Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘Fine.’

Silence. The ringing of the phone, apparently, makes only Bernat uncomfortable.

Now I will tell him how, lately, since I’ve been seeing Llorenç, he’s seemed a bit sad. And Bernat: that’s just how he is. And I, no: it’s your fault, Bernat, you plan his life without asking him what he thinks about it. And Bernat would curtly say mind your business. And I, I have to say something: it pains me to watch. And Bernat, marking each syllable: it-is-none-of-your-busi-ness. Understood? And I, all right, but he’s sad: he wants to be a teacher. Why don’t you let your son be what he wants to be? And Bernat would stand up, furious, as if I’d given away our Storioni again and he’d leave muttering curses and we’d never speak another word to each other.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Bernat, interested.

‘That … That you have to prepare it really well. Make sure there’ll be about twenty people. And choose a location with the capacity for twenty-five. Then it will be well attended.’

‘Very clever.’

They were quiet. I have the courage to tell him that I don’t like what he writes, but I don’t know how to talk to him about Llorenç. The telephone’s ringing invaded the silence again. Adrià stood up, picked up the receiver and put it down again. Bernat didn’t dare to comment. Adrià sat back down and took up the conversation as if nothing had happened.

‘You can’t expect a big crowd. In Barcelona there are eighty to a hundred cultural events every day, at least. Besides, people know you as a musician, not as a writer.’

‘Not as a musician, no: I am just another one of the violins scraping away on stage. As a writer I am the sole author of five books of short stories.’

‘That haven’t sold even a thousand copies between them.’

‘ Plasma alone sold a thousand.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You sound like my editor: always encouraging.’

‘Who is going to present it?’

‘Carlota Garriga.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Good? Great. She alone draws a crowd.’

When Bernat left, Adrià hadn’t said a single word to him about Llorenç. And he remained firm in his idea of creating the suicidal session devoted to his literary oeuvre: Bernat Plensa, a narrative trajectory, the invitations would read. Then the telephone, as if it had been lying in wait, began to ring again and, as always, Adrià was startled.

Adrià decided to switch one of his History of Aesthetic Ideas classes for something else and so he had them meet at a different place and time, like when they’d gone down into the lobby of the metro at Plaça Universitat. Or when they’d done, I don’t know, those fun things that daft Ardèvol comes up with. They say that one day he held a class in the garden on Diputació Street, and people were passing by and he just carried on.

‘Does anyone have a problem making it at that time?’

Three hands went up.

‘So I expect everyone else will be there, and punctual.’

‘And what are we going to do there?’

‘Listen. And take part, if you feel like it.’

‘But listen to what?’

‘Finding that out there is part of the content of the class.’

‘How late will it go?’ the blond boy in the middle, the one with the two loyal admirers who were now looking at him, thrilled by his opportune question.

‘Is it going to be on the exam?’ asked the boy with the Quaker beard who always sat by the window and away from everyone else.

‘Do we have to take notes?’ the girl with the huge plait.

After answering all their questions, the class ended as always, with his ordering them to read poetry and go to the theatre.

When he got home he found a telegram from Johannes Kamenek inviting him to give a conference at the university tomorrow. Stop. Tomorrow Stop? Kamenek had lost his mind.

‘Johannes.’

‘Oh, finally!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s a favour.’ Kamenek’s voice was slightly panicked.

‘And what’s the rush?’

‘Your phone must be off the hook. Or broken.’

‘Well, no. It’s just that … If you call in the morning, there is someone who …’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Well. I was before your telegram. You are asking me to come and give a conference tomorrow. Is that a mistake?’

‘No, no. You have to put out a fire. Ulrike Hörstrup can’t make it. Please.’

‘Wow: what’s it on?’

‘Whatever you want. There’s a guaranteed audience because they’re participants in the seminars. Which are going very well. And at the last minute …’

‘What happened to Hörstrup?’

‘She’s got a fever of thirty-nine. She couldn’t even make the trip. You’ll have plane tickets at your house before this evening.’

‘And it has to be tomorrow?’

‘At two in the afternoon. Say yes.’

I said no, that I still didn’t even know what I wanted to talk about yet, for god’s sake, Johannes, don’t do this to me, and he said talk about whatever you want but, please, come, and then I had to say yes. They mysteriously delivered the tickets to my house and the next day I flew to Stuttgart and then to my beloved Tübingen. Up in the plane I thought about what I’d like to talk about and I sketched an outline. In Stuttgart I was met by a Pakistani taxi driver with strict instructions and he dropped me off in front of the university after speeding dizzily for several kilometres.

‘I don’t know how to repay the favour,’ said Johannes, receiving me at the entrance to the faculty.

‘It’s a favour: you don’t need to repay it. I’m going to talk about Coşeriu.’

‘No. They’ve already talked about him today.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘I should have … Shoot, I’m so sorry. You can … I don’t know …’

Johannes, despite his hesitation, grabbed me by the arm and made me walk towards the auditorium.

‘I’ll improvise. Give me a few minutes to

‘We don’t have a few minutes,’ said Kamenek, still leading me by the arm.

‘Whoa. Do I have time to have a piss?’

‘No.’

‘And they say that we Mediterraneans are all improvisation and the Germans always methodically prepare …’

‘You are right: but Ulrike was already a substitution.’

‘Oh: so I’m third-string. And why didn’t you adjourn?’

‘Impossible. It’s never been done. Never. And we have people from abroad who …’

We stopped in front of the door to the assembly hall. He embraced me, embarrassed, he said thank you, my friend, and he led me into the hall, where thirty per cent of the couple of hundred people attending the seminars on linguistics and thought looked surprised at Ulrike Hörstrup’s strange appearance: bald and with a growing pot belly, and not very feminine in the slightest. As Adrià organised in his head the ideas he didn’t have, Johannes Kamenek reminded the audience about Professor Hörstrup’s health problems and how lucky they all were to be able to hear Professor Adrià Ardèvol who will speak on … who will speak right now.

And he sat at my side, I suppose in some sort of gesture of solidarity. I felt how he physically deflated and decompressed, poor Johannes. And in order to be able to order my ideas I began to recite, slowly and in Catalan, that poem by Foix that begins by saying: ‘És per la Ment que se m’obre Natura / A l’ull golós; per ella em sé immortal / Puix que l’ordén, i ençà i enllà del mal, / El temps és u i pel meu ordre dura’. And I translated it literally: It is through the Mind that Nature opens up to me / To my greedy eye; through it I know I am immortal / Since order, and on both sides of evil, / Time is one and through my order endures. And from Foix and the importance of thought and the present, I began to explain what beauty means and why humanity has been pursuing it for centuries. Professor Ardèvol posed many questions and didn’t know how or didn’t want to answer them. And, inevitably, evil showed up. And the sea, the dark sea. He spoke of the love of knowledge, without worrying about making everything fit into the seminars on linguistics and thought. He spoke little of linguistics and much about I am thinking about the nature of life but death intervenes. And then, like a flash of lightning, Sara’s funeral came to him, with Kamenek silent and perplexed. And after a long time he said that is why Foix ends the sonnet by saying: ‘… i en els segles em moc / Lent, com el roc davant la mar obscura’ and fifty minutes had passed. ‘… and I move through the centuries / Slowly, like the rock before the dark sea.’ And he left quickly to take a long piss, longer than a rainy day.