CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Bernardo Atxaga
Title Page
Epigraph
The bird’s story
The bird’s story continues
The squirrels’ story
The bird takes up the story again
The star’s story
The snake’s story
The bird takes up the story again
The snake takes up the story again
The snake’s story continues
The wild goose’s story
Epilogue
Copyright
As he dies, leaving his two boys as orphans, Paulo’s father charges him with the duty of looking after his slow-witted younger brother, for otherwise Daniel will be put in an institution. But Paulo is unable to exert any authority over Daniel, who – though 20 – is still in the throes of puberty and goes off in a fumbling, inept pursuit of the village girls.
Among these girls are pretty Teresa and her plain friend, Carmen, a girl disfigured by a birthmark on one cheek. Teresa is the reluctant, indeed disgusted, object of Daniel’s dreams, but both are sweet on Paulo, the quiet, irresolute but handsome lad who has inherited the family sawmill. Each girl schemes to win favour with Paulo. The narrators of this story, who take turns to continue the tale, are creatures of the wild, driven by their inner voices – a bird, squirrels, a black snake ... Delicately told, in the simplest langauge, this is an eleguiac tale of lost innocence and the ruthlessness of the natural world, where the hunter all too soon becomes the prey.
Translated from the Spanish by
Margaret Jull Costa
OBABAKOAK
THE LONE MAN
THE LONE WOMAN
A man or a stone or a tree will begin the fourth song.
Les Chants de Maldoror, Lautréamont
Concerning the inner voice. A death and a promise.
Paulo and Daniel
THERE IS A voice that comes from deep within ourselves, and just as summer was beginning, when I was still an inexperienced bird and had never strayed far from the tree where I lived, that voice gave me an order. Before I heard the voice, I knew very little of the world: I knew the tree and the rushing stream beneath it, but almost nothing else. The other birds in my flock used to talk of houses and roads and about a huge river into which the waters of our stream and those of many others all flow, but I had never been to those places and did not know them. Nevertheless, I believed what they told me because the different descriptions tallied – the roofs were always red and the walls were always white and the huge river was always called the sea.
There is a voice that comes from deep within ourselves, the other birds told me. A voice unlike any other, a voice that has power over us.
“How much power?” I asked one day.
“We have to obey the voice,” replied the birds who were at that moment resting amongst the branches of the tree.
But they couldn’t be more specific, for not even the older birds had ever actually heard that powerful voice. They knew of its existence not from personal experience, but from what they had been told by other birds from other times. They believed in it, though, as surely as they believed in the existence of houses, roads and the sea. For my part, I took it to be just another story and didn’t give it much importance, never dreaming that the voice would speak to me. Then, on that day at the beginning of summer, everything changed.
I felt suddenly very restless, the way birds do who are hungry or ill, and I spent the whole morning hopping aimlessly about the tree. This restlessness was combined with the unpleasant feeling that my ears had gone completely mad and were hearing things in a strange, disorderly fashion: the waters of the stream seemed to thunder over the pebbles; the birds nearby sounded to me as if they were screaming; the wind, which was no more than a breeze, was as deafening as a storm. Around midday, I began to experience difficulties breathing and I was suddenly alone. The other birds left the tree and flew off somewhere else.
“Why are you flying away from me?” I asked one of the last to go.
“Because you’re dying,” came the reply.
Convinced of the truth of that response, I decided to review my life. But my life until then had been so brief that the review only lasted a moment. Then I looked up at the sky, and its blue colour seemed to me more remote than ever. So I looked down at the stream, and the sheer speed of the water frightened me. Finally, I looked at the ground, at the brambles and nettles covering it, and into my head came a story I once heard about a girl who had fallen ill. Apparently, the doctor went over to the bed where she was lying and said:
“A torn skirt can be mended, but not this young girl’s health. There’s nothing to be done.”
Her relatives did not tell her the truth, but decided to take her to a folk healer. After examining her, he said:
“There’s nothing I can do. Her legs are swollen and her breathing is weak. She’ll be dead within a couple of months.”
They said nothing to the girl then either, because they did not want to cause her needless suffering. They put her on a horse and carried her back home. But time passed, and she eventually realised there was no hope for her. One evening, her brother found her in the garden crying.
“What’s wrong, sister?” he said. And she replied:
“Nothing’s wrong. I was just thinking that I’m still only nineteen and that soon I’ll be buried under the earth.”
That was the story I was remembering as I waited for the push that would propel me off the branch and onto the ground. Except that death did not come. Instead, I heard the voice. First, I felt the strident noises gradually dwindling away to nothing, and then a great silence filled the tree and its surroundings, like the silence that comes when snow covers the fields.
“Follow the road to Obaba and fly to Paulo’s house,” I heard someone say. It was a voice that seemed to emerge from the centre of that silence and from the centre of myself, from both places at once.
“I don’t know where Obaba is and I don’t know who Paulo is either,” I thought, and just then I saw a village of about a hundred houses, Obaba, and near that village a sawmill and above that, on a small hill, a house with many windows. I knew at once – because the voice gave me that ability, that of seeing and knowing things by sheer power of thought – that this was Paulo’s house.
I set off to carry out the order the voice had given me and I flew down the valley until the stream became as broad and deep as a river, and then I flew on above the alder trees, which, in places like Obaba, always accompany the river down to the sea. After a while, I noticed that the river was forming into a pool, and that the line of alder trees gave way to make room for a building surrounded by wooden logs and by piles of planks, and I knew that this was the sawmill and that my first journey was about to end. It was evening, and the sky was yellow and blue, intense yellow where the sun was setting and pale blue everywhere else.
I flew higher up, looked down and saw the two parts of Obaba, its four or five streets, its square, and then, again, the sawmill, the hill and the house of many windows. The roof of the house was red and its walls white. But what struck me more than the colours was the racket made by all the dogs in the area. They kept howling and barking.
“What are they making so much fuss about?” I thought.
I knew then that the cause of all the racket was the dog who was guarding the house of many windows, Paulo’s house, for it was that dog’s frantic howling and barking that was provoking the response from the other dogs. For some reason, perhaps because the voice inside me told me so, I associated the dogs’ unease with what the sick girl had said to her brother:
“Nothing’s wrong. I was just thinking that I’m only nineteen and that soon I’ll be buried under the earth.”
I did not need any more memories. I understood that the barking and howling announced a death.
“Paulo’s death?” I wondered. I could not ignore the fact that the cause of all the commotion was there, at the door of his house. It was his dog that was howling and barking.
Where the sun had just set, the sky was growing red. The day was ending. And the life of someone who was living in the house of many windows was also ending. While I was thinking about this, I followed the course of the river with my eyes and I saw how it wound about the mountains until, at last, after crossing fields planted with corn, it surrendered its waters to the sea. In the sea – I could see them clearly – black fish were swimming.
Nevertheless, despite the ability which allowed me to perceive as images things that were far away or things that I was thinking or that the voice suggested to me, I could not penetrate the walls of Paulo’s house to find out which member of the family was ill.
“Perhaps Paulo is the one who is dying. Perhaps that is why I’m here,” I thought somewhat apprehensively.
I was still struggling with this idea when I heard a bell ringing. On the road linking the upper part of Obaba with the more heavily populated lower part that extended along both sides of the river, a boy dressed in red and white was ringing a bell, and all the men still working in the orchards and the fields knelt down as he passed. Behind the boy came a man dressed in black and bearing a cross, and behind him came a fairly large group of children.
“It’s one of the signs of death,” I thought, looking at the procession. It seemed to be making its way towards the sawmill, towards the workers who, still in their overalls, stood together waiting, talking in low voices. Soon the bell in the tower started to ring and, as the gloomy sound rang out across the valley, the howling of the dogs grew more widespread and ever more frantic. I decided to fly down towards Paulo’s house.
As soon as I approached, I saw a group of squirrels scurrying back and forth across the roof of the house and I immediately suspected the truth: that these squirrels had received the same order from the voice as I had. At first, it bothered me: Wasn’t my presence enough? Did Paulo need more company?
The reply came at once. I learned that Paulo had an older brother, Daniel, and he was the reason the squirrels had come.
The first thing I noticed when I went into the house was the smell of wax polish on the gleaming wooden floors. Then I crossed a corridor and went into a room where a man was lying on the bed; his breathing was laboured. I realised that this was Paulo’s father and that the boy beside the bed was Paulo himself.
“I beg you, please, Paulo, take care of Daniel. Never ever abandon him.”
The man’s eyes were closed, and he was tossing and turning in the bed. The sheets must have been burning hot.
“Why is it raining so heavily?” the man asked suddenly. “It’s July, isn’t it?”
It was July, and the sky I had just left behind me was certainly not a rainy sky. On the contrary, it had been a sunny day, and the light filtering in through the slats of the blinds was still bright enough to make the mirror on the wardrobe door glitter.
An old woman whom I hadn’t noticed until then left the corner where she was sitting and came over to the bed. I realised she was the woman who did the household chores.
“It’s the dogs,” she whispered. “The dogs are making him confused.”
At that moment, the dog guarding the house was barking wildly, and his peers were answering him from every hallway in Obaba. In his delirium, Paulo’s father was confusing the barking with the sound the rain made when it beat on the skylight in the roof.
“Take care of Daniel,” the father said again, still without opening his eyes. “Take care of your brother at all times, come rain or shine, in July and all year round. You’re only sixteen, and I hate to place such a heavy burden on your shoulders, but I have no choice, Paulo. I will be dead soon, and you will be the only one who can take it on. Someone else can look after the house, someone else can look after the sawmill, but, without you, Daniel will have no one. It’s not your fault, Sara, as I’ve told you many times, and, besides, Daniel isn’t a bad person.”
It seemed that at any moment he might run out of breath.
“Sara isn’t here,” said the old lady, slightly raising her voice. “You’re not talking to your wife, you’re talking to your son.”
“I’ll soon be with Sara again,” said the man. Paulo was staring at the mirror; he was very pale.
There was a silence, and the smell of sweat coming from the sick man’s bed grew more intense, masking the smell of wax polish on the wooden floor. Paulo moved the leg he had been sitting on and rubbed it to get rid of the pins and needles.
“It wasn’t your fault, Sara,” said the man again.
“Talk to Paulo,” said the old woman sternly, forcing the man to open his eyes. Paulo swallowed hard and looked into those eyes. As his father’s illness progressed, they had grown enormous, almost round.
“Daniel is your responsibility,” said the man in an almost inaudible voice. “Don’t just throw him away as if he were an old rag. He may not be normal, but he’s not an old rag either. He’s your brother, the only one you have.”
The man sat up in bed, raised his fists to his head and let out a moan.
“Do you promise, Paulo?”
Paulo was incapable of saying a word, but he nodded firmly.
“He says he will,” said the old lady. “Do you see? He’s nodding. Don’t worry, Paulo will take good care of his brother, and we’ll help him.”
Paulo left the room in which his father lay dying and searched the whole house for his brother Daniel. He found him at last in the kitchen, crouched under the table and staring at the wall with an expression that seemed to say: “This wall is the only thing I care about in all the world.”
When Daniel heard the door opening, he crawled on his knees over to the wall and pressed his huge body against it. Although his intention had been to conceal himself more effectively, he merely succeeded in lifting the table up on his back so that it was resting on only three legs. Paulo accepted his brother’s behaviour as if it were perfectly natural.
“What are you doing hiding under there, Daniel?” he said. There was a puddle of yellowish liquid on one of the floor tiles.
Daniel stopped staring at the wall and turned his head. He had almost no eyelashes and, in his wide eyes, there was an