Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘Well …’

She looked at him defiantly. He was about to say of course I am the most important person in the family; but a sixth or seventh sense helped him catch it in time. He was left with his mouth hanging open.

‘No, go ahead, say it,’ prodded Tecla.

Bernat closed his mouth. Looking him in the eye, she said we have our life too: you take for granted that we can always go where you say and that we always have to read what you write and like it; no, and be excited about it.’

‘You’re exaggerating.’

‘Why did you ask Llorenç to read it in ten days?’

‘Is it wrong to ask my son to read a book?’

‘He’s nine years old, for the love of God.’

‘So?’

‘Do you know what he told me, last night?’

The boy was in bed, and he turned on the light on his bedside table just as his mother was tiptoeing out of the room.

‘Mama.’

‘Aren’t you sleeping?’

‘No.’

‘What’s wrong?’

Tecla sat by his bed. Llorenç opened the drawer on the bedside table and pulled out a book. She recognised it.

‘I started reading it but I don’t understand a thing.’

‘It’s not for children. Why are you reading it?’

‘Dad told me that I had to finish it before Sunday. That it’s a short book.’

She grabbed the book.

‘Ignore him.’

She opened it up and flipped through it absentmindedly.

‘He’ll ask me questions.’

She gave him back the book: ‘Hold onto it. But you don’t have to read it.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘And what if he asks me questions?’

‘I’ll tell him not to ask you any.’

‘Why can’t I ask my son questions!’ Bernat, indignant, hitting his cup against the saucer. ‘Aren’t I his father?’

‘Your ego knows no bounds.’

Llorenç poked his head into the kitchen, with his anorak on and his rucksack on his back.

‘Daddy’s coming. You can start down, Son.’

Bernat got up, threw his napkin onto the table and left the kitchen.

Adrià was now back in front of the bookshop after walking around the block. And he still didn’t know what to do. Just then they turned off one of the lights in the display window. He reacted in time, moving a few metres away. Mireia Gràcia came flying out and even though she went right past him, she didn’t notice him because she was looking at her watch. When Bauçà, Bernat and two or three other people came out, he came walking over quickly, as if he were running very late.

‘Hey! … Don’t tell me it’s over!’ Adrià’s face and tone were disappointed.

‘Hello, Ardèvol.’

Adrià waved at Bauçà. The other people headed off in their various directions. Then Bauçà said that he was leaving.

‘You don’t want to go out to eat with us?’ Bernat.

Bauçà said no, you go ahead, that he was running late for dinner, and he’d left his two friends alone.

‘Well? How did it go?’

‘Well. Quite well. Mireia Gràcia was very persuasive. Very … good, yeah. And there was a good crowd. Good. Right?’

‘I’m glad to hear it. I would have liked to be there but …’

‘Don’t worry, laddie … They even asked me questions.’

‘Where’s Tecla?’

They started walking amid a silence that spoke volumes. When they reached the corner, Bernat stopped short and looked Adrià in the eye: ‘I have the feeling that it’s my writing against the world: against you, against Tecla, against my son, against my editor.’

‘Where’d you get that come from?’

‘No one gives a shit about what I write.’

‘Bloody hell, but you just told me that …’

‘And now I’m telling you that no one gives a shit about what I write.’

‘Do you give a shit?’

Bernat looked at him warily. Was he pulling his leg? ‘It’s my whole life.’

‘I don’t believe you. You put up too many filters.’

‘Some day I hope to understand you.’

‘If you wrote the way you play the violin, you would be great.’

‘Isn’t that a stupid thing to say? I’m bored by the violin.’

‘You don’t want to be happy.’

‘It’s not necessary, according to what you once told me.’

‘Fine. But if I knew how to play like you … I would do …’

‘Nothing, bullshit, you’d do.’

‘What’s wrong? Did you have another fight with Tecla?’

‘She didn’t want to come.’

That was more delicate. What do I say now?

‘Do you want to come over?’

‘Why don’t we go out to eat?’

‘It’s just that …’

‘Sara’s expecting you.’

‘Well, I told her that … Yes, she’s expecting me.’

This is the story of Bernat Plensa: we have been friends for many years. For many years he’s envied me because he doesn’t really know me; for many years I’ve admired him for how he plays the violin. And every once in a while we have monumental fights as if we were desperate lovers. I love him and I can’t stop telling him that he is a clumsy, bad writer. And since he started giving me his work to read, he has published various very bad collections of stories. Despite his intellectual ability, he can’t accept that no one likes them, perhaps not because everyone is always completely wrong but because what he writes is completely uninteresting. Completely. It’s always the same between us. And his wife … I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that living with Bernat must be difficult. He is assistant concertmaster in the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. And he plays chamber music with a group of his colleagues. What more does he want? most of us mortals would ask. But not him. Surely, like all mortals, he can’t see the happiness around him because he is blinded by what’s out of his reach. Bernat is too human. And today I couldn’t go out for dinner with him because Sara is sad.

Bernat Plensa i Punsoda, a very fine musician who insists in seeking out his own unhappiness in literature. There is no vaccine for that. And Alí Bahr watched the group of children who played in the shade, in the shelter of the wall that separated White Donkey’s garden from the road that led from al-Hisw to distant Bi’r Durb. Alí Bahr had just turned twenty and didn’t know that one of the girls, the one that was shrieking as a snot-nosed kid with grazed knees chased her, was Amani, who in a few years would be known throughout the plain as Amani the lovely. He whipped the donkey because in a couple of hours he had to be home. To save his energy, he picked up a rock from the middle of the path, not too big and not too small, and threw it forward, hard and furiously, as if to indicate the route to the donkey.

The life of Plasma by Bernat Plensa can be summed up as: no repercussion, not a single review, not a single sale. Luckily, neither Bauçà, nor Adrià nor Tecla said see, I told you so. And Sara, when I explained it to her, said you are a coward: you should have been there, in the audience. And I: it was humiliating. And she: no, he would have felt comforted by the presence of a friend. And life went on: ‘They’re conspiring against me. They want me to disappear; they want me to cease to exist.’

‘Who?’

‘Them.’

‘One day you’ll have to introduce me.’

‘I’m not kidding.’

‘Bernat, no one is ganging up on you.’

‘Yeah, because they don’t even know I exist.’

‘Tell that to the people applauding at the end of your concerts.’

‘It’s not the same thing and we’ve discussed this a thousand times.’

Sara listened to them in silence. Suddenly, Bernat looked at her and, in an ever so slightly accusatory tone, asked her what did you think of the book? which is the question, the only question I think an author cannot ask with impunity because he runs the risk that someone will answer it.