Jaume Cabré - Confessions

And the next day the convalescent Six Hundred took us twenty kilometres further north, to Escaló, and from there, on foot, along a goat path that climbed the sunny Barraonse slope, the only passable route to reach the ruins of Sant Pere del Burgal, the monastery of my dreams. Sara didn’t let me carry the large rucksack with her notebook and pencils and charcoals inside: it was her burden.

A bit further on, I picked up a stone from the middle of the path, not too big and not too small, and Adrià contemplated it pensively and the image of Amani the lovely and her sad story came into his head.

‘What is it about that rock?’

‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Adrià, putting it into his rucksack.

‘You know what impression I get from you?’ you said, breathing a bit heavily from the climb.

‘Huh?’

‘That’s just it. You don’t say what impression, you say huh.’

‘Now you’ve lost me.’ Adrià, who was leading, stopped, looked at the green valley, listened to the Noguera’s distant murmur and turned towards Sara. She also stopped, a smile on her face.

‘You are always thinking.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you are always thinking about something far from here. You are always somewhere else.’

‘Boy … I’m sorry.’

‘No. That’s how you are. I’m special too.’

Adrià went over to her and kissed her on the forehead, with such tenderness, Sara, that I still get emotional when I remember it. You don’t know how much I love you and how much you have transformed me. You are a masterpiece and I hope you understand what I mean.

‘You, special?’

‘I’m a weird woman. Full of complexes and secrets.’

‘Complexes … you hide them well. Secrets … that one’s easy to fix: tell them to me.’

Now Sara looked down the path to avoid meeting his eyes.

‘I’m a complicated woman.’

‘You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.’

Adrià started to continue heading up, but he stopped and turned: ‘I’d just like you to tell me one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

I know it’s hard to believe, but I asked her what did my mother and your mother tell you about me. What did they tell you that you believed.

Your radiant face grew dark and I thought shit, now I’ve put my foot in it. You waited a few seconds and, with your voice a bit hoarse, you said I begged you not to ask me that. I begged you …

Annoyed, you picked up a stone and threw it down the slope.

‘I don’t want to relive those words. I don’t want you to know them; I want to spare you them because you have every right to be ignorant of them. And I have every right to forget them.’ You adjusted your rucksack with an elegant gesture. ‘It’s Bluebeard’s locked room, remember.’

Sara said it so rotundly that I had the impression that she’d never stopped thinking about it. We had been living together for some time and I always had the question on the tip of my tongue: always.

‘All right,’ said Adrià. ‘I won’t ever ask you again.’

They began their descent again. There was still a steeper stretch before I finally reached, at the age of thirty-nine, the ruins of Sant Pere del Burgal that I had dreamed of so often, and Brother Julià de Sau, who as a Dominican had been called Friar Miquel, came out to receive us with the key in his hands. With the Sacred Chest in his hands. With death in his hands.

‘Brothers, may the peace of the Lord be with you,’ he told us.

‘And may the peace of the Lord also be with you,’ I replied.

‘What did you say?’ asked Sara, surprised.

‘Once you’ve had a taste of artistic beauty, your life changes. Once you’ve heard the Monteverdi choir sing, your life changes. Once you’ve seen a Vermeer up close, your life changes; once you’ve read Proust, you are never the same again. What I don’t know is why.’

‘Write it.’

‘We are random chance.’

‘What?’

‘It would be easier for us to never have been and yet we are.’

‘…’

‘Generation after generation of frenetic dances of millions of spermatozoa chasing eggs, random conceptions, deaths, annihilations … and now you and I are here, one in front of the other as if it couldn’t have been any other way. As if there were only the possibility of a single family tree.’

‘Well. It’s logical, isn’t it?’

‘No. It’s ffucking random.’

‘Come on …’

‘And what’s more, the fact that you can play the violin so well, that’s even more ffucking random.’

‘Fine. But …’ Silence. ‘What you’re saying is a bit dizzying, don’t you think?’

‘Yes. And then we try to survive the chaos with art’s order.’

‘You should write about this, don’t you think?’ ventured Bernat, taking a sip of tea.

‘Does the power of art reside in the artwork or rather in the effect it has on someone? What do you think?’

‘That you should write about this,’ insisted Sara after a few days. ‘That way you’ll understand it better.’

‘Why am I paralysed by Homer? Why does Brahms’s clarinet quintet leave me short of breath?’

‘Write about it,’ said Bernat immediately. ‘And you’ll be doing me a favour, because I want to know as well.’

‘How is it that I am unable to kneel before anyone and yet when I hear Beethoven’s Pastoral I have no problem bowing down to it?’

‘The Pastoral is trite.’

‘Not on your life. Do you know where Beethoven came from? From Haydn’s one hundred and four symphonies.’

‘And Mozart’s forty-one.’

‘That’s true. But Beethoven was only able to do nine. Because almost every one of the nine exists on a different level of moral complexity.’

‘Moral?’

‘Moral.’

‘Write about it.’

‘We can’t understand an artwork if we don’t look at its evolution.’ He brushed his teeth and rinsed out his mouth. As he dried himself off with a towel, he shouted through the open bathroom door: ‘But the artist’s touch of genius is always needed, that’s precisely what makes it evolve.’

‘The power resides in the person, then,’ Sara replied, from bed, without stifling a yawn.

‘I don’t know. Van der Weyden, Monet, Picasso, Barceló. It’s a dynamic line that starts in the caves of the Valltorta gorge and has yet to end because humanity still exists.’

‘Write about it.’ It look Bernat a few days to finish his tea and then he put the cup down delicately on the saucer. ‘Don’t you think you should?’

‘Is it beauty?’

‘What?’

‘Is it beauty’s fault? What does beauty mean?’

‘I don’t know. But I recognise it when I see it. Why don’t you write about it?’ repeated Bernat, looking him in the eye.

‘Man destroys man, and he also composes Paradise Lost.’

‘It’s a mystery, you’re right. You should write about it.’

‘The music of Franz Schubert transports me to a better future. Schubert is able to say many things with very few elements. He has an inexhaustible melodic strength, filled with elegance and charm as well as energy and truth. Schubert is artistic truth and we have to cling to it to save ourselves. It amazes me that he was a sickly, syphilitic, skint man. Where does his power come from? What is this power he wields over us? I bow down before Schubert’s art.’