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lasted only a moment. He must tell the story with all its details just as he had decided to do before returning home from his visit to Hamburg.
    He dipped his pen in the inkwell. A final glance at the park revealed a small boy wagging an umbrella threateningly at the swans.
    “What are you doing home so early?” my father asked as soon as I opened the front door.
    “I didn’t go to the cinema after all.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I fainted in church,” I confessed, shamefaced.
    I saw that he was alarmed and quickly explained that nothing untoward had happened. The darkness in the church and the flickering candle flame had been to blame. I shouldn’t have stared so hard at it.
    Sighing, my father gestured toward the library.
    “Esteban, if it’s spirit you want, you’ll find it in those books in there, not in the darkness of a church,” he said. After a silence, I stammered: “Can I ask you something?” I couldn’t go on talking to him and still keep my secret. I needed to know what he thought about the Maria Vockel incident.
    “Of course.”
    He sat down in an armchair and indicated that I do likewise. He appeared nervous and it seemed to me that he no longer saw me as a child but as an adult, capable of making my own decisions.
    I described everything that had happened from the moment I entered the church: the conversation during the fainting fit, my feelings at the time and my subsequent doubts. He listened attentively, without interrupting. When he saw that my story was over, he got up and began to pace about the room. He stopped by the window, plunged in thought. “Now he’ll go to the library and look up some book that will explain it all away,” I thought. But he didn’t move.
    “Could something like that really happen?” I asked. “Is there any chance Maria Vockel might be real?”
    “There’s only one way to find out, Esteban. By writing to that address,” he said, smiling. I was glad to find him so understanding. “I’ll help you write the letter,” he added, still smiling. “I haven’t quite lost my grasp of my own language yet.”
    Despite their friendly tone, his words made me lower my gaze. My father had not been successful in his attempts to teach me German. Even at home, I preferred to speak as I did with my friends and I grew angry when he refused to use “the language we both knew.” But that Sunday everything was different. Repenting of my earlier attitude, I promised myself that I would make up for lost time, that I would not offend him like that again.
    But my father was happy, as if the events of the afternoon had revived pleasant memories. He put his hand under my chin and made me look up. Then, spreading out an old map of Hamburg on the table, he started to look for Johamesholfstrasse.
    “Look, there it is. In the St. Georg district,” he said, pointing to it on the map, adding: “Shall we write the letter now?”
    “Yes, I’d like that,” I replied, laughing.
    Now, after all these years, I realize that the letter marked the end of an era in my life. I, who had never been like the other children in Obaba, was about to become, from that moment on, a complete foreigner, a worthy successor to Engineer Werfell. I would no longer go around with my school friends and I would never again return to the church. Furthermore, I would begin to study, to prepare myself to go to the university.
    The sending of the letter was followed by a period riven by doubt. One day I’d be certain that a reply could not be long in coming, the next I’d think such a possibility ridiculous and grow angry with myself for cherishing such hopes.
    That state of uncertainty ended one Friday, when my father came running into the room where I was reading and showed me a cream-colored envelope.
    “Maria Vockel!” I shouted, getting up from my chair.
    “Maria Vockel, 2 Johamesholfstrasse, Hamburg,” replied my father, reading out the sender’s address.
    A shiver ran down my spine. It seemed