Jaume Cabré - Confessions

Silence. She took a sip of tea. The doorbell rang and Adrià went to answer it.

‘Watch out, move aside.’

Caterina came in and ran to the bathroom with a dripping umbrella.

‘It’s raining?’

‘You wouldn’t even notice lightning and snow,’ she said from the bathroom.

‘You’re always exaggerating.’

‘Exaggerating? You couldn’t find water in the sea!’

I went back to the dining room. Sara was finishing her breakfast. Adrià put a hand over hers to keep her from getting up.

‘Why can’t you stop being sad?’

She was silent. She wiped her mouth with a blue-and-white chequered napkin and folded it slowly. I was waiting, standing, as I heard the usual noises Caterina made at the other end of the flat.

‘Because I think that if I stop … I am sinning against the memory of my people. Of my uncle. Of … I have so many dead.’

I sat down without taking my hand off hers.

‘I love you,’ I told you. And you looked at me sadly, serenely and beautifully. ‘Let’s have a baby,’ I finally dared to say.

You shook your head no, as if you didn’t dare to say it out loud.

‘Why not?’

You lifted your eyebrows and said oof.

‘It’s life against death, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t have the heart.’ You shook your head while you said no, no, no, no, no.

For a long time I wondered why you gave so many nos in response to having a child. One of my deepest regrets is not having watched a girl who looked like you grow up and to whom no one would say be still, damn it, or I’ll rip off your nose, because she would never have to nervously wring a blue- and white-checked napkin. Or a boy who wouldn’t have to beg Tėve, Tėve in panic.

After that confession he’d paid so dearly for on the frozen island of Usedom, Budden left the chair in front of the fireplace, he left behind that icy town on the Baltic shore having robbed his trusting hosts of an ID card from their beloved Eugen Müss to save himself problems with the Allied forces of occupation, and he began his third flight, as if he were afraid that the poor confessor, from his grave, could accuse him before his grieving brothers of any number of deserved sins. Deep down it wasn’t the Carthusians and their silence that he was afraid of. He wasn’t afraid of the penance they hadn’t imposed on him; he wasn’t afraid of death; he didn’t deserve suicide because he knew that he had to make amends for his evil. And he knew full well that he deserved eternal hellfire and he didn’t feel he had the right to avoid it. But he still had work to do before going to hell. ‘You have to see, my son,’ the confessor had told him before absolution and death, in the only, brief comments he had made during the long, eternal confession, ‘how you can make amends for the evil you have done.’ And in a lower voice, he had added: ‘If amends are possible …’ After a few seconds of doubt, he continued: ‘May divine mercy, which is infinite, forgive me, but even if you try to make amends for the evil, I don’t think there is a place for you in paradise.’ During his flight, Eugen Müss thought about making amends for his evil. He’d had it easier the other times, because in his first flight they’d only had to destroy archives; he had to destroy the corpus delicti; the little corpses delicti. My God.

In three monasteries, two Czech and one Hungarian, they turned him away with kind words. The fourth, after a long period as a postulant, accepted him. He was luckier than that poor friar who was fleeing from fear, who begged to be admitted as just another monk twenty-nine times and the father prior at Sant Pere del Burgal, looking into his eyes, refused him. Until one rainy, happy Friday that was the thirtieth time he begged to be admitted. Müss wasn’t fleeing from fear: he was fleeing from Doctor Budden.

Father Klaus, who was then the master of the novitiates, also kept a hand in with the aspirants. His interpretation was that the still young man had spiritual thirst, an eagerness for prayer and penance that the Cistercian life could offer him. So he accepted him as a postulant at the Mariawald monastery.

The life of prayer brought him close to the presence of God, always with the fear and certainty that he wasn’t worthy of breathing. One day, after eight months, Father Albert collapsed in a heap as he was walking through the cloister in front of him, when he headed to the chapterhouse where the father abbot was waiting to speak with them about some changes to their schedule. Brother Eugen Müss didn’t calculate his reaction well and when he saw Father Albert on the ground he said it’s a heart attack and he gave precise instructions to those who rushed over to help him. Father Albert survived, but the surprised brothers discovered that Novice Müss not only had medical knowledge but was, in fact, a doctor.

‘Why have you hidden this from us?’

Silence. He looked at the ground. I wanted to start a new life. I didn’t think it was important information.

‘I am the one who decides what is important and what is superfluous.’

He was unable to hold either the father abbot’s gaze or Father Albert’s, when he went to visit him in his convalescence. What’s more, Müss was convinced that Father Albert, as he thanked him for his response that had saved his life, guessed his secret.

Müss’s reputation as a doctor grew over the following months. When it came time for him to take the first vows and change his first name from Eugen, which wasn’t his anyway, to Arnold — this time according to the Rule, as a sign of renunciation — he had already cured a bout of collective food poisoning effectively and selflessly, and his reputation was firmly established. So when Brother Robert had his crisis, very far to the West, in another monastery in another country, his Abbot decided to recommend Brother Arnold Müss as a medical expert. And that was where his despair began again.

‘In the end, I can’t help but refer to that bit about how there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.’

‘Who said that?’

‘Adorno.’

‘I agree.’

‘I don’t: there is poetry after Auschwitz.’

‘No, but I mean … that there shouldn’t be.’

‘No. After Auschwitz, after the many pogroms, after the extermination of the Cathars, of whom not one remains, after the massacres in every period, everywhere around the world … Cruelty has been present for so many centuries that the history of humanity would be the history of the impossibility of poetry ‘after’. And yet it hasn’t been that, because who can explain Auschwitz?’

‘Those who have lived through it. Those who created it. Scholars.’

‘Yes. All that will be evidence; and they’ve made museums to remember it. But something is missing: the truth of the lived experience. That cannot be conveyed in a scholarly work.’

Bernat closed the bound pages and looked at his friend and said and?

‘It can only be conveyed through art; literary artifice, which is the closest thing to lived experience.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Yes. Poetry is needed after Auschwitz more than ever.’

‘It’s a good ending.’

‘Yes, I think so. Or I don’t know. But I think it is one of the reasons for the persistence of aesthetic will in humanity.’

‘When will it be published? I can’t wait.’

A few months later, La voluntat estètica appeared, simultaneously in Catalan and in German, translated by me and meticulously revised by the patient Saint Johannes Kamenek. One of the few things I’m proud of, my dear. And stories and landscapes emerged and I stored them away in my memory. And one day, behind your back and behind mine, I went to visit Morral again.

‘How much?’

‘That much.’