by Jaume Cabré
It was the next day, after Lauds, when they told him to wait, seated on a hard bench, in a corner of the wide, well-lit corridor. The German words, scant and respectful, of the nurse brother had echoed in his ears like cruel orders. The nurse monk, Brother Müss’s assistant, accompanied by the nurse brother from Achel, disappeared behind a door. They must want a report first. They left him alone, with all his fears, and then Brother Müss had him enter the silent office and they sat with a table between them and he begged him, in quite good Dutch, to explain his torment to him, and Brother Robert scrutinised his eyes and found that his gaze was sweet and then the pain exploded and he started to say because imagine that you are at home having lunch, with your wife, mother-in-law and three little daughters, your mother-in-law with a bit of a chest cold, the new blue-and-white chequered tablecloth, because it’s your eldest’s birthday, little Amelietje. And after saying that Brother Robert didn’t stop talking for an entire hour without taking a breath, without asking for a glass of water, without lifting his gaze from the polished table and without noticing Brother Eugen Müss’s sad expression. And when he had explained the whole story, he added that that was why he went through life with his head bowed, crying over my cowardice and searching for some way to make amends for my evil until I had the idea of hiding there where the memory could never reach me. I had to return to speaking with God and I sought out entrance into a Carthusian monastery, where they counselled me that what I was attempting was not a good idea. From that day on I lied and at the other two places where I knocked on the door I didn’t mention the reasons for my pain or express it. In each new interview, I learned what I had to say and what I had to keep quiet, so that when I knocked on the door of Saint Benedict’s Abbey in Achel I already knew that no one would put up obstacles to my belated vocation and I begged, if obedience didn’t demand otherwise, that they let me live there and fulfil the humblest tasks in the monastery. Ever since that day I again began speaking, a bit, with God and I have learned to get the cows to listen to me.
Doctor Müss took his hand. They were like that, in silence, for perhaps ten or twenty minutes; and then Brother Robert began to breathe somewhat more calmly and he said after years of silence at the monastery, the memory came back to blow up inside my head.
‘You have to be prepared for it to blow up every once in a while, Brother Robert.’
‘I can’t bear it.’
‘Yes, you can; with God’s help.’
‘God doesn’t exist.’
‘You are a Trappist monk, Brother Robert. Are you trying to shock me?’
‘I ask for forgiveness from God, but I don’t understand his designs. Why, if God is love …’
‘What will maintain you, as a man, is knowing that you would never have caused any evil such as the one that corrodes your spirit. Like the one that was inflicted on you.’
‘Not on me: on Truu, Amelia, little Julietje, my Berta and my coughing mother-in-law.’
‘You are right: but they also did harm to you. The heroic man is he who gives back good when he has been done wrong.’
‘If I had here in front of me those responsible for …’ He sobbed. ‘I don’t know what I would do, Father. I swear I don’t believe I’d be capable of forgiving them …’
Brother Eugen Müss was writing something on a small sheet of paper. Brother Robert looked into his eyes and the other gazed back, like that moment when Doctor Müss told the journalist that he had no time to waste and, without knowing it, looked towards the lens of the hidden camera with that same gaze. And then Matthias Alpaerts understood that he had to go to Bebenbeleke, wherever it was, to re-encounter that gaze that had been able to calm him because the memories had once again blown up inside his head a few days earlier.
The first thing you find, when you arrive in Bebenbeleke, is that there is no town with that name. That’s just the name of the hospital, which is in the middle of nowhere, many miles north of Kikwit, many miles south of Yumbu-Yumbu, and a good distance from Kikongo and Beleke. The hospital is surrounded by cabins that some patients had built in the shelter of the hospital and that, unofficially, serve as lodgings for the relatives of the ill when they require a stay of several days and that, gradually, generated new cabins, some of which began to be inhabited by people with little or no relationship to the hospital and, over the years, would make up the town of Bebenbeleke. Doctor Müss had no problem with it. And the hens that lived tranquilly around the hospital and, even though they weren’t allowed, often also inside it. Bebenbeleke is a town made of pain, because half a kilometre from the hospital, towards Djilo, after the white rock, there is the cemetery for patients who were unable to recover. The indicator of Doctor Müss’s failures.
‘I left the order after a few months,’ said Matthias Alpaerts. I went in thinking it was the remedy and I left convinced that it was the best remedy. But within the monastery or outside of it, the memories remained fresh.
Doctor Müss had him sit on the green bench, still untainted by blood, beside the entrance and he took his hand the way he had thirty years earlier in the consultation room at the Mariawald Abbey.
‘Thank you for wanting to help me, Brother Müss,’ said Matthias Alpaerts.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t have helped more.’
‘You helped me a lot, Brother Müss. Now I am prepared and, when the memories explode, I am better able to defend myself against them.’
‘Does it happen often?’
‘More than I’d like, Brother Müss. Because …’
‘Don’t call me brother; I’m no longer a monk,’ interrupted Doctor Müss. ‘Shortly after our meeting I asked for dispensation from Rome.’
The silence of former Brother Robert was eloquent, and former Brother Müss had to break it and reply that he had abandoned the order out of a desire for penitence and, God forgive me, firmly thinking that I could be more useful doing good among the needy than locking myself up to pray the hours.
‘I understand.’
‘I have nothing against monastic life: it was about my temperament and my superiors understood that.’
‘You are a saint, out here in this desert.’
‘This is no desert. And I’m no saint. I am a doctor, a former monk, and I just practise medicine. And I try to heal the wounds of evil.’
‘What stalks me is evil.’
‘I know. But I can only fight against evils.’
‘I want to stay and help you.’
‘You are too old. You are over seventy, aren’t you?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I can be helpful.’
‘Impossible.’
Doctor Müss’s tone had suddenly turned curt with that reply. As if the other man had deeply offended him. Matthias Alpaerts’s hands began to tremble and he hid them in his pockets so the doctor wouldn’t notice.
‘How long have they been trembling like that?’ Doctor Müss pointed to his hidden hands and Matthias stifled an expression of displeasure. He held out his hands in front of him; they were trembling excessively.
‘When the memories explode inside me. Sometimes I think it’s not possible for them to shake so much against my will.’
‘You won’t be useful to me, with that trembling.’
Matthias Alpaerts looked him in the eye; the commentary was, at the very least, cruel.
‘I can be useful in many different ways,’ he said, offended. ‘Digging the garden, for example. In the Achel monastery I learned to work the land.’
‘Brother Robert … Matthias … Don’t insist. You have to return home.’
‘I have no home. Here I can be useful.’
‘No.’
‘I don’t accept your refusal.’
Then Brother Müss took Matthias Alpaerts by one arm and brought him to dinner. Like every evening, there was only a sticky mass of millet, which the doctor heated up on a little burner. They sat down right there in the office, using the doctor’s desk as a dining room table. And Doctor Müss opened up a small cabinet to
pull out two plates and Matthias watched him hide something, perhaps a dirty rag, behind some plastic cups. As they ate without appetite, the doctor explained why he couldn’t possibly stay there to help him as an improvised nurse nor as a gardener nor as a cook nor as a farmhand who didn’t know how to bear fruits without sweating blood.
At midnight, when everyone was sleeping, Matthias Alpaerts’s hands didn’t tremble as he went into Doctor Müss’s office. He opened the small cabinet near the window and, with the help of a small torch, he found what he was looking for. He examined the rag in the scant, uncertain light. For a very long minute he hesitated because he didn’t quite recognise it. All his trembling was focused on his heart, which struggled to escape through his throat. When he heard a cock crow, he made up his mind and put the rag back in its place. He felt an itching in his fingers, the same itching that Fèlix Ardèvol felt or that I was starting to feel when an object of my desires was slipping out of my grasp. Itching and trembling in the tips of his fingers. Even though Matthias Alpaerts’s illness was different from ours.
He left before the sun came up, with the van that came from Kikongo and brought medicines and foodstuffs, and a sprinkling of hope for the ill in that extensive area that dipped its feet in the Kwilu.
32
I came back from Paris with my head bowed and my tail between my legs. In that period Adrià Ardèvol was teaching a course on the history of contemporary thought to a numerous audience of relatively sceptical students despite his reputation as a surly-sage-who-does-his-own-thing-and-doesn’t-go-out-for-coffee-ever-and-wants-nothing-to-do-with-faculty-meetings-because-he’s-above-good-and-evil that he had started to have among his colleagues at the Universitat de Barcelona. And the relative prestige of having published, almost secretly, La revolució francesa and Marx?, two fairly provocative little books that had started to earn him admirers and detractors. The days in Paris had devastated him and he had no desire to talk about Adorno because he couldn’t care less about anything.
I hadn’t thought about you again, Little Lola, because my head was filled with Sara. Not until some obscure relative called to tell me my cousin is dead and she left some addresses of people she wanted to be notified. She added the information of the place and time and we exchanged various words of courtesy and condolence.
At the funeral there were about twenty people. I vaguely remembered three or four faces, but I couldn’t greet anyone, not even the obscure cousin. Dolors Carrió i Solegibert ‘Little Lola’ (1910–1982), born and died in the Barceloneta, mother’s friend, a good woman, who screwed me over because Little Lola’s only real family was Mother. And she was probably her lover. I wasn’t able to say goodbye to you with the affection that, despite everything, you deserved.
‘Hey, hey, but that was what, twenty years ago, that you broke up?’
‘Come on, not twenty! And we didn’t break up: they broke us up.’
‘She must already have grandchildren.’
‘Why do you think I’ve never looked for another woman?’
‘The truth is I have no idea.’
‘I’ll explain it to you: every day, well, almost every day, when I go to sleep, you know what I think?’
‘No.’
‘I think now the bell is going to ring, ding dong.’
‘Your bell goes rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs.’
‘All right: rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs, and I open it and it’s Sara saying that she left because of something or another and asking do you want me in your life again, Adrià.’
‘Hey, hey, kid, don’t cry. And now you don’t have to think about her any more. You see? In a way it’s better, don’t you think?’
Bernat felt uncomfortable in the face of Adrià’s rare expansiveness.
He pointed to the cabinet and Adrià shrugged, which Bernat interpreted as go ahead. He pulled out Vial and he played him a couple of Telemann’s fantasies, at the end of which I felt better, thank you, Bernat, my dear friend.
‘If you want to cry more, go ahead and cry, eh?’
‘Thanks for giving me permission,’ smiled Adrià.
‘You are delicate, fragile.’
‘It devastated me that my two mothers conspired against our love and we just fell right into their trap.’
‘All right. The two mothers are dead and you can keep on …’
‘I can keep on what?’
‘I don’t know. I meant …’
‘I envy your emotional stability.’
‘Don’t be fooled.’
‘Yes, yes. You and Tecla, wham bam.’
‘I can’t get Llorenç to understand anything.’
‘How old is he?’
‘He’s the soul of contradiction.’
‘He doesn’t want to study violin?’
‘How did you know?’
‘I’ve heard that old song and dance somewhere before.’
Adrià was pensive for a while. He shook his head: I think life is a botched job, he said, in conclusion. And, like someone who takes up the bottle, he went to the Sant Antoni market on Sunday to relax and he contrived a way to bump into Morral at his stand, who signalled for Adrià to follow him. This time they were the first ten pages of the Goncourt brothers’ manuscript of Renée Mauperin, written in a uniform hand – with a few corrections in the margin – that Morral assured me was Jules’s.
‘Are you knowledgeable about literature?’
‘I sell things: books, trading cards, manuscripts and Bazooka chewing gum, you know what I mean?’
‘But where in the hell do you get it from?’
‘The chewing gum?’
Sly Morral didn’t tell me his methods. His silence ensured his safety and guaranteed that his mediation was always necessary.
I bought the Goncourt pages. And, in the following few weeks, as if they’d been waiting for me, manuscripts and loose pages appeared by Orwell, Huxley and Pavese. Adrià bought them all, despite his theoretical reticence to buying for buying’s sake. But he couldn’t let the eighth of February of he wasn’t sure which year of Il mestiere di vivere slip through his hands, a loose page that spoke of Guttoso’s wife, and of the hope of living with a woman who waits for you, who will sleep beside you and keep you warm and be your companion and make you feel alive, my Sara, which I don’t have and never will. How could I say no to that page? And I’m sure that Morral noticed my trembling and, depending on its intensity, upped the price. I am convinced that it is very difficult to resist possessing the original pages of texts that have moved you deeply. The paper with the handwriting, the gesture, the ink, which is the material element that incarnates the spiritual idea which will eventually become the work of art or the work of universal thought; the text enters the reader and transforms him. It is impossible to say no to that miracle. Which is why I didn’t think it over long when Morral, as an intermediary, introduced me to a man whose name I never knew, who was selling two poems by Ungaretti at ridiculous prices: Soldati and San Martino del Carso, the poem that speaks of a town reduced to ruins by war and not by the passing of time. È il mio cuore il paese più straziato. And mine as well, dear Ungaretti. What melancholy, what grief, what joy to own the piece of paper the author used to convert his first intuition into a work of art. And I paid what he asked, almost without haggling, and then Adrià heard a curt spitting on the ground and he looked around.
‘What, Carson.’
‘How. I have something to say, too.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘We have a problem,’ they both said at the same time.
‘What’s that?’
‘Don’t you realise?’
‘I don’t want to realise.’
‘Have you looked at how much you’ve spent on manuscripts these last few years?’
‘I love Sara and she left because our mothers tricked her.’
‘You can’t do anything about that. She has remade her life.’
‘Another whisky, please. Make it a double.’
‘Do you know how much you’ve spe
nt?’
‘No.’
The buzzing of an office calculator. I don’t know if it was the valiant Arapaho chief or the coarse cowboy who was using it. A few seconds of silence until they told me the scandalous amount of money that
‘All right, all right, I’ll stop. That’s it. Are you happy now?’
‘Look, doctor,’ said Morral another day. ‘A Nietzsche.’
‘A Nietzsche?’
‘Five pages of Die Geburt der Tragödie. I don’t know what that means, by the way.’
‘The birth of tragedy.’
‘That’s what I suspected,’ Morral, with a toothpick in his mouth because it was after lunch.
Instead of sounding like a foreboding title to me, I looked at the five pages carefully for about an hour, and then Adrià lifted his head and exclaimed but where in the hell do you get these things from? For the first time, Morral answered the question:
‘Contacts.’
‘Sure. Contacts …’
‘Yes. Contacts. If there are buyers, the manuscripts sprout up like mushrooms. Especially if you can guarantee the authenticity of the merchandise the way we can.’
‘Who is this we?’
‘Are you interested or not?’
‘How much?’
‘This much.’
‘That much?’
‘That much.’
‘Bloody hell.’
But the tingling, the itching in the fingers and in the intellect.
