Confessions

by Jaume Cabré

And she turned and went from the blank paper to my pale face (extremely pale according to the valiant Black Eagle) and took three seconds to smile because it was hard for her to abandon her things, her mysteries, her secrets, her mysterious tears. But we were happy. And now, leaving the cemetery, in Tübingen, she said you just write, I’m by your side.

  When it’s cold, even in springtime, nocturnal footsteps make a different noise, as if the cold had a sound. Adrià was thinking that as they walked in silence to the hotel. The footsteps in the night of two happy people.

  ‘Sie wünschen?’

  ‘Adrià Ardèvol? Adrià? Is that you?’

  ‘Ja. Yes. Bernat?’

  ‘Hello. Can you talk?’

  Adrià looked at Sara, who was taking off her anorak and about to draw the curtains in their room in the little hotel Am Schloss.

  ‘What are we doing? What do you want?’

  Sara had time to brush her teeth, put on her pyjamas and get into bed. Adrià was saying aha, yes, sure, sure, yes. Until he decided not to say anything and just to listen. When he hadn’t spoken for five minutes, he looked at Sara, who was contemplating the ceiling and lulled by the silence.

  ‘Listen, I … Yes. Yes. Of course.’

  Three more minutes. I think that you, my love, were thinking about the two of us. Every once in a while I would look at you out of the corner of my eye and you were hiding a satisfied smile. I think, my beloved, that you were proud of me, and I felt like the happiest man in the world.

  ‘Wait, what?’

  ‘Haven’t you been listening to me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, look: that’s it. And I’m …’

  ‘Bernat: maybe you should think about separating. If it’s not working, it’s not working.’ Pause. Adrià heard his friend’s breathing on the other end of the line. ‘No?’

  ‘Man, it’s just that …’

  ‘How’s the novel going?’

  ‘It’s not. How can it, with all this crap?’ Distant silence. ‘Besides, I don’t know how to write and on top of it all you want me to get separated.’

  ‘I don’t want you to get separated. I don’t want anything. I just want to see you happy.’

  Three and a half more minutes until Bernat said thanks for listening and decided to hang up. Adrià sat for a few seconds in front of the telephone. He got up and pulled the thin curtain open a tiny bit. Outside it was snowing silently. He felt sheltered, by Sara’s side. I felt sheltered by your side, Sara: then it was impossible to imagine that now, as I write to you, I would be living exposed to the elements.

  42

  I returned from Tübingen puffed up like a balloon and vain as a peacock. I was looking down on humanity from so far up that I wondered, in admiration, how the rest of the world could live so far down there below. Until I went to have a coffee at the university bar.

  ‘Hey there.’

  Even prettier. She had sidled up to me without me even realising.

  ‘Hey, how’s it going?’

  Yes, even prettier. That irritation she made an effort to show when I was around had softened in the last few months. Maybe out of boredom. Maybe because things were going well for her.

  ‘Well. And you? It went really well in Germany, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I like La voluntat estètica better. Much better.’

  Small sip of coffee. I liked that declaration of principles.

  ‘Me too, but don’t spread that around.’

  Silence. Now I took a small sip of black coffee; now she took a small sip of her white coffee.

  ‘You are very good,’ she said after a little while.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You heard me. You are very good.’

  ‘Thank you. I …’

  ‘No. Don’t ruin it. Devote yourself to thinking and writing a book occasionally. But don’t touch people. Just avoid them, you know?’

  She finished her white coffee in one last sip. I really wanted to ask her for explanations, but I understood that it would be foolish to start that conversation. And especially when I still hadn’t told you anything about Laura. I hadn’t said anything even though I could have, easily. And now she, instead of going for my jugular, was praising me. And it had been a month since, with the renovations, she had chosen the desk in front of mine, now that I finally had one to myself. I had to get used to a new kind of relationship with Laura. I even thought that this would save me from ever having to tell you about her.

  ‘Thank you, Laura,’ I said.

  She tapped her knuckles twice on the table and left. I had to wait a little while to avoid running into her on the stairs. But I thought it was better that Laura was done pouting over me. And Omedes had said Laura Baylina, you know that little blonde, so cute you just want to eat her up? Well, she’s a sensational teacher. She has all her students by the short hairs. And I thought, I’m glad. And I also thought that probably all the shitty things I did to her helped her to improve. To Omedes, I said I’ve heard that; every once in a while there has to be a good professor, doesn’t there?

  Adrià Ardèvol got up and walked around his spacious study several times. He was thinking about what Laura had said to him that morning. He stopped in front of the incunabula and said to himself that he didn’t know why he studied and studied, to the exclusion of all else. To quench a strange thirst. To comprehend the world. To comprehend life. Who knows. And he didn’t think any more about it because he heard rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs. He waited a little while, thinking that Little Lola would open the door, and he sat back down in front of his Lewis and read a few lines of the reflection he makes on realism in literature.

  ‘How.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘Caterina.’

  ‘Rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs.’

  He lifted his head. Caterina must have left. He checked the time. Seven-thirty in the evening. He grudgingly abandoned Lewis.

  He opened the door and found Bernat with a sports bag in his hand, and he said hello, can I come in?, and he entered before Adrià had a chance to say come in, of course, come in.

  After a long hour Sara arrived, and from the hall said in a loud, happy voice two Grimm stories!, closed the door and entered the study loaded down with drawings as she said didn’t you put the vegetables on?

  ‘Hey, hello, Bernat,’ she added. And she noticed his sports bag.

  ‘Uh, you see …’ said Adrià.

  Sara understood everything and said to Bernat stay for dinner. She said it as if it were an order. And to Adrià: six drawings for each story. And she went out to unload the drawings and put the pot on the stove. Bernat looked timidly at Adrià.

  ‘We’ll set you up in the guest room,’ said Sara to break the silence, all of them before the monastery of Santa Maria de Gerri, which, even though it was night-time, was drenched in the sun coming from Trespui. The two men looked up from their plates of vegetables, surprised.

  ‘Well: I imagine you’ve come to stay for a few days, right?’

  The truth is, Sara, that Bernat hadn’t asked me yet. I knew that he wanted to stay, but I was resistant, I don’t know why. Maybe because it annoyed me that he didn’t have the balls to ask.

  ‘If you don’t mind.’

  I always wished I were like you, Sara, direct. But I am someone incapable of taking any bull by the horns. And this was my best friend. And now that we had cleared up the most important thing, the dinner continued, more relaxed. And Bernat felt obliged to explain that he didn’t want to separate, but every day we argue more and I feel bad for Llorenç, who …

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘I don’t know. Seventeen or eighteen.’

  ‘He’s big, isn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘Big for what?’ said Bernat defensively.

  ‘For if you separate.’

  ‘What concerns me,’ said Sara, ‘is that you don’t know your son’s age.’

  ‘I said seventeen or eighteen.’

  ‘Is he seventeen or is h
e eighteen?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘When is his birthday?’

  Guilty silence. And you, when you feel you are in the right, no one can stop you, and you insisted, ‘Let’s see: what year was he born?’

  After thinking it over for a while Bernat said 1977.

  ‘Summer, autumn, winter, spring?’

  ‘Summer.’

  ‘He’s seventeen. Voilà.’

  You didn’t say it, but you surely had a few choice words for a man who doesn’t know his own son’s age and who, poor Tecla, with such a distracted guy, who’s always doing his own thing, as if we were all at his beck and call, you know?, and stuff like that. But you just shook your head and kept all your comments to yourself. We finished our dinner in peace. Sara turned in early and left us alone, which was her way of encouraging me to get him to talk.

  ‘You should separate,’ I told him.

  ‘It’s my fault. I don’t know my own son’s age.’

  ‘Come on, seriously: separate and try to live a happy life.’

  ‘I won’t live a happy life. I’ll be eaten up by guilt.’

  ‘Guilty over what?’

  ‘Everything. What are you reading?’

  ‘Lewis.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Clive Staples Lewis. A wise man.’

  ‘Ah.’ Bernat paged through the book and left it on the table. He looked at Adrià and said the thing is I still love her.

  ‘And does she love you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘All right. But you are hurting each other and hurting Llorenç.’

  ‘No. If I … It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘That’s why you’re running away from home, right?’

  Bernat sat at the table, covered his face with his hands and began to cry, in irrepressible sobs. He was like that for a good long while and I didn’t know what to do, whether I should go over to him, whether I should hug him, whether I should tap him on his shoulder or tell him a joke. I didn’t do anything. Or I did. I moved aside the C.S. Lewis book so it wouldn’t get wet. Sometimes I hate myself.

  Tecla answered the door and stood there for a good long while staring at me in silence. She had me come in and then closed the door.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Confused. Shattered. And you?’

  ‘Confused. Shattered. Have you come to act as an intermediary?’

  Actually, Adrià never really had much to talk about with Tecla. She was too different, her gaze was too unsettling. And she was very pretty. Sometimes it seemed that she was sorry for being so pretty. Now she wore her hair pulled back in an improvised ponytail, and he would have gladly French kissed her. She folded her arms modestly and looked me in the eyes, as if inviting me to finally say something already; to say that Bernat was shattered and that he was down on his knees begging to come home; that he understands how unbearable he is and he will try his best to … and that yes, yes, I know he left with a slam of the door, that he’s the one who left and not you, that … But he is asking, begging on his knees to come back because he can’t live without you and …

  ‘I’m here to pick up his violin.’

  Tecla remained stock still for a few seconds and when she reacted she went down the hall, I think a bit offended. As she disappeared, I still had time to say and his scores … The ones in a blue folder, the thick one …

  She came back with the violin and a thick folder that she put down on the dining room table, maybe a little too hard. From what I could tell she was very offended. I understood that it was inappropriate to make any sort of reflection and I just took the violin and the thick folder.

  ‘I’m very sorry about all this,’ I said in parting.

  ‘So am I,’ she said when she closed the door. The door closed a little too hard, as well. Just then Llorenç was coming up the stairs two by two, with a sports bag on his back. I got into the lift before the boy could see who the person hiding in such a shameful way was. I know, I’m a coward.

  The second day, in the afternoon, Bernat was studying and decent violin playing was again heard in that house. It had been quite some time. Adrià, in his study, looking up to hear better. Bernat, in the guest room, filling the inner courtyard with Enescu’s sonatas. And that evening he asked me if he could use the Storioni and he made it cry for twenty or thirty delicious minutes. He interpreted some sonatas by Tonton Leclair, but now all by himself. For a few moments I thought that I had to give Vial to him. That he could really make use of it. But I stifled the desire in time.

  I don’t know if music helped him. After dinner we were all three talking for a good long while. Sara made an exceptional reference to her Uncle Haïm and from the uncle we moved on to the banality of evil, because I had recently devoured Arendt and there were things going through my head that I didn’t know what to do with.

  ‘Why does it bother you?’ said Bernat.

  ‘If evil can be gratuitous, we’re screwed.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘If I can commit evil just because and that’s fine, humanity has no future.’

  ‘You mean crime without a motive, just because.’

  ‘A crime just because is the most inhumane thing you can imagine. I see a man waiting for the bus and I kill him. Horrible.’

  ‘Does hatred justify crime?’

  ‘No, but it explains it. Gratuitous crime, the more horrific, is inexplicable.’

  ‘And a crime in the name of God?’ intervened Sara.

  ‘That’s a gratuitous crime but with a subjective alibi.’

  ‘And if it’s in the name of freedom? Or of progress? Or of the future?’

  ‘Killing in the name of God or in the name of the future is the same thing. When the justification is ideological, empathy and compassion vanish. One kills coldly, without one’s conscience being affected. Like the gratuitous crime of a psychopath.’

  They were silent for a little while. Without looking each other in the eye, as if they were subdued by the conversation.

  ‘There are things that I don’t know how to explain,’ said Adrià in a mournful voice. ‘Cruelty. The justification of cruelty. Things that I don’t know how to explain except through narration.’

  ‘Why don’t you try it?’ you said, looking at me with those eyes of yours that still bore right through me.

  ‘I don’t know how to write. That’s Bernat’s thing.’

  ‘Don’t mess with me, I’m not up for it.’

  The conversation waned and we went to sleep. I remember, my love, that that was the day I took the decision. I grabbed some blank pages and the fountain pen and I tried to remedy it by coming from a distance, thinking that, gradually, I would approach us, and I wrote the rocks shouldn’t be too small, because then they would be harmless. But they shouldn’t be too big either, because then they would curtail the torture of the guilty too much. Because we are talking about punishing the guilty, let us not ever forget. All those good men who lift their fingers, anxious to participate in a stoning, must know that the sin requires atonement through suffering. That’s how it is. It has always been that way. Therefore, wounding the adulterous woman, taking out an eye, showing ourselves insensitive to her sobs, that pleases the Almighty, the One God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

  Alí Bahr hadn’t volunteered: he was the accuser and, as such, had the privilege of throwing the first stone. Before him, the infamous Amani, buried in a hole, only her indecent face showing, which was now covered in tears and had been repeating for too long, don’t kill me, Alí Bahr lied to you. And Alí Bahr, impatient, made uncomfortable by the guilty woman’s words, stepped forward at the Qadi’s signal and threw the first stone to see if that whore would finally ffucking shut up, blessed be the Most High. And the stone that had to silence the slut moved too slowly, like he when he went into Amani’s house with the pretext of selling her a basket of dates, and Amani, seeing a man enter, covered her face with the kitchen cloth she had in her hands and said what are you doing
here and who are you.

  ‘I came to sell these dates to Azizzadeh Alfalati, the merchant.’

  ‘He’s not here; he won’t be back until the evening.’

  Which was what Alí Bahr was hoping someone would confirm for him. Besides, he had been able to see her face: more lovely, much more lovely than he had been told in the hostel in Murrabash. Blasphemous women tend to be the most beautiful. Alí Bahr put down the basket of dates on the floor.

  ‘We haven’t ordered them,’ she said, suspicious. ‘I don’t have the authority to …’

  He advanced two steps towards the woman and, opening his arms, with a serious air, he just said I want to unmask your secret, little Amani. With his eyes sparkling, he curtly concluded: ‘I come in the name of the Most High to confound blasphemy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ frightened, lovely Amani.

  He advanced even more towards the girl. ‘I find myself forced to search for your secret.’

  ‘My secret?’

  ‘Your blasphemy.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. My father … He … He will demand an explanation.’

  Alí Bahr could no longer conceal the sparkle in his eye. He brusquely said, ‘Take off your clothes, blasphemous dog.’

  Insidious Amani, instead of obeying, ran into the house and Alí Bahr was forced to follow her and grab her by the neck. And when she began to scream for help, he was forced to cover her mouth with one hand while, with the other, he tore at her clothes to reveal the provocation to sin.

  ‘Look, blasphemer!’

  And he ripped off the medallion she wore around her neck, cutting her and making her bleed.

  The man looked at the medallion in his open palm. A human figure: a woman with a child in her arms and a lush, strange tree in the background. And on the other side, Christian letters. So it was true what the women said about lovely Amani: she worshipped false gods or, at the very least, was disobeying the law of not sculpting, drawing, painting, buying, wearing, having or concealing any human figure under any circumstance, blessed be the Most High.

  He hid the medallion among the folds of his clothes because he knew he could get a nice sum for it from the merchants on their way to the Red Sea and Egypt, with his spirit tranquil because he wasn’t the one who had sculpted or drawn, nor painted nor bought, worn, carried or hidden any object that featured the human figure.