Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘Don’t drag your bow, child! You are reproducing negroid, epileptic rhythms, more suited to a wind instrument!’

‘What?’

‘Look, look, look!’

Professor Manlleu snatched the violin from him and did a wildly exaggerated portamento, something I had never done. And, with the violin in position, he said to me that is crap. You understand me? Insanity, dementia, filth and rubbish!

And boy did I miss Trullols, and I was only ten minutes into my third class with Master Manlleu. Later, surely in an attempt to impress him with his dazzling talent, he explained that when he was his age, uff, at your age: I was a child prodigy. At your age I played Max Bruch and I learned it all on my own.

And he snatched the violin out of his hands again and began with the soooooltiresolsiiila#faasooool. Tiresoltiiiietcetera, how lovely.

‘That is a concert and not these lousy studies you’ve been studying.’

‘Can I start with Max Bruch?’

‘How can you start with Bruch when you’re still not out of nappies, child?’ He gave him back the violin and he drew very close to him and shouted so he could hear him loud and clear: ‘Maybe, if you were me. But I’m one of a kind.’ In a brusque voice: ‘Exercise twenty-two. And don’t harbour any illusions, Ardèvol: Bruch was mediocre and just happened to get lucky.’ And he shook his head, pained by life: if only I could have devoted more time to composing …

Exercise twenty-two, dei portamenti, was designed to teach you how to do portamenti but Master Manlleu, when he heard the first portamento, was again shocked and again began to talk about his precocious genius and, this time, about the Bartók concerto that he knew backwards and forwards without the slightest hesitation at the age of fifteen.

‘You must know that the good interpreter has a special memory in addition to his normal memory that allows him retain all of the soloist’s notes and all of the orchestra’s. If you can’t do that, you’re no good; you should deliver ice or light streetlamps. And then don’t forget to put them out.’

So I opted to do the portamenti exercise without portamenti and that way we were able to keep the peace. And I would learn the portamenti at home. And Bruch was mediocre. In case I didn’t have that clear, I received the last three minutes of my third class with Master Manlleu in the hall of his house, standing, my scarf around my neck, while he ranted against gypsy violinists, who play in bars and night clubs and do such harm to the young folk because they incite them to do unnecessary and exaggerated portamenti. It quickly becomes obvious that they are only playing to impress women. Those portamenti are only admissible for poofs. Until next Friday, child.

‘Good night, Master Manlleu.’

‘And remember, as if it were burned onto your brain, everything I’ve told you and will be telling you in each class. Not everyone has the privilege of studying with me.’

At least I already knew that the concept of poofs was closely linked to the violin. But when I’d looked marica up it didn’t help at all because it wasn’t in the dictionary and my question remained. Bruch must have been a mediocre poof. I guess.

In that period, Adrià Ardèvol was a saintly person, with endless saintly patience, and that was why the classes with Master Manlleu didn’t seem as bad to him as they seem to me now when I describe them to you. I did my duty with him and I remember, minute by minute, the years I was under his yoke. And I particularly remember that after two or three sessions I began to turn a problem over in my mind, one that I’ve never been able to resolve: musical interpreters are required to be perfect. They can be miserable wretches, but their execution must be perfect. Like Master Manlleu, who seemed to have every possible defect but who played perfectly.

The problem was that listening to him and listening to Bernat I thought I could grasp a difference between Manlleu’s perfection and Bernat’s truth. And that made me a bit more interested in music. I don’t understand why Bernat isn’t satisfied with his talent and obsessively seeks out personal dissatisfaction, crashing up against self-confessed impotence, in book after book. We’ve both truly got a gift for finding dissatisfaction in life.

‘But you don’t make mistakes!’ Bernat told me, shocked, fifty years ago, when I explained my doubts to him.

‘But I need to know that I can make them.’ Perplexed silence. ‘Don’t you understand?’

And that’s why I stopped playing the violin. But that’s another story. As Bernat and I walked to school, I explained all the ins and outs of my classes with Manlleu. And we took forever to get to school because in the middle of Aragó Street, amid the smoke from the locomotive engines that blackened the facades, Bernat tried to imitate, without a violin, what Manlleu had told me to do. The people passing by looked at us, and later, at home, he would try it and that was how he became, for free, some sort of second disciple of Wednesdays and Fridays with the great Manlleu.

‘Thursday afternoon, you are both punished. This is the third time you’ve been late in fifteen days, young men.’ The beadle with the blond moustache who stood guard at the entrance smiled, pleased to have caught us.

‘But …’

‘No buts.’ Shaking the loathsome notebook and pulling a pencil out of his smock. ‘Name and class.’

And on Thursday afternoons in the Manlleu era, instead of being at home secretly rummaging through Father’s papers, may he rest in peace, instead of being at Bernat’s house, practising or having him over to my house to practise, we were forced to show up at the 2B classroom, where twelve or fifteen other scamps were purging their tardiness with a textbook open on their desks while Herr Oliveres or Mr Rodrigo watched over us with obvious boredom.

And when I got home, Mother interrogated me about my lessons with Manlleu and asked captious questions about the possibilities that I would very soon give a dazzling recital, you hear me, Adrià? with top-notch works, as it seems Manlleu had promised her.

‘Like which ones?’

‘The Kreutzer Sonata . Or Brahms,’ she said one day.

‘That’s impossible, Mother!’

‘Nothing’s impossible,’ she answered, as if she were Trullols saying never say never, Ardèvol. But even though it was almost the same piece of advice, it didn’t have any effect on me.

‘I don’t know how to play as well as you think I do, Mother.’

‘You will play perfectly.’

And, perfectly imitating Father’s skill for avoiding being contradicted, she left the room before I could tell her that I hated the perfection demanded of musicians, blah, blah, blah … and she headed towards Mrs Angeleta’s dominions and I felt a little sad because even though Mother was speaking to me again, she barely looked me in the eye and she was more interested in my progress report than in my irrepressible desire to see a woman naked and the inexplicable stains on my sheets, which, actually, I had no interest in making a topic of conversation. And now how could I study i portamenti at home without doing portamenti?

At home? As soon as I had reached the stairs I thought again about my angel whom I had cruelly abandoned to her fate, forced to by my Negroid rhythm classes with Manlleu. I went up the stairs two by two thinking of the angel who must have flown away as I dilly-dallied, thinking that she would never forgive me, and I knocked impatiently and Lola opened the door. I pushed her aside and looked towards the bench. Her red smile welcomed me with another ciao dolcíssim and I felt like the happiest violinist on earth.

And three hours after her miraculous apparition, Mother arrived with a worried expression and when she saw the angel in the hall, she looked at Little Lola, who had come out to greet her, and she made that face she makes when she understands, because without allowing her much introduction, she had her go into Father’s study. Three minutes later the shouting began.