Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m not one of your students.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’

‘Listening to you. Don’t you recognise me?’

He got up and came down, without a briefcase or notes, to the professor’s dais. Adrià had already put all the papers into his briefcase and now added the cassette tape.

‘No. Should I recognise you?’

‘Well … Technically, you are my uncle.’

‘I’m your uncle?’

‘Tito Carbonell,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘We saw each other in Rome, at my mother’s house, when you sold her the shop.’

Now he remembered him: a silent teenager with thick eyebrows, who snooped behind the doors, and had become a handsome young man of confident gestures.

Adrià asked how is your mother, he said well, she sends her regards, and soon the conversation languished. Then came the question, ‘Why did you come to this class?’

‘I wanted to know you better before making my offer.’

‘What offer?’

Tito made sure that no one else was in the classroom and then he said I want to buy the Storioni.

Adrià looked at him in surprise. He was slow to react.

‘It’s not for sale,’ he finally said.

‘When you hear the offer, you’ll put it up for sale.’

‘I don’t want to sell it. I’m not listening to offers.’

‘Two hundred thousand pesetas.’

‘I said it’s not for sale.’

‘Two hundred thousand pesetas is a lot of money.’

‘Not even if you offered me twice that.’ He brought his face close to the young man’s. ‘It-is-not-for-sale.’ He straightened up. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly. Two million pesetas.’

‘Do you even listen when people speak to you?’

‘With two million clams you can lead a comfortable life, without having to teach people who have no fucking clue about music.’

‘Tito, is that what you said your name was?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tito: no.’

He picked up his briefcase and prepared to leave. Tito Carbonell didn’t budge. Perhaps Adrià was expecting him to prevent him from leaving. Seeing that his path was clear, he turned around.

‘Why are you so interested in it?’

‘For the shop.’

‘Aha. And why doesn’t your mother make me the offer?’

‘She isn’t involved in these things.’

‘Aha. What you mean is that she doesn’t know anything about it.’

‘Call it what you wish, Professor Ardèvol.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-six,’ he lied, although I didn’t know that until much later.

‘And you are conspiring outside the shop?’

‘Two million one hundred thousand pesetas, final offer.’

‘Your mother should be informed about this.’

‘Two and a half million.’

‘You don’t listen when people talk to you, do you?’

‘I’d like to know why you don’t want to sell it …’

Adrià opened his mouth and closed it again. He didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t know why he didn’t want to sell Vial, that violin that had rubbed elbows with so much tragedy but which I had grown accustomed to playing, more and more hours each day. Perhaps because of the things that Father had told me about it; perhaps because of the stories I imagined when I touched its wood … Sara, sometimes, just running a finger over the violin’s skin, I am transported to the period when that wood was a tree that never even imagined it would one day take the shape of a violin, of a Storioni, of Vial. It’s not an excuse, but Vial was some sort of window onto the imagination. If Sara were here, if I saw her every day … perhaps everything would be different … obviously if … if only I had sold it to Tito then, even for twenty lousy pesetas. But I still couldn’t even suspect that then.

‘Eh?’ said Tito Carbonell, impatiently. ‘Why don’t you want to sell it?’

‘I’m afraid that is none of your business.’

I left the classroom with a cold sensation on the nape of my neck, as if I were waiting for the treacherous shot any minute. Tito Carbonell didn’t shoot me in the back and I felt the thrill of having survived.

It had been a couple of millennia since the Creation of the World according to the Decimal System, when he’d distributed the books throughout the house, although he hadn’t made real inroads into his father’s study. Adrià had devoted the third drawer of the manuscript table to some of his father’s unclassifiable documents, conveniently separated into envelopes, which had no relationship to the shop nor space in the registry system, because Mr Ardèvol kept another separate one for the valuable documents that he kept for himself, which was his way of starting to enjoy the objects that he had tracked over days or sometimes years. In the library everything was organised. Almost everything. All that was left to classify were the unclassifiable documents; they were all gathered, relegated to the third drawer with the sincere promise that he would take a look at them when he had some time. A few years passed in which it seems Adrià didn’t have the time.

Among the various papers in the third drawer, there was some correspondence. It was strange that a man as meticulous as Father had considered his correspondence as unclassifiable material and hadn’t left a copy of the letters he wrote; he had only kept the ones he received. They were in a couple of old folders filled to bursting. There were replies from someone named Morlin to demands from Father that I assume were professional. There were five very strange letters, written in impeccable Latin, filled with hard to understand allusions, from a priest named Gradnik. He was from Ljubljana, and went on and on about the unbearable crisis of faith that had gripped him for years. From what he said he had been a fellow student with Father at the Gregoriana and he urgently asked for his opinion on theological questions. The last letter had a different tone. It was dated in the year 1941 from Jesenice and began by saying it is very likely that this letter won’t reach you, but I can’t stop writing to you; you are the only one who has always answered me, even when I was most alone, serving as rector and sexton in the snow and ice of a little town near Kamnik whose name I have tried to forget. This may be my last letter because it is very likely that I will die any minute now. I hung up my cassock a year ago. There is no woman involved. It’s all due to the fact that I lost my faith. I’ve lost it drop by drop; it just slipped through my fingers. I’m the one responsible: confiteor. Since the last time I wrote to you, and after your words of encouragement that inspired me tremendously, I can tell you more objectively. Gradually, I realised that what I was doing made no sense. You had to choose between a love that was impossible to resist and the life of a priest. I have yet to come across any woman who makes me swoon. All my problems are mental. It has been a year since my big decision. Today, with all of Europe at war, I know that I was right. Nothing makes sense, God doesn’t exist and man must defend himself as best he can from the ravages of time. Look, dear friend: I am so sure of this step I’ve taken, completed only a few weeks ago: I have enlisted in the people’s army. In short, I traded my cassock for a rifle. I am more useful trying to save my people from Evil. My doubts have vanished, dear Ardèvol. I have been talking for years about Evil, the Archfiend, the Devil … and I was unable to understand the nature of Evil. I tried to examine the evil of guilt, the evil of grief, metaphysical evil, physical evil, absolute evil and relative evil and, above all, the efficient cause of evil. And after so much studying, after going over it again and again, it turned out that I had to hear the confession of the lay sisters in my parish, confessing to the horrible sin of not having been strict enough in their fasting from midnight to taking Communion. My God, my gut was telling me it can’t be, it can’t be, Drago: you are losing your reason for being, if what you want is to be useful to humanity. I realised everything when a mother told me how can God allow my little daughter to die in such pain, Father; why didn’t God intervene to stop it? And I had no reply and I found myself giving her a sermon on the efficient cause of Evil, until I grew silent, ashamed, and I asked for her forgiveness and I told her I didn’t know. I told her I don’t know, Andreja, forgive me but I don’t know. Perhaps this will make you laugh, dear Fèlix Ardèvol, you who write me long letters defending the selfish cynicism your life has become, according to you. I was once choked with doubts because I was defenceless in the face of my tears; but no longer. I know where Evil is. Absolute Evil, even. Its name is Himmler. Its name is Hitler. Its name is Pavelić. It is Luburić and his macabre invention in Jasenovac. Its name is Schutzstaffel and Abwehr. The war highlights the most beastly part of human nature. But Evil existed before the war and doesn’t depend on any entelechy, but rather on people. That is why my inseparable companion for the last few weeks has been a rifle with a telescopic sight because the commander’s decided that I’m a good shot. We will soon enter combat. Then I will blow Evil up bit by bit with every bullet and it doesn’t upset me to think about that. As long as it is a Nazi, an Ustaša or, simply, and may God forgive me, an enemy soldier in my sights. Evil uses Fear and absolute Cruelty. I suppose to ensure that we are filled with rage, the commanders tell us horrifying things about the enemy and we all are eager to find ourselves face to face with him. One day I will kill a man and I hope to not feel sorry about it at all. I’ve joined a group filled with Serbians who live in Croatian towns but have had to flee from the Ustaša; there are four of us Slovenians and some of the many Croatians who believe in freedom. I still don’t have any military rank, some people call me sergeant because I’m easy to spot: I’m as tall and stocky as ever. And the Slovenians call me Father because one day I got drunk and must have talked too much; I deserve it. I am ready to kill before being killed. I don’t feel any sort of remorse; I don’t worry about what I’m doing. I’ll probably die in some skirmish now. I hear that the German army is advancing towards the south. We all know that any military operation inevitably leaves behind a trail of dead, on our side as well. Here at war we avoid making friends: we are all one because we all depend on each other, and I cry over the death of the man who yesterday ate breakfast by my side but whose name I didn’t get the chance to ask. All right, I’ll take off my mask: I’m terrified of killing someone. I don’t know if I’ll be able to. But Evil is specific people. I hope to be brave and I hope I’ll be able to pull the trigger without my heart trembling too much.