Jaume Cabré - Confessions

Then she sprang into the room. In the corner by the window there was, hanging on the wall, the little painting of the yellow gardenias by Mignon welcoming her.

‘But how …’

‘You like that one, don’t you?’

‘How did you know?’

‘But do you like it or not?’

‘It is my favourite object in this house.’

‘Well, from now on it’s yours.’

Her way of saying thank you was to stand in front of the gardenias and stare intensely at them for a good long while.

The next action was almost liturgical for me: adding the name Sara Voltes-Epstein to the mailbox in the lobby. And after ten years of living alone, as I wrote or read, I again heard footsteps, or a teaspoon hitting a glass, or warm music coming from her studio, and I thought that we could be happy together. But Adrià didn’t come up with a solution for the other open front; when you leave a file folder half open you can run into many problems. He already knew that full well; but his excitement was more intense than his prudence.

What was hardest for Adrià, in the new situation, was accepting the off-limits areas that Sara imposed on their lives. He realised it at her surprise when Adrià invited her to meet Aunt Leo and his cousins in Tona.

‘It’s better not to mix our families,’ responded Sara.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want any unpleasantness.’

‘I want to introduce you to Aunt Leo, and my cousins, if we can find them. I don’t want to introduce you to any unpleasantness.’

‘I don’t want problems.’

‘You won’t have any. Why would you?’

When her luggage arrived with the half-finished drawings and completed works, and the easels and the charcoal and the coloured pencils, she made an official inauguration of her studio, giving me a pencil drawing of Mignon’s gardenias that I hung up and still have on my wall, there where the original used to hang. And you got down to work because you were behind on the illustrations a couple of French publishers had commissioned from you for some children’s stories. Days of silence and calm, you drawing, me reading or writing. Meeting up in the hallway, visiting each other every once in a while, having coffee mid-morning in the kitchen, looking into each other’s eyes and not saying anything to avoid bursting the fragility of that unexpectedly recovered happiness.

It took a lot of work, but when Sara had the most urgent job finished, they ended up going to Tona in a second-hand Seat Six Hundred that Adrià had bought when he had finally passed his licence exam on the seventh try. They had to change a tyre in La Garriga: in Aiguafreda Sara made him stop in front of a florist’s shop, went in and emerged with a lovely small bouquet that she placed on the back seat without comment. And on the slope of Sant Antoni, in Centelles, the radiator water started to boil; but apart from that, everything went smoothly.

‘It’s the most beautiful town in the world,’ Adrià told her, excited, when the Six Hundred was getting to Quatre Carreteres.

‘The most beautiful town in the world is pretty ugly,’ responded Sara when they stopped on Sant Andreu Street and Adrià put on the hand brake too abruptly.

‘You have to look at it through my eyes. Et in Arcadia ego.’

They got out of the car and he told her look at the castle, my love. Up here, up high. Isn’t it lovely?

‘Well … I don’t know what to tell you …’

He could tell that she was nervous, but he didn’t know what to do to …

‘You have to look at it through my eyes. You see that ugly house and the other one with geraniums?’

‘Yes …’

‘This is where Can Casic was.’

And he said it as if he could see it; as if he could reach out and touch Josep with the smoking cigarette at his lips, hunched over, sharpening knives on the threshing floor, beside the haystack that was consumed like an apple core.

‘You see?’ said Adrià. And he pointed towards the stable of the mule who was always called Estrella and wore shoes that clicked like high heels against the manure-covered stones when she swatted away flies, and he even heard Viola barking furiously, pulling her chain taut because the silent, nameless white cat was getting too close, boasting haughtily of her freedom.

‘For Pete’s sake, kids, go play somewhere else, for Pete’s sake.’

And they all ran to hide behind the white rock and life was an exciting adventure, different from fingering flat major arpeggios; with the scent of manure and the sound of Maria’s clogs when she went into the pigsty, and the tanned gang of reapers in late July with their sickles and scythes. And the dog at Can Casic was also always named Viola and she envied the kids because they weren’t tied down with a rope that measured exactly eight ells.

‘For Pete’s sake is a euphemism for for heaven’s sake, which is a euphemism for for Christ’s sake.’

‘Hey, look at Adrià. He says for Christ’s sake!’

‘Yeah, but nobody ever understands him,’ grumbled Xevi as they sledded down from the stone border to the street filled with wheel tracks from the cart and piles of shit from Bastús, the street sweeper’s mule.

‘You say things nobody understands,’ challenged Xevi once they had reached the bottom.

‘Sorry. Sometimes I think out loud.’

‘No, I don’t …’

And he didn’t smack the dust off of his trousers because everything was permitted in Tona, far from his parents, and no one got angry if you grazed your knees.

‘Can Casic, Sara …’ he summed up, standing on the same street where Bastús used to piss and which was now paved; and it didn’t even occur to him that Bastús was no longer a mule but a diesel Iveco with a trailer, a lovely thing that doesn’t chew even a sprig of straw, is all clean and doesn’t smell of manure.

And then, with the flowers in your hands, you got on tiptoe and gave me an unexpected kiss, and I thought et in Arcadia ego, et in Arcadia ego, et in Arcadia ego, devoutly, as if it were a litany. And don’t be afraid, Sara, you are safe here, at my side. You go ahead and draw and I’ll love you and together we will learn to build our Arcadia. Before knocking on the door of Can Ges you handed me the bouquet.

On the way home, Adrià convinced Sara that she had to get her licence; that she would surely be a better student than he’d been.

‘All right.’ After a kilometre in silence. ‘You know, I liked your Aunt Leo. How old is she?’

Laus Deo. He had noticed about an hour into their visit to Can Ges that Sara had lowered her guard and was smiling inside.

‘I don’t know. Over eighty.’

‘She’s very fit. And I don’t know where she gets her energy. She doesn’t stop.’

‘She’s always been like that. But she keeps everyone in line.’

‘She wouldn’t take no for an answer about the jar of olives.’

‘That’s Aunt Leo.’ And with the momentum: ‘Why don’t we go to your house one day?’

‘Don’t even think about it.’ Her tone was curt and definitive.

‘Why not, Sara?’

‘They don’t accept you.’

‘Aunt Leo accepted you immediately.’

‘Your mother, if she were alive, wouldn’t have ever let me set foot in your house.’

‘Our house.’

‘Our house. Aunt Leo, fine, I’m sure I’ll be fond of her in no time. But that doesn’t count. What counts is your mother.’

‘She’s dead. She’s been dead for ten years!’

Silence until Figueró. To break it, Adrià tightened the thumbscrews and said Sara.

‘What.’

‘What did they tell you about me?’

Silence. The train, on the other shore of the Congost, went up towards Ripoll. And we were about to hurl ourselves headlong into a conversation.