Confessions (39 page)

‘Deal. The lawyers will dot the i’s,’ decided Daniela, exhaling. Then she looked at Laura with a hint of irony and said we can discuss the millions of lires of history, madam, when we are in the mood.

W
e didn’t say a word until we were seated, one in front of the other. It was forty-five minutes of silence that was impossible to evaluate because that blonde, blue girl had completely disorientated him. Once they were seated, after ordering and waiting, also in silence, for them to bring the first course, Laura picked up a forkful of spaghetti that immediately began to unravel.

‘You are a bastard,’ she said, leaning over her plate before starting to suck on the sole remaining long strand of spaghetti.

‘Me?’

‘I’m talking to you, yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m not your lawyer, not that you needed one.’ She abandoned the fork on the plate. ‘By the way, I take it you sell antiques.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Why didn’t you talk to me about it before?’

‘All you had to do was keep quiet.’

‘No one deigned to give me the manual for this trip.’

‘Forgive me: it’s my fault.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you did very well.’

‘Well, I wanted to ruin everything and run away, because you’re a son of a bitch.’

‘You’re right.’

Laura was able to fish out another strand of spaghetti and, instead of her words bothering me, all I could think was that, at that rate, she would never finish her first course. I wanted to give her explanations I hadn’t given her before: ‘Mother gave me instructions for selling the shop to Daniela; step by step. She even indicated how I had to look at her and what gestures I had to make.’

‘So you were acting.’

‘To a certain extent. But you surpassed me.’

Both of them looked at their plates, until Adrià put down his fork and covered his full mouth with his napkin.

‘The value of the weight of history!’ he said, bursting into laughter.

The dinner continued with long rifts of silence. They tried to avoid eye contact.

‘So your mother wrote you a book of instructions.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you were following it.’

‘Yes.’

‘You seemed … I don’t know: different.’

‘Different in what way?’

‘Different from how you usually are.’

‘How am I, usually?’

‘Absent. You’re always somewhere else.’

They nibbled on olives in silence, not knowing what to say to each other, as they waited for their dessert. Until Adrià said he didn’t know she was so far-sighted and perceptive.

‘Who?’

‘My mother.’

Laura placed her fork on the table and looked him in the eye.

‘Do you know I feel used?’ she insisted. ‘Did you get that, after everything I’ve said?’

I looked at her carefully and I saw that her blue gaze was damp. Poor Laura: she was saying the great truth of her life and I still didn’t want to recognise it.

‘Forgive me. I couldn’t do it alone.’

T
hat night Laura and I made love, very tenderly and cautiously, as if we were afraid of hurting each other. She curiously examined the medallion that Adrià wore around his neck, but she didn’t mention it. And then she cried: it was the first time that smiling Laura showed me her perennial dose of sadness. And she didn’t explain her heartaches. I was silent as well.

After strolling through the Vatican museums and silently admiring the Moses at San Pietro in Vincoli for over an hour, the patriarch took a step forward, with the tablets of the law in his hand and, when approaching his people and seeing that they were worshipping a golden calf and dancing around it, he angrily grabbed the stone tablets where Jahweh had engraved in divine script the points of the agreement, the new alliance with his people, and he threw them to the ground, smashing them to bits. While Aaron knelt and picked up a jagged piece, not too big and not too small, and saved it as a souvenir, Moses raised his voice and said you good-for-nothings, what are you doing adoring false gods the second I turn my back, bloody hell, what ingrates! And the people of God said forgive us, Moses, we won’t do it again. And he replied I am not the one who has to forgive you, but rather God the merciful against whom you have sinned by worshipping false gods. Just for that you deserve to be stoned to death. All of you. And when they went out beneath the blazing Roman midday sun, thinking of stones and smashed tablets, it occurred to me, out of the blue, that, a century earlier, in the Hijri year of twelve hundred and ninety, a crying baby had been born in the small village of al-Hisw, with her face illuminated like the moon, and her mother, upon seeing her, said this daughter of mine is a blessing from Allah the Merciful; she is beautiful like the moon and splendorous as the sun, and her father, Azizzadeh the
merchant, seeing his wife’s delicate state, told her, hiding his anxiousness, what name should we give her, my wife, and she responded she will be called Amani, and the people of al-Hisw will know her as Amani the lovely; and she was left drained by her words; and her husband Azizzadeh, with bitter tears in his dark eyes, after making sure that everything was in order, gave a white coin and a basket of dates to the midwife; looked, worried, at his wife, and a black cloud crossed through his thoughts. The mother’s cracked voice still said Azizzadeh: if I die, take good care of the golden jewel in my memory.

‘You aren’t going to die.’

‘Listen to me. And when lovely Amani’s first monthly blood comes, give it to her and tell her it is from me. To remember me by, my husband. To remember her mother who didn’t have enough strength to.’ And she began to cough. ‘Promise me you will,’ she insisted.

‘I promise, my wife.’

The midwife came back into the room and said she needs to rest. Azizzadeh shook his head and went back to the shop because he had to supervise the unloading of the delivery of pistachios and walnuts that had just arrived from Lebanon. But even if it had been engraved on tablets like the law of the infidel sons of Mūsa who call themselves the chosen people, Azizzadeh would never have believed the sad end lovely Amani would meet in fifteen years’ time, praise be the merciful Lord.

‘What are you thinking about?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘You see, see how you’re always somewhere else?’

They took the train back to Barcelona and arrived on Wednesday: Laura missed two classes for the first time in her life and without prior notice. Dr Bastardes, who must have sensed many things, didn’t reproach her for it. And I, after the Roman operation, already knew that I would be able to devote my life to studying what I wished and teaching a few classes, just enough to maintain a presence in the academic world. It seemed that, apart from my romantic problems, the sky was clear. Even though I hadn’t come across any juicy manuscripts lately.

A
drià had got a weight off his shoulders, with the help of his aloof mother who had considered his inability to handle practical matters and had watched over her son from the other side, the way every mother in the world except mine does. Just thinking of it gets me emotional and calculating that perhaps in some moment Mother did love me. Now I know for sure that Father once admired me; but I am convinced that he never loved me. I was one more object in his magnificent collection. And that one more object returned from Rome to his house with the intention of putting it in order, since he had been living too long stumbling into the unopened boxes of books that had come from Germany. He turned on the light and there was light. And he called Bernat to come over and help him to plan this ideal order, as if Bernat were Plato and he Pericles, and the flat in the Eixample the bustling city of Athens. And thus the two wise men decided that into the study would go the manuscripts, the incunabula that he would buy, the delicate objects, the books of the fathers, the records, the scores and the most commonly used dictionaries, and they divided the waters from below from those above and the firmament was made with its clouds, separate from the sea waters. In his parents’ bedroom, which he had managed to make his own, they found a place for the poetry and music books, and they separated the lower waters so that there was a dry place, and they gave that dry spot the name earth, and they called the waters ocean seas. In his childhood bedroom, beside Sheriff Carson and valiant Black Eagle, who kept constant watch from the bedside table, they emptied out, without a second glance, all the shelves of books that had accompanied him as a child and there they put the history books, from the birth of memory to the present day. And geography as
well, and the earth began to have trees and seeds that germinated and sprouted grasses and flowers.

‘Who are these cowboys?’

‘Don’t touch them!’

He didn’t dare to tell him that it was none of his business. That would have seemed unfair. He just said, nothing, I’ll get rid of them some other day.

‘How.’

‘What.’

‘You’re ashamed of us.’

‘I’m very busy right now.’

I heard the Sheriff, from behind the Arapaho chief, spitting contemptuously onto the ground and choosing not to say anything.

The three long hallways in the flat were devoted to literary prose, arranged by language. With some endless new shelving that he ordered from Planas. In the hallway to the bedroom, Romance languages. In the one beyond the front hall, Slavic and Nordic languages, and in the wide back hall, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon.

‘But how can you read in crazy language like this?’ asked Bernat suddenly, brandishing Пешчаниcat, by Danilo Kiš.

‘With patience. If you know Russian, Serbian isn’t that difficult.’

‘If you know Russian …’ grumbled Bernat, offended. He put the book in its place and muttered through his teeth, ‘Sure, then it’s a piece of cake.’

‘We can put literary essays and literature and art theory in the dining room.’

‘Either take out the glassware or take out the buffet.’ He pointed at the walls without mentioning the white stain above the buffet. Adrià lowered his eyes and said I’ll give all the glassware to the shop. They’ll sell it and be happy. That’ll give me three good walls. And he created the fish and the marine creatures and all the monsters of the sea. And the empty spot left on the wall by the absence of the monastery of Santa Maria de Gerri by Modest Urgell now had company: Wellek, Warren, Kayser, Berlin, Steiner, Eco, Benjamin,
Indgarden, Grye, Canetti, Lewis, Fuster, Johnson, Calvino, Mira, Todorov, Magris and other joys.

‘How many languages do you know?’

‘I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter. Once you know a few, you can always read more than you think you can.’

‘Yeah, sure, I was just about to say that,’ said Bernat, a bit peeved. After a little while, as they removed a piece of furniture, ‘You never told me you were studying Russian.’

‘You never told me you were practising Bartók’s second.’

‘And how do you know?’

‘Contacts. In the laundry room I’ll put

‘Don’t touch anything in the laundry room.’ Bernat, the voice of reason. ‘You’ll have to have someone come in to dust, iron and do things like that. And she’ll need her own space.’

‘I’ll do that myself.’

‘Bullshit. Hire someone.’

‘I know how to make omelettes, boiled rice, fried eggs, macaroni and other pastas and whatever I need. Potato frittata. Salads. Vegetables and potatoes.’

‘I’m talking about things of a higher order: ironing, sewing, cleaning. And making cannelloni and baked capon.’

What a drag. But finally he listened to Bernat and hired a woman who was still young and active, named Caterina. She came on Mondays, stayed for lunch and did the whole house leaving no stone unturned. And she ironed. And sewed. A ray of sunshine in so much darkness.

‘It’s best if you don’t go into the study. All right?’

‘As you wish,’ she said, going in and giving it the once-over with her expert eye. ‘But I must say this place is a breeding ground for dust.’

‘Let’s not exaggerate …’

‘A breeding ground for dust filled with those little silver bugs that nest in books.’

‘Don’t exaggerate, Little Lola.’

‘Caterina. I’ll just dust the old books.’

‘Don’t even think about it.’

‘Well, then let me at least sweep and clean the floor,’ Caterina, trying to save some aspects of the negotiation.

‘Fine. But don’t touch anything on top of the table.’

‘I wouldn’t think of it,’ she lied.

Despite Adrià’s initial good intentions, he eventually took over the walls without wardrobes and Caterina ended up having to live with fine art books and encyclopedias. Visibly wrinkling her nose did her no good.

‘Can’t you see there’s no other space for them?’ begged Adrià.

‘Well, it’s not exactly a small flat. What do you want so many books for?’

‘To eat them.’

‘A waste of a lovely flat, you can’t even see the walls.’

Caterina inspected the laundry room and said I’ll have to get used to working with books around.

‘Don’t worry, Little Lola. They stay still and quiet during the day.’

‘Caterina,’ said Caterina looking at him askance because she wasn’t sure if he was pulling her leg or if he was mad as a hatter.

‘And all this stuff you brought from Germany, what is it?’ asked Bernat one day, suspiciously opening the top of a cardboard box with his fingertips.

‘Basically, philology and philosophy. And some novels. Böll, Grass, Faulkner, Mann, Llor, Capmany, Roth and things like that.’

‘Where do you want to put them?’

‘Philosophy, in the front hall. With mathematics and astronomy. And philology and linguistics, in Little Lola’s room. The novels, each in the corresponding hallway.’

‘Well, let’s get to it.’

‘What orchestra do you want to play Bartók with?’

‘With mine. I want to ask for an audition.’

‘Wow, that’s great, don’t you think?’

‘We’ll see if they’ll listen to reason.’

‘If they’ll listen to the violin, you mean.’

‘Yes. You’re going to have to order more shelves.’

He ordered them, and Planas was happy as a clam because Adrià’s orders showed no signs of letting up. And on the
fourth day of creation Caterina won an important victory because she got permission from the Lord to dust all the books in the flat except for the ones in the study. And she decided that she would also come on Thursday mornings for a modest supplement, that way she could guarantee that once a year she’d have dusted all the books. And Adrià said as you wish, Little Lola: you know more about these things than I do.

‘Caterina.’

‘And since there is still space there, in the guest room, religion, theology, ethnology and the Greco-Roman world.’

And it was the moment when the Lord parted the waters and let the earth dry and created the ocean seas.

‘You’ll have to … What do you like better, cats or dogs?’

‘No, no, neither.’ Curtly, ‘Neither.’

‘You don’t want them to shit on you. Right?’

‘No, it’s not that.’

‘Yeah, sure, if you say so …’ Sarcastic tone from Bernat as he placed a pile of books on the floor. ‘But it would do you good to have a pet.’

‘I don’t want anything to die on me. Understood?’ he said as he filled up the second row in front of the bathroom with prose in Slavic languages. And the domestic animals were created and the wild animals populated the earth and he saw that it was good.

And, seated on the dark floor of hallway one, they reviewed their melancholy: ‘Boy, Karl May. I have a lot of his, too.’

‘Look: Salgari. God, no: twelve Salgaris.’

‘And Verne. I had this one with engravings by Doré.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘Who knows.’

‘And Enid Blyton. Not the strongest prose. But I read them thirty times over.’

‘What are you going to do with the Tintins?’

‘I don’t want to throw anything out. But I don’t where to put it all.’

‘You still have a lot of room.’

And the Lord said yes, I have a lot of room, but I want to
keep buying books. And my problem is where do I put the karlmays and julesvernes, you know? And the other said I understand. And they saw that in the bathroom there was a space between the little closet and the ceiling, and Planas, enthused, made a sturdy double shelf and all the books he had read as a kid went to rest there.

‘That’s not going to fall?’

‘If it falls, I will personally come and hold it up for the rest of time.’

‘Like Atlas.’

‘What?’

‘Like a caryatid.’

‘Well, I don’t know. But I can assure you that it won’t fall down. You can shit with no worries. Pardon me. I mean, don’t worry, it won’t fall.’

‘And in the small toilet, the magazines.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Bernat as he moved twenty kilos of ancient history through the Romance prose hallway to Adrià’s childhood bedroom.

‘And in the kitchen, cookbooks.’

‘You need a bibliography to fry to an egg?’

‘They’re Mother’s books; I don’t want to throw them out.’

And as he said I will make man in my image and likeness, he thought of Sara. Of Laura. No, Sara. No, Laura. I don’t know: but he thought of her.

And on the seventh day, Adrià and Bernat rested and they invited Tecla over to see their creation and after the visit they sat in the armchairs in the study. Tecla, who was already pregnant with Llorenç, was impressed by all their work and said to her husband let’s see if some day you decide to tidy things up in our house. And they drank tea from Can Múrria that was delicious. And Bernat straightened up suddenly, as if he had been pricked with a pin: ‘Where’s the Storioni?’

‘In the safe.’

‘Take it out. It needs air. And you have to play it so its voice doesn’t fade out.’

‘I do play it. I’m trying to get my level back up. I play it obsessively and I’m starting to fall in love with that instrument.’

‘That Storioni is easy to love,’ said Bernat in a whisper.

‘Is it true you play the piano too?’ Tecla, curious.

‘At a very basic level.’ As if excusing himself: ‘If you live alone, you have a lot of time for yourself.’

Seven two eight zero six five. Vial was the only occupant of the safe. When he pulled it out, it seemed it had grown pale from so long in the dungeon.

‘Poor thing. Why don’t you put it with the incunabula, in the cabinet?’

‘Good idea. But the insurers …’

‘Screw them.’

‘Who’s going to steal it?’

Adrià passed it, with a gesture that strove for solemnity, to his friend. Play something, he said to him. And Bernat tuned it, the D string was slightly flat, and he played Beethoven’s two fantasies in such a way that we could sense the orchestra. I still think that he played extraordinarily, as if having lived far away from me had matured him, and I thought that when Tecla wasn’t there I would say kid, why don’t you stop writing about stuff you know nothing about and devote yourself to what you do so well, eh?

‘Don’t start,’ responded Bernat when I posed that question to him eight days later. And the Lord contemplated his work and said it was very good, because he had the universe at home and more or less in universal decimal classification. And he said to the books grow and multiply and go forth throughout the house.

‘I
’ve never seen such a large flat,’ said Laura in admiration, still wearing her coat.

‘Here, take that off.’

‘Or such a dark one.’

‘I always forget to open the blinds. Wait.’

He showed her the most presentable part of the flat and when they went into the study, he couldn’t help but do so with possessive pride.

‘Wow, is that a violin?’

Adrià pulled it out of the cabinet and put it in her hands. It
was obvious that she didn’t know what to do with it. Then he put it under the loupe and turned on the light.

‘Read what’s in here.’

‘Laurentius Storioni Cremonensis …’ with difficulty, but with longing, ‘me fecit seventeen sixty-four. Wow.’ She looked up, amazed. ‘It must have cost a shitload, I mean an arm and a leg.’

‘I guess. I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’ With her mouth agape she gave him back the instrument, as if it were burning her hand.

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘You are strange, Adrià.’

‘Yes.’

They were quiet for a little while, not knowing what to say to each other. I like that girl. But every time I court her, I think of you, Sara, and I wonder what made our eternal love suffer so many encumbrances. At that moment I still couldn’t understand it.

‘Do you play the violin?’

‘Yeah. A little.’

‘Come on, play me something.’

‘Uhh …’

I supposed that Laura didn’t know much about music. In fact, I was wrong: she didn’t know a thing. But since I didn’t yet know that, I played for her, from memory and with some invention, the
Meditation from Thaïs
, which is very effective. With my eyes closed because I couldn’t remember all of the fingering and I needed all my concentration. And when Adrià opened his eyes, Laura was disconsolate, crying blue tears, and looking at me as if I were a god or a monster and I asked her what’s wrong, Laura, and she replied I don’t know, I think I got emotional because I felt something here and she made some circles with her hand on her stomach; and I answered that’s the sound of the violin, it’s magnificent. And then she couldn’t hold back a sob and until then I hadn’t realised that she wore a very discreet bit of makeup on her eyes because the mascara had smudged a little and she looked very, very sweet. But this time I hadn’t used her, like in Rome. She came
because that morning I had said would you like to come to the inauguration of my flat? And she, who was just getting out of Greek class, I think, said you’ve moved? And I, no. And she, are you having a party? And I, no, but I’m inaugurating a new order in the house and …