by Jaume Cabré
‘What?’ With the sheriff and the brown horse in one hand, I pretended I’d had my head in the clouds.
‘You need to try on your school smock. How is it possible that you didn’t hear me calling you?’
‘Smock?’
‘Mrs Angeleta let down the sleeves.’ And with an authoritative gesture, ‘Come on!’
In the sewing room, Mrs Angeleta, with a pin between her lips, looked at the hang of the new sleeves with a professional air.
‘You grow too fast, lad.’
Mother had gone to say goodbye to Mr Berenguer and Little Lola went into the ironing room to look for clean shirts while I put on the smock without sleeves, as I had done so many other times throughout my childhood.
‘And you wear out the elbows too fast,’ hammered home Mrs Angeleta, who was already a thousand years old, give or take.
The door to the flat closed. Father’s footsteps headed off towards his study and Mrs Angeleta shook her snow-covered head.
‘You have a lot of visitors lately.’
Little Lola was silent and acted as if she hadn’t heard. Mrs Angeleta, as she pinned the sleeve to the smock, went on anyway.
‘Sometimes I hear shouts.’
Little Lola grabbed the shirts and said nothing. Mrs Angeleta continued to prod. ‘Lord knows what you talk about …’
‘About ffucking life,’ I said without thinking.
Little Lola’s shirts fell to the floor, Mrs Angeleta pricked my arm and Black Eagle turned and surveyed the parched horizon with his eyes almost closed. He noticed the cloud of dust before anyone else. Even before Swift Rabbit.
‘Three riders are approaching,’ he said. No one made any comment. That cave-like room offered some respite from the harsh summer heat; but no one, no squaw, no child, no one had the energy to care about visitors or their intentions. Black Eagle made an imperceptible motion with his eyes. Three warriors started to walk towards their horses. He followed them closely while keeping one eye on the dust cloud. They were coming straight to the cave, without the slightest subterfuge. Like a bird distracting a predator and diverting it away from its nest with various techniques, he and his three men shifted to the west to distract the visitors. The two groups met close to the five holm oaks; the visitors were three white men, one with very blond hair and the other two with dark skin. One of them, the one with the theatrical moustache, nimbly got down from his saddle with his hands away from his body and smiled.
‘You are Black Eagle,’ he declared, keeping his hands away from his body in a sign of submission.
The great Arapaho chief of the Lands to the South of Yellow Fish’s Shore of the Washita gave an imperceptible nod from up on his horse, without moving a hair, and then he asked whom he had the honour of receiving, and the man with the black moustache smiled again, made a jocular half bow and said I’m Sheriff Carson, from Rockland, a two-day ride from your lands.
‘I know where you established your town, Rockland,’ the legendary chief responded curtly. ‘In Pawnee territory.’ And he spat on the ground to show his contempt.
‘These are my deputies,’ – not entirely sure who the gob of spit was directed at. ‘We are looking for a criminal on the lam.’ And he, in turn, spat and found it wasn’t half bad.
‘What has he done to be treated as a criminal?’ The Arapaho chief.
‘Do you know him? Have you seen him?’
‘I asked you what he did to be treated as a criminal.’
‘He killed a mare.’
‘And dishonoured two women,’ added the blond.
‘Yes, of course, that too,’ accepted Sheriff Carson.
‘And why are you looking for him here?’
‘He’s an Arapaho.’
‘My people extend several days toward the west, toward the east and toward the cold and the heat. Why have you come to this spot?’
‘You know who he is. We want you to deliver him to justice.’
‘You are mistaken, Sheriff Carson. Your murderer is not an Arapaho.’
‘Oh, no? And how do you know that?’
‘An Arapaho would never kill a mare.’
Then the light turned on and Little Lola waved him off with one hand, ordering him out of the larder. In front of Adrià, Mother, with war paint on her face, without looking at him, without spitting on the ground, said Lola, have him wash his mouth out well. With soap and water. And if necessary, add a few drops of bleach.
Black Eagle withstood the torture bravely, without a single groan. When Little Lola had finished, as he dried himself with a towel, he looked her in the eyes and said Little Lola, do you know what dishonouring a woman means exactly?
When I was seven or eight years old I made some decisions about my life. One was very wise: leaving my education in my mother’s hands. But it seems that things didn’t go that way. And I found out because, that night, I wanted to know how my father would react to my slip and so I set up my espionage device in the dining room. It wasn’t particularly complicated because my room shared a partition wall with the dining room. Officially, I had gone to sleep early, so my father, when he came home, wouldn’t find me awake. It was the best way to save myself the sermon that would have been filled with pitfalls because if I told him, in self-defence, that the whole ffucking life thing was something I’d heard him say, then the topic of the conversation would have shifted from you’ve got a very dirty mouth that I’ll now scrub with Lagarto soap to how the fuck do you know I said that about ffucking life, you bald-faced liar? Huh? Huh? Were you spying on me? And there was no way I was going to reveal my espionage cards, because over time, without even really trying, I was the only one in the house who controlled every corner, every conversation, the arguments and the inexplicable weeping, like that week Little Lola spent crying. When she emerged from her room, she had very skilfully hidden her pain, which much have been immense. It was years before I knew why she was crying, but at the time I learned that there was pain that could last a week and life scared me a little bit.
So I was able to listen in on the conversation between my parents by putting my ear to the bottom of a glass placed against the partition wall. Since Father’s voice was weary, Mother summed up the matter by saying that I was very trying. Father didn’t want to know the details and said it’s already been decided.
‘What’s been decided?’ Mother’s frightened voice.
‘I’ve enrolled him at the Jesuit school on Casp Street.’
‘But, Fèlix … If …’
That day I learned that Father was the only one in charge. And I mentally made note that I had to look up what Jesuits were in the Britannica. Father held Mother’s gaze in silence and she made up her mind to press on, ‘Why the Jesuits? You aren’t a believer and …’
‘Quality education. We have to be efficient; we only have one child and we can’t make a cock-up of it.’
Let’s see: yes, they only had one child. Or no; but that wasn’t the point anyway. So Father brought up the idea of the languages, which I’ll admit I liked.
‘What did you say?’
‘Ten languages.’
‘Our son isn’t a monster.’
‘But he can learn them.’
‘And why ten?’
‘Because Pater Levinski at the Gregorian knew nine. Our son has to do him one better.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he called me inept in front of the other students. Inept because my Aramaic was not progressing after an entire year with Faluba.’
‘Don’t make jokes: we are talking about our son’s education.’
‘I’m not joking: I am talking about my son’s education.’
I know that it bothered my mother a lot that my father referred to me as his son in front of her. But Mother was thinking of other things because she started to say that she didn’t want to turn me into a monster; and, with a skill I didn’t know she had in her, she said do you hear me? I don’t want my son to end up being a carnival monster who has to do Pater Luwowski on
e better.
‘Levinski.’
‘Levinski the monster.’
‘A great theologian and Biblicist. A monster of erudition.’
‘No: we have to discuss it calmly.’
I didn’t understand that. That was exactly what they were doing: discussing my future calmly. And I was pleased because ffucking life hadn’t come up at all.
‘Catalan, Spanish, French, German, Italian, English, Latin, Greek, Aramaic, and Russian.’
‘What are you listing?’
‘The ten languages he has to know. He already knows the first three.’
‘No, he just makes up the French.’
‘But he does a pretty good job, he makes himself understood. My son can do anything he sets out to. And he has a particular talent for languages. He will learn ten.’
‘He also needs time to play.’
‘He’s already big. But when it’s time to go to university he has to know them.’ And with a weary sigh, ‘We’ll talk about it some other time, OK?’
‘He’s seven years old, for the love of God!’
‘I’m not demanding he learn Aramaic right now.’ He drummed his fingers on the table with a conclusive gesture, ‘He’ll start with German.’
I liked that too, because I could almost figure out the Britannica on my own with a dictionary by my side, no problem: but German, on the other hand, I found pretty opaque. I was very excited about the world of declinations, the world of languages that change their word endings according to their function in the sentence. I didn’t exactly put it that way, but almost: I was very pedantic.
‘No, Fèlix. We can’t make that mistake.’
I heard the small sound of someone spitting curtly.
‘Yes?’
‘What is Aramaic?’ asked Sheriff Carson in a deep voice.
‘I don’t really know: we’ll have to research it.’
I was a strange kid; I can admit that. I see myself now remembering how I listened to what would be my future, clinging to Sheriff Carson and the brave Arapaho chief and trying not to give myself away, and I think I wasn’t strange, I was very strange.
‘It isn’t a mistake. The first day of school a teacher I’ve already got my eye on will come to teach him German.’
‘No.’
‘His name is Romeu and he’s a very bright lad.’
That irked me. A teacher at home? My house was my house and I was the one who knew everything about what happened inside it: I didn’t want awkward witnesses. No, I didn’t like that Romeu chap, poking his nose around my house, saying oh, how lovely, a personal library at seven years old and that kind of crap grownups say when they come to the house. No way.
‘And he will study three majors.’
‘What?’
‘Law and History.’ Silence. ‘And a third, which he can choose. But definitely Law, which is most useful for manoeuvring in this dog-eat-dog world.’
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. My foot began to move of its own accord, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. I hated law. You don’t know how much I hated it. Without knowing exactly what it was, I hated it to death.
‘Je n’en doute pas,’ disait ma mère. ‘Mais est-ce qu’il est un bon pédagogue, le tel Gomeu?’
‘Bien sûr, j’ai reçu des informations confidentielles qui montrent qu’il est un individu parfaitement capable en langue allemagne. Allemande? Tedesque? Et en la pédagogie de cette langue. Je crois que …’
I was already starting to calm down. My foot stopped moving in that out of control way and I heard Mother get up and say what about the violin? Will he have to give it up?
‘No. But it will be secondary.’
‘I don’t agree.’
‘Good night, dear,’ said Father as he opened the newspaper and paged through it because that was what he always did at that time of the day.
So I was changing schools. What a drag. And how scary. Luckily Sheriff Carson and Black Eagle would go with me. The violin will be secondary? And why Aramaic so much later? That night it took me a while to get off to sleep.
I’m sure I’m mixing things up. I don’t know if I was seven or eight or nine years old. But I had a gift for languages and my parents had realised that and wanted to make the most of it. I had started French because I spent a summer in Perpignan at Aunt Aurora’s house and there, as soon as they got a little flustered, they’d switch from their guttural Catalan to French; and that’s why when I speak French I add the hint of a Midi accent I’ve maintained my whole life with some pride. I don’t remember how old I was. German came later; English I don’t really recall. Later, I think. It’s not that I wanted to learn them. It was that they learned me.
Now that I’m thinking about it in order to tell you, I see my childhood as one long and very boring Sunday afternoon, wandering aimlessly, looking for a way to slip off into the study, thinking that it would be more fun if I had a sibling, thinking that the point would come when reading was boring because I was already up to my eyeballs in Enid Blyton, thinking that the next day I had school, and that was worse. Not because I was afraid of school or the teachers and parents, but because of the children. It was the children at school that frightened me, because they looked at me like I was some kind of a freak.
‘Little Lola.’
‘What?’
‘What can I do?’
Little Lola stopped drying her hands or applying lipstick and looked at me.
‘Can I go with you?’ Adrià, with a hopeful look.
‘No, no, you’d be bored!’
‘I’m bored here.’
‘Turn on the radio.’
‘It’s a yawn.’
Then Little Lola grabbed her coat and left the room that always smelled of Little Lola and, in a whisper, so no one would hear it, she told me to ask Mother to take me to the cinema. And louder she said goodbye, see you later; she opened the door to the street, winked at me and left; yeah, she could have fun on Sunday afternoons, who knows how, but I was left condemned to wander the flat like a lost soul.
‘Mother.’
‘What.’
‘No, nothing.’
Mother looked up from her magazine, finished the last sip of her coffee, and glanced at me over it.
‘Tell me, Son.’
I was afraid to ask her to take me to the cinema. Very afraid and I still don’t know why. My parents were too serious.
‘I’m bored.’
‘Read. If you’d like, we can study French.’
‘Let’s go to Tibidabo.’
‘Oh, you should have said that this morning.’
We never went there, to Tibidabo, not any morning nor any Sunday afternoon. I had to go there in my imagination, when my friends told me what Tibidabo was like, that it was filled with mechanical devices, mysterious automatons and lookout points and dodgem cars and … I didn’t know what exactly. But it was a place where parents took their children. My parents didn’t take me to the zoo or to stroll along the breakwater. They were too staid. And they didn’t love me. I think. Deep down I still wonder why they had me.
‘Well, I want to go to Tibidabo!’
‘What is all this shouting?’ complained Father from his study. ‘Don’t make me punish you!’
‘I don’t want to study my French!’
‘I said don’t make me punish you!’
Black Eagle thought that it was all very unfair and he let me and Sheriff Carson know how he felt. And to keep from getting utterly bored, and especially to keep from getting punished, well, I started in on my arpeggio exercises on the violin, which had the advantage of being difficult and so it was hard to get them to come out sounding good. I was terrible at the violin until I met Bernat. I abandoned the exercise halfway through.
‘Father, can I touch the Storioni?’
Father lifted his head. He was, as always, looking through the magnifying lamp at some very odd piece of paper.
‘No,’ he said. And pointing at something on top of the table, ‘Look how bea
utiful.’
It was a very old manuscript with a brief text in an alphabet I didn’t recognise.’
‘What is it?’
‘A fragment of the gospel of Mark.’
‘But what language is it in?’
‘Aramaic.’
Did you hear that, Black Eagle? Aramaic! Aramaic is a very ancient language, a language of papyrus and parchment scrolls.
‘Can I learn it?’
‘When the time is right.’ He said it with satisfaction; that was very clear because, since I generally did things well, he could brag of having a clever son. Wanting to take advantage of his satisfaction, ‘Can I play the Storioni?’
Fèlix Ardèvol looked at him in silence. He moved aside the magnifying lamp. Adrià tapped a foot on the floor. ‘Just once. Come on, Father …’
Father’s expression when he is angry is scary. Adrià held it for just a few seconds. He had to lower his eyes.
‘Don’t you understand the word no? Niet, nein, no, ez, non, ei, nem. Sound familiar?’
‘Ei and nem?’
‘Finnish and Hungarian.’
When Adrià left the study, he turned and angrily proffered a terrible threat.
‘Well, then I won’t study Aramaic.’
‘You will do what I tell you to do,’ warned Father with the coldness and calmness of one who knows that yes, he will always do what he says. And he returns to his manuscript, to his Aramaic, to his magnifying glass.
That day Adrià decided to lead a double life. He already had secret hiding places, but he decided to expand his clandestine world. He proposed a grand goal for himself: working out the combination of the safe and, when Father wasn’t at home, studying with the Storioni: no one would notice. And putting it back in its case and into the safe in time to erase all trace of the crime. He went to study his arpeggios so no one would realise and he didn’t say anything to either the Sheriff or the Arapaho chief, who were napping on the bedside table.
4
I always remembered Father as an old man. Mother, on the other hand, was just Mother. It’s a shame she didn’t love me. All that Adrià knew was that Grandfather Adrià raised her like men used to do when they became widowers very young and with a baby in their arms, looking from side to side to see if someone will offer them a manual for fitting the child into their life. Grandmother Vicenta died very young, when Mother was six. She had a vague recollection of her; I merely had the memory of the only two photos ever taken of her: her wedding shot, in the Caria Studio, in which they were both very young and attractive, but too dolled up for the occasion; and another of Grandmother with Mother in her arms and a broken smile, as if she knew she wouldn’t see her First Communion, wondering why is it my lot to die so young and be just a sepia photo for my grandson, who it seems is a child prodigy but whom I will never meet. Mother grew up alone. No one ever took her to Tibidabo and perhaps that’s why it never occurred to her that I was dying to know what the animated automatons were like, the ones that I’d heard moved magically and looked like people once you put a coin into them.
