Jaume Cabré - Confessions

The father prior looked at the nurse brother with his mouth agape. Why did the reverend father abbot have to be away just then? Why did the General Chapter have to be celebrated precisely on the same day that Brother Robert had fallen into some sort of prostration that the nurse brother’s limited knowledge was unable to pull him out of? Why, God of the Universe? Why did I accept the post as prior?

‘But he’s alive, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Catatonic. I think. If you say get up, he gets up; if you say sit, he sits. If you say speak, he starts to cry, Father.’

‘That’s not catatonic.’

‘Look, Father: I can handle wounds, scrapes, dislocated or broken bones, flu and colds and stomach aches: but these spiritual ailments …’

‘And what is your recommendation, brother?’

‘I, Father, would …’

‘Yes, what do you recommend I do?’

‘Have him seen by a real doctor.’

‘Doctor Geel wouldn’t know what to do with him.’

‘I’m talking about a real doctor.’

Luckily, Father Abbot Manfred, at the third meeting of the General Chapter, commented worriedly in front of the other Brother Abbots on what the Prior had told him over the telephone, in a frightened, distant voice. The Father Abbot of Mariawald told him that, if he considered it opportune, they had a doctor monk at their monastery who, despite his extreme humility and completely reluctantly, had acquired a reputation even beyond the monastery. For ailments of both the body and the spirit. That Brother Eugen Müss was at his disposition.

For the first time in ten years, since the sixteenth of April of the Year of Our Lord nineteen fifty when he had managed to enter the abbey of Saint Benedict of Achel and had become Brother Robert, Matthias Alpaerts was going beyond the lands of the abbey. His hands, opened on his legs, trembled excessively. With tiny frightened eyes he looked through the dirty window of the Citroën Stromberg that bounced along the dusty road leading away from his refuge and brought him to the world of the tempests he had wanted to flee forever. The nurse brother occasionally looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He realised that and tried to distract himself by staring at the nape of the silent chauffeur’s neck. The trip to Heimbach took four and a half hours, during which the nurse brother, in order to break the stubborn silence, had time to mumble, along with the hoarse noise of the car’s ailing carburettor, the Terce, Sext and None, and they reached the gates of Mariawald when the bells, so different than those at Achel, Lord, were calling the community to their Vespers.

It was the next day, after Lauds, when they told him to wait, seated on a hard bench, in a corner of the wide, well-lit corridor. The German words, scant and respectful, of the nurse brother had echoed in his ears like cruel orders. The nurse monk, Brother Müss’s assistant, accompanied by the nurse brother from Achel, disappeared behind a door. They must want a report first. They left him alone, with all his fears, and then Brother Müss had him enter the silent office and they sat with a table between them and he begged him, in quite good Dutch, to explain his torment to him, and Brother Robert scrutinised his eyes and found that his gaze was sweet and then the pain exploded and he started to say because imagine that you are at home having lunch, with your wife, mother-in-law and three little daughters, your mother-in-law with a bit of a chest cold, the new blue-and-white chequered tablecloth, because it’s your eldest’s birthday, little Amelietje. And after saying that Brother Robert didn’t stop talking for an entire hour without taking a breath, without asking for a glass of water, without lifting his gaze from the polished table and without noticing Brother Eugen Müss’s sad expression. And when he had explained the whole story, he added that that was why he went through life with his head bowed, crying over my cowardice and searching for some way to make amends for my evil until I had the idea of hiding there where the memory could never reach me. I had to return to speaking with God and I sought out entrance into a Carthusian monastery, where they counselled me that what I was attempting was not a good idea. From that day on I lied and at the other two places where I knocked on the door I didn’t mention the reasons for my pain or express it. In each new interview, I learned what I had to say and what I had to keep quiet, so that when I knocked on the door of Saint Benedict’s Abbey in Achel I already knew that no one would put up obstacles to my belated vocation and I begged, if obedience didn’t demand otherwise, that they let me live there and fulfil the humblest tasks in the monastery. Ever since that day I again began speaking, a bit, with God and I have learned to get the cows to listen to me.

Doctor Müss took his hand. They were like that, in silence, for perhaps ten or twenty minutes; and then Brother Robert began to breathe somewhat more calmly and he said after years of silence at the monastery, the memory came back to blow up inside my head.

‘You have to be prepared for it to blow up every once in a while, Brother Robert.’

‘I can’t bear it.’

‘Yes, you can; with God’s help.’

‘God doesn’t exist.’

‘You are a Trappist monk, Brother Robert. Are you trying to shock me?’

‘I ask for forgiveness from God, but I don’t understand his designs. Why, if God is love …’

‘What will maintain you, as a man, is knowing that you would never have caused any evil such as the one that corrodes your spirit. Like the one that was inflicted on you.’

‘Not on me: on Truu, Amelia, little Julietje, my Berta and my coughing mother-in-law.’

‘You are right: but they also did harm to you. The heroic man is he who gives back good when he has been done wrong.’

‘If I had here in front of me those responsible for …’ He sobbed. ‘I don’t know what I would do, Father. I swear I don’t believe I’d be capable of forgiving them …’

Brother Eugen Müss was writing something on a small sheet of paper. Brother Robert looked into his eyes and the other gazed back, like that moment when Doctor Müss told the journalist that he had no time to waste and, without knowing it, looked towards the lens of the hidden camera with that same gaze. And then Matthias Alpaerts understood that he had to go to Bebenbeleke, wherever it was, to re-encounter that gaze that had been able to calm him because the memories had once again blown up inside his head a few days earlier.

The first thing you find, when you arrive in Bebenbeleke, is that there is no town with that name. That’s just the name of the hospital, which is in the middle of nowhere, many miles north of Kikwit, many miles south of Yumbu-Yumbu, and a good distance from Kikongo and Beleke. The hospital is surrounded by cabins that some patients had built in the shelter of the hospital and that, unofficially, serve as lodgings for the relatives of the ill when they require a stay of several days and that, gradually, generated new cabins, some of which began to be inhabited by people with little or no relationship to the hospital and, over the years, would make up the town of Bebenbeleke. Doctor Müss had no problem with it. And the hens that lived tranquilly around the hospital and, even though they weren’t allowed, often also inside it. Bebenbeleke is a town made of pain, because half a kilometre from the hospital, towards Djilo, after the white rock, there is the cemetery for patients who were unable to recover. The indicator of Doctor Müss’s failures.

‘I left the order after a few months,’ said Matthias Alpaerts. I went in thinking it was the remedy and I left convinced that it was the best remedy. But within the monastery or outside of it, the memories remained fresh.