Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘Who?’

‘At your house. To make you run away.’

‘Nothing.’

‘And what did it say in that famous letter I supposedly wrote to you?’

In front of them was a Danone lorry that was moving quite slowly. And Adrià still had to think three times before passing. The lorry or the conversation. He stopped and insisted: eh, Sara? What lies did they tell you? What did they say about me?

‘Don’t ask me again.’

‘Why?’

‘Never again.’

Now came a nice straight stretch. He put on his turn signal but didn’t dare pass.

‘I have a right to know what …’

‘And I have a right to close that chapter.’

‘Can I ask your mother?’

‘It’s better if you never see her again.’

‘Bollocks.’

Let someone else pass. Adrià was unable to pass a slow lorry loaded down with yogurts, mostly because his eyes were misty and had no windscreen wipers.

‘I’m sorry, but it’s better that way. For both of us.’

‘I won’t insist. I don’t think I’ll insist … But I would like to be able to say hello to your parents. And your brother.’

‘My mother is like yours. I don’t want to force her. She has too many scars.’

Voilà: near Molí de Blancafort, the lorry turned towards La Garriga and Adrià felt as if he’d passed it himself. Sara continued: ‘You and I have to do our own thing. If you want us to live together, you can’t open that box. Like Pandora.’

‘It’s like we live inside the story of Bluebeard. With gardens filled with fruit but a locked room we aren’t allowed to enter.’

‘Something like that, yes. Like the forbidden apple tree. Are you up to the challenge?’

‘Yes, Sara,’ I lied for the umpteenth time. I just didn’t want you to run away again.

In the department office there are three desks for four professors. Adrià had no desk because he had given it up on the first day: the thought of working anywhere that wasn’t his home seemed impossible. He only had a place to leave his briefcase and a little cabinet. And yes, he needed a desk and he realised he’d been too hasty when relinquishing it. Which is why, when Llopis wasn’t there, he usually sat at his desk.

He went in, ready for anything. But Llopis was there, correcting some galleys or something like that. And Laura looked up from her spot. Adrià just stood there. No one said anything. Llopis looked up discreetly, glanced at both of them, said he was going to get a coffee and prudently disappeared from the battlefield. I sat in Llopis’s chair, face to face with Laura and her typewriter.

‘I need to explain something to you.’

‘You, giving explanations?’

Laura’s sarcastic tone didn’t bode well for a comfortable conversation.

‘Do you want to talk?’

‘Well … It’s been a few months since you’ve answered my calls, you avoid me here, if I run into you, you say not now, not now …’

Both were silent.

‘I should be thanking you for being so kind as to show up here today,’ she added in the same hurt tone.

Oblique, uncomfortable looks. Then Laura moved her Olivetti aside, as if it were an obstacle between them, and, like someone rolling up her sleeves, preparing for anything, she said, ‘There’s another woman, isn’t there?’

‘No.’

If there’s one thing I’ve never understood about myself, it is my inability to take the bull by the horns. At most, I grab it by the tail and then I’m doomed to receive one of its fatal kicks. I’ll never learn; because I said no, no, no, bollocks, Laura, there’s no one else … It’s me who, well, it’s just that I’d rather not …

‘Pathetic.’

‘Don’t insult me,’ said Adrià.

‘Pathetic isn’t an insult.’ She got up, a bit out of control. ‘Tell the truth, for fuck’s sake. Tell me you don’t love me!’

‘I don’t love you,’ said Adrià just as Parera opened the door and Laura burst into tears. When she said what a son of a bitch you are, what a son of a bitch you are, what a son of a bitch you are, Parera had already closed the door, leaving them alone again.

‘You used me like a tissue.’

‘Yes. Forgive me.’

‘Go to hell.’

Adrià left the office. At the railing of the cloister, Parera was making time, smoking a peace cigarette, perhaps taking sides without knowing the details. He passed by her and didn’t dare to say thank you or anything.

At home, Sara looked at him strangely, as if the argument and the unpleasantness had got stuck to his face or his clothes, but you didn’t say anything; I am sure you understood everything, but you had the sense not to put it on the table and when you said I have to tell you something, Adrià already saw a new storm brewing; but instead of making it clear that you knew everything, you said I think we should switch bakeries: this bread is like chewing gum. What do you think?

Until one day Sara got a call and was speaking softly into the dining room telephone and when I poked my head in I saw that she was silently crying, her hand still on the receiver after hanging up.

‘What’s going on?’ No reply. ‘Sara?’

She looked at him, absent. She took her hand off of the telephone, as if it were burning hot.

‘Mama is dead.’

My God. I don’t know how it happened, but I remembered the day that Father had said we are starting to have too many treasures in this house and I had understood that we were starting to have too many skeletons in this house. Now I was an adult, but I still had trouble accepting that life was made up of one death after another.

‘I didn’t know that …’

She looked at me through her tears.

‘She wasn’t sick: it was sudden. Ma pauvre maman …’

It made me furious. I don’t know how to say it, Sara, but it made me furious that people died around me. It made me furious even though, with the passing of time, things hadn’t improved much. Surely I can’t accept life. That’s why I rebelled uselessly and dangerously and was unfaithful to you. Like a thief, like the Lord, I entered the temple. I sat on a discreet bench at the back of the synagogue. And I saw your father again, who I hadn’t seen since the day of that awful conversation, when you had disappeared without a trace and I could only cling to desperation. Adrià was also able to enjoy watching the back of Max’s neck; he was a head taller than his sister, more or less Bernat’s height. And Sara, squeezed between the two men and other family members that I won’t ever meet because you don’t want me to, because I am my father’s son and the blood of his sins will flow through his children and his children’s children for seven generations. I would like to have a child with you, Sara, I thought. With no conditions, I thought. But I still didn’t dare to tell you that. When you told me it’s best if you don’t come to the funeral, then Adrià grasped the magnitude of the aversion the Epsteins had to the memory of Mr Fèlix Ardèvol.

Meanwhile, the distance with Laura grew even though I always thought poor Laura, it was all my fault. And I was relieved when, in the middle of the cloister, she told me I am going to Uppsala to finish my thesis. And maybe I’ll stay there forever.

Boom. Her blue gaze on mine like an accusation.

‘I wish you the best of luck; you deserve it.’

‘Bastard.’

‘Good luck, really, Laura.’

And I didn’t see her for at least a year or even think about her, because Mrs Voltes-Epstein’s death slipped in. You don’t know how it pains me to have to call your mother Mrs Voltes-Epstein. And one day, a few months after the funeral, I made a date with Mr Voltes in a café near the university. It’s something I’ve never told you, my dear. I didn’t dare. Why did I do it? Because I am not my father. Because I am guilty of many things. But, even though sometimes it seems that I am, I am in no way guilty of being my father’s son.