Confessions (58 page)

‘Tante Aline,’ said Romain Gunzbourg.

‘Romain?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve grown so much!’ she lied. ‘You were like this …’ She pointed to her waist. Then she had them come in, pleased with her role as a co-conspirator.

‘He will see you; but I can’t guarantee that he’ll read it.’

‘Thank you, madam. Truly,’ said Bernat.

She had them go into some sort of small hallway. On the walls were framed scores by Bach. Bernat pointed with his chin to one of the reproductions. Romain went over to it. In a whisper: ‘I told you I was from the poor branch.’ About the framed score: ‘I’m sure it’s an original.’

A door opened and Tante Aline had them come into a large room, filled with books from top to bottom, ten times more
books than in Adrià’s house. And a table filled with folders stuffed with papers. And some piles of books with numerous slips of long paper as bookmarks. And before the desk, sitting in an armchair was Isaiah Berlin, with a book in his hand, who looked curiously at that strange pair who had entered his sanctuary.

‘How did it go?’ asked Sara, when he came back.

Berlin seemed tired. He spoke little and when Bernat gave him the copy of
Der ästhetische Wille,
the man took it, turned it over and then opened it at the index. For a long minute no one said a peep. Tante Aline winked at her nephew. When Berlin finished examining the book he closed it and left it in his hands.

‘And why do you think I should read it?’

‘Well, I … If you don’t want to …’

‘Don’t cringe, man! Why do you want me to read it?’

‘Because it is very good. It’s excellent, Mr Berlin. Adrià Ardèvol is a profound and intelligent man. But he lives too far from the centre of the world.’

Isaiah Berlin put the book on a small table and said every day I read and every day I realise that I have everything left to read. And every once in a while I reread, even though I only reread that which deserves the privilege of rereading.

‘And what earns it that privilege?’ Now Bernat sounded like Adrià.

‘Its ability to fascinate the reader; to make him admire it for its intelligence or its beauty. Even though with rereading, by its very nature, we always enter into contradiction.’

‘What do you mean, Isaiah?’ interrupted Tante Aline.

‘A book that doesn’t deserve to be reread doesn’t deserve to be read either.’ He looked at the guests. ‘Have you asked them if they would like some tea?’ He looked at the book and he immediately forgot his pragmatic suggestion. He continued: ‘But before reading it we don’t know that it’s not worthy of a rereading. Life is cruel like that.’

They spoke about everything for a little while, both of the visitors sitting on the edge of the sofa. They didn’t have any tea because Romain had given his auntie a signal that it was
best to take advantage of the little time they had. And they spoke of the orchestra’s tour.

‘French horn? Why do you play the French horn?’

‘I fell in love with the sound,’ replied Romain Gunzbourg.

And then the strange pair told them that the next evening they would perform at the Royal Festival Hall. And the Berlins promised they would listen to them on the radio.

In the programme there was
Leonora
(number three), Robert Gerhard’s second symphony and Bruckner’s fourth with Gunzbourg on the French horn and dozens more musicians. It went well. Gerhard’s widow attended, was moved, and received the bouquet of flowers meant for Decker. And the next day they returned home after five concerts in Europe that had left them worn out and with divided opinions about whether it was good to do microtours during the season or ruin the summer gigs with a more properly set-up tour or forget about tours altogether, with what they pay us we do enough just going to all the rehearsals, don’t you think?

In the hotel, Bernat found an urgent message and thought what’s happened to Llorenç, and that was the first time he worried about his son, perhaps because he was still thinking about the unwrapped book he had given him.

It was an urgent telephone message from Mr Isaiah Berlin that said, in the evening receptionist’s handwriting, that he should come urgently to Headington House, if possible the next day, that it was very important.

‘Tecla.’

‘How did it go?’

‘Well. Poldi Feichtegger came. Adorable: eighty-something years old. The bouquet of flowers was bigger than she was.’

‘You are coming home tomorrow, right?’

‘Well. I, it’s that … I have to stay one more day, because …’

‘Because of what?’

Bernat, loyal to his special way of complicating his life, didn’t want to tell Tecla that Isaiah Berlin had asked him to come back to talk about my book, which he had found very, very interesting, which he had read in a matter of hours but was starting to reread because it had a series of perceptions
that he considered brilliant and profound, and that he wanted to meet me. It would have been easy to tell her that. But Bernat wouldn’t be Bernat if he wasn’t making his life more complicated. He didn’t trust Tecla’s ability to keep a secret, which I have to admit he was right about. But he chose silence and replied because an urgent job came up.

‘What job?’

‘This thing. It’s … it’s complicated.’

‘Drinking French wine with a French horn?’

‘No, Tecla. I have to go to Oxford to … There’s a book that … anyway I’ll be home the day after tomorrow.’

‘And they’re going to change your ticket?’

‘Ay, that’s right.’

‘Well: I think it’d be best, if you plan on flying back. If you plan on coming back at all.’

And she hung up. Bollocks, thought Bernat; I screwed up again. But the next morning he changed his plane ticket, took the train to Oxford and Berlin told him what he had to tell him and he gave him a note for me that read dear sir, your book moved me deeply. Particularly the reflection on the why behind beauty. And how this why can be asked in every period of humanity. And also how it is impossible to separate it from the inexplicable presence of evil. I just recommended it effusively to some of my colleagues. When will it be published in English? Please, don’t stop thinking and, every once in a while, writing down your thoughts. Sincerely yours, Isaiah Berlin. And I am so grateful to Bernat, for the consequences of his persuading Berlin to read my book, which were essential for me, but even more so for the tenacity with which he has always tried to help me. And I reward his efforts by talking to him sincerely about his writings and causing him severe bouts of depression. Friend, life is so hard.

‘And swear to me one more time that you will never mention it to Adrià.’ He looked at her with fervent eyes. ‘You understand me, Sara?’

‘I swear.’ And after a pause: ‘Bernat.’

‘Hmmm?’

‘Thank you. From me and from Adrià.’

‘No need for that. I always owe Adrià things.’

‘What do you owe him?’

‘I don’t know. Things. He’s my friend. He’s a kid who … Even though he’s so wise, he still wants to be my friend and put up with my crises. After all these years.’

V
issarion Grigoryevich Belinsky was to blame for the fact that when I turned fifty I started to brush up my neglected Russian. To distance myself from fruitless approaches to the nature of evil, I immersed myself in the suicidal attempt to bring Berlin, Vico and Llull together in one book and I was starting to see, to my surprise, that it was possible. As usually happened in moments of unexpected discoveries, I had to distance myself in order to reassure myself that the intuition wasn’t a mirage and so I spent a few days paging through completely different things, including Belinsky. It was Belinksy, the scholar and enthusiastic propagandist of Pushkin, who gave me a pressing desire to read in Russian. Belinsky talking about Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin and not Pushkin’s work directly. I understood what the interest in others’ literature meant, that which pushes you to create literature without realising it. I was passionate about Belinsky’s passion, so much so that what I knew of Pushkin didn’t impress me until I reread him after reading Belinsky. Before my eyes, Ruslan, Ludmila, Farlaf, Ratmir, Rodgay and also Chernomor and the Boss came to life, recited out loud thanks to what Belinsky had inspired in me. Sometimes I think about the power of art and about the study of art and I get frightened. Sometimes I don’t understand why humanity is always fighting when there are so many other things to do. Sometimes I think that we are more wicked than we are poets and, therefore, that we are hopeless. The problem is that no one is without sin. Very, very few people, to be more precise. Very, very few. And then Sara came in and Adrià, whose gaze was on the inextricable whole: verses of jealousy, love and Russian language, could tell without looking at her that Sara’s eyes were gleaming. He lifted his gaze.

‘How did it go?’

She put down the folders with the portrait samples on the sofa.

‘We are going to do the exhibition,’ she said.

‘Bravo!’

Adrià got up, glanced with a bit of nostalgia at Ludmila’s doom and hugged Sara.

‘Thirty portraits.’

‘How many do you have?’

‘Twenty-eight.’

‘All charcoal?’

‘Yes, yes: that will be the leitmotif: seeing the soul in charcoal or something like that. They have to find a really lovely phrase.’

‘Make them show it to you first: to make sure they don’t come up with something ridiculous.’

‘Seeing the soul in charcoal isn’t ridiculous.’

‘No, of course not! But gallery owners aren’t poets. And the ones at Artipèlag …’ Pointing to the folders resting on the sofa: ‘I’m so pleased. You deserve it.’

‘I need to make two more portraits.’

I already knew that you wanted to make one of me. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but I did like your enthusiasm. At my age I was starting to learn that more than things, what was important was the excitement we projected into them. That is what makes us people. And Sara was in an exceptional moment: every day she was more respected for her drawings. I had only twice asked why she didn’t try her hand at painting, and she, with that gentle but definitive stance, both times told me no, Adrià, what makes me happy is drawing with pencil and charcoal. My life is in black and white, perhaps in memory of my family, who lived in black and white. Or perhaps …

‘Perhaps there’s no need for you to explain.’

‘You’re right.’

At dinnertime I said that I knew whom the other portrait should be of and she said who? and I answered a self-portrait. She stopped with her fork in the air, thinking it over;
I surprised you, Sara. You hadn’t thought of that. You never think of yourself.

‘I’m embarrassed,’ you said, after a few long seconds of silence. And you put the bite of croquette into your mouth.

‘Well, get over it. You’re a big girl.’

‘It’s not arrogant?’

‘No, quite the opposite; it is a display of humility: you bare the souls of twenty-nine people and you subject yourself to the same interrogation as the others. It would seem that you’re restoring the order of things.’

Now I caught you again with your fork in the air. You put it down and you said you know, you might be right. And thanks to that, today as I write to you I have your extraordinary self-portrait on the wall in front of me, beside the incunabula, presiding over my world. It is the most valuable object in this study. Your self-portrait that was to be the last drawing in the exhibition you prepared so meticulously, whose opening you were unable to attend.

F
or me, Sara’s work is some sort of window into inner silence. An invitation to introspection. Sara, I love you. And I remember you suggesting an order for the thirty artworks, and secretly making the first sketches for your self-portrait. And those at the Artipèlag Gallery outdid themselves:
Sara Voltes-Epstein. Charcoal drawings. A window into the soul.
It was a gorgeous catalogue that made one want to be sure to see the exhibition, or buy up every drawing. Your mature work that took you two years to complete. Without rushing, naturally, calmly, the way you’ve always done things.

The self-portrait is the work that took her the longest, locked up in her studio without witnesses, because she was embarrassed to be seen observing herself in the mirror, looking at herself on paper and working the details, the sweet crease at the corners of her lips, the small defeats that huddle inside the wrinkles. And the little lines at your eyes that are so much a part of you, Sara. And all those tiny signs that I don’t know how to reproduce but which make a face, as if it were a violin, become a landscape that reflects the long winter voyage in full
detail, with total immodesty, my God. As if it were the cruel tachograph that records the lorry driver’s life, your face draws our tears, your tears without me, which I don’t entirely know about and the tears for the misfortunes that befell your family and your people. And some joys that were beginning to show in the brightness of your eyes and illuminate the splendid face that I have before me now as I write you this long letter that was only meant to be a few pages. I love you. I discovered you, I lost you and I found you again. And above all we had the privilege to begin to grow old together. Until the moment that misfortune entered our house.

During those days she was unable to do any illustrations and the assignments began to pile up in a way that had never happened to her before. All her thoughts were focused on the charcoal portraits.

I
t was one month before the opening at the Artipèlag and I, before returning to Vico, Llull and Berlin, had gone from Pushkin and Belinsky to Hobbes, with his sinister vision of human nature, always prone to evil. And between one thing and another I ended up in his translation of the
Iliad
, which I read in a delicious mid-nineteenth-century edition. And yes, the misfortune.

Thomas Hobbes was trying to convince me that I had to choose between liberty and order because, otherwise, the wolf would come, the wolf that I had seen so many times in human nature when studying history and knowledge. I heard the sound of a key in the lock, the door closing silently and it wasn’t the wolf Hobbes warned of, but Sara’s mute footsteps, which entered the study. She stood there for a few seconds, still and soundless. I looked up and immediately realised that we had a problem. Sara sat on the sofa behind which I had spied on so many secrets with Carson and Black Eagle. She had trouble getting the words out. It was all too clear that she was searching for the right way to say it and Adrià took off his reading glasses and helped her along, saying, hey, Sara, what’s wrong?

Sara got up, went to the instrument cabinet and pulled out
Vial. She put it on the reading table with a bit too much emphasis, almost covering up poor Hobbes who was in no way to blame.

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘Father bought it.’ Suspicious pause. ‘I already showed you the buyer’s certificate. Why?’

‘It’s Vial, the only Storioni with a proper name.’

Sara kept silent, prepared to listen. And Guillaume-François Vial took a step out of the darkness, so the person inside the carriage could see him. The coachman stopped the horses right in front of him. He opened the door and Monsieur Vial got into the coach.

‘Good evening,’ said La Guitte.

‘You can give it to me, Monsieur La Guitte. My uncle has agreed to the price.’

La Guitte laughed to himself, proud of his nose. So many days roasting in Cremona’s sun had been worth it. To make sure: ‘We are talking about five thousand florins.’

‘We are talking about five thousand florins,’ Monsieur Vial reassured him.

‘Tomorrow you will have the famous Lorenzo Storioni’s violin in your hands.’

‘Don’t try to deceive me: Storioni isn’t famous.’

‘In Italy, in Naples and Florence … they speak of no one else.’

‘And in Cremona?’

‘The Bergonzis and the others aren’t happy at all about the appearance of that new workshop.’

‘You already explained all that to me …’ Sara, standing, impatient, like a strict teacher expecting an awkward child’s excuses.

But Adrià, tuning her out, said ‘mon cher tonton! …’ he declared as he burst into the room early the next morning. Jean-Marie Leclair didn’t even deign to look up; he was watching the flames in the fireplace. ‘Mon cher tonton,’ repeated Vial, with less enthusiasm.

Leclair half turned. Without looking him in the eyes he asked him if he had the violin with him. Leclair was soon
running his fingers over the instrument. From a painting on the wall emerged a servant with a beak-like nose with a violin bow in his hand, and Leclair spent some time searching out all of that Storioni’s possible sounds with fragments of three of his sonatas.

‘It’s very good,’ he said when he had finished. ‘How much did it cost you?’

‘How.’

‘Ten thousand florins, plus a five-hundred coin reward that you’ll give me for finding this jewel.’

‘Hey, how!’

With an authoritative wave, Leclair sent out the servants. He put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder and smiled. And I heard Sheriff Carson’s curt spit hitting the ground, but I paid him no heed.

‘You are a bastard. I don’t know who you take after, you son of a rotten bitch. Your poor mother, which I doubt, or your pathetic father. Thief, conman.’

‘Why? I just …’ Fencing with their eyes. ‘Fine: I can forget about the reward.’

‘You think that I would trust you, after so many years of you being such a thorn in my side?’

‘So why did you entrust me to …’

‘As a test, you stupid son of a sickly, mangy bitch. This time you won’t escape prison.’ After a few seconds, for emphasis: ‘You don’t know how I’ve been waiting for this moment.’

‘How, Adrià, you’re drifting! Look her in the face!’

‘You’ve always wanted my ruin, Tonton Jean. You envy me.’

‘Christ, child. Listen to Black Eagle! She already knows all that. You’ve already told her.’

Leclair looked at him in surprise and pointed to him: ‘No flea-ridden cowboy should even address me.’

‘Hey, hey … I didn’t say anything to you. And I deserve to be treated with respect.’

‘Piss off, both of you, you and your friend with the feathers on his head who looks like a turkey.’

‘How.’

‘How what?’ Leclair, absolutely irritated.

‘Instead of making friends, you’d be wise to continue the argument with your nephew before the sun sets over the western hill.’

Leclair looked at Guillaume Vial, somewhat disconcerted. He had to make an effort to concentrate and then pointed at him: ‘What do you think I could envy about you, you wretched, crappy fleabag?’

Vial, red as a tomato, was too enraged to be able to respond.

‘It’s better if we don’t go into details,’ he said just to say something.

Leclair looked at him with contempt.

‘Why not go into details? Physique? Height? People skills? Friendliness? Talent? Moral stature?’

‘This conversation is over, Tonton Jean.’

‘It will end when I say so. Intelligence? Culture? Wealth? Health?’

Leclair grabbed the violin and improvised a pizzicato. He examined it with respect.

‘Adrià.’

‘What?’

Sara sat down in front of me. I faintly heard Sheriff Carson saying watch out, kid, this is serious; and then don’t tell me we didn’t warn you. You looked me in the eyes: ‘I said I already know that. You explained it to me a long time ago!’

‘Yes, yes, it’s just that Leclair said the violin is very good, but I don’t give a damn, you understand me? I only want to be able to send you to prison.’

‘You are a bad uncle.’

‘And you are a bastard who I’ve finally been able to unmask.’

‘The brave warrior has lost his marbles after so many battles.’ A curt gob of spit corroborated the valiant Arapaho chief’s statement.

Leclair pulled on the little bell’s rope and the servant with the beak-like nose entered through the door to the back of the room.

‘Call the commissioner. He can come whenever he’s ready.’ To his nephew: ‘Have a seat, we’ll wait for Monsieur Béjart.’

They didn’t have a chance to sit down. Instead Guillaume-François Vial walked in front of the fireplace, grabbed the poker and bashed in his beloved tonton’s head. Jean-Marie Leclair, known as l’Aîne, was unable to say another word. He collapsed without even a groan, the poker stuck in his head. Splattered blood stained the violin’s wooden case. Vial, breathing heavily, wiped his clean hands on his uncle’s coat and said you don’t know how much I was looking forward to this moment, Tonton Jean. He looked around him, grabbed the violin, put it into the blood-spattered case and left the room through the balcony that led to the terrace. As he ran away, in the light of day, it occurred to him that he should make a not very friendly visit to La Guitte the bigmouth. And Father bought it long before I was born from someone named Saverio Falegnami, the legal owner of the instrument.

Silence. Unfortunately, I had nothing more to say. Well, I had no interest in saying anything further. Sara stood up.

‘Your father bought it in nineteen forty-five.’

‘How do you know?’

‘And he bought it from a fugitive.’