Confessions

by Jaume Cabré

  ‘Nietzsche. The first five pages of Die Geburt der Tragödie, which means the rupture of tragedy.’

  ‘The birth.’

  ‘That’s what I meant.’

  ‘Where do you get so many first pages?’

  ‘The entire manuscript would be unattainable.’

  ‘You mean that someone chops them up to …’ Horrified, ‘And what if I want more? What if I want the whole book?’

  ‘First we’d have to hear the price. But I think it’s best to start with what we have on hand. Are you interested?’

  ‘Indeed!’

  ‘You already know the price.’

  ‘That much less this much.’

  ‘No. That much.’

  ‘Well, then less this much.’

  ‘We could start to negotiate there.’

  ‘How.’

  ‘Not now, goddamn it!’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘No, no, talking to myself. Do we have a deal?’

  Adrià Ardèvol paid that much less this much and he left with the first five pages of the Nietzsche as well as the pressing need to talk to Morral again about acquiring the complete manuscript, if they even really had it. And he thought that perhaps it was the moment to ask Mr Sagrera how much money he had left to know whether Carson and Black Eagle’s hand wringing was founded or not. But Sagrera would tell him that he had to invest: that keeping it in the savings account was a shame.

  ‘I don’t know what I can do with it.’

  ‘Buy flats.’

  ‘Flats?’

  ‘Yes. And paint. I mean paintings.’

  ‘But … I buy manuscripts.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  He would show him the collection. Mr Sagrera would examine them with his nose wrinkled and, after deep reflection, would conclude that it was very risky.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They are fragile. They could get gnawed on by rats or those silvery insects.’

  ‘I don’t have rats. Little Lola deals with the silverfish.’

  ‘How.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Caterina.’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘I insist: if you buy a flat, you are buying something solid that will never go down in price.’

  As if wanting to spare himself that conversation, Adrià Ardèvol didn’t talk to Mr Sagrera about flats or rats. Nor about the money spent on silverfish food.

  A few nights later I cried again, but not over love. Or yes: it was over love. In the letter box at home there was a notification from someone named Calaf, a notary in Barcelona, a man I’d never met, and I soon thought of problems with the sale of the shop, some sort of problems with the family, because I’ve always distrusted notaries even though I am now acting as a notary of a life that belongs to me increasingly less and less. Where was I: oh, yes, the notary Calaf, a stranger who kept me waiting for half and hour with no explanation in a very drab little room. Thirty minutes later he came into the drab little room, making no apologies for his delay. He didn’t look me in the eyes, he stroked a small thick white beard and asked me to show him my ID card. He gave it back to me with an expression I interpreted as one of displeasure, of disappointment.

  ‘Mrs Maria Dolors Carrió has named you to receive a part of her estate.’

  Me, inheriting something from Little Lola? She was a millionaire and she’d worked as a maid her whole life and, moreover, in a family like mine? My God.

  ‘And what am I to inherit?’

  The notary looked at me somewhat aslant; surely he didn’t like me at all: but my heart was still upset about Paris, with that I remade my life, Adrià, and the closing door, and I couldn’t give a hoot about what the entire association of notaries thought of me. The notary again stroked his little beard, shook his head and read the writing before him, in an exceedingly nasal voice: ‘A painting by someone named Modest Urgell, dated eighteen ninety-nine.’

  Little Lola, you are even more stubborn than I am.

  Once the formalities were over and the taxes paid, Adrià once again hung the Urgell, the painting of the Santa Maria de Gerri monastery, on the wall that he hadn’t wanted to cover with any other painting or any bookshelves. The light of the sun setting over Trespui still illuminated it with a certain sadness. Adrià pulled out a chair from the dining room table and sat in it. He was there for a long time, looking at the painting, as if he wanted to watch the sun’s slow movement. When he returned from the monastery of Santa Maria de Gerri, he burst into tears.

  33

  The university, the classes, being able to live inside the world of books … His great joy was discovering an unexpected book in his home library. And the solitude didn’t weigh on him because all his time was occupied. The two books he had published had been harshly reviewed by their few readers. A vitriolic comment on the second book appeared in El Correo Catalán and Adrià clipped it out and saved it in a file. Deep down he was proud of having provoked strong emotions. Anyway, he contemplated it all with indifference because his real pains were others and also because he knew that he was just getting started. Every once in a while, I played my beloved Storioni, mostly so its voice wouldn’t fade out; and also to learn the stories that had left scars on its skin. Sometimes I even went back to Mrs Trullols’s technical exercises and I missed her a little bit. What must have happened to everyone and everything. What must have become of Trullols …

  ‘She died,’ said Bernat one day, now that they were seeing each other again occasionally. ‘And you should get married,’ he added as if were Grandfather Ardèvol arranging nuptials in Tona.

  ‘Did she die a long time ago?’

  ‘It’s not good for you to be alone.’

  ‘I’m fine on my own. I spend the day reading and studying. And playing the violin and the piano. Every once in a while I buy myself a treat at Can Múrria, some cheese, foie gras or wine. What more could I want? Little Lola takes care of the mundane things.’

  ‘Caterina.’

  ‘Yes, Caterina.’

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘It’s what I wanted to do.’

  ‘And fucking?’

  Fucking, bah. It was the heart. That was why he had fallen hopelessly in love with twenty-three students and two faculty colleagues, but he hadn’t made much progress because … well, except for with Laura who, well, who …

  ‘What did Trullols die of?’

  Bernat got up and gestured to the cabinet. Adrià raised one hand to say help yourself. And Bernat played a diabolical csárdás that made even the manuscripts dance and then a sweet little waltz, slightly sugary but very well played.

  ‘It sounds marvellous,’ said Adrià admiringly. And grabbing Vial, a bit jealous: ‘Some day when you are playing in chamber, you should borrow it.’

  ‘Too much responsibility.’

  ‘So? What did you want, that was so urgent?’

  Bernat wanted me to read a story he had written and I sensed we would have more problems.

  ‘I can’t stop writing. Even though you always tell me I should give it up.’

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘But I’m afraid that you’re right.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That what I write has no soul.’

  ‘Why doesn’t it?’

  ‘If I knew that …’

  ‘Maybe it’s because it’s not your medium of expression.’

  Then Bernat took the violin from me and played Sarasate’s Caprice basque, with six or seven flagrant errors. And when he finished he said you see, the violin isn’t my medium of expression.

  ‘You made those mistakes on purpose. I know you, kid.’

  ‘I could never be a soloist.’

  ‘You don’t need to be. You are a musician, you play the violin, you earn a living doing it. What more do you want, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘I want to earn appreciation and admiration, not a living. And playing as assistant concertmaster I’ll never leave a lasting impression.’

  ‘T
he orchestra leaves a lasting impression.’

  ‘I want to be a soloist.’

  ‘You can’t! You just said so yourself.’

  ‘That’s why I want to write: a writer is always a soloist.’

  ‘I don’t think that should be the great motivation for creating literature.’

  ‘It’s my motivation.’

  So I had to keep the story, which was actually a story collection, and I read it and after a few days I told him that perhaps the third one is the best, the one about the travelling salesman.

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Well. Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t find any soul or any such shite?’

  ‘No soul or any such shite. But you already know that!’

  ‘You’re just bitter because they rip apart what you write. Even though I like it, eh?’

  From that declaration of principles, and for a long time after, Bernat didn’t pester Adrià with his writing again. He had published three books of short stories that hadn’t shaken up the Catalan literary world and probably hadn’t shaken up a single reader either. And instead of being happy with the orchestra he sought out a way to be a tad bitter. And here I am giving lessons on how to attain happiness. As if I were some sort of a specialist. As if happiness were a required course.

  The class had been pretty regular, leaning towards good. He had talked about music in the time of Leibniz. He had transported them to Leibniz’s Hannover and he had played music by Buxtehude for them, specifically the variation for spinet of the aria ‘La Capricciosa’ (BuxWV 250) and he asked them to see if they could remember a later work (not much later, eh?) of a more famous musician. Silence. Adrià stood up, rewound the cassette and let them listen to another minute of Trevor Pinnock’s spinet.

  ‘Do you know what work I am referring to?’ Silence. ‘No?’ he asked.

  Some students looked out of the window. Others stared at their notes. One girl shook her head. To help them, he spoke of Lübeck in that period and again said no? And then he drastically lowered the bar and said come on: if you can’t tell me the work, at least tell me the composer. Then a student he’d barely noticed before, sitting in one of the middle rows, without raising his hand said Johann Sebastian Bach?, like that, with a question mark, and Adrià said bravo! And the work has a similar structure. A theme, the one I played twice for you, that is reminiscent of the development of a variation … Do you know what? For next Wednesday’s class try to find out the work I’m talking about. And try to listen to it a couple of times.

  ‘And if we can’t guess which one it is?’ The girl who had shaken her head before.

  ‘It is number 998 in his catalogue. Happy now? Any more hints?’

  Despite the bar lowering I had to do, I would have liked the classes of that period to have each lasted five hours. I would have also liked it if the students were always deeply interested in everything and posed questions that forced me to ask for more time so I could have my reply prepared for the next class. But Adrià had to settle for what he had. The students went down the tiered seats to the exit door. All except the one who’d guessed the right answer, who remained seated on the bench. Adrià, as he removed the cassette, said I don’t think I’ve noticed you before. Since the other didn’t respond, he looked up and realised that the young man was smiling in silence.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I’m not one of your students.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here?’

  ‘Listening to you. Don’t you recognise me?’

  He got up and came down, without a briefcase or notes, to the professor’s dais. Adrià had already put all the papers into his briefcase and now added the cassette tape.

  ‘No. Should I recognise you?’

  ‘Well … Technically, you are my uncle.’

  ‘I’m your uncle?’

  ‘Tito Carbonell,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘We saw each other in Rome, at my mother’s house, when you sold her the shop.’

  Now he remembered him: a silent teenager with thick eyebrows, who snooped behind the doors, and had become a handsome young man of confident gestures.

  Adrià asked how is your mother, he said well, she sends her regards, and soon the conversation languished. Then came the question, ‘Why did you come to this class?’

  ‘I wanted to know you better before making my offer.’

  ‘What offer?’

  Tito made sure that no one else was in the classroom and then he said I want to buy the Storioni.

  Adrià looked at him in surprise. He was slow to react.

  ‘It’s not for sale,’ he finally said.

  ‘When you hear the offer, you’ll put it up for sale.’

  ‘I don’t want to sell it. I’m not listening to offers.’

  ‘Two hundred thousand pesetas.’

  ‘I said it’s not for sale.’

  ‘Two hundred thousand pesetas is a lot of money.’

  ‘Not even if you offered me twice that.’ He brought his face close to the young man’s. ‘It-is-not-for-sale.’ He straightened up. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Perfectly. Two million pesetas.’

  ‘Do you even listen when people speak to you?’

  ‘With two million clams you can lead a comfortable life, without having to teach people who have no fucking clue about music.’

  ‘Tito, is that what you said your name was?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tito: no.’

  He picked up his briefcase and prepared to leave. Tito Carbonell didn’t budge. Perhaps Adrià was expecting him to prevent him from leaving. Seeing that his path was clear, he turned around.

  ‘Why are you so interested in it?’

  ‘For the shop.’

  ‘Aha. And why doesn’t your mother make me the offer?’

  ‘She isn’t involved in these things.’

  ‘Aha. What you mean is that she doesn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Call it what you wish, Professor Ardèvol.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-six,’ he lied, although I didn’t know that until much later.

  ‘And you are conspiring outside the shop?’

  ‘Two million one hundred thousand pesetas, final offer.’

  ‘Your mother should be informed about this.’

  ‘Two and a half million.’

  ‘You don’t listen when people talk to you, do you?’

  ‘I’d like to know why you don’t want to sell it …’

  Adrià opened his mouth and closed it again. He didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t know why he didn’t want to sell Vial, that violin that had rubbed elbows with so much tragedy but which I had grown accustomed to playing, more and more hours each day. Perhaps because of the things that Father had told me about it; perhaps because of the stories I imagined when I touched its wood … Sara, sometimes, just running a finger over the violin’s skin, I am transported to the period when that wood was a tree that never even imagined it would one day take the shape of a violin, of a Storioni, of Vial. It’s not an excuse, but Vial was some sort of window onto the imagination. If Sara were here, if I saw her every day … perhaps everything would be different … obviously if … if only I had sold it to Tito then, even for twenty lousy pesetas. But I still couldn’t even suspect that then.

  ‘Eh?’ said Tito Carbonell, impatiently. ‘Why don’t you want to sell it?’

  ‘I’m afraid that is none of your business.’

  I left the classroom with a cold sensation on the nape of my neck, as if I were waiting for the treacherous shot any minute. Tito Carbonell didn’t shoot me in the back and I felt the thrill of having survived.

  39

  It had been a couple of millennia since the Creation of the World according to the Decimal System, when he’d distributed the books throughout the house, although he hadn’t made real inroads into his father’s study. Adrià had devoted the third drawer of the manuscript table to some of his father’s unclassifiable
documents, conveniently separated into envelopes, which had no relationship to the shop nor space in the registry system, because Mr Ardèvol kept another separate one for the valuable documents that he kept for himself, which was his way of starting to enjoy the objects that he had tracked over days or sometimes years. In the library everything was organised. Almost everything. All that was left to classify were the unclassifiable documents; they were all gathered, relegated to the third drawer with the sincere promise that he would take a look at them when he had some time. A few years passed in which it seems Adrià didn’t have the time.

  Among the various papers in the third drawer, there was some correspondence. It was strange that a man as meticulous as Father had considered his correspondence as unclassifiable material and hadn’t left a copy of the letters he wrote; he had only kept the ones he received. They were in a couple of old folders filled to bursting. There were replies from someone named Morlin to demands from Father that I assume were professional. There were five very strange letters, written in impeccable Latin, filled with hard to understand allusions, from a priest named Gradnik. He was from Ljubljana, and went on and on about the unbearable crisis of faith that had gripped him for years. From what he said he had been a fellow student with Father at the Gregoriana and he urgently asked for his opinion on theological questions. The last letter had a different tone. It was dated in the year 1941 from Jesenice and began by saying it is very likely that this letter won’t reach you, but I can’t stop writing to you; you are the only one who has always answered me, even when I was most alone, serving as rector and sexton in the snow and ice of a little town near Kamnik whose name I have tried to forget. This may be my last letter because it is very likely that I will die any minute now. I hung up my cassock a year ago. There is no woman involved. It’s all due to the fact that I lost my faith. I’ve lost it drop by drop; it just slipped through my fingers. I’m the one responsible: confiteor. Since the last time I wrote to you, and after your words of encouragement that inspired me tremendously, I can tell you more objectively. Gradually, I realised that what I was doing made no sense. You had to choose between a love that was impossible to resist and the life of a priest. I have yet to come across any woman who makes me swoon. All my problems are mental. It has been a year since my big decision. Today, with all of Europe at war, I know that I was right. Nothing makes sense, God doesn’t exist and man must defend himself as best he can from the ravages of time. Look, dear friend: I am so sure of this step I’ve taken, completed only a few weeks ago: I have enlisted in the people’s army. In short, I traded my cassock for a rifle. I am more useful trying to save my people from Evil. My doubts have vanished, dear Ardèvol. I have been talking for years about Evil, the Archfiend, the Devil … and I was unable to understand the nature of Evil. I tried to examine the evil of guilt, the evil of grief, metaphysical evil, physical evil, absolute evil and relative evil and, above all, the efficient cause of evil. And after so much studying, after going over it again and again, it turned out that I had to hear the confession of the lay sisters in my parish, confessing to the horrible sin of not having been strict enough in their fasting from midnight to taking Communion. My God, my gut was telling me it can’t be, it can’t be, Drago: you are losing your reason for being, if what you want is to be useful to humanity. I realised everything when a mother told me how can God allow my little daughter to die in such pain, Father; why didn’t God intervene to stop it? And I had no reply and I found myself giving her a sermon on the efficient cause of Evil, until I grew silent, ashamed, and I asked for her forgiveness and I told her I didn’t know. I told her I don’t know, Andreja, forgive me but I don’t know. Perhaps this will make you laugh, dear Fèlix Ardèvol, you who write me long letters defending the selfish cynicism your life has become, according to you. I was once choked with doubts because I was defenceless in the face of my tears; but no longer. I know where Evil is. Absolute Evil, even. Its name is Himmler. Its name is Hitler. Its name is Pavelić. It is Luburić and his macabre invention in Jasenovac. Its name is Schutzstaffel and Abwehr. The war highlights the most beastly part of human nature. But Evil existed before the war and doesn’t depend on any entelechy, but rather on people. That is why my inseparable companion for the last few weeks has been a rifle with a telescopic sight because the commander’s decided that I’m a good shot. We will soon enter combat. Then I will blow Evil up bit by bit with every bullet and it doesn’t upset me to think about that. As long as it is a Nazi, an Ustaša or, simply, and may God forgive me, an enemy soldier in my sights. Evil uses Fear and absolute Cruelty. I suppose to ensure that we are filled with rage, the commanders tell us horrifying things about the enemy and we all are eager to find ourselves face to face with him. One day I will kill a man and I hope to not feel sorry about it at all. I’ve joined a group filled with Serbians who live in Croatian towns but have had to flee from the Ustaša; there are four of us Slovenians and some of the many Croatians who believe in freedom. I still don’t have any military rank, some people call me sergeant because I’m easy to spot: I’m as tall and stocky as ever. And the Slovenians call me Father because one day I got drunk and must have talked too much; I deserve it. I am ready to kill before being killed. I don’t feel any sort of remorse; I don’t worry about what I’m doing. I’ll probably die in some skirmish now. I hear that the German army is advancing towards the south. We all know that any military operation inevitably leaves behind a trail of dead, on our side as well. Here at war we avoid making friends: we are all one because we all depend on each other, and I cry over the death of the man who yesterday ate breakfast by my side but whose name I didn’t get the chance to ask. All right, I’ll take off my mask: I’m terrified of killing someone. I don’t know if I’ll be able to. But Evil is specific people. I hope to be brave and I hope I’ll be able to pull the trigger without my heart trembling too much.