Confessions

by Jaume Cabré

  ‘I didn’t know he wrote.’

  ‘No one knows: not even his editor, really. He writes boring, pretentious crap … anyway. I still don’t understand how I could have ever been interested in a man like that. Much less spend my life with him!’

  ‘And why did you give up the piano?’

  ‘I gave it up without realising I was. Partly …’

  ‘Bernat continued with the violin.’

  ‘I gave up the piano because the priority in our house was Bernat’s career, you understand? This was many years ago. Before Llorenç.’

  ‘Typical.’

  ‘Don’t get all feminist on me: I’m telling you this as a friend; don’t get me worked up, all right?’

  ‘But do you really think that separating … at our age?’

  ‘So what? If you’re too young, because you’re too young. If you’re old, because you’re old. And we’re not that old. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. Well, I’ve got half my life ahead of me, all right?’

  ‘You’re very nervous.’

  It was understandable: among other things, in that well-planned break-up process, Bernat had tried to get her to be the one to move out. Her reply was to grab his violin and throw it out the window. Four hours later she received word of her husband reporting her for serious damage to his assets and she had to go running to her lawyer, who had scolded her as if she were a little girl and warned her don’t play around like that, Mrs Plensa, it’s serious: if you want, I can handle the case; but you’ll have to do what I tell you to.

  ‘If I ever see that ruddy violin again, I’ll throw it right out the window, just like I did before, I don’t care if I end up in prison.’

  ‘That’s no way to talk. Do you want me to handle the case?’

  ‘Of course: that’s why I’ve come here.’

  ‘Well, I have to say that it’d be better to fight, to hate each other and throw dishes. Dishes: not the violin. That was a serious mistake.’

  ‘I wanted to hurt him.’

  ‘And you did; but you chose an idiotic way to do it, excuse my frankness.’

  And he explained their strategy.

  ‘And now I’m telling you my problems because you’re my best friend.’

  ‘Don’t worry, go ahead and cry, Tecla. It’ll do you good. I do it all the time.’

  ‘The judge was a woman and she ruled in her favour on everything. See how unjust justice can be. All she did was give her a fine for destroying the violin. A fine she hasn’t paid and never will. Four months in Bagué’s clinic and I still don’t think it sounds the same.’

  ‘Is it a good instrument?’

  ‘Very good. A mirecourt from the late nineteenth century. A Thouvenel.’

  ‘Why don’t you insist she pays the fine?’

  ‘I don’t want to have anything more to do with Tecla. I hate her from the bottom of my heart. She’s even prejudiced me against my son. And that is almost as unforgivable as destroying the violin.’

  Silence.

  ‘I meant the other way around.’

  ‘I knew what you meant.’

  Every once in a while, large cities have narrow streets, silent passageways that allow your footsteps to echo in the stillness of the night, and it seems like everything is going back to the way it was, when there were only a few of us and we all knew each other and greeted each other on the street. In the period when Barcelona, at night, also went to bed. Bernat and Xènia walked along the lonely Permanyer Alley, the child of another world, and for a few minutes all they heard were their own footsteps. Xènia wore heels. Dressed to the nines. She was dressed to the nines even though it was almost an improvised meeting. And her heels echoed in the night of her dark eyes; she’s simply lovely.

  ‘I feel your pain,’ said Xènia when they got to Llúria and were greeted by the honk of a noisy taxi in a hurry. ‘But you have to get it out of your head. It’s better if you don’t talk about it.’

  ‘You were the one who asked me.’

  ‘If only I’d known …’

  As Bernat opened the door to his flat he said right back where I started from, and then explained that he had grown up in the Born district and now, coincidentally, after his separation, he had moved back. And I like being back here because I have memories around every corner. You want whisky or something like that?

  ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘Neither do I. But I have some for guests.’

  ‘I’ll have some water.’

  ‘The bitch didn’t even give me the option of staying in my own home. I had to pull myself up by my bootstraps.’ He opened his arms as if he wanted to show her the whole flat in one swoop. ‘But I’m glad to be back in my old neighbourhood. This way.’

  He pointed towards where she should go. He went ahead to turn on the light in the room. ‘I think that people make a journey and then come back to where they started from. We always return to our roots. Unless we die first.’

  It was a large room, surely meant to be a dining room. There was a sofa and an armchair in front of a small round table, two music stands with scores on them, a cabinet with three instruments and a table with a computer and a large pile of papers beside it. The opposite wall was covered with books and scores. As if they summed up Bernat’s life.

  Xènia opened her purse, pulled out the tape recorder and placed it in front of Bernat.

  ‘You see? I’ve haven’t got it all fixed up yet, but this is meant to be a living room.’

  ‘It’s quite comfortable.’

  ‘Tecla, that bitch, didn’t even let me take a stick of furniture. It’s all from Ikea. At my age and shopping at Ikea. Hell’s bells, are you recording?’

  Xènia turned off the tape recorder. In a tone he hadn’t heard the whole evening: ‘Do you want to talk about your bitch of a wife or about your books? So I know whether to turn the tape recorder on or not.’

  The silence was so deep they could have heard their own footsteps. But they weren’t walking along a deserted narrow street. Bernat could make out his own heartbeat and he felt incredibly ridiculous. He waited for the sound of a motorbike going up Llúria to pass.

  ‘Touché.’

  ‘I don’t speak French.’

  Bernat vanished, embarrassed. He returned with a bottle of some water she’d never seen before. And two Ikea glasses.

  ‘Water from the clouds of Tasmania. You’ll like it.’

  They spent half an hour talking about his short stories and his writing process. And that the third and fourth collections were the best. Novel? No, no: I like the short form. As he calmed down, he mentioned that he was embarrassed about the scene he’d made talking about his bitch of an ex-wife, but that it was still all going through his head and he couldn’t believe that even after he’d paid a fortune to the lawyer they’d sided with Tecla on almost everything, and I’m still shaken up about it and I’m really sorry to have told you all that, but as you can see writers – all artists – are people too.

  ‘I never doubted that.’

  ‘Touché pour la seconde fois.’

  ‘I told you I don’t speak French. Can you tell me about your creative process?’

  They spoke for a long time. Bernat explained how he started, many, many years ago, to write, in no particular rush. I take a long time to finish a book. Plasma took a good three years.

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘Yes. It wrote itself. How can I explain it …’

  Silence. A couple of hours had passed and they’d finished off the Tasmanian cloud water. Xènia listened, rapt. The occasional car still went up Llúria. The place was comfortable; for the first time in many months, Bernat was comfortable at home, with someone who listened to him and didn’t criticise him the way poor Adrià had always done.

  Suddenly, he was overcome by the fatigue that followed the tension of so many hours of conversation. The years take their toll.

  Xènia settled back in the Ikea armchair. She extended her hand as if she wanted to turn off the tape recorder, but
she stopped halfway.

  ‘Now I’d like to discuss … your double personality, as a musician and a writer.’

  ‘Aren’t you tired?’

  ‘Yes. But this is something I’ve been wanting to do for some time, an interview so … like this.’

  ‘Thank you so much. But we can leave it for tomorrow. I’m …’

  He knew that he was spoiling the magic of the moment but there was nothing he could do about it. For a few minutes they were seated in silence, as she put away her things and both of them calculating whether it was a good moment to continue or if it was best to be prudent, until Bernat said I’m very sorry that I only offered you water.

  ‘It was excellent.’

  What I’d like to do is take you to bed.

  ‘Should we meet tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow’s not good for me. The day after.’

  To the bedroom, right now.

  ‘Very well. Come here, if that works for you.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘And we’ll talk about whatever.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  They grew silent. She smiled and he smiled back.

  ‘Wait, I’ll call you a cab.’

  They were so close. Looking at each other, in silence, she with the serene night in her gaze. He, with the vague greyness of unconfessable secrets in his eyes. But despite everything, she left in the ruddy blooming taxi that always had to spoil everything. Before, Xènia had given him a furtive kiss on the cheek, near his lips. She’d had to stand on tiptoe to reach. She’s so cute on tiptoes. Downstairs on the street he watched the taxi take Xènia out of his life, even just for a couple of days. He smiled. It had been two long years since he’d last smiled.

  The second meeting was easier. Xènia took off her coat without asking permission, she put her recording devices down on the little table and patiently waited for Bernat, who had gone to the other end of the flat with his mobile, to finish an endless argument with someone who was probably his lawyer. He spoke in a low voice and with a kind of stifled rage.

  Xènia looked at some book spines. In one corner were the five books that Bernat Plensa had published; she hadn’t read the first two. She pulled out the oldest one. On the first page was a dedication to my muse, my beloved Tecla, who was so supportive to me in the creation of these stories, Barcelona, 12 February 1977. Xènia couldn’t help but smile. She put the book back in its place, beside its companions in the complete works of Bernat Plensa. On the desk, the computer was sleeping with the screen dark. She moved the mouse and the screen lit up. There was a text. A seventy-page document. Bernat Plensa was writing a novel and he had said no, no novels. She looked towards the hallway. She could hear Bernat’s voice at the far end, still speaking softly. She sat in front of the computer and read After buying the tickets, Bernat put them in his pocket. He gazed at the sign announcing the concert. The young man beside him, wearing a hat that hid his face and wrapped in a scarf, tapped his feet on the ground to ward off the cold, very interested in that night’s programme. Another man, who was fat and stuffed into a slender coat, was trying to return his tickets because of some problem. They took a walk along Sant Pere Més Alt and they missed it. When they were back in front of the Palau de la Música, it was all over. The sign that read Prokofiev’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 2 in G-Minor performed by Jascha Heifetz and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra directed by Eduard Toldrà had an aggressive JEWS RAUS scrawled on it in tar and a swastika that dripped from each arm, and the atmosphere had become darker, people avoided eye contact and the earth had become even flatter. Then they told me that it had been a Falangist gang and that the couple of policemen who’d been sent from the headquarters on Via Laietana, right around the corner, had coincidentally been away from their post in front of the Palau having a coffee break and Adrià was overcome with an irrepressible desire to go live in Europe, further north, where they say people are clean and cultured and free, and lively and happy and have parents who love you and don’t die because of something you did. What a crap country we were born into, he said looking at the smear that dripped hatred. Then the policemen arrived and said, all right, move it along, not in groups, come on, on your way, and Adrià and Bernat, like the rest of the onlookers, disappeared because you never know.

  The auditorium of the Palau de la Música was full, but the silent was thick. We had trouble getting to our two empty seats, in the stalls, almost in the middle.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Adrià, timidly as he sat beside the lovely girl who smiled at him.

  ‘Adrià? Adrià Ican’trememberwhat?’

  Then I recognised you. You didn’t have plaits in your hair and you looked like a real woman.

  ‘Sara Voltes-Epstein! …’ I said, astonished. ‘Are you here?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘No, I mean …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said laughing and putting her hand over mine casually, setting off a fatal electric shock. ‘I live in Barcelona now.’

  ‘Well, how about that,’ I said, looking from side to side. ‘This is my friend Bernat. Sara.’

  Bernat and Sara nodded politely to each other.

  ‘How awful, eh, the thing with the sign …’ said Adrià, with his extraordinary ability to stick his foot in it. Sara made a vague expression and started looking at the programme. Without taking her eyes off of it, ‘How did your concert go?’

  ‘The one in Paris?’ A bit embarrassed. ‘Fine. Normal.’

  ‘Do you still read?’

  ‘Yes. And you, do you still draw?’

  ‘Yes. I’m having an exhibition.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the parish of …’ She smiled. ‘No, no. I don’t want you to come.’

  I don’t know if she meant it or if it was a joke. Adrià was so stiff that he didn’t dare to look her in the eye. He just smiled timidly. The lights began to dim, the audience started to applaud and Master Toldrà came out on the stage and Bernat’s footsteps were heard coming from the other end of the flat. Then Xènia put the computer to sleep and stood up from the chair. She pretending she’d been reading book spines and when Bernat entered the study she made a bored face.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, brandishing the mobile.

  ‘More problems?’

  He furrowed his brow. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it. Or that he had learned he shouldn’t discuss it with Xènia. They sat down and, for a few seconds, the silence was quite uncomfortable; perhaps that was why they both smiled without looking at each other.

  ‘And how does it feel to be a musician writing literature?’ asked Xènia, putting the tiny recorder in front of her on the small round table.

  He looked at her without seeing her, thinking of the furtive kiss of the other night, so close to his lips.

  ‘I don’t know. It all happened gradually, inevitably.’

  That was a real whopper. It all happened so bloody slowly, so gratuitously and capriciously and, yet, his anxiety did arrive all at once, because Bernat had been writing for years and for years Adrià had been telling him that what he wrote was completely uninteresting, it was grey, predictable, dispensable; definitely not an essential text. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, stop asking me for my opinion.

  ‘And that’s it?’ said Xènia, a bit peeved. ‘It all happened gradually, inevitably? And full stop? Should I turn off the tape recorder?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Here, with you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it’s post-concert trauma.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m more than sixty years old, I am a professional violinist, I know that I do fine but playing with the orchestra doesn’t do it for me. What I wanted was to be a writer, you understand?’

  ‘You already are.’

  ‘Not the way I wanted to be.’

  ‘Are you writing something now?’

  ‘No.�
��

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘No reason. What do you mean by not the way you wanted to be?’

  ‘That I’d like to captivate, enthral.’

  ‘But with the violin …’

  ‘There are fifty of us playing. I’m not a soloist.’

  ‘But sometimes you play chamber music.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And why aren’t you a soloist?’

  ‘Not everyone who wants to be one can be. I don’t have the skill or temperament for it. A writer is a soloist.’

  ‘Is it an ego problem?’

  Bernat Plensa picked up Xènia’s recording device, examined it, found the button and turned it off. He placed it back down on the table while he said I am the epitome of mediocrity.

  ‘You don’t believe what that imbecile from

  ‘That imbecile and all the others who’ve been kind enough to tell me that in the press.’

  ‘You know that critics are just …’

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘Big poofs.’

  ‘I’m being serious.’

  ‘Now I understand your hysterical side.’

  ‘Wow: you don’t pull your punches.’

  ‘You want to be perfect. And since you can’t … you get cranky; or you demand that those around you be perfect.’

  ‘Do you work for Tecla?’

  ‘Tecla is a forbidden subject.’

  ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘I’m trying to get a reaction out of you,’ replied Xènia. ‘Because you have to answer my question.’