Suddenly the flame began to rise into the air. At first it seemed to be moving of its own accord, as if propelled forward by something at its base. But then, when it was already hovering above the altar steps, I saw that this was not the case, that the flame was not traveling forward on its own but was held in the hand of a young girl with fair hair. She was the one hovering there, gently, unhesitatingly.
“She’s coming toward me,” I thought. The light from the flame was blinding me now.
The young girl flew across the whole length of the church and came to a halt in front of me. She hovered in the air, about a yard above the floor of the choir loft. The organ had fallen silent.
“Do you know what love is, Esteban?” she asked sweetly.
I replied with a nod and tried to get up from the bench in order to see her face. But the candle flame kept me riveted to the spot.
“Could you love me?” she asked and for a moment I glimpsed her nose, her half-open lips.
“Yes,” I said. It seemed the only possible answer.
“Then come and find me, Esteban. Come to Hamburg,” she said. “My address is Maria Vockel, 2 Johamesholfstrasse, Hamburg.”
Having said that, she turned and began to move off toward the altar. I cried out that yes, I would come to Hamburg and find her, but asked her not to go just yet, to stay a little longer. Then I heard someone say: “It’s all right, Esteban, it’s all right. Calm down.” I was lying on the floor of the choir loft with the canon bending over me. Andrés was fanning me with the pages of a score.
“Maria Vockel!” I exclaimed.
“Calm down, Esteban. You must have fainted.”
There was a gentle edge to the canon’s voice. He helped me to my feet and asked Andrés to take me outside to get some air.
“You’d best not go to the cinema, Esteban. Better safe than sorry,” the canon advised me as we said good-bye. “You won’t go now, will you?”
But the image of the fair-haired young girl still filled my mind and I did not feel strong enough to reply.
Andrés answered for me, reassuring the canon: “Don’t worry, Father, he won’t go and neither will I. I’ll stay with him, just in case.”
The canon said that would be fine and returned to the organ bench. The service had to go on.
I felt better as soon as I got outside and my mind grew clearer. Very soon the image of the young girl with fair hair began to grow tenuous, to disappear, the way dreams do, the way specks of dust vanish the instant the ray of sun illuminating them moves on. But by my side was my school friend, Andrés, to ensure that the scene I’d witnessed in the choir loft was not entirely lost. He was two or three years older than me and much preoccupied by affairs of the heart; he would never forget a woman’s name.
“Who’s Maria Vockel?” he asked at last.
It was then, when I heard her name again, that the image returned to me. Again I saw her flying from one part of the church to the other and remembered her questions. Hesitantly, I told Andrés all that had happened.
“It’s a shame you didn’t see her face,” he commented when I had finished. He seemed very interested in that missing detail of the girl’s portrait.
“No, just her nose and her lips. But I’m sure she’s prettier than any of the girls in Obaba.” I spoke as I thought, with the slightly ridiculous vehemence of my fourteen years.
“She can’t be prettier than the girl who works in the bar,” he replied gravely.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said.
I had forgotten how touchy Andrés could be on the subject of female beauty. From his point of view — which, even then, at the height of my adolescence, struck me as slightly absurd — no woman could compare with the waitress he was pursuing. He spent every free moment scrounging enough money to enable him to spend Saturday evenings drinking at a corner of the bar where she worked. Drinking and suffering, of course, because she, the prettiest girl in the world, spoke to everyone but him.
“You do forgive me, don’t you?” I urged. I didn’t want him to go; I needed someone to talk to.
“All right,” he said.
“Do you fancy a stroll?” I suggested. I didn’t want to go straight home, I needed time to sort out the feelings at that moment thronging my mind.
“We could cycle.”
“I’d prefer to walk, really. I’ve got a lot to think about.”
We set off along a path which, starting from the church, encircled the valley where Obaba’s three small rivers met. It was narrow and somewhat ill-suited to two walkers like us with bikes to push, but I felt very drawn to the landscape you could see from there. It was green and undulating, with a scattering of white houses, the sort of landscape that appears in every adolescent’s first attempts at poetry.
“It looks like a toy valley,” I said.
“Yes, I suppose it does,” replied Andrés, rather unconvinced.
“It looks like those cribs you make at Christmas time,” I added, stopping for a better look. I was starting to feel euphoric. The strange vision I’d had in the choir of the church had made my heart drunk.
It had stopped raining at last and the swans were taking advantage of the lull to seek out scraps of food along the edges of the lake. The friendly passerby who had been throwing them bread was now walking away toward the city along the main path of the park, his empty white bag folded beneath one arm.
Attracted by the new turn the day was taking, Esteban Werfell left his notebook and went over to the window. “I was so young then!” He sighed, recalling the conversation he’d had with Andrés.
Yes, very young, and tormented by the remarks made about Engineer Werfell and about his own mother, tormented and confused, seeking in picture books the affection and security he failed to find at school or in the streets of Obaba. His heart then had been like a small Cape of Despair, fertile soil for a fantasy figure like Maria Vockel. He wanted to believe in the reality of that fair-haired young girl, he wanted to believe in her words. The way in which she had appeared to him was, after all, not so very different from the methods employed by the heroines in the novels he read.
Even after all these years, Esteban Werfell still felt it right to consider Maria Vockel his first love. Walking along the path encircling the little valley, he grew melancholy, dreamy, just like Andrés. For the first time in his life, he felt he understood how his companion suffered over his waitress.
“At least you can see her. I’ll never see mine.”
He remembered his words now with a smile. They were ridiculous, like most of the words recorded in his personal journal of the time. But to deny the past was mere foolishness.
“Why don’t you go to Hamburg? That’s where your father’s from, isn’t it?” reasoned Andrés. He was concerned with details, but not with the apparition in itself, nor with the likelihood of such an occurrence. On the contrary, it seemed quite reasonable to him. He knew of lovers who had communicated in much stranger ways than that. By becoming owls, for example. Maria Vockel must have had some reason for choosing that particular method.
Leaving his memories for a moment, Esteban Werfell opened the window and leaned out over the park. The sky was growing steadily bluer and late evening visitors were out walking their dogs or throwing bread to the swans. On the other side of the lake, a group of some twenty children were playing football.
“Anyway,” he thought, leaning on the windowsill and returning to his memories, “Andrés was no exception. People in Obaba had no difficulty in accepting even the strangest events. My father used to make fun of them.”
“They have crude minds, Esteban,” his father would say. And he always came up with some humorous anecdote to illustrate that point of view. But he had disliked the anecdotes and it seemed to him that his father was unfair to the people of Obaba, that he was wrong to despise them.