Confessions (74 page)

T
here are starting to be too many skeletons in this house, Adrià thought his father had grumbled. And he strolled through the Creation of the Universe without seeing the books’ spines. And at work, classes had lost their vitality because all his desire was limited to sitting before Sara’s self-portrait, in the study, contemplating your mystery, my beloved. Or, also in silence, before the Urgell in the dining room, as if wanting to witness the impossible flight of the sun on the Trespui side. And very occasionally he looked half-heartedly at the pile of papers and some days he picked them up, sighed and wrote a few lines or reread, sceptically, the work he’d done the day or the week before and found it painfully insignificant. The thing is he didn’t know what to do about it. Because even his hunger had abandoned him.

‘Adrià, listen.’

‘Yes.’

‘You haven’t eaten anything in two days.’

‘Don’t worry: I’m not hungry.’

‘Well, of course I worry.’

Caterina had just come into the study, taken Adrià by one arm and started to pull on him.

‘What are you doing?’ Adrià raising his voice, disconcerted.

‘I don’t care if you start bellowing. You’re coming to the kitchen with me, right now.’

‘Hey! Leave me be, woman!’ indignant, Adrià Ardèvol.

‘No. Sorry, but no.’ More indignant than him, and shouting louder: ‘Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?’

‘There’s no need.’

‘Come on, one foot in front of the other.’ Brusque, authoritative voice.

He was Haïm Epstein, and Little Lola was the Hauptsturmführer
taking him to barracks number twenty-six against the orders of Sturmbannführer Barber because someone had invented a terribly fun rabbit hunting game. Hauptsturmführer Katharine forced him into the kitchen and, instead of half a dozen frightened Hungarian women, he found rice soup and noodles and a steak with a tomato cut in two. Hauptsturmführer Katharine made him sit at the little table and Haïm Ardèvol was hungry for the first time in many days and he started eating, head bowed, as if he feared the Hauptsturmführer’s recrimination.

‘Delicious,’ about the soup.

‘Would you like more?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

During dinner, Katharine, with the visor of her cap hiding her gaze, standing, with the staff threateningly tapping the leg of her shiny boot, watched to make sure the prisoner didn’t escape from the kitchen. She even got him to have a yogurt for dessert. When he finished the prisoner said thank you, Little Lola, then got up and left the kitchen.

‘Caterina.’

‘Caterina. Shouldn’t you be home by now?’

‘Yes. But I don’t want to show up tomorrow and find you stiff as a board in the corner.’

‘Oh, please. What an imagination.’

‘No, sir. Stiff as a board: deader than the Dead Sea.’

Adrià went back to the study because he thought that his problem was some pages he had written that he didn’t entirely believe in. Too many things for him to deal with on his own. And the days kept passing. The months, too, slow, endless. Until one day he heard a curt spitting onto the floor and he said what do you want, Carson?

‘Maybe this is enough already, don’t you think?’

‘There’s never enough when you feel …’

‘How do you feel?’

‘What do I know?’

‘How.’

‘Yes, go on.’

‘If you’ll allow me …’

‘Go ahead, come on, Black Eagle.’

‘The wind on the open plain will do your sickly spirit good.’

‘Yes. I thought about taking a trip, but I don’t know where to go or what to do.’

‘It would be enough to just accept the invitations to Oxford, Rennes, Tübingen and I don’t know where else.’

‘Konstanz.’

‘That was it.’

‘You’re right.’

‘The hunt will be fruitful if the noble warrior offers up his valiant chest to the new challenges of war and the hunt.’

‘I understand already, thank you. Thank you both.’

I listened to my advisers and I took some air along the plains of Europe in search of noble exploits. The anxiety over his writing returned shyly, hesitantly, perhaps thanks to the travel and the encouragement he got from those who asked when are you going to publish another book, Ardèvol?

And in the end, a pile of pages written on one side, that he wasn’t at all convinced about. I’ve lost all steam. I don’t know where evil is and I don’t know how to explain my agnostic perplexity. I lack the tools of the philosopher to continue the journey. I insist on searching for the place where evil resides and I know that it is not inside a person. Inside many people? Is evil the fruit of a perverse human will? Or not: does it come from the Devil, who inoculates those he wishes to with it, as poor weepy-eyed Matthias Alpaerts seemed to think? Evil is that the Devil doesn’t exist. And God, where is He? Abraham’s severe God, Jesus’s inexplicable God, cruel and loving Allah … Ask the victims of any perverse act. If God exists, his coldness in the face of evil’s consequences would be shocking. What do the theologians say? As poetic as they make it, in the end, deep down, they come up against its limits: absolute evil, relative evil, physical evil, moral evil, the evil of guilt, the evil of pain … My God. It would be laughable, if evil wasn’t accompanied by pain. And natural catastrophes, are they evil as well? Are they another evil? And the pain that they provoke, is that another pain?

‘How.’

‘What.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Me too, Black Eagle,’ murmured Adrià, before the pile of manuscript pages in his neat but illegible handwriting. He got up and walked around the study, to loosen up his ideas. Do you know what was wrong with me, Sara? Instead of reasoning, I was shouting. Instead of thinking, I cried or laughed, and that’s not the way to do scholarship. And then I thought seven, two, eight, zero, six, five.

I opened my father’s safe, which I hadn’t visited in years. Seven, two, eight, zero, six, five. I was curious because I couldn’t remember what I had stored there. I found a couple of thick envelopes with various documents belonging to my parents that were almost certainly of no use to anyone: receipts from a thousand years ago, hastily written notes that had lost their urgency after fifty years. And some stock certificates and things like that, which I put to one side so the accountant could have a look at them and tell me what to do with them. And a sole, sad, blue folder, the manuscript in Aramaic that Father had written too many years ago. That message with delayed effects. If Father could now know that I had got rid of Vial, he would surely scream and give me a hard smack to the nape of the neck. In the same folder there was another, also solitary, amulet: the letter that Isaiah Berlin had sent me thanks to Bernat’s manoeuvrings. Thank you, Bernat, my friend, who will be reading these pages before the others – if all goes according to plan – and you’ll be able to cut out this final expansiveness.

And there was still something in one corner. A Kodak envelope. I opened it with curious fingers: inside were photos that I had taken of my Storioni the day I gave it back to Matthias Alpaerts. I didn’t even remember that, after I’d had the photos developed, I’d hidden them all in the safe. I was only thinking, and I still think it today, of the uncertainty over having done the stupidest thing in the world by allowing myself to be taken in by a story that was too dramatic to be fake. I went through the photos one by one: they were those kind that have the month and year they were taken stamped
right on them. I went through them: its face, its back, its ribs, its lovely scroll, the f-holes; and the one that I took by getting right up to the f-hole: you could barely make out the Laurentius Storioni cremonensis me fecit inside. Oof. I looked at the next photo and my mouth dropped open: it was a photo you had taken of yourself in the mirror on your wardrobe. Like a kind of self-portrait, perhaps prior to drawing yourself. It was dated two years earlier than the others. Had you forgotten about it? Or maybe you’d started the roll and left it inside the camera, waiting to finish the reel before taking it to be developed? There were another couple of photos taken by you. Adrià’s vision blurred and he had to make an effort to calm himself down. It was him, working, with his head leaning towards the desk, writing. A photo taken in secret when we were no longer speaking to each other. You were irritated and angry with me, but you took my picture secretly. Now I realise what I hadn’t thought enough about: the fight hurt you more than it hurt me, because you started it. And what if the stroke was caused by having to suffer such pressure?

The third photo was a drawing on the easel in your studio. A drawing I’ve never seen and that Sara never mentioned to me. A drawing saved in a photo because you had probably torn it into a thousand pieces. Poor thing. I struggled to hold back my tears and I thought that the next day, if I could find the negatives, I would have an enlargement made. I looked at it under the table’s magnifying glass. They were six studies, in search of a face. Six drawings, increasingly more complete, in three-quarter views, of a baby’s face. I couldn’t say if they were drawings made with the baby in front of her or if they were an exercise in remembering Claudine’s face, what she could recall of it. Or if she’d had the cold bloodedness to draw her dead daughter. All this time that photograph had been in the safe beside the others. The photograph of your pain. Because once you had lived through the drama, you were still able to draw it; perhaps you didn’t know that it is impossible to resist. Look at Celan. Look at Primo Levi. Drawing, like writing, is reliving. And as if wanting to corroborate it with applause, the bloody telephone rang and I began to tremble,
as if I were worse off than I already was. I forced myself, on the orders of Dalmau in fact, to undertake the gruelling task of lifting the receiver: ‘Hello.’

‘Hey, Adrià. It’s Max.’

‘Hi.’

‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’ Five seconds. ‘And you?’

‘Fine. Listen: do you want to come to a wine tasting in the Priorat?’

‘Wow …’

‘I’ve decided to write a book … One with a lot of photos, eh, not like yours.’

‘On what?’

‘On the tasting process …’

‘It must be difficult to put such fragile sensations into words.’

‘Poets do it.’

Now I will ask him what he knew about Claudine and Sara’s grief.

‘Max Voltes-Epstein, the poet of wine.’

‘Are you up for it?’

‘Listen. I wanted to ask you a question that …’ He ran a hand over his bald skull and was in time to stop himself. ‘Sure, why not: when is it?’

‘This weekend: at the Quim Soler Centre.’

‘Will you pick me up?’

‘Deal.’

Max hung up. I had no right to rummage around in the life of a good man like Max. And maybe he didn’t know anything about it. Because Sara’s secrets could have been secrets from everyone. What a shame: I would have been able to help you bear your pain. That seems a tad pretentious. Or bear a part of it. I would have liked to be your refuge and I wasn’t able to and I didn’t know enough about it. At best, I sheltered you from a few scattered showers but not a single storm.

I
had asked Dalmau how fast the process is, how much of a rush we’re in, how urgent is it, you understand?, and he pressed his lips together to help him think.

‘Every case is different.’

‘Obviously, I’m interested in my case.’

‘They’ll have to do some tests. What we have now are signs.’

‘Is it really irreversible?’

‘With today’s medicine, yes.’

‘Bugger.’

‘Yeah.’

They were silent. Doctor Dalmau looked at his friend, seated on the other side of his office desk, refusing to bury his head between his shoulders, thinking urgently, refusing to focus his eyes on the yellows of the Modigliani.

‘I’m still working. I read well.’

‘You yourself have admitted that you have inexplicable lapses. That you go blank. That …’

‘Yes, yes, yes … But that happens to everyone at my age.’

‘Sixty-two, today, isn’t that old. You’ve had a lot of warning signs. You haven’t even noticed many of them.’

‘Let’s say that this is the third warning.’ Silence. ‘Can you give me a date?’

‘I don’t know. There isn’t a date; it is a process that advances at its own pace, which is different in each individual. We will monitor you. But you have to …’ He stopped.

‘I have to what?’

‘To make arrangements.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Put your affairs … in order.’

‘You mean a will?’

‘Um … I don’t know how … You don’t have anyone, do you?’

‘Well, I do have friends.’

‘You don’t have anyone, Adrià. You have to leave everything in order.’

‘That’s brutal, man.’

‘Yes. And you’ll have to hire someone, so you spend the minimum amount of time alone.’

‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’

‘All right. But come every fifteen days.’

‘Deal,’ I said, imitating Max.

T
hat was when I made the decision I had begun to ponder on that rainy night in Vallcarca. I took the three hundred pages where I had worn my fingers to the bone struggling to discuss evil, which I already knew was ineffable and mysterious like beliefs, and on the back side, like some sort of palimpsest, I started the letter that seems to be drawing to a close as I reach the hic et nunc. Despite Llorenç’s efforts, I didn’t use the computer, which lies, obedient, on one corner of my desk. These pages are the day-to-day record of something written chaotically, in many tears mixed with a little ink.

All these months I have been writing frenetically, in front of your self-portrait and the two landscapes you gave me: your subjective vision of my Arcadia and the small lobed apse of Sant Pere del Burgal. I have observed them obsessively and I know their every detail, every line and every shadow. And every one of the stories they’ve evoked in me. I have written steadily in front of this altar made up of your drawings, as if in a race between memory and oblivion, which will be my first death. I wrote without thinking, pouring onto the paper everything I could put into words, and trusting that, afterwards, someone with the soul of a palaeontologist, Bernat if he accepts the task, can decipher it in order to be able to give it to I don’t even know whom. Perhaps this is my testament. Very disorganised, but a testament.