Obabakoak (6 page)
Authors: Bernardo Atxaga
The letter continues on the eighth page of which the top half is well preserved, the sheet having been placed the other way up from the preceding pages. Of the lower part, however, about eight lines remain illegible.
The man’s companions considered that the white boar had again acted with prudence and discernment, waiting among the leaves and watching the party until one of them, the man whom he later wounded, was alone and defenseless. Old Matías summed up the thoughts of all of them:
“It would be best if from now on you cover your faces. Especially those of you who did Javier wrong. It’s clear he wants vengeance.”
It was on one such day that I suddenly realized that spring was upon us and that the fields were fragrant and full of the lovely flowers the Creator provides us with. But for me and for the other inhabitants of Obaba that whole garden of flowers bloomed in vain; no flower could perform its true function there, no flower could serve as a balm to our spirits. The pinks and lilies in the woods were born alone and died alone because no one, not the children or the women or even the most hardened of the men, dared go near them; the same fate awaited the mountain gentians, the thickets of rhododendrons, the roses and the irises. The white boar was sole master of the land on which they grew. One of the broadsheets published in your own town put it well: “A wild animal is terrorizing the small village of Obaba.” And do you know how many nights it came down to visit us only to …
The eighth page stops here. Fortunately the next two pages are perfectly legible. In this final part of the letter, Canon Lizardi’s handwriting becomes very small.
… what Matías had foretold came to pass with the exactitude of a prophecy. Night after night, without cease, with the resolve of one who has drawn up a plan and does not hesitate to carry it out, the white boar continued to attack the houses of those who were members of the hunting parties. Then, when panic had filled every heart, the old man came to see me at the rectory. The moment he came in, he said: “I’ve come to ask you a question and the sooner I have your answer the better. I want to know if I can kill the white boar?”
His words filled me with fear and not just because of the brusque manner in which he spoke. For, since in his eyes there was no difference between the boy he had known and the boar currently plundering our valley, what the old man really wanted was for me to give my blessing to a crime. I must confess that I myself had my doubts on the matter. I was wrong, you will say; a simple priest has no right to doubt what has been proven by so many theologians and other wise men. But I am just an ordinary man, a small tree that has always grown in the utmost darkness, and that animal, which in its actions seemed to exhibit both understanding and free will, had me in its power.
For all those reasons, I wanted to avoid a direct answer. I said:
“There’s no point even trying, Matías. You’re an old man. You’ll never catch an animal like that, one that has made fools of our best hunters.”
“It will be easy for me,” he replied, raising his voice and not without a certain arrogance, “because I know Javier’s habits.” Then he added: “Anyway that’s my affair. What I want to know is whether or not I can kill the boar. You have a duty to answer me.”
“But is it necessary? Why kill an animal that, sooner or later, will leave Obaba? Provided that—”
“Of course it’s necessary!” he broke in, almost shouting now. “Have you no pity for him? Don’t you feel sorry for Javier?”
“Matías, I wouldn’t want to…”
But again he would not let me finish. He sat up in his chair and, after scrabbling in the bag he had with him, placed a filthy handkerchief on my table. Do you know what it contained? No, how could you? It was the bloody foot of a boar. It was a ghastly sight and I stepped back, horrified.
“Javier is in terrible pain,” the old man began.
I remained silent, unable to utter a word.
“The people of Obaba are cowards,” he continued after a pause. “They don’t want to meet him face-to-face and so they resort to snares and traps and poison. What do they care if he dies a slow and painful death? No good hunter would do that.”
“It’s only natural that they should be afraid, Matías. You’re wrong to despise them for that.”
But I wasn’t convinced by what I said and it was an effort to get the words out. The old man was not listening anyway; he seemed to be in mid-soliloquy.
“When a boar falls into a snare, it frees itself by gnawing off the trapped limb. That is the law it lives by.”
He spoke hesitantly, breathing hard.
“Don’t you think Javier’s learned fast?” he asked then, looking into my eyes. The smile he gave me was that of a father proud of his son’s achievements. I nodded and thought to myself how utterly justified his feelings were and that on the last day, God our Father would not have the least hesitation in bestowing on him the paternity he claimed. Yes, Matías was Javier’s true father; not the one who abandoned him at birth, nor the other one who, having taken him in, treated him only with contempt.
“Can I kill him?” the old man asked me. He had grown somber again. As you know, dear friend, pity is an extreme form of love, the form that touches us most deeply and most strongly impels us toward goodness. And there was no doubt that Matías was speaking to me in the name of pity. He could not bear the boy’s suffering to continue. It must be ended as soon as possible.
“Yes, you can,” I said. “Killing the boar would not be a sin.”
Well done, you will say. However, bearing in mind what happened afterward …
The tenth page stops at that point. The first four lines are missing on the next and last page; the rest, including the signature, is perfectly preserved.
… on the outskirts of Obaba, not far from this house, there is a thickly wooded gully in the form of an inverted pyramid, and at one end there is a cave that seems to penetrate deep into the earth. That was where Matías sensed the white boar was hiding. Why, you will ask, on what did he base such a supposition, a supposition that later—I will tell you now—was to prove correct? Because he knew that was what Javier used to do when he ran away from the inn. He would hide there in the cave, poor boy, with only the salamanders for company.
But, as I said, I only knew all this when it was too late. Had I known before, I would not have given my consent to Matías. No, you can’t go into that cave, I would have told him. No hunter would wait for a boar in a place like that. It’s too dangerous. You’ll be committing a grave sin by going there and placing your own life in mortal danger.
But God chose not to enlighten me. I made a mistake when confronted by a question whose rights or wrongs I could not hope to fathom and, later, there was no time to remedy the situation. The events I will now recount happened all in a rush, the way boulders, once their support has gone, hurtle headlong down hillsides. In fact, it was all over in a matter of hours.
When Matías left, I went into the church and it was there that I heard what, at the time and to my great astonishment, sounded like an explosion. At first I could not establish the origin of such a loud noise, so unusual in Obaba. It was certainly not from a rifle, I thought.
“Unless the shot were fired in a cave!” I exclaimed. I knew at once that I was right. With God’s help, I had guessed what had happened.
Matías was already dead when I reached the gully. He was lying facedown at the entrance to the cave itself, his rifle still in his hand. A few yards away, farther inside the cave, lay the white boar, panting and losing blood from a wound in its neck.
Then, amid the panting, I thought I heard a voice. I listened more carefully and what do you think I heard? The word that any boy would have cried out at such a moment: “Mother!” Before my very eyes, the boar lay there groaning and whimpering and saying over and over: “Mother, mother”… pure illusion, you will say, the imaginings of a weary, overwrought man; and that is what I tell myself when I remem
ber all I have read in science books or when I recall what faith requires us to believe. Nevertheless, I cannot forget what I saw and heard in that cave. Because then, dear God, I had to pick up a stone and finish him off. I could not leave him there to bleed to death, to suffer; I had to act as honorably as the old man would have done.
I can go no further and I will end here. I am, as you see, a broken man. You would be doing me the greatest favor by coming here to visit me! I have spent three years in Obaba. Is that not enough solitude for any man?
With that question—and the signature that follows it—both letter and exposition end. I would not, however, wish to conclude my work without reference to a fact that, after several conversations with the present inhabitants of Obaba, seems to me significant. It concerns the matter of Lizardi’s paternity. Many of those who spoke to me state that Javier was, without a doubt, his son, a belief that, in my view, a second reading of the document certainly tends to substantiate. That fact would also explain why the letter never left the rectory where it was written. A canon like Lizardi would never dare send a confession from which, in the end, he had omitted the one essential detail.
THE FARTHEST-FLUNG QUARTER
of Obaba was called Albania and it possessed neither a main road nor its own school building. So, since there was nothing better to be had, the local children learned their alphabet and their punctuation—as well as where Denmark and Pakistan could be found or how much forty-six plus twenty-seven came to—in what had been a meeting room on the first floor of the local boarding house.
All together there were thirty-two students of whom seventeen were girls and fifteen were boys and every morning—having pushed passed the leather bottles containing wine and oil that cluttered the doorway—they would line up in single file behind the schoolmistress and go up eight, then ten, then five steps to reach the last—if my sums are correct—of the twenty-three stairs. And once in the improvised classroom, they would sit down at the desks in order of seniority: the youngest in the front rows and right at the back the fourteen-year-old adolescents who had to grapple with Dalmau Carles’s very comprehensive, very difficult encyclopedia-cum-textbook.
They would finish their work at five o’clock and then—in great disorder and making a tremendous racket—go down first five, then ten, then eight steps, twenty-three steps in all, and go off home in search of an afternoon snack of bread and chocolate or else go and play in the washhouse with their cork boats and little glass bottles.
Thus at five o’clock, the schoolmistress would be left alone in front of the blackboard, bent over her long table; and because she was both very young and very new to that mountainous region, she preferred to stay at school marking her pupils’ exercises than to go back to the gray and white house she’d been assigned on the outskirts of Albania, for she still did not feel at home there, she felt very foreign and alone.
To the schoolmistress the days in Albania seemed endless and she spent most of her spare time writing letters. She wrote, above all, to the man she called (capitalizing the first letter of each word) Her Best Friend. In her first letter she told him:
Since there’s no main road, I live here as if under siege, with all escape routes blocked. The first Sunday after my arrival, I went down to the village, to the streets of Obaba, I mean; but there was nothing there for me, except bars, the kind women aren’t supposed to go into. To be honest, it’s an uphill struggle living here without the walks we used to take along the seafront, the whole gang—María, David, Carlos, Cristina, Ignacio, you, and me. Here, when it’s misty or drizzling, I spend the afternoons lying on my bed going over in my mind the talks we had on the beach. As you see, my memories of the summer are my only consolation. Not that it’s always like that, sometimes it’s sunny and then I take the children out catching butterflies. The other day, for example, we caught a huge
Nymphalis antiopa,
the biggest I’ve ever seen.
In almost all her letters she made a point of mentioning butterflies, always giving them their correct Latin names, because she knew how much her friends admired her knowledge of the subject. But, contrary to all her expectations, eight days passed, then twelve, then seventeen; in fact, if my sums are correct, one whole month and a week passed and not a single letter was delivered to her mailbox, not even the one she awaited most keenly, the letter from Her Best Friend.
“I never thought they’d forget me that quickly. They’re a complete washout as friends and I’m never going to write to them again,” she decided.
It was a firm decision and as such was written down in the notebook she used as a diary.
Meanwhile, autumn came to an end and as the days passed so the butterflies disappeared. Now they could find only the red admirals that feed on nettles and live near the shadowy deeps of rivers. As for the swallows, they were already lined up along the telegraph wires: One hundred and twenty swallows on one wire and one hundred and forty on the other, two hundred and sixty swallows in all. At any moment they would take flight and set off on their great journey south.
“The swallows have gone, winter has arrived,” the schoolmistress wrote in her notebook when the air in Albania—minus two hundred and sixty swallows—seemed suddenly empty.
The thoughts she confided to her diary gave the schoolmistress an outlet for her feelings and provided her life with the consolation shared confidences always bring. They restored to her some sense of calm and Her Confused Heart (again duly capitalized) regained its normal rhythm. However, her Heart was not the only problem. Other impulses stirred within her inner being, other forces that no notebook could encompass, and it was those impulses—secret but nonetheless powerful and that occasionally obliged her to sleep entirely naked—that brought to mind Her Best Friend and then it was as if he were by her side once more and was kissing her as he had on that June night when they’d broken away from their other friends and got lost among the dunes.
