Free Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga

without even a good-bye, he had slammed the door and was off down the street.
    “He takes it so seriously!” The schoolmistress sighed, smiling.
    To get from the gray and white house to the school he had to take one hundred and thirty steps, then forty, then eighty, that is, he had to take a total—if my sums are correct—of two hundred and fifty steps. The servant boy made some calculations and worked out that if he hurried and covered three steps in one, it would take him only half a minute to reach the stove, instead of the minute and a half it usually took him. Then, forgetting all about arithmetic, he ran off toward the school.
    But his calculations did not come out quite as he expected, for when he’d covered only half the distance, he tripped over a tool left by the workers repairing the drains in Albania and, as ill luck would have it, in the sudden movement he made to keep his balance and not fall over, the key slipped out of his hand and fell into the bottom of a trench.
    “Don’t worry, son, it won’t fall any farther,” said a fat man who was working in the trench.
    “Could you give me the key, please?” Manuel asked, his face serious.
    “Something tells me you’re going to have to get it yourself. I do hate getting my hands dirty.”
    The fat man scooped up the key on his spade and sent it flying into one of the puddles in the trench. He smiled mockingly.
    “Give me the key, you pig!”
    The servant boy disliked practical jokers and had even less time for good-for-nothings always on the lookout for an excuse to stop work. They made the blood rush to his head.
    “Come down here and I’ll give it to you,” teased the fat man, still smiling.
    “Mind how you go, lad,” warned one of the other laborers working in the trench.
    The servant boy was very keen on wrestling and once, the most glorious day of his life, he’d been present at the bout in which the champion, Ochoa, had defeated every one of his opponents using his innovative back heel trip and ever since then, up in the mountains, with the animals and trees, Manuel’s one ambition had been to train himself and learn how to execute that move properly.
    “He’s too sure of himself, this one,” he thought, and a moment later the fat man was lying flat on his back in the trench. The other laborers laughed as Manuel ran off down the street with the key firmly grasped in his hand.
    “I did that almost as well as Ochoa himself,” he thought proudly, opening the door to the school.
    During the three years he’d spent up in the mountains as a shepherd, with only the animals for company, the servant boy had learned how to entertain himself and he felt at ease as soon as he entered the meeting room that served as a school. He designated that empty area the Great Space, where he and his dog, Moro—and no one else—could play at being what they were not. Had the schoolmistress ever seen the plays they put on there, she would never have thought that, in comparison with the rest of the pupils, Manuel was the most grown up. On the contrary, she would have thought him the most childish.
    His plays always took as their backdrop the lands of Asia and Africa, which the schoolmistress had drawn in sawdust, and in those plays Moro acted as his adjutant, that is, as the adjutant of Hannibal, the mighty king of Carthage, in Manuel’s opinion the only truly valiant man in the whole encyclopedia.
    That day he began the play thus: “Asia has turned traitor, Moro, and joined forces with the Romans. I have, therefore, decided to punish them. I’m going to burn down one of their cities.”
    Then, reading the names the schoolmistress had written on little flags placed on the map, he added:
    “Which city shall we burn down, Moro? Peking, Nanking, Chungking?”
    “I don’t mind which you choose, as long as it’s not Chungking. It would be a pity to destroy a city with such a funny-sounding name,” Moro informed him.
    “What about Peking?”
    “No, not