Bernardo Atxaga - Obabakoak

I imagine Menscher speaking from behind the railings around his garden and I imagine the faces of those who listened to him. I cannot bear that image, it wounds me. On reflection, though, perhaps Menscher really was mad, because only madmen can bear the mocking smiles of the people who address them.

“It seems,” writes the journalist, and it is not hard to imagine a mocking smile on his lips too, “that the relationship between Menscher and Nabilah was a most passionate one. An old friend of the painter, whose name must remain secret, explained to me that Menscher had spoken to him of that passion in lurid and intimate detail, the kind of detail that, for obvious reasons, we cannot go into here.”

The journalist then emphasizes what he said before: “According to what his childhood friend tells me, the painter spoke of Nabilah as if he had really and truly lain with her in some lowly bed in the city of Jaddig. It is possible that Menscher died believing this to be so.… That he died or was killed, because it is still unclear as to what exactly happened.”

The journalist is, at last, back on familiar ground. He knows that readers of the article will appreciate the sincerity required in recounting such tragic events and he does his best to achieve this.

“Some months ago,” he writes, “the painter began to paint a very different image to the one described earlier. There was no longer joy in his heart. On the contrary, he seemed distressed, frightened. When anyone asked him the reason for that change, Menscher replied saying that he had seriously violated the ancient customs of Arabia, which not only forbid carnal relations before marriage but also any relationship between an Arab woman and a foreigner; he and Nabilah had been found out, and now her family was looking for him with the intention of killing him.

Naturally, no one believed his story, although many people felt sorry for Menscher and pitied his sufferings. They thought too that he would get over his bad spell and go back to being happy again.

Unfortunately the exact opposite happened. Menscher’s fear became terror and that terror caused him to cry out and run madly from one side of the garden to the other. Menscher asked for help from those who, with a feeling of impotence one can easily imagine, watched from the pavement, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. Now, however, we all know that the situation merited the second reaction, for Hans Menscher is now dead. He was found stabbed to death in his garden yesterday morning, the twenty-seventh of July. The dagger that put an end to his life was authentically Arabian, with a long blade and a damascene hilt — a detail that has been remarked upon in every café conversation.”

The passerby who made that walk to the library does not feel disappointed. His curiosity has provided him with an entertaining afternoon and he now has a story to tell at supper time. Contented, he goes down the steps of the building and is lost among the crowd. However, that passerby will not have had the luck that, purely by chance, I had; a stroke of luck, as I will now explain, that allowed me to discover how the Menscher story ended.

It happened that I was invited to the house of a retired judge and when he told me that he was writing a book on unsolved court cases, it occurred to me to ask him about the mad painter and the matter of the Arabian dagger that had killed him.

“That case,” he said, “was indeed never solved.”

Seeing that I was clearly hoping for a more detailed reply, the judge asked me to follow him. When we reached his study, he took down a file from the bookcase and placed in my hands an envelope bearing a seal. My hands trembled: The seal bore Arabic characters.

“Read what the letter says.”

The letter was written in English, a language I do not know well, but well enough to see that it was a request from the police in Jaddig for information on a German subject, Hans Menscher, giving as a justification for that request a complaint made in their offices by a woman called Nabilah Abauati. In her statement Nabilah Abauati declared that on the night of the twenty-sixth to twenty-seventh of July, 1923, three members of her family had murdered the above-mentioned German citizen.

“So,” I asked, “what really happened?”

“You’re forgetting that I deal only in unsolved cases,” smiled the judge and indicated that it was time for us to rejoin the other guests gathered in the drawing room.

TO WRITE A STORY in just five minutes you need — as well as the customary pen and blank paper, of course — a small hourglass, which will provide accurate information both on the passing of time and on the vanity and worthlessness of the things of this life and, therefore, of the actual effort you are at this moment engaged in. Do not for an instant consider sitting yourself down in front of one of those monotonous and monotone modern walls; let your gaze lose itself in the open landscape that spreads itself before you outside your window and in the sky where seagulls and other such medium-weight birds trace the geometry of their fleeting pleasure. It is also necessary, though less essential, that you listen to music, to some song whose words are incomprehensible to you, a song in Russian, for example. Having done this, turn inward, bite your own tail, peer through your own personal telescope at the place where your entrails are silently working away, ask your body if it is cold, if it is thirsty, if it is both cold and thirsty or suffering from any other kind of discomfort. If the answer is in the affirmative, if, for example, you feel a general tickling sensation, do not fall prey to anxiety, for it would be strange indeed if you managed to settle down to your work at the first attempt. Look at the hourglass, whose lower portion is still almost empty, and you will see that, as yet, not even half a minute has gone by. Don’t get nervous, go calmly to the kitchen, taking small steps or dragging your feet as you prefer. Drink a little water — if it’s iced water, take the opportunity to splash some on your neck — and before returning to sit down at the table take a nice, quiet leak (in the toilet, that is, because peeing in the hallway is not, in principle, an essential attribute of the literary man).

The seagulls are still there, so are the sparrows, and there too — on the shelf to your left — is a large dictionary. Pick it up with the greatest of care, as if it were charged with electricity, as if it were a platinum blond. Then — taking care to notice the sound the pen makes as it scratches the surface of the paper — write down this sentence: “To write a story in just five minutes you need.”

There you have your beginning, which is no small thing, and barely two minutes have passed since you sat down to work. You not only have the first sentence, in the large dictionary you are holding in your left hand you also have everything else you require. That book contains everything, absolutely everything; believe me, the power of those words is infinite.

Let yourself be carried along by instinct and imagine that you, yes, you, are the Golem, a man or woman made up of letters, or rather, constructed entirely of symbols. And allow the letters of which you are composed to go forth — the way one stick of dynamite sets off all the others — in search of their sisters, those drowsy sisters asleep in the dictionary.

Some time has passed but a glance at the hourglass shows that not even half the time at your disposal has gone.

And suddenly, like a shooting star, the first sister awakens and comes to you, enters your head, and lies down, humbly, inside your brain. You must write that word down at once and write it in capital letters for it has grown on the journey. It is a short word, agile and swift; it is the word net.