He looked out at the park again. There were no swans on the lake now, they’d retreated to their house. No, they didn’t like the February rain either.
However — he wrote — any attempt to select out special moments of our life may prove a grave mistake. It may be that a life can only be judged as a whole, in extenso, and not by its parts, not by taking one day and rejecting another, not by separating out the years like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, in order to conclude that this bit was very good and this very bad. The fact is that everything that lives is like a river, with no shortcuts and no halts along the way.
But, while that is true, it is equally true that memory tends to behave quite differently. Like all good witnesses, memory takes pleasure in the concrete, in selected details. If I had to compare it with anything, I’d say it was like an eye. I would never, on the other hand, compare it to a bookkeeper who specializes in taking inventories.
For example, right now I can see the swans’ house, covered from ground to roof with ivy, which is by its nature dark and darker still on rainy days like today. I see it but, strictly speaking, I never see it. Each time I look up, my gaze slides over the monotonous green and black of the leaves, and doesn’t stop until it finds the reddish stain on one of the corners of the roof. I don’t even know what it is. Perhaps it’s a scrap of paper or a primrose that’s chosen to bloom there or a single tile that the ivy has left uncovered. As far as my eyes are concerned, it doesn’t matter, for they shun the dark and unerringly seek out that one point of light.
Esteban Werfell stared out at the reddish stain, but still failed to assuage his doubts. It could as easily be a primrose as a scrap of paper or a tile. In the end, though, such a detail was of no matter. What did matter was what he had just written about memory. To say that memory took pleasure in the concrete was inexact. It was a question of necessity, not pleasure.
That is how the eye behaves — he went on — and, if my idea is correct, memory does too. It disregards the ordinary and instead seeks out remarkable days, intense moments; in my own case, it seeks out one particular far-off afternoon of my life.
But enough of this. It’s time to begin the story itself.
Once he’d ruled a line to bring to a close that first page of his notebook, Esteban Werfell felt relieved. There it was, he had managed to outline an introduction to what he wanted to say. He didn’t know quite why he went about things that way, with all those detours and delays, but it was certainly very typical of him, it always had been. He never wrote or spoke directly, he never dealt frankly with the people around him. After all these years, he accepted his timidity, his cowardice, as a character defect, but the opportunities he had let slip by because of it still hurt him. His whole life had been one of silence, passivity, withdrawal.
But he was getting sidetracked again. It wasn’t a question now of how he lived his life, but of how he wrote, and it was a matter of indifference whether he took a circuitous route to get there or not. No one would ever read his personal journal. He did occasionally allow himself to fantasize about some imaginary future reader — sitting at that same table after his death — poring over his notebooks, but he could never really bring himself to believe in him or her. No, there would be no such reader. There was, therefore, something slightly ridiculous about his preoccupation with style.
As he dipped his pen in the inkwell, he looked across at the park. In the rain, without the usual walkers, the area around the lake looked more solitary than ever. The little streams that sprang up among the grass rippled as they flowed over the pebbles.
Hic incipit—he wrote — here begins the story of the afternoon when, for the first time in my life, I was taken to church. I was fourteen years old and I lived with my father in a place called Obaba.
It was Sunday and I’d arranged to meet up with some school friends and go to the cinema that had been built some three miles from Obaba near the railway. But for the first time, and contrary to the rules governing our friendship, my friends turned up at the house long before the agreed hour and, as soon as I opened the door to them, made a most unexpected request. “Come to church with us this evening,” they said, “come and sing in the choir. Ask Mr. Werfell to let you come. You can tell him it’s just a matter of singing some psalms, you don’t have to believe in anything.”
Such behavior was odd in them. Such boldness, I mean. And the word boldness is apt on this occasion, since in Obaba paying social visits — insofar as that implied seeing the interior of someone else’s house — was considered to be in distinctly bad taste, in the same league as turning around to stare when someone was getting undressed. Moreover, my father was a foreigner, a stranger and an enemy, and everyone knew how much he hated the church and religion in general.
Looking back, I have no doubt that the person behind that proposal was the canon of Obaba, a Jesuit. In his eyes I must have seemed a soul in mortal danger, a child who, lacking a mother — she had died when I was born — was at the mercy of a hateful man, a man who would not hesitate to drag his own son into the abyss in which he himself lived. The canon must have thought there could be no better way of attracting me than through my friendship with my schoolfellows.
The hatred between the canon and my father was not, so to speak, purely intellectual. It had its roots in something other than the iconoclastic approach adopted by my father from the moment he was put in charge of the mines at Obaba. That something was my existence. To use the words I heard on the lips of the schoolmaster one day, I was not the “legitimate fruit of a marriage.” And I wasn’t, for the simple reason that my parents had joined together in free union, without recourse to the church, a fact which at that time and in that place was deemed inadmissible. But that’s another story and has no place in this notebook.
The park was still deserted and the trees, oblivious of the coming spring, seemed listless. Not even the swans gave any sign of life.
He looked away from the window and reread what he’d written. No, his parents’ story had no place in that notebook, perhaps in the next notebook, the thirteenth. It would, above all, be the story of a young woman who chose to live with a foreigner and, because of that, was slandered and condemned to be ostracized. “Your mother would sleep with anyone. Your mother didn’t wear any knickers. Your mother died young because of all the wicked things she did.”
The words heard during playtime at the school in Obaba still wounded him. He wasn’t sure whether he would write that thirteenth notebook or not, but, if he did, he knew how difficult it would be. But he would face that when he came to it. The task in hand was the story he had brought back with him from the trip to Hamburg.
Esteban Werfell bent over his notebook again. His school friends’ unexpected visit once more filled his imagination.
Seeing my astonishment, my friends proceeded, rather clumsily, to argue their case, studiously avoiding all mention of the canon. According to them, it was wrong that they and I should have to go our separate ways on Sundays. It was a sheer waste of time, because sometimes they finished their singing ten or fifteen minutes earlier than usual, minutes that could prove vital if we were to get to the cinema on time, minutes that, in fact, were never put to good use; all because of me, of course, because I was their friend and they had no alternative but to wait for me.
Summing up, one of them said: “We always arrive after the film’s started, and it seems stupid to me to cycle three miles only to miss half the plot. It would make much better sense to stick together.”