Jaume Cabré - Confessions

The funeral was dark, filled with serious gentlemen with their hats in their hands and ladies who covered their faces with thin veils. My cousins came from Tona and some vague Bosch second cousins from Amposta, and for the first time in my life I felt that I was the centre of attention, dressed in black with my hair well parted and very kempt because Little Lola had given me a double dose of hair spray and said I was very handsome. And she kissed me on the forehead the way Mother never did, and even less now, when she doesn’t even look at me. They say that Father was in the dark box, but I wasn’t able to check. Little Lola told me that he had been badly injured and it was better not to look at him. Poor Father, all day long immersed in books and strange objects and he somehow manages to die covered in wounds. Life is so idiotic. And what if the wounds had been caused by a Kaiken dagger in the shop? No: they told me that it had been an accident.

For a few days, we lived with the curtains drawn and I was entirely surrounded by whispers. Lola paid more attention to me and Mother spent hours sitting in the armchair where she took her coffee, in front of the empty armchair where Father took his coffee, before he died. But she didn’t take any coffee because it wasn’t coffee hour. It was complicated, all that, because I didn’t know if I could sit in the other armchair because Mother didn’t see me and as many times as I said hey, Mother, she grabbed my wrist but she looked at the wallpaper and she didn’t say anything to me and then I thought it doesn’t matter and I didn’t sit in Father’s armchair and I thought this is what grief is like. But I was grieving too and I still looked all around. There were a few very anguished days because I knew that Mother didn’t see me. Then I got used to it. I think that Mother hasn’t looked at me since. She must have guessed that it was all my fault and that was why she didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. Sometimes she looks at me, but it’s only to give me instructions. And she left my life in the hands of Little Lola. For the moment.

Without any prior discussion, Mother showed up at the house one day with a new student violin, a nice one with good proportions and good sound. And she gave it to me almost without saying a word and definitely without looking me in the eyes. As if she were distracted and acting mechanically. As if she were thinking about before or after but not about what she was doing. It took me a long time to understand her. And I returned to my violin studies, which had been interrupted many days before.

One day, while I was studying in my bedroom, I tuned the bass-string with such fury that I snapped it. Then I snapped two more strings and I went out into the sitting room and I said Mother, you have to take me to Casa Beethoven. I have no more E strings. She looked at me. Well: she looked towards me, more or less, and she said nothing. Then I repeated that I had to buy new strings and then Little Lola came out from behind some curtain and said I’ll take you, but you have to tell me which strings they are because they all look the same to me.

We went there on the metro. Little Lola explained that she had been born in the Barceloneta and that often, when she would walk with her girlfriends, they’d say let’s go to Barcelona and in ten minutes they’d be at the lower end of the Ramblas and they’d go up and down the Ramblas like silly fools, laughing and covering their mouths with their hands so the boys wouldn’t see them laugh, which it seems is more fun than going to the cinema, according to what Little Lola told me. And she told me that she’d never imagined that in that tiny, dark shop they sold violin strings. And I asked for a G, two Es and one Pirastro, and she said that was easy: you could have written that down on a piece of paper and I could have come by myself. Then I said no, that Mother always had me come with her just in case. Little Lola paid, we left Casa Beethoven, and as she bent down to kiss my cheek she looked down the Ramblas with nostalgia, but she didn’t cover her mouth with her hand because she wasn’t laughing like a silly fool. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was also losing my mother.

A couple of weeks after the funeral, some other men who spoke Spanish came and Mother again turned pale like death and again the whispering between Mother and Little Lola and I felt left out and I screwed up my courage and I said to my mother, what is going on. It was the first time she really looked at me in many days. She said it’s too big, my son, it’s too big. It’s best that … and then Little Lola came in and took me to school. I noticed that some of the other children were looking at me strangely, more than usual. And Riera came over to me at breaktime and he told me did they bury it too? And I said, what? And Riera, with a smug smile, said how disgusting, right, seeing a head by itself? And he insisted with the you buried it too, right? And I didn’t understand anything and, just in case, I went to the sunny corner, with the lads who were trading collectors’ cards, and from then on I avoided Riera.

It had always been hard for me to be just another kid like the others. Basically, I just wasn’t. My problem, which was very serious and according to Pujol had no solution, was that I liked to study: I liked studying history and Latin and French and I liked going to the conservatory and when Trullols made me do mechanics, because I did scales and I imagined myself before a full theatre and then the mechanics came out with a better sound. Because the secret is in the sound. The hands are a cinch, they move on their own if you invest the hours. And sometimes I improvised. I liked all that and I also liked picking up the encyclopaedia Espasa and taking a trip through its entries. And then, at school, when Mr Badia asked a question about something, Pujol would point to me and say that I’d been chosen to answer all the questions. And then I would be embarrassed about answering the question because it seemed they were parading me around, as if they were Father. Esteban, who sat at the desk behind mine and was a right bastard, called me girl every time I answered a question correctly until one day I said to Mr Badia that no, I didn’t remember what the square root of one hundred and forty-four was and I had to go to the toilet and throw up, and as I threw up Esteban came in. He saw me vomit and he told me look what a girl you are. But when my father died I saw that they looked at me somehow differently, as if I had gone up in their estimation. Despite everything, I think I envied all the children who didn’t want to study and who, every once in a while, failed something. And in the conservatory it was different because you’d put the violin in your hand right away and try to get a good sound out of it, no, no, it sounds like a hoarse duck, listen to this. And Trullols grabbed my violin and got such a lovely sound out of it that even though she was quite old and too thin, I almost fell in love. It was a sound that seemed made of velvet and had the perfume of some flower I can’t name, but I can still remember.

‘I’ll never be able to get that sound out of it. Even though I can do vibrato now.’

‘These things take time.’

‘Yes, but I never …’

‘Never say never, Ardèvol.’

It is surely the most poorly expressed bit of musical and intellectual advice ever, but it has had more of an effect on me than any other throughout my life, either in Barcelona or in Germany. A month later the sound had ostensibly improved. It was a sound that still lacked perfume but was closer to velvet. But now that I think about it, I didn’t go back right away, not to school and not to the conservatory. First I spent some days in Tona, with my cousins. And when I came back, I tried to understand how it had all happened.