Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘I want to come too,’ Rosa.

‘No.’

‘And me?’

‘Yes.’

Rosa stormed off, affronted because Adrià, who was the littlest, could go with you and I can’t.

‘It’s very unpleasant, my girl,’ said Aunt Leo.

And I went to see how Prudenci jammed his fist and entire arm into Blanca’s arsehole and then said something I didn’t catch to my uncle and Xevi jotted it down on a piece of paper and Blanca chewed her cud, oblivious to the worries of the—

‘Watch out, watch out, watch out, she’s pissing!’ shouted Adrià in excitement.

The men moved aside, still discussing their matters, but I stayed in the front row because watching a cow piss and shit from the stalls was one of the great spectacles life in Tona had to offer. Like watching Parrot, the mule at Can Casic, piss. That was really something to see, and that’s why I think my aunt and uncle were being unfair with poor Rosa. And there were more things, like fishing for tadpoles in the stream beside the Matamonges gully. And returning with eight or ten victims that we kept in a glass bottle.

‘Poor creatures.’

‘No, Auntie, I’ll feed them every day.’

‘Poor creatures.’

‘I’ll give them bread, I promise.’

‘Poor creatures.’

I wanted to see how they turned into frogs or, more often, into dead tadpoles because we never thought to change their water or about what they could eat inside the bottle. And the swallows’ nests in the lean-to. And the sudden downpours. And the apotheosis of the threshing days at Can Casic, where the grain was no longer winnowed but separated by machines that made the haystack and filled the town and my memories with straw dust. Et in Arcadia ego, Adrià Ardèvol. No one can take those memories from me. And now I think that Aunt Leo and Uncle Cinto must have been made of solid stuff because they pretended nothing had happened after the fight between the two brothers. It was a long time ago. Adrià hadn’t been born yet. And I knew about it because the summer I turned twenty, to avoid being alone with Mother in Barcelona, I decided to spend three or four weeks in Tona, if you’ll have me. I was also feeling somewhat forlorn because Sara, who I was already dating while keeping it secret from both families, had had to go to Cadaqués with her parents and I was feeling so, so alone.

‘What does if you’ll have me mean? Don’t ever say that again,’ said my Aunt Leo, indignant. ‘When are you coming?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Your cousins aren’t here. Well, Xevi is, but he spends all day at the farm.’

‘I reckoned.’

‘Josep and Maria from Can Casic died this past winter.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘And Viola died of grief.’ Silence on the other end of the line. As a consolation: ‘They were very old, both of them. Josep walked in a right angle, poor thing. And the dog was also very old.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Bring your violin.’

So I told Mother that Aunt Leo had invited me and I couldn’t refuse. Mother didn’t say yes or no. We were very distant and didn’t speak much. I spent my days studying and reading, and she spent hers in the shop. And when I was at home, her gaze still accused me of capriciously throwing away a brilliant violin career.

‘Did you hear me, Mother?’

It seems that, as always, in the shop, there were problems she didn’t want to let me in on. And so, without looking at me, she just said bring them a little gift.

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Something small, you choose it.’

My first day in Tona, with my hands in my pockets, I went into town to find a little gift at Can Berdagué. And when I reached the main square I saw her sitting at the tables of El Racó, drinking tiger nut milk and smiling at me as if she were waiting for me. Well, she was waiting for me. At first I didn’t recognise her; but then, wait, I know her, who is she, who is she, who is she. I knew that smile.

‘Ciao,’ she said.

Then I recognised her. She was no longer an angel, but she had the same angelic smile. Now she was a grown woman, simply lovely. She waved me over to sit by her side, and I obeyed.

‘My Catalan is still very spotty.’

I asked her if we could speak in Italian. Then she asked me caro Adrià, sai chi sono, vero?

I didn’t buy any gift for Aunt Leo at Can Berdagué. The first hour was spent with her drinking tiger nut milk and Adrià swallowing hard. She didn’t stop talking and she explained everything to me that Adrià didn’t know or pretended not to know because even though he was now twenty years old, at home such things weren’t discussed. It was she, in Tona’s main square, who told me that my angel and I were siblings.

I looked at her, stunned. It was the first time that anyone had put it into words. She could sense my confusion.

‘É vero,’ she insisted.

‘This is like something out of a photo-novel,’ I said, wanting to conceal my bewilderment.

She didn’t bat an eyelash. She clarified that she was old enough to be my mother, but that she was my half-sister, and she showed me a birth certificate or something where my father recognised his paternity of some Daniela Amato, which was her according to her passport, which she also showed me. So she had been waiting for me, with the conversation and the documents at the ready. So what I half knew but no one had come out and said was true; I, only child par excellence, had an older, much older, sister. And I felt defrauded by Father, by Mother, by Little Lola and by so many secrets. And I think it hurt me that Sheriff Carson had never even ever insinuated it. A sister. I looked at her again: she was just as pretty as when she’d showed up at my house in angel form, but she was a forty-six year old woman who was my sister. We had never played over boring Sunday afternoons. She would have gone off laughing with Little Lola, and covering her mouth with her hand every time they’d caught a man looking at them.

‘But you’re my mother’s age,’ I said, just to say something.

‘A bit younger.’ I noticed an irritated tone in her reply.

Her name was Daniela. And she told me that her mother … and she explained a very beautiful love story, and I couldn’t imagine Father in love and I kept very quiet and listened, listened to what she told me and tried to imagine it, and I don’t know why she started to talk about the relationship between the two brothers, because Father, before beginning his studies at the seminary in Vic, had had to learn to winnow the wheat, to thresh properly and to touch Estrella’s belly to see if she had finally got knocked up. Grandfather Ardèvol had taught both sons to tie the hampers tightly to the mule and to know that if the clouds were dark but came from Collsuspina they always blew past without a sprinkle. Uncle Cinto, who was the heir, put more care into things around the farm. And in the management of the land, the harvests, and the hired hands. Our father, on the other hand, was in the clouds whenever he could be, thinking and reading hidden in the corners, like you do. When they, somewhat desperately, sent Father to the seminary in Vic he was already, despite his lack of interest, half-trained to be a farmer. There he found his motivation and started to learn Latin, Greek and some lessons from the great teachers. Verdaguer’s shadow was still fresh and ran through the hallways, and two out of three seminarians tried their hand at writing verse; but not our father: he wanted to study the philosophy and theology they offered him in instalments.

‘And how do you know all this?’

‘My mother explained it to me. Our father was quite talkative as a young man. Later, it seems he shut up like a closed umbrella, like a mummy.’

‘What else?’