“Give me the key, you pig!”
The servant boy disliked practical jokers and had even less time for good-for-nothings always on the lookout for an excuse to stop work. They made the blood rush to his head.
“Come down here and I’ll give it to you,” teased the fat man, still smiling.
“Mind how you go, lad,” warned one of the other laborers working in the trench.
The servant boy was very keen on wrestling and once, the most glorious day of his life, he’d been present at the bout in which the champion, Ochoa, had defeated every one of his opponents using his innovative back heel trip and ever since then, up in the mountains, with the animals and trees, Manuel’s one ambition had been to train himself and learn how to execute that move properly.
“He’s too sure of himself, this one,” he thought, and a moment later the fat man was lying flat on his back in the trench. The other laborers laughed as Manuel ran off down the street with the key firmly grasped in his hand.
“I did that almost as well as Ochoa himself,” he thought proudly, opening the door to the school.
During the three years he’d spent up in the mountains as a shepherd, with only the animals for company, the servant boy had learned how to entertain himself and he felt at ease as soon as he entered the meeting room that served as a school. He designated that empty area the Great Space, where he and his dog, Moro — and no one else — could play at being what they were not. Had the schoolmistress ever seen the plays they put on there, she would never have thought that, in comparison with the rest of the pupils, Manuel was the most grown up. On the contrary, she would have thought him the most childish.
His plays always took as their backdrop the lands of Asia and Africa, which the schoolmistress had drawn in sawdust, and in those plays Moro acted as his adjutant, that is, as the adjutant of Hannibal, the mighty king of Carthage, in Manuel’s opinion the only truly valiant man in the whole encyclopedia.
That day he began the play thus: “Asia has turned traitor, Moro, and joined forces with the Romans. I have, therefore, decided to punish them. I’m going to burn down one of their cities.”
Then, reading the names the schoolmistress had written on little flags placed on the map, he added:
“Which city shall we burn down, Moro? Peking, Nanking, Chungking?”
“I don’t mind which you choose, as long as it’s not Chungking. It would be a pity to destroy a city with such a funny-sounding name,” Moro informed him.
“What about Peking?”
“No, not Peking either, Hannibal. It’s such a nice name for a dog. I myself would like to have been called Peking, so I’m afraid…”
“You refuse me everything today, Moro.”
“How about those mountains to the left of China? Why don’t we burn them?”
“I’ll have to think about it. Wait just a moment.”
He had to confess that, since that mountainous region bore neither flag nor name, his adjutant’s suggestion was really very sensible. It was always easier to condemn complete strangers.
Beneath his gaze the whole of China lay humbled at his feet: Peking, Nanking, Chungking, Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan; and in all of those places he saw hordes of tiny people raising supplicant eyes to him. “Don’t do it, Hannibal,” they said, “have pity and do not burn our cities. We will never again be the vassals of Rome. We swear it!”
At last, picking up a few handfuls of sawdust and wrapping them in a piece of paper, he pronounced: “So be it, I will burn those mountains instead! For Carthage can never forgive!” Shortly afterward, a large section of the Himalayas was burning in the stove.
“That’s a good blaze you’ve got going, Manuel!” said the schoolmistress as soon as she opened the door, raising her voice above the hubbub emerging from twenty-four (thirty-one minus seven, who had gone down with flu) childish Albanian throats. By then, he’d already sat down at his own desk, the one nearest to the stove.
“It’s nothing special. At least it didn’t smoke, that’s the main thing,” he replied, with a gesture dismissing the importance of his achievement. His tone had grown serious again.
The young servant spent the morning looking through the stove’s inspection window, keeping an eye on the fire. Because, needless to say, the fire was always ready to surprise you and the worst thing you could do was to trust it. One minute it could be blazing away merrily and the next have burned so low it looked as if it might die down altogether. If you didn’t watch it all the time, the fire could easily just burn itself out.
“Turn to the arithmetic section in your encyclopedias,” the schoolmistress said, having left the younger ones practicing their handwriting.
The servant pulled a face. He disliked arithmetic anyway and felt a special hatred for the problems they were made to do at the end of each lesson; he found them totally incomprehensible.
But the schoolmistress was already reading out the problem they had to solve that day and he tried to look as if he were really paying attention.
“A man had six horses. He sold three of them for 1,000 pesetas each. He sold another two for 1,300 pesetas each. The last horse, on the other hand, broke a leg and had to be slaughtered. Question: Bearing in mind that he received a total of 7,300 pesetas, how much money did the butcher give him for the sixth horse?”
“How did the horse come to break its leg in the first place?” wondered the servant boy. That stupid encyclopedia always left out the most important bits.
Then he heard a voice ask: “How much money did the butcher give him, Manuel?” The blood rushed to his face. He liked the fact that the schoolmistress said his name out loud in front of everyone but he didn’t like what that fact implied. Having to answer caused him intense embarrassment.
“We don’t eat horse meat in these parts, Miss,” he blurted out. The pupils in the back row burst out laughing and the schoolmistress had to threaten them with the ruler to silence them.
“Now come on, Manuel. How much money did he give him?” she asked again.
“I don’t know. About seventy-five pesetas I should think!”
“Two hundred pesetas!” shouted a girl with her hair in a braid.
The schoolmistress nodded.
“Did anyone else get that answer?”
Everyone in the back row put their hands up. But the servant boy didn’t agree.
“What do they know?” he declared to himself, looking at the others with scorn. “You try going to a butcher with a clapped-out old horse and see if he gives you two hundred pesetas for it. Not a chance!”
Then he got up to get firewood for the stove and, as he passed the schoolmate who had laughed loudest at his reply, he crouched down and said: “If I catch you on the way out from school, I’ll kill you.”
The boy who had laughed so heartily went pale. He knew all too well that no one had yet managed to better the servant boy in a fight. He could beat everyone, even boys twice his age.
Post tenebras spero lucem: at six in the evening it was already dark in Albania and so, all the lights on the boarding-house stairs having gone out, with the banister for support, the schoolmistress had to feel her way down the twenty-three stairs — five plus ten plus eight — that led to the hallway cluttered with the leather bottles of wine and oil.
But, as well as that outer darkness, there was the other darkness lodged in Her Confused Heart and it was, without a doubt, the darker of the two, a darkness that obliged her to stop and stand still when, after the first fifteen stairs, she had reached the main landing. From there she could clearly hear the conversations of the laborers drinking and laughing in the boarding house immediately below her. To begin with, that pause had simply been a rest, then an innocent entertainment, then suddenly, when midwinter was upon them, a habit she didn’t even dare confess to her diary.