by Jaume Cabré
‘Do you like it? It’s good, right?’
Adrià returned to his world. He stood up with a start.
‘Hey, we’re here!’
They got off at the stop on the side of the highway. Before them rose the frozen town of Bebenhausen. A woman with white hair had got off with them and gave them a smile. Adrià suddenly thought to ask her if she would take a photo of them with this camera, you see, madam? She puts her basket down, takes the camera and says sure, what button do I press?
‘Right here. Thank you very much, madam.’
The two friends posed in front of the town, which was covered in a thin layer of ice that made it very uninviting. The woman snapped the shot and said there you go. Adrià took back the camera and picked up the basket. He silently indicated for her to go ahead, that he would carry it for her. All three of them started to walk up a ramp that led to the houses.
‘Watch out,’ said the woman, ‘the frozen asphalt is treacherous.’
‘What did she say?’ asked Bernat, all ears.
Just then he slipped as he took a step, falling on his arse in the middle of the ramp.
‘That,’ replied Adrià, bursting into laughter.
Bernat got up, humiliated, mumbled a swear word and had to put on a good face. When they reached the top of the ramp, Adrià gave the woman back her basket.
‘Tourists?’
‘Students.’
He shook her hand and said Adrià Ardèvol. Pleased to meet you.
‘Herta,’ said the woman. And she headed off, with the basket in one hand and not slipping for anything in the world.
The cold was more intense than in Tübingen. It was obscenely cold. The cloister was tranquil and silent as they waited for the guided tour at ten on the dot. The other visitors were waiting in the vestibule, more sheltered. They stepped on the still virgin ice of the night’s freeze.
‘What a beautiful thing,’ said Bernat in admiration.
‘I like this place a lot. I’ve come six or seven times, in spring, summer, autumn … It’s relaxing.’
Bernat sighed in satisfaction, and said how can you not be a believer when you look at the beauty and peace of this cloister.
‘The people who lived here worshipped a vengeful and vindictive god.’
‘Have some respect.’
‘It pains me to say it, Bernat; I’m not kidding.’
When they were silent, all that was heard was the ice cracking beneath their feet. No bird had any interest in freezing. Bernat took in a deep breath and expelled a thick cloud, as if he were a locomotive. Adrià returned to the conversation: ‘The Christian God is vindictive and vengeful. If you make a mistake and you don’t repent, he punishes you with eternal hell. I find that reaction so disproportionate that I just don’t want to have anything to do with that God.’
‘But …’
‘But what.’
‘Well, he is the God of love.’
‘No way: you’ll burn in hell forever because you didn’t go to mass or you stole from a neighbour. I don’t see the love anywhere.’
‘You aren’t looking at the whole picture.’
‘I’m not saying I am: I’m no expert.’ He stopped short. ‘But there are other things that bother me more.’
‘Like what?’
‘Evil.’
‘What?’
‘Evil. Why does your God allow it? He doesn’t keep evil from happening: all he does is punish the evildoer with eternal flames. Why doesn’t he prevent it? Do you have an answer?’
‘No … Well … God respects human freedom.’
‘That’s what the clever priests lead you to believe; they don’t have the answers to why God does nothing in the face of evil, either.’
‘Evil will be punished.’
‘Yeah, sure: after it’s done the damage.’
‘Bloody hell, Adrià; I don’t what to say to you. I don’t have arguments, you know that … I just believe.’
‘Forgive me; I don’t want to … But you’re the one who brought up the subject.’
He opened a door and a small group of explorers, captained by the guide, prepared to start their visit.
‘Bebenhausen monastery, which we will now visit, was founded by Rudolf I of Tübingen in eleven eighty and was secularised in eighteen oh six.’
‘What does secularised mean?’ (a woman in thick plasticframed eyeglasses and a garnet overcoat).
‘That just means that it stopped being used as a monastery.’
Then the guide started to soft-soap them elegantly because they were cultured people who preferred twelfth- and thirteenth-century architecture to a glass of schnapps or a beer. And he went on to say that during several periods of the twentieth century the monastery was used as a meeting place for various local and regional political groups until a recent agreement with the federal government. It will be completely restored so that visitors can see a faithful reproduction of how it looked when it was a monastery and a large community of Cistercian monks lived here. This summer the construction will begin. Now, please follow me, we will enter what was the monastery’s church. Be careful on the stairs. Watch out. Hold on here, madam, because if you break your leg you’ll miss my wonderful explanations. And ninety per cent of the group smiled.
The frozen visitors entered the church, taking the stairs very carefully. Once inside, Bernat realised that Adrià was not among the nine ice-cold visitors. As the white-haired guide said this church, which still retains many late Gothic elements like this vault over our heads, Bernat left the church and returned to the cloister. He saw Adrià sitting on a stone that was white with snow, his back to him, reading … yes, reading his pages! He watched him anxiously. He was quite sorry not to have a camera because he wouldn’t have hesitated to immortalise the moment in which Adrià, his spiritual and intellectual mentor, the person he most trusted and most distrusted in the world, was absorbed in the fiction that he had created from absolute nothingness. For a few moments he felt important and no longer noticed the cold. He went back into the church. The group was now beneath a window that was damaged but the guide didn’t know how, and then one of the frozen visitors asked how many monks lived here, in the times of splendour.
‘In the fifteenth century, up to a hundred,’ answered the guide.
Like the number of pages in my story, thought Bernat. And he imagined that his friend must now be on page sixteen, when Elisa says the only thing I can do is run away from home.
‘But where will you go, child?’ Amadeu asked in fright.
‘Don’t call me a child,’ Elisa got angry, pushing her hair off her shoulders abruptly.
When she was angry, Elisa would get dimples on her cheeks that looked like tiny navels and Amadeu saw them, he looked at them and lost his bearings and all ability to speak.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You can’t stay here by yourself. You have to follow the group.’
‘No problem,’ said Bernat lifting his arms in a show of innocence and leaving his characters to Adrià’s thorough reading. And he went to the back of the group that was now going down the steps and be very careful with the stairs, they are very treacherous at these temperatures. Adrià was still in the cloister, reading, oblivious to the cold wind, and for a few moments Bernat was the happiest man in the world.
He chose to pay again and repeat the itinerary with a new group of cold-looking visitors. In the cloister, immobile, Adrià was still reading, his head bowed. And what if he was frozen? thought Bernat, terrified. He didn’t realise that what worried him most about Adrià freezing was that he wouldn’t have finished reading his story. But he looked at him out of the corner of his eye as he heard the guide who, now in German, said Bebenhausen monastery, which we will now visit, was founded by Rudolf I of Tübingen in eleven eighty and was secularised in eighteen oh six.
‘What does secularised mean?’ (a young man, tall and thin, encased in an electric blue anorak).
‘That just means that it stopped being use
d as a monastery.’ Then the guide started to soft-soap them elegantly because they were cultured people who preferred twelfth- and thirteenth-century architecture to a glass of schnapps or a beer. And he went on to say that during several periods of the twentieth century the monastery was used as a meeting place for various local and regional political groups until a recent agreement with the federal government. It will be completely restored so that visitors can see a faithful reproduction of how it looked when it was a monastery and a large community of Cistercian monks lived here. This summer the construction will begin. Now, please follow me, we will enter what was the monastery’s church. Be careful on the stairs. Watch out. Hold on here, madam, because if you break your leg you’ll miss my wonderful explanations. And ninety per cent of the group smiled. Bernat heard the man starting to say this church, which still retains many late Gothic elements like this vault over our heads; but he heard it from the doorway because he was furtively going back, towards the cloister, and he hid behind a column. Page forty or forty-five, calculated Bernat. And Adrià was reading, struggling to keep Sara and Kornelia from turning into Elisa and he didn’t want to move from there despite the cold. Forty or forty-five, at the point where Elisa goes up the slope of Cantó on her bicycle, her hair fluttering behind her; now that I think about it, if she’s pedalling up, her hair can’t be fluttering because she can barely move the bicycle. I’ll have to revise that. If it were downhill, maybe. Well, I’ll change it to the descent of Cantó and let those locks fly. He must be enjoying it; he doesn’t even notice the cold. Making sure that his footsteps weren’t heard, he returned to the group that was just then lifting its head like a single person to gaze upon the coffered ceiling, which is a wonder of marquetry, and a woman with hair the colour of straw said wunderbar and looked at Bernat as if demanding to know his aesthetic stance. Bernat, who was bursting with emotion, nodded three or four times, but he didn’t dare say wunderbar because they’d be able tell that he wasn’t German and had no clue what it meant. At least not until Adrià had told him what he thought, and then he would jump and shriek, wild with joy. The woman with hair the colour of straw was satisfied with Bernat’s ambiguous gesture and said wunderbar, but now in a softer voice, as if only to herself.
On the fourth visit, the guide, who had been looking at Bernat suspiciously for some time, came over to him and looked him in the eyes, as if he wanted to figure out whether that mute and solitary tourist was pulling his leg or whether he was an enthusiastic victim of the charms of the Bebenhausen monastery, or perhaps of his wonderful explanations. Bernat looked enthusiastically at the leaflet that he’d nervously wrinkled, and the guide shook his head, clicked his tongue and said the Bebenhausen monastery, which we will now visit, was founded by Rudolf I of Tübingen in eleven eighty and was secularised in eighteen oh six.
‘Wunderbar. What does secularised mean?’ (a young, pretty woman, wrapped up like an Eskimo and her nose red with cold).
When they left the cloister after having admired the coffered ceiling, Bernat, hidden among the blocks of ice that were the visitors, saw that Adrià must be on page eighty and Elisa had already emptied the pond and let the twelve red fish die in the moving scene where she decides to punish the feelings and not the bodies of the two boys by depriving them of their fish. And that was the setup for the unexpected ending, of which he was particularly, and humbly, proud.
There were no more groups. Bernat remained in the cloister, staring openly at Adrià, who in that moment turned page one hundred and three, folded the papers and contemplated the icy boxwood hedges he had before him. Suddenly he got up and then I saw Bernat, who was watching me with a strange expression as if I were a ghost and said I thought you had frozen. We left in silence and Bernat timidly asked me if I wanted to do the guided tour, and I told him there was no need, that I already knew it by heart.
‘Me too,’ he replied.
Once we were outside I said that I needed a very hot cup of tea, urgently.
‘Well, what do you think?’
Adrià looked at his friend, puzzled. Bernat pointed with his chin to the packet of pages Adrià carried in his gloved hand. Eight or ten or a thousand agonizing seconds passed. Then Adrià, without looking Bernat in the eye, said it’s very, very bad. It lacks soul; I didn’t believe a single emotion. I don’t know why, but I think it’s terrible. I don’t know who Amadeu is; and the worst of it is that I don’t give a rat’s arse. And Elisa, well, it goes without saying.’
‘You’re kidding.’ Bernat, pale like Mother when she told me that Father had gone to heaven.
‘No. I wonder why you insist on writing when with music …’
‘What a son of a bitch you are.’
‘Then why did you let me read it?’
The next day they took the bus to Stuttgart Station because something was going on with the train in Tübingen, each looking out at the landscape, Bernat draped in a stubborn hostile silence and with the same brooding expression he’d had since their educational visit to the Bebenhausen monastery.
‘One day you told me that a close friend doesn’t lie to you. Remember that, Bernat. So stop acting offended, bollocks.’
He said it in a loud, clear voice because speaking Catalan in a bus travelling from Tübingen to Stuttgart gave him a rare feeling of isolation and impunity.
‘Pardon? Are you speaking to me?’
‘Yes. And you added that if my bloody best friend can’t tell me the truth and just acts like everybody else, oh, great, Bernat, what a load of … It’s missing the magical spark. And you shouldn’t lie to me. Don’t ever lie to me again, Adrià. Or our friendship will be over. Do you remember those words? Those are your words. And you went on: you said I know that you’re the only one who tells me the truth.’ He looked at him aslant. ‘And I won’t ever stop doing that, Bernat.’ With my eyes straight ahead, I added: ‘If I’m strong enough.’
They let the bus advance a few foggy, damp kilometres.
‘I play music because I don’t know how to write,’ Bernat said while looking out the window.
‘Now that’s good!’ shouted Adrià. And the woman in the seat in front of them looked back, as if they’d asked for her opinion. She shifted her gaze towards the sad grey, rainy landscape that was bringing them closer to Stuttgart: loud Mediterranean people; they must be Turks. Long silence until the taller of the two Turkish boys relaxed his expression and looked at his companion out of the corner of his eye: ‘Now that’s good? What do you mean?’
‘Real art comes from some frustration. It doesn’t come out of happiness.’
‘Well, if that’s the case, I’m a bona fide artist.’
‘Hey, you are in love, don’t forget.’
‘You’re right. But only my heart works,’ pointed out Kemal Bernat. ‘The rest is shite.’
‘I’ll switch places with you right now.’ Ismaïl Adrià meant it.
‘Fine. But we can’t. We are condemned to envy each other.’
‘What must that lady in front of us be thinking?’
Kemal watched her as she obstinately contemplated the landscape that was now urban but equally grey and rainy. Kemal was relieved to give up his brooding since, although he was quite offended, it was a lot of work to maintain. Like someone distilling a great thought: ‘I don’t know. But I’m convinced her name is Ursula.’
Ursula looked at him. She opened and closed her purse, perhaps to cover up her discomfiture, thought Kemal.
‘And she has a son our age,’ added Ismaïl.
As it headed uphill, the cart began to moan and the cart driver cracked the whip hard against the horses’ backs. The slope was too steep to take with twenty men on board, but a bet was a bet.
‘You can start digging in your pockets, sergeant!’ said the cart driver.
‘We’re not at the top yet.’
The soldiers, who wanted to taste the pleasure of seeing the sergeant lose a bet, held their breath as if that could help the poor beasts make it up the slope to where
the houses of Vet began. It was a slow, agonising ascent, and when they finally reached the top, the driver laughed and said Allah is great, and so am I! And my mules too! What do you think, sergeant?
The sergeant handed the cart driver a coin and Kemal and Ismaïl stifled a smile. To shake off the humiliation, the subordinate shouted orders: ‘Everyone down. Have the Armenian assassins get ready!’
The cart driver lit a small cigar, satisfied, as he watched the soldiers, armed to the teeth, get down off the cart and head to the first house in Vet, ready for anything.
‘Adrià?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Huh?’
Adrià looked forward. Ursula was adjusting her jacket and looked out on the landscape again, apparently uninterested in the young Turks and their concerns.
‘Maybe her name is Barbara.’
‘Huh?’ He made an effort to return to the bus. ‘Yes. Or Ulrike.’
‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come to see you.’
‘If you’d known what?’
‘That you wouldn’t like my story.’
‘Rewrite it. But put yourself inside Amadeu.’
‘Elisa is the protagonist.’
‘Are you sure?’
Silence from the young Turks. After a short while: ‘Well, have a look at that. You tell it from Amadeu’s point of view and …’
‘All right, all right, all right. I’ll rewrite it. Happy?’
On the platform, Bernat and Adrià hugged each other and Frau Ursula thought goodness, these Turks, here, in the light of day, and she continued towards the B sector of the platform, which was considerably further on.
Bernat, still with his arms around me, said thank you, son of a bitch, I really mean it.