Jaume Cabré - Confessions

Doctor Müss had him sit on the green bench, still untainted by blood, beside the entrance and he took his hand the way he had thirty years earlier in the consultation room at the Mariawald Abbey.

‘Thank you for wanting to help me, Brother Müss,’ said Matthias Alpaerts.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t have helped more.’

‘You helped me a lot, Brother Müss. Now I am prepared and, when the memories explode, I am better able to defend myself against them.’

‘Does it happen often?’

‘More than I’d like, Brother Müss. Because …’

‘Don’t call me brother; I’m no longer a monk,’ interrupted Doctor Müss. ‘Shortly after our meeting I asked for dispensation from Rome.’

The silence of former Brother Robert was eloquent, and former Brother Müss had to break it and reply that he had abandoned the order out of a desire for penitence and, God forgive me, firmly thinking that I could be more useful doing good among the needy than locking myself up to pray the hours.

‘I understand.’

‘I have nothing against monastic life: it was about my temperament and my superiors understood that.’

‘You are a saint, out here in this desert.’

‘This is no desert. And I’m no saint. I am a doctor, a former monk, and I just practise medicine. And I try to heal the wounds of evil.’

‘What stalks me is evil.’

‘I know. But I can only fight against evils.’

‘I want to stay and help you.’

‘You are too old. You are over seventy, aren’t you?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I can be helpful.’

‘Impossible.’

Doctor Müss’s tone had suddenly turned curt with that reply. As if the other man had deeply offended him. Matthias Alpaerts’s hands began to tremble and he hid them in his pockets so the doctor wouldn’t notice.

‘How long have they been trembling like that?’ Doctor Müss pointed to his hidden hands and Matthias stifled an expression of displeasure. He held out his hands in front of him; they were trembling excessively.

‘When the memories explode inside me. Sometimes I think it’s not possible for them to shake so much against my will.’

‘You won’t be useful to me, with that trembling.’

Matthias Alpaerts looked him in the eye; the commentary was, at the very least, cruel.

‘I can be useful in many different ways,’ he said, offended. ‘Digging the garden, for example. In the Achel monastery I learned to work the land.’

‘Brother Robert … Matthias … Don’t insist. You have to return home.’

‘I have no home. Here I can be useful.’

‘No.’

‘I don’t accept your refusal.’

Then Brother Müss took Matthias Alpaerts by one arm and brought him to dinner. Like every evening, there was only a sticky mass of millet, which the doctor heated up on a little burner. They sat down right there in the office, using the doctor’s desk as a dining room table. And Doctor Müss opened up a small cabinet to pull out two plates and Matthias watched him hide something, perhaps a dirty rag, behind some plastic cups. As they ate without appetite, the doctor explained why he couldn’t possibly stay there to help him as an improvised nurse nor as a gardener nor as a cook nor as a farmhand who didn’t know how to bear fruits without sweating blood.

At midnight, when everyone was sleeping, Matthias Alpaerts’s hands didn’t tremble as he went into Doctor Müss’s office. He opened the small cabinet near the window and, with the help of a small torch, he found what he was looking for. He examined the rag in the scant, uncertain light. For a very long minute he hesitated because he didn’t quite recognise it. All his trembling was focused on his heart, which struggled to escape through his throat. When he heard a cock crow, he made up his mind and put the rag back in its place. He felt an itching in his fingers, the same itching that Fèlix Ardèvol felt or that I was starting to feel when an object of my desires was slipping out of my grasp. Itching and trembling in the tips of his fingers. Even though Matthias Alpaerts’s illness was different from ours.

He left before the sun came up, with the van that came from Kikongo and brought medicines and foodstuffs, and a sprinkling of hope for the ill in that extensive area that dipped its feet in the Kwilu.

I came back from Paris with my head bowed and my tail between my legs. In that period Adrià Ardèvol was teaching a course on the history of contemporary thought to a numerous audience of relatively sceptical students despite his reputation as a surly-sage-who-does-his-own-thing-and-doesn’t-go-out-for-coffee-ever-and-wants-nothing-to-do-with-faculty-meetings-because-he’s-above-good-and-evil that he had started to have among his colleagues at the Universitat de Barcelona. And the relative prestige of having published, almost secretly, La revolució francesa and Marx? two fairly provocative little books that had started to earn him admirers and detractors. The days in Paris had devastated him and he had no desire to talk about Adorno because he couldn’t care less about anything.

I hadn’t thought about you again, Little Lola, because my head was filled with Sara. Not until some obscure relative called to tell me my cousin is dead and she left some addresses of people she wanted to be notified. She added the information of the place and time and we exchanged various words of courtesy and condolence.

At the funeral there were about twenty people. I vaguely remembered three or four faces, but I couldn’t greet anyone, not even the obscure cousin. Dolors Carrió i Solegibert ‘Little Lola’ (1910–1982), born and died in the Barceloneta, mother’s friend, a good woman, who screwed me over because Little Lola’s only real family was Mother. And she was probably her lover. I wasn’t able to say goodbye to you with the affection that, despite everything, you deserved.

‘Hey, hey, but that was what, twenty years ago, that you broke up?’

‘Come on, not twenty! And we didn’t break up: they broke us up.’

‘She must already have grandchildren.’

‘Why do you think I’ve never looked for another woman?’

‘The truth is I have no idea.’

‘I’ll explain it to you: every day, well, almost every day, when I go to sleep, you know what I think?’

‘No.’

‘I think now the bell is going to ring, ding dong.’

‘Your bell goes rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs.’

‘All right: rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs, and I open it and it’s Sara saying that she left because of something or another and asking do you want me in your life again, Adrià.’

‘Hey, hey, kid, don’t cry. And now you don’t have to think about her any more. You see? In a way it’s better, don’t you think?’

Bernat felt uncomfortable in the face of Adrià’s rare expansiveness.

He pointed to the cabinet and Adrià shrugged, which Bernat interpreted as go ahead. He pulled out Vial and he played him a couple of Telemann’s fantasies, at the end of which I felt better, thank you, Bernat, my dear friend.

‘If you want to cry more, go ahead and cry, eh?’

‘Thanks for giving me permission,’ smiled Adrià.

‘You are delicate, fragile.’

‘It devastated me that my two mothers conspired against our love and we just fell right into their trap.’

‘All right. The two mothers are dead and you can keep on …’

‘I can keep on what?’

‘I don’t know. I meant …’

‘I envy your emotional stability.’

‘Don’t be fooled.’

‘Yes, yes. You and Tecla, wham bam.’

‘I can’t get Llorenç to understand anything.’

‘How old is he?’

‘He’s the soul of contradiction.’

‘He doesn’t want to study violin?’