Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘And swear to me one more time that you will never mention it to Adrià.’ He looked at her with fervent eyes. ‘You understand me, Sara?’

‘I swear.’ And after a pause: ‘Bernat.’

‘Hmmm?’

‘Thank you. From me and from Adrià.’

‘No need for that. I always owe Adrià things.’

‘What do you owe him?’

‘I don’t know. Things. He’s my friend. He’s a kid who … Even though he’s so wise, he still wants to be my friend and put up with my crises. After all these years.’

Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky was to blame for the fact that when I turned fifty I started to brush up my neglected Russian. To distance myself from fruitless approaches to the nature of evil, I immersed myself in the suicidal attempt to bring Berlin, Vico and Llull together in one book and I was starting to see, to my surprise, that it was possible. As usually happened in moments of unexpected discoveries, I had to distance myself in order to reassure myself that the intuition wasn’t a mirage and so I spent a few days paging through completely different things, including Belinsky. It was Belinksy, the scholar and enthusiastic propagandist of Pushkin, who gave me a pressing desire to read in Russian. Belinsky talking about Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin and not Pushkin’s work directly. I understood what the interest in others’ literature meant, that which pushes you to create literature without realising it. I was passionate about Belinsky’s passion, so much so that what I knew of Pushkin didn’t impress me until I reread him after reading Belinsky. Before my eyes, Ruslan, Ludmila, Farlaf, Ratmir, Rodgay and also Chernomor and the Boss came to life, recited out loud thanks to what Belinsky had inspired in me. Sometimes I think about the power of art and about the study of art and I get frightened. Sometimes I don’t understand why humanity is always fighting when there are so many other things to do. Sometimes I think that we are more wicked than we are poets and, therefore, that we are hopeless. The problem is that no one is without sin. Very, very few people, to be more precise. Very, very few. And then Sara came in and Adrià, whose gaze was on the inextricable whole: verses of jealousy, love and Russian language, could tell without looking at her that Sara’s eyes were gleaming. He lifted his gaze.

‘How did it go?’

She put down the folders with the portrait samples on the sofa.

‘We are going to do the exhibition,’ she said.

‘Bravo!’

Adrià got up, glanced with a bit of nostalgia at Ludmila’s doom and hugged Sara.

‘Thirty portraits.’

‘How many do you have?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘All charcoal?’

‘Yes, yes: that will be the leitmotif: seeing the soul in charcoal or something like that. They have to find a really lovely phrase.’

‘Make them show it to you first: to make sure they don’t come up with something ridiculous.’

‘Seeing the soul in charcoal isn’t ridiculous.’

‘No, of course not! But gallery owners aren’t poets. And the ones at Artipèlag …’ Pointing to the folders resting on the sofa: ‘I’m so pleased. You deserve it.’

‘I need to make two more portraits.’

I already knew that you wanted to make one of me. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but I did like your enthusiasm. At my age I was starting to learn that more than things, what was important was the excitement we projected into them. That is what makes us people. And Sara was in an exceptional moment: every day she was more respected for her drawings. I had only twice asked why she didn’t try her hand at painting, and she, with that gentle but definitive stance, both times told me no, Adrià, what makes me happy is drawing with pencil and charcoal. My life is in black and white, perhaps in memory of my family, who lived in black and white. Or perhaps …

‘Perhaps there’s no need for you to explain.’

‘You’re right.’

At dinnertime I said that I knew whom the other portrait should be of and she said who? and I answered a self-portrait. She stopped with her fork in the air, thinking it over; I surprised you, Sara. You hadn’t thought of that. You never think of yourself.

‘I’m embarrassed,’ you said, after a few long seconds of silence. And you put the bite of croquette into your mouth.

‘Well, get over it. You’re a big girl.’

‘It’s not arrogant?’

‘No, quite the opposite; it is a display of humility: you bare the souls of twenty-nine people and you subject yourself to the same interrogation as the others. It would seem that you’re restoring the order of things.’

Now I caught you again with your fork in the air. You put it down and you said you know, you might be right. And thanks to that, today as I write to you I have your extraordinary self-portrait on the wall in front of me, beside the incunabula, presiding over my world. It is the most valuable object in this study. Your self-portrait that was to be the last drawing in the exhibition you prepared so meticulously, whose opening you were unable to attend.

For me, Sara’s work is some sort of window into inner silence. An invitation to introspection. Sara, I love you. And I remember you suggesting an order for the thirty artworks, and secretly making the first sketches for your self-portrait. And those at the Artipèlag Gallery outdid themselves: Sara Voltes-Epstein. Charcoal drawings. A window into the soul. It was a gorgeous catalogue that made one want to be sure to see the exhibition, or buy up every drawing. Your mature work that took you two years to complete. Without rushing, naturally, calmly, the way you’ve always done things.

The self-portrait is the work that took her the longest, locked up in her studio without witnesses, because she was embarrassed to be seen observing herself in the mirror, looking at herself on paper and working the details, the sweet crease at the corners of her lips, the small defeats that huddle inside the wrinkles. And the little lines at your eyes that are so much a part of you, Sara. And all those tiny signs that I don’t know how to reproduce but which make a face, as if it were a violin, become a landscape that reflects the long winter voyage in full detail, with total immodesty, my God. As if it were the cruel tachograph that records the lorry driver’s life, your face draws our tears, your tears without me, which I don’t entirely know about and the tears for the misfortunes that befell your family and your people. And some joys that were beginning to show in the brightness of your eyes and illuminate the splendid face that I have before me now as I write you this long letter that was only meant to be a few pages. I love you. I discovered you, I lost you and I found you again. And above all we had the privilege to begin to grow old together. Until the moment that misfortune entered our house.

During those days she was unable to do any illustrations and the assignments began to pile up in a way that had never happened to her before. All her thoughts were focused on the charcoal portraits.

It was one month before the opening at the Artipèlag and I, before returning to Vico, Llull and Berlin, had gone from Pushkin and Belinsky to Hobbes, with his sinister vision of human nature, always prone to evil. And between one thing and another I ended up in his translation of the Iliad , which I read in a delicious mid-nineteenth-century edition. And yes, the misfortune.

Thomas Hobbes was trying to convince me that I had to choose between liberty and order because, otherwise, the wolf would come, the wolf that I had seen so many times in human nature when studying history and knowledge. I heard the sound of a key in the lock, the door closing silently and it wasn’t the wolf Hobbes warned of, but Sara’s mute footsteps, which entered the study. She stood there for a few seconds, still and soundless. I looked up and immediately realised that we had a problem. Sara sat on the sofa behind which I had spied on so many secrets with Carson and Black Eagle. She had trouble getting the words out. It was all too clear that she was searching for the right way to say it and Adrià took off his reading glasses and helped her along, saying, hey, Sara, what’s wrong?