Jaume Cabré - Confessions

The worst is the uncertainty; what’s horrible is not knowing if. She looks at you and you can’t decipher her gaze. Is she accusing me? Does she want to talk about her vast grief and cannot? Does she want to explain that she hates me? Or perhaps she wants to tell me that she loves me and that I should save her? Poor Gertrud is in a well and I can’t rescue her.

Every day Alexandre Roig went to see her and spent long periods of time there, looking at her, letting himself be wounded by her gaze, wiping the sweat off her forehead, without daring to say anything to her, to avoid making the situation worse. And she, after an eternity, was starting to hear the shouts of Tiberium in Tiberim, Tiberium in Tiberim, which was the last thing she had read before the darkness. And she was starting to see a face, two or three faces that said things to her, that put a spoon in her mouth, that wiped away her sweat, and she wondered what is going on, where am I, why don’t you say anything to me? and then she saw herself far, far away, at night, and at first she didn’t understand a thing, or she didn’t want to understand it and, filled with confusion, she again took shelter in Suetoni and said morte eius ita laetatus est populus, ut ad primum nuntium discurrentes pars: ‘Tiberium in Tiberim!’ clamitarent. They shouted it, but all of Suetonius crowded together in her head and it seems no one could hear her. Perhaps because she was speaking Latin and … No. Yes. And then it took her centuries to remember who the face was that she constantly had in front of her, telling her I don’t know what that I couldn’t make out. And one day she understood what it was that she was remembering about that night and she began to tie the loose ends together and she was horrified from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. And, as best she could, she started shrieking in fear. And Alexandre Roig didn’t know what was worse, tolerating the intolerable silence or facing the consequences of his actions once and for all. He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing, but one day: ‘Doctor, why doesn’t she speak?’

‘She does speak.’

‘Pardon me, but my wife hasn’t spoken since she came out of the coma.’

‘Your wife speaks, Mr Roig. She has been for a few days now; didn’t they tell you? We can’t understand a thing because she speaks in some weird language and we don’t … But she speaks. Boy does she ever.’

‘In Latin?’

‘Latin? No. I don’t think so. Well, I, languages aren’t my …’

Gertrud was speaking and reserved her silence just for him. That scared him more than the knife-like gaze.

‘Why don’t you say anything to me, Gertrud?’ he said, before giving her that bloody semolina soup; it seemed they had no other menu options at this hospital.

But the woman just looked at him with the same intensity as ever.

‘Do you hear me? Can you hear me now?’

He repeated it in Estonian and, in honour of his grandfather, in Italian. Gertrud remained silent and opened her mouth to receive the semolina soup each day, as if she hadn’t the slightest interest in conversation.

‘What are you telling the others?’

More soup. Alexandre Roig had the feeling that Gertrud was holding back an ironic smile and his hands started to sweat. He fed her the soup in silence, trying to keep his eyes from meeting his wife’s. When he’d finished, he moved very close to her, almost able to smell her thoughts, but he didn’t kiss her. Right into her ear he said what are you telling them, Gertrud, that you can’t tell me? And he repeated it in Estonian.

She had come out of the coma two weeks earlier; it had been two weeks since they’d told him Professor Roig, as we feared, your wife has been left quadriplegic from the traumas suffered. There isn’t anything we can do for her now, but who knows, in a few years we can imagine hope for alleviating and even curing this type of injury, and I was speechless because many things that were too big were happening to me and I didn’t realise the true dimensions of my misfortune. My entire life was in a stir. And now the anguish over finding out what Gertrud was saying.

‘No, no, no. It’s normal for the patient to have a slight regression: it’s normal for them to speak whatever language they spoke as children. Swedish?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m terribly sorry, but here, among the staff …’

‘Don’t worry.’

‘What’s strange is that she doesn’t speak to you.’

Fucking bitch. Poor thing.

Only two weeks passed before Professor Alexandre Roig finally managed to bring his wife home. He left the technical aspects to Dora, a vast expert in palliative treatments who’d been recommended by the hospital, and he devoted himself to feeding Gertrud her soup, and avoiding her eyes and thinking what do you know and what do you think about what I know and I don’t know if you know and no one better hear you.

‘What’s strange is that she doesn’t speak to you,’ repeated Dora.

More than strange, it was worrisome.

‘And she gets more chatty with each passing day, Mr Roig, as soon as I get close to her she starts saying things in Norwegian, isn’t it, as if … You should hide so you can see it.’

And he did, with the complicity of that matron with the nurse’s wimple who had taken Gertrud as something personal and every day she said to her today you are prettier than ever, Gertrud, and when Gertrud spoke she clasped her unfeeling hand and she told her what are you saying, I can’t understand you, sweetie, can’t you see I don’t understand Icelandic, much as I’d like to. And Professor Alexandre Roig, who should have been locked up in his study at that time of the day, waited in the next room for as long as it took Gertrud to start speaking again, and in the mid-afternoon, that drowsy time after lunch, when the complicit nurse approached her to carry out the ritual changing of position, Gertrud said exactly what I was fearing and I began to tremble like a birch leaf.

Heaven forbid, it wasn’t something he sought out although in the blackest depths of his soul it was a desire that nestled unconfessed. It was his drowsiness, after two long hours on the dark highway, Gertrud napping intermittently in the passenger seat and I driving and thinking desperately of how to tell Gertrud that I wanted to leave, that I was very sorry, very, but that I had made up my mind, and that was that, that life sometimes has these things and that I didn’t care what the family or my co-workers might say, or the neighbours, because everyone has the right to a second chance and now I have that. I am so deeply in love, Gertrud.

And then the unexpected bend and the decision that he made without making it, since everything was dark so it seemed simpler, and he opened the door and he took off his seat belt and he leapt onto the asphalt and the car continued, without anyone to step on the brake, and the last thing he heard from Gertrud was a scream that said what’s going on, what’s going on, Saaaaaandreee … and something else that he couldn’t catch and the void swallowed up the car, Gertrud and her frightened shriek, and since then, nothing more, the knife-sharp gaze and that was it. And I at home, alone, when Dora had kicked me out of the hospital, thinking about you, thinking what had I done wrong and searching desperately for the slip of paper where you had written the name of the owner of the violin and dreaming of travelling to Ghent or to Brussels with Vial in its blood-stained case, arriving at a well-to-do home, ringing a doorbell that first made a noble clonk and then an elegant clank, and a maid with a starched cap opening the door and asking me what I had come for.

‘I’ve come to return the violin.’

‘Ah, yes, come in. It’s about time, eh?’