Post tenebras spero lucem
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.
But she was stubborn and didn’t want to go back on the decision she had made. She wouldn’t write him another letter until he replied to hers. And so she used her pen only on official matters or transactions, usually to write to the schools inspector. In one such letter she wrote:
I believe, Inspector, that teaching is always difficult, but the truth is that in cases such as my own it can become an almost impossible task. The roof leaks. The desks are falling to bits. Two of the windows have no glass in them. Bearing in mind that winter is nearly upon us, repairs, especially to the roof, seem to me absolutely essential. I am not exactly well supplied with teaching materials either. For example, I have no maps of Asia and Africa and when I have to talk to the children about these continents, I am forced to improvise maps by tracing them in sawdust.
She was proud of how well Africa and Asia had turned out, with their main geographical features and cities scattered among the sawdust, and it seemed to her that such a brilliant idea could only have occurred to someone who had spent many hours playing with sand on the beach. That was the real reason for bringing the deficiency to the inspector’s attention. The lack of maps did not in fact worry her that much.
The inspector’s reply arrived with great promptness.
I fully understand what you say in your letter but, unfortunately, we do not possess the necessary funds to refurbish all our establishments. Nevertheless, I will visit you there on 17 November and we can talk about it then. I need to see the school before I can make any decisions.
The letter broke the monotony of fifty endless days in Albania and receiving it provoked in the schoolmistress a joy of almost extravagant proportions, far in excess of what might be expected from someone in receipt of what was, after all, only an official note. But her heart, which was still confused, reacted with equal vehemence to all stimuli, whether false or genuine.
“The inspector will come on the seventeenth,” she wrote in her diary. Then she went over to the calendar she’d hung in her kitchen and circled the date in red. Even the arrival of Her Best Friend would not have merited so many notes and underlinings.
When the seventeenth of November arrived, the schoolmistress spent the whole day looking out the school window. But no inspector appeared in Albania.
Back home again, she wrote at the top of a sheet of paper: “I am most upset that you failed to keep your promise.” But then, deciding not to continue the letter, she lay down on the bed and stayed there, her eyes open, staring into the darkness. And when, at last, she did manage to fall asleep, she was besieged all night by dreams of spiders and snakes that crawled out from her own heart.
The barking of the local dogs announced the dawning of a new day and it seemed to her they had been barking for all eternity and would go on barking forever, that they would never be silent. And her illusion gained substance when she got up and looked out the window, for on the other side of the glass panes winter had laid its imperious hand over everything, as if it were the only possible season.