Confessions

by Jaume Cabré

  ‘I want to come too,’ Rosa.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rosa stormed off, affronted because Adrià, who was the littlest, could go with you and I can’t.

  ‘It’s very unpleasant, my girl,’ said Aunt Leo.

  And I went to see how Prudenci jammed his fist and entire arm into Blanca’s arsehole and then said something I didn’t catch to my uncle and Xevi jotted it down on a piece of paper and Blanca chewed her cud, oblivious to the worries of the—

  ‘Watch out, watch out, watch out, she’s pissing!’ shouted Adrià in excitement.

  The men moved aside, still discussing their matters, but I stayed in the front row because watching a cow piss and shit from the stalls was one of the great spectacles life in Tona had to offer. Like watching Parrot, the mule at Can Casic, piss. That was really something to see, and that’s why I think my aunt and uncle were being unfair with poor Rosa. And there were more things, like fishing for tadpoles in the stream beside the Matamonges gully. And returning with eight or ten victims that we kept in a glass bottle.

  ‘Poor creatures.’

  ‘No, Auntie, I’ll feed them every day.’

  ‘Poor creatures.’

  ‘I’ll give them bread, I promise.’

  ‘Poor creatures.’

  I wanted to see how they turned into frogs or, more often, into dead tadpoles because we never thought to change their water or about what they could eat inside the bottle. And the swallows’ nests in the lean-to. And the sudden downpours. And the apotheosis of the threshing days at Can Casic, where the grain was no longer winnowed but separated by machines that made the haystack and filled the town and my memories with straw dust. Et in Arcadia ego, Adrià Ardèvol. No one can take those memories from me. And now I think that Aunt Leo and Uncle Cinto must have been made of solid stuff because they pretended nothing had happened after the fight between the two brothers. It was a long time ago. Adrià hadn’t been born yet. And I knew about it because the summer I turned twenty, to avoid being alone with Mother in Barcelona, I decided to spend three or four weeks in Tona, if you’ll have me. I was also feeling somewhat forlorn because Sara, who I was already dating while keeping it secret from both families, had had to go to Cadaqués with her parents and I was feeling so, so alone.

  ‘What does if you’ll have me mean? Don’t ever say that again,’ said my Aunt Leo, indignant. ‘When are you coming?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Your cousins aren’t here. Well, Xevi is, but he spends all day at the farm.’

  ‘I reckoned.’

  ‘Josep and Maria from Can Casic died this past winter.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘And Viola died of grief.’ Silence on the other end of the line. As a consolation: ‘They were very old, both of them. Josep walked in a right angle, poor thing. And the dog was also very old.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Bring your violin.’

  So I told Mother that Aunt Leo had invited me and I couldn’t refuse. Mother didn’t say yes or no. We were very distant and didn’t speak much. I spent my days studying and reading, and she spent hers in the shop. And when I was at home, her gaze still accused me of capriciously throwing away a brilliant violin career.

  ‘Did you hear me, Mother?’

  It seems that, as always, in the shop, there were problems she didn’t want to let me in on. And so, without looking at me, she just said bring them a little gift.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something small, you choose it.’

  My first day in Tona, with my hands in my pockets, I went into town to find a little gift at Can Berdagué. And when I reached the main square I saw her sitting at the tables of El Racó, drinking tiger nut milk and smiling at me as if she were waiting for me. Well, she was waiting for me. At first I didn’t recognise her; but then, wait, I know her, who is she, who is she, who is she. I knew that smile.

  ‘Ciao,’ she said.

  Then I recognised her. She was no longer an angel, but she had the same angelic smile. Now she was a grown woman, simply lovely. She waved me over to sit by her side, and I obeyed.

  ‘My Catalan is still very spotty.’

  I asked her if we could speak in Italian. Then she asked me caro Adrià, sai chi sono, vero?

  I didn’t buy any gift for Aunt Leo at Can Berdagué. The first hour was spent with her drinking tiger nut milk and Adrià swallowing hard. She didn’t stop talking and she explained everything to me that Adrià didn’t know or pretended not to know because even though he was now twenty years old, at home such things weren’t discussed. It was she, in Tona’s main square, who told me that my angel and I were siblings.

  I looked at her, stunned. It was the first time that anyone had put it into words. She could sense my confusion.

  ‘É vero,’ she insisted.

  ‘This is like something out of a photo-novel,’ I said, wanting to conceal my bewilderment.

  She didn’t bat an eyelash. She clarified that she was old enough to be my mother, but that she was my half-sister, and she showed me a birth certificate or something where my father recognised his paternity of some Daniela Amato, which was her according to her passport, which she also showed me. So she had been waiting for me, with the conversation and the documents at the ready. So what I half knew but no one had come out and said was true; I, only child par excellence, had an older, much older, sister. And I felt defrauded by Father, by Mother, by Little Lola and by so many secrets. And I think it hurt me that Sheriff Carson had never even ever insinuated it. A sister. I looked at her again: she was just as pretty as when she’d showed up at my house in angel form, but she was a forty-six year old woman who was my sister. We had never played over boring Sunday afternoons. She would have gone off laughing with Little Lola, and covering her mouth with her hand every time they’d caught a man looking at them.

  ‘But you’re my mother’s age,’ I said, just to say something.

  ‘A bit younger.’ I noticed an irritated tone in her reply.

  Her name was Daniela. And she told me that her mother … and she explained a very beautiful love story, and I couldn’t imagine Father in love and I kept very quiet and listened, listened to what she told me and tried to imagine it, and I don’t know why she started to talk about the relationship between the two brothers, because Father, before beginning his studies at the seminary in Vic, had had to learn to winnow the wheat, to thresh properly and to touch Estrella’s belly to see if she had finally got knocked up. Grandfather Ardèvol had taught both sons to tie the hampers tightly to the mule and to know that if the clouds were dark but came from Collsuspina they always blew past without a sprinkle. Uncle Cinto, who was the heir, put more care into things around the farm. And in the management of the land, the harvests, and the hired hands. Our father, on the other hand, was in the clouds whenever he could be, thinking and reading hidden in the corners, like you do. When they, somewhat desperately, sent Father to the seminary in Vic he was already, despite his lack of interest, half-trained to be a farmer. There he found his motivation and started to learn Latin, Greek and some lessons from the great teachers. Verdaguer’s shadow was still fresh and ran through the hallways, and two out of three seminarians tried their hand at writing verse; but not our father: he wanted to study the philosophy and theology they offered him in instalments.

  ‘And how do you know all this?’

  ‘My mother explained it to me. Our father was quite talkative as a young man. Later, it seems he shut up like a closed umbrella, like a mummy.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘They sent him to Rome because he was very clever. And he got my mother pregnant. And he fled Rome because he was a coward. And I was born.’

  ‘Wow … like something out of a photo-novel,’ I insisted.

  Daniela, instead of getting annoyed, smiled encouragingly and continued with her story saying and your father had a fight with his brother.


  ‘With Uncle Cinto?’

  ‘You can shove the idea of marrying me off to that drip where the sun don’t shine,’ said Fèlix, pushing the photo back at him.

  ‘But you won’t have to lift a finger! The estate is a well-oiled machine. I’ve looked into it carefully. And you can devote yourself to your books, hell, what more do you want?’

  ‘And why are you in such a hurry to marry me off?’

  ‘Our parents asked me to; that if you ever left the path of priesthood … then you should marry; that I should have you marry.’

  ‘But you’re not married! Who are you to …’

  ‘I will be. I have my eye on a …’

  ‘As if they were cows.’

  ‘You can’t offend me. Mama knew it would be work to convince you.’

  ‘I’ll marry when I’m good and ready. If I ever do.’

  ‘I can find you a better-looking one,’ said Cinto, putting away the grey photo of the heiress of Can Puig.

  Then our father asked, too curtly, if Cinto would buy out his share of the estate because he wanted to move to Barcelona. That was when the shouting began and the words thrown like rocks, to hurt. And both brothers looked at each other with hatred. It didn’t come to blows. Fèlix Ardèvol got his share and they didn’t have much to do with each other for a few years. Thanks to Leo’s insistence, Father showed up when she and Cinto married. But then the brothers grew apart. One, buying up land in the area, raising livestock, making fodder, and the other, spending his share on mysterious trips to Europe.

  ‘What do you mean by mysterious trips?’

  Daniela slurped up the last of her tiger nut milk and said no more. Adrià went to pay and when he returned he said why don’t we take a walk, and Tori, the waiter at El Racó, as he sullied the table with a cleaning rag, made a face as if to say damn, I wouldn’t mind getting my paws on that French lady, no, I would not.

  Still standing, in the square, Daniela stood in front of him and put on dark glasses that gave her a modern and inevitably foreign air. As if they shared a private secret, she came over to him and undid the top button on his shirt.

  ‘Scusa,’ she said.

  And Tori thought bloody hell, how did that punk kid get a French lady like that. And he shook his head, astonished that the world moved so fast, as Daniela’s gaze fell on the little chain with the medallion.

  ‘I didn’t know you were religious.’

  ‘This isn’t religious.’

  ‘The Madonna of Pardàc is a Virgin Mary.’

  ‘It’s a keepsake.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘I don’t rightly know.’

  Daniela stifled a smile, rubbed the medallion with her fingers and let it drop onto Adrià’s chest. He hid it, angered by that invasion of his privacy. So he added it’s none of your business.

  ‘That depends.’

  He didn’t understand her. They walked in silence.

  ‘It’s a lovely medallion.’

  Jachiam pulled it out, showed it to the jeweller and said it’s gold. And the chain is too.

  ‘You haven’t stolen it?’

  ‘No! Little Bettina, my blind sister, gave it to me so I would never feel lonely.’

  ‘And so why do you want to sell it?’

  ‘That surprises you?’

  ‘Well … a family heirloom …’

  ‘My family … Oh, how I miss the living and the dead. My mother, my father and all the Muredas: Agno, Jenn, Max, Hermes, Josef, Theodor, Micurà, Ilse, Erica, Katharina, Matilde, Gretchen and little blind Bettina … I miss the landscape of Pardàc too.’

  ‘Why don’t you go back?’

  ‘Because there are still people there who want to hurt me and my family has let me know that it wouldn’t be prudent to …’

  ‘Yeah …’ said the goldsmith, lowering his head to get a better look at the medallion, not even slightly interested in the problems of the Muredas of Pardàc.

  ‘I sent my siblings a lot of money, to help them.’

  ‘Aha.’

  He continued to examine it before giving it back to its owner.

  ‘Pardàc is Predazzo?’ he said, looking him in the eye, as if he had just thought of something.

  ‘The people of the plains call it Predazzo, yes. But it’s Pardàc … Don’t you want to buy it?’

  The jeweller shook his head.

  ‘If you spend the winter with me, I’ll teach you my trade and when the snows melt you can go wherever you like. But don’t sell the medallion.’

  And Jachiam learned the trade of smelting metals to turn them into rings, medallions and earrings and for a few months he buried his longing at that good man’s house until one day, shaking his head, he said, as if picking up the thread of their first conversation: ‘Whom did you entrust the money to?’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘The money you sent to your family.’

  ‘A trustworthy man.’

  ‘From Occitania?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘No, nothing, nothing …’

  ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘What was the man’s name?’

  ‘I called him Blond. His name was Blond of Cazilhac. He was very blond.’

  ‘I don’t think he got past …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They killed him. And robbed him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mountain people.’

  ‘From Moena?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  That morning, with the winter’s wages in his pocket, Jachiam asked for the jeweller’s blessing and rushed northward to find out what had happened to the Muredas’s money and poor Blond. He walked rapidly, spurred on by rage and throwing all caution to the wind. On the fifth day he reached Moena and began bellowing in the main square. Come out, Brocias, he said, and a Brocia who heard him warned his cousin, and that cousin told another, and when they were ten men they went down to the square, snatched up Jachiam and brought him to the river. His panicked screams didn’t reach Pardàc. The medallion of the Madonna dai Ciüf was kept, as a reward, by the Brocia who had seen him.

  ‘Pardàc is in Trento,’ said Adrià.

  ‘But in my house,’ replied Daniela, pensively, ‘they always said that a sailor uncle I’d never met brought it back from Africa.’

  They strolled to the cemetery and the chapel of Lourdes without saying anything, and it was a lovely day for walking. After half an hour of silence, sitting on the stone benches in the chapel’s garden, Adrià, who now trusted her more, pointed to his chest and said do you want it?

  ‘No. It’s yours. Don’t ever lose it.’

  The sun’s trajectory had shifted the shadows in the garden, and Adrià again asked what do you mean about Father’s mysterious trips.

  He had checked into a little hotel in the Borgo, five minutes from St. Peter’s in the Vatican, on the edge of the Passetto. It was a discreet, modest and inexpensive hostel called Bramante that was run by a Roman matron who had spent many years rearing geese with an iron hand and who looked like a page pulled from the transition between Julius and Augustus. The first person he visited once he was set up in the narrow, damp room overlooking the Vicolo delle Palline was Father Morlin, whose initial reaction was to stand staring in the door to the cloister of the Santa Sabina monastery, struggling to remember who that man was who … no!

  ‘Fèlix Ardevole!’ he shouted. ‘Il mio omonimo! Vero?’

  Fèlix Ardèvol nodded and submissively kissed the friar’s hand, who was sweating beneath his heavy habit. Morlin, after looking him in the eyes, hesitated for a moment and instead of having him enter one of the visiting rooms, or stroll in the cloister, he sent him down an empty corridor, with the occasional worthless painting on its white walls. A very long corridor with few doors. Instinctively lowering his tone of voice, like in the old days, he said what do you want, and Fèlix Ardèvol replied I want contacts, only contacts. I want to establish a shop and I think you can help me to find top quality materia
l.

  They walked a few steps in silence. It was strange because despite the barrenness of the location, neither their footsteps nor their words echoed. Father Morlin must have known it was a discreet spot. When they had passed two paintings, he stopped in front of a very modest Annunciation, wiped his brow and looked him in the eye: ‘While you are at war? How were you able to get out?’

  ‘I can come and go pretty easily. I have my system. And I have contacts.’

  Father Morlin’s expression seemed to indicate that he didn’t want to know any more details.

  They talked for a long time. Fèlix Ardèvol’s idea was crystal clear: in the last few years, many Germans, Austrians and Poles began to feel uncomfortable with Hitler’s plans and searched for a change of scenery.

  ‘You are looking for rich Jews.’

  ‘People on the run always have great bargains for an antiquarian. Take me to those wanting to move to America. I’ll take care of the rest.’

  They reached the end of the corridor. A window overlooked a small austere cloister, decorated only with geraniums the colour of blood in some pots on the ground. Fèlix had trouble imagining a Dominican friar watering a row of geraniums. On the other side of the small cloister a similar window perfectly framed, as if on purpose, the distant dome of Saint Peter’s. For a few seconds, Fèlix Ardèvol thought that he’d like to take the window and its view along with him. He returned to reality, convinced that Morlin had brought him there to show him the window.

  ‘I need three or four addresses, of people in such circumstances.’

  ‘And how do you know, dear Ardevole, that I could help you with this?’

  ‘I have my sources: I devote many hours to my work and I know that you’ve been constantly widening your circle of contacts.’

  Father Morlin took the blow but showed no outward reaction.

  ‘And where does this sudden interest in others’ objects come from?’

  He was about to say because my work fascinates me; because when I find an object that I’m interested in, the world reduces to that object, whether it’s a statuette, a painting, a document or a fabric. And the world is filled with objects that need no justification. There are objects that …