Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘I talk too much, I know.’

And to prove it, she explained that she had met some really nice people and they were meeting up in the Algarve because they were bicycling all over the Iberian peninsula and

‘Are you a biker, too?’

‘I’m too old. I’m going to lie on a beach chair. To disconnect from the dramas in the department.’

‘And flirt a bit.’

She didn’t answer. She glanced at him to convey that I was going too far, because women have an ability to understand things that I’ve always envied.

What do I know, Sara? But this is how it went. In Laura’s flat, which was tiny but always spick and span, there was a controlled disorder that was particularly concentrated in the bedroom. A disorder that wasn’t chaotic in the least, the disorder of someone about to go on a trip. Clothing in piles, shoes lined up, a couple of tourist guides and a camera. Like a cat and a dog, they carefully watched each other’s moves.

‘Is it one of the electronic ones?’ said Adrià, picking up the camera suspiciously.

‘Uh-huh. Digital.’

‘You’re always into the latest thing.’

Laura took off her shoes, standing, and put on some sort of flip-flops that were very flattering.

‘And you must use a Leica.’

‘I don’t have a camera. I never have.’

‘And your memories?’

‘Here.’ Adrià pointed to his head. ‘They never break down. And they’re always here when I need them.’

I said it without irony because I can’t predict anyone’s future.

‘I can take two hundred photos, with this.’ She took the camera from him with a gesture that strove to conceal her impatience and put it down on the night table, beside the telephone.

‘Bravo,’ he said, uninterested.

‘And then I can put them into my computer. I look at them more there than in an album.’

‘Bravissimo. But for that you need a computer.’

Laura stood before him, defiant.

‘What?’ she said, her hands on her hips. ‘Now you want a lecture on the quality of digital photos?’

Adrià looked into those oh so blue eyes and embraced her. They held each other for a long time and I cried a little bit. Luckily, she didn’t notice.

‘Why are you crying?’

‘I’m not crying.’

‘Liar. Why are you crying?’

By mid afternoon they had turned the bedroom’s disorder into chaos. And they spent close to an hour lying down, looking at the ceiling. Laura studied Adrià’s medallion.

‘Why do you always wear it?’

‘Just because.’

‘But you don’t believe in …’

‘It’s a reminder.’

‘A reminder of what?’

‘I don’t know.’

Then the telephone rang. It rang on the bedside table next to Laura’s side of the bed. They looked at each other, as if wanting to ask, in some sort of guilty silence, whether they were expecting any call. Laura didn’t move, with her head on Adrià’s chest, and they both heard how the telephone, monotonously, insisted, insisted, insisted. Adrià stared at Laura’s hair, expecting her to reach for it. Nothing. The telephone kept ringing.

Two years later, the telephone rang suddenly and gave Adrià a start, just like every time he heard it. He stared at the device for a long time. The house was dark except for the reading light on in his study. The house was silent, the house without you, except for the insistent ringing of the telephone. He put a bookmark in Carr, closed it and stared at the shrieking telephone for a few more minutes, as if that solved everything. He let it ring for a good long while and finally, when whoever was calling had already made their stubborness clear, Adrià Ardèvol rubbed his face with his palms, picked up and said hello.

His gaze was sad and damp. He was nearing eighty and gave off a worn, infinitely beaten air. He stood on the landing of the staircase breathing anxiously, gripping a small travel bag as if his contact with it was what was keeping him alive. When he heard Adrià walking up the stairs slowly, he turned. For a few seconds, they both stared at each other.

‘Mijnheer Adrian Ardefol?’

Adrià opened the door to his home and invited him in while the man, in something approximating English, confirmed that he was the one who’d called that morning. I was convinced that a sad story was entering my house together with the stranger, but I no longer had any choice. I closed the door to keep the secrets from scampering out onto the landing and into the stairwell; standing, I offered to speak in Dutch and then I saw that the stranger’s damp eyes brightened a tad as he made an appreciative gesture to Adrià, who had to brush up on his rusty Dutch straightaway to ask the stranger what he wanted.

‘It’s a long story. That’s why I asked if you had some time.’

He led him into the study. He noticed that the man hadn’t tried to hide his admiration, which was like someone who suddenly happens upon an unexpected room filled with surprises when visiting the Louvre. Right in the middle of the study, the newcomer spun around timidly, taking in the shelves filled with books, the paintings, the incunabula, the instrument cabinet, the two desks, your self-portrait, the Carr on top of the table, which I still hadn’t been able to finish, and the manuscript beneath the loupe, my latest acquisition: sixty-three handwritten pages of The Dead with curious comments in the margin that were probably by Joyce himself. Once he had seen it all, he looked at Adrià in silence.

Adrià had him sit on the other side of the desk, one in front of the other, and for a few seconds I wondered what specific grief could have produced the rictus of pain that had dried onto the stranger’s face. He unzipped his bag with some difficulty and pulled out something covered carefully in paper. He unwrapped it meticulously and Adrià saw a dirty piece of cloth, dark with filth, on which a few dark and light checks could still be made out. The stranger moved aside the paper and placed the rag on the desk and, with gestures that seemed liturgical, he unfolded it carefully, as if it contained a valuable treasure. He seemed like a priest laying out an altar cloth. Once he had spread it out, I was somewhat disappointed to see that there was nothing inside. A stitched line separated it into two equal parts, like a border. I couldn’t perceive the memories. Then the stranger took off his glasses and wiped his right eye with a tissue. Noting Adrià’s respectful silence and without looking him in the eye, he said that he wasn’t crying, that for the last few months he’d been suffering a very uncomfortable allergy that caused etcetera, etcetera, and he smiled as if in apology. He looked around him and tossed the tissue into the bin. Then, with a vaguely liturgical gesture, he pointed to the filthy old rag with both hands extended in front of him. As if it were an invitation to the question.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

The stranger put both palms onto the cloth for a few seconds, as if he were mentally reciting a deep prayer, and he said, in a transformed voice, now imagine you are having lunch at home, with your wife, your mother-in-law and your three little daughters; your mother-in-law has a bit of a chest cold, and suddenly …

The stranger lifted his head and now his eyes were definitely filled with tears, not allergies and etceteras. But he didn’t make any motion to wipe away the tears of pain, he looked intently straight ahead, and he repeated imagine you are having lunch at home, with your wife, your sick mother-in-law and your three little daughters, with the new tablecloth set out, the blue-and-white chequered one, because today is the eldest girl’s birthday — little Amelietje — and suddenly someone breaks down the door without even knocking first and comes in armed to the teeth, followed by five more soldiers, storming in, and they all keep shouting schnell, schnell and raus, raus, and they take you out of your house forever in the middle of lunch, for the rest of your life, with no chance of looking back, the party tablecloth, the new one, the one my Berta had bought two years earlier, without the chance to grab anything, with just the clothes on your back. What does raus mean, Daddy, says Amelietje, and I couldn’t keep her from getting smacked on the nape of her neck by an impatient rifle who insisted raus, raus because everyone can understand German because it is the language and whoever says they don’t understand it is lying and will get what’s coming to them. Raus!