Jaume Cabré: Confessions

‘Listen, I …’

‘Shall I continue?’

‘No need for that.’

But Max read the whole thing to me. He was very cross and when he finished there was a terribly strange silence. I swallowed hard and said Max, I sent you that?

More silence. I looked at the papers on top of the desk. There were the Aesthetics exams to correct. Surely Little Lola had moved things around. And more papers and … Wait. I grabbed a paper, the one I had faxed, written with the Olivetti. I looked it over quickly.

‘Damn.’ Silence. ‘Are you sure I sent you that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Forgive me.’

Max’s voice sounded calmer: ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll write the bio myself. I already have her exhibition history.’

‘Thanks.’

‘No, and sorry about my … nerves … It’s just that the printers want the text right away if we want it to be finished before the exhibition closes.’

‘If you want I’ll try to …’

‘No, no: I’ll take care of it.’

‘Thank you, Max. Give my regards to Giorgio.’

‘I will. By the way: why do you write fucking with two f’s?’

I hung up. That was the first warning, but I didn’t know it yet. I went through the papers on the desk again. There was only that text. I reread it, concerned. On the paper I had written Sara Voltes-Epstein was born in Paris in nineteen fifty and when she was very young she met a stupid boy who fell in love with her and while he never intended any harm, he was never really able to make her happy. After some painful back and forth, after some coming and going, she agreed to live with the aforementioned stupid boy over what were long (too short) years of shared life that became the most important of my life. The most essential. Sara Voltes-Epstein died in Barcelona in the autumn of ninety-six. Proof that life is a ffucking bitch, she didn’t make it to fifty years old. Sara Voltes-Epstein devoted herself to drawing life for other people’s children. She only very occasionally and reluctantly exhibited her pencil and charcoal drawings, as if she only cared about the essential: the relationship with the paper via the stroke of a pencil or a stick of charcoal. She was very good, drawing. She was very good. She was.

Life went on, sadder, but alive. The appearance of the book of portraits by Sara Voltes-Epstein filled me with a profound and inexhaustible melancholy. The biographical note that Max had come up with was brief but impeccable, like everything Max does. Afterwards, things sped up: Laura didn’t come back from Uppsala, just as she had threatened to do, and I locked myself up to write about evil because I had many things going through my head. But Adrià Ardèvol, no matter how desperately he wrote and how many pages he filled, knew that he wasn’t making progress; that it was impossible to make progress because all he heard was the ringing of the telephone: a sustained and very unpleasant D.

‘Rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs.’ It was the door.

‘Do you mind?’

Adrià opened the door the rest of the way. That time, Bernat had gone straight to the point; he was carrying his violin and a bulky bag with half his life in it.

‘Did you have another argument?’

Bernat went inside without responding to the obvious. He spent the first five days in silence, while I battled with a sterile text and against the telephone’s insistence.

With that good faith, Bernat, starting on the sixth day, spent a few dinners trying to convince me to finally take the computer into my life, having me go over what Llorenç had taught me, which I had forgotten because I never put it to use.

‘No, I understand the concept. But to use it … I’d have to use it and I just don’t have the time.’

‘You’re hopeless.’

‘How can I start with that when I still haven’t even got used to the typewriter?’

‘But you use it.’

‘Because I don’t have a secretary to type things up for me.’

‘You don’t know how much time you’d save.’

‘I am a child of the codex, not of volume and scroll.’

‘I don’t understand you now.’

‘I’m a child of the codex and not of volume.’

‘Still don’t understand you. I just want to save you time, with the computer.’

Bernat wasn’t able to convince me and I wasn’t able to talk to him about Llorenç and how he had to avoid being a father like mine. Until one day I saw him packing a suitcase; it had only been a couple of weeks since he’d sought refuge at my house. He was going back home because, according to what he told me before leaving, he couldn’t live like this, which I didn’t exactly understand. He left my flat half-reconciled with Tecla, and I was alone again at home. Alone forever.

I hadn’t been able to get the idea out of my head until one fine day I called Max and I asked him if he would be there because I needed to see him. And I went to Cadaqués ready for everything.

The Voltes-Epstein house is large and spacious, not particularly lovely but designed to maximise the gorgeous view of the coves and the Homeric blue of the Mediterranean. It is a paradise I was entering for the first time. I was very pleased when Max hugged me as soon as I set foot in the house. I understood that as the official way of becoming part of the family, even though it was too late. The best room in the house, since Mr Voltes’s death, had been turned into Max’s study: an impressive library, they say the largest in Europe on wine: sunny slopes, vineyards, vines, tendrils, diseases, grapes, monographs on Cabernet, Tempranillo, Chardonnay, Riesling, Shiraz and company; history, geographic distribution, historic crises, epidemics, phylloxera, the start of varieties, the vineyard and the ideal latitude and altitude. Fog and the vineyard. The wine that comes from the cold. The raisin. Wines of the mountain and highest mountains. Green vineyards beside the sea. Cellars, caves, barrels, oak from Virginia and from Portugal, sulphites, years of ageing, humidity, darkness, cork oaks, caps, cork-making families, companies that export wine, grapes, cork, barrel wood, biographies of famous oenologists, of families of winemakers, books of photographs of the different colours of the vineyards. Types of soils. Denominations of origin; the various controlled and qualified and protected regions, with publications on legislation, lists, maps, borders and histories. The great years throughout history. Winegrowing lands, regions, districts. Interviews with oenologists and entrepreneurs. The world of wine packaging. Champagne. Cava. Sparkling wine. Gastronomy and wine. White wine, red wine, rosé, young wine, mature wine. Sweet, mellow wines. And a section devoted to sweet and dry liqueurs. Monasteries and liqueurs, chartreuse, cognacs and armagnacs, brandies, whiskies from around the world, bourbons, calvados, grappa, aguardientes, orujo, anisette, vodka; distillation as a concept. The universe of rum. Temperatures. Wine thermometers. The sommeliers who had made history … When he entered that room, Adrià made the same face of surprise and admiration that Matthias Alpaerts had when going into his study in Barcelona.

‘Impressive,’ he summed up. ‘You’re a wine scholar and your sister would mix it with soda and pour it straight into her mouth from a pitcher.’

‘It takes all kinds. But only up to a point: the pitcher isn’t necessarily bad. But the soda, that’s a real sin.

‘Stay for dinner,’ he added. ‘Giorgio is an excellent cook.’

We sat down, surrounded by the world of wine and the unspoken question: what do you want, what do you want to talk about, why? that Max was trying not to formulate. We were also surrounded by a silence mixed with sea air that conjoined one not to do anything, to let the day pass placidly and not allow anyone or any conversation to complicate our lives. It was hard to get to the point of why he’d come.