Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘All right. Then you can be a good orchestral violinist.’

‘I still want to take on the world.’

‘You decide: take the risk or play it safe. And you can take on the world sitting at your music stand.’

‘No. I’m losing my excitement.’

‘And when you play chamber music? Aren’t you happy?’

Here Bernat hesitated, looking towards one wall. I left him with his hesitation because just then Kornelia came in with a new experience on her arm and I wanted to disappear but I followed her with my eyes. She pretended not to see me and they sat down behind me. I felt a horrific emptiness at my back.

‘Maybe.’

‘What?’

Bernat looked at me, puzzled. Patiently: ‘Maybe when I play chamber I’m something like happy.’

I couldn’t give two shits about Bernat’s chamber music that evening. My priority was the emptiness, the itching at my back. And I turned, pretending I was looking for the blonde waitress. Kornelia was laughing as she checked the list of sausages on the plastic-coated menu. The experience had an amazing moustache that was completely odious and out of place. Diametrically opposed to the tall, blond secret of ten days earlier.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Me? What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. You’re like …’

Then Adrià smiled at the waitress who was passing by and asked her for a bit of bread and looked at Bernat and said go on, go on, forgive me, I was just …

‘Well, maybe when I play chamber music I’m …’

‘You see? And if you do Beethoven’s entire series with Tecla?’

The itching at my back was growing so intense that I didn’t think about whether I was making sense or not.

‘Yes, I can do it. And why? Who would ask us to do it in a hall? Or record it on a dozen LPs? Huh?’

‘You’re asking for a lot … Just being able to play it … Excuse me for a moment.’

I got up and went to the bathroom. When I passed Kornelia and her experience, I looked at her, she lifted her head, saw me and said hello and continued reading the sausage menu. Hello. As if it were the most normal thing in the world, after having sworn eternal love or practically, and having slept with you, she picks up an experience and when you run into her she says hello and keeps reading the sausage menu. I was about to say you should try my Bratwurst, it’s very good, miss. As I walked to the bathroom I heard the experience, in a superstrong Bavarian accent, say who is that guy with the Bratwurst? I missed Kornelia’s response because I went into the bathroom to make way for some waitresses with full trays.

We had to get over the spiked fence to be able to stroll in the cemetery at night. It was very cold, but we could both use the walk because we’d drunk all the beer we could get our hands on, him thinking about chamber music and me meeting new experiences. I told him about my Hebrew classes and the philosophy I alternated with my philology studies and my decision to spend my whole life studying and if I can teach in the university, fantastic: otherwise, I’ll be a private scholar.

‘And how will you earn a living? That is if you have to at all.’

‘I can always have dinner over at your house.’

‘How many languages do you speak?’

‘Don’t give up the violin.’

‘I’m about to.’

‘So why did you bring it with you?’

‘To do finger practice. On Sunday I’m playing at Tecla’s house.’

‘That’s good, right?’

‘Oh, sure. Thrilling. But I have to impress her parents.’

‘What are you going to play?’

‘César Franck.’

For a minute, both of us, I’m sure of it, were reminiscing about the beginning of Franck’s sonata, that elegant dialogue between the two instruments that was merely the introduction to great pleasures.

‘I regret having given up the violin,’ I said.

‘Now you say it, you big poof.’

‘I say it because I don’t want you to be regretting it a few months from now and cursing my name because I didn’t warn you.’

‘I think I want to be a writer.’

‘I think it’s fine if you write. But you don’t have to give up

‘Do you mind not being so condescending, for fuck’s sake?’

‘Go to hell.’

‘Have you heard anything from Sara?’

We started to walk in silence to the end of the path, to the grave of Franz Grübbe. I was realising that I’d been wrong not to tell him about Kornelia and my suffering. In those days I was already concerned about the image others had of me.

Bernat repeated his question with his eyes and didn’t insist. The cold was cutting and made my eyes water.

‘Why don’t we go back?’ I said.

‘Who is this Grübbe?’

Adrià looked pensively at the thick cross. Franz Grübbe, 1918–1943. Lothar Grübbe, with a trembling, indignant hand, pushed away a bramble that someone had put there as an insult. The bramble scratched him and he couldn’t think of Schubert’s wild rose because his thoughts had been abducted by his ill fate for some time. Lovingly, he put a bouquet of roses on his grave, white like his son’s soul.

‘You are tempting fate,’ said Herta who, nevertheless, had wanted to accompany him. Those flowers are screaming.

‘I have nothing to lose.’ He stood up. ‘Just the opposite: I have won the prize of a heroic, brave martyr for a son.’

He looked around him. His breath emerged in a thick cloud. He knew that the white roses, besides being a rebellious scream, would already be frozen come evening. But it had been almost a month since they had buried Franz, and he’d promised Anna he would bring him flowers on the sixteenth of each month until the day he could no longer walk. It was the least he could do for their son, the hero, the brave martyr.

‘Is he somebody important, this Grübbe?’

‘Huh?’

‘Why did you stop here?’

‘Franz Grübbe, nineteen eighteen, nineteen forty-three.’

‘Who is he?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Shit, it’s so cold. Is it always like this in Tübingen?’

Lothar Grübbe had lived silent and sulking since Hitler had taken power and he showed his silent sulkiness to his neighbours, who pretended not to see Lothar Grübbe sulking as they said that man is looking for trouble; and he, sulking, spoke to his Anna as he strolled, alone, through the park, saying it’s not possible that no one is rebelling, it just can’t be. And when Franz went back to the university, where he wasted his time studying laws that would be abolished by the New Order, the world came crashing down around Lothar because his Franz, with his eyes bright with excitement, said Papa, following the indications and wishes of the Führer, I just asked to sign up with the SS and it’s very likely that they’ll accept me because I’ve been able to prove that we are unsullied for five or six generations. And Lothar, perplexed, disconcerted, said what have they done to you, my son, why …

‘Father: We are Entering a New Era Made of Power, Energy, Light and Future. Etcetera, Father. And I want you to be happy for me.’

Lothar cried in front of his excited son, who scolded him for such weakness. That night he explained it to his Anna and he said forgive me, Anna, it’s my fault, it’s my fault for having let him study so far from home; they have infected him with fascism, my beloved Anna. And Lothar Grübbe had much time to cry because, one bad day, young Franz, who was again far from home, didn’t want to see his father’s reproachful gaze and so he just sent him an enthusiastic telegram that said The Third Company of the Waffen-SS of Who Knows Which One, Papa, Is Being Sent To The Southern Front, Stop. Finally I Can Offer My Life To My Führer, Stop. Don’t Cry For Me In That Case. Stop. I Will Have Eternal Life in Valhalla. Stop. And Lothar cried and decided that it had to be kept secret and that night he didn’t tell Anna that he had received a Telegram from Franz, Loaded With Detestable Capitals.