Confessions

by Jaume Cabré

  ‘I’m not asking for that much, bloody hell!’ reflected Bernat. ‘Just that you deign to read me. That’s all I’m asking for.’ Raising his voice, too much: ‘Is that too much to ask? Is it? Is it?’

  Then came the attack from behind. Llorenç, furious, barefoot, in pyjamas, came into the dining room and leapt on his father just as he was saying I don’t feel that you are with me on my artistic journey. Tecla was looking at the wall as if she were watching her own piano career that had slipped through her fingers because of the pregnancy while she felt totally offended, you understand? Totally and deeply offended, as if the only thing we have to do in life is adore you. And then the attack from behind: Llorenç let his fists fly on his father, turning Bernat’s back into a veritable punching bag.

  ‘Bloody hell. Cut it out!’

  ‘Don’t scold my mother.’

  ‘Go to bed,’ ordered Tecla, with a head gesture that, according to her, was supportive. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

  Llorenç let loose a couple more punches. Bernat opened his eyes and thought everyone is against me; no one wants me to write.

  ‘Don’t mix things up,’ said Adrià when he told him about it as they headed down Llúria, Bernat to rehearsal with his violin, and he to a History of Ideas II class.

  ‘What am I mixing up! Not even my son will let me complain!’

  Sara, my beloved: I am talking about many years ago, the period in which you filled my life. We have all grown older and you have left me alone for a second time. If you could hear me, I’m sure you would shake your head, worried to hear that Bernat is still the same, writing things of no interest to anyone. Sometimes it makes me cross that a musician with the ability to evoke that sound from his instrument and to create dense atmospheres is unable, not to write genius prose, but to realise that the characters and stories he writes don’t interest us at all. In short, for us, what Bernat writes also had no repercussion, not a single review, not a single sale. And that’s enough talk about Bernat, I’ll end up embittered and I have other headaches to deal with before my time comes.

  Around that same time … I think I said it not long ago. What importance does exact chronology have after all the chaos I’ve shown up to this point? Anyway, Little Lola started to grumble about every little thing and to complain that the Indian ink, the charcoal and the colours that Saga used were soiling everything.

  ‘Her name is Sara.’

  ‘She says Saga.’

  ‘Well, her name is Sara. Besides, the charcoal and all the rest are in her studio.’

  ‘Trust me. The other day she was copying the painting in the dining room, not that I can understand the point of painting things without any colour. And of course, leaving the rags for me to try and get clean again.’

  ‘Little Lola.’

  ‘Caterina. And the bathroom towels. Since her hands are always black … It must be some Frog custom.’

  ‘Caterina.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘You have to let artists do their thing, that’s all.’

  ‘You give them an inch,’ she said, making a gesture with her fingers; but I interrupted her before she got to the mile.

  ‘Sara is the lady of the house and she is in charge.’

  I know that I offended her with that declaration. But I let her and her indignation leave the study in silence, leaving me alone with those intuitions that would one day begin to shed some light on the grievance that would eventually become La voluntat estètica, the essay I am most pleased with having written.

  ‘Did you draw the Urgell in the dining room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘I haven’t …’

  ‘Let me see it.’

  You hesitated but finally gave in. I can still see you, a bit nervous, opening that huge folder where you kept your hesitations, which you carried around with you everywhere. You put the drawing on the table. The sun wasn’t hiding behind Trespui, but the three-story gable on the bell tower of Santa Maria de Gerri seemed to come alive with just the strokes of Sara’s charcoal. You were able to sense the wrinkles of age and the years with all their scars. You draw so well, my beloved, that there were centuries of history in the white, black and thousands of greys smudged by your fingertips. The landscape and the church, and the beginning of the bank of the Noguera. It was all so enchanting that I didn’t miss the dark, sad, magical colours Modest Urgell had used.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘A lott?’

  ‘A loottt.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ she said in satisfaction.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You spend so many hours looking at the Urgell …’

  ‘Me? Really?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know … I hadn’t even realised.’

  ‘This is a homage to your hours of observation. What are you searching for in it?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I do it instinctively. I like to.’

  ‘I didn’t ask what you found there, I asked you what you’re searching for.’

  ‘I think about the monastery of Santa Maria de Gerri. But mostly I think about the little monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal, which is nearby and I’ve never visited. Do you remember that parchment by Abbot Deligat that I showed you? It was the founding charter of the monastery in Burgal, from so many years ago that I feel the thrill of history when I touch the parchment. And I think about the monks pacing through it over the centuries. And praying to a God who doesn’t exist for centuries. And the salt mines of Gerri. And the mysteries enshrined way up at Burgal. And the peasants dying of hunger and illness, and the days passing slowly but implacably, and the months and the years, and it thrills me.’

  ‘I’ve never heard you string that many words together.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘What else are you searching for in it?’

  ‘I don’t know; I really don’t know what I look for in it. It’s hard to put into words.’

  ‘Well, then what do you find in it?’

  ‘Strange stories. Strange people. The desire to live and see things.’

  ‘Why don’t we go see it in the flesh?’

  We went to Gerri de la Sal in the Six Hundred, which threw in the towel at the port of Comiols. A very chatty mechanic from Isona changed some part of the cylinder head, can’t remember which, and insinuated that we should get a new car soon to avoid problems. We lost a day with those mundane misfortunes and we reached Gerri at night. The next day, from the inn, I saw the painting by Urgell in the flesh and I almost choked with emotion. And we spent the day looking at it, taking photographs of it, drawing it and watching the ghosts go in and out, ghosts of monks, peasants and salt miners until I sensed the two spirits of the monks who went to Sant Pere del Burgal to collect the key to close up that isolated, small monastery after hundreds of years of uninterrupted monastic life.

  And the next day the convalescent Six Hundred took us twenty kilometres further north, to Escaló, and from there, on foot, along a goat path that climbed the sunny Barraonse slope, the only passable route to reach the ruins of Sant Pere del Burgal, the monastery of my dreams. Sara didn’t let me carry the large rucksack with her notebook and pencils and charcoals inside: it was her burden.

  A bit further on, I picked up a stone from the middle of the path, not too big and not too small, and Adrià contemplated it pensively and the image of Amani the lovely and her sad story came into his head.

  ‘What is it about that rock?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Adrià, putting it into his rucksack.

  ‘You know what impression I get from you?’ you said, breathing a bit heavily from the climb.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘That’s just it. You don’t say what impression, you say huh.’

  ‘Now you’ve lost me.’ Adrià, who was leading, stopped, looked at the green valley, listened to the Noguera’s distant murmur and turned towards Sara. She also s
topped, a smile on her face.

  ‘You are always thinking.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you are always thinking about something far from here. You are always somewhere else.’

  ‘Boy … I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. That’s how you are. I’m special too.’

  Adrià went over to her and kissed her on the forehead, with such tenderness, Sara, that I still get emotional when I remember it. You don’t know how much I love you and how much you have transformed me. You are a masterpiece and I hope you understand what I mean.

  ‘You, special?’

  ‘I’m a weird woman. Full of complexes and secrets.’

  ‘Complexes … you hide them well. Secrets … that one’s easy to fix: tell them to me.’

  Now Sara looked down the path to avoid meeting his eyes.

  ‘I’m a complicated woman.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.’

  Adrià started to continue heading up, but he stopped and turned: ‘I’d just like you to tell me one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  I know it’s hard to believe, but I asked her what did my mother and your mother tell you about me. What did they tell you that you believed.

  Your radiant face grew dark and I thought shit, now I’ve put my foot in it. You waited a few seconds and, with your voice a bit hoarse, you said I begged you not to ask me that. I begged you …

  Annoyed, you picked up a stone and threw it down the slope.

  ‘I don’t want to relive those words. I don’t want you to know them; I want to spare you them because you have every right to be ignorant of them. And I have every right to forget them.’ You adjusted your rucksack with an elegant gesture. ‘It’s Bluebeard’s locked room, remember.’

  Sara said it so rotundly that I had the impression that she’d never stopped thinking about it. We had been living together for some time and I always had the question on the tip of my tongue: always.

  ‘All right,’ said Adrià. ‘I won’t ever ask you again.’

  They began their descent again. There was still a steeper stretch before I finally reached, at the age of thirty-nine, the ruins of Sant Pere del Burgal that I had dreamed of so often, and Brother Julià de Sau, who as a Dominican had been called Friar Miquel, came out to receive us with the key in his hands. With the Sacred Chest in his hands. With death in his hands.

  ‘Brothers, may the peace of the Lord be with you,’ he told us.

  ‘And may the peace of the Lord also be with you,’ I replied.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Sara, surprised.

  V

  VITA CONDITA

  WRITTEN IN PENCIL IN THE SEALED RAILWAY-CAR

  here in this carload

  i am eve

  with abel my son

  if you see my other son

  cain son of man

  tell him that i*

  Dan Pagis

  * Dan Pagis, Variable Directions, trans. Stephen Mitchell (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).

  38

  ‘Once you’ve had a taste of artistic beauty, your life changes. Once you’ve heard the Monteverdi choir sing, your life changes. Once you’ve seen a Vermeer up close, your life changes; once you’ve read Proust, you are never the same again. What I don’t know is why.’

  ‘Write it.’

  ‘We are random chance.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It would be easier for us to never have been and yet we are.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Generation after generation of frenetic dances of millions of spermatozoa chasing eggs, random conceptions, deaths, annihilations … and now you and I are here, one in front of the other as if it couldn’t have been any other way. As if there were only the possibility of a single family tree.’

  ‘Well. It’s logical, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. It’s ffucking random.’

  ‘Come on …’

  ‘And what’s more, the fact that you can play the violin so well, that’s even more ffucking random.’

  ‘Fine. But …’ Silence. ‘What you’re saying is a bit dizzying, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes. And then we try to survive the chaos with art’s order.’

  ‘You should write about this, don’t you think?’ ventured Bernat, taking a sip of tea.

  ‘Does the power of art reside in the artwork or rather in the effect it has on someone? What do you think?’

  ‘That you should write about this,’ insisted Sara after a few days. ‘That way you’ll understand it better.’

  ‘Why am I paralysed by Homer? Why does Brahms’s clarinet quintet leave me short of breath?’

  ‘Write about it,’ said Bernat immediately. ‘And you’ll be doing me a favour, because I want to know as well.’

  ‘How is it that I am unable to kneel before anyone and yet when I hear Beethoven’s Pastoral I have no problem bowing down to it?’

  ‘The Pastoral is trite.’

  ‘Not on your life. Do you know where Beethoven came from? From Haydn’s one hundred and four symphonies.’

  ‘And Mozart’s forty-one.’

  ‘That’s true. But Beethoven was only able to do nine. Because almost every one of the nine exists on a different level of moral complexity.’

  ‘Moral?’

  ‘Moral.’

  ‘Write about it.’

  ‘We can’t understand an artwork if we don’t look at its evolution.’ He brushed his teeth and rinsed out his mouth. As he dried himself off with a towel, he shouted through the open bathroom door: ‘But the artist’s touch of genius is always needed, that’s precisely what makes it evolve.’

  ‘The power resides in the person, then,’ Sara replied, from bed, without stifling a yawn.

  ‘I don’t know. Van der Weyden, Monet, Picasso, Barceló. It’s a dynamic line that starts in the caves of the Valltorta gorge and has yet to end because humanity still exists.’

  ‘Write about it.’ It look Bernat a few days to finish his tea and then he put the cup down delicately on the saucer. ‘Don’t you think you should?’

  ‘Is it beauty?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is it beauty’s fault? What does beauty mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I recognise it when I see it. Why don’t you write about it?’ repeated Bernat, looking him in the eye.

  ‘Man destroys man, and he also composes Paradise Lost.’

  ‘It’s a mystery, you’re right. You should write about it.’

  ‘The music of Franz Schubert transports me to a better future. Schubert is able to say many things with very few elements. He has an inexhaustible melodic strength, filled with elegance and charm as well as energy and truth. Schubert is artistic truth and we have to cling to it to save ourselves. It amazes me that he was a sickly, syphilitic, skint man. Where does his power come from? What is this power he wields over us? I bow down before Schubert’s art.’

  ‘Bravo, Herr Obersturmführer. I suspected that you were a sensitive soul.’

  Doctor Budden took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled a thin column of smoke as he went over the beginning of opus 100 in his head and then sang it with incredible precision.

  ‘I wish I had your ear, Herr Obersturmführer.’

  ‘It’s not much of an achievement. I studied piano.’

  ‘I envy you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t. Between all the hours devoted to studying medicine and music, I feel like I missed out on many things in life.’

  ‘Now you’ll make them up, wholesale, if you’ll allow me the expression,’ said Oberlagerführer Höss waving his open arms. ‘And you’re in the prime of your life.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Perhaps too suddenly.’

  Silence from both men, as if they were keeping tabs on each other. Until the doctor made up his mind and, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray and leaning over the desk, said in a lower voice: ‘Why did you want to see me, Obersturmbannführer?’

 
; Then Oberlagerführer Höss, in the same low tone, as if he distrusted the walls of his own house, said I wanted to talk to you about your superior.

  ‘Voigt?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Silence. They must have been calculating risks. Höss ventured a what do you think of him, between us.

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘I require … I demand sincerity. That is an order, dear Obersturmführer.’

  ‘Well, between us … he’s a blockhead.’

  Hearing that, Rudolf Höss leaned back smugly in his chair. Staring into his eyes, he told Doctor Budden that he was laying the groundwork for Voigt the blockhead to be sent to some front.

  ‘And who would run the …’

  ‘You, naturally.’

  Wait a second. That’s … And why not me?

  Everything had been said. A new alliance without intermediaries between God and his people. The Schubert trio still played beneath the conversation. To break the awkwardness, Doctor Budden said did you know that Schubert composed this marvellous piece just months before he died?

  ‘Write about it. Really, Adrià.’

  But it was all left momentarily up in the air because Laura returned from Uppsala and life at the university and particularly in the department office became somewhat uncomfortable again. She came back with a happier gaze, he said are you well? And Laura smiled and headed to classroom fifteen without answering. Adrià took that as a yes, that she was well. And pretty: she had come back prettier. Sitting at the sublet desk – that semester, from Parera – Adrià had trouble getting back to those papers that dealt with the subject of beauty. He didn’t know why, but they distracted him and they’d made him late for class for the first time in his life. Laura’s beauty, Sara’s beauty, Tecla’s beauty … did they enter into these ruminations? Hmm, did they?