by Jaume Cabré
‘Cinque.’
‘Cinque.’
‘Sei.’
‘Sei.’
‘Sette.’
‘Sette.’
‘Otto.’
‘Octo.’
‘Otttto!’
‘Otttto!’
‘Bravissimo!’
because you can learn Italian easily, in just four classes, trust me.
‘But Fèlix … The boy is already studying French, German, English …’
‘Signor Simone is a great teacher. In a year my son will be able to read Petrarch and that’s that.’
And he pointed to me, so there was no doubt: ‘You’ve been warned: tomorrow you start Italian.’
Now, before the violin, hearing me say centonovantatrè anni, Father couldn’t repress a proud expression that, I confess, made me feel utterly satisfied and self-important. Pointing with one hand to the instrument and putting the other on my shoulder, he said now it is mine. It has been many places, but now it’s mine. And it will be yours. And it will be your children’s. My grandchildren. And it will belong to our great grandchildren because it will never leave our family. Swear that to me.
I wonder how I can swear in the name of those who have yet to be born. But I know that I also swore in my own name. And every time I pick up Vial I remember that vow. And a few months later they killed my father, and it was my fault. I came to the conclusion that it was also the violin’s fault.
‘Mr Berenguer,’ said Adrià giving her an accusatory look, ‘is a former employee of the shop. He fought with Father and with Mother. And with me. He is a con man, did you know that?’
‘I am quite sure that he is an undesirable who wants to hurt you. But he knows exactly how your father bought the violin: he was there.’
‘And this Albert Carbonell is a half-relative who goes by the name of Tito and now runs the shop. Doesn’t that seem like a plot?’
‘If what they say is true, I don’t care about the plot. Here you have the owner’s address. All you have to do is get in touch with him and then you and I won’t have to wonder any more.’
‘It’s a trap! Any owner those two give us is an accomplice. What they want is to get their hands on the violin, can’t you see?’
‘No.’
‘How can you be so blind?’
I think that comment hurt you; but I was convinced that there was nothing innocent behind Mr Berenguer’s movements.
She handed him a folded piece of paper. Adrià took it but didn’t unfold it. He held it for quite some time before putting it down on the table.
‘Matthias Alpaerts,’ she said.
‘Huh?’
‘The name you didn’t read.’
‘It’s not true. The owner’s name is Netje de Boeck,’ I said angrily.
Thus, as if I were a five-year-old boy, you unmasked me. I looked at the piece of paper that read Matthias Alpaerts and I put it down on the table again.
‘This is all ridiculous,’ said Adrià after a long silence.
‘You are in a position to right a wrong and you refuse to do it.’
Sara left the study and I never heard her laugh again.
46
Silence reigned in the house for three or four days. It is horrible when two people who live together stay silent because they don’t want to say or they don’t dare to say things that could hurt. Sara focused on her exhibition and I wasn’t good for anything. I’m convinced that if your self-portrait has a slightly sad gaze, it’s because there was that silence in the house as you were making it. But I couldn’t give in. So Adrià Ardèvol made up his mind and went to the Law Faculty to consult Doctor Grau i Bordas about the problem a friend of mine had with a valuable object acquired by his family many years ago that presumably had been pillaged during the war, and Doctor Grau i Bordas stroked his chin and listened to what was happening to my friend and then he began to digress about generalisations regarding international law and Nazi pillaging and after five minutes Adrià Ardèvol understood that the man didn’t have a clue.
In the university’s department of musicology, Doctor Casals gave him a lot of information about the various families of luthiers in Cremona and recommended an authority on historic violins. And you can trust him, Ardèvol. And the question that he wanted to ask him from the moment they’d opened the case: ‘Can I try it?’
‘You play the violin too?’
In the hallway of Musicology, four students stopped to hear the enigmatic, sweet music that emerged from one of the offices. Until Doctor Casals put the violin in its case and said it is extraordinary; like a Gesù, truly.
He left the violin in his departmental office, in one corner. And he saw two students who wanted to improve their grades. And another student who wanted to know why did you only just pass me when I came to every class. You? Well, to a lot of classes. Ah, yes? To some, yeah. When the young lady left, Laura came in and sat at the desk in front of his. She was simply lovely and he said hello, without looking her in the eyes. She made a distracted wave and opened up a folder filled with notes or exams to correct or one of those things that make her sigh. They were alone for quite a while, each with their own work. Twice, no, three times, they both looked up at the same time and their gazes played timidly for a few moments. Until the fourth time, when she said how are you. Was it the first time she took the initiative? I don’t remember. But I know that she accompanied the question with a slight smile. That was an obvious declaration of armistice.
‘Well, all right.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all.’
‘But you’re a celebrity.’
‘Now you’re having a laugh.’
‘No: I envy you. Like half of the department.’
‘Now you’re really having a laugh. And how are you?’
‘Well, all right.’
They were quiet and smiled, each with their own thoughts.
‘Are you writing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you mind telling me what you’re working on?’
‘I am rewriting three conferences.’
She, with a smile, invited me to continue, and I, obedient, said Llull, Vico and Berlin.
‘Wow.’
‘Yes. But you know what? I am rewriting everything so it will be a new book, you know? Not three conferences, but …’
Adrià made a vague gesture, as if he were in the middle of the problem: ‘There has to be something that ties them all together.’
‘And have you found it?’
‘Maybe. The historical narrative. But I don’t know.’
Laura rearranged the papers, which is what she always did when she was thinking.
‘Is that the famous violin?’ she said pointing with a pencil to the corner.
‘Famous?’
‘Famous.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Gosh: don’t leave it there.’
‘Don’t worry: I’ll take it to class with me.’
‘Don’t tell me that you are planning on playing it in front of …’ she said, tickled.
‘No, no.’
Or yes. Why not? He decided suddenly. Like when he asked Laura to come with him to Rome to play his lawyer. Laura inspired him to rash decisions.
Adrià Ardèvol, in the History of Aesthetic Ideas class, second quarter, at the University of Barcelona, had the nerve to start the class with the partita number one played on his Storioni. Surely none of the thirty-five students noticed the five unjustifiable errors nor the moment when he got lost and even had to improvise the Tempo di Borea. And when he finished he carefully stored the violin in its case, placed it on the desk and said what relationship do you think there is between artistic manifestation and thought. And no one dared to say anything because gosh, I don’t know.
‘Now imagine that we are in the year seventeen twenty.’
‘Why?’ said a boy with a beard sitting at the back, isolated from the rest, perhaps to avoid contamination.
‘T
he year when Bach composed what I just played so badly.’
‘And our thinking has to change?’
‘At the very least you and I would be wearing wigs.’
‘But that doesn’t change our thinking.’
‘It doesn’t? Men and women in wigs, stockings and high heels.’
‘It’s just that the aesthetic idea of the eighteenth century is different from ours today.’
‘Just the aesthetic? In the eighteenth century, if you weren’t wearing a wig, makeup, stockings and heels, they wouldn’t let you into the salons. Today, a man wearing makeup, a wig, stockings and heels would be locked up in prison without any questions being asked.’
‘We have to take morality into account?’
It was the timid voice of a lanky girl from the front row. Adrià, who was between desks, turned around.
‘That’s what I like to hear,’ he said. And the girl turned red, which wasn’t my intention. ‘Aesthetics, as hard as we try to separate it, is never alone.’
‘No?’
‘No. It has a great capacity to drag other forms of thought with it.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Anyway, it was a class that worked very well to establish the bases of what I had to explain for the next few weeks. And, for a few moments, I even forgot that at home we were living in silence, Sara and I. And Adrià was very sorry not to find Laura in the office when he went there to pick up his things because he would have liked to explain to her how well her idea had worked.
As soon as I opened the case inside the workshop of Pau Ullastres, the luthier told me it’s an authentic Cremona. Just by its scent and its outward mien. Even so, Pau Ullastres didn’t know Vial’s specific history; he had heard some vague talk about it, but he thought a Storioni could be worth a serious pile of dough and you should have brought it in to be appraised earlier. For insurance purposes, you know? It took me a few seconds to understand, because I had been captivated by the still atmosphere of his workshop. A warm, reddish light the colour of violin wood, made that unexpected silence, right in the heart of Gràcia, more solid. The window overlooked an interior courtyard at the back of which was a wood drying shed with its door open. There the wood aged unhurriedly while the world, now round, spun like a compulsive spinning top.
I looked at the luthier, frightened: I didn’t know what he had said to me. He smiled and repeated it.
‘I never thought to have it appraised,’ I responded. ‘It was like another piece of furniture in the house, just always there. And we’ve never wanted to sell it.’
‘What a lucky family.’
I didn’t tell him I disagreed because it wasn’t any of Pau Ullastres’s business and there was no way I could have read these lines that weren’t yet written. The luthier asked for permission before playing it. He played better than Doctor Casals. It almost sounded as if Bernat were playing.
‘It’s marvellous,’ he said. ‘Like a Gesù: it’s on the same level.’
‘Are all the Storionis as good as this one?’
‘Not all of them; but this one is.’ He smelled it with his eyes closed. ‘You’ve kept it locked up?’
‘Not for some time now. There was a period where …’
‘Violins are alive. The wood of a violin is like wine. It needs to age slowly over time and it enjoys the pressure of the strings; it likes to be played, it likes to live at a comfortable temperature, to be able to breathe, not be banged, always be clean … Only lock it up when you go on a trip.’
‘I would like to get in touch with the former owners.’
‘Do you have an ownership title?’
‘Yes.’
I showed him Father’s contract of sale from Signor Saverio Falegnami.
‘The certificate of authenticity?’
‘Yes.’
I showed him the certificate cooked up by Grandfather Adrià and the luthier Carlos Carmona in a period when for a few grand you could have even counterfeit banknotes authenticated. Pau Ullastres looked at it curiously. He gave it back to me without comment. He thought it over: ‘Do you want to get it appraised now?’
‘No. In fact, what I want is to be sure of who its previous owners were. I want to meet with them.’
Ullastres looked at the ownership certificate: ‘Saverio Falegnami, it says here.’
‘The ones prior to that man.’
‘You mind telling me why you want to get in touch with them?’
‘I don’t even know myself. For me it’s as if this violin had always belonged to my family. I’ve never worried about its genealogy. But now …’
‘You are concerned about its authenticity?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘If it helps you at all, I would swear on all that is holy that this is an instrument from Lorenzo Storioni’s finest period. And not because of the certificate, but because of what I can see, hear and feel.’
‘I’ve been told it is the first violin he ever made.’
‘The best Storionis were the first twenty. They say it’s because of the wood he used.’
‘The wood?’
‘Yes. It was exceptional.’
‘Why?’
But the luthier was stroking my violin and didn’t answer. All those caresses were making me feel jealous. Then Ullastres looked at me: ‘What exactly do you want to do? Why exactly have you come?’
It is hard to make enquiries without being entirely truthful with those who could help you.
‘I would like to make a family tree of its owners since the beginning.’
‘That’s a good idea … But it’ll cost you an arm and a leg.’
I didn’t know how to tell him that what I wanted was to work out if Mr Berenguer and Tito had made up the name Alpaerts. And to know whether the name that Father had given me, Netje de Boeck, was the correct one. Or maybe find out that neither of those names were authentic and that the violin had always been mine. Because I was seeing that yes, that if there had been a legal owner prior to the Nazi, that it was in my best interests for me to get in touch with them, whoever they were, to get down on my knees and beg them to let me have it until my death; just thinking about Vial leaving my home forever gave me chills. And I had made up my mind to do whatever it took to keep that from happening.
‘Did you hear me, Mr Ardèvol? An arm and a leg.’
If I’d had any doubt, Vial was authentic. Perhaps I went to see Ullastres just for that: to be hear it for myself; to make sure that I had fought with Sara over a valuable violin; not over some pieces of wood in the shape of an instrument. No, deep down I don’t know why I went there to see him. But I believe it was since my visit to Ullastres’s workshop that I began to muse on that fine wood and on Jachiam Mureda.
For lunch they gave him a bland semolina soup. He thought he should let them know that he didn’t like semolina soup like the one they gave to whatshername … ffucking semolina soup. But things weren’t that simple because he didn’t know if it was his vision or what, but he was having more and more trouble reading and retaining things. Fucking ceiling. Retaining things. Retaining.
‘Aren’t you hungry, my prince?’
‘No. I want to read.’
‘They should give you alphabet soup.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on, eat a little.’
‘Little Lola.’
‘Wilson.’
‘Wilson.’
‘What, Adrià?’
‘Why am I so befuddled?’
‘What you need to do is eat and rest. You’ve worked enough.’
He gave him five spoonfuls of the semolina soup and was satisfied that Adrià had had enough lunch.
‘Now you can read.’ He looked at the floor, ‘Oh, we’ve made a real mess with the soup,’ he said. ‘And if you want to take a nap, let me know and I’ll put you into bed.’
Adrià, obedient, only read for a little while. He slowly read how Cornudella explained his reading of Carner. He read with his mouth open. But soon he was overc
ome by I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Little Lola, and he grew tired because Carner and Horace blurred together on the table. He took off his glasses and ran his palm over his fatigued eyes. He didn’t know if he should sleep in the chair or the bed or … I don’t think they’ve explained it well enough to me, he thought. Maybe it was the window?
‘Adrià.’
Bernat had come into cinquantaquattro and was looking at his friend.
‘Where should I sleep?’
‘Are you tired?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who am I?’
‘Little Lola.’
Bernat kissed him on the forehead and examined the room. Adrià was sitting in a comfortable chair beside the window.
‘Jònatan?’
‘Huh?’
‘Are you Jònatan?’
‘I’m Bernat.’
‘No: Wilson!’
‘Wilson is that lively bloke, the one from Ecuador?’
‘I don’t know. I think …’ He looked at Bernat, perplexed: ‘I’m all mixed up now,’ he confessed finally.
Outside it was an overcast, cold, windy day; but even if it’d been a sunny, gorgeous day it wouldn’t have mattered because the glass separated the two worlds too efficiently. Bernat went towards the bedside table and opened the drawer: he placed Black Eagle and Sheriff Carson inside it, so they could continue their useless but loyal watch, lying on the dirty rag where some dark and light checks and a large scar in the middle could still be made out; a rag that had been the source of much speculation by the doctors because during the first few days Mr Ardèvol wouldn’t let go of it, clutching it with both hands. A disgusting, dirty rag, yes, Doctor. How strange, no? What is this rag, eh, sweetie?
Adrià scratched with his fingernail at a small stain on the chair’s arm. Bernat turned when he heard the slight sound and said are you all right?
‘There’s no way to get rid of it.’ He scratched harder. ‘You see?’
Bernat came closer, put on his eyeglasses and examined the spot as if it were very interesting. Since he didn’t know what to do or what to say, he folded his glasses and said, don’t worry, it won’t spread. After fifteen minutes of silence, no one had interrupted them because life is made up of the sum of solitudes that lead us to
