Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘No. Don’t say a word. What? Because I’ll hang up when I’m good and ready. No, sir: quan a mi em roti.’

It was the first time I had ever heard that expression ‘quan a mi em roti’. I could tell it meant when I feel like it, yet it contained the word burp. And it was strange that I’d heard it from the mouth of the most polite person in my world. ‘Rotar’, to burp, came from the Latin ructare , frequentative of rugere . Over time it became ruptare and continued evolving from there. Cecília hung up with such force that I thought she might have shattered the telephone. And she began working on labelling and cataloguing new material into two registry books, serious, with her eyeglasses on and no apparent sign of the collapse she’d had moments earlier. It wasn’t hard for me to leave through the small door and come in again from the street, say hello Cecília and check whether there were any traces of tears on that always impeccable face.

‘What are you doing, cutie?’ She smiled at me.

And I, mouth agape, because she looked like another woman.

‘What did you ask the Three Kings to bring you for Christmas?’ she inquired.

I shrugged because in my house we never celebrated Epiphany because it was your parents and not the Three Kings who brought presents and one shouldn’t fall for primitive superstitions: so, from the first time I ever heard of the Three Kings, the excited wait for their gifts was more of a resigned wait for the present or presents that my father had chosen and which had no relationship to my achievement at school, which was expected without question, or with whether I’d been nice instead of naughty, which was also assumed. But at least I was given gifts meant for a child, in contrast with the general seriousness of our home.

‘I asked for a …’ I remember that my father had informed me that I would receive a lorry that made a siren noise and that I’d best not make the noise inside the house, ‘a lorry with a siren.’

‘Come on, give me a kiss,’ said Cecília, waving me over.

Father returned from Bremen on the weekend with a Mycenaean vase that spent many years in the store, and, from what I understood, with many useful documents and a couple of possible gems in the shape of first editions and handwritten manuscripts, including one from the fourteenth century that he said was now one of his prized jewels. Both at home and at work, they told him he had received a couple of strange calls. And, as if he couldn’t care less about all that would happen in a few days’ time, he told me look, look, look how beautiful this is, and he showed me some notebooks: it was a manuscript of the last things Proust had written. From À la recherche. A hotchpotch of tiny handwriting, paragraphs written in the margins, notes, arrows, little slips of paper attached with staples … Come on, read it.

‘It’s unintelligible.’

‘Come on, boy! It’s the end. The last pages; the last line: don’t tell me you don’t know how the Recherche ends.’

I didn’t answer. Father, all on his own, realised that he had tightened the rope too much and he played it off in that way he was so good at: ‘Don’t tell me you still don’t know French!’

‘Oui, bien sûr: but I can’t read his handwriting!’

That must not have been the right answer because Father, without any further comment, closed the notebook and put it away in the safe while he said under his breath I’ll have to make some decisions because we are starting to have too many treasures in this house. And I understood that we were starting to have too many skeletons in this house.

‘Your father … How can I say this, my son? Father …’

‘What? What happened to him?’

‘Well, he’s gone to heaven.’

‘But heaven doesn’t exist!’

‘Father is dead.’

I paid more attention to Mother’s excessively pale face than to the news. It looked like she was the one who was dead. As pale as young Lorenzo Storioni’s violin before it was varnished. And her eyes filled with anguish. I had never heard Mother’s voice catch. Without looking at me, staring at a stain on the wall where the bed was, she was telling me I didn’t kiss him as he left the house. Perhaps I could have saved him with a kiss. And I think she added he got what he deserved, in a softer voice. But I wasn’t sure.

Since I didn’t fully understand her, I locked myself in my messy bedroom, holding tight to the Red Cross lorry that the Three Kings had given me, and sat down on the bed. I started to cry silently, which was how I always did everything at home because if Father wasn’t studying manuscripts, he was reading or he was dying.

I didn’t ask Mother for details. I couldn’t see my father dead because they told me he’d had an accident, that he’d been run over by a lorry on the Arrabassada road, which isn’t on the way to the Athenaeum and well, you can’t see him, there’s no way. And I felt distressed because I had to find Bernat urgently before my world crumbled and they put me in prison.

‘Boy, why did he take your violin?’

‘Huh? What?’

‘Why did your father take your violin?’ repeated Little Lola.

Now it would all come out and I was dying of fright. I still had the pluck to lie, ‘He asked me for it for some reason. I don’t know why.’ And I added desperately, ‘Father was acting very strange.’

When I lie, which is often, I have the feeling that everyone can tell. The blood rushes to my face, I think I must be turning red, I look to either side searching for the hidden incoherence crouching inside the fiction I am creating … I see that I am in their hands and I’m always surprised that no one else has realised. Mother never catches on; but I’m sure Little Lola does. And yet she pretends she doesn’t. Everything about lying is a mystery. Even now that I’m older, I still turn red when I lie and I hear the voice of Mrs Angeleta, who one day when I told her I hadn’t stolen that square of chocolate, grabbed my hand and made me open it, revealing to Mother and Little Lola the ignominious chocolate stain. I closed it again, like a book, and she said you can catch a liar faster than a cripple, always remember that, Adrià. And I still remember it, at sixty. My memories are etched in marble, Mrs Angeleta, and marble they will become. But now the problem wasn’t the stolen chocolate square. I made a sad face, which wasn’t difficult because I was very sad and very afraid and I said I don’t know anything about it, and I started to cry because Father was dead and …

Little Lola left the bedroom and I heard her talking to someone. Then a strange man — who gave off an intense odour of tobacco, spoke in Spanish, hadn’t removed his coat, and had his hat in his hand — came into the bedroom and said to me what’s your name.

‘Adrià.’

‘Why did your father take your violin.’ Like that, like a weary interrogative.

‘I don’t know, I swear.’

The man showed me pieces of wood from my student violin.

‘Do you recognise this?’

‘Well, sure. It’s my violin … it was my violin.’

‘Did he ask you for it?’

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘Without any explanation?’

‘No. Yes.’

‘Does he play the violin?

‘Who?’

‘Your father.’

‘No, of course not.’

I had to repress a mocking smile that came up at the mere thought of Father playing the violin. The man with the coat, hat and tobacco smell looked towards Mother and Little Lola, who nodded in silence. The man pointed, with his hat, to the Red Cross lorry in my hands and said that lorry is really nice. And he left the room. I was left alone with my lies and didn’t understand a thing. From inside the ambulance lorry, Black Eagle shot me a commiserating look. I know that he thinks little of liars.