Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘What do you want, Adrià?’

It wasn’t easy to say. Because what Adrià wanted to know was what the hell had they told Sara, eh, to make her run away from one day to the next without saying anything and without even …

There was a silence only sliced, and then just partially, by the faint salty breeze.

‘Sara didn’t tell you all that?’

‘No.’

‘Did you ask her about it?’

‘Don’t ask me again, Adrià. It’s best that …’

‘Well, if she said that, then I …’

‘Max, look into my eyes. She is dead. Sara is dead! And I want to know what the hell happened.’

‘Perhaps you no longer need to.’

‘Yes, I do. And your parents and my parents are dead too. But I have a right to know what I’m guilty of.’

Max got up, went over to the window, as if he suddenly had to check some detail of the seascape that it framed like a painting. He stood there for a while, taking in the details. Or thinking, perhaps.

‘So you don’t know a thing,’ he concluded without turning towards me.

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to know or not.’

His reticence had made me nervous. I struggled to calm myself down. And I wanted to be more precise: ‘The only thing that Sara told me, when I went to see her in Paris, was that I had written her a letter saying that she was a stinking Jewess who could shove her shitty, snotty family, where the sun don’t shine, that they had a big broomstick firmly up their arses.’

‘Wow. I didn’t know that part.’

‘That was more or less what she said. But I didn’t write that!’

Max made a vague gesture and left the study. After a little while he came back with a chilled bottle of white wine and two glasses.

‘Let’s see what you think of this.’

Adrià had to contain his anxiousness and taste that Saint-Émilion and try to distinguish the flavours that Max explained to him; they slowly emptied the first glass like that, with little sips, discussing aromas and not what their mothers had told Sara.

‘Max.’

‘I know.’

He served himself half a glass and drank it not like an oenologist, but like a drinker. And when he was done he clicked his tongue, said help yourself and began to say that Fèlix Ardèvol was surprised by his customer’s appearance and I’ll tell you, beloved, because from what Max told me you only knew the tip of the iceberg. You have a right to the details: it is my penance. So, I have to say that Fèlix Ardèvol was surprised by his customer’s appearance, a man so weedy that when he wore his hat he looked like an open umbrella in the middle of the romantic garden at the Athenaeum.

‘Mr Lorenzo?’

‘Yes,’ said Fèlix Ardèvol. ‘You must be Abelard.’

The other sat in silence. He took off his hat and placed it delicately on the table. A blackbird passed shrieking between the two men and headed to the lushest patch of vegetation. The weedy man said, in a deep voice and in very artificial Spanish, that my client will send you a packet today right here. Half an hour after I’ve left.

‘Fine. I have time.’

‘When are you leaving?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

The next day, Fèlix Ardèvol took a plane, as he did so often. Once he was in Lyon, he rented a Stromberg, as he did so often, and in a few hours he was in Geneva. The same weedy man with the voice of a Lower Bulgarian was waiting for him at the Hôtel du Lac, and had him go up to a room. Ardèvol delivered the packet and the man, after delicately placing his hat on the chair, parsimoniously unwrapped it and opened the security seal. He slowly counted five wads of banknotes. It took him a good ten minutes. On a piece of paper, he took notes and made calculations, and he wrote the results meticulously into a small notebook. He even checked the bills’ serial numbers.

‘Such trust, it’s really appalling,’ muttered Ardèvol, impatient. The weedy man didn’t deign to respond until he had finished what he was doing.

‘What did you say?’ he asked as he placed the banknotes into a small briefcase, hid the little notebook, tore up the paper with the notes, gathered the pieces and put them in his pocket.

‘That such trust is really appalling.’

‘As you wish.’ He stood up, extended a packet he had pulled out of the briefcase and slid it over to Ardèvol.

‘That is for you.’

‘Now I have to start counting?’

The man gave a corpse-like smile, rescued the umbrella from the chair, put it on as a hat, and said if you want to rest, your room is paid up until tomorrrow. And he left without turning around or saying goodbye. Fèlix Ardèvol carefully counted the notes and felt satisfied with life.

He repeated the operation with slight variants. And soon he did it with new intermediaries and with increasingly fatter packets. And larger profits. What’s more, he took advantage of the trips to scrutinise corners and sniff library shelves, archives and warehouses. And one day, the weedy man who went by the name of Abelard, had a voice like thunder and spoke an artificial Spanish, as if he liked to hear himself speak, made a mistake. He left the torn up pieces of the paper where he’d jotted down his sums on the table of the room in the Hôtel du Lac instead of putting them in his pocket. And that night, after patiently constructing the puzzle on the glass top, Fèlix Ardèvol could read the words on the other side. The two words: Anselmo Taboada. And some indecipherable scribblings. Anselmo Taboada. Anselmo Taboada.

Fèlix Ardèvol took two months to put a face to that name. And one rainy Tuesday he showed up at military government headquarters and waited patiently to be seen. After a very long delay, after seeing soldiers of every rank pass before him, after hearing snippets of strange conversations, they had him enter an office twice the size of his, but without a single book. Behind a desk was the slightly curious face of Lieutenant Colonel Anselmo Taboada Izquierdo. Viva Franco. Long may he live. Viva. Without further ado, they struck up an educational and profitable conversation.

‘According to my calculations, Colonel, this is the amount that I have got into Switzerland for you,’ said Fèlix, sliding a paper along the desk with one hand, as he had seen the man who went by the name of Abelard do with his envelope of money.

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘I am Lorenzo.’

‘You’ve got the wrong person.’ He stood up, anxious.

‘I don’t have the wrong person.’ Ardèvol, seated, tranquil: ‘Actually, I came by headquarters because it was on my way: I’m going to see my good friend, the Civil Governor of Barcelona. A good friend of mine and also of the Captain-General here in the office next door.’

‘You are a friend of Don Wenceslao?’

‘A very close friend.’

As the lieutenant colonel sat back down, hesitating, Ardèvol placed one of the Civil Governor’s personal business cards on the desk and said call him and he’ll get you up to speed.

‘There’s no need for that. You can explain it to me.’

There wasn’t much explanation necessary, my beloved, because Father was very skilled at luring people into his spider web: ‘Oh!’ sycophantic leer from Fèlix Ardèvol as he cursed him in his head. The Civil Governor picked up the terracotta broken into three pieces.

‘Is this valuable?’ he said.

‘It’s worth a fortune, Your Excellency.’

Fèlix Ardèvol made an effort not to show his irritation in front of that clumsy oaf. Wenceslao González Oliveros placed the three pieces on the desk and in his florid Spanish said, with the surprising voice of an emasculated bullfighter, I’ll have it put together with good glue, like we’ve done with Spain after it was shattered and besmirched by rebels.