Jaume Cabré - Confessions

He stopped his account of the facts, but he kept his gaze fixed forward, looking nowhere because such pain could not be expressed while looking into anyone’s eyes. He swallowed hard, but I, tied to my chair, didn’t even think that the stranger, with all his talking, might need a glass of water. As if he didn’t, he continued his tale, saying and so I went through life with my head bowed, crying over my cowardice and looking for some way to make amends for my evilness until I thought of hiding myself there where the memory could never reach me. I sought out a refuge: I probably made a mistake, but I needed shelter and I tried to get closer to the God I distrusted because he hadn’t moved a muscle to save innocents. I don’t know if you can understand it, but absolute desperation makes you do strange things: I decided to enter a Carthusian monastery, where they counselled me that what I was doing wasn’t a good idea. I have never been religious; I was baptised as a Christian although religion in my house was never more than a social custom and my parents passed down their disinterest in religion to me. I married my beloved Berta, my brave wife who was Jewish but not from a religious family, and who didn’t hesitate to marry a goy for love. She made me Jewish in my heart. After the Carthusians refused me I lied and at the next two places I tried I didn’t mention the reasons for my grief; I didn’t even show it. In one place and the other I learned what I had to say and what I had to keep quiet, so that when I knocked on the door of Saint Benedict’s Abbey in Achel I already knew that no one would put up obstacles to my belated vocation and I begged, if obedience didn’t demand otherwise, that they let me live there and fulfil the humblest tasks in the monastery. That was when I began speaking again, a bit, with God and I learned to get the cows to listen to me. And then I realised that the telephone had been ringing for some time, but I didn’t have the heart to answer it. At least that was the first time in two years that it had rung without giving me a start. The stranger named Matthias, who was no longer such a stranger, and who had been called Brother Robert, looked at the telephone and at Adrià, waiting for some reaction. Since his host showed no interest in answering it, he continued speaking.

‘And that’s it,’ he said, to help himself get started again. But maybe he had already said everything, because he started to fold up the dirty cloth, as if gathering up his stand after a very hard day at the street market. He did it carefully, using all five of his senses. He left the folded cloth in front of him. He repeated en dat is alles, as if no further explanations were necessary. Then Adrià broke his long silence and asked why have you come to explain this to me. And then he added, what does this have to do with me?

Neither of the two men realised that the telephone, at some point, had got fed up with ringing in vain. Now the only noise that reached them was the very muffled sounds of the traffic on València Street. They were both silent, as if exceedingly interested in the traffic noise of Barcelona’s Eixample district. Until I looked the old man in the eye, and he, without returning my gaze, said and with all that, I confess that I don’t know where God is.

‘Well, I …’

‘For many years, in the monastery, he was part of my life.’

‘Was that experience useful to you?’

‘I don’t believe so. But they wanted to show me that pain is not the work of God, but a consequence of human freedom.’

Now he did look at me and continued, raising his voice slightly, as if it were a mass meeting, and he said what about earthquakes? And floods? And why doesn’t God doesn’t stop people from committing evil? Huh?

He put his palms on the folded cloth: ‘I talked a lot with cows, when I was a peasant monk. I always came to the maddening conclusion that God is guilty. Because it can’t be that evil only resides in the desire for evil. That’s too easy. He even gives us permission to kill the evil: dead dogs don’t bite, says God. And it’s not true. Without the dog, the bite continues to gnaw on us from inside, forever and ever.’

He looked from side to side without focusing on the books that had amazed him when he’d first entered the study. He picked up the thread: ‘I came to the conclusion that if all-powerful God allows evil, God is an invention in poor taste. And I broke inside.’

‘I understand. I don’t believe in God either. The guilty always have a first and last name. They are named Franco, Hitler, Torquemada, Amalric, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Adrià Ardèvol or whatever. But they have first and last names.’

‘Not always. The tool of evil has a first and last name, but evil, the essence of evil … I still haven’t resolved that.’

‘Don’t tell me that you believe in the devil.’

He looked at me in silence for a few seconds, as if weighing my words, which made me feel proud. But no: his head was somewhere else. He obviously didn’t want to philosophise: ‘Truu, the brunette, Amelia, the one with jet-black hair, Juliet, the littlest, blonde as the sun. And my coughing mother-in-law. And my strength, my wife, who was named Berta and who I have to believe has been dead for the last fifty-four years and ten months. I can’t stop feeling guilty about still being alive. Every day I wake up thinking that I am failing them, day in, day out … and now I’m eighty-five and I still haven’t known how to die, I keep living the same pain with the same intensity of the first day. Which is why — since despite everything I have never believed in forgiveness — I tried to get vengeance …’

‘Excuse me?’

‘… and I discovered that vengeance can never be complete. You can only take it out on the idiot who let himself get caught. You are always left with the disappointment of those who got away with it.’

‘I understand.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he interrupted, abruptly. ‘Because vengeance causes even more pain and brings no satisfaction. And I wonder: if I can’t forgive, why doesn’t vengeance make me happy? Huh?’

He grew quiet and I respected his silence. Had I ever taken vengeance on anyone? Surely I had, in the thousand evil things of daily life surely I had. I looked into his eyes and I insisted, ‘Where do I show up in this story?’

I said it with some confusion, I don’t know if I was expecting to have some sort of starring role in that life of pain or if I wanted to get to the part I was already fearing.

‘You are entering the stage right now,’ he responded, half hiding a smile.

‘What do you want?’

‘I came to get back Berta’s violin.’

The telephone started to ring, as if it were feverishly applauding the interpreters of a memorable recital.

Bernat plugged in the computer and turned it on. As he waited for the screen to come to life, I explained what had happened the day before. As he listened, his jaw dropped in amazement.

‘What?’ he said, absolutely beside himself.

‘You heard me right,’ I replied.

‘You’re … you’re … you’re crazy, man!’

He connected the mouse and the keyboard. He banged angrily on the table and started to walk around the room. He went over to the instrument cabinet and opened it with a bit too much force, as if he wanted to check what I’d just told him. He slammed it shut.

‘Careful you don’t break the glass,’ I warned him.

‘Fuck the glass. Fuck you, bloody hell, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because you would have talked me out of it.’

‘Obviously! But how could you …’

‘It was as simple as the man standing up, going over to the cabinet, opening it and pulling out the Storioni.’ He stroked it and Adrià watched him with curiosity and a bit of suspicion. The man burst into tears, hugging the violin; Adrià let him do it. The man pulled a bow from the cabinet, tightened it, looked at me to ask for my permission and began to play. ‘It didn’t sound very good. Actually, it sounded awful.’