We have been to so many places that a lot of them have been erased as if we had never been there at all. We have seen so many people that we could go back and reintroduce ourselves. What joy and sadness there was in all those exits and entrances! What a shame we couldn’t have got into another car or followed the road we passed back there on the right or the left! And what a shame that we must leave this one behind! One day, the car will drive us itself.
Where is it? What’s happened to it? Nothing. We’re still here, still in the car. But I looked at it rather differently today, the way you might look at your own arm, with the attachment, disbelief and anxiety with which some of us look at ourselves in the mirror.
SEÑOR OTAOLA, NATURAL SCIENCES
SEÑOR OTAOLA would go up the stairs at nine o’clock sharp, with an absent look in his eyes, a cold, correct expression on his face, and, if he happened to pass a colleague, he would raise one long, pale, bony hand in greeting. When he spoke to someone, he would bend deferentially towards him or her, wrinkling up his whole face in an attempt at a smile, and address them quietly, seriously, in clipped, military tones. Señor Otaola did not get out of breath climbing the stairs. He did not change his pace if something happened nearby. He merely looked very hard at the perpetrator, with cold, condemnatory eyes and a slightly haughty, weary look of deep understanding. Señor Otaola taught Natural Sciences. There was no haggling over marks with him; each pupil had to accept what he was given and that was that. And the mark stayed there, in the teacher’s mark book, waiting to be added up at the end of term. His classes were not noisy or intense, but diverting and gentle.
In winter, at nine o’clock in the morning, the cold in the classroom was as taut as a drum. Señor Otaola, who always wore a waistcoat, never wore an overcoat, raincoat or waterproofs while at school. Perhaps he left them in the staff room or the secretary’s office. He began the lesson impassively, as if the cold did not affect him, striding up and down the central aisle between the desks. It was very, very cold, and yet he spoke about silkworms, ladybirds, grasshoppers and butterflies. Those flies, dragonflies and grasshoppers gradually warmed the hearts of the boys, as if it were summer or else spring, late spring: the sun poured in through the windows, the shadows cast by the leaves of a poplar blinked and flickered on the desks; in the Natural Sciences class there really were flies, and then Señor Otaola would speak about sandstone, rushing streams, fluvial erosion, waterfalls, glaciers, moraine, erratic blocks…
Señor Otaola had a hoarse, muffled voice, as if he were suffering the chronic after-effects of some youthful expedition into jungles or up rivers. He would often half close his pale eyes as if the landscape he was describing dazzled him: the bright reflection from the pelagic zone of the sea, the sparse vegetation of the tundra, or the knifelike ridge of a rock. Señor Otaola wore gold cufflinks, a pocket watch and a wedding ring.
At nine o’clock, he went up the stairs to take his class, sometimes teaching one year, sometimes another. At ten o’clock he came down. He could be seen smoking a cigarette and pacing about in the entrance hall, and when there was a school meeting, he would punctually take his place, silent, but never hermetically so. He would greet the mothers of the children, the female teachers and the cleaners with a gesture that was parsimonious, yet gentlemanly and fulsome. In his classes all was peace and respect, the respect imposed by his measured words, his affable remoteness, his tone of voice, his conscientiousness, the exemplary irrevocability of everything he did in the classroom. Señor Otaola’s classes, his every step, were as they were, and nothing could change them. Knowing him, one could understand why the heavenly spheres do not bump into each other, why Nature always arrives promptly each spring, bearing flowers, why it never forgets the formula for making clouds, why life and death reach into so many corners in wise, miraculous silence. Glaciers in spring, blossoms in winter. And his slow hands moving in the air, dissecting imagined hexapods, ruthlessly stripping the petals from the sterile daisy of science. Did anyone have anything more to add about Señor Otaola?
Only Gil Fajardo in 2C — and it was surely a lie. He said that, over a period of two or three days, right in the middle of a lesson, he had heard the metallic rattle of a cricket. It wasn’t the complete sound, he said, more like a gentle strumming, as if the cricket were timidly tuning up its elytra. As if it were agreeing, from its position of animal inferiority, with something Señor Otaola had said about orthoptera or possibly about some other subject, he couldn’t quite remember: cryptogams, phanerogams, dunes, the courses of rivers, estuaries, meanders, sandbanks, volcanoes or hydrostatic levels… And, of course, he didn’t know whether the sound of the cricket was pretend or real, although it seemed to come from near where Señor Otaola was standing. But that is what Gil Fajardo said later. Before — if it’s true what he said — he had kept quiet about it or not believed it. Because he said this after the accident, which was really something rather more than what we would normally describe as an accident.
Señor Otaola had finished his lesson with the third years with his accustomed air of normality. The bell rang to announce the hour. It was ten o’clock. He went down the stairs as usual. And when he had gone down the first flight and was standing on the second landing, he stood looking at the steps before him, twelve of them, and suddenly took a leap, a leap intended to carry him from one landing to the next. Señor Otaola performed this leap with unwonted, childlike glee, although one could also say that he did not entirely lose his air of seriousness. He fell on the seventh stair and rolled down the last five. Señor Otaola broke a leg and sustained injuries to his head and one arm.
The leap was witnessed by Señor Rodríguez, the maths teacher, who was also going down the stairs at that moment, by Señorita Eulalia, the art teacher, who was coming up, and by several pupils from various years, who were racing down the stairs to answer a call of nature.
THE SEA
WE ENDED UP renting an apartment on the Costa Templada, near Almuñécar, one of the areas being promoted by the tourist board at the time.
She was happy. And I wasn’t in a bad mood exactly, just a little grumpy.
It turned out that the apartment was new, and there were still spots of paint on the door handles and on the skirting board. The first thing we did was to go into the village and buy cloths, scrubbing brushes, detergent and a litre of turps.
There was nowhere to hang our clothes and, instead of telling the concierge or writing a letter to the owner, I bought some metal hooks and screwed them into the back of the doors in the bedroom and bathroom.
Seeing my wife labouring away removing paint stains, I decided to give her a hand, and for three or four days — of the fifteen days we were going to spend there — I didn’t even have time to pick up a book or a pen. When we arrived, I was reading Charles Bally and all that fascinating stuff about the substantivation of the adjective.
I found the turps such a miraculous substance that I opened my suitcase and looked the word up in the dictionary. It turned out to be essence of turpentine, a semi-fluid resin exuded by pines, firs, larches and terebinths. I associated the last with healthy, summer things, which pleased me.
Almost every day we found something else wrong; the bedside table and the chairs were as wobbly as if they had a leg missing, but the sea was so close — we could see it from our balcony — and we went to the sea from day two on.
To get to the sea we had to pass a supermarket and a campsite run by a Belgian. Then we just had to go up a dusty hill, down another one and there we were — at about a quarter past one — at the beach, where one could immediately make out three distinct lines: the shifting line of the water, the dark line of wet sand, and the line formed by the sunshades and awnings with people underneath and around them, and, whether sitting or lying down, all were looking at the sea.