by Jaume Cabré
I am writing to you from a Slovenian town called Jesenice. I will put a stamp on it as if we weren’t at war. And I will take it in our lorry, which is filled with bags of mail today because until the conflict really starts, they want to keep us busy doing useful things. But I will entrust this letter to Jančar, who is the only person capable of getting it to you. May the God I no longer believe in assist him. Please answer to the sub-post office in Maribor, as always. If they don’t kill me, I’ll be anxiously awaiting your reply. I feel so alone, dear Fèlix Ardèvol. Death is cold and I shiver more and more. Your friend, Drago Gradnik, former priest, former theologian, who has renounced a brilliant career in the episcopal curia of Ljubljana and perhaps even in Rome. Your friend who is now a partisan rifleman on the front lines and who is impatient to blow off the head of the roots of Evil.
There were also replies from eight or ten antiquarians, collectors and vintage dealers from all over Europe to specific requests from Father. And a couple of letters from Doctor Wuang of Shanghai, which assured, in shaky English, that the happy manuscript (without further references) had never been in his hands and that he wished him a long happy life and prosperity in business and increasing happy wealth in his personal relationships, both familial and romantic. I felt Doctor Wuang was referring to me. And many other documents of all sorts.
One boring, rainy afternoon, when I’d finished grading exams and had no desire to think about the philosophy of language, I decided to be bored at home, without reading, mouth agape. The theatrical offerings were slim; I wasn’t in the mood for a musical, and it had been so many years since I’d set foot in a cinema that I wasn’t sure they were still making colour films. So I yawned and thought that it was a good moment to finally organise Father’s papers. So, after having placed the Tetralogia on the record player, I got to it. The first thing I pulled out was one of the letters from Morlin, who lived in Rome and appeared to be a priest, even though I didn’t know that yet. That was when I felt a desire to clarify certain moments in Father’s life. For no particular reason, not thinking that it would clarify his death, but because every time I looked into his personal papers I found some small surprise that stirred something in me. Perhaps that is why I’ve been tirelessly writing to you for so many weeks, in a way I’ve never done before in my life. It is clear that the hound on my heels will soon catch up to me. Perhaps that’s why I am putting together scraps of memory that, when the moment comes, will be very difficult to organise into anything presentable. In short, I continued with the selection. During a couple of hours, with the introduction still on in the background (we were at the point when Wotan and Loge, enraged, steal the ring and the Nibelung utters the terrible curse that will befall those who put it on their finger), I organised the correspondence and some drawings, which I assumed Father had made, of various objects. And I found, after a good long hour and a half – at the point where Brünnhilde disobeys Wotan and helps poor Sieglinde escape – a text in Hebrew on two yellowed pages of a size not commonly used any more, written in ink by a hand I recognised as my father’s. In it I was hoping to find one of the thousand things that had aroused his curiosity and, when I began to read it, I thought that it was my rusty Hebrew that was hampering a comfortable reading of the text. After five fruitless minutes, with various useless dictionary consultations, the surprise came. It wasn’t written in Hebrew, but in Aramaic camouflaged in the Hebrew alphabet. It was strange to read because I’m more used to Aramaic in the Syriac alphabet. But it was all just a question of making an effort. About a minute later I had figured out two things: first that Doctor Gombreny did her job because my Aramaic was decent; and second, that it wasn’t a copy of an ancient text but rather a letter that my father had written to me. To me! My father who, in life, had perhaps addressed me directly only fifty times, and almost always to say bloody hell what are you shouting for, had written a text to his ignored son. And I learned that Father’s Aramaic was much better than mine. Then, when I had almost read the whole thing, Siegfried, Sieglinde’s enterprising son, with that cruelty heroes have, kills the Nibelung Mime, who had raised him, to keep him from betraying him. The forest of the heroes, the text in Aramaic, it all enjoined blood. I was surrounded by blood. Adrià, immersed in the text, without seeing it, thinking about the terrible things he had read, let the record spin on the platter for a long half hour before turning it over. As if the characters were repeating their movements ad infinitum, accompanied only by the slight crackling of the needle. He was stunned, like Siegfried, by the revelation. Because the letter read My beloved son Adrià. I am writing you this secret with the uncertain hope that some day, many years from now, you will know what happened. Most likely this letter will be lost among the papers and consumed by the voracious silverfish who always haunt those who keep libraries of old books. If you are reading this it’s because you’ve saved my papers, and you have done what I set out for you: you have learned Hebrew and Aramaic. And if you have learned Hebrew and Aramaic, Son, then you are the type of scholar I imagined you would become. And I will have won out over your mother, who wants to turn you into an effete violinist. (Actually, in Aramaic it said effete rebec player, but my father’s nasty swipe was clear.) I want you to know that if you are reading this it is because I was unable to return home to destroy it. I don’t know if my death will be officially ruled an accident, but I want you to know I was murdered and that my killer is named Aribert Voigt, a former Nazi doctor who took part in brutalities which I will spare you here. He wanted to get back the Storioni violin, which was underhandedly taken from him at one point. I am leaving home, so that his rage won’t harm you, like the bird who pretends to be wounded in order to lead the predator far from its nest. Don’t look for my killer. By the time you read this he’ll probably have been dead for a long time. Don’t look for the violin, either; it’s not worth it. Don’t search for what I have found in many of the objects I’ve collected: the satisfaction of possessing something rare. Don’t search for it, because it ends up eating away at you; it’s endless anguish and it makes you do things that you later regret. If your mother is alive, spare her this story that I am explaining to you. Farewell. And beneath that was some sort of postscript that made me unhappy. A postscript that said Aribert Voigt killed me. I took Vial out of his bloody clutches. I know that he has been released and that, inevitably, he will come looking for me. Voigt is evil. I am also evil, but Voigt is absolute evil. If I die violently, don’t believe them when they say it was an accident. Voigt. I don’t want you to avenge me, Son. You can’t do it, obviously; because when you read this, if you ever do, Voigt will have been rotting in hell for many years already. If they killed me, that will mean that Vial, our Storioni, will have disappeared from the house. If for any reason there is public talk of Voigt or our violin, you should know that I found out who the instrument belonged to before Voigt confiscated it: Netje de Boeck, a Belgian woman, was the owner. I profoundly hope that Voigt meets a bad end and that someone, I don’t know whom, ensures that he never sleeps easily until the end of his days. But I don’t want it to be you, because I don’t want to taint you with my business matters. You’ve tainted me, Father, indeed, thought Adrià, because I’ve inherited the family illness, you passed it on to me: that itching of desire in my fingers when I hold certain objects. And the text in Aramaic ended with a laconic farewell, Son. They were probably the last words he ever wrote. And not one said I love you, my son. Perhaps he didn’t love me.
The record player spun in silence, accompanying Adrià’s perplexity. Although he was a little bit surprised that he hadn’t been the least surprised by his father’s confirmation of his moral profile. A long while passed before he began to ask himself questions, for example, why didn’t he want it known that he was killed by a Nazi like this Voigt. Was it that he didn’t want other stories to come to light? Sadly, I think that was the reason. Do you know how I felt, Sara? I felt stupid. I had always thought that I’d designed my life my own way, defying everyone’s plans, a
nd now it turns out that I’d ended up doing what my authoritarian father had intended from the very beginning. I put on the start of the Götterdämmerung to go along with that strange feeling, and the three Norns, Erda’s daughters, gathered beside Brünnhilde’s rock to weave the rope of destiny, as my father had patiently done with mine, without asking me or my mother what we thought of it. But a rope of destiny that Father had prepared had been unexpectedly cut and confirmed my deepest fears: it made me guilty of his atrocious death.
‘Hey! You said three days!’ I had never heard Bernat so indignant. ‘I’ve only had it for three hours!’
‘I’m sorry, forgive me, I swear. Now. It has to be now or they’ll kill me, I swear.’
‘Your word means nothing. I taught you vibrato!’
‘Vibrato isn’t something you can teach; you have to find it,’ I responded, desperate. At twelve years old I wasn’t very skilled at arguing. And I continued, very frightened: ‘They are going to find us out and my father will put me in jail. And you too. I’ll explain everything later, I swear.’
They both hung up the phone at the same time. He had to explain something to Little Lola or Mother about Bernat having my violin homework.
‘Stay on the pavement.’
‘Of course,’ he said, offended.
They met in front of the Solà family bakery. They opened their cases and made the switch, on the ground, on the corner of València and Llúria, ignoring the racket made by the tramvia struggling to make its way up the street. Bernat gave him back the Storioni and he gave back the violin of Madame d’Angoulême and explained that his father had all of a sudden gone into the study and had left the door open. And from his room Adrià had panicked, watching his father open the safe and pull out the case and close the safe without checking that the violin inside the case was the violin that should have been in the case, and I, I swear to you, I didn’t know what to do, because if I tell him that you have it, he’d throw me off the balcony, you know, and I don’t know what will happen, but …
Bernat looked at him coldly. ‘You just made all that up.’
‘No, really! I put my student violin in the case so he wouldn’t suspect anything if he opened it …’
‘I wasn’t born yesterday you know.’
‘I swear!’ Adrià, desperate.
‘You’re a lily liver who can’t keep his word.’
I didn’t know what to say. I looked impotently at my furious friend, who was now several inches taller than me. He looked like some sort of vengeful giant. But I was more afraid of my father. The giant opened his mouth again: ‘And you think that when he comes back and opens the safe and sees the Storioni he won’t start asking questions?’
‘And what do you want me to do? Huh?’
‘Let’s run away. To America.’
I liked Bernat for his sudden solidarity. Both of us running away to America, how cool. They didn’t run away to America, and Adrià didn’t have time to ask him, hey, Bernat, how is it to play the Storioni, can you tell the difference, is an old violin worth it? He didn’t even find out if his parents had noticed anything or … He only said he’s going to kill me, I swear he’s going to kill me, give it back to me. Bernat left in silence, with an expression that made it clear he didn’t believe his weird story that was just starting to get really complicated.
The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. Six one five four two eight. Adrià placed the Storioni in the safe, closed it, erased all traces of his furtive steps and left the study. In his room, Carson and Black Eagle were playing it cool and looking the other way, surely overwhelmed by the circumstances. And he sat there with an empty violin case and, to make things even more difficult, Little Lola stuck her head in twice to ask, on Mother’s request, are you studying today or what? and the second time he said I have a callus on my finger, it hurts … see? I can’t play.
‘Let’s see that finger?’ said Mother, entering unexpectedly just as he was gluing the three trading cards he’d bought at the Sant Antoni market on Sunday into his album.
‘I don’t see anything,’ she said, very crudely.
‘But I can feel it, and it hurts.’
Mother looked to either side, as if she was having trouble believing I wasn’t pulling her leg, and she left in silence. Luckily she hadn’t opened the case. Now I just had to wait for my father’s cosmic bollocking.
Mea culpa. It was my fault that he died. Even though he would have died by Voigt’s hand anyway. The taxi had left him alone at kilometre three and he had returned to Barcelona. At that point of the winter, the day faded very early. Alone on the highway. A trap, an ambush. Didn’t you see it, Father? Perhaps you thought it was a joke in poor taste and nothing more. Fèlix Ardèvol looked down on Barcelona for the last time. The sound of an engine. A car was coming down from Tibidabo with its lights on. It stopped in front of him and Signor Falegnami got out, thinner, balder, with the same big nose and his eyes gleaming. He was escorted by two muscular men and the chauffeur. All with disgusted faces. Falegnami demanded the violin with a curt gesture. Ardèvol gave it to him and Falegnami got into the car to open the case. He came out of the vehicle with the violin in his hand: ‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’
‘Now what?’ I can imagine my father more irritated than scared.
‘Where is the Storioni?’
‘Oh, bollocks. You have it there!’
In reply, Voigt lifted the violin and broke it against a rock on the side of the highway.
‘What are you doing?’ Father, frightened.
Voigt put the busted violin in front of his face. The top had broken off in pieces and you could read the instrument’s signature: Casa Parramon on Carme Street. Father must have been the one who was confused.
‘That’s impossible! I took it out of the safe myself!’
‘Well, then you must have been robbed some time ago, imbecile!’
I want to imagine that a smile crossed his lips when he said, well, if that’s the case, Signor Falegnami, then I have no idea who has that marvellous instrument.
Voigt lifted an eyebrow and one of the men punched Father in the stomach: he doubled over, panting.
