Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘How did you know?’

‘I’ve heard that old song and dance somewhere before.’

Adrià was pensive for a while. He shook his head: I think life is a botched job, he said, in conclusion. And, like someone who takes up the bottle, he went to the Sant Antoni market on Sunday to relax and he contrived a way to bump into Morral at his stand, who signalled for Adrià to follow him. This time they were the first ten pages of the Goncourt brothers’ manuscript of Renée Mauperin, written in a uniform hand — with a few corrections in the margin — that Morral assured me was Jules’s.

‘Are you knowledgeable about literature?’

‘I sell things: books, trading cards, manuscripts and Bazooka chewing gum, you know what I mean?’

‘But where in the hell do you get it from?’

‘The chewing gum?’

Sly Morral didn’t tell me his methods. His silence ensured his safety and guaranteed that his mediation was always necessary.

I bought the Goncourt pages. And, in the following few weeks, as if they’d been waiting for me, manuscripts and loose pages appeared by Orwell, Huxley and Pavese. Adrià bought them all, despite his theoretical reticence to buying for buying’s sake. But he couldn’t let the eighth of February of he wasn’t sure which year of Il mestiere di vivere slip through his hands, a loose page that spoke of Guttoso’s wife, and of the hope of living with a woman who waits for you, who will sleep beside you and keep you warm and be your companion and make you feel alive, my Sara, which I don’t have and never will. How could I say no to that page? And I’m sure that Morral noticed my trembling and, depending on its intensity, upped the price. I am convinced that it is very difficult to resist possessing the original pages of texts that have moved you deeply. The paper with the handwriting, the gesture, the ink, which is the material element that incarnates the spiritual idea which will eventually become the work of art or the work of universal thought; the text enters the reader and transforms him. It is impossible to say no to that miracle. Which is why I didn’t think it over long when Morral, as an intermediary, introduced me to a man whose name I never knew, who was selling two poems by Ungaretti at ridiculous prices: Soldati and San Martino del Carso, the poem that speaks of a town reduced to ruins by war and not by the passing of time. È il mio cuore il paese più straziato. And mine as well, dear Ungaretti. What melancholy, what grief, what joy to own the piece of paper the author used to convert his first intuition into a work of art. And I paid what he asked, almost without haggling, and then Adrià heard a curt spitting on the ground and he looked around.

‘What, Carson.’

‘How. I have something to say, too.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘We have a problem,’ they both said at the same time.

‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t you realise?’

‘I don’t want to realise.’

‘Have you looked at how much you’ve spent on manuscripts these last few years?’

‘I love Sara and she left because our mothers tricked her.’

‘You can’t do anything about that. She has remade her life.’

‘Another whisky, please. Make it a double.’

‘Do you know how much you’ve spent?’

‘No.’

The buzzing of an office calculator. I don’t know if it was the valiant Arapaho chief or the coarse cowboy who was using it. A few seconds of silence until they told me the scandalous amount of money that

‘All right, all right, I’ll stop. That’s it. Are you happy now?’

‘Look, doctor,’ said Morral another day. ‘A Nietzsche.’

‘A Nietzsche?’

‘Five pages of Die Geburt der Tragödie. I don’t know what that means, by the way.’

‘The birth of tragedy.’

‘That’s what I suspected,’ Morral, with a toothpick in his mouth because it was after lunch.

Instead of sounding like a foreboding title to me, I looked at the five pages carefully for about an hour, and then Adrià lifted his head and exclaimed but where in the hell do you get these things from? For the first time, Morral answered the question:

‘Contacts.’

‘Sure. Contacts …’

‘Yes. Contacts. If there are buyers, the manuscripts sprout up like mushrooms. Especially if you can guarantee the authenticity of the merchandise the way we can.’

‘Who is this we?’

‘Are you interested or not?’

‘How much?’

‘This much.’

‘That much?’

‘That much.’

‘Bloody hell.’

But the tingling, the itching in the fingers and in the intellect.

‘Nietzsche. The first five pages of Die Geburt der Tragödie, which means the rupture of tragedy.’

‘The birth.’

‘That’s what I meant.’

‘Where do you get so many first pages?’

‘The entire manuscript would be unattainable.’

‘You mean that someone chops them up to …’ Horrified, ‘And what if I want more? What if I want the whole book?’

‘First we’d have to hear the price. But I think it’s best to start with what we have on hand. Are you interested?’

‘Indeed!’

‘You already know the price.’

‘That much less this much.’

‘No. That much.’

‘Well, then less this much.’

‘We could start to negotiate there.’

‘How.’

‘Not now, goddamn it!’

‘Excuse me?’

‘No, no, talking to myself. Do we have a deal?’

Adrià Ardèvol paid that much less this much and he left with the first five pages of the Nietzsche as well as the pressing need to talk to Morral again about acquiring the complete manuscript, if they even really had it. And he thought that perhaps it was the moment to ask Mr Sagrera how much money he had left to know whether Carson and Black Eagle’s hand wringing was founded or not. But Sagrera would tell him that he had to invest: that keeping it in the savings account was a shame.

‘I don’t know what I can do with it.’

‘Buy flats.’

‘Flats?’

‘Yes. And paint. I mean paintings.’

‘But … I buy manuscripts.’

‘What’s that?’

He would show him the collection. Mr Sagrera would examine them with his nose wrinkled and, after deep reflection, would conclude that it was very risky.

‘Why?’

‘They are fragile. They could get gnawed on by rats or those silvery insects.’

‘I don’t have rats. Little Lola deals with the silverfish.’

‘How.’

‘What?’

‘Caterina.’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘I insist: if you buy a flat, you are buying something solid that will never go down in price.’

As if wanting to spare himself that conversation, Adrià Ardèvol didn’t talk to Mr Sagrera about flats or rats. Nor about the money spent on silverfish food.

A few nights later I cried again, but not over love. Or yes: it was over love. In the letter box at home there was a notification from someone named Calaf, a notary in Barcelona, a man I’d never met, and I soon thought of problems with the sale of the shop, some sort of problems with the family, because I’ve always distrusted notaries even though I am now acting as a notary of a life that belongs to me increasingly less and less. Where was I: oh, yes, the notary Calaf, a stranger who kept me waiting for half and hour with no explanation in a very drab little room. Thirty minutes later he came into the drab little room, making no apologies for his delay. He didn’t look me in the eyes, he stroked a small thick white beard and asked me to show him my ID card. He gave it back to me with an expression I interpreted as one of displeasure, of disappointment.

‘Mrs Maria Dolors Carrió has named you to receive a part of her estate.’