by Jaume Cabré
‘Yes, sorry: it is a closing comment of farewell.’
‘And what does it say?’
‘It says that as for the spiritual instructions, I have collected them all separately.’
‘Where?’
‘In the book he wrote,’ said Bernat. ‘I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.’
Bernat opened up, trying not to make a sound. Like a thief. He felt along the wall until he found the switch. He flipped it, but the light didn’t come on. Shit. He pulled a torch out of his briefcase and felt even more like a thief. There in the hall was the fuse-box or whatever it’s called now. He flipped the switch and the hall light came on as well as another one at the back of the flat, perhaps the one in the Germanic and Asian prose corridor. He stood there for a few seconds, contemplating the silence of that house. He went towards the kitchen. The refrigerator was unplugged, with the door open and no socks inside. And the freezer, also empty. He walked through Slavic and Nordic prose, led by the light that was on in fine arts and encylopaedias, Sara’s studio, which had been Little Lola’s room before that. The easel was still set up, as if Adrià hadn’t stopped believing that one day Sara would come back and start drawing, dirtying her fingers with charcoal. And a mountain of huge folders with sketches. Framed and placed on some sort of an altar were In Arcadia Hadriani and Sant Pere del Burgal: A Dream, the two landscapes that Sara had given Adrià and which, since he’d left no specific instructions for them, Bernat had decided he would send to Max Voltes-Epstein. He left the light on. He glanced at religion and the classical world, and went back through Romance languages and peeked into poetry; there he switched on the light. Everything was in order. Then he went to literary essays and turned on the light: the dining room was the same as ever. The sun, at the monastery of Santa Maria de Gerri, continued to come from Trespui. He pulled a camera out of his jacket pocket. He had to move aside a couple of chairs to stand before the painting by Modest Urgell. He took a couple of photos with flash and a couple without. He left literary essays and went into the study. Everything was just as they had left it. He sat in a chair and began to think about all the time he had spent in there, always with Adrià by his side, discussing mostly music and literature, but also politics and life. As young men and as boys, dreaming of the secret mysteries there. He turned on the light beside the reading chair. He also turned on the light beside the sofa and the light on the ceiling. There where Sara’s self-portrait had hung for years was now a blank spot that made him feel sort of dizzy. He took off his jacket, rubbed his face with the palms of his hands, the way Adrià used to, and said let’s get to it. He went behind the desk and knelt. He tried six, one, five, four, two, eight. It didn’t open. He tried seven, two, eight, zero, six, five, and the safe opened silently. There was nothing inside. Yes, there were some envelopes. He grabbed them and placed them on the desk to look at more comfortably. He opened one. He went through it page by page: a list of characters. He was there: Bernat Plensa, Sara Voltes-Epstein, Me, Little Lola, Aunt Leo … the people … well, the characters with the date of their birth and in some cases death. More papers: some sort of diagram with a lot of lines through it as if it’d been rejected. Another list with more characters. And that was it. If that was all, Adrià had written in a torrent, going from one place to another as dictated by his remaining fading memory. Bernat put it all back into the envelope and placed the envelope in his briefcase. He lowered his head and struggled to keep from crying. He breathed in and out slowly a few times until he was calmer. He opened up the other envelope. A few photos: one of Sara taking a picture of herself in the mirror. So pretty. Not even now did he want to admit that he had always been a little bit in love with her. The other photo was Adrià working, writing at that same desk where Bernat was now sitting. My friend, Adrià. And a few more photos: an illustration with sketches of a very young girl’s face. And also several photos of Vial, from the back and from the front. He put the photos back into the envelope, with an expression of bitter disgust, thinking about lost Vial. He looked inside the safe. Nothing more; he closed it but didn’t move the wheel. He paid a visit to history and geography. On the bedside table, Carson and Black Eagle kept faithful watch for no one. He picked them up, with their horses and everything, and put them into his briefcase. He went back to the study and sat in the armchair that Adrià usually used for reading. For almost an hour he stared into the void, reminiscing and longing for it all and allowing the occasional tear to slip down his cheek.
After a long time, Bernat Plensa i Punsoda finally snapped out of it. He looked around him and was no longer able to hold back a sob that came from deep inside. He covered his face with his hands. When he was calmer he got up from the reading chair; he took a last look over the whole study as he put on his jacket. Adéu, ciao, à bientôt, adiós, tschüss, vale, dag, bye, αντίο, Пoká, la revedere, viszlát, head aega, lehitraot, tchau, maa as-salama, puix beixlama, my friend.
36
You came into my life sweetly, like the first time, and I didn’t think about Edward or Ottilie or about my lies again, but rather about your silent and comforting presence. Adrià told her take possession of the house; take possession of me. And he had her choose between two rooms to set up her drawing studio, and her books, and her clothes and your life, if you want to, my beloved Sara; but I didn’t know that in order to store all of Sara’s life it would take many more cupboards than Adrià could possibly offer her.
‘This will work very well. It’s larger than my studio in Paris,’ you said, looking into Little Lola’s room from the doorway.
‘It has light and it’s mostly quiet. Since it’s interior.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, turning towards me.
‘You don’t have to thank me. Thank you.’
Then she sprang into the room. In the corner by the window there was, hanging on the wall, the little painting of the yellow gardenias by Mignon welcoming her.
‘But how …’
‘You like that one, don’t you?’
‘How did you know?’
‘But do you like it or not?’
‘It is my favourite object in this house.’
‘Well, from now on it’s yours.’
Her way of saying thank you was to stand in front of the gardenias and stare intensely at them for a good long while.
The next action was almost liturgical for me: adding the name Sara Voltes-Epstein to the mailbox in the lobby. And after ten years of living alone, as I wrote or read, I again heard footsteps, or a teaspoon hitting a glass, or warm music coming from her studio, and I thought that we could be happy together. But Adrià didn’t come up with a solution for the other open front; when you leave a file folder half open you can run into many problems. He already knew that full well; but his excitement was more intense than his prudence.
What was hardest for Adrià, in the new situation, was accepting the off-limits areas that Sara imposed on their lives. He realised it at her surprise when Adrià invited her to meet Aunt Leo and his cousins in Tona.
‘It’s better not to mix our families,’ responded Sara.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want any unpleasantness.’
‘I want to introduce you to Aunt Leo, and my cousins, if we can find them. I don’t want to introduce you to any unpleasantness.’
‘I don’t want problems.’
‘You won’t have any. Why would you?’
When her luggage arrived with the half-finished drawings and completed works, and the easels and the charcoal and the coloured pencils, she made an official inauguration of her studio, giving me a pencil drawing of Mignon’s gardenias that I hung up and still have on my wall, there where the original used to hang. And you got down to work because you were behind on the illustrations a couple of French publishers had commissioned from you for some children’s stories. Days of silence and calm, you drawing, me reading or writing. Meeting up in the hallway, visiting each other every once in a while, having coffee mid-morning in the k
itchen, looking into each other’s eyes and not saying anything to avoid bursting the fragility of that unexpectedly recovered happiness.
It took a lot of work, but when Sara had the most urgent job finished, they ended up going to Tona in a second-hand Seat Six Hundred that Adrià had bought when he had finally passed his licence exam on the seventh try. They had to change a tyre in La Garriga: in Aiguafreda Sara made him stop in front of a florist’s shop, went in and emerged with a lovely small bouquet that she placed on the back seat without comment. And on the slope of Sant Antoni, in Centelles, the radiator water started to boil; but apart from that, everything went smoothly.
‘It’s the most beautiful town in the world,’ Adrià told her, excited, when the Six Hundred was getting to Quatre Carreteres.
‘The most beautiful town in the world is pretty ugly,’ responded Sara when they stopped on Sant Andreu Street and Adrià put on the hand brake too abruptly.
‘You have to look at it through my eyes. Et in Arcadia ego.’
They got out of the car and he told her look at the castle, my love. Up here, up high. Isn’t it lovely?
‘Well … I don’t know what to tell you …’
He could tell that she was nervous, but he didn’t know what to do to …
‘You have to look at it through my eyes. You see that ugly house and the other one with geraniums?’
‘Yes …’
‘This is where Can Casic was.’
And he said it as if he could see it; as if he could reach out and touch Josep with the smoking cigarette at his lips, hunched over, sharpening knives on the threshing floor, beside the haystack that was consumed like an apple core.
‘You see?’ said Adrià. And he pointed towards the stable of the mule who was always called Estrella and wore shoes that clicked like high heels against the manure-covered stones when she swatted away flies, and he even heard Viola barking furiously, pulling her chain taut because the silent, nameless white cat was getting too close, boasting haughtily of her freedom.
‘For Pete’s sake, kids, go play somewhere else, for Pete’s sake.’
And they all ran to hide behind the white rock and life was an exciting adventure, different from fingering flat major arpeggios; with the scent of manure and the sound of Maria’s clogs when she went into the pigsty, and the tanned gang of reapers in late July with their sickles and scythes. And the dog at Can Casic was also always named Viola and she envied the kids because they weren’t tied down with a rope that measured exactly eight ells.
‘For Pete’s sake is a euphemism for for heaven’s sake, which is a euphemism for for Christ’s sake.’
‘Hey, look at Adrià. He says for Christ’s sake!’
‘Yeah, but nobody ever understands him,’ grumbled Xevi as they sledded down from the stone border to the street filled with wheel tracks from the cart and piles of shit from Bastús, the street sweeper’s mule.
‘You say things nobody understands,’ challenged Xevi once they had reached the bottom.
‘Sorry. Sometimes I think out loud.’
‘No, I don’t …’
And he didn’t smack the dust off of his trousers because everything was permitted in Tona, far from his parents, and no one got angry if you grazed your knees.
‘Can Casic, Sara …’ he summed up, standing on the same street where Bastús used to piss and which was now paved; and it didn’t even occur to him that Bastús was no longer a mule but a diesel Iveco with a trailer, a lovely thing that doesn’t chew even a sprig of straw, is all clean and doesn’t smell of manure.
And then, with the flowers in your hands, you got on tiptoe and gave me an unexpected kiss, and I thought et in Arcadia ego, et in Arcadia ego, et in Arcadia ego, devoutly, as if it were a litany. And don’t be afraid, Sara, you are safe here, at my side. You go ahead and draw and I’ll love you and together we will learn to build our Arcadia. Before knocking on the door of Can Ges you handed me the bouquet.
On the way home, Adrià convinced Sara that she had to get her licence; that she would surely be a better student than he’d been.
‘All right.’ After a kilometre in silence. ‘You know, I liked your Aunt Leo. How old is she?’
Laus Deo. He had noticed about an hour into their visit to Can Ges that Sara had lowered her guard and was smiling inside.
‘I don’t know. Over eighty.’
‘She’s very fit. And I don’t know where she gets her energy. She doesn’t stop.’
‘She’s always been like that. But she keeps everyone in line.’
‘She wouldn’t take no for an answer about the jar of olives.’
‘That’s Aunt Leo.’ And with the momentum: ‘Why don’t we go to your house one day?’
‘Don’t even think about it.’ Her tone was curt and definitive.
‘Why not, Sara?’
‘They don’t accept you.’
‘Aunt Leo accepted you immediately.’
‘Your mother, if she were alive, wouldn’t have ever let me set foot in your house.’
‘Our house.’
‘Our house. Aunt Leo, fine, I’m sure I’ll be fond of her in no time. But that doesn’t count. What counts is your mother.’
‘She’s dead. She’s been dead for ten years!’
Silence until Figueró. To break it, Adrià tightened the thumbscrews and said Sara.
‘What.’
‘What did they tell you about me?’
Silence. The train, on the other shore of the Congost, went up towards Ripoll. And we were about to hurl ourselves headlong into a conversation.
‘Who?’
‘At your house. To make you run away.’
‘Nothing.’
‘And what did it say in that famous letter I supposedly wrote to you?’
In front of them was a Danone lorry that was moving quite slowly. And Adrià still had to think three times before passing. The lorry or the conversation. He stopped and insisted: eh, Sara? What lies did they tell you? What did they say about me?
‘Don’t ask me again.’
‘Why?’
‘Never again.’
Now came a nice straight stretch. He put on his turn signal but didn’t dare pass.
‘I have a right to know what …’
‘And I have a right to close that chapter.’
‘Can I ask your mother?’
‘It’s better if you never see her again.’
‘Bollocks.’
Let someone else pass. Adrià was unable to pass a slow lorry loaded down with yogurts, mostly because his eyes were misty and had no windscreen wipers.
‘I’m sorry, but it’s better that way. For both of us.’
‘I won’t insist. I don’t think I’ll insist … But I would like to be able to say hello to your parents. And your brother.’
‘My mother is like yours. I don’t want to force her. She has too many scars.’
Voilà: near Molí de Blancafort, the lorry turned towards La Garriga and Adrià felt as if he’d passed it himself. Sara continued: ‘You and I have to do our own thing. If you want us to live together, you can’t open that box. Like Pandora.’
‘It’s like we live inside the story of Bluebeard. With gardens filled with fruit but a locked room we aren’t allowed to enter.’
‘Something like that, yes. Like the forbidden apple tree. Are you up to the challenge?’
‘Yes, Sara,’ I lied for the umpteenth time. I just didn’t want you to run away again.
In the department office there are three desks for four professors. Adrià had no desk because he had given it up on the first day: the thought of working anywhere that wasn’t his home seemed impossible. He only had a place to leave his briefcase and a little cabinet. And yes, he needed a desk and he realised he’d been too hasty when relinquishing it. Which is why, when Llopis wasn’t there, he usually sat at his desk.
He went in, ready for anything. But Llopis was there, correcting some galleys or something like that. And Laura looked up from
her spot. Adrià just stood there. No one said anything. Llopis looked up discreetly, glanced at both of them, said he was going to get a coffee and prudently disappeared from the battlefield. I sat in Llopis’s chair, face to face with Laura and her typewriter.
‘I need to explain something to you.’
‘You, giving explanations?’
Laura’s sarcastic tone didn’t bode well for a comfortable conversation.
‘Do you want to talk?’
‘Well … It’s been a few months since you’ve answered my calls, you avoid me here, if I run into you, you say not now, not now …’
Both were silent.
‘I should be thanking you for being so kind as to show up here today,’ she added in the same hurt tone.
Oblique, uncomfortable looks. Then Laura moved her Olivetti aside, as if it were an obstacle between them, and, like someone rolling up her sleeves, preparing for anything, she said, ‘There’s another woman, isn’t there?’
‘No.’
If there’s one thing I’ve never understood about myself, it is my inability to take the bull by the horns. At most, I grab it by the tail and then I’m doomed to receive one of its fatal kicks. I’ll never learn; because I said no, no, no, bollocks, Laura, there’s no one else … It’s me who, well, it’s just that I’d rather not …
‘Pathetic.’
‘Don’t insult me,’ said Adrià.
‘Pathetic isn’t an insult.’ She got up, a bit out of control. ‘Tell the truth, for fuck’s sake. Tell me you don’t love me!’
‘I don’t love you,’ said Adrià just as Parera opened the door and Laura burst into tears. When she said what a son of a bitch you are, what a son of a bitch you are, what a son of a bitch you are, Parera had already closed the door, leaving them alone again.
‘You used me like a tissue.’
‘Yes. Forgive me.’
‘Go to hell.’
Adrià left the office. At the railing of the cloister, Parera was making time, smoking a peace cigarette, perhaps taking sides without knowing the details. He passed by her and didn’t dare to say thank you or anything.
