Jaume Cabré: Confessions

‘No. But it will be secondary.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘Good night, dear,’ said Father as he opened the newspaper and paged through it because that was what he always did at that time of the day.

So I was changing schools. What a drag. And how scary. Luckily Sheriff Carson and Black Eagle would go with me. The violin will be secondary? And why Aramaic so much later? That night it took me a while to get off to sleep.

I’m sure I’m mixing things up. I don’t know if I was seven or eight or nine years old. But I had a gift for languages and my parents had realised that and wanted to make the most of it. I had started French because I spent a summer in Perpignan at Aunt Aurora’s house and there, as soon as they got a little flustered, they’d switch from their guttural Catalan to French; and that’s why when I speak French I add the hint of a Midi accent I’ve maintained my whole life with some pride. I don’t remember how old I was. German came later; English I don’t really recall. Later, I think. It’s not that I wanted to learn them. It was that they learned me.

Now that I’m thinking about it in order to tell you, I see my childhood as one long and very boring Sunday afternoon, wandering aimlessly, looking for a way to slip off into the study, thinking that it would be more fun if I had a sibling, thinking that the point would come when reading was boring because I was already up to my eyeballs in Enid Blyton, thinking that the next day I had school, and that was worse. Not because I was afraid of school or the teachers and parents, but because of the children. It was the children at school that frightened me, because they looked at me like I was some kind of a freak.

‘Little Lola.’

‘What?’

‘What can I do?’

Little Lola stopped drying her hands or applying lipstick and looked at me.

‘Can I go with you?’ Adrià, with a hopeful look.

‘No, no, you’d be bored!’

‘I’m bored here.’

‘Turn on the radio.’

‘It’s a yawn.’

Then Little Lola grabbed her coat and left the room that always smelled of Little Lola and, in a whisper, so no one would hear it, she told me to ask Mother to take me to the cinema. And louder she said goodbye, see you later; she opened the door to the street, winked at me and left; yeah, she could have fun on Sunday afternoons, who knows how, but I was left condemned to wander the flat like a lost soul.

‘Mother.’

‘What.’

‘No, nothing.’

Mother looked up from her magazine, finished the last sip of her coffee, and glanced at me over it.

‘Tell me, Son.’

I was afraid to ask her to take me to the cinema. Very afraid and I still don’t know why. My parents were too serious.

‘I’m bored.’

‘Read. If you’d like, we can study French.’

‘Let’s go to Tibidabo.’

‘Oh, you should have said that this morning.’

We never went there, to Tibidabo, not any morning nor any Sunday afternoon. I had to go there in my imagination, when my friends told me what Tibidabo was like, that it was filled with mechanical devices, mysterious automatons and lookout points and dodgem cars and … I didn’t know what exactly. But it was a place where parents took their children. My parents didn’t take me to the zoo or to stroll along the breakwater. They were too staid. And they didn’t love me. I think. Deep down I still wonder why they had me.

‘Well, I want to go to Tibidabo!’

‘What is all this shouting?’ complained Father from his study. ‘Don’t make me punish you!’

‘I don’t want to study my French!’

‘I said don’t make me punish you!’

Black Eagle thought that it was all very unfair and he let me and Sheriff Carson know how he felt. And to keep from getting utterly bored, and especially to keep from getting punished, well, I started in on my arpeggio exercises on the violin, which had the advantage of being difficult and so it was hard to get them to come out sounding good. I was terrible at the violin until I met Bernat. I abandoned the exercise halfway through.

‘Father, can I touch the Storioni?’

Father lifted his head. He was, as always, looking through the magnifying lamp at some very odd piece of paper.

‘No,’ he said. And pointing at something on top of the table, ‘Look how beautiful.’

It was a very old manuscript with a brief text in an alphabet I didn’t recognise.’

‘What is it?’

‘A fragment of the gospel of Mark.’

‘But what language is it in?’

‘Aramaic.’

Did you hear that, Black Eagle? Aramaic! Aramaic is a very ancient language, a language of papyrus and parchment scrolls.

‘Can I learn it?’

‘When the time is right.’ He said it with satisfaction; that was very clear because, since I generally did things well, he could brag of having a clever son. Wanting to take advantage of his satisfaction, ‘Can I play the Storioni?’

Fèlix Ardèvol looked at him in silence. He moved aside the magnifying lamp. Adrià tapped a foot on the floor. ‘Just once. Come on, Father …’

Father’s expression when he is angry is scary. Adrià held it for just a few seconds. He had to lower his eyes.

‘Don’t you understand the word no? Niet, nein, no, ez, non, ei, nem. Sound familiar?’

‘Ei and nem?’

‘Finnish and Hungarian.’

When Adrià left the study, he turned and angrily proffered a terrible threat.

‘Well, then I won’t study Aramaic.’

‘You will do what I tell you to do,’ warned Father with the coldness and calmness of one who knows that yes, he will always do what he says. And he returns to his manuscript, to his Aramaic, to his magnifying glass.

That day Adrià decided to lead a double life. He already had secret hiding places, but he decided to expand his clandestine world. He proposed a grand goal for himself: working out the combination of the safe and, when Father wasn’t at home, studying with the Storioni: no one would notice. And putting it back in its case and into the safe in time to erase all trace of the crime. He went to study his arpeggios so no one would realise and he didn’t say anything to either the Sheriff or the Arapaho chief, who were napping on the bedside table.

I always remembered Father as an old man. Mother, on the other hand, was just Mother. It’s a shame she didn’t love me. All that Adrià knew was that Grandfather Adrià raised her like men used to do when they became widowers very young and with a baby in their arms, looking from side to side to see if someone will offer them a manual for fitting the child into their life. Grandmother Vicenta died very young, when Mother was six. She had a vague recollection of her; I merely had the memory of the only two photos ever taken of her: her wedding shot, in the Caria Studio, in which they were both very young and attractive, but too dolled up for the occasion; and another of Grandmother with Mother in her arms and a broken smile, as if she knew she wouldn’t see her First Communion, wondering why is it my lot to die so young and be just a sepia photo for my grandson, who it seems is a child prodigy but whom I will never meet. Mother grew up alone. No one ever took her to Tibidabo and perhaps that’s why it never occurred to her that I was dying to know what the animated automatons were like, the ones that I’d heard moved magically and looked like people once you put a coin into them.

Mother grew up alone. In the 20s, when they killed on the streets, Barcelona was sepia coloured and the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera tinted the eyes of Barcelonians with the colour of bitterness. So when Grandfather Adrià understood that his daughter was growing up and he’d have to explain things to her that he didn’t know, since they had nothing to do with paleography, he got Lola’s daughter to come and live at the house. Lola was Grandmother Vicenta’s trusted woman, who still took care of the house, from eight in the morning to eight in the evening, as if her mistress hadn’t died. Lola’s daughter, who was two and half years older than Mother, was also named Lola. They called the mother Big Lola. The poor woman died before seeing the republic established. On her deathbed she passed the baton to her daughter. She said take care of Carme as if she were your own life, and Little Lola never left Mother’s side. Until she left the house. In my family, Lolas appeared and disappeared when there was a death.