Jaume Cabré - Confessions

The cold was more intense than in Tübingen. It was obscenely cold. The cloister was tranquil and silent as they waited for the guided tour at ten on the dot. The other visitors were waiting in the vestibule, more sheltered. They stepped on the still virgin ice of the night’s freeze.

‘What a beautiful thing,’ said Bernat in admiration.

‘I like this place a lot. I’ve come six or seven times, in spring, summer, autumn … It’s relaxing.’

Bernat sighed in satisfaction, and said how can you not be a believer when you look at the beauty and peace of this cloister.

‘The people who lived here worshipped a vengeful and vindictive god.’

‘Have some respect.’

‘It pains me to say it, Bernat; I’m not kidding.’

When they were silent, all that was heard was the ice cracking beneath their feet. No bird had any interest in freezing. Bernat took in a deep breath and expelled a thick cloud, as if he were a locomotive. Adrià returned to the conversation: ‘The Christian God is vindictive and vengeful. If you make a mistake and you don’t repent, he punishes you with eternal hell. I find that reaction so disproportionate that I just don’t want to have anything to do with that God.’

‘But …’

‘But what.’

‘Well, he is the God of love.’

‘No way: you’ll burn in hell forever because you didn’t go to mass or you stole from a neighbour. I don’t see the love anywhere.’

‘You aren’t looking at the whole picture.’

‘I’m not saying I am: I’m no expert.’ He stopped short. ‘But there are other things that bother me more.’

‘Like what?’

‘Evil.’

‘What?’

‘Evil. Why does your God allow it? He doesn’t keep evil from happening: all he does is punish the evildoer with eternal flames. Why doesn’t he prevent it? Do you have an answer?’

‘No … Well … God respects human freedom.’

‘That’s what the clever priests lead you to believe; they don’t have the answers to why God does nothing in the face of evil, either.’

‘Evil will be punished.’

‘Yeah, sure: after it’s done the damage.’

‘Bloody hell, Adrià; I don’t what to say to you. I don’t have arguments, you know that … I just believe.’

‘Forgive me; I don’t want to … But you’re the one who brought up the subject.’

He opened a door and a small group of explorers, captained by the guide, prepared to start their visit.

‘Bebenhausen monastery, which we will now visit, was founded by Rudolf I of Tübingen in eleven eighty and was secularised in eighteen oh six.’

‘What does secularised mean?’ (a woman in thick plasticframed eyeglasses and a garnet overcoat).

‘That just means that it stopped being used as a monastery.’

Then the guide started to soft-soap them elegantly because they were cultured people who preferred twelfth- and thirteenth-century architecture to a glass of schnapps or a beer. And he went on to say that during several periods of the twentieth century the monastery was used as a meeting place for various local and regional political groups until a recent agreement with the federal government. It will be completely restored so that visitors can see a faithful reproduction of how it looked when it was a monastery and a large community of Cistercian monks lived here. This summer the construction will begin. Now, please follow me, we will enter what was the monastery’s church. Be careful on the stairs. Watch out. Hold on here, madam, because if you break your leg you’ll miss my wonderful explanations. And ninety per cent of the group smiled.

The frozen visitors entered the church, taking the stairs very carefully. Once inside, Bernat realised that Adrià was not among the nine ice-cold visitors. As the white-haired guide said this church, which still retains many late Gothic elements like this vault over our heads, Bernat left the church and returned to the cloister. He saw Adrià sitting on a stone that was white with snow, his back to him, reading … yes, reading his pages! He watched him anxiously. He was quite sorry not to have a camera because he wouldn’t have hesitated to immortalise the moment in which Adrià, his spiritual and intellectual mentor, the person he most trusted and most distrusted in the world, was absorbed in the fiction that he had created from absolute nothingness. For a few moments he felt important and no longer noticed the cold. He went back into the church. The group was now beneath a window that was damaged but the guide didn’t know how, and then one of the frozen visitors asked how many monks lived here, in the times of splendour.

‘In the fifteenth century, up to a hundred,’ answered the guide.

Like the number of pages in my story, thought Bernat. And he imagined that his friend must now be on page sixteen, when Elisa says the only thing I can do is run away from home.

‘But where will you go, child?’ Amadeu asked in fright.

‘Don’t call me a child,’ Elisa got angry, pushing her hair off her shoulders abruptly.

When she was angry, Elisa would get dimples on her cheeks that looked like tiny navels and Amadeu saw them, he looked at them and lost his bearings and all ability to speak.

‘Excuse me?’

‘You can’t stay here by yourself. You have to follow the group.’

‘No problem,’ said Bernat lifting his arms in a show of innocence and leaving his characters to Adrià’s thorough reading. And he went to the back of the group that was now going down the steps and be very careful with the stairs, they are very treacherous at these temperatures. Adrià was still in the cloister, reading, oblivious to the cold wind, and for a few moments Bernat was the happiest man in the world.

He chose to pay again and repeat the itinerary with a new group of cold-looking visitors. In the cloister, immobile, Adrià was still reading, his head bowed. And what if he was frozen? thought Bernat, terrified. He didn’t realise that what worried him most about Adrià freezing was that he wouldn’t have finished reading his story. But he looked at him out of the corner of his eye as he heard the guide who, now in German, said Bebenhausen monastery, which we will now visit, was founded by Rudolf I of Tübingen in eleven eighty and was secularised in eighteen oh six.

‘What does secularised mean?’ (a young man, tall and thin, encased in an electric blue anorak).

‘That just means that it stopped being used as a monastery.’ Then the guide started to soft-soap them elegantly because they were cultured people who preferred twelfth- and thirteenth-century architecture to a glass of schnapps or a beer. And he went on to say that during several periods of the twentieth century the monastery was used as a meeting place for various local and regional political groups until a recent agreement with the federal government. It will be completely restored so that visitors can see a faithful reproduction of how it looked when it was a monastery and a large community of Cistercian monks lived here. This summer the construction will begin. Now, please follow me, we will enter what was the monastery’s church. Be careful on the stairs. Watch out. Hold on here, madam, because if you break your leg you’ll miss my wonderful explanations. And ninety per cent of the group smiled. Bernat heard the man starting to say this church, which still retains many late Gothic elements like this vault over our heads; but he heard it from the doorway because he was furtively going back, towards the cloister, and he hid behind a column. Page forty or forty-five, calculated Bernat. And Adrià was reading, struggling to keep Sara and Kornelia from turning into Elisa and he didn’t want to move from there despite the cold. Forty or forty-five, at the point where Elisa goes up the slope of Cantó on her bicycle, her hair fluttering behind her; now that I think about it, if she’s pedalling up, her hair can’t be fluttering because she can barely move the bicycle. I’ll have to revise that. If it were downhill, maybe. Well, I’ll change it to the descent of Cantó and let those locks fly. He must be enjoying it; he doesn’t even notice the cold. Making sure that his footsteps weren’t heard, he returned to the group that was just then lifting its head like a single person to gaze upon the coffered ceiling, which is a wonder of marquetry, and a woman with hair the colour of straw said wunderbar and looked at Bernat as if demanding to know his aesthetic stance. Bernat, who was bursting with emotion, nodded three or four times, but he didn’t dare say wunderbar because they’d be able tell that he wasn’t German and had no clue what it meant. At least not until Adrià had told him what he thought, and then he would jump and shriek, wild with joy. The woman with hair the colour of straw was satisfied with Bernat’s ambiguous gesture and said wunderbar, but now in a softer voice, as if only to herself.