by Jaume Cabré
‘No. Until he shows signs of life don’t put the vegetables on the stove.’
And Little Lola would head towards the kitchen, grumbling I’d show that guy what for, the whole house at the mercy of his loupe. And, if Adrià were near that guy, I would hear him reading:
A un vassalh aragones. / Be sabetz lo vassalh qui es, / El a nom. N’Amfos de Barbastre. / Ar arujatz, senher, cal desastre / Li avenc per sa gilozia.
‘What is it?’
‘La reprensió dels gelosos. A short novel.’
‘Is it Old Catalan?’
‘No. Occitan.’
‘They sound similar.’
‘Very much so.’
‘What does gelós mean?’
‘It was written by Ramon Vidal de Besalú. Thirteenth century.’
‘Wow, that’s old. What does gelós mean?’
‘Folio 132 of the Provençal songbook from Karlsruhe. There is another one in the National Library of Paris. This is mine. It’s yours.’
Adrià understood that as an invitation and extended his hand. Father smacked my hand back and it really, really hurt. He didn’t even bother to say you’re always touching everything. He went over the lines with his loupe and said life brings me such joy, these days.
A Japanese dagger for female suicide, summed up Adrià. And he continued his journey to the ceramic pots. He left the engravings and manuscripts for last, because they inspired such reverence in him.
‘Let’s see when you’ll start helping us, we’ve a lot of work.’
Adrià looked about the deserted shop and smiled politely at Cecília. ‘When Father lets me,’ he said.
She was going to say something, but she thought better of it and just stood with her mouth open for a few moments. Then her eyes gleamed and she said, come on, give me a kiss.
And I had to kiss her because it wasn’t the time or the place to make a scene. The year before I had been deeply in love with her, but now the kissing stuff was starting to irk me. Even thought I was still very young, I had already begun the phase of serious kiss aversion, as if I were twelve or thirteen; I had always been precocious in the non-essential subjects. I must have been eight or nine then, and that anti-kissing fever lasted until … well, you already know until when. Or perhaps you don’t know yet. By the way, what did that bit about ‘I’ve remade my life’ that you said to the encyclopaedia salesman mean?
For a few moments Adrià and Cecília watched the people who passed on the street without even glancing at the window display.
‘There’s always work,’ said Cecília, who had read my thoughts. ‘Tomorrow we are emptying a flat with a library: it’s going to be pandemonium.’
She went back to her bronze. The scent of the Netol metal cleaner had gone to Adrià’s head and he decided to get some distance. Why did they commit suicide, those Japanese women, he thought.
Now it seems that I was only there a few times, poking around the shop. Poking around is a figure of speech. I mostly felt bad about not being able to touch anything in the corner with musical instruments. Once, when I was older, I tried a violin, but when I glanced back I hit upon Mr Berenguer’s silent gaze and I swear I was frightened. I never tried that again. I remember, over time, besides the flugelhorns, tubas and trumpets, at least a dozen violins, six cellos, two violas and three spinets, plus the Ming dynasty gong, an Ethiopian drum and some sort of immense, immobile snake that didn’t give off any sound, which I later found out was called a serpent. I’m sure they must have sold and bought some, because the instruments would change but I remember that being the usual amount in the shop. And for a while some violinists from the Liceu would come in to make deals – usually unsuccessfully – to acquire some of those instruments. Father didn’t want musicians, who are always short on cash, as clients; I want collectors: those who want the object so badly that if they can’t buy it, they steal it; those are my clients.
‘Why?’
‘Because they pay the price I tell them and they leave contented. And some day they return, with their tongues hanging out, because they want more.’
Father knew a lot.
‘Musicians want an instrument to play it. When they have it, they use it. The collector doesn’t own it to play it: he might have ten instruments and just run his hand over them. Or his eyes. And he’s happy. The collector doesn’t play a note: he takes note.’
Father was very intelligent.
‘A musician collector? That would be a windfall; but I don’t know any.’
And then, in confidence, Adrià told Father that Herr Romeu was more boring than a Sunday afternoon and he looked at me in that way where his eyes went right through me and which, at sixty years old, still makes me anxious.
‘What did you say?’
‘That Herr Romeu …’
‘No: more boring than what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘Than a Sunday afternoon.’
‘Very good.’
Father was always right. His silence made it seem as if he were putting my words into his pocket, for his collection. Once they were tucked away carefully, he returned to the conversation.
‘Why is he boring?’
‘All day long he makes me study declinations and endings that I already know by heart and makes me say this cheese is very good; where did you buy it? Or I live in Hannover and my name is Kurt. And where do you live? Do you like Berlin?’
‘And what would you like to be able to say?’
‘I don’t know. I want to read some amusing story. I want to read Karl May in German.’
‘Very well: I think you’re right.’
I repeat: very well: I think you’re right. And I’ll take it even further: that was the only time in my life where he said I was right. If I were a fetishist, I would have framed the sentence, along with the time and date of its occurrence. And I would have made a black and white photo of it.
The next day I didn’t have class because Herr Romeu had been fired. Adrià felt very important, as if people’s fates were in his hands. It was a glorious Tuesday. That time I was glad that Father took a hard line with everyone. I must have been nine or ten, but I had a very highly developed sense of dignity. Or, better put, sense of mortification. Especially now that I look back, Adrià Ardèvol realised that not even when he was little had he ever been a little boy. He was caught up in every possible precociousness, the way others catch colds and infections. I even feel sorry for him. And that without knowing the details that I can now cobble together, such as that Father – after having opened the shop under very precarious circumstances, with Cecília who was learning to do her hair up very prettily – he received a visit from a customer who said he wanted to talk to him about some matter and Father had him enter the office and the stranger told him Mr Ardèvol, I haven’t come here to buy anything, and Father looked him in the eye and grew alarmed.
‘And would you mind telling me why you did come?’
‘To tell you that your life is in danger.’
‘Is that so?’ A smile from Father. A slightly peeved smile.
‘Yes.’
‘Would you mind telling me why?’
‘For example, because Doctor Montells has been released from prison.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘And he has told us things.’
‘And who are ‘us’?’
‘Let’s just say that we are very angry with you because you denounced him as pro-Catalan and communist.’
‘Me?’
‘You.’
‘I’m no grass. Anything else I can help you with?’ he said, getting up.
The visitor did not rise from his chair. He made himself even more comfortable, rolling a cigarette with unusual skill. And then he lit it.
‘No one smokes here.’
‘I do.’ He pointed to the hand with the cigarette. ‘And we know that you denounced three other people. They all send greetings, from prison or
from their homes. From now on, be very careful with corners: they are dangerous.’
He put out the cigarette on the wooden tabletop as if it were a vast ashtray, exhaled the smoke into Mr Ardèvol’s face, got up and left the office. Fèlix Ardèvol watched a part of the tabletop sizzle without doing anything to impede it. As if it were his penitence.
That evening, at home, perhaps to rid himself of those bad feelings, Father had me come into his study and to reward me, to reward me especially for making demands on my teachers, that’s what my son has to do, he showed me a folded piece of parchment, written on both sides, which was the founding charter of the Sant Pere del Burgal monastery, and he said look, Son (I wished he’d added, after the look, Son, a ‘in whom I have placed all my hopes’, now that we’d established a close alliance), this document was written more than a thousand years ago and now we are holding it in our hands … Hey, hey, hold your horses, I’ll hold it. Isn’t it lovely? It’s from when the monastery was founded.’
‘Where is it?’
‘In Pallars. You know the Urgell in the dining room?’
‘That monastery is Santa Maria de Gerri.’
‘Yes, yes. Burgal is even further up. Some twenty kilometres more towards the cold.’ About the parchment: ‘Sant Pere del Burgal’s founding charter. The Abbot Deligat asked Count Ramon de Tolosa for a precept of immunity for that monastery, which was tiny but survived for hundreds of years. It thrills me to think that I hold so much history in my hands.’
And I listened to what my father was telling me and it wasn’t very hard at all for me to imagine that he was thinking the day was too luminous, too springlike to be Christmas. They had just buried the Right Reverend Father Prior Dom Josep de Sant Bartomeu in the modest, scant cemetery at Sant Pere where the life that burst forth in springtime from beneath the tender, damp grass into a thousand colourful buds was now held hostage by the ice. They had just buried the father prior and with him all possibility of the monastery keeping its doors open. Sant Pere del Burgal, before, when it still snowed abundantly, was an isolated, independent abbey; since the remote times of Abbot Deligat, it had undergone various transformations including moments of prosperity, with some thirty monks contemplating the magnificent panorama created each day by the waters of the Noguera River, with the Poses forest in the background, praising the Lord and giving thanks for his works and cursing the Devil for the cold that devastated their bodies and made the entire community’s souls shrink. Sant Pere del Burgal had also gone through moments of hardship, without wheat for the mill, with barely six or seven old, sick monks to do the same tasks a monk always does from when he joins the monastery until he is transferred to its cemetery, as they’d done that day with the father prior. But now there was only one survivor whose memory went back that far.
There was a brief, feeble prayer for the dead, a rushed and dismayed benediction over the humble box. Then the improvised officiant, Brother Julià de Sau, gave the signal to the five peasants from Escaló who’d climbed up to help the monastery with that mournful event. There were no signs yet of the brothers who were to come from the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey to confirm the monastery’s closing. They would arrive too late, as they always did when they were needed.
Brother Julià de Sau entered the small monastery of Sant Pere. He went into the church. With tears in his eyes, he used the hammer and chisel to make a hole in the stone of the high altar and pull out the tiny wooden lipsanotheca that held the saints’ relics. He was overcome with dread because for the first time in his life he was alone. Alone. No other brothers. His footsteps echoed in the narrow corridor. He glanced at the tiny refectory. One of the benches was up against the wall, and had damaged the dirty plaster. He didn’t bother to move it. A tear fell from his eye and he headed towards his cell. From there he contemplated the beloved landscape he knew like the back of his hand, tree by tree. Above his cot, the Sacred Chest that held the monastery’s founding charter and that now would also hold the lipsanotheca containing the relics of unknown saints that had been with them for centuries of daily prayers and masses. And the community’s chalice and paten. And the only two keys in Sant Pere del Burgal: one to the small church and one to the monastic area. So many years of canticles to the Lord reduced to a sturdy savin wood box that would become, from that moment on, the only testimony to the history of a closed monastery. On one end of his straw mattress lay the handkerchief to make a bundle with two pieces of clothing, some sort of rudimentary scarf and the book of hours. And the little bag with the fir cones and maple seed pods that reminded him of the other, old life he didn’t miss much, when he was called Friar Miquel and he taught in the Dominican order; when, at the palace of His Excellency, the wife of the Wall-eyed Man of Salt stopped him near the kitchens and said here, Friar Miquel, pine and fir cones and maple seeds.
‘And what would I want them for?’
‘I have nothing more to offer you.’
‘And why would you need to offer me anything?’ said Friar Miquel impatiently.
The woman lowered her head and said in an almost inaudible whisper, His Excellency raped me and wants to kill me so my husband doesn’t find out, because then he would kill me.
Stunned, Friar Miquel had to go into the hallway and sit down on the boxwood bench.
‘What do you say?’ asked the woman, who had followed him and stood before him.
The woman didn’t add anything more because she’d already said it all.
‘I don’t believe you, you despicable liar. What you want is …’
‘When I’ve hung myself from a rotten beam will you believe me then?’ Now she looked at him with frightening eyes.
‘But child …’
‘I want you to hear my confession because I am going to kill myself.’
‘I’m not a priest.’
‘But you can … I have no choice but to die. And since it’s not my fault I think that God will forgive me. Isn’t that right, Friar Miquel?’
‘Suicide is a sin. Run away from here. Far away!’
‘Where can I go, a woman alone?’
Friar Miquel would have liked to be far away, where the world ends, despite the dangers lurking at the wild limits of the universe.
In his cell at Sant Pere del Burgal, Brother Julià looked at his outstretched hand that held the seeds he’d been given by that desperate woman whom he hadn’t known how to console. The next day they found her hanging from a rotten beam in the large hayloft. She swung by the rosary of the fifteen mysteries that hung around the waist of His Excellency’s habit, which had been lost two days earlier. By order of His Excellency, the suicide victim was denied burial on sacred ground and the Wall-eyed Man of Salt was expelled from the palace for having allowed his wife to commit an act that cried out to heaven. It was the Wall-eyed Man of Salt himself who’d found her that morning, and he’d tried to break the rosary in the absurd hope that she was still breathing. When Friar Miquel found out, he cried bitterly and prayed, despite his superior’s orders, for the salvation of that desperate woman’s soul. He swore before God that he would never lose those seed pods and pine cones that reminded him of his cowardly silence. He looked at them again, twenty years later, in his open hand, now that life had thrown him a curve and he would become a monk at Santa Maria de Gerri. He put the seeds in the pocket of his Benedictine habit. He looked out the window. Perhaps they were already quite close, but he could no longer make out movements in the distance. He tied the handkerchief into an awkward bundle. That night no monk would sleep at the monastery of Burgal.
Holding tight to the Sacred Chest, he went into each and every one of the cells, Friar Marcel’s, Friar Martí’s, Friar Adrià’s, Father Ramon’s, Father Basili’s, Father Josep de Sant Bartomeu’s, and his humble cell, at the end of the narrow corridor, the cell that was closest to the tiny cloister and closest to the monastery’s door, which he had been entrusted, if that’s the word, to watch over since his arrival. Then he approached the reservoir, the modest chapterh
ouse, the kitchen and once again the refectory where the bench was still eating away at the wall’s plaster. Then he went out into the cloister and he couldn’t keep his grief from welling up, a burst of deep sobbing, because he didn’t know how to accept that as the will of God. To calm himself down, to bid farewell forever to so many years of Benedictine life, he went into the monastic chapel. He got down on his knees before the altar, clinging to the Sacred Chest. For the last time in his life he looked at the paintings in the apse. The prophets and the archangels. Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Saint John and the other apostles and the Mother of God showing her devotion, along with the archangels, to severe Christ Pantocrator. And he felt guilty, guilty of the extinction of the little monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal. And with his free hand he beat on his chest and said confiteor, Domine. Confiteor, mea culpa. He put the Sacred Chest down on the floor and he knelt until he could kiss the ground that so many generations of monks had walked upon in their praise of the Almighty God who observed him impassively.
He stood, picked up the Sacred Chest again, looked at the holy paintings one last time and walked backwards to the door. Once he was outside the small church, he closed the two door leaves with a brisk motion, gave the key its final turn in the lock and placed it inside the Sacred Chest. Those beloved paintings wouldn’t be seen again by human eyes until Jachiam of Pardàc opened the church up, almost three hundred years later, by simply pushing on a rotten worm-eaten door leaf with his flat hand.
And then Brother Julià de Sau thought of the day that his feet – eager and weary, still filled with fear – had reached the door of Sant Pere and he’d knocked with a closed fist. Fifteen monks then lived intra muros monasterii. My God, Glorious Lord, how he missed those days – despite not having any right to feel nostalgia for a time he hadn’t experienced – when there was a job for each monk and a monk for each job. When he knocked on that door begging for admission, it had been years since he had left security behind and entered deep into the realm of fear, which is every fugitive’s constant companion. And even more so when he suspects that he might be making a mistake, because Jesus speaks to us of love and kindness and I didn’t fulfil his commandment. But he did, yes, because Father Nicolau Eimeric, the Inquisitor General, was his superior and it was all carried out in God’s name and for the good of the Church and the true faith, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t because Jesus was so far from me; and who are you, Friar Miquel, silly lay friar, to ask where Jesus is? Our Lord God lies in blind, unconditional obedience. God is with me, Friar Miquel. And he who is not with me is against me. Look me in the eyes when I speak to you! He who is not with me is against me. And Friar Miquel chose to flee, he preferred uncertainty and perhaps hell to salvation with a bad conscience. And that was why he fled, taking off his Dominican habit and entering the kingdom of fear, and he travelled to the Holy Land searching for forgiveness for all his sins as if forgiveness were possible in this world or the next. If they had been sins. Dressed as a pilgrim he had seen much misfortune, he had dragged himself along compelled by regret, he had made promises that were difficult to keep, but he wasn’t at peace because if you disobey the voice of salvation your soul will never find rest.
