Free Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga Page A

Peking either, Hannibal. It’s such a nice name for a dog. I myself would like to have been called Peking, so I’m afraid…”
    “You refuse me everything today, Moro.”
    “How about those mountains to the left of China? Why don’t we burn them?”
    “I’ll have to think about it. Wait just a moment.”
    He had to confess that, since that mountainous region bore neither flag nor name, his adjutant’s suggestion was really very sensible. It was always easier to condemn complete strangers.
    Beneath his gaze the whole of China lay humbled at his feet: Peking, Nanking, Chungking, Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan; and in all of those places he saw hordes of tiny people raising supplicant eyes to him. “Don’t do it, Hannibal,” they said, “have pity and do not burn our cities. We will never again be the vassals of Rome. We swear it!”
    At last, picking up a few handfuls of sawdust and wrapping them in a piece of paper, he pronounced: “So be it, I will burn those mountains instead! For Carthage can never forgive!” Shortly afterward, a large section of the Himalayas was burning in the stove.
    “That’s a good blaze you’ve got going, Manuel!” said the schoolmistress as soon as she opened the door, raising her voice above the hubbub emerging from twenty-four (thirty-one minus seven, who had gone down with flu) childish Albanian throats. By then, he’d already sat down at his own desk, the one nearest to the stove.
    “It’s nothing special. At least it didn’t smoke, that’s the main thing,” he replied, with a gesture dismissing the importance of his achievement. His tone had grown serious again.
    The young servant spent the morning looking through the stove’s inspection window, keeping an eye on the fire. Because, needless to say, the fire was always ready to surprise you and the worst thing you could do was to trust it. One minute it could be blazing away merrily and the next have burned so low it looked as if it might die down altogether. If you didn’t watch it all the time, the fire could easily just burn itself out.
    “Turn to the arithmetic section in your encyclopedias,” the schoolmistress said, having left the younger ones practicing their handwriting.
    The servant pulled a face. He disliked arithmetic anyway and felt a special hatred for the problems they were made to do at the end of each lesson; he found them totally incomprehensible.
    But the schoolmistress was already reading out the problem they had to solve that day and he tried to look as if he were really paying attention.
    “A man had six horses. He sold three of them for 1,000 pesetas each. He sold another two for 1,300 pesetas each. The last horse, on the other hand, broke a leg and had to be slaughtered. Question: Bearing in mind that he received a total of 7,300 pesetas, how much money did the butcher give him for the sixth horse?”
    “How did the horse come to break its leg in the first place?” wondered the servant boy. That stupid encyclopedia always left out the most important bits.
    Then he heard a voice ask: “How much money did the butcher give him, Manuel?” The blood rushed to his face. He liked the fact that the schoolmistress said his name out loud in front of everyone but he didn’t like what that fact implied. Having to answer caused him intense embarrassment.
    “We don’t eat horse meat in these parts, Miss,” he blurted out. The pupils in the back row burst out laughing and the schoolmistress had to threaten them with the ruler to silence them.
    “Now come on, Manuel. How much money did he give him?” she asked again.
    “I don’t know. About seventy-five pesetas I should think!”
    “Two hundred pesetas!” shouted a girl with her hair in a braid.
    The schoolmistress nodded.
    “Did anyone else get that answer?”
    Everyone in the back row put their hands up. But the servant boy didn’t agree.
    “What do they know?” he declared to himself, looking at the others with scorn. “You try going