by Jaume Cabré
‘But I don’t want …’
‘If you came by the shop: not if you decided to run it.’
It was a sealed envelope. I opened it in front of Mr Sagrera. The letter didn’t begin with my beloved son. It didn’t have any preface; it didn’t even say hey, Adrià, how’s it going. It was a list of instructions, cold but pragmatic, with advice that I understood would be very useful to me.
Despite my intentions, after a few days or a few weeks, I can’t remember which, I went to a clandestine auction. Morral, the bookseller from the Sant Antoni market, had given me the address with a mysterious air. Perhaps such mystery wasn’t necessary, because apparently there was no protective filter. You rang the bell, they opened the door and you went into a garage in an industrial area of Hospitalet. There was a table with a display case, as if we were in a jewellery shop, well illuminated, where the objects for auction were placed. As soon as I began to examine them, the tickle returned and I was quickly covered in that sweat, my constant companion when I’m about to acquire something. And that thick, dry tongue. I think it’s the same thing a gambler feels in front of a machine. I was actually the one who bought a large part of the things that I’ve always told you belonged to my father. For example, the fifty-ducat coin from the sixteenth century that is now worth millions. I bought it there. It cost me a pretty penny. Later, in other auctions and frenetic exchanges, leaping into the void, face to face with another fanatical collector, the five gold florins minted in Perpignan in the period of James III of Majorca. What a pleasure to hold them and make them clink in my hand. With those coins in my hand I felt like when Father lectured me about Vial and the different musicians it had had over its lifetime, serving it, trying to get a good sound out of it, respecting it, venerating it. Or the thirteen magnificent Louis d’ors that, in my hand, make the same noise that soothed Guillaume-François Vial as an old man. Despite the danger inherent in living with that Storioni, he’d grown fond of it and didn’t want to be separated from it until he heard that Monsieur La Guitte had spread the rumour that a violin made by the famous Lorenzo Storioni could be linked to the murder, years back, of Monsieur Leclair. Then his prized violin began to burn in his hands and transformed from a cherished possession into a nightmare. He decided to get rid of it, somewhere far from Paris. When he was returning from Antwerp, where he had been able to sell it most satisfactorily along with its case stained with the odious blood of Tonton Jean, the violin had metamorphosed into a soothing goat leather purse filled with Louis d’ors. It made such a lovely sound, that purse. He had even thought that the purse was his future, his hidey hole, his triumph against the vulgarity and vanity of Tonton Jean. Now that no one could link him to the violin, which had been acquired by Heer Arcan of Antwerp. And that was the sound of the Louis d’ors when he jangled them together.
‘Would you like to come to Rome?’
Laura looked at him in surprise. They were in the faculty’s cloister, surrounded by students, he with his hands in his pockets, she with a full briefcase, looking like a public defender about to go into court to settle a difficult case, and I, staring into her blue gaze. Laura was no longer a student anxious for knowledge. She was a professor who was quite beloved by the students. She still had the blue gaze and the sadness inside. And Adrià contemplated her, filled with uncertainty, as images of you, Sara, mixed in his mind with images of this woman who, from what he had seen, didn’t have much luck with the boyfriends she chose.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I have to go there for work … Five days at most. We could be here on Monday and you wouldn’t miss any classes.’
In fact, Adrià was improvising. Days earlier he had realised that he didn’t know how to approach that blue gaze. He wanted to take the step but he didn’t know how. And I was afraid to make up my mind because I thought that if I did I would finally get you out of my mind. And then he had come up with the most presentable plan; the blue gaze smiled and Adrià wondered if Laura was ever not smiling. And he was very surprised when she said all right, sure.
‘Sure what?’
‘I’ll go to Rome with you.’ She looked at him, alarmed. ‘That’s what you meant, right?’
They both laughed and he thought you are getting involved again and you have no idea what Laura is like, besides blue.
During the take-off and the landing, she took his hand for the first time, smiled timidly and confessed I’m afraid of flying, and he said why didn’t you tell me. And she shrugged as if to say look, this is how it played out, and he interpreted that to mean that it was worth it to her to swallow her fear and go with Ardèvol to Rome. I felt very proud of my rallying power, beloved Sara, even though she was just a young professor with her whole future ahead of her.
Rome was no bowl of cherries; it was a bedlam of vehicles atop an immense city, captained by suicidal taxi drivers like the one who took them in record time from the hotel to the Via del Corso, which was crucified by traffic. The Amato green-grocer’s was a well-lit oasis of appetising boxes of fruit that made the passers-by turn their heads. He introduced himself to a man with a thick beard who was taking care of a demanding customer; he gave him a card with some instructions and pointed up the street, towards the Piazza del Popolo.
‘Do you mind telling me what we’re doing?’
‘You’ll know soon enough.’
‘Fine: I would like to understand what I’m doing here.’
‘Keeping me company.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m scared.’
‘Fantastic.’ She had to run to keep up with Adrià’s strides. ‘Then maybe you could explain to me what’s going on. Don’t you think?’
‘Look, we’re here.’
It was three doors further on. He pressed one of the bells and soon the sound of a lock indicated that the door was open, as if they were expecting them. Up in the flat, with her hand on the open door, my angel – my former angel – was waiting, with a slightly distant smile. Adrià kissed her, pointed to her casually, informing Laura that, ‘This is my half-sister. This is Mrs Daniela Amato.’
And to Daniela I said, ‘This is my lawyer,’ referring to Laura.
Laura reacted well. Actually, she was fantastic. She didn’t bat an eyelash. The two women looked at each other for a few seconds, as if making calculations on the force they would have to exert. Daniela had us go into a very nice living room, where there was a Sheraton sideboard I was sure I’d seen in the shop; on top of the sideboard was a photo of Father quite young and a very pretty girl, who looked a bit like Daniela. I supposed it was the legendary Carolina Amato, Father’s Roman love, la figlia del fruttivendolo Amato. In the photo she was a young woman, with an intense gaze and smooth skin. It was strange, because that young woman’s daughter was right in front of me, and she was in her fifties and no longer bothered to try to conceal her wrinkles. My half-sister was still an elegant, beautiful woman. Before we began to speak, a lanky teenager with thick brows came in with a tray of coffee.
‘My son Tito,’ announced Daniela.
‘Piacere di conoscerti,’ I said, extending my hand.
‘Don’t bother,’ he responded in Catalan as he put the tray down delicately on the coffee table. ‘My father is from Vilafranca.’
And then Laura began to shoot me murderous glances because she must have thought that I’d gone too far, expecting her, in the role of my lawyer, to chat with the Italian branch of my family, whom she couldn’t care less about. I smiled at her and put my hand over hers, to reassure her; it worked, as I had never got it to work with anyone else, before or since. Poor Laura: I have the feeling I owe her a thousand explanations and I’m afraid I’m too late.
The coffee was wonderful. And the sale conditions for the shop were too. Laura just kept quiet; I said the price, Daniela looked at Laura a couple of times and saw that she was slowly and discreetly shaking her head, very professional. Even still, she tried to bargain: ‘I don’t agree with your offer.’
‘Excuse me,’ interjected
Laura, and I looked at her in surprise. In a weary tone: ‘This is the only offer that Mr Ardèvol will be making.’
She looked at her watch, as if she were in a big rush, and then she grew silent and serious. It took Adrià a few seconds to react and he said that the offer also included his right to rescue certain objects from the shop before you take over. Daniela carefully read the list I presented to her as I looked at Laura. I winked at her and she didn’t wink back, serious in her role as lawyer.
‘And the Urgell in the house?’ Daniela lifted her head.
‘That belongs to the family: it’s not part of the shop.’
‘And the violin?’
‘That too. It’s all in writing.’
Laura lifted a hand as if she wanted to have a word and, with a studied weary air, looking at Daniela, she said you know that we are talking about a shop filled with intangibles.
Ay, Laura.
‘What?’ Daniela.
It’s best if you keep quiet.
‘That one thing is the object and quite another its value.’
Why did I ever ask you to come with me to Rome, Laura?
‘Bravo. So?’
‘The price goes up with each passing day.’
Please don’t start.
‘And?’
‘That the price you two agree on is one thing.’ Laura said that without even glancing at me, as if I weren’t there. While I thought shut up and don’t mess things up, bloody hell, she said but regardless of the price you come to, you will never even approximate its true value.
‘I’d be very curious to hear what you think the true value of the shop is, madam.’
I would be, too, Laura. But stop mucking things up, all right?
‘No one knows that. X number of pesetas is the official price. To arrive at the true value, we would have to add the weight of history.’
Silence. As if we were digesting those wise words. Laura wiped her hair off her forehead, putting it behind one ear and, in a confident tone that I had never heard from her before, leaning towards Daniela, she said we aren’t exactly talking about apples and bananas, Mrs Amato.
We continued in silence. I knew that Tito was behind the door, because a shadow with thick eyebrows gave him away. Soon I was imagining that the boy had inherited the fever for objects, the one that Father had, the one that Mother had acquired, the one that I have, the one that Daniela has … Touched by the family obsession. The silence was so thick that it seemed we were all attempting to gauge the weight of history.
‘Deal. The lawyers will dot the i’s,’ decided Daniela, exhaling. Then she looked at Laura with a hint of irony and said we can discuss the millions of lires of history, madam, when we are in the mood.
We didn’t say a word until we were seated, one in front of the other. It was forty-five minutes of silence that was impossible to evaluate because that blonde, blue girl had completely disorientated him. Once they were seated, after ordering and waiting, also in silence, for them to bring the first course, Laura picked up a forkful of spaghetti that immediately began to unravel.
‘You are a bastard,’ she said, leaning over her plate before starting to suck on the sole remaining long strand of spaghetti.
‘Me?’
‘I’m talking to you, yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m not your lawyer, not that you needed one.’ She abandoned the fork on the plate. ‘By the way, I take it you sell antiques.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Why didn’t you talk to me about it before?’
‘All you had to do was keep quiet.’
‘No one deigned to give me the manual for this trip.’
‘Forgive me: it’s my fault.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But you did very well.’
‘Well, I wanted to ruin everything and run away, because you’re a son of a bitch.’
‘You’re right.’
Laura was able to fish out another strand of spaghetti and, instead of her words bothering me, all I could think was that, at that rate, she would never finish her first course. I wanted to give her explanations I hadn’t given her before: ‘Mother gave me instructions for selling the shop to Daniela; step by step. She even indicated how I had to look at her and what gestures I had to make.’
‘So you were acting.’
‘To a certain extent. But you surpassed me.’
Both of them looked at their plates, until Adrià put down his fork and covered his full mouth with his napkin.
‘The value of the weight of history!’ he said, bursting into laughter.
The dinner continued with long rifts of silence. They tried to avoid eye contact.
‘So your mother wrote you a book of instructions.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were following it.’
‘Yes.’
‘You seemed … I don’t know: different.’
‘Different in what way?’
‘Different from how you usually are.’
‘How am I, usually?’
‘Absent. You’re always somewhere else.’
They nibbled on olives in silence, not knowing what to say to each other, as they waited for their dessert. Until Adrià said he didn’t know she was so far-sighted and perceptive.
‘Who?’
‘My mother.’
Laura placed her fork on the table and looked him in the eye.
‘Do you know I feel used?’ she insisted. ‘Did you get that, after everything I’ve said?’
I looked at her carefully and I saw that her blue gaze was damp. Poor Laura: she was saying the great truth of her life and I still didn’t want to recognise it.
‘Forgive me. I couldn’t do it alone.’
That night Laura and I made love, very tenderly and cautiously, as if we were afraid of hurting each other. She curiously examined the medallion that Adrià wore around his neck, but she didn’t mention it. And then she cried: it was the first time that smiling Laura showed me her perennial dose of sadness. And she didn’t explain her heartaches. I was silent as well.
After strolling through the Vatican museums and silently admiring the Moses at San Pietro in Vincoli for over an hour, the patriarch took a step forward, with the tablets of the law in his hand and, when approaching his people and seeing that they were worshipping a golden calf and dancing around it, he angrily grabbed the stone tablets where Jahweh had engraved in divine script the points of the agreement, the new alliance with his people, and he threw them to the ground, smashing them to bits. While Aaron knelt and picked up a jagged piece, not too big and not too small, and saved it as a souvenir, Moses raised his voice and said you good-for-nothings, what are you doing adoring false gods the second I turn my back, bloody hell, what ingrates! And the people of God said forgive us, Moses, we won’t do it again. And he replied I am not the one who has to forgive you, but rather God the merciful against whom you have sinned by worshipping false gods. Just for that you deserve to be stoned to death. All of you. And when they went out beneath the blazing Roman midday sun, thinking of stones and smashed tablets, it occurred to me, out of the blue, that, a century earlier, in the Hijri year of twelve hundred and ninety, a crying baby had been born in the small village of al-Hisw, with her face illuminated like the moon, and her mother, upon seeing her, said this daughter of mine is a blessing from Allah the Merciful; she is beautiful like the moon and splendorous as the sun, and her father, Azizzadeh the merchant, seeing his wife’s delicate state, told her, hiding his anxiousness, what name should we give her, my wife, and she responded she will be called Amani, and the people of al-Hisw will know her as Amani the lovely; and she was left drained by her words; and her husband Azizzadeh, with bitter tears in his dark eyes, after making sure that everything was in order, gave a white coin and a basket of dates to the midwife; looked, worried, at his wife, and a black cloud crossed through his thoughts. The mother’s cracked voice still said Azizzadeh: if I die, take good care of the golden jewel in my memory.
>
‘You aren’t going to die.’
‘Listen to me. And when lovely Amani’s first monthly blood comes, give it to her and tell her it is from me. To remember me by, my husband. To remember her mother who didn’t have enough strength to.’ And she began to cough. ‘Promise me you will,’ she insisted.
‘I promise, my wife.’
The midwife came back into the room and said she needs to rest. Azizzadeh shook his head and went back to the shop because he had to supervise the unloading of the delivery of pistachios and walnuts that had just arrived from Lebanon. But even if it had been engraved on tablets like the law of the infidel sons of Mūsa who call themselves the chosen people, Azizzadeh would never have believed the sad end lovely Amani would meet in fifteen years’ time, praise be the merciful Lord.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘You see, see how you’re always somewhere else?’
They took the train back to Barcelona and arrived on Wednesday: Laura missed two classes for the first time in her life and without prior notice. Dr Bastardes, who must have sensed many things, didn’t reproach her for it. And I, after the Roman operation, already knew that I would be able to devote my life to studying what I wished and teaching a few classes, just enough to maintain a presence in the academic world. It seemed that, apart from my romantic problems, the sky was clear. Even though I hadn’t come across any juicy manuscripts lately.
29
Adrià had got a weight off his shoulders, with the help of his aloof mother who had considered his inability to handle practical matters and had watched over her son from the other side, the way every mother in the world except mine does. Just thinking of it gets me emotional and calculating that perhaps in some moment Mother did love me. Now I know for sure that Father once admired me; but I am convinced that he never loved me. I was one more object in his magnificent collection. And that one more object returned from Rome to his house with the intention of putting it in order, since he had been living too long stumbling into the unopened boxes of books that had come from Germany. He turned on the light and there was light. And he called Bernat to come over and help him to plan this ideal order, as if Bernat were Plato and he Pericles, and the flat in the Eixample the bustling city of Athens. And thus the two wise men decided that into the study would go the manuscripts, the incunabula that he would buy, the delicate objects, the books of the fathers, the records, the scores and the most commonly used dictionaries, and they divided the waters from below from those above and the firmament was made with its clouds, separate from the sea waters. In his parents’ bedroom, which he had managed to make his own, they found a place for the poetry and music books, and they separated the lower waters so that there was a dry place, and they gave that dry spot the name earth, and they called the waters ocean seas. In his childhood bedroom, beside Sheriff Carson and valiant Black Eagle, who kept constant watch from the bedside table, they emptied out, without a second glance, all the shelves of books that had accompanied him as a child and there they put the history books, from the birth of memory to the present day. And geography as well, and the earth began to have trees and seeds that germinated and sprouted grasses and flowers.
