Confessions (50 page)

‘Works of art are of an infinite solitude, said Rilke.’

The thirty-seven students looked at him in silence. Professor Adrià Ardèvol got up, left the dais and began to deliberately ascend a few of the terraced rows of chairs. No comments?, he asked.

No: no one had any comments. My students have no comment when I prod them with that bit about works of art being an infinite solitude. And if I tell them that artwork is the enigma that no reasoning can master?

‘Artwork is the enigma that no reasoning can master.’

Now his walking had led him to the middle of the classroom. Some heads turned to look at him. Ten years after Franco’s death, students had lost the impetus that made them participate in everything, chaotically, uselessly but passionately.

‘The hidden reality of things and of life can only be deciphered, approximately, with the help of art, even if it is incomprehensible.’ He looked at them, turning to take them all in with his gaze. ‘In the enigmatic poem echoes the voice of unresolved conflict.’

She raised her hand. The girl with the short hair. She had raised her hand! Perhaps she would ask him if all that about the incomprehensible was going to be on the exam the next day; perhaps she would ask him for permission to use the
toilet. Perhaps she would ask him if through art we can grasp all that which man had to renounce in order to build an objective world.

He pointed to the girl with the short hair and said yes, go ahead.

‘Your reprehensible name will always be remembered as one of those that contributed to the horror that vilified humanity.’ He said it in English with a Manchester accent and a formulaic tone, not worrying if he’d been understood. With a dirty finger he pointed to a place on the document. Budden raised his eyebrows.

‘Here must sign you,’ said the sergeant impatiently, in a terrible German he seemed to be making up as he went along. And he tapped several times with his dirty finger to show exactly where.

Budden did so and returned the document.

‘You are free.’

Free. Once he was out of prison, he fled for a second time, again without any clear destination. Yet he stopped in a frozen village on the Baltic coast, in the shelter of a humble Carthusian monastery, and he spent the winter contemplating the fireplace of the silent house where they’d taken him in. He did just enough odd jobs around the house and the town to survive. He spoke little because he didn’t want to be recognised as an educated person and he worked hard to toughen up his pianist and surgeon’s hands. In the house that took him in they didn’t speak much either because the married couple who lived there were grieving over the death of their only son Eugen on the Russian front during damn Hitler’s damn war. The winter was long for Budden, who had been put into the mourned son’s room in exchange for all the work he could do; he stayed there for two long years, during which he spoke to no one, except when strictly necessary, as if he were one of the monks in the neighbouring Carthusian monastery; strolling alone, letting himself be whipped by the cutting wind off the Gulf of Finland, crying when no one could see him, not allowing the images that tormented him to vanish unjustly because in remembrance there is penitence. At the end of that
two-year-long winter, he headed to the Carthusian monastery of Usedom and, on his knees, asked the brother doorman for someone to hear his confession. After some hesitation at his unusual request, they assigned him a father confessor, an old man who was accustomed to silence, with a grey gaze and a vaguely Lithuanian accent whenever he strung together more than three words. Beginning when the Terce rang out, Budden didn’t leave out a single detail, with his head bowed and his voice monotonous. He could feel the poor monk’s shocked eyes piercing the back of his neck. The monk only interrupted him once, after the first hour of confession.

‘Are you Catholic, my son?’ he asked him.

Throughout the other four hours of the confession, he didn’t say a peep. There was one point where Budden thought that the man was crying silently. When the bells rang to call the monks to the Vespers prayers, the confessor said ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis with a trembling voice, and he made a shaky sign of the cross as he mumbled the rest of the formula. And then there was silence, even with the echo of the bell; but the penitent hadn’t moved.

‘And the penance, Father?’

‘Go in the name of …’ He didn’t dare to take God’s name in vain; he coughed uncomfortably and continued. ‘There is no penance that could … No penance that … Repent, my son; repent, my son. Repent … Do you know what I think, deep down?’

Budden lifted his head, distressed but also surprised. The confessor had leaned his head sweetly to one side and was engaged by a crack in the wood.

‘What do you think, Father? …’

Budden stared at the crack in the wood; he had trouble seeing it because the light was starting to fade. Father? he said. Father? And it seemed that he was that Lithuanian boy who moaned and said Tėve, Tėve!, from the bunk bed at the back. The confessor was dead and he could no longer help him, no matter how much he begged. And he began to pray for the first time in many years, some sort of invented prayer pleading for relief he didn’t deserve.

‘Honestly, poems or a song … they don’t make me think all that.’

Adrià was thrilled because the girl hadn’t asked if that was going to be on the exam. His eyes were even shining.

‘All right. What do they make you think?’

‘Nothing.’

Some laughter. The girl turned, a bit bothered by the laughing.

‘Quiet,’ said Adrià. He looked at the girl with the short hair, encouraging her to continue.

‘Well …’ she said. ‘They don’t make me think. They make me feel things I can’t describe.’ In a softer voice, ‘Sometimes …’ even softer voice, ‘they make me cry.’

Now no one laughed. The three or four seconds of silence that followed were the most important moment of that course. The beadle ruined it by opening the door and announcing the end of the class.

‘Art is my salvation, but it can’t save humanity,’ responded Professor Ardèvol to the beadle, who closed the door, ashamed by that professor who was off his rocker.

‘A
rt is my salvation, but it can’t save humanity,’ he repeated to Sara as they breakfasted in the dining room, in front of the Urgell that seemed it was also awakening to the new day.

‘No: humanity is hopeless.’

‘Don’t be sad, my love.’

‘I can’t stop being sad.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think that …’

Silence. She took a sip of tea. The doorbell rang and Adrià went to answer it.

‘Watch out, move aside.’

Caterina came in and ran to the bathroom with a dripping umbrella.

‘It’s raining?’

‘You wouldn’t even notice lightning and snow,’ she said from the bathroom.

‘You’re always exaggerating.’

‘Exaggerating? You couldn’t find water in the sea!’

I went back to the dining room. Sara was finishing her breakfast. Adrià put a hand over hers to keep her from getting up.

‘Why can’t you stop being sad?’

She was silent. She wiped her mouth with a blue-and-white chequered napkin and folded it slowly. I was waiting, standing, as I heard the usual noises Caterina made at the other end of the flat.

‘Because I think that if I stop … I am sinning against the memory of my people. Of my uncle. Of … I have so many dead.’

I sat down without taking my hand off hers.

‘I love you,’ I told you. And you looked at me sadly, serenely and beautifully. ‘Let’s have a baby,’ I finally dared to say.

You shook your head no, as if you didn’t dare to say it out loud.

‘Why not?’

You lifted your eyebrows and said oof.

‘It’s life against death, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t have the heart.’ You shook your head while you said no, no, no, no, no.

For a long time I wondered why you gave so many nos in response to having a child. One of my deepest regrets is not having watched a girl who looked like you grow up and to whom no one would say be still, damn it, or I’ll rip off your nose, because she would never have to nervously wring a blue- and white-checked napkin. Or a boy who wouldn’t have to beg Tėve, Tėve in panic.

After that confession he’d paid so dearly for on the frozen island of Usedom, Budden left the chair in front of the fireplace, he left behind that icy town on the Baltic shore having robbed his trusting hosts of an ID card from their beloved Eugen Müss to save himself problems with the Allied forces of occupation, and he began his third flight, as if he were afraid that the poor confessor, from his grave, could accuse him before his grieving brothers of any number of deserved sins. Deep down it wasn’t the Carthusians and their silence that
he was afraid of. He wasn’t afraid of the penance they hadn’t imposed on him; he wasn’t afraid of death; he didn’t deserve suicide because he knew that he had to make amends for his evil. And he knew full well that he deserved eternal hellfire and he didn’t feel he had the right to avoid it. But he still had work to do before going to hell. ‘You have to see, my son,’ the confessor had told him before absolution and death, in the only, brief comments he had made during the long, eternal confession, ‘how you can make amends for the evil you have done.’ And in a lower voice, he had added: ‘If amends are possible …’ After a few seconds of doubt, he continued: ‘May divine mercy, which is infinite, forgive me, but even if you try to make amends for the evil, I don’t think there is a place for you in paradise.’ During his flight, Eugen Müss thought about making amends for his evil. He’d had it easier the other times, because in his first flight they’d only had to destroy archives; he had to destroy the corpus delicti; the little corpses delicti. My God.

In three monasteries, two Czech and one Hungarian, they turned him away with kind words. The fourth, after a long period as a postulant, accepted him. He was luckier than that poor friar who was fleeing from fear, who begged to be admitted as just another monk twenty-nine times and the father prior at Sant Pere del Burgal, looking into his eyes, refused him. Until one rainy, happy Friday that was the thirtieth time he begged to be admitted. Müss wasn’t fleeing from fear: he was fleeing from Doctor Budden.

Father Klaus, who was then the master of the novitiates, also kept a hand in with the aspirants. His interpretation was that the still young man had spiritual thirst, an eagerness for prayer and penance that the Cistercian life could offer him. So he accepted him as a postulant at the Mariawald monastery.

The life of prayer brought him close to the presence of God, always with the fear and certainty that he wasn’t worthy of breathing. One day, after eight months, Father Albert collapsed in a heap as he was walking through the cloister in front of him, when he headed to the chapterhouse where the father abbot was waiting to speak with them about some changes
to their schedule. Brother Eugen Müss didn’t calculate his reaction well and when he saw Father Albert on the ground he said it’s a heart attack and he gave precise instructions to those who rushed over to help him. Father Albert survived, but the surprised brothers discovered that Novice Müss not only had medical knowledge but was, in fact, a doctor.

‘Why have you hidden this from us?’

Silence. He looked at the ground. I wanted to start a new life. I didn’t think it was important information.

‘I am the one who decides what is important and what is superfluous.’

He was unable to hold either the father abbot’s gaze or Father Albert’s, when he went to visit him in his convalescence. What’s more, Müss was convinced that Father Albert, as he thanked him for his response that had saved his life, guessed his secret.

Müss’s reputation as a doctor grew over the following months. When it came time for him to take the first vows and change his first name from Eugen, which wasn’t his anyway, to Arnold – this time according to the Rule, as a sign of renunciation – he had already cured a bout of collective food poisoning effectively and selflessly, and his reputation was firmly established. So when Brother Robert had his crisis, very far to the West, in another monastery in another country, his Abbot decided to recommend Brother Arnold Müss as a medical expert. And that was where his despair began again.

‘In the end, I can’t help but refer to that bit about how there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.’

‘Who said that?’

‘Adorno.’

‘I agree.’

‘I don’t: there is poetry after Auschwitz.’

‘No, but I mean … that there shouldn’t be.’

‘No. After Auschwitz, after the many pogroms, after the extermination of the Cathars, of whom not one remains, after the massacres in every period, everywhere around the world … Cruelty has been present for so many centuries that the history of humanity would be the history of the impossibility
of poetry ‘after’. And yet it hasn’t been that, because who can explain Auschwitz?’

‘Those who have lived through it. Those who created it. Scholars.’

‘Yes. All that will be evidence; and they’ve made museums to remember it. But something is missing: the truth of the lived experience. That cannot be conveyed in a scholarly work.’

Bernat closed the bound pages and looked at his friend and said and?

‘It can only be conveyed through art; literary artifice, which is the closest thing to lived experience.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Yes. Poetry is needed after Auschwitz more than ever.’

‘It’s a good ending.’

‘Yes, I think so. Or I don’t know. But I think it is one of the reasons for the persistence of aesthetic will in humanity.’

‘When will it be published? I can’t wait.’

A
few months later,
La voluntat estètica
appeared, simultaneously in Catalan and in German, translated by me and meticulously revised by the patient Saint Johannes Kamenek. One of the few things I’m proud of, my dear. And stories and landscapes emerged and I stored them away in my memory. And one day, behind your back and behind mine, I went to visit Morral again.

‘How much?’

‘That much.’