Jaume Cabré - Confessions

I am writing to you from a Slovenian town called Jesenice. I will put a stamp on it as if we weren’t at war. And I will take it in our lorry, which is filled with bags of mail today because until the conflict really starts, they want to keep us busy doing useful things. But I will entrust this letter to Jančar, who is the only person capable of getting it to you. May the God I no longer believe in assist him. Please answer to the sub-post office in Maribor, as always. If they don’t kill me, I’ll be anxiously awaiting your reply. I feel so alone, dear Fèlix Ardèvol. Death is cold and I shiver more and more. Your friend, Drago Gradnik, former priest, former theologian, who has renounced a brilliant career in the episcopal curia of Ljubljana and perhaps even in Rome. Your friend who is now a partisan rifleman on the front lines and who is impatient to blow off the head of the roots of Evil.

There were also replies from eight or ten antiquarians, collectors and vintage dealers from all over Europe to specific requests from Father. And a couple of letters from Doctor Wuang of Shanghai, which assured, in shaky English, that the happy manuscript (without further references) had never been in his hands and that he wished him a long happy life and prosperity in business and increasing happy wealth in his personal relationships, both familial and romantic. I felt Doctor Wuang was referring to me. And many other documents of all sorts.

One boring, rainy afternoon, when I’d finished grading exams and had no desire to think about the philosophy of language, I decided to be bored at home, without reading, mouth agape. The theatrical offerings were slim; I wasn’t in the mood for a musical, and it had been so many years since I’d set foot in a cinema that I wasn’t sure they were still making colour films. So I yawned and thought that it was a good moment to finally organise Father’s papers. So, after having placed the Tetralogia on the record player, I got to it. The first thing I pulled out was one of the letters from Morlin, who lived in Rome and appeared to be a priest, even though I didn’t know that yet. That was when I felt a desire to clarify certain moments in Father’s life. For no particular reason, not thinking that it would clarify his death, but because every time I looked into his personal papers I found some small surprise that stirred something in me. Perhaps that is why I’ve been tirelessly writing to you for so many weeks, in a way I’ve never done before in my life. It is clear that the hound on my heels will soon catch up to me. Perhaps that’s why I am putting together scraps of memory that, when the moment comes, will be very difficult to organise into anything presentable. In short, I continued with the selection. During a couple of hours, with the introduction still on in the background (we were at the point when Wotan and Loge, enraged, steal the ring and the Nibelung utters the terrible curse that will befall those who put it on their finger), I organised the correspondence and some drawings, which I assumed Father had made, of various objects. And I found, after a good long hour and a half — at the point where Brünnhilde disobeys Wotan and helps poor Sieglinde escape — a text in Hebrew on two yellowed pages of a size not commonly used any more, written in ink by a hand I recognised as my father’s. In it I was hoping to find one of the thousand things that had aroused his curiosity and, when I began to read it, I thought that it was my rusty Hebrew that was hampering a comfortable reading of the text. After five fruitless minutes, with various useless dictionary consultations, the surprise came. It wasn’t written in Hebrew, but in Aramaic camouflaged in the Hebrew alphabet. It was strange to read because I’m more used to Aramaic in the Syriac alphabet. But it was all just a question of making an effort. About a minute later I had figured out two things: first that Doctor Gombreny did her job because my Aramaic was decent; and second, that it wasn’t a copy of an ancient text but rather a letter that my father had written to me. To me! My father who, in life, had perhaps addressed me directly only fifty times, and almost always to say bloody hell what are you shouting for, had written a text to his ignored son. And I learned that Father’s Aramaic was much better than mine. Then, when I had almost read the whole thing, Siegfried, Sieglinde’s enterprising son, with that cruelty heroes have, kills the Nibelung Mime, who had raised him, to keep him from betraying him. The forest of the heroes, the text in Aramaic, it all enjoined blood. I was surrounded by blood. Adrià, immersed in the text, without seeing it, thinking about the terrible things he had read, let the record spin on the platter for a long half hour before turning it over. As if the characters were repeating their movements ad infinitum, accompanied only by the slight crackling of the needle. He was stunned, like Siegfried, by the revelation. Because the letter read My beloved son Adrià. I am writing you this secret with the uncertain hope that some day, many years from now, you will know what happened. Most likely this letter will be lost among the papers and consumed by the voracious silverfish who always haunt those who keep libraries of old books. If you are reading this it’s because you’ve saved my papers, and you have done what I set out for you: you have learned Hebrew and Aramaic. And if you have learned Hebrew and Aramaic, Son, then you are the type of scholar I imagined you would become. And I will have won out over your mother, who wants to turn you into an effete violinist. (Actually, in Aramaic it said effete rebec player, but my father’s nasty swipe was clear.) I want you to know that if you are reading this it is because I was unable to return home to destroy it. I don’t know if my death will be officially ruled an accident, but I want you to know I was murdered and that my killer is named Aribert Voigt, a former Nazi doctor who took part in brutalities which I will spare you here. He wanted to get back the Storioni violin, which was underhandedly taken from him at one point. I am leaving home, so that his rage won’t harm you, like the bird who pretends to be wounded in order to lead the predator far from its nest. Don’t look for my killer. By the time you read this he’ll probably have been dead for a long time. Don’t look for the violin, either; it’s not worth it. Don’t search for what I have found in many of the objects I’ve collected: the satisfaction of possessing something rare. Don’t search for it, because it ends up eating away at you; it’s endless anguish and it makes you do things that you later regret. If your mother is alive, spare her this story that I am explaining to you. Farewell. And beneath that was some sort of postscript that made me unhappy. A postscript that said Aribert Voigt killed me. I took Vial out of his bloody clutches. I know that he has been released and that, inevitably, he will come looking for me. Voigt is evil. I am also evil, but Voigt is absolute evil. If I die violently, don’t believe them when they say it was an accident. Voigt. I don’t want you to avenge me, Son. You can’t do it, obviously; because when you read this, if you ever do, Voigt will have been rotting in hell for many years already. If they killed me, that will mean that Vial, our Storioni, will have disappeared from the house. If for any reason there is public talk of Voigt or our violin, you should know that I found out who the instrument belonged to before Voigt confiscated it: Netje de Boeck, a Belgian woman, was the owner. I profoundly hope that Voigt meets a bad end and that someone, I don’t know whom, ensures that he never sleeps easily until the end of his days. But I don’t want it to be you, because I don’t want to taint you with my business matters. You’ve tainted me, Father, indeed, thought Adrià, because I’ve inherited the family illness, you passed it on to me: that itching of desire in my fingers when I hold certain objects. And the text in Aramaic ended with a laconic farewell, Son. They were probably the last words he ever wrote. And not one said I love you, my son. Perhaps he didn’t love me.