Jaume Cabré - Confessions

He picked up the rag and looked at it fervidly and recited I still don’t know by what miracle I was able to recover both halves. He placed the napkin on the table, again with the devotion of a priest folding and unfolding an altar cloth.

‘Mr Alpaerts,’ I said, raising my voice slightly.

The old man looked at me, surprised by the interruption. For a few moments it seemed he didn’t know where he was.

‘We should eat something.’

We ate in the kitchen, as if it were a casual visit. Despite his grief, Alpaerts ate hungrily. He curiously examined the oil cruet; I showed him how to use it and he bathed his vegetables in olive oil. Seeing how well it went over, I pulled out your spouted wine pitcher, which I hadn’t used in so long, since your death: I had put it away out of fear it would get broken. I don’t think I ever mentioned that. I put a bit of wine inside, demonstrated how to use it and, for the first and last time, Matthias Alpaerts laughed heartily. He drank from the pitcher’s long spout, stained himself, still smiling, and said, out of the blue, bedankt, heer Ardefol. Perhaps he was thanking me for the laugh that had come out of him; I didn’t want to ask.

I will never know for sure whether Matthias Alpaerts lived through all the things he explained to me. Deep down I know it; but I will never be entirely certain. In any case, I surrendered to a story that had defeated me, thinking of you and what you would have wanted me to do.

‘You squandered your inheritance, my friend. If I can still call you a friend.’

‘The violin was mine, why are you so worked up about it?’

Because I always thought that, if you died before I did, you would leave me the violin.

‘Because it’s not at all clear that this man’s story is true. And even if we’re not going to be friends any more, I’ll show you how to use the computer later.’

‘He told me if you look through the sound hole, mijnheer Ardefol, you’ll see that it says Laurentius Storioni Cremonensis me fecit 1764 and next to that there are two marks, like little stars. And beneath Cremonensis, there is an irregular line, thicker in some parts, that goes from the m to the last n. If I remember correctly, because it’s been more than fifty years.’

Adrià picked up the violin and looked at it. He had never noticed, but it was true. He looked at Matthias, opened his mouth, closed it again and placed the violin on the table.

‘Yes, that’s true,’ ratified Bernat. But I knew that too and the violin wasn’t mine, unfortunately.

Adrià placed the violin on the table again. Now it was time to make a decision. Deep down I know that it wasn’t that hard for me to do. But we still spent a couple of hours together before saying farewell. I gave him the original case, the one with the dark stain that was impossible to get off.

‘You are a complete fool.’

‘The atrocious pain made Matthias Alpaerts continue living as if he were the same age as when he lost everything. That pain is what defeated me.’

‘You were defeated by his history. No: his story.’

‘Perhaps. So?’

The man caressed the top of the violin delicately with his fingertips. His hand began to tremble. He hid it, embarrassed, and turned towards me: ‘Pain becomes concentrated and more intense when a defenceless being suffers it. And the certainty that it could have been avoided by a heroic act torments you throughout your life and throughout your death. Why didn’t I cry out; why didn’t I strangle the soldier who hit little Amelia with his rifle butt; why didn’t I kill the SS who were saying you to the right, you to the left, you, you hear me?’

‘Where are my daughters!’

‘What?’

‘Where are my daughters. They’ve snatched them from my hands!’

Matthias stood — his arms open, his eyes wide — before the soldier that had called over the officer.

‘What are you telling me for. Come on. Get moving!’

‘No! Amelia, with jet-black hair, and Truu, the one with brown hair the colour of forest wood, they were with me.’

‘I said get moving. Go to the right and stop pestering me.’

‘My daughters! And Juliet, the one with the golden ringlets! A clever little girl. She was in the other train carriage, do you hear me!?’

The soldier, bored by his insistence, rammed his rifle butt into his forehead. As he fell, half dazed, he saw one of the napkin halves on the ground, and he grabbed it and clung to it as if it were one of his daughters.

‘You see?’ he leaned towards Adrià, moving aside the few hairs he had left: there was something strange on his head, some sort of distant scar from that pain that was still so near.

‘Get in the queue or I’ll smash your skull,’ said the deliberate voice of Doctor Budden, the officer, putting his hand on the closed holster. It was later than usual and he was a bit anxious; especially after his conversation with Doctor Voigt, who was demanding results in one thing or another, make it up, for goodness sake, it’s not that hard. But I want a report with the results. And Matthias Alpaerts was unable to see that monster’s eyes because his visor covered most of his face. He got into the right queue obediently, which didn’t take him — though he couldn’t know that — to the gas chambers, but rather to the disinfection blocks to become free labour ad maiorem Reich gloriam. And Budden — like the pied piper of Hamelin — was able to make his selection of boys and girls. Voigt, a few metres further on, was able to blow off the head of Netje de Boeck, Matthias’s mother-in-law with a chest cold. And he kept telling Adrià that in the face of that officer’s threat I lowered my head and ever since then I think that my daughters died because I didn’t rebel, and so did Berta and my mother-in-law with a chest cold. I hadn’t seen Berta and Juliet since we’d got on the train. Poor Berta: we weren’t able to look at each other one last time. Look at each other, just look at each other, my God; just look at each other, even from a distance. Look at each other … My beloved women, I abandoned you. And I wasn’t able to avenge the fear that those ogres made Truu, Amelia and Juliet go through. Forgive me, if this cowardice is worthy of forgiveness.

‘Don’t torture yourself.’

‘I was thirty-one years old. I could fight.’

‘They would have cracked your skull and your family would have died anyway. Now they live on in your memory.’

‘Nonsense. This is torment. That ridiculous protest was the only act of rebellion that I allowed myself.’

‘I understand you saying that: you must not be able to get it out of your head; that is what I believed about Alpaerts: his pain. Which will lead him to his death today or tomorrow or the day after. That was what pained him, that and having moved to one side when he should have taken a blow that ended up killing a child. Or not giving a bread crumb to someone: his great sins ate away at his soul.’

‘Like Primo Levi?’

It was that first time in the whole afternoon that Bernat wasn’t insulting me. I looked at him with my mouth open in surprise and he finished his thought: I mean how he committed suicide when he was already old. He could have done it before then, the moment he emerged from the horror. Or Paul Celan, who waited for years and years.

‘They committed suicide not because they’d lived through the horror, but because they had written about it.’

‘Now I don’t follow you.’

‘They had already written it down; now they could die. That’s how I see it. But they also realised that writing is reliving, and spending years reliving the hell is unbearable: they died for having written about the horror they had already lived through. And in the end, so much pain and panic reduced to a thousand pages or to two thousand verses; making so much pain fit into a stack of paper almost seemed like sarcasm.’