Jaume Cabré - Confessions

The Bishop himself filled Friar Nicolau’s glass. He took a taste without realising what he was drinking because, enraged, he continued his speech and said I have suffered exile, I was deposed from my post as Inquisitor by order of King Pedro, I was chosen Vicar General of the Dominican order here in Girona, but what you don’t know is that the accursed king pressured Holy Father Urbà, who ended up not accepting my appointment.

‘I didn’t know that.’

The Bishop, seated in a comfortable chair but with his back very straight and his entire being alert, silently contemplated how the Inquisitor General wiped the sweat from his brow with his habit sleeve. After two good ourfathers: ‘Are you feeling well, Your Excellency?’

‘Yes.’

The Bishop was silent and took a sip of wine.

‘Nevertheless, Your Excellency, you are now Vicar General again.’

‘My constancy and faith in God and his holy mercy made them restore my post and dignity as Inquisitor General.’

‘All for the good.’

‘Yes, but now the King threatens me with new exile and I’ve been warned that he wants to have me killed.’

The Bishop thought it over for quite some time. In the end, His Grace lifted a timid finger and said King Pedro maintains that your obsession with condemning the work of Llull …

‘Llull?’ shouted Eimeric. ‘Have you read anything by Llull, Your Grace?’

‘Well, I … Well … ummm, yes.’

‘And?’

Eimeric stared with that black gaze of his, the one that penetrated souls. His Grace swallowed hard: ‘I don’t know what to say. I … What I read … Anyway, I didn’t know that …’ He ended up capitulating: ‘I’m no theologian.’

‘I’m no engineer, but I’ve managed to get the crematoria in Birkenau to function twenty-four hours a day without breaking down. And I’ve got my men who supervise the Sonderkommando’s rat squads not to go mad.’

‘How did you do it, dear Oberlagerführer Höss?’

‘I don’t know. By preaching the Truth. Showing all the hungry souls that there is only one evangelical doctrine, and that my sacred mission is to keep errors and evil from rotting the essence of the church. Therefore I work to eliminate all heresies and the most efficient way to do so is by eliminating the heretics, both the new and the relapsed.’

‘Nevertheless, the King …’

‘The Inquisitor General Major and the Vicar of the Order, when he came from Rome, understood it very well. He knew of King Pedro’s animosity towards my personage and he appreciated that, despite everything, I continued in my condemnation of the entire works, book by book, of the abominable and dangerous Ramon Llull. He didn’t argue with any of the procedures we’d begun during these years and, in an emotive celebration of the holy mass, when it came time for the sermon, he put forth my humble personage as an example of conduct for all, from the first to the last Oberlagerführer. Whatever the King of Valencia and Catalonia and Aragon and the Majorcas may say. And then I considered myself a happy man because I was faithful to the most sacred of vows that I had taken and could take in my life. The problem, however, was that woman.’

‘There is something that …’ The Bishop, after hesitating, lifted a finger cautiously. ‘Careful: I am not saying that they don’t deserve to die.’ He looked at the colour of the wine in his glass and it seemed red as a flame. ‘Can’t we …’

‘Can’t we what?’ Eimeric, impatient.

‘Must they necessarily die by fire?’

‘General practice throughout the Christian church confirms that yes, they must die by fire, Your Grace.’

‘It’s a horrific death.’

‘I’m being eaten up by fevers right now and don’t complain, as I continue to work ceaselessly for the good of the Blessed Mother Church.’

‘I insist that death by fire is horrific.’

‘But deserved!’ exploded His Excellency. ‘More horrific is the blasphemy and stubbornness in error. Or don’t you agree, Your Grace?’ — as I looked at the empty cloister, lost in my thoughts. And I realised that I was alone. I looked around me. Where had Kornelia gone?

The group of tourists waited, patient and disciplined, in a corner of the Bebenhausen cloister, except for Kornelia who … Now I saw her: she was strolling contemplatively, alone, right through the middle of the cloister, always unpredictable. I watched her with a certain gluttony and it seemed she knew my eyes were upon her. She stopped, her back to me, and turned towards the group who were waiting for there to be enough people to begin the visit. I waved to her, but she either didn’t notice or pretended not to see me. Kornelia. A chaffinch stopped at the fountain before me, drank a sip of water and gave a lovely trill. Adrià shivered.

On the eve of Saint James’s Day, at dusk, Josep Xarom’s only consolation was being spared Friar Nicolau’s gaze, as the defender of the Church lay in his bed burning up with a stubborn fever. Yet the relative tepidness of Friar Miquel de Susqueda, notary and assistant to the Inquisitor General, didn’t spare him any pain, any suffering, any horror. In the languidly encroaching dusk of Saint James’s Day Eve, scorched by days of inclement sun, two women and a man led three mules loaded down with pack saddles and hampers filled with memories and five children sleeping on top. They fled the Jewish Quarter and headed to the bank of the River Ter, on the heels of the two families who’d left the previous day. They left behind sixteen generations of Xaroms and Meirs in their beloved Girona, that noble and ungrateful city. The smoke of the iniquity that had devoured poor Josep still rose, Josep who was victim of a fit of envy by an anonymous informer. Dolça Xarom, the only child who awoke in time to have a last look at the proud walls of the cathedral silhouetted against the stars, cried silently, on muleback, over the death of so many things in one single night. A spark of confidence awaited the group at Estartit, in the form of a boat rented by poor Josep Xarom and Massot Bonsenyor a few days earlier, when they saw trouble brewing, when they sensed it without knowing exactly where it would come from, or how and when it would drop on them.

The boat took advantage of a warm western wind to get some distance from the nightmare. The next evening it stopped in Ciutadella, on Minorca, where six more people embarked, and three days later it arrived in Palermo, Sicily, where they rested for half a week from the seasickness brought on by the roughness of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Once they had recovered, taking advantage of favourable winds, they crossed the Ionian Sea and docked at the Albanian port of Durrës, where the six families embarked, fleeing from tears towards some place where no one would be offended by their whisperings on the Sabbath. Since they were warmly welcomed by the Jewish community in Durrës, they established themselves there.

Dolça Xarom, the fleeing girl, had children there, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and at eighty years old, still stubbornly recalled the silent streets of Girona’s Jewish Quarter and the hulking Christian cathedral, silhouetted against the stars and blurred by tears. Despite the nostalgia, the Xarom Meir family lived and prospered over twelve generations in Durrës and time was so insistent that a moment came when the memory of the ancestor burned by the ungodly goyim shattered and was almost erased in the memory of the children of the children of the children, just like the distant name of their beloved Girona. One fine day in the Year of the Patriarchs 5420, the nefarious Year of the Christians 1660, Emanuel Meir was drawn by the commercial boom to the Black Sea. Emanuel Meir, eighth great-great-grandson of Dolça the fleeing girl, moved to bustling Varna, in Bulgaria on the Black Sea, in the period when the Sublime Porte ruled there. My parents, who were fervent Catholics in predominantly Lutheran Germany, wanted me to be a priest. And I spent quite some time considering it.