Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘Yup.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yup.’

‘Thanks, Bernat.’

‘I’m sorry … I’m sure you could have done it much better.’

‘No, no. You did the best you could.’

‘It makes me so angry, you know.’

After a while of heavy silence, Adrià said I’m sorry but I think I’m going to cry a little bit.

Bernat’s examination ended with our Ciaccona from the second suite. I had heard him play it so many times … and I always had things to tell him, as if I were the virtuoso and he the disciple. He began studying it after we heard Heifetz play it at the Palau de la Música. Fine. Perfect. But once again without soul, perhaps because he was nervous about the exam. Soulless, as if the last rehearsal at my house a mere twenty-four hours before had been a mirage. Bernat’s creative breath went flat when he was in front of an audience; he lacked that bit of God, which he tried to replace with determination and practice, and the result was good but too predictable. That was it: my best friend was too bloody predictable, even in his attacks.

He finished the exam dripping with sweat, surely thinking that he had pulled it off. The three judges, who’d had vinegary looks on their faces throughout the two-hour audition, deliberated for a few seconds and unanimously decided to give him an excellent, with personal congratulations from each of them. And Trullols, who was in the audience, waited until Bernat’s mother had hugged him, and all that stuff that mothers who aren’t mine do, and she gave him a kiss on the cheek, excited, the way some teachers get excited, and I heard her prophesise, you’re the best student I’ve ever had; you have a brilliant future ahead of you.

‘Extraordinary,’ said Adrià.

Bernat stopped loosening his bow and looked at his friend. He put it away in the case and closed it, in silence. Adrià insisted: impressive, lad; congratulations.

‘Yesterday I told you that you were my friend. That you are my friend.’

‘Yes. You recently said best friend.’

‘Exactly. You don’t lie to your best friend.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I played competently and that’s it. I have no élan.’

‘You played well today.’

‘You would have done it better than me.’

‘What are you saying! I haven’t picked up a violin in two years!’

‘If my bloody best friend is unable to tell me the truth and he’d rather just act like everyone else …’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Don’t ever lie to me again, Adrià.’ He wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘Your comments are very irritating and you’re making me angry.’

‘Well, I …’

‘But I know that you are the only one who says the truth.’ He winked. ‘Auf Wiedersehen.’

When I had the train ticket in my hands, I understood that going to Tübingen to study was much more than thinking of the future. It was ending my childhood; distancing myself from my Arcadia. Yes, yes: I was a lonely, unhappy child with parents who were unresponsive to anything beyond my intelligence, and who didn’t know how to ask me if I wanted to go to Tibidabo to see the automatons that moved like people when you inserted a coin. But being a child means having the ability to smell the flower that gleams amidst the toxic mud. And it means knowing how to be happy with that five-axle lorry that was a cardboard hatbox. Buying the ticket to Stuttgart, I knew that my age of innocence was over.

Long ago, when the earth was flat and those reckless travellers who reached the end of the world hit up against the cold fog or hurled themselves off a dark cliff, there was a holy man who decided to devote his life to the Lord Our God. He was a Catalan named Nicolau Eimeric, and he became a well-known professor of Sacred Theology for the Order of Preachers at the monastery of Girona. His religious zeal led him to firmly command the Inquisition against evil heresy in the lands of Catalonia and the kingdoms of Valencia. Nicolau Eimeric had been born in Baden-Baden on 25 November, 1900; he had been promoted rapidly to SS Obersturmbannführer and, after a glorious first period as Oberlagerführer of Auschwitz, in 1944 he again took up the reins on the Hungarian problem. In a legal document, he condemned as perversely heretical the book Philosophica amoris by the obstinate Ramon Llull, a Catalan native from the kingdom of the Majorcas. He likewise declared perversely heretical all those in Valencia, Alcoi, Barcelona or Saragossa, Alcanyís, Montpeller or any other location who read, disseminated, taught, copied or thought about the pestiferous heretical doctrine of Ramon Llull, which came not from Christ but from the devil. And thus he signed it this day, 13 July, 1367, in the city of Girona.

‘Proceed. I am beginning to have a fever and I don’t want to go to bed until …’

‘You can go untroubled, Your Excellency.’

Friar Nicolau wiped the sweat from his brow, half from the heat and half from fever, and watched Friar Miquel de Susqueda, his young secretary, finish the condemning document in his neat hand. Then he went out onto the street scorched by a blazing sun, barely catching his breath before he immersed himself in the slightly less hot shade of the chapel of Santa Àgueda. He got down on his knees in the middle of the room and, humbly bowing his head before the divine sacrarium, said oh, Lord, give me strength, don’t let my human feebleness weaken me; don’t let the calumnies, rumours, envy and lies unsettle my courage. Now it is the King himself who dares to criticise my proceedings to benefit the true and only faith, Lord. Give me strength to never stop serving you in my mission of strict vigilance over the truth. After saying an amen that was almost a fleeting thought, he remained kneeling to allow the strangely scorching sun to sink until it caressed the western mountains; with his mind blank, in prayer position, in direct communication with the Lord of the Truth.

When the light entering through the window began to wane, Friar Nicolau left the chapel with the same energy he’d entered with. Outside, he eagerly breathed in the scent of thyme and dried grass that emanated from the earth, still warm from the hottest day in the memory of several generations. He again wiped the sweat from his brow, which was now burning, and he headed towards the grey stone building at the end of the narrow street. At the entrance, he had to control his impatience because just then a woman, always the same one, accompanied by the Wall-eyed Man of Salt, who acted as her husband, walked slowly into the palace, loaded down with a sack of turnips bigger than she was.

‘Must you use this door?’ said Friar Miquel in irritation, as he came out to receive her.

‘The garden entrance is flooded, Your Excellency.’

In a curt voice, Friar Nicolau Eimeric asked if everything was prepared and, continuing his long strides towards the room, thought oh, Lord, all my energies, day and night, are focused on the defence of Your Truth. Give me strength, for at the end of the light it will be you who shall judge me and not men.

I am a dead man, thought Josep Xarom. He hadn’t been able to hold the black gaze of the Inquisitor devil who had swept into the room, formulated his question in shouts and now waited impatiently for an answer.

‘What hosts?’ said Doctor Xarom after a long pause, his voice drowned in panic.

The Inquisitor got up, wiped the sweat from his brow for the third time since he’d entered the interrogation room and repeated the question of how much did you pay Jaume Malla for the consecrated hosts that he gave you.