Maria Vockel’s letter cheered me up so much that for the first time in my life I began to feel superior to the people of Obaba. Something astonishing had happened to me, not the sort of thing that would happen to just anyone, something that truly made me one of “the chosen.” Henceforward, I would be a strong person and not allow myself to be intimidated by the other “chosen ones” who used to point their fingers at me.
For some time I continued going around with my school friends. I needed their company, in part because my relationship with Maria Vockel was too great a novelty to be kept a secret. And when, like the adolescents we were, we met up to exchange confidences, I tended to be the most talkative of all, even more than Andrés.
But they didn’t like that girl from Hamburg. They said she was probably ugly and wore glasses and was bound to be boring, why else would she talk so much about books and reading.
“Doesn’t she ever mention ‘it’?” they would ask, laughing and making obscene gestures.
I defended myself by showing them the photo of a young girl, fair-haired and without glasses, her lips curved in a smile, and chided them for their coarseness. But they would just start laughing again and cast doubt on the authenticity of the photo.
Relations between us soon began to cool. I refused to show them the letters that arrived regularly now from Hamburg and only joined them to go to the cinema. And when, following the example of Andrés, they stopped going and instead took to hanging around in bars, the rupture between us was complete. I preferred to stay at home studying German and reading the books in my father’s library. I wanted to prepare myself; I wanted to be good enough for Maria Vockel.
My father couldn’t conceal his joy at my withdrawal from everything to do with Obaba. On Sunday afternoons he would ask, a shade apprehensively:
“Aren’t you going out with your friends?”
“No, I’m fine here at home.”
My reply, which was always the same, made him happy.
When I was seventeen, I left Obaba and went to the university. By that time more than a hundred letters had passed between Maria and myself and not a single topic remained undiscussed. Together they would have served as an illuminating book on the problems of adolescence.
The letters also spoke about the future of our relationship. I asked her to wait for me, told her that it would not be long now before I came to Hamburg. Reading between the lines, that request was a promise of marriage.
Life, however, had a different future in mind for us. Our relationship, so intense up until my first day at the university, fell off sharply from the moment I entered the lecture halls there. It was as if someone had given a signal and, so to speak, all the music had suddenly stopped.
Maria Vockel took longer and longer to reply and the tone of her letters was no longer enthusiastic; sometimes she was merely polite. For my part the change disconcerted me, filled me with uncertainty. How should I react? By demanding explanations? By repeating my promises? In fact I simply let the days drift by, unable to bring myself to act.
When I returned to Obaba for the Christmas holidays, I saw a cream-colored envelope on the table in my bedroom. I knew at once it was her letter of farewell.
“Bad news?” my father asked over lunch.
Crestfallen, I replied: “Maria’s finished with me.” However foreseeable, the news had affected me deeply.
My father gave me an amused smile.
“Don’t worry, Esteban,” he said. “The pain of love is like a toothache. Intense but never serious.”
Sure enough, my dejection lasted only a short time. I was angry at first, to the point of sending Maria a fairly sharp riposte, and then, almost without realizing, I forgot all about it. By the time I’d finished my studies, the relationship I’d had with her seemed something very remote and I was glad it was over.
When my studies were completed, I worked as a geography teacher. I married one of my colleagues at work and the cream-colored envelopes remained buried and forgotten. By then my father lay beneath the earth of Obaba.
Esteban Werfell stopped writing and began to reread the pages of the notebook. On the first page he read: “I have returned from Hamburg with the intention of writing a memoir of my life.”
He sighed, relieved. The memoir was nearly complete. All that remained was to describe what happened on the trip to Hamburg.
Bending over his work again, he hesitated about whether or not to write the word epilogue at the beginning of the new page. He chose instead to rule a line separating off that final part of the story.
Outside it was now completely dark. The park was lit by the sodium light of the street lamps. Beneath the line he wrote:
And, were it not for the trip I have just made to Hamburg, that would have been the end of this review of my life from that particular Sunday afternoon onward. But what I found there obliges me to make a leap in time and continue the story.
When I left for Hamburg, my main aim was to get to know my father’s city, something that for many years I had been prevented from doing by the political situation and, in particular, by the war. I wanted to visit the places he used to go to before he left for Obaba and thus pay homage to his memory. I would go to Buschstrasse, I would buy tickets to the opera at the Schauspielhaus and I would walk by the shores of the Binnenalster lake.
I had a secondary aim too: “If I have time,” I thought, “I’ll go to 2 Johamesholfstrasse. Maybe Maria Vockel still lives there.”
But, after ten days in the city, when I felt I had achieved my primary objective, the idea of visiting my “first love”—something that until then I had considered perfectly natural — began to trouble me. I told myself I would gain nothing from my curiosity, that, whatever happened on such a visit, all the fond memories I had of Maria Vockel would be undone. Basically, I was afraid of taking that step.
For several days I remained undecided, growing more and more agitated. I didn’t even leave the hotel but spent my time at the window gazing out at the St. Georg district of Hamburg. There lay the street whose name I’d first heard pronounced in the choir loft in the church; there were the houses represented by the dot my father had marked on the map of the city.
Only a few hours before I was due to catch the train home, I suddenly tore myself away from the window, ran down the stairs, and hailed a taxi. “If you don’t do it, you’ll regret it forever after,” I said to myself.
I was invaded by the memory of Maria Vockel, plunged into another time, a time outside the one in which I actually found myself. In a way, it was like being fourteen again.
The taxi dropped me opposite 2 Johamesholfstrasse. It was an old, rather grand house with three balconies.
“So this is where she wrote all those letters to me,” I thought, letting my eyes take it all in. Then I went up to the door and rang the bell. My heart was beating so hard my whole body shook.
An old man of about eighty appeared at the door. He was very thin and his face was deeply lined.
“Can I help you?” he said.
The question brought me abruptly back to real time and I was overcome by a feeling that what I was doing was utterly ridiculous. I was left speechless. At last I managed to stammer out:
“I wondered if Maria Vockel still lived in this house.”
“Maria Vockel?” said the old man, puzzled. Then, pointing at me and opening his eyes very wide like someone suddenly recalling some remarkable fact, he exclaimed: “Werfell!” and burst out laughing. I was stunned.