by Jaume Cabré
Vial, red as a tomato, was too enraged to be able to respond.
‘It’s better if we don’t go into details,’ he said just to say something.
Leclair looked at him with contempt.
‘Why not go into details? Physique? Height? People skills? Friendliness? Talent? Moral stature?’
‘This conversation is over, Tonton Jean.’
‘It will end when I say so. Intelligence? Culture? Wealth? Health?’
Leclair grabbed the violin and improvised a pizzicato. He examined it with respect. ‘The violin is very good, but I don’t give a damn, you understand me? I only want to be able to send you to prison.’
‘You’re a bad uncle.’
‘And you are a bastard who I’ve finally been able to unmask. Do you know what?’ He smiled exaggeratedly, bringing his face very close to his nephew’s. ‘I’ll keep the violin, but for the price La Guitte gives me.’
He pulled the little bell’s rope taut and the servant with the beak-like nose entered through the door to the back of the room.
‘Call the commissioner. He can come whenever he’s ready.’ To his nephew: ‘Have a seat, we’ll wait for Monsieur Béjart.’
They didn’t have a chance to sit down. Instead Guillaume-François Vial walked in front of the fireplace, grabbed the poker and bashed in his beloved tonton’s head. Jean-Marie Leclair, known as l’Aîne, was unable to say another word. He collapsed without even a groan, the poker stuck in his head. Splattered blood stained the violin’s wooden case. Vial, breathing heavily, wiped his clean hands on his uncle’s coat and said you don’t know how much I was looking forward to this moment, Tonton Jean. He looked around him, grabbed the violin, put it into the blood-spattered case and left the room through the balcony that led to the terrace. As he ran away, in the light of day, it occurred to him that he should make a not very friendly visit to La Guitte.
‘As far as I know,’ continued Signor Somethingorother, still standing in the middle of the street, ‘it is a violin that has never been played regularly: like the Stradivarius Messiah, do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘No,’ said Ardèvol, impatient.
‘I’m saying that that makes it even more valuable. The same year it was made, Guillaume-François Vial made off with it and its whereabouts have been unknown. Perhaps it has been played, but I have no record of it. And now we find it here. It is an instrument of incalculable value.’
‘That is what I wanted to hear, caro dottore.’
‘Is it really his first?’ asked Mr Berenguer, his interest piqued.
‘Yes.’
‘I would forget about it, Mr Ardèvol. That’s a lot of money.’
‘Is it worth it?’ asked Fèlix Ardèvol, looking at Somethingorother.
‘I would pay it without hesitating. If you have the money. It has an incredibly lovely sound.’
‘I don’t give a damn about its sound.’
‘And exceptional symbolic value.’
‘That does matter to me.’
‘And we are returning it right now to its owner.’
‘But he gave it to me! I swear it, Papa!’
Mr Plensa put on his coat, shifted his eyes imperceptibly towards his wife, picked up the case and, with a forceful nod, ordered Bernat to follow him.
The silent funereal retinue that transported the scrawny coffin was presided over by Bernat’s black thoughts, as he cursed the moment when he’d flaunted the violin in front of his mother and showed her an authentic Storioni, and the dirty grass went straight to his father as soon as he arrived and said Joan, look what the boy has. And Mr Plensa looked at it; he examined it; and after a few seconds of silence he said blast it, where did you get this violin?
‘It has a beautiful sound, Papa.’
‘Yes, but I’m asking you where you got it.’
‘Joan, please!’
‘Come now, Bernat. This is no joking matter.’ Impatiently, ‘Where did you get it from.’
‘Nowhere; I mean they gave it to me. Its owner gave it to me.’
‘And who is this idiotic owner?’
‘Adrià Ardèvol.’
‘This violin belongs to the Ardèvols?’
Silence: his mother and father exchanged a quick glance. His father sighed, picked up the violin, put it into its case and said we are going to return it to its owner right now.
13
I was the one who opened the door for her. She was younger than my mother, very tall, with sweet eyes and lipstick. She gave me a friendly smile as soon as she saw me and I liked her right away. Well, more than liked her, exactly, I fell irresistibly and forever in love with her and was overcome with a desire to see her naked.
‘Are you Adrià?’
How did she know my name? And that accent was truly strange.
‘Who is it?’ Little Lola, from the depths of the flat.
‘I don’t know,’ I said and smiled at the apparition. She smiled at me and even winked, asking if my mother was home.
Little Lola came into the hall and, from the apparition’s reaction, I assumed she had taken her for my mother.
‘This is Little Lola,’ I warned.
‘Mrs Ardèvol?’ she said with the voice of an angel.
‘You’re Italian!’ I said.
‘Very good! They told me you’re a clever lad.’
‘Who told you?’
Mother had been in the shop waging war and organising things since the crack of dawn, but the apparition said she didn’t mind waiting as long as it took. Little Lola pointed brusquely to the bench and vanished. The angel sat down and looked at me, a very pretty golden cross glittering around her neck. She said come stai. And I answered bene with another charming smile, my violin case in my hand because I had class with Manlleu and he couldn’t abide by tardiness.
‘Ciao!’ I said timidly as I opened the door to the stairwell. And my angel, without moving from the bench, blew me a kiss, which rebounded against my heart and gave me a jolt. And her red lips soundlessly said ciao in such a way that I heard it perfectly inside my heart. I closed the door as gently as I could so that the miracle wouldn’t disappear.
‘Don’t drag your bow, child! You are reproducing negroid, epileptic rhythms, more suited to a wind instrument!’
‘What?’
‘Look, look, look!’
Professor Manlleu snatched the violin from him and did a wildly exaggerated portamento, something I had never done. And, with the violin in position, he said to me that is crap. You understand me? Insanity, dementia, filth and rubbish!
And boy did I miss Trullols, and I was only ten minutes into my third class with Master Manlleu. Later, surely in an attempt to impress him with his dazzling talent, he explained that when he was his age, uff, at your age: I was a child prodigy. At your age I played Max Bruch and I learned it all on my own.
And he snatched the violin out of his hands again and began with the soooooltiresolsiiila#faasooool. Tiresoltiiiietcetera, how lovely.
‘That is a concert and not these lousy studies you’ve been studying.’
‘Can I start with Max Bruch?’
‘How can you start with Bruch when you’re still not out of nappies, child?’ He gave him back the violin and he drew very close to him and shouted so he could hear him loud and clear: ‘Maybe, if you were me. But I’m one of a kind.’ In a brusque voice: ‘Exercise twenty-two. And don’t harbour any illusions, Ardèvol: Bruch was mediocre and just happened to get lucky.’ And he shook his head, pained by life: if only I could have devoted more time to composing …
Exercise twenty-two, dei portamenti, was designed to teach you how to do portamenti but Master Manlleu, when he heard the first portamento, was again shocked and again began to talk about his precocious genius and, this time, about the Bartók concerto that he knew backwards and forwards without the slightest hesitation at the age of fifteen.
‘You must know that the good interpreter has a special memory in addition to his normal memory that all
ows him retain all of the soloist’s notes and all of the orchestra’s. If you can’t do that, you’re no good; you should deliver ice or light streetlamps. And then don’t forget to put them out.’
So I opted to do the portamenti exercise without portamenti and that way we were able to keep the peace. And I would learn the portamenti at home. And Bruch was mediocre. In case I didn’t have that clear, I received the last three minutes of my third class with Master Manlleu in the hall of his house, standing, my scarf around my neck, while he ranted against gypsy violinists, who play in bars and night clubs and do such harm to the young folk because they incite them to do unnecessary and exaggerated portamenti. It quickly becomes obvious that they are only playing to impress women. Those portamenti are only admissible for poofs. Until next Friday, child.
‘Good night, Master Manlleu.’
‘And remember, as if it were burned onto your brain, everything I’ve told you and will be telling you in each class. Not everyone has the privilege of studying with me.’
At least I already knew that the concept of poofs was closely linked to the violin. But when I’d looked marica up it didn’t help at all because it wasn’t in the dictionary and my question remained. Bruch must have been a mediocre poof. I guess.
In that period, Adrià Ardèvol was a saintly person, with endless saintly patience, and that was why the classes with Master Manlleu didn’t seem as bad to him as they seem to me now when I describe them to you. I did my duty with him and I remember, minute by minute, the years I was under his yoke. And I particularly remember that after two or three sessions I began to turn a problem over in my mind, one that I’ve never been able to resolve: musical interpreters are required to be perfect. They can be miserable wretches, but their execution must be perfect. Like Master Manlleu, who seemed to have every possible defect but who played perfectly.
The problem was that listening to him and listening to Bernat I thought I could grasp a difference between Manlleu’s perfection and Bernat’s truth. And that made me a bit more interested in music. I don’t understand why Bernat isn’t satisfied with his talent and obsessively seeks out personal dissatisfaction, crashing up against self-confessed impotence, in book after book. We’ve both truly got a gift for finding dissatisfaction in life.
‘But you don’t make mistakes!’ Bernat told me, shocked, fifty years ago, when I explained my doubts to him.
‘But I need to know that I can make them.’ Perplexed silence. ‘Don’t you understand?’
And that’s why I stopped playing the violin. But that’s another story. As Bernat and I walked to school, I explained all the ins and outs of my classes with Manlleu. And we took forever to get to school because in the middle of Aragó Street, amid the smoke from the locomotive engines that blackened the facades, Bernat tried to imitate, without a violin, what Manlleu had told me to do. The people passing by looked at us, and later, at home, he would try it and that was how he became, for free, some sort of second disciple of Wednesdays and Fridays with the great Manlleu.
‘Thursday afternoon, you are both punished. This is the third time you’ve been late in fifteen days, young men.’ The beadle with the blond moustache who stood guard at the entrance smiled, pleased to have caught us.
‘But …’
‘No buts.’ Shaking the loathsome notebook and pulling a pencil out of his smock. ‘Name and class.’
And on Thursday afternoons in the Manlleu era, instead of being at home secretly rummaging through Father’s papers, may he rest in peace, instead of being at Bernat’s house, practising or having him over to my house to practise, we were forced to show up at the 2B classroom, where twelve or fifteen other scamps were purging their tardiness with a textbook open on their desks while Herr Oliveres or Mr Rodrigo watched over us with obvious boredom.
And when I got home, Mother interrogated me about my lessons with Manlleu and asked captious questions about the possibilities that I would very soon give a dazzling recital, you hear me, Adrià? with top-notch works, as it seems Manlleu had promised her.
‘Like which ones?’
‘The Kreutzer Sonata. Or Brahms,’ she said one day.
‘That’s impossible, Mother!’
‘Nothing’s impossible,’ she answered, as if she were Trullols saying never say never, Ardèvol. But even though it was almost the same piece of advice, it didn’t have any effect on me.
‘I don’t know how to play as well as you think I do, Mother.’
‘You will play perfectly.’
And, perfectly imitating Father’s skill for avoiding being contradicted, she left the room before I could tell her that I hated the perfection demanded of musicians, blah, blah, blah … and she headed towards Mrs Angeleta’s dominions and I felt a little sad because even though Mother was speaking to me again, she barely looked me in the eye and she was more interested in my progress report than in my irrepressible desire to see a woman naked and the inexplicable stains on my sheets, which, actually, I had no interest in making a topic of conversation. And now how could I study i portamenti at home without doing portamenti?
At home? As soon as I had reached the stairs I thought again about my angel whom I had cruelly abandoned to her fate, forced to by my Negroid rhythm classes with Manlleu. I went up the stairs two by two thinking of the angel who must have flown away as I dilly-dallied, thinking that she would never forgive me, and I knocked impatiently and Lola opened the door. I pushed her aside and looked towards the bench. Her red smile welcomed me with another ciao dolcíssim and I felt like the happiest violinist on earth.
And three hours after her miraculous apparition, Mother arrived with a worried expression and when she saw the angel in the hall, she looked at Little Lola, who had come out to greet her, and she made that face she makes when she understands, because without allowing her much introduction, she had her go into Father’s study. Three minutes later the shouting began.
One thing is hearing a conversation clearly enough, and another is understanding what it’s about. The espionage system that Adrià used to know what was cooking in Father’s study was complicated and, as he grew taller and heavier, it had to become more sophisticated because I could no longer fit behind the sofa. When I heard the first shouts I saw that I had to somehow protect my angel from Mother’s rage. From the little dressing room, the door that opened onto the gallery and the laundry room left me before a ground glass window that was never opened but looked into Father’s study. The little natural light that reached the study entered through that window. And by lying down under the window I could hear the conversation. As if I were in there with them. At home I was always everywhere. Almost. Mother, pale, finished reading the letter and looked at the wall.
‘How do I know this is true?’
‘Because I inherited Can Casic in Tona.’
‘Pardon?’
My angel, in reply, handed her another document in which the notary Garolera of Vic certified to all effects the willing of the house, the straw loft, the pond, the garden plot and the three fields of Can Casic to Daniela Amato, born in Rome on 25th December of 1919, daughter of Carolina Amato and an unknown father.
‘Can Casic in Tona?’ Vehemently: ‘It didn’t belong to Fèlix.’
‘It did. And now it’s mine.’
Mother tried to conceal the trembling in the hand that held the document. She gave it back to its owner with a disdainful gesture.
‘I don’t know where you are going with this. What do you want?’
‘The shop. I have a right to it.’
From her tone of voice, I could tell that my angel had said it with a delicious smile, which made me want to cover her in kisses. If I were in my mother’s place, I would have given her the shop and whatever else it took with the only condition being that she never lost that smile. But Mother, instead of giving her anything, started laughing, pretending to laugh heartily: a fake laugh that she had recently added to her repertoire. I started to be scared, because I still wasn’t used to that si
de of Mother, the heartless, anti-angel side; I had always seen her either with her gaze lowered before Father or absent and cold, when she was recently widowed and was planning my future. But I had never seen her snap her fingers, demanding to see the document detailing ownership of Can Casic again and saying, after a pause, I don’t give a ffuck what this paper says.
‘It is a legal document. And I have a right to my part of the shop. That is why I’ve come.’
‘My solicitor will inform you of my refusal of all of your proposals. All of them.’
‘I am your husband’s daughter.’
‘That’s like saying you are Raquel Meller’s daughter. It’s a lie.’
My angel said no, Mrs Ardèvol: it is not a lie. She looked around her, slowly, and she repeated it is not a lie: Fifteen years ago I was in this study. He didn’t invite me to take a seat either.
‘What a surprise, Carolina,’ said Fèlix Ardèvol, his mouth agape, completely disconcerted. Even his tone of voice had cracked from the shock. The two women came in and he had them go into the study before Little Lola, who was busy with Carme’s trousseau, noticed the inopportune visit.
The three of them were in the study, standing as hustle and bustle reigned in the rest of the house, porters bringing up Mother’s furniture, Grandmother’s dresser, the hall mirror that Fèlix had agreed to put in the dressing room and people coming and going, and Little Lola, who had only been there for two hours but already knew every tile in Mr Ardèvol’s house, my God, what a grand flat the girl will have. And the study door was closed, with those visitors she didn’t find amusing in the least, but she couldn’t pry into Mr Fèlix’s affairs.
‘Are you busy?’ asked the older woman.
‘Quite.’ He lifted his arms. ‘Everything’s topsy-turvy.’ Curtly: ‘What do you want?’
‘Your daughter, Fèlix.’
‘Carolina, I …’
Carolina had understood pretty much everything from the moment her seminarian with the clean gaze of a good man had shrugged so cowardly when she’d placed his palm on her belly.
