Jaume Cabré - Confessions

After a few months of repeating more or less the same gestures each day, morning and afternoon, over the third year of his imprisonment, his conscience became more porous: in addition to the moans, shrieks, sobs and panicked tears, he started to remember the smells of each face. And the time came when he could no longer sleep at night, like the five Latvian subjects whom they were able to keep awake for twenty-two days until they died of exhaustion, with their eyes destroyed by looking at so much light. And one night he began to shed tears. Konrad hadn’t cried since he was sixteen, when he’d asked Sigrid out on a date and she’d responded with a look of total disdain. The tears emerged slowly, as if they were too thick, or perhaps indecisive after remaining hidden for such a long time. And an hour later they were still streaming down slowly. And when, outside of the cell, the rosy fingers of dawn tinted the dark sky, he broke out into an endless sob as his soul said waarom, how can it be, warum, how can it be that I never thought to cry in the presence of those sad, wide eyes, warum, mein Gott.

‘Works of art are of an infinite solitude, said Rilke.’

The thirty-seven students looked at him in silence. Professor Adrià Ardèvol got up, left the dais and began to deliberately ascend a few of the terraced rows of chairs. No comments? he asked.

No: no one had any comments. My students have no comment when I prod them with that bit about works of art being an infinite solitude. And if I tell them that artwork is the enigma that no reasoning can master?

‘Artwork is the enigma that no reasoning can master.’

Now his walking had led him to the middle of the classroom. Some heads turned to look at him. Ten years after Franco’s death, students had lost the impetus that made them participate in everything, chaotically, uselessly but passionately.

‘The hidden reality of things and of life can only be deciphered, approximately, with the help of art, even if it is incomprehensible.’ He looked at them, turning to take them all in with his gaze. ‘In the enigmatic poem echoes the voice of unresolved conflict.’

She raised her hand. The girl with the short hair. She had raised her hand! Perhaps she would ask him if all that about the incomprehensible was going to be on the exam the next day; perhaps she would ask him for permission to use the toilet. Perhaps she would ask him if through art we can grasp all that which man had to renounce in order to build an objective world.

He pointed to the girl with the short hair and said yes, go ahead.

‘Your reprehensible name will always be remembered as one of those that contributed to the horror that vilified humanity.’ He said it in English with a Manchester accent and a formulaic tone, not worrying if he’d been understood. With a dirty finger he pointed to a place on the document. Budden raised his eyebrows.

‘Here must sign you,’ said the sergeant impatiently, in a terrible German he seemed to be making up as he went along. And he tapped several times with his dirty finger to show exactly where.

Budden did so and returned the document.

‘You are free.’

Free. Once he was out of prison, he fled for a second time, again without any clear destination. Yet he stopped in a frozen village on the Baltic coast, in the shelter of a humble Carthusian monastery, and he spent the winter contemplating the fireplace of the silent house where they’d taken him in. He did just enough odd jobs around the house and the town to survive. He spoke little because he didn’t want to be recognised as an educated person and he worked hard to toughen up his pianist and surgeon’s hands. In the house that took him in they didn’t speak much either because the married couple who lived there were grieving over the death of their only son Eugen on the Russian front during damn Hitler’s damn war. The winter was long for Budden, who had been put into the mourned son’s room in exchange for all the work he could do; he stayed there for two long years, during which he spoke to no one, except when strictly necessary, as if he were one of the monks in the neighbouring Carthusian monastery; strolling alone, letting himself be whipped by the cutting wind off the Gulf of Finland, crying when no one could see him, not allowing the images that tormented him to vanish unjustly because in remembrance there is penitence. At the end of that two-year-long winter, he headed to the Carthusian monastery of Usedom and, on his knees, asked the brother doorman for someone to hear his confession. After some hesitation at his unusual request, they assigned him a father confessor, an old man who was accustomed to silence, with a grey gaze and a vaguely Lithuanian accent whenever he strung together more than three words. Beginning when the Terce rang out, Budden didn’t leave out a single detail, with his head bowed and his voice monotonous. He could feel the poor monk’s shocked eyes piercing the back of his neck. The monk only interrupted him once, after the first hour of confession.

‘Are you Catholic, my son?’ he asked him.

Throughout the other four hours of the confession, he didn’t say a peep. There was one point where Budden thought that the man was crying silently. When the bells rang to call the monks to the Vespers prayers, the confessor said ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis with a trembling voice, and he made a shaky sign of the cross as he mumbled the rest of the formula. And then there was silence, even with the echo of the bell; but the penitent hadn’t moved.

‘And the penance, Father?’

‘Go in the name of …’ He didn’t dare to take God’s name in vain; he coughed uncomfortably and continued. ‘There is no penance that could … No penance that … Repent, my son; repent, my son. Repent … Do you know what I think, deep down?’

Budden lifted his head, distressed but also surprised. The confessor had leaned his head sweetly to one side and was engaged by a crack in the wood.

‘What do you think, Father? …’

Budden stared at the crack in the wood; he had trouble seeing it because the light was starting to fade. Father? he said. Father? And it seemed that he was that Lithuanian boy who moaned and said Tėve, Tėve! from the bunk bed at the back. The confessor was dead and he could no longer help him, no matter how much he begged. And he began to pray for the first time in many years, some sort of invented prayer pleading for relief he didn’t deserve.

‘Honestly, poems or a song … they don’t make me think all that.’

Adrià was thrilled because the girl hadn’t asked if that was going to be on the exam. His eyes were even shining.

‘All right. What do they make you think?’

‘Nothing.’

Some laughter. The girl turned, a bit bothered by the laughing.

‘Quiet,’ said Adrià. He looked at the girl with the short hair, encouraging her to continue.

‘Well …’ she said. ‘They don’t make me think. They make me feel things I can’t describe.’ In a softer voice, ‘Sometimes …’ even softer voice, ‘they make me cry.’

Now no one laughed. The three or four seconds of silence that followed were the most important moment of that course. The beadle ruined it by opening the door and announcing the end of the class.

‘Art is my salvation, but it can’t save humanity,’ responded Professor Ardèvol to the beadle, who closed the door, ashamed by that professor who was off his rocker.

‘Art is my salvation, but it can’t save humanity,’ he repeated to Sara as they breakfasted in the dining room, in front of the Urgell that seemed it was also awakening to the new day.

‘No: humanity is hopeless.’

‘Don’t be sad, my love.’

‘I can’t stop being sad.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think that …’