Jaume Cabré: Confessions

It’s strange: there are so many things I want to explain to you and yet I keep getting distracted and wasting time with reflections that would make Freud drool. Perhaps it’s because my relationship with my father is to blame for everything. Perhaps because it was my fault he died.

One day, when I was a bit older, when I’d already secretly taken over the space between the back of the sofa and the wall in my father’s study and turned it into a mansion for my cowboys and Indians, Father came in followed by a familiar voice that I still found somewhere between pleasant and blood-curdling. It was the first time I’d heard Mr Berenguer outside of the shop and he sounded different: and ever since then I didn’t like his voice inside the shop or out of it. I remained stock still and put Sheriff Carson down on the floor. Black Eagle’s brown horse, normally so silent, fell and made a small noise that startled me but the enemy didn’t notice, and Father said I don’t have to give you any explanations.

‘I think you do.’

Mr Berenguer sat on the sofa, which moved a bit closer to the wall, and, heroically, I told myself better squashed than discovered. I heard Mr Berenguer tapping and my father’s icy voice saying no smoking in this house. Then Mr Berenguer said that he demanded an explanation.

‘You work for me.’ My father’s voice was sarcastic. ‘Or am I wrong?’

‘I got ten engravings, I got the people who sold them at a loss not to complain too much. I got the ten engravings across three borders and got them appraised myself and now you tell me that you’ve sold them without even consulting me. One of them was a Rembrandt, you know that?’

‘We buy and sell; that’s how we earn our living in this fucking life.’

That was the first time I’d heard the word fucking and I liked it; Father said it with two fs: ffucking life, I guess because he was angry. I knew that Mr Berenguer was smiling; I already knew how to decipher silences and was sure that Mr Berenguer was smiling.

‘Oh, hello, Mr Berenguer.’ It was Mother’s voice. ‘Fèlix, have you seen the boy?’

‘No.’

Crisis was imminent. How could I get out from behind the sofa and disappear into some other part of the flat, pretending I hadn’t heard a thing? I talked it over with Sheriff Carson and Black Eagle, but they were no help. Meanwhile, the men were in silence, surely waiting for my mother to leave the study and close the door.

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, madam.’ Returning to the bitter tone of their discussion, ‘I feel I’ve been cheated. I deserve a special commission.’ Silence. ‘I demand it.’

I couldn’t care less about the commission. To stay calm, I translated the conversation into French in my head; so I must have been seven years old. Sometimes I did that to keep myself from worrying; when I was anxious I couldn’t control my fidgeting and, in the silence of the study, if I moved around they would have heard me. Moi, j’exige ma commission. C’est mon droit. Vous travaillez pour moi, monsieur Berenguer. Oui, bien sûr, mais j’ai de la dignité, moi!

In the background, Mother, shouting Adrià, boy! Little Lola, have you seen him? Dieu sait où est mon petit Hadrien!

I don’t remember too well, but I believe Mr Berenguer left even angrier than he’d arrived and that Father got rid of him with a through thick and thin, monsieur Berenguer, which I didn’t know how to translate. How I wish Mother had even once called me mon petit Hadrien!

So I was able leave my hidey hole. The time it took my father to walk his visitor to the door was enough for me to erase my tracks. I had acquired great skill for camouflage and near ubiquity, in that life of a partisan I led at home.

‘Here!’ Mother had appeared on the balcony where I was watching the cars whose lights had just started to flick on, because life in that period, as I remember it, was endless dusk. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’

‘What?’ With the sheriff and the brown horse in one hand, I pretended I’d had my head in the clouds.

‘You need to try on your school smock. How is it possible that you didn’t hear me calling you?’

‘Smock?’

‘Mrs Angeleta let down the sleeves.’ And with an authoritative gesture, ‘Come on!’

In the sewing room, Mrs Angeleta, with a pin between her lips, looked at the hang of the new sleeves with a professional air.

‘You grow too fast, lad.’

Mother had gone to say goodbye to Mr Berenguer and Little Lola went into the ironing room to look for clean shirts while I put on the smock without sleeves, as I had done so many other times throughout my childhood.

‘And you wear out the elbows too fast,’ hammered home Mrs Angeleta, who was already a thousand years old, give or take.

The door to the flat closed. Father’s footsteps headed off towards his study and Mrs Angeleta shook her snow-covered head.

‘You have a lot of visitors lately.’

Little Lola was silent and acted as if she hadn’t heard. Mrs Angeleta, as she pinned the sleeve to the smock, went on anyway.

‘Sometimes I hear shouts.’

Little Lola grabbed the shirts and said nothing. Mrs Angeleta continued to prod. ‘Lord knows what you talk about …’

‘About ffucking life,’ I said without thinking.

Little Lola’s shirts fell to the floor, Mrs Angeleta pricked my arm and Black Eagle turned and surveyed the parched horizon with his eyes almost closed. He noticed the cloud of dust before anyone else. Even before Swift Rabbit.

‘Three riders are approaching,’ he said. No one made any comment. That cave-like room offered some respite from the harsh summer heat; but no one, no squaw, no child, no one had the energy to care about visitors or their intentions. Black Eagle made an imperceptible motion with his eyes. Three warriors started to walk towards their horses. He followed them closely while keeping one eye on the dust cloud. They were coming straight to the cave, without the slightest subterfuge. Like a bird distracting a predator and diverting it away from its nest with various techniques, he and his three men shifted to the west to distract the visitors. The two groups met close to the five holm oaks; the visitors were three white men, one with very blond hair and the other two with dark skin. One of them, the one with the theatrical moustache, nimbly got down from his saddle with his hands away from his body and smiled.

‘You are Black Eagle,’ he declared, keeping his hands away from his body in a sign of submission.

The great Arapaho chief of the Lands to the South of Yellow Fish’s Shore of the Washita gave an imperceptible nod from up on his horse, without moving a hair, and then he asked whom he had the honour of receiving, and the man with the black moustache smiled again, made a jocular half bow and said I’m Sheriff Carson, from Rockland, a two-day ride from your lands.

‘I know where you established your town, Rockland,’ the legendary chief responded curtly. ‘In Pawnee territory.’ And he spat on the ground to show his contempt.

‘These are my deputies,’ — not entirely sure who the gob of spit was directed at. ‘We are looking for a criminal on the lam.’ And he, in turn, spat and found it wasn’t half bad.

‘What has he done to be treated as a criminal?’ The Arapaho chief.

‘Do you know him? Have you seen him?’

‘I asked you what he did to be treated as a criminal.’

‘He killed a mare.’

‘And dishonoured two women,’ added the blond.

‘Yes, of course, that too,’ accepted Sheriff Carson.

‘And why are you looking for him here?’

‘He’s an Arapaho.’

‘My people extend several days toward the west, toward the east and toward the cold and the heat. Why have you come to this spot?’