by Jaume Cabré
‘No. This kid has never heard of the cabbala.’
‘One hundred and sixty-eight to one.’
Llull, Vico, Berlin was a feverish book, written quickly, but it left me exhausted because each day, when I got up and when I went to sleep, I opened Sara’s wardrobe and her clothes were still there. Writing under such circumstances is very difficult. And one day I finished writing it, which doesn’t mean that it was finished. And Adrià was overcome with a desire to throw all the pages off the balcony. But he just said Sara, ubi es? And then, after a few minutes in silence, instead of going out on the balcony, he made a pile of all the pages, put them on one corner of the table, said I’m going out, Little Lola, without realising that Caterina wasn’t there, and he headed to the university, as if it were the ideal place to distract himself.
‘What are you doing?’
Laura turned around. From the way she was walking, it looked as if she were taking measurements of the cloister.
‘Thinking. And you?’
‘Trying to distract myself.’
‘How’s the book?’
‘I just finished it.’
‘Wow,’ she said, pleased.
She took both of his hands in hers, but immediately pulled them away as if she’d been burned.
‘But I’m not at all convinced. It’s impossible to bring together three such strong personalities.’
‘Have you finished it or not?’
‘Well, yes. But now I have to read it all the way through and I’ll come up against many obstacles.’
‘So it’s not finished.’
‘No. It’s written. Now I just have to finish it. And I don’t know if it’s publishable, honestly.’
‘Don’t give in, coward.’
Laura smiled at him with that gaze that disconcerted him. Especially when she called him a coward because she was right.
Ten days later, in mid-July, it was Todó, with his deliberateness, who said hey, Ardèvol, are you going ahead with the book in the end or what. They were both looking out from the first floor of the sunny, half-empty cloister.
I have trouble writing because Sara is not around.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Shit: if you don’t know …’
She’s not around: we aren’t speaking because of a damn violin.
‘I’m having trouble bringing together personalities that are so … so …’
‘Such strong personalities, yes: that’s the official version that everyone knows,’ interrupted Todó.
Why don’t you all just leave me alone, for fuck’s sake?
‘Official version? And how do people know, that I’m writing …’
‘You’re the star, mate.’
Bloody hell.
They were in silence for a long while. Ardèvol’s lengthy conversations were filled with silences, according to reliable sources.
‘Llull, Vico, Berlin,’ recited Todó, his voice arriving from a distance.
‘Yes.’
‘Shit. Vico and Llull, all right: but Berlin?’
No, no, please, leave me alone, you annoying fuck.
‘The desire to organise the world through scholarship: that is what unites them.’
‘Hey, that could be interesting.’
That’s why I wrote it, you bloody idiot, you’re making me swear and everything.
‘But I think it’s still going to take me some time. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish it: you can consider that the official version.’
Todó leaned on the stone railing.
‘Do you know what?’ he said after a long pause. ‘I really hope you work it out.’ He looked at him out of the corner of his eye. ‘It’d do me good to read something like that.’
He patted him on the arm in a show of support and went towards his office, in the corner of the cloister. Below, a couple walked through the cloister holding hands, uninterested in the rest of the word, and Adrià envied them. He knew that when Todó had told him that it would do him good to read something like that, it wasn’t to butter him up and even less because it would do his spirit good to read a book where the unlinkable was linked and he struggled to show that the great thinkers were doing the same thing as Tolstoy but with ideas. Todó’s spirit was featherweight and if he was yearning for a book that didn’t yet exist it was because he had been obsessed for years now with undermining Doctor Bassas’s position in their department and in the university, and the best way to do that was by creating new idols, in whatever discipline. If not for you, I would have even felt flattered to be used in other people’s power struggles. The violin belongs to my family, Sara. I can’t do that, because of my father. He died over this violin and now you want me to just give it away to some stranger who claims it’s his? And if you can’t understand that it’s because when it comes to Jewish matters, you don’t listen to reason. And you let yourself be hoodwinked by gangsters like Tito and Mr Berenguer. Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani.
In the deserted office, it suddenly came to him. Or, to put it better, he came to a decision all of a sudden. It must have been the euphoria of the half-finished book. He dialed a number and waited patiently as he thought please let her be there, let her be there, let her be there because otherwise … He looked at his watch: almost one. They must be having lunch.
‘Hello.’
‘Max, it’s Adrià.’
‘Hey.’
‘Can you put her on?’
Slight hesitation.
‘Let’s see. One sec.’
That meant she was there! She hadn’t run off to Paris, to the huitième arrondissement, and she hadn’t gone to Israel. My Sara was still in Cadaqués. My Sara hadn’t wanted to flee too far … On the other side of the line, still silence. I couldn’t even hear footsteps or any murmur of conversation. I don’t know how many eternal seconds passed. When a voice came on it was Max again: ‘Listen, she says that … I’m really sorry … She says to ask you if you’ve returned the violin.’
‘No: I want to talk to her.’
‘It’s that … Then she says … she says she doesn’t want to talk to you.’
Adrià gripped the phone very tightly. Suddenly, his throat was dry. He couldn’t find the words. As if Max had guessed that, he said I’m really sorry, Adrià. Really.
‘Thank you, Max.’
And he hung up as the office door opened. Laura looked surprised to find him there. In silence, she went over to her desk and shuffled through the drawers for a few minutes. Adrià had barely changed position, looking into the void, hearing Sara’s brother’s delicate words as if they were a death sentence. After a little while he sighed loudly and looked over at Laura.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked as she gathered some very thick folders, the kind she was always carrying around everywhere.
‘Of course. I’ll buy you lunch.’
I don’t know why I said that. It wasn’t out of any sort of revenge. I think it was because I wanted to show Laura and the whole world that nothing was wrong, that everything was under control.
Seated before Laura’s blue eyes and perfect skin, Adrià left half of his pasta on his plate. They had barely spoken. Laura filled his water glass and he made an appreciative gesture.
‘So, how’s everything going?’ said Adrià, putting on a friendly face as if they had lifted the conversation ban.
‘Well. I’m going to the Algarve for fifteen days.’
‘How nice. Todò is a bit loony, yeah?’
‘Why?’
They reached, after a few minutes, the conclusion that yes, a bit loony; and that it was best if you didn’t tell him anything about my book that doesn’t yet exist because there is nothing more unpleasant than writing knowing that everyone is on the edge of their seats wondering whether you will be able to tie together Vico and Llull and all that.
‘I talk too much, I know.’
And to prove it, she explained that she had met some really nice people and they were meeting up in the Algarve because they
were bicycling all over the Iberian peninsula and
‘Are you a biker, too?’
‘I’m too old. I’m going to lie on a beach chair. To disconnect from the dramas in the department.’
‘And flirt a bit.’
She didn’t answer. She glanced at him to convey that I was going too far, because women have an ability to understand things that I’ve always envied.
What do I know, Sara? But this is how it went. In Laura’s flat, which was tiny but always spick and span, there was a controlled disorder that was particularly concentrated in the bedroom. A disorder that wasn’t chaotic in the least, the disorder of someone about to go on a trip. Clothing in piles, shoes lined up, a couple of tourist guides and a camera. Like a cat and a dog, they carefully watched each other’s moves.
‘Is it one of the electronic ones?’ said Adrià, picking up the camera suspiciously.
‘Uh-huh. Digital.’
‘You’re always into the latest thing.’
Laura took off her shoes, standing, and put on some sort of flip-flops that were very flattering.
‘And you must use a Leica.’
‘I don’t have a camera. I never have.’
‘And your memories?’
‘Here.’ Adrià pointed to his head. ‘They never break down. And they’re always here when I need them.’
I said it without irony because I can’t predict anyone’s future.
‘I can take two hundred photos, with this.’ She took the camera from him with a gesture that strove to conceal her impatience and put it down on the night table, beside the telephone.
‘Bravo,’ he said, uninterested.
‘And then I can put them into my computer. I look at them more there than in an album.’
‘Bravissimo. But for that you need a computer.’
Laura stood before him, defiant.
‘What?’ she said, her hands on her hips. ‘Now you want a lecture on the quality of digital photos?’
Adrià looked into those oh so blue eyes and embraced her. They held each other for a long time and I cried a little bit. Luckily, she didn’t notice.
‘Why are you crying?’
‘I’m not crying.’
‘Liar. Why are you crying?’
By mid afternoon they had turned the bedroom’s disorder into chaos. And they spent close to an hour lying down, looking at the ceiling. Laura studied Adrià’s medallion.
‘Why do you always wear it?’
‘Just because.’
‘But you don’t believe in …’
‘It’s a reminder.’
‘A reminder of what?’
‘I don’t know.’
Then the telephone rang. It rang on the bedside table next to Laura’s side of the bed. They looked at each other, as if wanting to ask, in some sort of guilty silence, whether they were expecting any call. Laura didn’t move, with her head on Adrià’s chest, and they both heard how the telephone, monotonously, insisted, insisted, insisted. Adrià stared at Laura’s hair, expecting her to reach for it. Nothing. The telephone kept ringing.
VI
STABAT MATER
We are granted all that we fear.
Hélène Cixous
50
Two years later, the telephone rang suddenly and gave Adrià a start, just like every time he heard it. He stared at the device for a long time. The house was dark except for the reading light on in his study. The house was silent, the house without you, except for the insistent ringing of the telephone. He put a bookmark in Carr, closed it and stared at the shrieking telephone for a few more minutes, as if that solved everything. He let it ring for a good long while and finally, when whoever was calling had already made their stubborness clear, Adrià Ardèvol rubbed his face with his palms, picked up and said hello.
His gaze was sad and damp. He was nearing eighty and gave off a worn, infinitely beaten air. He stood on the landing of the staircase breathing anxiously, gripping a small travel bag as if his contact with it was what was keeping him alive. When he heard Adrià walking up the stairs slowly, he turned. For a few seconds, they both stared at each other.
‘Mijnheer Adrian Ardefol?’
Adrià opened the door to his home and invited him in while the man, in something approximating English, confirmed that he was the one who’d called that morning. I was convinced that a sad story was entering my house together with the stranger, but I no longer had any choice. I closed the door to keep the secrets from scampering out onto the landing and into the stairwell; standing, I offered to speak in Dutch and then I saw that the stranger’s damp eyes brightened a tad as he made an appreciative gesture to Adrià, who had to brush up on his rusty Dutch straightaway to ask the stranger what he wanted.
‘It’s a long story. That’s why I asked if you had some time.’
He led him into the study. He noticed that the man hadn’t tried to hide his admiration, which was like someone who suddenly happens upon an unexpected room filled with surprises when visiting the Louvre. Right in the middle of the study, the newcomer spun around timidly, taking in the shelves filled with books, the paintings, the incunabula, the instrument cabinet, the two desks, your self-portrait, the Carr on top of the table, which I still hadn’t been able to finish, and the manuscript beneath the loupe, my latest acquisition: sixty-three handwritten pages of The Dead with curious comments in the margin that were probably by Joyce himself. Once he had seen it all, he looked at Adrià in silence.
Adrià had him sit on the other side of the desk, one in front of the other, and for a few seconds I wondered what specific grief could have produced the rictus of pain that had dried onto the stranger’s face. He unzipped his bag with some difficulty and pulled out something covered carefully in paper. He unwrapped it meticulously and Adrià saw a dirty piece of cloth, dark with filth, on which a few dark and light checks could still be made out. The stranger moved aside the paper and placed the rag on the desk and, with gestures that seemed liturgical, he unfolded it carefully, as if it contained a valuable treasure. He seemed like a priest laying out an altar cloth. Once he had spread it out, I was somewhat disappointed to see that there was nothing inside. A stitched line separated it into two equal parts, like a border. I couldn’t perceive the memories. Then the stranger took off his glasses and wiped his right eye with a tissue. Noting Adrià’s respectful silence and without looking him in the eye, he said that he wasn’t crying, that for the last few months he’d been suffering a very uncomfortable allergy that caused etcetera, etcetera, and he smiled as if in apology. He looked around him and tossed the tissue into the bin. Then, with a vaguely liturgical gesture, he pointed to the filthy old rag with both hands extended in front of him. As if it were an invitation to the question.
‘What is that?’ he asked.
The stranger put both palms onto the cloth for a few seconds, as if he were mentally reciting a deep prayer, and he said, in a transformed voice, now imagine you are having lunch at home, with your wife, your mother-in-law and your three little daughters; your mother-in-law has a bit of a chest cold, and suddenly …
The stranger lifted his head and now his eyes were definitely filled with tears, not allergies and etceteras. But he didn’t make any motion to wipe away the tears of pain, he looked intently straight ahead, and he repeated imagine you are having lunch at home, with your wife, your sick mother-in-law and your three little daughters, with the new tablecloth set out, the blue-and-white chequered one, because today is the eldest girl’s birthday – little Amelietje – and suddenly someone breaks down the door without even knocking first and comes in armed to the teeth, followed by five more soldiers, storming in, and they all keep shouting schnell, schnell and raus, raus, and they take you out of your house forever in the middle of lunch, for the rest of your life, with no chance of looking back, the party tablecloth, the new one, the one my Berta had bought two years earlier, without the chance to grab anything, with just the clothes on your back. What does raus mean, Daddy, says Amelietje
, and I couldn’t keep her from getting smacked on the nape of her neck by an impatient rifle who insisted raus, raus because everyone can understand German because it is the language and whoever says they don’t understand it is lying and will get what’s coming to them. Raus!
Two minutes later they were going down the street, my mother-in-law coughing, with a violin case in her arms because her daughter had left it in the hall after returning home from rehearsal; the girls with their eyes wide, my Berta, pale, squeezing little Juliet in her arms. Down the street, almost running because it seemed the soldiers were in a big hurry, and the mute gazes of the neighbours from the windows, and I grabbed the little hand of Amelia, who turned seven today and was crying because the blow to her neck hurt and because the German soldiers were scary, and poor Trude, just five years old, begged me to pick her up and I put her on my shoulders, and Amelia had to run to keep up with us and until we reached Glass Square, where the lorry was, I didn’t realise that I was still gripping a blue-and-white chequered napkin.
There were more humane ones, they told me later. The ones who said you can take twenty-five kilos of luggage and you have half an hour to gather it, schnell, eh? And then you think about everything there is in a house. What would you grab, to take with you? To take where? A chair? A book? The shoebox with family photos? China? Light bulbs? The mattress? Mama, what does schnell mean. And how much are twenty-five kilos? You end up grabbing that useless key ring that hangs forgotten in the hall and that, if you survive and don’t have to trade it for a crumb of mouldy bread, will become the sacred symbol of that normal, happy life you had before the disaster. Mama, why did you bring that? Shut up, my mother-in-law responded.
Leaving the house forever, accompanied by the rhythm of the soldiers’ boots, leaving that life with my wife pale with panic, the girls terrified, my mother-in-law about to faint and I unable to do anything about it. Who turned us in? We live in a Christian neighbourhood. Why? How did they know? How did they sniff out the Jews? On the lorry, to keep from seeing the girls’ desperation, I thought who, how and why. When they made us get into the lorry, which was filled with frightened people, Berta the Brave with the little one and I with Trude stayed to one side. My mother-in-law and her cough, a bit further down, and Berta started to shout where is Amelia, Amelietje, my daughter, where are you, stay close to us, Amelia, and a little hand made its way over and grabbed my trouser leg and then poor Amelietje, scared, even more scared after finding herself alone for a few moments, looked up at me, asking for help, she too wanted to climb into my arms, but she didn’t ask because Truu was littler and that gaze that I’ve never been able to forget for the rest of my life, never, the help that your daughter begs you for and you don’t know how to give, and you will go to hell for not having helped your little daughter in her moment of need. All you can think to do is give her the blue-and-white chequered napkin and she clung to it with both hands and looked at me gratefully, as if I’d given her a precious treasure, the talisman that would keep her from getting lost wherever she went.
