Obabakoak (20 page)

I pondered life’s ironies as I looked at the photo and it seemed to me that the lizard held so close to Albino María’s ear was, in some obscure way, an augury of all that happened to him later on. Symbolically speaking, lsmael’s gesture united past with future.

But was that union in fact purely symbolic?

At certain times—at dusk, for example, walking down the street along with a lot of other people—we are assailed by the most unexpected questions… and every time I went out for a stroll that was the question that kept returning again and again. What if that relationship were
more physical
than it at first sight appeared? What if the lizard really had crept inside Albino María’s ear? No, it simply wasn’t possible.

However, contrary to my expectations, the hypothesis grew in strength. One day I was looking at the photo again and I discovered that what Ismael had in his hand wasn’t a full-grown lizard, but a baby lizard, something that really was small enough to slip into someone’s ear. Then I consulted encyclopedias and nature guides and learned that the variety
Lacerta viridis
could in fact prove dangerous to man although—at least in those particular books—the nature of the danger was never specified.

Then it suddenly occurred to me to wonder about the eardrum. If the lizard had managed to get into the ear, the boy must have had a pierced eardrum. There was no other explanation.

My natural impatience meant that I had to find out the truth or falsity of my reasoning as soon as possible. I picked up the phone and called my uncle, an emigrant who had made his fortune in South America and then returned to live in Obaba.

“You know I don’t go out much anymore. You’ll have to ask someone else, I’m afraid,” he replied, without showing the least curiosity about the subject. In fact the only thing he was interested in were the literary gatherings held at his house on the first Sunday of every month. “Now you haven’t forgotten our arrangement, have you? We’ve got a meeting next Sunday,” he said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be there, and with no fewer than four stories.”

“The uncle from Montevideo will be pleased.”

That’s what he liked to call himself: “the uncle from Montevideo.” He’d lived for a long time in that city and still had some business interests there, a couple of bookshops and a bakery.

“Are you sure? You never usually like anything I write! According to you all my stories are plagiarized!”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? All you writers today ever do is plagiarize. But hope springs eternal…”

“All right. You can tell me all about it on Sunday.”

“And see if you can bring another writer with you. The more the merrier.”

“I’ll try, Uncle, but I can’t promise anything. People are afraid of you. Is there anything in the world he does like? they ask themselves. Apart from nineteenth-century novels, that is.”

At the other end of the phone, my uncle chortled.

“So who could I ask about Albino María?” I said.

“Why don’t you phone the bar? All you have to do is say you’re conducting a survey about the physically handicapped. The word
survey
works wonders these days.”

I followed my uncle’s advice and got the result he’d predicted. The woman who owned the bar seemed very interested.

“Yes, you’re right, I think he is deaf. Hang on just a minute, I’ll go and ask some of the others at the bar,” she said.

While I waited, I came to the conclusion that the general tendency of stories is to grow ever more complicated.

Then I heard her say: “Yes, that’s right, he’s completely deaf in his right ear.”

It seemed to me that the moment had come to consult a doctor, because, as the photograph clearly demonstrated, the lizard—always supposing that it
had
managed to creep inside his ear—could only have done so from that side.

I need few words to summarize what happened next. At first the doctor I consulted—a friend of mine who was also very keen on literature—said that what I told him was an impossibility. But, being of an experimental turn of mind, he accepted the idea as a working hypothesis.

“I’ll go to the hospital library and consult the database. We’re certain to have something on tropical diseases. Call me back in a few days.”

But I didn’t need to call him back, he called me, the following morning.

“Well, it seems it is possible,” he said, without even a hello.

“Are you serious?”

It was a hot summer’s day, but the sweat dampening my palms at that moment had nothing to do with the temperature.

“Massieu, Pereire, Spurzheim, Bishop…”

I realized he was reading off the computer screen.

“Who are they? People who’ve written books on the subject?”

“Well, on tropical diseases in general. But the computer gives the chapter titles of the books and every one of them has something on the dangers posed by lizards.
On lizards and mental pathology…
”

He was reading from the screen again.

“I’ve spoken to my colleagues,” he went on, “and we’re all agreed. If what you believe were true, though it probably isn’t…”

“Of course not. That’s what I think. That it’s just a possibility, I mean,” I said.

“Right. But what I was going to say was, that if it were true, it would be the first case known in Europe. Interesting, eh?”

“Do you want to come to Obaba next Sunday?” I broke in. “It’s one of my uncle’s literary dos. You remember my uncle, don’t you, the one from Montevideo?”

“How could I forget? He demolished my story in about five seconds flat. Never mind that it was the first one I’d ever written,” he said, laughing.

“Look, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. On Saturday we’ll leave here in the evening and go to a village on the coast. No, I won’t tell you which village exactly. Just that we’re going to visit someone. Oh, all right, it’s Ismael. I see there’s no point trying to keep any secrets from you. Yes, he lives there now, he owns a bar next to the beach. And then afterward, we can drive back to Obaba. We could even have a swim.”

He remained silent a moment.

“Will your uncle put up with a plagiarist like me?”

“According to him everything that’s been written since the nineteenth century is just one long act of plagiarism. So if that’s all you’re worried about, don’t be.”

“Okay, I’ll come. I’d like to meet Albino María.”

He sounded uneasy. But his unease was that of the literary man, not of the doctor.

“Fine. Right. I’ll pick you up on Saturday at seven. If there’s any problem, call me.”

But there was no problem. At just after seven the following Saturday, our car joined the highway. The journey to Obaba had begun.

The village on the coast was less than an hour from our town and we took advantage of the remaining daylight to walk along the seafront and have supper out in the open air. Then, when it was eleven o’clock, we drove down to the beach and went to the bar run by my old classmate.

“Have you seen what the place is called?” my friend said, pointing up at the neon sign.

“The Lizard,” I read.

“It looks like Ismael hasn’t lost his old interests.”

“So it would seem.”

The bar was packed with adolescents and we had a hard time finding a suitable place from which to spy on him. Finally, thanks to the generosity of some motorcyclists, we occupied the bit of the bar they’d been using to put their helmets and gloves on. Then we sat down on the stools, our eyes fixed on Ismael.

He was as thin as ever, but he no longer looked like the wild boy of Obaba. He’d changed a lot. He was wearing an orange T-shirt emblazoned with some slogan in English and had blond highlights in his dark hair. When he saw us, he walked the length of the bar to greet us.

“What a surprise! What are you two doing here?”

It wasn’t only his appearance that had changed. He seemed relaxed and his smile was friendly. What would the photograph say to me the next time I looked at it? Probably nothing. It had told me often enough already that “to live” and “to change” were synonymous.

“As you see, even we manage to get out occasionally,” we replied, but were unable to continue the conversation because Ismael had to attend to a group of youngsters who were shouting for him.

Before he left, he offered us both a cigarette and—pointing to a seascape, one of the many he had hanging on the walls—made some comment about how polluted the sea had become.

“I never thought Ismael would turn out to be an ecologist,” I said.

“I bet he goes surfing too,” my friend whispered.

Half an hour later, with the bar still filling up with people, we broached the matter that had brought us there. We told him we were curious about the details of something that had happened when we were both at primary school, that there was no reason for him to be worried, our interest was, so to speak, purely scientific.

A mixture of fear and distrust surfaced in Ismael’s eyes. It was the look of the nine-year-old with a knife in his pocket. At least that hadn’t changed.

“Go on,” he said.

“You’re very keen on lizards, aren’t you?” I began. But not in any accusatory tone, I said it brightly, playfully.

“What makes you say that? Because of the name I gave the bar?”

His tone was unpleasant, almost threatening. But I knew he was a coward, I’d known it ever since primary school. He was a little devil then, but not up to fighting anyone face-to-face.

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean the lizard in the photograph, the one you were holding to Albino María’s ear. What I want to know is did the lizard crawl inside his head or not?”

“What are you talking about? You must be mad!” he shouted, then stalked off and began washing up some glasses.

“You’ve offended him,” my friend said.

But Ismael was back with us again.

“I’d have expected better from you. Do intellectuals like you still believe rubbish like that? Frankly, I’m disappointed.”

Ismael was still talking very loudly. His every gesture spoke his scorn. The motorcyclists down the bar from us were looking in our direction. It was beginning to look as if a fight was in the cards.

“Don’t get so upset, Ismael,” I replied, imitating the Obaba accent. I felt euphoric. The two gins inside me were beginning to take effect.

“I’m in my own place and I can do what I like! And I won’t have anyone coming in here making stupid accusations!”

I decided then to adopt Obaba behavior patterns. I took his hand in mine, a gesture that meant I was on his side and loved him like a brother. After all, we were from the same place, weren’t we? We’d appeared in the same photo. Surely that was enough. How could he not trust me?

“You know perfectly well I’ve got nothing against you personally!” I said.

“We’re just interested in this one small thing. I’m treating Albino María’s deafness and I just wanted to know exactly what happened that day, that’s all.”

I was amazed at my friend’s deftness. That was without doubt the best way of approaching the subject.

The reaction was quick in coming. The anger in Ismael’s eyes subsided.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked.

“Well, according to Albino María’s mother, that was the day he started to go deaf.”

I was astonished at how good my friend was at lying.

“Okay, I’ll tell you the truth. Not that I think it will be of much use to you,” said Ismael, drying his hands on a cloth. “I don’t actually know what happened to that lizard. It’s true I had it in my hand… to play some practical joke, I suppose, so that the photograph would turn out funny, with everyone in front moving about and shouting.… I imagine that’s what I wanted. But I don’t know what happened afterward. I do remember that it slipped out from between my fingers. But I don’t think it got into Albino María’s head. To be frank, that simply doesn’t seem possible.”

“No, of course not. We don’t think it is either. But we were just passing and it occurred to us to pop in and ask, that’s all.”

My friend’s tone was conciliatory now.

“I
was
very naughty when I was little. Really naughty!” said Ismael, smiling.

“We all were in our own way. You’d never think it to look at me, but I actually burned down my grandfather’s house. Not on purpose, of course,” my friend confessed.

“Good grief!”

It was clear that such remarks were very much to Ismael’s taste. Perhaps they helped ease his bad conscience. After a brief farewell, we left the pub and walked back to the harbor parking lot. Back in the car, my friend and I—both a little disappointed—recalled what Balzac said: that life does not provide us with nice, rounded stories, that it was only in books that you found good, strong endings.

“We’ll never know what happened with that lizard,” I said.

That remains to be seen. Before we finally close the file on the subject, we have to talk to Albino María,” my friend replied.

“We could probably visit him tomorrow. He hardly ever leaves Obaba.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Speaking of Balzac and good endings, what’s the best story you know? I mean, in your opinion, which story has the most satisfying ending?” I asked suddenly. There were scarcely any cars on the road at that hour and the solitude of the highway created a favorable climate for confidences.

“I’m not sure I could say just off the top of my head,” my friend answered.

“Well, if you like, I’ll tell you what Boris Karloff’s reply would have been. I bet you can’t guess what Boris Karloff thought was the best story in the world,” I said.

“No, I can’t, but I bet it was some horror story.”

It was the story about the servant from Baghdad.”

“Which story is that?”

“I’ll tell it to you if you like. With a cup of coffee in front of me, of course.”

“Okay. It’ll be good training for tomorrow’s session. With your uncle sitting in judgment, we need all the practice we can get.” We stopped at a highway café. Then, seated at a corner table, I recounted the old Sufi tale to my friend. And I did so in exactly the same words I’m going to use now to transcribe it. The story about the lizard and the last word of that story can wait.