Obabakoak (19 page)

“Well, you know what women are like,” remarked Daniel. It was clear that some subjects were dearer to his heart than others.

Finally, crossing the plateau, we dropped down to the hill where the bodegas stood. There we saw Julián and Benito immersed in their task of surveying the plain, but I indicated to Daniel that I’d rather continue on, that I’d prefer not to stop there just then. I felt quite incapable of saying good-bye to those two old men.

At nightfall—still following the recommendations of those popular songs for when “the time has come to say good-bye”—we went drinking. In Villamediana itself to start with, then in the next village along, and later still in the bars on the main road. The next thing we knew we’d missed supper and we were, as another line from the song would have it, free from all sorrow.

“It’s time we did something serious!” said Daniel, opening his car door.

Then, having committed our first traffic offense of the night, he drove us to a club.

The plain to the north and the south; a row of warehouses toward the west; two trucks to the east; those were the cardinal points of
LAS VEGAS
. The sign was lit up in red neon.

There were two girls behind the bar and two more in front. The two behind the bar served us.

As far as I can remember, I spent the two hours we were there discussing the social and political problems of the Dominican Republic. I believe I received detailed and fairly well-documented facts that I subsequently forgot completely.

Daniel, for his part, tried to learn a few words of Portuguese, every now and then bursting out in loud laughter. I don’t know what the words were that he found so funny. I only remember that he paid for them in beer.

“If you want whiskey, you’ll have to teach me nicer words,” he said to the girl.

When we left Las Vegas, he was smiling and happy.

“Did you notice the way that little Portuguese girl looked at me?” he asked as we committed our second traffic offense of the night.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, as if she was in love with me.”

“Really?”

If he hadn’t been driving, I might have said more, but I didn’t want to distract him.

“I mean, she didn’t look at me the way professionals do. She didn’t look at me with a cold professional eye. I’m serious. Don’t you believe me?”

“Of course I do.”

“How did you get on?”

“I didn’t notice anything special about the way mine looked at me. She seemed rather like a schoolteacher. I mean, she looked at me the way a schoolteacher would.”

The night was full of stars, there wasn’t another soul on the road, and I too felt happy.

We agreed to have one last drink at my house and made a stop on the hill first. From there you could see even more stars. Suddenly Daniel said: “The Three Wise Men are on their way.”

IN SEARCH
OF THE
                   LAST WORD

A LONG TIME AGO
, when we were still young and green, a man with a mustache and a checked cap arrived at the primary school we went to and announced in a grave voice that he’d come to take a group photo of us, the first we’d ever had taken. We listened to him and giggled, because he looked so funny, especially in that cap, and also because up until that moment we’d never even heard the term
group photo.
Then, jumping in all the puddles and throwing our satchels in the air, we followed our school-mistress to the colonnade by the church.

The minute we arrived, our exuberance flagged a little—happiness is never entirely unqualified—for sitting primly on the benches arranged there were the secondary school girls, our sworn enemies of the time: a lot of stuck-up ninnies who wouldn’t even deign to greet us in the street. “Let he who has never cast a stone raise his hand,” the parish priest would say each time one of the girls went running to him with some tale. And every hand stayed firmly in its pocket, every eye remained fixed on the floor. Now, alas, they were there before us, waiting, equipped with combs and scissors, a malign smile on their lips.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Off you go now, your friends from the girls’ school are here to spruce you all up!” the schoolmistress said encouragingly, addressing the boys in particular, and she seemed mystified by the look of disgust on our faces at the prospect of that “makeup” session. She didn’t live in the village and so knew nothing of the generational war being waged in Obaba.

Their attempts to smarten us up involved much pinching, hair pulling, and other such incidents, but, at last, after lining us up on some stone steps, all the village girls and boys, we were about nine years old at the time, duly had our picture taken, united forever even though soon, like travelers with different destinations, we were all to wade into the river of life and be parted forever.

A week later a sheaf of photographs arrived back at the school and everyone wanted to see how we’d come out. There we were, serious little girls and even more serious though not so little boys, displaying a gravity worthy of Roman statues. But it wasn’t in fact a question of gravity, or even of dignity or of any other word ending in “-ity.” It had to do purely and simply with the solemn vow of vengeance sworn (most solemnly of all by those of us with curly hair) only moments before.

“There will be more stones,” said our faces. “And soon,” added our tight lips.

The schoolmistress distributed copies of the photo and told us to take good care of them, for later on, when we got to be her age, for example, we’d be really pleased to have a photo like that to look back on. And, like the good students we were, we carefully put the photo away and, no sooner had we done so, than we forgot all about it. For, as I said, we were young and green then and not in the least preoccupied with the past.

The fact is that the world was more than enough for us. It spread itself before our eyes like a peacock’s tail and each day brought us a thousand different things with the promise of a thousand, ten thousand, or a hundred thousand more new things to come. And what was the world? It was impossible to say really, but it seemed immense to us, unbounded by time or space. At least that’s how we imagined it to be and that’s why the addresses on the letters we wrote were so long. Because it was not enough for us to indicate to the postman, for example, the name of our cousin and the city in which he lived; to make things absolutely clear we had to specify in which province the city lay, in which country the province was, and in which continent the country. Then, at the end of this whole long list, we would write in large letters: Planet Earth. Just in case the postman got the wrong galaxy.

Winters and summers passed and, like people playing the Game of the Goose, we moved on from the square we started on. Sometimes we advanced easily, jumping from goose to goose; at other times we swerved away from the luminous landscapes and fell into prisons, into infernos. Then came the day on which we got out of bed, looked in the mirror, and saw that we were no longer nine years old, but twenty or even twenty-five, and that, although still young, we were no longer green.

Amazed, we went feverishly over our whole existence. How had we gotten here? How had we come so far? Was it true that we felt more tired now than we used to in primary school; was it true that the geographical specifications on our letters were now so brief, and what other things, apart from them, had changed? The question seemed a complex one and, after giving the matter much thought—we thought—like characters in a puppet show, that the best thing would be to think it all through again.

In the midst of this confusion, and exactly as our schoolmistress had predicted, we remembered that first group photo. We got it out now and again from among our old exercise books and begged it to reveal to us the meaning of existence. And the portrait would speak, for example, of sorrow and bring to our notice the two sisters, Ana and María, stopped forever on square number twelve of the Great Board; or else, it would ask us to ponder the fate of José Arregui, our classmate, who, from being a smiling boy standing halfway up the stone steps, had grown to be a man, a man tortured and then found dead in a police cell.

But not all the answers the photo gave were sad ones. On the whole, it simply underlined the old saying that to live is to change and made us smile at the paradoxes those changes throw out. Manuel, our finest warrior in the battle against the secondary school girls, had ended up marrying one of them and now had the reputation of being a rather henpecked husband. Martín and Pedro María, two brothers who never went to catechism classes, had both become missionaries and now lived in Africa.

However, my interest in the photo soon evaporated. Its answers became rather stupid and repetitious and never really surprised me. I still needed to go on asking the questions but in another way, in another place.

The photo remained on my bedside table for a whole year—and might well have stayed there forever—until a colleague at work came to my house and asked if he could borrow it. He said he’d just set up a darkroom and that, since he was still in the process of trying it out, he could blow the photo up for me to five or six times the original size.

“Then you can hang it on the wall,” he suggested.

It was then, when my colleague had finished his work, that the old photo spoke clearly and revealed its secret. For once it was enlarged, I discovered in it a detail that had gone unnoticed before, and that detail set me off on the trail of some surprising facts.

But before I say what happened I should confess that it is not usual for a writer to be both participant in and witness to any stories worthy of the telling, indeed that may be why we’re usually obliged to invent them instead. Nevertheless, just this once the rule will be broken. On this one occasion the author will extract his narrative material from his own reality. His work will be that of narrator rather than creator and although those two words may sound similar, they are not at all the same thing.

And now that the prologue is done, let’s get down to the story and continue, word by word, until we reach the last one.

The enlargement made by my colleague was, as I’ve said, some five times the size of the original photo, and because of that I could pick out details that before had been only blurs: the weeds growing in the cracks and joins of the stone steps, the buttons on the coat of one of the children being photographed.

While looking at this sort of detail I happened to notice the right arm of a classmate called Ismael, the bad boy of the class. He had slipped his arm underneath the flap of the satchel clasped to his chest, so that the fingers of his hand were poking out the other end. The hand was not empty. There was something sticking out of it. “A knife?” I thought, recalling that he was in the habit of carrying one around with him. But it couldn’t be, it definitely wasn’t anything sharp. It was then that I decided to resort to a magnifying glass to find out what it was. There was no doubt about it, what Ismael had in his hand was a lizard.

“He probably wanted to frighten the child in front of him,” I thought, remembering how scared the children in Obaba were of lizards.

“Never go to sleep on the grass,” our parents would tell us. “If you do, a lizard will come along and crawl inside your head.”

“But how will it get in?” we’d ask.

“Through your ear.”

“But what for?” we’d ask again.

“To gobble up your brains. There’s nothing a lizard likes more than human brains to eat.”

“And then what happens?” we’d insist.

“You’ll go crazy, just like Gregorio,” our parents would say straightfaced (Gregorio was the name of one of Obaba’s “characters
”
), adding: “That’s if you’re lucky, of course. Because the fact is the lizard didn’t actually eat much of his brains.”

Then, so as not to alarm us too much, they’d tell us that there were two ways of protecting oneself against lizards. The first was not to go to sleep on the grass. The second—assuming that the lizard had already managed to crawl inside your head—was to run as fast as you could around seven villages and ask the parish priest in each of them to ring the church bells, because then, unable to bear all that bell ringing, the terrified lizard would leave your head and run away.

Such were the ideas haunting me as I studied the photo and it occurred to me that the scene I’d just discovered could be interpreted as an attempted prank. That little devil Ismael probably held the lizard to the ear of the classmate immediately in front of him—Albino María by name—so that, out of disgust and fear, the latter would move and ruin the whole group pose. For some reason Albino María had withstood this act of aggression and there had been no need to retake the photo.

But something wouldn’t let me accept that interpretation so easily. That something was the memory of what had subsequently happened to Albino María, who in only a short time had gone from being one of the school’s brightest students to being one of its most stupid, growing progressively worse, becoming more and more confused until finally he was incapable of even reading or writing; a sad process that only came to a halt some years later, by which time Albino María had joined the ranks of the village idiots.