Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘That’s very easy to say.’

‘No: that’s how it is. It was very hard for me to write, but it is my living will. And I am completely lucid and can stand by it.’

‘You aren’t lucid. You are demoralised.’

‘You’re mistaking the smoke for the fire.’

‘What?’

‘I’m lucid.’

‘You are alive. You can continue living. I will always be by your side.’

‘I don’t want you by my side. I want you brave and doing what I am begging you to do.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You’re a coward.’

‘Yes.’

We heard some voices saying cinquantaquattro. Here it is. The door opened and I smiled at the people who entered the room and interrupted our conversation. Some friends from Cadaqués. They knew about the roses, too.

‘Look how lovely they are, Sara,’ said the woman.

‘Very lovely.’

Sara smiled pallidly and was very polite. She told them that she was fine, don’t worry. And the friends from Cadaqués were able to leave half an hour later a bit reassured because they had come in not knowing what to say, poor thing.

Over many days, many visits interrupted our conversation, which was always the same one. And when it had been fifteen or twenty days since Sara had awoken, one night, when I was about to go home, Sara asked me to put the painting by Mignon before her. For a few minutes, she ran her eyes over it, gluttonously, without blinking. And, suddenly, she burst into tears. It must have been those tears that made me brave.

The exhibition opened without you. The gallerists couldn’t postpone it because their calendar was booked for the next two years and Sara Voltes-Epstein would never able to visit it, so just go ahead and you’ll tell me all about it, really. You can just videotape it all anyway, right?

A few days before, Sara gathered Max and I together beside her bed and said I want to add two drawings.

‘Which ones?’

‘Two landscapes.’

‘But …’ Max, perplexed. ‘It’s a show of portraits.’

‘Two landscapes,’ she insisted, ‘that are portraits of a soul.’

‘Which ones are they?’ I asked.

‘My landscape of Tona and the apse of Sant Pere del Burgal.’

Your composure left me dumbstruck. Because you continued giving orders: they are both in the black folder that’s still in Cadaqués. The drawing of Tona is called In Arcadia Hadriani and the other, Sant Pere del Burgal: A Dream.’

‘Whose soul are they the portrait of?’ Max needed everything to be explained to him.

‘The person who needs to know already does.’

‘Anima Hadriani,’ I said, about to cry or to jump with joy, I still don’t know which.

‘But the people at the gallery …’

‘Just two more drawings, shit, Max! And if there is no budget for it, they can leave them unframed.’

‘No, no: I mean about the portrait concept …’

‘Max, look at me.’

You blew a lock of hair out of your eyes, I pushed it aside with my hand and you said thank you. And to Max: the exhibition will be the way I say it’ll be. You owe that to me. Thirty portraits and two landscapes dedicated to the man I love.

‘No, no, I wasn’t …’

‘Wait. One is a free interpretation of Adrià’s lost paradise. And the other is a monastery in ruins that, I don’t know why, but that Adrià has always had in his head, even though he only saw it for the first time recently. And that’s how you’ll do it. You will do it for me. Even though I won’t be able to see the exhibition.’

‘We’ll take you there.’

‘I shudder at the thought of making a scene with ambulances and stretchers … No. Make a video for me.’

So, it was an opening without the artist. Max officiated as the strong man and said my sister isn’t here but it’s as if she were. This evening we will show her the photos and the video we’re making, and Sara, sitting up with some good cushions, saw all the portraits and the two landscapes together for the first time and, in a repetition of the opening in cinquantaquattro with Max, Dora, Bernat, Doctor Dalmau, me and I don’t know who else, when the camera landed on Uncle Haïm, Sara said stop there for a moment. And she spent a few seconds looking at the frozen image and thinking who knows what and then they showed the rest. She didn’t ask to stop the tape at my portrait, head bowed, reading. The camera travelled to her self-portrait, with that enigmatic gaze, and she didn’t want to look closer at that one either. She listened attentively to Max saying a few words to the crowd, she saw that many people had come, and as they showed the images again, she said thank you, Max, very lovely words. And she mentioned that she had seen Murtra, Josée and Chantal Cases, the Rieras from Andorra, everybody, and wow, that’s Llorenç, he’s grown so much.

‘And Tecla, you see?’ I said.

‘And Bernat. How nice.’

‘Ooh, who’s that handsome one?’ exclaimed Dora.

‘A friend of mine,’ said Max. ‘Giorgio.’

Silence. To break it, Max himself said: ‘Every piece sold. Did you hear me?’

‘Who’s that one? Stop, stop!’ Sara almost miraculously sat up: ‘It’s Viladecans! It looks like he wants to eat Uncle Haïm up with his eyes! …’

‘Yeah, yes, it’s true, he was there. He spent a million hours staring at each portrait.’

‘Whoa …’

Seeing her eyes gleam, I thought she’s getting her lust for life back and I thought a new life is possible, changing priorities, changing style, changing all the values of everything. No? She grew serious, as if she had heard my thoughts. After a few seconds: ‘The self-portrait isn’t for sale.’

‘What?’ Max, scared.

‘It’s not for sale.’

‘Well, that was the first one to sell.’

‘Who bought it?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll ask.’

‘I told you that …’ She grew silent, slightly confused.

You hadn’t told us anything. But the world was starting to mix up the things you say, the things you think, the things you hope for and the things that could have been if not for.

‘Can I call from here?’ Max, desolate.

‘There’s a telephone at reception.’

‘You don’t have to call,’ Adrià interrupted, as if he’d been caught red-handed.

I felt Max, Sara, Doctor Dalmau and Bernat looking at me. That happens to me sometimes. As if I had entered life without an invitation and they’d all just realised I was a fraud, with reproachful, stabbing stares.

‘Why?’ someone said.

‘Because I bought it.’

Silence. Sara pulled a face: ‘Silly,’ she said.

Adrià looked at her, his eyes wide.

‘I wanted to give it to you,’ I improvised.

‘I wanted to give it to you, too.’ She let out a new timid giggle, one I had never heard before she’d fallen ill.

The opening at the hospital ended with a toast, everyone with a sad plastic cup filled with water. And Sara never said I really would have liked to be there. But you looked at me and you smiled. I’m sure that you had reconciled with me thanks to that half-truth about the violin. I wasn’t honest enough to refute it.

When she had drank the ritual sip with my help, she moved her head from one side to the other and said, out of the blue, I’m going to cut my hair real short, it’s bothering me at the back of my neck.

Laura had come back from the Algarve very tanned. We saw each other in the office, between the turmoil and the pressing September exams; she asked me about Sara, I said yeah, what can you do and she didn’t insist. Even though we spent hours together in the office, we didn’t say anything more to each other and we pretended not to see each other. Some days later, I had lunch with Max because I had come up with the idea of making a book with the title of the exhibition, with all of the portraits, eight and a half by twelve and a half, what do you think? That’s a brilliant idea, Adrià: and with the two landscapes. Sure, with the two landscapes. An expensive book, done well, not some rush job. Sure, done well. We fought over who would pay for it and we ended up agreeing to split it and I got to work with the help of the gallerists at Artipèlag and Bauçà. And I was excited at the idea that we might be able to start another life, you at home, well attended, if you still wanted to live with me, something I wasn’t sure about, if you agreed and gave up on those strange thoughts. I spoke with all the doctors: Dalmau warned me that, from the information he had, Sara still wasn’t well and that I shouldn’t rush to get her home, that Doctor Real was right. And that it was much better for everyone’s mental health if we didn’t make too many plans yet. That we weren’t out of the woods yet and that it was best to take it one day at a time, trust me. And Laura cornered me one day in a hallway by the classrooms and said I’m going back to Uppsala. They’ve offered me a job at the Centre for Language Studies and …