Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘I’m here to pick up his violin.’

Tecla remained stock still for a few seconds and when she reacted she went down the hall, I think a bit offended. As she disappeared, I still had time to say and his scores … The ones in a blue folder, the thick one …

She came back with the violin and a thick folder that she put down on the dining room table, maybe a little too hard. From what I could tell she was very offended. I understood that it was inappropriate to make any sort of reflection and I just took the violin and the thick folder.

‘I’m very sorry about all this,’ I said in parting.

‘So am I,’ she said when she closed the door. The door closed a little too hard, as well. Just then Llorenç was coming up the stairs two by two, with a sports bag on his back. I got into the lift before the boy could see who the person hiding in such a shameful way was. I know, I’m a coward.

The second day, in the afternoon, Bernat was studying and decent violin playing was again heard in that house. It had been quite some time. Adrià, in his study, looking up to hear better. Bernat, in the guest room, filling the inner courtyard with Enescu’s sonatas. And that evening he asked me if he could use the Storioni and he made it cry for twenty or thirty delicious minutes. He interpreted some sonatas by Tonton Leclair, but now all by himself. For a few moments I thought that I had to give Vial to him. That he could really make use of it. But I stifled the desire in time.

I don’t know if music helped him. After dinner we were all three talking for a good long while. Sara made an exceptional reference to her Uncle Haïm and from the uncle we moved on to the banality of evil, because I had recently devoured Arendt and there were things going through my head that I didn’t know what to do with.

‘Why does it bother you?’ said Bernat.

‘If evil can be gratuitous, we’re screwed.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘If I can commit evil just because and that’s fine, humanity has no future.’

‘You mean crime without a motive, just because.’

‘A crime just because is the most inhumane thing you can imagine. I see a man waiting for the bus and I kill him. Horrible.’

‘Does hatred justify crime?’

‘No, but it explains it. Gratuitous crime, the more horrific, is inexplicable.’

‘And a crime in the name of God?’ intervened Sara.

‘That’s a gratuitous crime but with a subjective alibi.’

‘And if it’s in the name of freedom? Or of progress? Or of the future?’

‘Killing in the name of God or in the name of the future is the same thing. When the justification is ideological, empathy and compassion vanish. One kills coldly, without one’s conscience being affected. Like the gratuitous crime of a psychopath.’

They were silent for a little while. Without looking each other in the eye, as if they were subdued by the conversation.

‘There are things that I don’t know how to explain,’ said Adrià in a mournful voice. ‘Cruelty. The justification of cruelty. Things that I don’t know how to explain except through narration.’

‘Why don’t you try it?’ you said, looking at me with those eyes of yours that still bore right through me.

‘I don’t know how to write. That’s Bernat’s thing.’

‘Don’t mess with me, I’m not up for it.’

The conversation waned and we went to sleep. I remember, my love, that that was the day I took the decision. I grabbed some blank pages and the fountain pen and I tried to remedy it by coming from a distance, thinking that, gradually, I would approach us, and I wrote the rocks shouldn’t be too small, because then they would be harmless. But they shouldn’t be too big either, because then they would curtail the torture of the guilty too much. Because we are talking about punishing the guilty, let us not ever forget. All those good men who lift their fingers, anxious to participate in a stoning, must know that the sin requires atonement through suffering. That’s how it is. It has always been that way. Therefore, wounding the adulterous woman, taking out an eye, showing ourselves insensitive to her sobs, that pleases the Almighty, the One God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

Alí Bahr hadn’t volunteered: he was the accuser and, as such, had the privilege of throwing the first stone. Before him, the infamous Amani, buried in a hole, only her indecent face showing, which was now covered in tears and had been repeating for too long, don’t kill me, Alí Bahr lied to you. And Alí Bahr, impatient, made uncomfortable by the guilty woman’s words, stepped forward at the Qadi’s signal and threw the first stone to see if that whore would finally ffucking shut up, blessed be the Most High. And the stone that had to silence the slut moved too slowly, like he when he went into Amani’s house with the pretext of selling her a basket of dates, and Amani, seeing a man enter, covered her face with the kitchen cloth she had in her hands and said what are you doing here and who are you.

‘I came to sell these dates to Azizzadeh Alfalati, the merchant.’

‘He’s not here; he won’t be back until the evening.’

Which was what Alí Bahr was hoping someone would confirm for him. Besides, he had been able to see her face: more lovely, much more lovely than he had been told in the hostel in Murrabash. Blasphemous women tend to be the most beautiful. Alí Bahr put down the basket of dates on the floor.

‘We haven’t ordered them,’ she said, suspicious. ‘I don’t have the authority to …’

He advanced two steps towards the woman and, opening his arms, with a serious air, he just said I want to unmask your secret, little Amani. With his eyes sparkling, he curtly concluded: ‘I come in the name of the Most High to confound blasphemy.’

‘What do you mean?’ frightened, lovely Amani.

He advanced even more towards the girl. ‘I find myself forced to search for your secret.’

‘My secret?’

‘Your blasphemy.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about. My father … He … He will demand an explanation.’

Alí Bahr could no longer conceal the sparkle in his eye. He brusquely said, ‘Take off your clothes, blasphemous dog.’

Insidious Amani, instead of obeying, ran into the house and Alí Bahr was forced to follow her and grab her by the neck. And when she began to scream for help, he was forced to cover her mouth with one hand while, with the other, he tore at her clothes to reveal the provocation to sin.

‘Look, blasphemer!’

And he ripped off the medallion she wore around her neck, cutting her and making her bleed.

The man looked at the medallion in his open palm. A human figure: a woman with a child in her arms and a lush, strange tree in the background. And on the other side, Christian letters. So it was true what the women said about lovely Amani: she worshipped false gods or, at the very least, was disobeying the law of not sculpting, drawing, painting, buying, wearing, having or concealing any human figure under any circumstance, blessed be the Most High.

He hid the medallion among the folds of his clothes because he knew he could get a nice sum for it from the merchants on their way to the Red Sea and Egypt, with his spirit tranquil because he wasn’t the one who had sculpted or drawn, nor painted nor bought, worn, carried or hidden any object that featured the human figure.

As he was thinking that and had made the pendant vanish, he noticed that lovely Amani, with her clothes half-torn, was showing part of that lascivious body that was a sin in and of itself. He had already heard it from some men, that beneath those insinuating clothes there must be an exceptional body.

In the background was the sound of the mufti calling the people to the Zuhr prayer.