Authors: Bernardo Atxaga
Obabakoak (5 page)
Although undated, we can deduce that the letter was written in 1903 since, in the closing words that immediately precede the signature, the author states that he has been in Obaba for three years and, at least according to the cleric who now holds the post, everything seems to indicate that Canon Lizardi took over the rectorship of the place around the turn of the century.
He was clearly a cultivated man, judging by the elegant, baroque calligraphy and the periphrastic style laden with similes and citations he uses to broach the delicate matter that first caused him to take up his pen. The most likely hypothesis is that he was a Jesuit who, having left his order, opted for ordinary parish work.
As regards the addressee, he was doubtless an old friend or acquaintance, even though, as mentioned earlier, the poor condition of the first page does not permit us to ascertain that person’s name and circumstances. Nonetheless, we feel justified in assuming that he was a person of considerable ecclesiastical authority, capable of acting as guide or even teacher in the very difficult situation prevailing in Obaba at the time, if one is to believe the events described in the letter. One should not forget either that Lizardi is writing to him in a spirit of confession and his tone throughout is that of a frightened man in need of the somewhat sad consolation of a superior.
On the first page, according to the little that one can read at the bottom, Lizardi writes of the “grief” paralyzing him at that moment and describes himself as feeling “unfitted to the test.” Those few scant words allow us to place in context the story that the canon unfolds over the subsequent ten pages and prevent us from being misled by the circuitous, circumlocutory style. Let us look now at the form the test referred to at the very start of the letter might have taken. This is what Lizardi writes on the second page, which I transcribe word for word:
… but first, dear friend, allow me to speak briefly of the stars, for it is in astronomy books that one finds the best descriptions of this daily wandering, this mysterious process of living, which no metaphor can adequately encompass. According to the followers of Laplace our universe was born out of the destruction of a vast ball or nucleus drifting through space, drifting alone, moreover, with only the Creator for company, the Creator who made everything and is in the origin of all things; and out of that destruction, they say, came stars, planets, and asteroids, all fragments of that one lump of matter, all expelled from their first home and doomed ever after to distance and separation.
Those, like myself, who are sufficiently advanced in years to be able to discern that dark frontier of which Solinus speaks, feel cast down by the description science so coldly sets before us. For, looking back, we cannot see the world that once enwrapped us like a cloak about a newborn babe. That world is no longer with us and because of that we are bereft of all the beloved people who helped us take our first steps. At least I am. My mother died fifteen years ago and two years ago the sister who shared my house with me died too. And of my only brother, who left to travel overseas while still only an adolescent, I know nothing. And you, dear friend, you yourself are far away; at a time when I need you so, you too are far away.
This paragraph is followed by a few barely legible lines that, as far as I can make out, refer to the psalm in which the Hebrews in exile from Zion bemoan their fate. Then, on the third page, the canon concludes his long introduction and embarks on the central theme of his letter:
… for, you know as well as I, that life pounds us with the relentlessness and force of the ocean wave upon the rocks. But I’m straying from my subject and I can imagine you growing impatient and asking yourself what is it exactly that troubles me, what lies behind all these complaints and preambles of mine. For I well remember how restless and passionate you were and how you hated procrastination. But remember too my weakness for rhetoric and forgive me: I will now explain the events that have led to my writing this letter. I hope with all my heart that you will listen to what I have to say with an open mind and ponder as you do so the lament in Ecclesiastes: “Vae soli!” Yes, the fate of a man alone is a most bitter one, even more so if that man, like the last mosquitoes of summer, can barely stagger to his feet and can only totter through what little remains of his life. But enough of my ills; I will turn my attention to the events I promised to recount to you.
Nine months ago last January, an eleven-year-old boy disappeared into the Obaba woods, forever, as we now know. At first, no one was much concerned by his absence, since Javier—that was the boy’s name, that of our most beloved martyr—had been in the habit of running away from home and remaining in the woods for days on end. In that sense he was special and his escapes bore no resemblance to the tantrums that, at some point in their lives, drive all boys to run away from home; like that time you and I, in protest at an unjust punishment at school, escaped the watchful eyes of our parents and spent the night out in the open, hidden in a maize field… but, as I said, this was not the case with Javier.
I should at this point explain that Javier was of unknown parentage or, to use the mocking phrase so often used here to describe him, “born on the wrong side of the blanket.” For that reason he lived at the inn in Obaba, where he was fed and clothed in exchange for the silver coins furnished to the innkeepers—vox populi dixit—by his true progenitors.
It is not my intention in this letter to clear up the mystery of the poor boy’s continual flights, but I am sure Javier’s behavior was ruled by the same instinct that drives a dying dog to flee its masters and head for the snowy mountain slopes. It is there, sharing as he does the same origins as the wolves, that he will find his real brothers, his true family. In just the same way, I believe, Javier went off to the woods in search of the love his guardians failed to give him at home, and I have some reason to think that it was then, when he was walking alone among the trees and the ferns, that he felt happiest.
Hardly anyone noticed Javier’s absences, hardly anyone sighed or suffered over them, not even the people who looked after him. With the cruelty one tends to find among the ill-read, they washed their hands of him saying that “he would come back when he was good and hungry.” In fact, only I and one other person bothered to search for him, that other person being Matías, an old man who, having been born outside of Obaba, also lived at the inn.
The last time Javier disappeared was different, though, for so fierce was my insistence that they look for him, a whole gang of men got together to form a search party. But, as I said before, nine months have now passed and poor Javier has still not reappeared. There is, therefore, no hope now of him returning.
Consider, dear friend, the tender hearts of children and the innocence in which, being beloved of God, they always act. For that is how our children are in Obaba and it gives one joy to see them always together, always running around, indeed, running around the church itself, for they are convinced that if they run around it eleven times in succession the gargoyle on the tower will burst into song. And when they see that, despite all their efforts, it still refuses to sing, they do not lose hope but attribute the failure to an error in their counting or to the speed with which they ran, and they persevere in their enterprise.
Javier, however, never joined in, neither then nor at any other time. He lived alongside them, but apart. The reasons for his avoidance of them lay perhaps in his character, too serious and silent for his age. Perhaps too it was his fear of their mockery, for a purple stain covered half his face, considerably disfiguring him. Whatever the reason, the conclusion …
The third page ends there. Unfortunately the top of the following page, page four, is badly affected by mold and none of my efforts to clean it up have met with much success. I have only been able to salvage a couple of lines.
Reading them, one has the impression that Canon Lizardi has once more abandoned the story and returned to the sad reflections of the beginning of the letter. At least so I deduce from the presence there of a word like
santateresa,
the local word for the praying mantis, an insect that, according to the nature guide I consulted, is unique in the natural world for the way in which it torments its victims. The author of the guide comments: “It devours them slowly, taking care not to let them die at once, as if its real hunger were for torture not for food.”
Was Lizardi comparing the behavior of that insect with the way life had treated the boy? For my part, I believe he was. But let us leave these lucubrations and look at what Lizardi did in fact write in the legible part of that fourth page.
… do not think, dear friend, that I ever abandoned or neglected him. I visited him often, always with a kind word on my lips. All in vain.
I was still caught up in these thoughts when, at the beginning of February, one month after Javier had run away, a pure white boar appeared in the main street of Obaba. To the great amazement of those watching, it did not withdraw before the presence of people, but trotted in front of them with such calm and gentleness that it seemed more like an angelic being than a wild beast. It stopped in the square and stayed there for a while, quite still, watching a group of children playing with what remained of the previous night’s fall of snow.
The upper part of the fifth page is also damaged but not as badly as the page I have just transcribed. The dampness only affects the first three lines. It goes on:
… but you know what our people are like. They feel no love for animals, not even for the smallest, which, being too weak to defend themselves, deserve their care and attention. In respect of this, I recall an incident that occurred shortly after my arrival in Obaba. A brilliantly colored bird alighted on the church tower and I was looking up at it and rejoicing to think that it was our Father Himself, who, in His infinite kindness, had sent me that most beautiful of His creatures as a sign of welcome, when, lo and behold, three men arrived with rifles on their shoulders… they had shot the poor bird down before I had a chance to stop them. Such is the coldness of our people’s hearts, which in no way resembles that of our good Saint Francis.
They reacted in just the same way toward the white boar. They began shooting at it from windows, the braver among them from the square itself, and the racket they made so startled me that I came running out of the church, where I happened to be at the time. They only managed to wound the animal, however, and in the midst of loud squeals, it fled back to the woods.
Since it was a white boar, and therefore most unusual, the hunt
ers were in a state of high excitement; they could already imagine it as a trophy. But that was not to be, at least not that day. They returned empty-handed, and, faint with exhaustion, they all ended up at the inn, drinking and laughing and with great hopes for the next day. And it was then, on that first day of the hunt, that Matías confronted them with these grim words: “What you’re doing is wrong. He came here with no intention of harming anyone yet you greet him with bullets. You’d be well advised to consider the consequences of your actions.”
As you will recall from the beginning of the letter, Matías was the old man who loved the boy best and was so grieved by his disappearance that many feared he might lose his mind. And there in the inn, hearing those words and what he went on to say, no one doubted that this was exactly what had happened. For in his view, the white boar was none other than our lost boy, none other than Javier, who, because of the sad life he had led as a human being, had changed his very nature. It seems he argued his case as follows:
“Didn’t you see the way he stopped in the square to watch the boys playing in the snow? Isn’t that just what Javier used to do? And, again just like Javier, didn’t the boar have a purple stain around its snout?”
Those who were present say that the old man’s speech was followed by a heated discussion, with some hunters denying that the boar had any such stain and others passionately affirming that it had. Now tell me, dear friend, can you imagine anything more foolish? What kind of a person is it who raises not the slightest objection to the idea of the boy’s metamorphosis and believes, therefore, that it was indeed Javier hiding beneath the boar’s rough coat, and yet grows irate and argumentative over the incidental detail of a birthmark. But, as you well know, superstition still lingers in places like Obaba and just as the stars continue to shine long after they are dead, the old beliefs …
The first ten lines of the sixth page are completely illegible and we can learn nothing of what happened in the days following the boar’s first appearance. We can, on the other hand, find out what happened later, since the latter part of page six and the whole of page seven are perfectly conserved.
… but one night the boar returned to Obaba and, gliding through the shadows, made its way to a solitary house situated some five hundred yards from the square. Once outside the house, it began to beat and gnaw at the door, emitting such furious grunts that the people who had been sleeping inside were dumbstruck and unable to call for help, so great was the terror that gripped them.
I should not say that the animal acted with criminal intent for I know it is wrong to attribute to animals faculties that are proper only to men. And yet I am sorely tempted to do so. How else explain its determination to enter the house? How else explain the damage it caused to the livestock when it saw that it could not break down the door?… for I should tell you that, before disappearing back into the woods, the boar killed a horse and an ox kept by the inhabitants in a nearby outhouse. But I am not proud and I know that only our Father can know the true reasons behind such behavior.
After what had happened, the hunters’ anger was roused and many who until then had remained calm decided to throw in their lot with the hunting parties that had already been established. And, as ever, old Matías was the one dissenting voice. He went out into the streets and pleaded with those setting off for the woods:
“Leave the boar in peace! You’ll only enrage him by doing this! Javier will recognize you!”
The hunters responded with violence, forgetting it was an old man they were dealing with, an old man speaking to them, moreover, out of his delirium. Then they continued on their way. But you should not judge their rudeness and their intemperance too harshly. For, as I explained, they were quite beside themselves with terror. They feared the boar would continue to attack their livestock, livestock that is on the whole of the poorest quality, so poor it barely provides enough to feed and clothe them. But Matías had his reasons too:
“Javier has nothing against you! He only attacks those who did him harm before!”
Unfortunately for everyone concerned, what the old man said was not pure madness. For the family the boar had attacked was the least Christian in Obaba, its members having for generations been much given to cruelty, a propensity they gave full rein to during the last war. Often, when they got drunk at the inn, they had made Javier the butt of their cruelty, mocking and even beating him, for evil always vents itself on the weak. But was there a connection between the two facts? Should I entirely disregard what the old man said? These were the questions I asked myself, the questions that tormented me.
Mothers in Obaba tell their children a story in which a daughter asks her wicked father if he believes he will ever die. The father tells her that this is most unlikely because, as he explains: “I have a brother who is a lion and lives in the mountains and inside that lion is a hare and inside that hare is a dove. That dove has an egg. If someone finds that egg and breaks it on my forehead, then and only then will I die.” However, the person listening to the story knows that the little servant of the house will discover the connection between all those things and that the father, who is in fact a demon, will die. But I lacked the little servant’s ingenuity and was unable to answer my own questions. Perhaps I was slow; perhaps the thread that led from the boar to Javier was more difficult to find than that linking the father’s life to the dove’s egg.
However, subsequently, things happened so quickly that there was little time for reflection. For on the third day of the hunt, the boar pursued and wounded a straggler from one of the hunting parties.