Confessions

by Jaume Cabré

  The self-portrait is the work that took her the longest, locked up in her studio without witnesses, because she was embarrassed to be seen observing herself in the mirror, looking at herself on paper and working the details, the sweet crease at the corners of her lips, the small defeats that huddle inside the wrinkles. And the little lines at your eyes that are so much a part of you, Sara. And all those tiny signs that I don’t know how to reproduce but which make a face, as if it were a violin, become a landscape that reflects the long winter voyage in full detail, with total immodesty, my God. As if it were the cruel tachograph that records the lorry driver’s life, your face draws our tears, your tears without me, which I don’t entirely know about and the tears for the misfortunes that befell your family and your people. And some joys that were beginning to show in the brightness of your eyes and illuminate the splendid face that I have before me now as I write you this long letter that was only meant to be a few pages. I love you. I discovered you, I lost you and I found you again. And above all we had the privilege to begin to grow old together. Until the moment that misfortune entered our house.

  During those days she was unable to do any illustrations and the assignments began to pile up in a way that had never happened to her before. All her thoughts were focused on the charcoal portraits.

  It was one month before the opening at the Artipèlag and I, before returning to Vico, Llull and Berlin, had gone from Pushkin and Belinsky to Hobbes, with his sinister vision of human nature, always prone to evil. And between one thing and another I ended up in his translation of the Iliad, which I read in a delicious mid-nineteenth-century edition. And yes, the misfortune.

  Thomas Hobbes was trying to convince me that I had to choose between liberty and order because, otherwise, the wolf would come, the wolf that I had seen so many times in human nature when studying history and knowledge. I heard the sound of a key in the lock, the door closing silently and it wasn’t the wolf Hobbes warned of, but Sara’s mute footsteps, which entered the study. She stood there for a few seconds, still and soundless. I looked up and immediately realised that we had a problem. Sara sat on the sofa behind which I had spied on so many secrets with Carson and Black Eagle. She had trouble getting the words out. It was all too clear that she was searching for the right way to say it and Adrià took off his reading glasses and helped her along, saying, hey, Sara, what’s wrong?

  Sara got up, went to the instrument cabinet and pulled out Vial. She put it on the reading table with a bit too much emphasis, almost covering up poor Hobbes who was in no way to blame.

  ‘Where did you get it from?’

  ‘Father bought it.’ Suspicious pause. ‘I already showed you the buyer’s certificate. Why?’

  ‘It’s Vial, the only Storioni with a proper name.’

  Sara kept silent, prepared to listen. And Guillaume-François Vial took a step out of the darkness, so the person inside the carriage could see him. The coachman stopped the horses right in front of him. He opened the door and Monsieur Vial got into the coach.

  ‘Good evening,’ said La Guitte.

  ‘You can give it to me, Monsieur La Guitte. My uncle has agreed to the price.’

  La Guitte laughed to himself, proud of his nose. So many days roasting in Cremona’s sun had been worth it. To make sure: ‘We are talking about five thousand florins.’

  ‘We are talking about five thousand florins,’ Monsieur Vial reassured him.

  ‘Tomorrow you will have the famous Lorenzo Storioni’s violin in your hands.’

  ‘Don’t try to deceive me: Storioni isn’t famous.’

  ‘In Italy, in Naples and Florence … they speak of no one else.’

  ‘And in Cremona?’

  ‘The Bergonzis and the others aren’t happy at all about the appearance of that new workshop.’

  ‘You already explained all that to me …’ Sara, standing, impatient, like a strict teacher expecting an awkward child’s excuses.

  But Adrià, tuning her out, said ‘mon cher tonton! …’ he declared as he burst into the room early the next morning. Jean-Marie Leclair didn’t even deign to look up; he was watching the flames in the fireplace. ‘Mon cher tonton,’ repeated Vial, with less enthusiasm.

  Leclair half turned. Without looking him in the eyes he asked him if he had the violin with him. Leclair was soon running his fingers over the instrument. From a painting on the wall emerged a servant with a beak-like nose with a violin bow in his hand, and Leclair spent some time searching out all of that Storioni’s possible sounds with fragments of three of his sonatas.

  ‘It’s very good,’ he said when he had finished. ‘How much did it cost you?’

  ‘How.’

  ‘Ten thousand florins, plus a five-hundred coin reward that you’ll give me for finding this jewel.’

  ‘Hey, how!’

  With an authoritative wave, Leclair sent out the servants. He put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder and smiled. And I heard Sheriff Carson’s curt spit hitting the ground, but I paid him no heed.

  ‘You are a bastard. I don’t know who you take after, you son of a rotten bitch. Your poor mother, which I doubt, or your pathetic father. Thief, conman.’

  ‘Why? I just …’ Fencing with their eyes. ‘Fine: I can forget about the reward.’

  ‘You think that I would trust you, after so many years of you being such a thorn in my side?’

  ‘So why did you entrust me to …’

  ‘As a test, you stupid son of a sickly, mangy bitch. This time you won’t escape prison.’ After a few seconds, for emphasis: ‘You don’t know how I’ve been waiting for this moment.’

  ‘How, Adrià, you’re drifting! Look her in the face!’

  ‘You’ve always wanted my ruin, Tonton Jean. You envy me.’

  ‘Christ, child. Listen to Black Eagle! She already knows all that. You’ve already told her.’

  Leclair looked at him in surprise and pointed to him: ‘No flea-ridden cowboy should even address me.’

  ‘Hey, hey … I didn’t say anything to you. And I deserve to be treated with respect.’

  ‘Piss off, both of you, you and your friend with the feathers on his head who looks like a turkey.’

  ‘How.’

  ‘How what?’ Leclair, absolutely irritated.

  ‘Instead of making friends, you’d be wise to continue the argument with your nephew before the sun sets over the western hill.’

  Leclair looked at Guillaume Vial, somewhat disconcerted. He had to make an effort to concentrate and then pointed at him: ‘What do you think I could envy about you, you wretched, crappy fleabag?’

  Vial, red as a tomato, was too enraged to be able to respond.

  ‘It’s better if we don’t go into details,’ he said just to say something.

  Leclair looked at him with contempt.

  ‘Why not go into details? Physique? Height? People skills? Friendliness? Talent? Moral stature?’

  ‘This conversation is over, Tonton Jean.’

  ‘It will end when I say so. Intelligence? Culture? Wealth? Health?’

  Leclair grabbed the violin and improvised a pizzicato. He examined it with respect.

  ‘Adrià.’

  ‘What?’

  Sara sat down in front of me. I faintly heard Sheriff Carson saying watch out, kid, this is serious; and then don’t tell me we didn’t warn you. You looked me in the eyes: ‘I said I already know that. You explained it to me a long time ago!’

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s just that Leclair said the violin is very good, but I don’t give a damn, you understand me? I only want to be able to send you to prison.’

  ‘You are a bad uncle.’

  ‘And you are a bastard who I’ve finally been able to unmask.’

  ‘The brave warrior has lost his marbles after so many battles.’ A curt gob of spit corroborated the valiant Arapaho chief’s statement.

  Leclair pulled on the little bell’s rope and the servant with the beak-like nose entered through the door to the back of the
room.

  ‘Call the commissioner. He can come whenever he’s ready.’ To his nephew: ‘Have a seat, we’ll wait for Monsieur Béjart.’

  They didn’t have a chance to sit down. Instead Guillaume-François Vial walked in front of the fireplace, grabbed the poker and bashed in his beloved tonton’s head. Jean-Marie Leclair, known as l’Aîne, was unable to say another word. He collapsed without even a groan, the poker stuck in his head. Splattered blood stained the violin’s wooden case. Vial, breathing heavily, wiped his clean hands on his uncle’s coat and said you don’t know how much I was looking forward to this moment, Tonton Jean. He looked around him, grabbed the violin, put it into the blood-spattered case and left the room through the balcony that led to the terrace. As he ran away, in the light of day, it occurred to him that he should make a not very friendly visit to La Guitte the bigmouth. And Father bought it long before I was born from someone named Saverio Falegnami, the legal owner of the instrument.

  Silence. Unfortunately, I had nothing more to say. Well, I had no interest in saying anything further. Sara stood up.

  ‘Your father bought it in nineteen forty-five.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘And he bought it from a fugitive.’

  ‘From someone named Falegnami.’

  ‘Who was a fugitive. And his name was surely not Falegnami.’

  ‘That I don’t know.’ I think you could see a mile off that I was lying.

  ‘I do know.’ With her hands on her hips, leaning towards me: ‘He was a Bavarian Nazi who had to flee and thanks to your father’s money he was able to disappear.’

  A lie, or a half-truth, or a few lies cobbled together for the coherence that transforms them into something believable, can hold up for a while. Even for a long while. But they can never last an entire lifetime because there is an unwritten law that speaks of the hour of truth of all things.

  ‘How do you know all that?’ trying to seem surprised and not defeated.

  Silence. She, like a statue, icy, authoritarian, imposing. Since she was silent, I kept talking, a bit desperately: ‘A Nazi? Well, it’s better that we have it than some Nazi, right?’

  ‘This Nazi had confiscated it from a Belgian or Dutch family that had the poor taste to show up in Auschwitz-Birkenau.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  How did you know, Sara … How did you know that, which I only knew because my father had left it written in Aramaic on a piece of paper that surely only I had read.

  ‘You have to give it back.’

  ‘To who?’

  ‘To its owners.’

  ‘I am its owner. We are.’

  ‘Don’t involve me in this. You have to return it to its real owners.’

  ‘I don’t know who they are. Dutch, you say?’

  ‘Or Belgian.’

  ‘That’s not much to go on. Should I just go to Amsterdam and stand in the middle of the street with the violin in my hand saying, is this yours, dames en heren?’

  ‘Don’t play the cynic.’

  He didn’t know how to answer. What could he say when he always feared that day would come? Without knowing the details, but that what he was going through would someday happen: I, seated, with my glasses in one hand, my Storioni on the table and Sara with her hands on her hips and saying well, research it. There are detectives in the world. Or we can go to a centre for the recovery of stolen assets. Surely there are a dozen Jewish organisations that could help us.

  ‘At the first step you take, the house would fill with people trying to take advantage.’

  ‘Or maybe the owners would show up.’

  ‘We are talking about fifty years ago, you realise that?’

  ‘The owners of the instrument have direct or indirect descendants.’

  ‘Who probably couldn’t care less about the violin.’

  ‘Have you asked them that?’

  Little by little, the tone of your voice grew harsher and I was feeling attacked and offended because the harshness in your voice was accusing me of something I hadn’t felt guilty of until then: the horrible crime of being my father’s son. And, what’s more, your voice was changing, the timbre sharpening, as it always did when you talked about your family or when you talked about the Shoah, or when Uncle Haïm came up.

  ‘I’m not lifting a finger until I know that what you are saying is true. Where did you get all this from?’

  Tito Carbonell had been sitting at the steering wheel of his car on the corner for half an hour. He saw his uncle come out, with his diminishing hair, his briefcase in one hand, heading up València Street towards the university. Tito stopped drumming his fingers on the wheel. The voice from the back seat said Ardèvol’s balder every day. Tito didn’t think he needed to add any comment; he just checked his watch. The voice from the back seat was going to say I don’t think it’ll be long, relax, when a policeman put his hand to his cap in greeting, leaned over to talk to the driver and said gentleman, you can’t be here.

  ‘We’re waiting for someone who … Here she is,’ he improvised.

  Tito got out of the car and the policeman was distracted by a Coca-Cola lorry trying to unload, invading Llúria Street by a good half metre. Tito got back inside the car and when he saw that Caterina was coming through the doorway, he said in a cheery voice that is the famous Caterina Fargues. The voice from the back seat didn’t respond. They waited four more minutes until Sara stepped out on the street and looked both ways. She glanced at the opposite corner and, with quick, decisive steps, went towards the car.

  ‘Get in, they won’t let us stay here,’ said Tito, pointing to the back door of the car with his head. She hesitated for a few seconds and got in the car, in the back, as if it were a taxi.

  ‘Good day,’ said the voice.

  Sara saw an older man, very thin, hidden behind a dark mackintosh, who looked at her with interest. With a flat palm, he patted the empty part of the seat between them, to invite her to sit beside him.

  ‘So you are the famous Sara Voltes-Epstein.’

  Sara sat down just as Tito started the car. When they passed the policeman, he thanked him with a nod and entered the traffic that was heading up Llúria.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she said with a slightly scared voice.

  ‘Relax: somewhere where we can speak comfortably.’

  The place where they could speak comfortably was a luxurious bar on the Diagonal. They had reserved a table in an isolated corner. They sat down and for a few seconds they all three looked at each other in silence.

  ‘This is Mr Berenguer,’ said Tito, pointing to the thin older man. He nodded his head slightly in greeting. And then Tito explained that he personally, some time ago, had checked that in her house they had a Storioni violin named Vial –

  ‘And would you mind telling me how you checked that?’

  – that was very valuable and that, unfortunately, had been stolen more than fifty years ago from its legitimate owners –

  ‘The owner is Mr Adrià Ardèvol.’

  – and it turns out that its legitimate owner has been looking for it for ten years and it seems we’ve finally found it –

  ‘And why am I supposed to believe you?’

  – and we already know that the instrument was acquired by its legitimate owner on the fifteenth of February of nineteen thirty-eight in the city of Antwerp. Then it was appraised at far below its true value. Then it was stolen. Confiscated. The legitimate owner has moved heaven and earth to find it and, when he finally did, he took a few years to reflect and now it seems that he’s decided to reclaim it.

  ‘Well, then let him reclaim it legally. And prove this strange tale.’

  ‘There are legal problems. It’s a very long story.’

  ‘I’ve got time.’

  ‘I don’t want to bore you.’

  ‘Aha. And how did the violin come into my husband’s hands?’

  ‘Mr Adrià Ardèvol is not your husband. But if you’d like, I can explain how it came into
Mr Adrià Ardèvol’s hands.’

  ‘My husband has an ownership certificate for the instrument.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s a fake.’

  ‘And why should I believe that?’

  ‘Who was the owner according to that certificate?’

  ‘How do you expect me to remember that? He showed it to me a long time ago.’

  ‘None of this makes any sense,’ said Adrià without looking at Sara. He stroked the violin instinctively, but pulled away his hand as though he’d received a shock.

  I was too young, but Father had me enter the study as if to tell me a secret, even though there was no one else at home. And he told me have a good look at this violin. Vial was resting on the table. He brought over the loupe and had me look through it. I stuck my hand in my pocket and Sheriff Carson said pay attention, boy, this must be important. I pulled my hand away as if I’d been burned and I contemplated the violin through the magnifying glass. The violin, the scratches, the fine lines. And the ribs, with little varnish left on them …

  ‘Everything you see is its history.’

  I remembered that at other times he had explained similar things about the violin. That was why I wasn’t at all surprised to hear: how, this rings a bell. And so I responded to Father, yes, its history. And what do you mean by that?

  ‘That its history has travelled through many homes and touched many people whom we will never meet. Imagine, from millesettecentosessantaquattro to today, that’s …!

  ‘Mmmm … Vediamo … Centonovantatrè anni.’

  ‘That’s right. I see that you’ve understood me.’

  ‘No, Father.’

  It had been eight months since I’d begun to learn

  ‘Uno.’

  ‘Uno.’

  ‘Due.’

  ‘Due.’

  ‘Tre.’

  ‘Tre.’

  ‘Quattro.’

  ‘Quattro.’