Obabakoak Read Online Free PDF Page B

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