Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga Read Free Book Online

hidden in a maize field… but, as I said, this was not the case with Javier.
    I should at this point explain that Javier was of unknown parentage or, to use the mocking phrase so often used here to describe him, “born on the wrong side of the blanket.” For that reason he lived at the inn in Obaba, where he was fed and clothed in exchange for the silver coins furnished to the innkeepers—vox populi dixit—by his true progenitors.
    It is not my intention in this letter to clear up the mystery of the poor boy’s continual flights, but I am sure Javier’s behavior was ruled by the same instinct that drives a dying dog to flee its masters and head for the snowy mountain slopes. It is there, sharing as he does the same origins as the wolves, that he will find his real brothers, his true family. In just the same way, I believe, Javier went off to the woods in search of the love his guardians failed to give him at home, and I have some reason to think that it was then, when he was walking alone among the trees and the ferns, that he felt happiest.
    Hardly anyone noticed Javier’s absences, hardly anyone sighed or suffered over them, not even the people who looked after him. With the cruelty one tends to find among the ill-read, they washed their hands of him saying that “he would come back when he was good and hungry.” In fact, only I and one other person bothered to search for him, that other person being Matías, an old man who, having been born outside of Obaba, also lived at the inn.
    The last time Javier disappeared was different, though, for so fierce was my insistence that they look for him, a whole gang of men got together to form a search party. But, as I said before, nine months have now passed and poor Javier has still not reappeared. There is, therefore, no hope now of him returning.
    Consider, dear friend, the tender hearts of children and the innocence in which, being beloved of God, they always act. For that is how our children are in Obaba and it gives one joy to see them always together, always running around, indeed, running around the church itself, for they are convinced that if they run around it eleven times in succession the gargoyle on the tower will burst into song. And when they see that, despite all their efforts, it still refuses to sing, they do not lose hope but attribute the failure to an error in their counting or to the speed with which they ran, and they persevere in their enterprise.
    Javier, however, never joined in, neither then nor at any other time. He lived alongside them, but apart. The reasons for his avoidance of them lay perhaps in his character, too serious and silent for his age. Perhaps too it was his fear of their mockery, for a purple stain covered half his face, considerably disfiguring him. Whatever the reason, the conclusion …
    The third page ends there. Unfortunately the top of the following page, page four, is badly affected by mold and none of my efforts to clean it up have met with much success. I have only been able to salvage a couple of lines.
    Reading them, one has the impression that Canon Lizardi has once more abandoned the story and returned to the sad reflections of the beginning of the letter. At least so I deduce from the presence there of a word like
santateresa,
the local word for the praying mantis, an insect that, according to the nature guide I consulted, is unique in the natural world for the way in which it torments its victims. The author of the guide comments: “It devours them slowly, taking care not to let them die at once, as if its real hunger were for torture not for food.”
    Was Lizardi comparing the behavior of that insect with the way life had treated the boy? For my part, I believe he was. But let us leave these lucubrations and look at what Lizardi did in fact write in the legible part of that fourth page.
    … do not think, dear friend, that I ever abandoned or neglected him. I visited him often, always with a kind word on my lips.