Jaume Cabré - Confessions

Holding tight to the Sacred Chest, he went into each and every one of the cells, Friar Marcel’s, Friar Martí’s, Friar Adrià’s, Father Ramon’s, Father Basili’s, Father Josep de Sant Bartomeu’s, and his humble cell, at the end of the narrow corridor, the cell that was closest to the tiny cloister and closest to the monastery’s door, which he had been entrusted, if that’s the word, to watch over since his arrival. Then he approached the reservoir, the modest chapterhouse, the kitchen and once again the refectory where the bench was still eating away at the wall’s plaster. Then he went out into the cloister and he couldn’t keep his grief from welling up, a burst of deep sobbing, because he didn’t know how to accept that as the will of God. To calm himself down, to bid farewell forever to so many years of Benedictine life, he went into the monastic chapel. He got down on his knees before the altar, clinging to the Sacred Chest. For the last time in his life he looked at the paintings in the apse. The prophets and the archangels. Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Saint John and the other apostles and the Mother of God showing her devotion, along with the archangels, to severe Christ Pantocrator. And he felt guilty, guilty of the extinction of the little monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal. And with his free hand he beat on his chest and said confiteor, Domine. Confiteor, mea culpa. He put the Sacred Chest down on the floor and he knelt until he could kiss the ground that so many generations of monks had walked upon in their praise of the Almighty God who observed him impassively.

He stood, picked up the Sacred Chest again, looked at the holy paintings one last time and walked backwards to the door. Once he was outside the small church, he closed the two door leaves with a brisk motion, gave the key its final turn in the lock and placed it inside the Sacred Chest. Those beloved paintings wouldn’t be seen again by human eyes until Jachiam of Pardàc opened the church up, almost three hundred years later, by simply pushing on a rotten worm-eaten door leaf with his flat hand.

And then Brother Julià de Sau thought of the day that his feet — eager and weary, still filled with fear — had reached the door of Sant Pere and he’d knocked with a closed fist. Fifteen monks then lived intra muros monasterii. My God, Glorious Lord, how he missed those days — despite not having any right to feel nostalgia for a time he hadn’t experienced — when there was a job for each monk and a monk for each job. When he knocked on that door begging for admission, it had been years since he had left security behind and entered deep into the realm of fear, which is every fugitive’s constant companion. And even more so when he suspects that he might be making a mistake, because Jesus speaks to us of love and kindness and I didn’t fulfil his commandment. But he did, yes, because Father Nicolau Eimeric, the Inquisitor General, was his superior and it was all carried out in God’s name and for the good of the Church and the true faith, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t because Jesus was so far from me; and who are you, Friar Miquel, silly lay friar, to ask where Jesus is? Our Lord God lies in blind, unconditional obedience. God is with me, Friar Miquel. And he who is not with me is against me. Look me in the eyes when I speak to you! He who is not with me is against me. And Friar Miquel chose to flee, he preferred uncertainty and perhaps hell to salvation with a bad conscience. And that was why he fled, taking off his Dominican habit and entering the kingdom of fear, and he travelled to the Holy Land searching for forgiveness for all his sins as if forgiveness were possible in this world or the next. If they had been sins. Dressed as a pilgrim he had seen much misfortune, he had dragged himself along compelled by regret, he had made promises that were difficult to keep, but he wasn’t at peace because if you disobey the voice of salvation your soul will never find rest.

‘Can’t you keep your hands still?’

‘But Father … I just want to touch the parchment. You said that it was mine, too.’

‘With this finger. And carefully.’

Adrià brought a timid hand forward, with one finger extended, and touched the parchment. He felt as if he was already inside the monastery.

‘OK, that’s enough, you’ll dirty it.’

‘A little bit more, Father.’

‘Don’t you know what that’s enough means?’ shouted Father.

And I pulled away my hand as if the parchment had shocked me, and that was why, when the former friar returned from his journey in the Holy Land with his soul wizened, his body gaunt and his face tanned, his gaze hard as a diamond, he still felt the fires of hell inside him. He didn’t dare go near his parents’ house, if they were even still alive; he wandered the roads dressed as a pilgrim, begging for alms and spending them at inns on the most poisonous drinks they had on hand, as if he was in a hurry to disappear and not have to remember his memories. He also relapsed into sins of the flesh, obsessively, in a search for the oblivion and redemption that penitence hadn’t afforded him. He was a true soul in purgatory. Then the kindly smile of Brother Julià de Carcassona, caretaker of the Benedictine abbey of La Grassa where he had asked for hospitage to spend a freezing winter’s night, suddenly and unexpectedly illuminated his path. The night’s rest became ten days of prayer at the abbey church, on his knees beside the wall furthest from the community’s seats of honour. It was at Santa Maria de la Grassa where he first heard of Burgal, a cenobium so far from everything that they said that the rain reached it so weary that it barely dampened your skin. He held on to Brother Julià’s smile, which may have sprung from happiness, like a deep secret treasure, and he set off on the road to the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey, as the monks at La Grassa had advised him to do. He brought with him a pouch filled with donated food and the secret, happy smile, and he headed towards the mountains that are snow-capped all year round, towards the world of perpetual silence where, perhaps, with a bit of luck, he could seek redemption. He went through valleys, over hills and waded, with his destroyed sandals, through the icy water of the rivers that had just been born of the snow. When he reached the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey, they confirmed that the priory of Sant Pere del Burgal was so secluded and remote that no one knew for sure if thoughts reached there in one piece. And what the father prior there decides with you, they assured him, will be approved by the father abbot here.

So, after a journey that lasted weeks, aged despite not having reached forty, he knocked hard on the door to the monastery of Sant Pere. It was a cold, dark dusk and the monks had finished evensong and were preparing for supper, if a bowl of hot water can be called supper. They took him in and asked him what he wanted. He begged for entrance into their tiny community; he didn’t explain his pain to them, instead he spoke of his desire to serve the Holy Mother Church with a modest, anonymous job, as a lay brother, on the lowest rung, just attentive to the gaze of God Our Lord. Father Josep de Sant Bartomeu, who was already the prior, looked into his eyes and sensed the secret in his soul. Thirty days and thirty nights they had him at the door to the monastery, in a precarious shack. But what he was asking for was the shelter entailed in the habit, the refuge of living according to the holy Benedictine law that transforms people and bestows inner peace on those who practise it. Twenty-nine times he begged them to let him be just another monk and twenty-nine times the father prior, looking into his eyes, refused. Until that one rainy, happy Friday that was the thirtieth time he begged for entrance.

‘Don’t touch it, goddamn it, you’re always touching everything!’