Jaume Cabré: Confessions

Mr Berenguer was very special; when he smiled he scared me a little and he treated Cecília like an inept maid, something I’ve never forgiven him for. But he was the one who knew the most about Father, my great mystery.

The Santa Maria reached Ostia on the foggy early morning of Thursday, September 2nd. His voyage from Barcelona was worse than any of the trips Aeneas took in search of his destiny and eternal glory. Neptune did not smile on him aboard the Santa Maria and he spent much of the journey feeding the fish. By the time he arrived, his skin colour had changed from the healthy tan typical of a peasant from the Plain of Vic to pale as a mystical apparition.

That seminarian had such excellent qualifications — he was studious, pious and polished, learned despite his age — that Monsignor Josep Torras i Bages had personally decided that he would be squandering his God-given gift of bountiful natural intelligence in Vic. They had a precious flower on their hands and it would wither in the humble vegetable patch that was Vic’s seminary; it needed a lush garden in which to thrive.

‘I don’t want to go to Rome, Monsignor. I want to devote myself to study bec

‘That’s precisely why I’m sending you to Rome, dear boy. I know our seminary well enough to know that an intelligence like yours is wasting its time here.’

‘But, Monsignor …’

‘God has great designs for you. Your instructors have been insisting,’ he said, shaking the document in his hands a bit theatrically.

Born at Can Ges in the village of Tona, into the bosom of an exemplary family, son of Andreu and Rosalia, at six years old he already possessed the academic preparation and the accordant resolve to commence his ecclesiastical studies, beginning with the first course in Latinity under the direction of Pater Jacint Garrigós. His academic progress was so noteworthy and immediate that when he began to study Rhetoric, he had to lecture on the celebrated ‘Oratio Latina’. The Monsignor knows from personal experience, since we have had the immense pleasure of having you as a student in this seminary, that this is one of the first literary acts with which the instructors honour their most distinguished and proven student orators. But that distinction exceeded his eleven years and, above all, his still slight frame. While the audience could hear the solemn rhetorician Fèlix Ardèvol lecturing conscientiously in the language of Virgil, a not small stool was required to allow the tiny and circumspect speaker to be seen by the spectators who included his thrilled parents and brother. Thus Fèlix Ardèvol y Guiteres set off on the path of great academic triumphs in Mathematics, Philosophy, Theology, reaching the height of illustrious students of this seminary such as the distinguished fathers Jaume Balmes y Urpià, Antoni Maria Claret y Clarà, Jacint Verdaguer y Santaló, Jaume Collell y Bancells, Professor Andreu Duran and Your Grace, who honours us as bishop of our beloved diocese.

May our virtue of gratitude extend to our predecessors as well. The Lord Our God calls on us to do so: ‘Laudemos viors gloriosos et parentes nostros in generatione sua’ (Eccles. 44:1) It is for this reason that we are convinced we are correct in enthusiastically requesting that seminary student Fèlix Ardèvol y Guiteres continue his Theology studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

‘You have no choice, my child.’

Fèlix Ardèvol didn’t dare to say that he hated boats, he who had been born on terra firma and had always lived far from the sea. Since he hadn’t known how to face up to the bishop, he’d had to undertake that arduous voyage. In a corner of the Ostia port, beside some half-rotted boxes infested with huge rats, he vomited up his impotence and almost all his memories of the past. For a few seconds, he breathed heavily as he stood up again, wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, briskly smoothed the cassock he’d worn on the trip and looked towards his splendid future. Despite the circumstances, like Aeneas, he had arrived in Rome.

‘This is the best room in the residency.’

Surprised, Fèlix Ardèvol turned. In the doorway a short, somewhat plump student, who was sweating like a pig inside a Dominican habit, smiled kindly.

‘Félix Morlin, from Liège,’ said the stranger, taking a step into the cell.

‘Fèlix Ardèvol. From Vic.’

‘Oh! A namesake!’ he shouted, laughing as he extended a hand.

They were fast friends. Morlin told him that he’d been given the most coveted room in the residence hall and asked him what his inside connection was. Ardèvol had to confess that he had none; that at reception, the fat, bald concierge had looked at his papers and said Ardevole? cinquantaquattro, and he’d given him the key without even looking him in the eye. Morlin didn’t believe him, but he laughed heartily.

Exactly a week later, before the school year began, Morlin introduced him to eight or ten students he knew in the second year; he advised him not to waste his time befriending students outside of the Gregorian or the Istituto Biblico; he showed him how to slip out unnoticed by the guard, urging him to have lay clothes prepared in case they had to stroll incognito. He was the guide for the new first-year students, showing them the unique buildings along the shortest route from the residence hall to the Pontifical Gregorian University. His Italian was tinged with a French accent but totally understandable. And he gave them a speech about the importance of knowing how to keep your distance from the Jesuits at the Gregorian, because, if you weren’t careful, they would turn your brain on its ear. Just like that, plof!

The day before classes began, all the new and old students, who came from a thousand different places, gathered in the huge auditorium of the Palazzo Gabrielli-Borromeo at the Gregorian’s headquarters, and the Pater Decanus of the Pontifical Gregorian University of the Collegio Romano, Daniele D’Angelo, S.J., in perfect Latin, urged us to be aware of our great luck, of the great privilege you have to be able to study in any of the faculties of the Pontifical Gregorian University, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Here we have had the honour of welcoming illustrious students, and among them there have been a few holy fathers, the last of which was our sorely missed Pope Leo XIII. We will demand nothing more of you than effort, effort and effort. You come here to study, study, study and learn from the best specialists in Theology, Canonical Law, Spirituality, Church History, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

‘Pater D’Angelo is called D’Angelodangelodangelo,’ Morlin whispered in his ear, as if he were communicating worrisome news.

And when you have finished your studies, you will scatter all over the world, you will return to your countries, to your seminaries, to the institutes of your orders; those who are not yet will be ordained priests and will bear the fruit of what you were taught here. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera and then fifteen minutes more of practical advice, perhaps not as practical as Morlin’s, but necessary for everyday life. Fèlix Ardèvol thought that it could have been worse; sometimes the Orationes Latinae in Vic were more boring than that pragmatic instruction manual he was reciting for them.

The first months of the school year, until after Christmas, passed without incident. Fèlix Ardèvol particularly admired the brilliance of Pater Faluba, a half-Slovak, half-Hungarian Jesuit with infinite knowledge of the Bible, and the mental rigour of Pater Pierre Blanc, who was very haughty and taught the revelation and its transmission to the Church, and who, despite also having been born in Liège, had failed Morlin on the final exam in which his friend wrote about the approximations to Marian theology. Since he sat next to him in three subjects, he began to make friends with Drago Gradnik, a red-faced Slovenian giant who had come from the Ljubljana seminary and had a wide, powerful bull’s neck that looked as if it was about to burst out of his clerical collar. They talked little, although his Latin was fluent. But both were shy and tried to channel their energies in getting through the numerous doors their studies opened for them. While Morlin complained and widened his circle of contacts and friends, Ardèvol locked himself up in cinquantaquattro, the best cell in the residence hall, and he discovered new worlds in the paleographic study of papyri and other biblical documents that Pater Faluba brought them, written in Demotic, Coptic, Greek or Aramaic. He taught them the art of loving objects. A destroyed manuscript, he would repeat, is of no use to science. If it must be restored, it must be restored no matter the cost. And the role of the restorer is as important as the role of the scientist who will interpret it. And he didn’t say etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, because he always knew what he was talking about.