At any rate I haven’t seen any smoke coming from his chimney.”

“And you’d like to take him some.”

“I’ve got a bundle at home ready. It’s just a question of delivering it to him.”

Daniel was, in the best sense, a good man.

But that wasn’t the dominant mood of the conversation during our last walk. We left unpleasant topics completely to one side. We just walked and, as we walked, we remembered the time we watched the night games of the hares, the lunch we’d had with the shepherds and the jokes that were told afterward, the argument we’d had with a group of hunters.

Warmed by the south wind, we talked about the funny things that had happened to us during that time.

“Stop here, Daniel. Now this is a sacred place for me,” I said as we rounded a corner and came across a beehive.

“Something to do with a woman I bet.”

“Well, yes, but not in the way you mean. Do you remember how during those first few months I used to go around all the time in a tracksuit?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, one day I was having a quiet walk around here when I suddenly remembered my kitchen. I mean I suddenly remembered that I’d left a pot boiling on the stove. I could already imagine the house in flames and I was off like a shot. I came tearing around this bend at full pelt and right here, right where we’re standing, I ran slap into the whole female population of Villamediana out for a stroll. Some thirty of them, at least, married women, newlyweds, widows and grandmothers… and, of course, I couldn’t stop to talk, I had to get home as fast as I could. And when I passed them, you should have heard the applause, Daniel!… when I tell you that even one of the grandmothers cheered me on, need I say more? I felt really touched. It was the first time in my life that I’d been cheered on as a runner. At last I understood how Zátopek must have felt.”