Their arguments were, as I said, rather clumsy; in fact the service tended to finish later rather than earlier. I said nothing to contradict them, though. Deep down I wanted to go to church. Not just because it was forbidden territory, and therefore desirable, but also because of the need I felt to be a normal child, to be one of the boys. Apart from my father, I was the only person in Obaba who had never set foot in that building and, naturally — I was after all only fourteen — I didn’t like being marked out as different.
Their proposal was in line with my own desires, therefore, and I didn’t argue with what they said. I simply indicated the door of the library, where my father was working. It was his permission they required. No, I didn’t dare to ask him, it was best that they should do so. Not that I thought he would agree. I expected my father to dismiss them in a loud voice, declaring that he had no intention of going against the principles of a lifetime on that or any other Sunday.
Instead I heard him say: “If he wants to go, let him.” I felt first surprised, then frightened; it was as if every pane of glass in the window had suddenly shattered. Why did he say yes? I couldn’t even begin to imagine why.
A swan stood at the door of its house making loud honking noises, as if to reproach the continuing rain. It rained on and on, flattening the grass and forming puddles that grew ever deeper. Soon the whole park would be awash.
Esteban Werfell clasped his hands and rested them on the notebook. No, at fourteen he couldn’t possibly have understood his father, because at that age, he saw him not with his own eyes, but through the eyes of others, through the eyes of those who, he later realized, were his father’s declared enemies. In Obaba it was said that Engineer Werfell was a proud, intractable man and that’s what he thought too. It was said — a little girl who played with him in the square told him this — that he was so cruel he beat the mine workers; and Esteban would simply smile and nod. Indeed he accepted that image because he had no other. What was his father? Just that, his father. And beyond that? Beyond that, nothing. Well, apart from being a mining engineer.
But that time had passed. He was a grown man, not a rather unsympathetic adolescent. He thought now that he understood why his father had accepted his school friends’ proposal.
“Sheer weariness,” he sighed. He was beginning to enjoy the rain. It was helping him to remember.
Engineer Werfell had indeed grown weary, he regretted having left his native city of Hamburg to move to a place where all his ideas seemed ridiculous. At first, he dreamed of returning. “We’ll go back, Esteban, and you can study at the same university I went to.” Those words ran like a refrain throughout his childhood.
But then the bad news began to arrive. One day it was the mine closing down; the next it was the failure of the bonds he’d bought on the Stock Exchange, leaving him almost penniless; then came the letter from his best friend, Theodor Steiner, telling him that the association to which they both belonged — the Eichendorff Club — had been banned in Germany and that his ideas were now outlawed even in the country of his birth.
By the time Esteban was fourteen, his father had given up hope. He would die in Obaba, he would never return to Germany. His son would never study at a German university. It was logical then, given the circumstances, that he no longer had the strength to fight for his son’s education. What did it matter? “If he wants to go, let him.” The battle was lost anyway.
The swan standing at the door of his house honked again, this time managing to get all the other swans inside to join him. The din distracted him from his memories.
“Be quiet!” he shouted, and went on to wonder: Why was he so proud? He didn’t want to cut the thread at that moment joining him and his father.
If he’d been more humble, Engineer Werfell would have been better able to accept life in Obaba. If he’d been more intelligent too. Yes, that was what real intelligence was, the ability to adapt to any situation. A man able to adapt would never know that descent into hell. On the contrary, he would achieve happiness. What use had all his books, reading, and ideas been to his father? In the end he’d been defeated. “Only the mean of spirit adapt to life,” his father used to say. But he didn’t agree with him anymore. Nor did he agree with the old maxim coupling knowledge and suffering, or with the one that says the more a man knows, the more he suffers. As he used to say to his students, that unfortunate consequence came only after climbing the first rungs up the ladder of knowledge. As a man climbed higher, he had to learn to triumph over suffering.
The swans seemed to have quieted down. Esteban Werfell dipped his pen in the inkwell and covered the first lines of a new page with his neat writing. He was determined to note down these reflections in his journal.
Even in the most difficult situations there comes a moment when giving up the struggle becomes something desirable, even pleasant. Thus, for example, the victim of a shipwreck ultimately becomes reconciled to the sea, even someone who has sweated blood trying to save his ship and has spent the whole night beneath the stars, encircled by fishes, in the most utter solitude, defying the waves. It doesn’t matter what he’s done, or how dearly he clings to life, the end is always sweet. He sees that he can do no more, that no one is coming to his rescue, that no coast is in sight, and then he accepts the situation, he rests, he gives himself up to the sea like a child wanting only to sleep.
But my father was too proud. True his ship had foundered and he had no option but to submit, but he wouldn’t accept that, he didn’t want the final pleasure of defeat. He replied brusquely: “If he wants to go, let him,” and shut himself up in his library, the “only place in Obaba that he liked.” When I knocked to ask him for money to go to the cinema, he didn’t answer. He simply slipped a coin under the door. Now, I think, I regret the joy I showed then.
For as soon as I had the money, we all rushed off, pushing and shoving, the way we did when the teacher let us out at break time. Then we wheeled our bikes up the hill known in Obaba as Canons’ Hill.
It was a spring day of unsettled weather, with almost continual showers and squally winds, and the ditches by the roadside were full of water. Where they’d overflowed, the fallen apple blossom carried along by the current almost covered the ground. We trod on it as we passed, and it was like treading on carpets of white.
We walked briskly along, pushing the bikes, which, as Andrés, one of my friends, quite rightly remarked, seemed much heavier going uphill. At the end of the road, on the brow of the hill, stood the imposing spire of the church.
We all felt really cheerful. We laughed for no reason and rang our bicycle bells to compare the different sounds they made. “Are you happy, Esteban?” I told them I was, that it was an event of real importance for me, that I was bursting with curiosity. “Aren’t you a bit nervous too?” I told them I wasn’t. But I was and my nervousness was growing minute by minute. The time was approaching. As my father would have put it, I would soon be on the Other Side.
A moment later I was entering the church for the first time.
The massive door was extremely heavy. I had to lean the whole weight of my body against it before it yielded.
Andrés said to me: “Before going in you have to make the sign of the cross.”
I told him I didn’t know how to. So he wetted my fingers with his and guided my hand in its movements.
“It’s so dark!” I exclaimed as soon as I went in. I was blinded by the contrast between the brightness outside and the shadowy depths inside. I couldn’t see a thing, not even the central aisle immediately in front. “Don’t talk so loud,” said my companions going in ahead of me.