by Jaume Cabré
‘Do you love me or not?’
‘You know everything and you know that I love you.’
‘Then help me die.’
Leaving the hospital gave me a pang of bad conscience. Walking through Universal Creation, looking halfheartedly at the spines of books without really seeing them. Just as at other times strolling through Romance Language Prose made me recall pleasurable readings; or entering Poetry meant, inevitably, pulling out a book and furtively reading a couple of poems at random or with every intention, as if Universal Creation were Paradise, and the poems, apples that had never been forbidden. Just as entering Essays made me identify with those who had one day tried to put order into their reflections, now I wandered looking at spines without seeing the titles on them, dejected, my eyes filled only with Sara’s pain. It was impossible to work. I would sit before a pile of manuscript papers, trying to reread where I had left off, but then you arose saying kill me if you love me, or you stock-still for years, patient, level-headed, and me having to leave your room every five minutes to scream with rage. I asked Dora if you’d saved the hair when you had it cut …
‘No.’
‘Damn! …’
‘She told us to throw it away.’
‘Shit, but …’
‘Yes, it’s a shame. I thought the same thing.’
‘Did you really do as she said?’
‘It’s impossible not to do what your wife says.’
And the nights were one long insomnia. To the point that I had to do strange things to get to sleep, like going over texts in Hebrew, which was the language I had most neglected because I had few opportunities to work with it. And I searched for texts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and contemporary texts and I was reminded of the venerable Assumpta Brotons with her pince-nez and a half smile that I at first took for kindly and later found out was a smirk. And the patience she had. And the patience I had to have.
‘Echad.’
‘Eshad.’
‘Echad.’
‘Ehad.’
‘Very good. Do you understand it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Schtayim.’
‘Shtaim.’
‘Very good. Do you understand it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Schalosh.’
‘Shalosh.’
‘Very good. Do you understand it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Arba.’
‘Arba.’
‘Khamesh.’
‘Kamesh.’
‘Yes, that’s it, very good!’
The letters danced before my eyes because nothing mattered to me, because all my desire remained by your side. I went to bed in the wee hours and at six in the morning I was still lying there with my eyes open. I barely slept a few minutes and was up before Little Lola arrived, shaved and showered and ready to return to the hospital if I didn’t have class, to witness some miracle for the love of God.
Until one night I felt so ashamed of myself that I decided to try to really put myself in Sara’s shoes in an attempt to understand her fully. And the next day Adrià contrived to bump into Dora alone, who wasn’t as scared as I was, but very reticent because it wasn’t a case of some irreversible disease that would sooner or later be life-threatening; she could spend years in that state; she … and I had to hear myself pleading in favour of Sara’s arguments, which could be summed up in one “do it because you love me”. Alone again. Alone before your request, your entreaty. But I didn’t feel capable of it. And one night I said to Sara that yes, that I would do it, and she smiled at me and she said if I could move I would get up and French kiss you right now. And I’d said it knowing I was lying, because I had no intention of carrying it out. In the end, Sara, I always lied to you; about that and about trying to return the violin, which according to my version was full steam ahead and I was about to get in touch with … The edifice of lies I constructed just to buy time was pathetic. Buy time from whom? Buy time from fear, thinking that each passing day was a victory, things like that. I spoke about it with Dalmau, who advised me not to involve Doctor Real.
‘You say it like it’s a crime.’
‘It is a crime. According to our current legislation.’
‘So why are you helping me?’
‘Because one thing is the law and another is the cases that the law doesn’t dare to legislate.’
‘In other words, you agree with me.’
‘What do you want? A signed declaration?’
‘No. Sorry. I … Anyway.’
He grabbed me, he had me sit down and, even though we were in his office and there was no one else home, he lowered his voice and, with the yellow Modigliani as a mute, shocked witness, gave me a speed course on assisted suicide for love. And I knew that I would never make use of that knowledge. I spent a couple of weeks relatively calm until one day Sara looked me in the eyes and said when, Adrià? I opened my mouth. I looked up at the fucking ceiling and I looked at her without knowing what to say. I said I talked to … I’m … eh?
The next day you died all on your own. I will always believe that you died on your own because you understood that I was a coward and you so wanted to die and I wasn’t brave enough to accompany you on the final stretch and make it easier on you. Doctor Real’s version was that you had another haemorrhage like the one that had caused the accident, despite the treatment they were giving you. And even though you were in hospital, there was nothing that could be done. You left with your exhibition of portraits still up. And Max, who came with Giorgio, crying, said what a shame, she didn’t know we were making the book for her; we should have told her.
That was how it all went, Sara. Since I was unable to help you, you had to go on your own, in a rush, secretly, without looking back, without being able to say goodbye. Do you understand my disquiet?
57
‘Adrià?’ Just hearing him say that I could tell that Max was upset.
‘Yes, what?’
‘I got the fax.’
‘Is it all right?’
‘No. It’s not.’
‘It’s just that, the fax … I must have hit the wrong key …’
‘Adrià.’
‘Yes.’
‘I received the fax perfectly. You pushed the right button and I got it.’
‘Very good. So then there’s no problem, yeah?’
‘No problem? Do you know what you sent me?’ His tone was like Trullols when she told me to do arpeggios in G major and I started them in D major.
‘Of course, Sara’s bio.’
‘Yes. What note did you start with?’ insisted Trullols.
‘Hey, what’s wrong with you?’
‘To put where?’ now it was Max.
‘At the end of the book of portraits. Are you pleased?’
‘No. Now I’ll read you what you sent me.’
It wasn’t a question: it was a warning. And I immediately heard him saying Sara Voltes-Epstein was born in Paris in nineteen fifty and when she was very young she met a stupid boy who fell in love with her and while he never intended any harm, he was never really able to make her happy.
‘Listen, I …’
‘Shall I continue?’
‘No need for that.’
But Max read the whole thing to me. He was very cross and when he finished there was a terribly strange silence. I swallowed hard and said Max, I sent you that?
More silence. I looked at the papers on top of the desk. There were the Aesthetics exams to correct. Surely Little Lola had moved things around. And more papers and … Wait. I grabbed a paper, the one I had faxed, written with the Olivetti. I looked it over quickly.
‘Damn.’ Silence. ‘Are you sure I sent you that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Forgive me.’
Max’s voice sounded calmer: ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll write the bio myself. I already have her exhibition history.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No, and sorry about my … nerves … It’s just that
the printers want the text right away if we want it to be finished before the exhibition closes.’
‘If you want I’ll try to …’
‘No, no: I’ll take care of it.’
‘Thank you, Max. Give my regards to Giorgio.’
‘I will. By the way: why do you write fucking with two f’s?’
I hung up. That was the first warning, but I didn’t know it yet. I went through the papers on the desk again. There was only that text. I reread it, concerned. On the paper I had written Sara Voltes-Epstein was born in Paris in nineteen fifty and when she was very young she met a stupid boy who fell in love with her and while he never intended any harm, he was never really able to make her happy. After some painful back and forth, after some coming and going, she agreed to live with the aforementioned stupid boy over what were long (too short) years of shared life that became the most important of my life. The most essential. Sara Voltes-Epstein died in Barcelona in the autumn of ninety-six. Proof that life is a ffucking bitch, she didn’t make it to fifty years old. Sara Voltes-Epstein devoted herself to drawing life for other people’s children. She only very occasionally and reluctantly exhibited her pencil and charcoal drawings, as if she only cared about the essential: the relationship with the paper via the stroke of a pencil or a stick of charcoal. She was very good, drawing. She was very good. She was.
Life went on, sadder, but alive. The appearance of the book of portraits by Sara Voltes-Epstein filled me with a profound and inexhaustible melancholy. The biographical note that Max had come up with was brief but impeccable, like everything Max does. Afterwards, things sped up: Laura didn’t come back from Uppsala, just as she had threatened to do, and I locked myself up to write about evil because I had many things going through my head. But Adrià Ardèvol, no matter how desperately he wrote and how many pages he filled, knew that he wasn’t making progress; that it was impossible to make progress because all he heard was the ringing of the telephone: a sustained and very unpleasant D.
‘Rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs.’ It was the door.
‘Do you mind?’
Adrià opened the door the rest of the way. That time, Bernat had gone straight to the point; he was carrying his violin and a bulky bag with half his life in it.
‘Did you have another argument?’
Bernat went inside without responding to the obvious. He spent the first five days in silence, while I battled with a sterile text and against the telephone’s insistence.
With that good faith, Bernat, starting on the sixth day, spent a few dinners trying to convince me to finally take the computer into my life, having me go over what Llorenç had taught me, which I had forgotten because I never put it to use.
‘No, I understand the concept. But to use it … I’d have to use it and I just don’t have the time.’
‘You’re hopeless.’
‘How can I start with that when I still haven’t even got used to the typewriter?’
‘But you use it.’
‘Because I don’t have a secretary to type things up for me.’
‘You don’t know how much time you’d save.’
‘I am a child of the codex, not of volume and scroll.’
‘I don’t understand you now.’
‘I’m a child of the codex and not of volume.’
‘Still don’t understand you. I just want to save you time, with the computer.’
Bernat wasn’t able to convince me and I wasn’t able to talk to him about Llorenç and how he had to avoid being a father like mine. Until one day I saw him packing a suitcase; it had only been a couple of weeks since he’d sought refuge at my house. He was going back home because, according to what he told me before leaving, he couldn’t live like this, which I didn’t exactly understand. He left my flat half-reconciled with Tecla, and I was alone again at home. Alone forever.
I hadn’t been able to get the idea out of my head until one fine day I called Max and I asked him if he would be there because I needed to see him. And I went to Cadaqués ready for everything.
The Voltes-Epstein house is large and spacious, not particularly lovely but designed to maximise the gorgeous view of the coves and the Homeric blue of the Mediterranean. It is a paradise I was entering for the first time. I was very pleased when Max hugged me as soon as I set foot in the house. I understood that as the official way of becoming part of the family, even though it was too late. The best room in the house, since Mr Voltes’s death, had been turned into Max’s study: an impressive library, they say the largest in Europe on wine: sunny slopes, vineyards, vines, tendrils, diseases, grapes, monographs on Cabernet, Tempranillo, Chardonnay, Riesling, Shiraz and company; history, geographic distribution, historic crises, epidemics, phylloxera, the start of varieties, the vineyard and the ideal latitude and altitude. Fog and the vineyard. The wine that comes from the cold. The raisin. Wines of the mountain and highest mountains. Green vineyards beside the sea. Cellars, caves, barrels, oak from Virginia and from Portugal, sulphites, years of ageing, humidity, darkness, cork oaks, caps, cork-making families, companies that export wine, grapes, cork, barrel wood, biographies of famous oenologists, of families of winemakers, books of photographs of the different colours of the vineyards. Types of soils. Denominations of origin; the various controlled and qualified and protected regions, with publications on legislation, lists, maps, borders and histories. The great years throughout history. Winegrowing lands, regions, districts. Interviews with oenologists and entrepreneurs. The world of wine packaging. Champagne. Cava. Sparkling wine. Gastronomy and wine. White wine, red wine, rosé, young wine, mature wine. Sweet, mellow wines. And a section devoted to sweet and dry liqueurs. Monasteries and liqueurs, chartreuse, cognacs and armagnacs, brandies, whiskies from around the world, bourbons, calvados, grappa, aguardientes, orujo, anisette, vodka; distillation as a concept. The universe of rum. Temperatures. Wine thermometers. The sommeliers who had made history … When he entered that room, Adrià made the same face of surprise and admiration that Matthias Alpaerts had when going into his study in Barcelona.
‘Impressive,’ he summed up. ‘You’re a wine scholar and your sister would mix it with soda and pour it straight into her mouth from a pitcher.’
‘It takes all kinds. But only up to a point: the pitcher isn’t necessarily bad. But the soda, that’s a real sin.
‘Stay for dinner,’ he added. ‘Giorgio is an excellent cook.’
We sat down, surrounded by the world of wine and the unspoken question: what do you want, what do you want to talk about, why?, that Max was trying not to formulate. We were also surrounded by a silence mixed with sea air that conjoined one not to do anything, to let the day pass placidly and not allow anyone or any conversation to complicate our lives. It was hard to get to the point of why he’d come.
‘What do you want, Adrià?’
It wasn’t easy to say. Because what Adrià wanted to know was what the hell had they told Sara, eh, to make her run away from one day to the next without saying anything and without even …
There was a silence only sliced, and then just partially, by the faint salty breeze.
‘Sara didn’t tell you all that?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ask her about it?’
‘Don’t ask me again, Adrià. It’s best that …’
‘Well, if she said that, then I …’
‘Max, look into my eyes. She is dead. Sara is dead! And I want to know what the hell happened.’
‘Perhaps you no longer need to.’
‘Yes, I do. And your parents and my parents are dead too. But I have a right to know what I’m guilty of.’
Max got up, went over to the window, as if he suddenly had to check some detail of the seascape that it framed like a painting. He stood there for a while, taking in the details. Or thinking, perhaps.
‘So you don’t know a thing,’ he concluded without turning towards me.
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to know or not.’
His reticen
ce had made me nervous. I struggled to calm myself down. And I wanted to be more precise: ‘The only thing that Sara told me, when I went to see her in Paris, was that I had written her a letter saying that she was a stinking Jewess who could shove her shitty, snotty family, where the sun don’t shine, that they had a big broomstick firmly up their arses.’
‘Wow. I didn’t know that part.’
‘That was more or less what she said. But I didn’t write that!’
Max made a vague gesture and left the study. After a little while he came back with a chilled bottle of white wine and two glasses.
‘Let’s see what you think of this.’
Adrià had to contain his anxiousness and taste that Saint-Émilion and try to distinguish the flavours that Max explained to him; they slowly emptied the first glass like that, with little sips, discussing aromas and not what their mothers had told Sara.
‘Max.’
‘I know.’
He served himself half a glass and drank it not like an oenologist, but like a drinker. And when he was done he clicked his tongue, said help yourself and began to say that Fèlix Ardèvol was surprised by his customer’s appearance and I’ll tell you, beloved, because from what Max told me you only knew the tip of the iceberg. You have a right to the details: it is my penance. So, I have to say that Fèlix Ardèvol was surprised by his customer’s appearance, a man so weedy that when he wore his hat he looked like an open umbrella in the middle of the romantic garden at the Athenaeum.
‘Mr Lorenzo?’
‘Yes,’ said Fèlix Ardèvol. ‘You must be Abelard.’
The other sat in silence. He took off his hat and placed it delicately on the table. A blackbird passed shrieking between the two men and headed to the lushest patch of vegetation. The weedy man said, in a deep voice and in very artificial Spanish, that my client will send you a packet today right here. Half an hour after I’ve left.
‘Fine. I have time.’
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
The next day, Fèlix Ardèvol took a plane, as he did so often. Once he was in Lyon, he rented a Stromberg, as he did so often, and in a few hours he was in Geneva. The same weedy man with the voice of a Lower Bulgarian was waiting for him at the Hôtel du Lac, and had him go up to a room. Ardèvol delivered the packet and the man, after delicately placing his hat on the chair, parsimoniously unwrapped it and opened the security seal. He slowly counted five wads of banknotes. It took him a good ten minutes. On a piece of paper, he took notes and made calculations, and he wrote the results meticulously into a small notebook. He even checked the bills’ serial numbers.
