Confessions (6 page)

‘She turned twenty-two months ago.’

At that moment the door to the flat opened and Carme came in, accompanied by Little Lola. She looked at the two silent men, planted in the middle of the hall. Little Lola disappeared with the shopping basket and Carme looked at them again as she took off her coat.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.

F
or a long time, despite his aloof nature, I was fascinated by my father and wanted to make him happy. Above all, I wanted him to admire me. Brusque, yes; irascible, that too; and he hardly loved me at all. But I admired him. Surely that’s why I find it so hard to talk about him. So as not to justify him. So as not to condemn him.

One of the only times, if not the only, that my father admitted that I was right he said very good, I think you’re right. I hold on to that memory like a treasure in a little chest. Because in general it was us, the others, who were always wrong. I understand why Mother watched life pass by from the balcony. But I was little and wanted to always be where the action was. And when Father gave me impossible objectives, at first I had no problem with it. Even though the main ones weren’t achieved. I didn’t study Law; I only had one major but, on the other hand, I’ve spent my entire life studying. I didn’t collect ten or twelve languages so as to break Pater Levinski’s record: I learned them relatively easily and because it appealed to me. And even though I still have outstanding debts with Father, I haven’t sought to make him proud wherever he may be, which is nowhere because I inherited his scepticism about eternal life. Mother’s plans, always relegated to a second plane, didn’t turn out either. Well, that’s not exactly true. I didn’t find out until later that Mother had plans for me, because she kept them hidden from Father.

So I was an only child, carefully observed by parents eager for signs of intelligence. I could sum up my childhood thusly: the bar was set high. The bar was set high in everything, even for eating with my mouth closed and keeping my elbows off the table and not interrupting the adults’ conversation, except when I exploded because there were days when I couldn’t take
it any more and not even Carson and Black Eagle could calm me down. That was why I liked to take advantage of the occasions when Little Lola had to run an errand in the Gothic Quarter; I’d go along and wait for her in the shop, my eyes wide as saucers.

As I grew up, I became more and more attracted to the shop: because it filled me with a kind of apprehensive awe. At home we just called it the shop, even though, more than a shop, it was an entire world where you could dispense with life beyond its walls. The shop’s door stood on Palla Street, in front of the ruinous facade of a church ignored as much by the bishopric as by town hall. When you opened it, a little bell rang, which I can still hear tinkling, letting Cecília or Mr Berenguer know. The rest, from that point on, was a feast for the eyes and nose. Not for the touch, because Adrià was strictly forbidden to touch anything, you’re always touching everything, don’t you dare touch a thing. And not a thing means not a thing, boy, do you understand that, Adrià? And since not a thing was not a thing, I wandered along the narrow aisles, with my hands in my pockets, looking at a worm-eaten polychrome angel, beside a golden washbasin that had been Marie Antoinette’s. And a gong from the Ming dynasty that was worth a fortune, which Adrià wanted to sound before he died.

‘What’s that for?’

Mr Berenguer looked at the Japanese dagger, then back at me and he smiled, ‘It’s a Bushi kaiken dagger.’

Adrià was left with his mouth hanging open. Mr Berenguer looked towards where Cecília was polishing bronze goblets, leaned towards the boy, giving him a whiff of his dubious breath, and said in a whisper, ‘A short knife Japanese women warriors use to kill themselves.’ He looked him up and down to see if he could make out a reaction. Since the boy seemed unfazed, the man finished more curtly. ‘Edo period, seventeenth century.’

Obviously Adrià had been impressed, but at eight years old – which is what he must have been at the time – he already knew how to mask his emotions, just as Mother did when
Father locked himself in the study and looked at his manuscripts with a magnifying glass and no one could make any noise in the house because Father was reading in his study and god only knows what time he’d emerge for dinner.

‘No. Until he shows signs of life don’t put the vegetables on the stove.’

And Little Lola would head towards the kitchen, grumbling I’d show that guy what for, the whole house at the mercy of his loupe. And, if Adrià were near that guy, I would hear him reading:

A un vassalh aragones. / Be sabetz lo vassalh qui es, / El a nom. N’Amfos de Barbastre. / Ar arujatz, senher, cal desastre / Li avenc per sa gilozia.

‘What is it?’

‘
La reprensió dels gelosos
. A short novel.’

‘Is it Old Catalan?’

‘No. Occitan.’

‘They sound similar.’

‘Very much so.’

‘What does
gelós
mean?’

‘It was written by Ramon Vidal de Besalú. Thirteenth century.’

‘Wow, that’s old. What does
gelós
mean?’

‘Folio 132 of the Provençal songbook from Karlsruhe. There is another one in the National Library of Paris. This is mine. It’s yours.’

Adrià understood that as an invitation and extended his hand. Father smacked my hand back and it really, really hurt. He didn’t even bother to say you’re always touching everything. He went over the lines with his loupe and said life brings me such joy, these days.

A Japanese dagger for female suicide, summed up Adrià. And he continued his journey to the ceramic pots. He left the engravings and manuscripts for last, because they inspired such reverence in him.

‘Let’s see when you’ll start helping us, we’ve a lot of work.’

Adrià looked about the deserted shop and smiled politely at Cecília. ‘When Father lets me,’ he said.

She was going to say something, but she thought better of it and just stood with her mouth open for a few moments. Then her eyes gleamed and she said, come on, give me a kiss.

And I had to kiss her because it wasn’t the time or the place to make a scene. The year before I had been deeply in love with her, but now the kissing stuff was starting to irk me. Even thought I was still very young, I had already begun the phase of serious kiss aversion, as if I were twelve or thirteen; I had always been precocious in the non-essential subjects. I must have been eight or nine then, and that anti-kissing fever lasted until … well, you already know until when. Or perhaps you don’t know yet. By the way, what did that bit about ‘I’ve remade my life’ that you said to the encyclopaedia salesman mean?

For a few moments Adrià and Cecília watched the people who passed on the street without even glancing at the window display.

‘There’s always work,’ said Cecília, who had read my thoughts. ‘Tomorrow we are emptying a flat with a library: it’s going to be pandemonium.’

She went back to her bronze. The scent of the Netol metal cleaner had gone to Adrià’s head and he decided to get some distance. Why did they commit suicide, those Japanese women, he thought.

Now it seems that I was only there a few times, poking around the shop. Poking around is a figure of speech. I mostly felt bad about not being able to touch anything in the corner with musical instruments. Once, when I was older, I tried a violin, but when I glanced back I hit upon Mr Berenguer’s silent gaze and I swear I was frightened. I never tried that again. I remember, over time, besides the flugelhorns, tubas and trumpets, at least a dozen violins, six cellos, two violas and three spinets, plus the Ming dynasty gong, an Ethiopian drum and some sort of immense, immobile snake that didn’t give off any sound, which I later found out was called a serpent. I’m sure they must have sold and bought some, because the instruments would change but I remember that being the usual amount in the shop. And for a while some violinists from the Liceu would
come in to make deals – usually unsuccessfully – to acquire some of those instruments. Father didn’t want musicians, who are always short on cash, as clients; I want collectors: those who want the object so badly that if they can’t buy it, they steal it; those are my clients.

‘Why?’

‘Because they pay the price I tell them and they leave contented. And some day they return, with their tongues hanging out, because they want more.’

Father knew a lot.

‘Musicians want an instrument to play it. When they have it, they use it. The collector doesn’t own it to play it: he might have ten instruments and just run his hand over them. Or his eyes. And he’s happy. The collector doesn’t play a note: he takes note.’

Father was very intelligent.

‘A musician collector? That would be a windfall; but I don’t know any.’

And then, in confidence, Adrià told Father that Herr Romeu was more boring than a Sunday afternoon and he looked at me in that way where his eyes went right through me and which, at sixty years old, still makes me anxious.

‘What did you say?’

‘That Herr Romeu …’

‘No: more boring than what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Than a Sunday afternoon.’

‘Very good.’

Father was always right. His silence made it seem as if he were putting my words into his pocket, for his collection. Once they were tucked away carefully, he returned to the conversation.

‘Why is he boring?’

‘All day long he makes me study declinations and endings that I already know by heart and makes me say this cheese is very good; where did you buy it? Or I live in Hannover and my name is Kurt. And where do you live? Do you like Berlin?’

‘And what would you like to be able to say?’

‘I don’t know. I want to read some amusing story. I want to read Karl May in German.’

‘Very well: I think you’re right.’

I repeat: very well: I think you’re right. And I’ll take it even further: that was the only time in my life where he said I was right. If I were a fetishist, I would have framed the sentence, along with the time and date of its occurrence. And I would have made a black and white photo of it.

The next day I didn’t have class because Herr Romeu had been fired. Adrià felt very important, as if people’s fates were in his hands. It was a glorious Tuesday. That time I was glad that Father took a hard line with everyone. I must have been nine or ten, but I had a very highly developed sense of dignity. Or, better put, sense of mortification. Especially now that I look back, Adrià Ardèvol realised that not even when he was little had he ever been a little boy. He was caught up in every possible precociousness, the way others catch colds and infections. I even feel sorry for him. And that without knowing the details that I can now cobble together, such as that Father – after having opened the shop under very precarious circumstances, with Cecília who was learning to do her hair up very prettily – he received a visit from a customer who said he wanted to talk to him about some matter and Father had him enter the office and the stranger told him Mr Ardèvol, I haven’t come here to buy anything, and Father looked him in the eye and grew alarmed.

‘And would you mind telling me why you did come?’

‘To tell you that your life is in danger.’

‘Is that so?’ A smile from Father. A slightly peeved smile.

‘Yes.’

‘Would you mind telling me why?’

‘For example, because Doctor Montells has been released from prison.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘And he has told us things.’

‘And who are ‘us’?’

‘Let’s just say that we are very angry with you because you denounced him as pro-Catalan and communist.’

‘Me?’

‘You.’

‘I’m no grass. Anything else I can help you with?’ he said, getting up.

The visitor did not rise from his chair. He made himself even more comfortable, rolling a cigarette with unusual skill. And then he lit it.

‘No one smokes here.’

‘I do.’ He pointed to the hand with the cigarette. ‘And we know that you denounced three other people. They all send greetings, from prison or from their homes. From now on, be very careful with corners: they are dangerous.’

He put out the cigarette on the wooden tabletop as if it were a vast ashtray, exhaled the smoke into Mr Ardèvol’s face, got up and left the office. Fèlix Ardèvol watched a part of the tabletop sizzle without doing anything to impede it. As if it were his penitence.

That evening, at home, perhaps to rid himself of those bad feelings, Father had me come into his study and to reward me, to reward me especially for making demands on my teachers, that’s what my son has to do, he showed me a folded piece of parchment, written on both sides, which was the founding charter of the Sant Pere del Burgal monastery, and he said look, Son (I wished he’d added, after the look, Son, a ‘in whom I have placed all my hopes’, now that we’d established a close alliance), this document was written more than a thousand years ago and now we are holding it in our hands … Hey, hey, hold your horses, I’ll hold it. Isn’t it lovely? It’s from when the monastery was founded.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In Pallars. You know the Urgell in the dining room?’

‘That monastery is Santa Maria de Gerri.’

‘Yes, yes. Burgal is even further up. Some twenty kilometres more towards the cold.’ About the parchment: ‘Sant Pere del Burgal’s founding charter. The Abbot Deligat asked Count Ramon de Tolosa for a precept of immunity for that monastery, which was tiny but survived for hundreds of years. It thrills me to think that I hold so much history in my hands.’

And I listened to what my father was telling me and it wasn’t very hard at all for me to imagine that he was thinking the day was too luminous, too springlike to be Christmas. They had just buried the Right Reverend Father Prior Dom Josep de Sant Bartomeu in the modest, scant cemetery at Sant Pere where the life that burst forth in springtime from beneath the tender, damp grass into a thousand colourful buds was now held hostage by the ice. They had just buried the father prior and with him all possibility of the monastery keeping its doors open. Sant Pere del Burgal, before, when it still snowed abundantly, was an isolated, independent abbey; since the remote times of Abbot Deligat, it had undergone various transformations including moments of prosperity, with some thirty monks contemplating the magnificent panorama created each day by the waters of the Noguera River, with the Poses forest in the background, praising the Lord and giving thanks for his works and cursing the Devil for the cold that devastated their bodies and made the entire community’s souls shrink. Sant Pere del Burgal had also gone through moments of hardship, without wheat for the mill, with barely six or seven old, sick monks to do the same tasks a monk always does from when he joins the monastery until he is transferred to its cemetery, as they’d done that day with the father prior. But now there was only one survivor whose memory went back that far.