Jaume Cabré - Confessions

For a little while after the professors were arrested, just in case, Fèlix Ardèvol stayed away from Doctor Bosch’s university office, instead showing up at his house, much to Carme Bosch’s delight.

‘How are you, beautiful?’

The girl, who was prettier by the day, always answered with a smile and lowered her gaze. Her eyes had become one of Fèlix Ardèvol’s most fascinating mysteries, which he was determined to get to the bottom of as soon as possible. Almost as fascinating as a handwritten manuscript by Goethe without an owner.

‘Today I’ve brought you more work, and better paid,’ he said when he entered Professor Bosch’s study. And Grandfather Adrià prepared to offer his expert opinion and certify its authenticity, charge his fee and never ask but Fèlix, listen, where in God’s name do you get all this stuff. And how do you manage to … Eh?

As he watched him pull out papers, Grandfather Adrià took a moment to clean his pince-nez eyeglasses. His task didn’t begin until he had the manuscript on the table.

‘Gothic chancery script,’ said Doctor Bosch putting on his spectacles and looking greedily at the manuscript that Fèlix had placed on the table. He picked it up and looked it over carefully from every angle over a long while.

‘It is incomplete,’ he said, breaking the silence that was lasting too long.

‘Is it from the fourteenth century?’

‘Yes. I see that you are learning.’

By that period, Fèlix Ardèvol had already set up a network through much of Europe that searched for any paper or papyrus, loose or bundled parchments in the often disorganised and dusty shelves of archives, libraries, cultural institutes, town halls and parishes. Young Mr Berenguer, a true ferreter, spent his days visiting these spots and making a first evaluation, which he explained over the faulty phone lines of the period. Depending on the decision, he paid the owners as little as possible for the treasure, when he was unable to just make off with it, and he brought it to Ardèvol, who did the expert’s report along with Doctor Bosch. Everyone came out a winner, including the posterity of the manuscripts. But it was best if everyone was kept in the dark. Everyone. Over ten years he had found a lot of junk. A lot. But every once in a while he happened upon a real gem, like a copy of the 1876 edition of L’après-midi d’un faune with illustrations by Manet, inside of which there were manuscripts by Mallarmé himself, surely the last things he had written. They’d been sleeping in the attic of a wretched municipal library in Valvins. Or three complete parchments in good shape from the corpus of the chancery of John II, miraculously rescued from an inheritance lot in an auction in Göteborg. Every year he’d get his hands on three or four gems. And Ardèvol worked day and night for those gems. Gradually, in the solitude of the huge flat he had let in the Eixample district, the idea took shape of him setting up an antiquarian’s shop where everything that wasn’t a true gem would end up. That decision led to another: accepting inheritance lots with other things beside manuscripts. Vases, bongos, chippendale furniture, umbrella stands, weapons … anything that was made a long time ago and wasn’t useful in the slightest. That was how the first musical instrument entered his home.

The years passed; Mr Ardèvol, my father, would visit Professor Bosch, my grandfather whom I knew as a small child. And Carme, my mother, turned twenty-two and one day Mr Fèlix Ardèvol said to his colleague I want to talk to you about your daughter.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Doctor Bosch, a bit frightened, taking off his pince-nez and looking at his friend.

‘I want to marry her. If you have no objections.’

Doctor Bosch got up and went out into the dark hall, flustered, brandishing his pince-nez. A few steps behind, Ardèvol watched him attentively. After some minutes of nervous pacing he turned and looked at Ardèvol, without realising that he had intense brown eyes.

‘How old are you?’

‘Forty-four.’

‘And Carme must be eighteen or nineteen, at most.’

‘Twenty-two and a half. Your daughter is over twenty-two.’

‘Are you sure?’

Silence. Doctor Bosch put on his glasses as if he were about to examine his daughter’s age. He looked at Ardèvol, opened his mouth, took off his glasses and, with a hazy look, said to himself, filled with admiration, as if before a Ptolemaic papyrus, Carme’s twenty-two years old …

‘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.

For 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.