Confessions

by Jaume Cabré

  41

  Everything I am explaining to you, esteemed friends and colleagues, was prior to the Història del pensament europeu. Anyone who wants more practical information on our man, can consult two sources in particular: the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The latter, which is the one I had closer at hand, says, in its fifteenth edition:

  Adrià Ardèvol i Bosch (Barcelona, 1946). Professor of aesthetic theory and the history of ideas, earned a doctorate in 1976 at Tübingen and is author of of La revolució francesa (1978), an argument against violence in the service of an ideal, in which he calls into question the historical legitimacy of figures such as Marat, Robespierre and Napoleon himself, and with skilful intellectual work, compares them to the bloodthirsty dictators of the twentieth century such as Stalin, Hitler, Franco and Pinochet. Deep down, at that moment, young Professor Ardèvol couldn’t give a rat’s arse about history: as he was writing the book, he was still indignant, as he had been for years, over the disappearance of his Sara ↑Voltes-Epstein (Paris, 1950–Barcelona, 1996) without any explanation and he was feeling that the world and life owed him one. And he was unable to explain it all to his good friend Bernat ↑Plensa i Punsoda (Barcelona, 1945), who, on the other hand, often cried on Ardèvol’s shoulder over his misfortunes. The work caused ripples in French intellectual circles, which turned their back on him, until they forgot about it. Which was why Marx? (1980) went unnoticed and not even the few remaining Catalan Stalinists noticed its appearance in order to annihilate it. Following a visit to ↑Little Lola (La Barceloneta, 1910–1982), he picked up the trail of his beloved Sara (vid. supra) and peace returned to his life except for a few specific incidents with Laura ↑Baylina (Barcelona, 1959?), with whom he hadn’t been able to decently end a relationship that he acknowledges was very unfair, mea culpa, confiteor. For many years it’s been said that he is milling over a Història del mal, but since he’s not entirely convinced of the project, it will be slow to come to fruition, if he ever feels up to the task. Once he regained his inner peace, he was able to dedicate his efforts to the creation of what he considers his finest work, La voluntat estètica (1987), which received the enthusiastic support of Isaiah ↑Berlin (cf. Personal Impressions, Hogarth Press, 1987 [1998, Pimlico]), and, after years of feverish dedication, to the culmination of the impressive Història del pensament europeu (1994), his most internationally known work and the one that brings us today to the Assembly Hall of the Brechtbau, the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of this university. It is an honour for me to have the opportunity to present this modest introduction to the event. And I struggled to not get carried away by subjective, personal memories, since my relationship with Doctor Ardèvol dates back many years to the hallways, classrooms and offices of this university, when I was a new professor (I was once young too, dear students!) and Ardèvol was a young man desperate with a heartache that led him to spend a few months sleeping around until he got into a very complicated relationship with a young woman named Kornelia ↑Brendel (Offenbach, 1948) who put him through some real tribulations because she, who wasn’t as pretty as he thought anyway, even though it must be noted that she looked like she was good in bed, insisted on having new experiences and that, for a passionate Mediterranean man like Doctor Ardèvol, was hard to bear. Well: it would have been for a cold, square Germanic man, too. Don’t ever speak a word of this, because he could take it very badly, but I myself was one of Miss Brendel’s new experiences. Let me explain; after a huge basketball player and a Finn who played ice hockey, and after a painter with fleas, Miss Brendel opted for another sort of experience and she looked at me and wondered what it would be like to bed a professor. In fact, I have to confess that I was just a hunting trophy, and my head, with a mortarboard cap, hangs over the fireplace of her castle beside the Finn’s with its bright red helmet. And that’s quite enough of that, because we haven’t come here today to talk about me but to talk about Doctor Ardèvol. I was saying that his relationship with Miss Brendel was torment, which he was able to overcome when he decided to take refuge in his studies. Which is why we should erect a monument to Kornelia Brendel beside the Neckar. Ardèvol finished his studies at Tübingen and read his doctoral thesis on Vico that, I’ll remind you although there is no need, was praised highly by Professor Eugen Coșeriu (vid. Eugenio Coșeriu-Archiv, Eberhard Karls Universität) who, old but lucid and energetic, is nervously moving his foot in the front row although the expression on his face is a satisfied one. I’m told that Doctor Ardèvol’s thesis is one of the most requested texts by students of the history of ideas at this university. And I’ll stop here because all I’ll do is keep singing his praises: I’ll let the fatuous and conceited Doctor Schott have the floor. Kamenek, with a smile, slide the microphone towards Professor Schott, winked at Adrià and sat more comfortably in his chair. There were about a hundred people in the assembly hall. An interesting mix of professors and intrigued students. And Sara thought how handsome he looked, with his new suit jacket.

  It was the world premiere of the suit jacket that she had made him buy as a condition of her accompanying him to Tübingen for the presentation of his Història del pensament europeu. And Adrià, seated at the table beside those illustrious presenters, looked towards her and I said to myself Sara, you are my life and this is a dream. Not the profound, scrupulous and sensitive presentation by Kamenek, with slight, discreet concessions to a more personal and subjective tone; not the enthusiastic speech by Professor Schott, who insisted that Die Geschichte des europäischen Denkens is a major reflection that must be disseminated to every European university and I beg you all to read promptly. I beg you? I order you all to read it! Professor Kamenek didn’t refer to Isaiah Berlin and his Personal Impressions (vid. supra) in vain. I would have to add, if you’ll allow me, Professor Kamenek, the explicit references that Berlin makes to Ardèvol both in conversation with Jahanbegloo and in Ignatieff’s canonical biography. No, none of this is the miracle, Sara. Nor the Lesung that will surely last a good long hour. That’s not it, Sara. It’s seeing you here, in the chair where I sat so many times, with your dark ponytail spilling down your back and you looking at me, holding back a smile and thinking I’m handsome in my new suit jacket, isn’t that so, Professor Ardèvol?

  ‘Excuse me, Professor Schott?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  What do I think. My God.

  ‘Love, that moves the sun and the other stars.’

  ‘What?’ Puzzled, the professor looked at the audience and turned his confused gaze on Adrià.

  ‘I’m in love and I often lose the thread of things. Can you repeat the question?’

  The hundred or so members of the audience didn’t know whether to laugh or not. Nervous glances, the half-frozen smiles of deer in the headlights; until Sara broke out in a generous laugh and they were able to follow suit.

  Professor Schott repeated the question. Professor Ardèvol answered it with precision, many people’s eyes gleamed with interest, and life is wonderful, I was thinking. And then I read the third chapter, the most subjective, which I had devoted to my discovery of the historical nature of knowledge before reading a single line of Vico. And the shock I felt when I discovered his work on the suggestion of Professor Roth, who unfortunately is no longer among us. And as I read I couldn’t help thinking that many years back Adrià had fled to Tübingen to lick his wounds over his sudden, inexplicable desertion by Sara, who now was laughing with satisfaction before him; that twenty years earlier he went through Tübingen sleeping with everyone he could, as had been pointed out in the presentation, and wandered through the classrooms searching every girl for some feature that reminded him of Sara. And now, in Room 037, he had her before him, more mature, looking at him with an ironic smirk as he closed the book and said a book like this requires many years of work and I hope I don’t feel inspired to write another for many, many, many years, amen. And the audience rapped their knuckles on the table with polite enthusiasm. And afterwards,
dinner with Professor Schott, Dean Vartten, a thrilled Kamenek, and two female professors who were fairly mute and timid. One of them, perhaps the shorter one, said in a wisp of a voice that she had been moved by the human portrait that Kamenek had given of Doctor Ardèvol, and Adrià celebrated Professor Kamenek’s sensitivity while Kamenek lowered his eyes, a bit confused by the unexpected praise. After dinner, Adrià took Sara for a stroll through the park, which in the last light of day gave off a scent of cold spring bursting forth, and she kept saying this is all so lovely. Even though it’s cold.

  ‘They say it’s going to snow tonight.’

  ‘It’s still lovely.’

  ‘Whenever I was sad and thinking of you I would come walking here. And I would jump over the cemetery fence.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘See? I just did.’

  She didn’t think twice and leapt over the fence as well. After walking some thirty metres they found the entrance gate, which was open, and Sara struggled to hold back a nervous laugh, as if she didn’t want to laugh in the house of the dead. They reached the grave at the back and Sara read the name on it, curious.

  ‘Who are they?’ asked the commander with no stars.

  ‘Germans from the resistance.’

  The commander went over to get a better look at them. The man was middle-aged, and looked more like an office worker than a guerrilla fighter; and she looked like a peaceful housewife.

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘It’s a long story. We want explosives.’

  ‘Where the hell did you come from and who the hell do you think you are?’

  ‘Himmler has to visit Ferlach.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘In Klagenfurt. Here, on the other side of the border. We know the territory.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We want to offer him a warm reception.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By blowing him up.’

  ‘You won’t be able to get close enough.’

  ‘We know how to do it.’

  ‘You don’t know how to do it.’

  ‘Yes. Because we are willing to die to kill him.’

  ‘Who did you say you were?’

  ‘We didn’t say. The Nazis dismantled our resistance group. They executed thirty of our comrades. And our leader committed suicide in prison. Those of us who are left want to give meaning to the death of so many heroes.’

  ‘Who was your leader?’

  ‘Herbert Baum.’

  ‘You are the group that …’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nervous glances from the commander with no stars at his assistant with the blond moustache.

  ‘When did you say Himmler was visiting?’

  They studied the suicide plan in depth; yes, it was possible, quite possible. Therefore, they assigned them a generous ration of dynamite and the supervision of Danilo Janicek. Since they were very short of resources, they decided that after five days Janicek would rejoin the partisan group, whether or not the operation had been carried out. And Janicek was not to commit suicide along with them, under any circumstances.

  ‘It’s dangerous,’ protested Danilo Janicek, who wasn’t the least bit thrilled with the idea when they explained it to him.

  ‘Yes. But if it comes off …’

  ‘I’m not sure about this.’

  ‘It’s an order, Janicek. Take someone with you to cover your back.’

  ‘The priest. I need strong shoulders and good marksmanship.’

  And that was how Drago Gradnik ended up on the paths of Jelendol, emulating a krošnjar, loaded down with explosives and just as happy as if he were transporting spoons and wooden plates. The explosives reached their destination safely. A rail-thin man received them in a dark garage on Waidischerstrasse and assured them that Himmler’s visit to Ferlach was confirmed for two days later.

  No one was able to explain how the tragedy happened. Not even the activists in Herbert Baum’s group can understand it still. But the day before their planned assassination, Danilo and the priest were preparing the explosives.

  ‘It must have been unstable material.’

  ‘No. It was used for military operations: it wasn’t unstable.’

  ‘I’m sure it must have been sweating. I don’t know if you know but when dynamite sweats …’

  ‘I know: but the material was fine.’

  ‘Well, then they bungled it.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe. But there’s no other explanation.’

  The fact is that at three in the morning, when they had already packed the charges into the rucksacks that the two members of the suicide commando planned to use to blow themselves up, with Himmler as their dance partner, Danilo, tired, anxious, said don’t touch that, damn it, and the priest, weary and annoyed by the other man’s tone, put down the rucksack they’d just loaded up, too hard. There was light and noise and the dark garage lit up for a fraction of a second before blowing up with the glass, bricks from the partition wall and bits of Danilo and Father Gradnik mixed into the rubble.

  When the occupying military authorities tried to reconstruct the events, all they found were the remains of at least two people. And one of those people had honking big feet. And amid the scrap iron, intestines and blood splatters they found, around a wide neck, the ID tag of missing SS-Obersturmführer Franz Grübbe, who according to the only approved version, the version of SS-Hauptsturmführer Timotheus Schaaf, was the abject cause of that humiliating defeat of a Waffen-SS division that had heroically succumbed at the entrance to Kranjska Gora, since as soon as he heard the first shots, he ran towards the enemies with his hands in the air begging for mercy. An SS officer begging for mercy from a communist guerrilla commando! Now we understand it: the abject traitor reappeared, mixed up in the preparation of an abject attempt on the Reichsführer himself, because that was nothing less than a plan to kill Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.

  ‘And who is this Grübbe?’

  ‘A traitor to the fatherland, to the Führer and the sacred vow he solemnly swore when he joined the Schutzstaffel. SS-Haupsturmführer Schaaf can give you more details.’

  ‘May he be shamefully reviled.’

  The telegram that Lothar Grübbe received was curt and to the point, informing him of the infamy committed by his abject son, who wanted to make an attempt on the life of his highest direct superior, the Reichsführer, but had been blown up into a thousand abject bits when handling the explosive. And it added that they had made twelve arrests of German traitors belonging to an already crushed group like that of the abject Jew Herbert Baum. The shame of the empire will fall on your abject son for a thousand years.

  And Lothar Grübbe cried with a smile and that night he told Anna, you see, my love, our son had a change of mind. I wanted to spare you this, but it turns out that our Franz had got his head filled with all of Hitler’s crap; and something made him realise that he was wrong. The infamy of the regime has befallen us, which is the greatest joy they can give a Grübbe.

  To celebrate the bravery of little Franz, the hero of the family, the only one who up until now has responded with valour to the beast of the Reich, he asked Günter Raue to repay the favour; yes, after so many years. And Günter Raue weighed the pros and cons and said yes, Lothar, my friend, but with one condition. What’s that? That, for the love of God, you be discreet. And I will tell you how much of a tip you should give the gravediggers. And Lothar Grübbe said all right, that seems fair. And five days later – as they said that the Western front was starting to be a problem and no one talked about the Byelorussian disaster, where mother Earth had swallowed up a group of whole armies – in the tranquil Tübingen cemetery, in the Grübbe-Landau family plot, in front of a sad man and his cousin Herta Landau, of the Landaus of Bebenhausen, the memory of a brave hero was buried inside an empty coffin. When better times come, we will honour him with flowers as white as his soul. I am proud of our son, dear Anna, who is now reunited with you. I won’t be long in coming beca
use I have nothing more to do here.

  Darkness had fallen. They left, pensive, through the gate that was still open, she took his hand, they walked in silence to the street lamp that illuminated the park’s path and when they reached there she said I think what Professor Schott said is true.

  ‘He said a lot of things.’

  ‘No, that your history of European thought is a truly important work.’

  ‘I don’t know. I would like it to be true, but I can’t know that.’

  ‘It is,’ insisted Sara. And what’s more, I love you.

  ‘Well, I’ve been batting around some other ideas for a while now.’

  ‘What kind of ideas?’

  ‘I don’t know. The history of evil.’

  As they left the cemetery, Adrià said the problem is I haven’t really got my bearings. I haven’t been able to really reflect. I don’t know, I come up with examples but not an idea that …’

  ‘Just write, I’m by your side.’

  I wrote with Sara by my side as she drew with me close by. Sara illustrating stories and drawing in charcoal and Adrià beside her, admiring her skill. Sara cooking kosher food and teaching him about the richness of Jewish cuisine and Adrià responding with the eternal potato omelette, boiled rice and grilled chicken. Every once in a while, Max would send a package with bottles from excellent years. And laughing just because. And going into her studio while she was absorbed, for over ten minutes, in the easel with a blank sheet of paper, thinking her things, her mysteries, her secrets, her tears that she won’t allow me to wipe away.

  ‘I love you too, Sara.’