Confessions

16

Adrià Ardèvol had matured quite a lot. Time wasn’t passing in vain. He now knew what poof meant and he had even discovered the meaning of theodicy. Black Eagle, the Arapaho chief, and valiant Sheriff Carson gathered desert dust on the shelf that held Salgari, Karl May, Zane Grey and Jules Verne. But he hadn’t managed to escape his mother’s implacable tutelage. My capacity for obedience had made me a technically good, yet soulless, violinist. Like a second-rate Bernat. Even my shameful flight from my first public recital was eventually accepted by Master Manlleu as a sign of my genius nature. Our relationship didn’t change, except that, from then on, he considered it his right to insult me when he deemed it necessary. Master Manlleu and I never spoke about music. We only spoke about the violin repertoire, and about names like Wieniaswski, Nardini, Viotti, Ernst, Sarasate, Paganini and, above all, Manlleu, Manlleu and Manlleu, and I felt like saying to him but, sir, when will we play real music? But I knew that it would set off a tempest that could cause me real damage. We only spoke of repertoire, of his repertoire. Of hand position. Of feet position. Of what clothes you have to wear when you practise. And whether the foot position could be the Sarasate-Sauret position, the Wieniaswski-Wilhelmj position, the Ysaÿe-Joachim or, only for the chosen few, the Paganini-Manlleu position. And you have to try the Paganini-Manlleu position because I want you to be a chosen one even though, unfortunately, you were unable to be a child prodigy because I arrived in your life too late.

Resuming lessons with Master Manlleu after Adrià’s escape from the recital, with a substantial raise from Mrs Ardèvol, had been extremely difficult because at first they were silent classes, designed to show the offended silence of the genius who strove to convert a boy confused by weak character into a semi-genius. Gradually, the indications and the corrections led him back to his usual loquacity until one day he said bring your Storioni.

‘Why, sir?’

‘I want to play it.’

‘I have to ask my mother for permission.’ Adrià had learned the rules of prudence after so many disasters.

‘She will let you if you tell her that it is my express wish.’

Mother said you’re crazy, what are you thinking; take your Parramon and get going. And Adrià insisted long enough that she said no means no. That was when he let out that it was Master Manlleu’s express wish.

‘You should have said that to begin with,’ she said, serious. Very serious, because mother and son had been at war for a few years and any excuse was a good one, to the point that one day Adrià said when I turn eighteen I’m going to leave home. And she answered: with what money? And he: with my hands; with my inheritance from Father; I don’t know. And she: well, you’d better find out before you leave.

And the next Friday I showed up with the Storioni. More than playing it, the master wanted to compare it. He played Wieniawski’s tarantella with my Storioni; it sounded amazing. And then, with his eyes gleaming, looking for my reaction, he revealed a secret to me: a 1702 Guarnerius that had belonged to Felix Mendelssohn. And he played the same tarantella, which sounded amazing. With a triumphant look on his face he told me that his Guarnerius sounded ten times better than my Storioni. And he gave it back to me smugly.

‘Master Manlleu, I don’t want to be a violinist.’

‘You keep quiet and practise.’

‘No.’

‘What will your adversaries say?’

‘I have no adversaries.’

‘Son,’ he said, sitting in the listening chair. ‘Everyone who is studying violin at a level above you is your adversary. And they will look for a way to sink you.’

And we went back to the vibrato, vibrato trill, and the hunt for harmonics, martelé and tremolo … and I was sadder with each passing day.

‘Mother, I don’t want to be a violinist.’

‘Son: you are a violinist.’

‘I want to give it up.’

Her response was to set up a recital for me in Paris. So I would realise what a spectacular life awaits you as a violinist, Son.

‘At eight years old,’ reflected Master Manlleu, ‘I did my first recital. You’ve had to wait until seventeen. You’ll never be able to catch up to me. But you must try to approach my greatness. And I’ll help you to overcome the trac.’

‘I don’t want to be a violinist. I want to read. And I don’t have trac.’

‘Bernat, I don’t want to be a violinist.’

‘Don’t say that, you’ll make me angry. You play great and with seeming effortlessness. It’s just trac.’

‘I have no problem with playing the violin, but I don’t want to be a violinist. I don’t want to. And I don’t have trac.’

‘Whatever you do, don’t give up your lessons.’

It wasn’t that Bernat was interested in my mental health or my future. It was that Bernat was still following along with my lessons from Manlleu, second-hand. And he was making progress in his technique and, since he didn’t have to deal with Manlleu, he didn’t get bored of it or tire of the instrument or get heartburn. And meanwhile he was studying with Massià, who had been highly recommended by Trullols.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Adrià Ardèvol was to realise that his aversion to a career as a soloist had sprung up as the only way to fight against his mother and Master Manlleu. And, when his voice was already beginning to crack because he couldn’t control it, he said Master Manlleu, I want to play music.

‘What?’

‘I want to play Brahms, Bartók, Schumann. I hate Sarasate.’

Master Manlleu was silent for a few weeks, teaching lessons with mere gestures, until one Friday he put a stack of scores, a good six inches high, on top of the piano and said come now, let’s return to the repertoire. It was the only time in his life that Master Manlleu acknowledged that Adrià was right. His father had done it only once, but he’d admitted it. Master Manlleu only said come now, let’s return to the repertoire. And in revenge for having to acknowledge that I was right he wiped the dandruff off his dark trousers and said on the twentieth of next month, in the Debussy theatre in Paris. The Kreutzer, the César Franck, Brahms’s third and just a brilliant performance of some Wieniaswski and Paganini for the encores. Happy now?

The spectre of my trac, because I had massive trac, skilfully disguised by the charming theory that my love for music kept me from etcetera. The spectre of my trac reappeared and Adrià began to sweat.

‘Who will play the piano?’

‘Some accompanist. I’ll find one for you.’

‘No. Someone who … The piano won’t accompany me: it should do what I do.’

‘Nonsense: you are the leader. Yes or no? I will find an acceptable pianist for you. Three rehearsals. And now let’s read. We’ll begin with Brahms.’

And Adrià started to feel that perhaps knowing how to play the violin was a way to figure out life, figure out the mysteries of loneliness, the growing evidence that his desires never match up to his reality, his yearning to discover what he had made happen to his father.

The acceptable pianist was Master Castells, a good pianist, timid, able to hide beneath the keys at Master Manlleu’s slightest bidding. Adrià realised very quickly that he formed part of the vast economic network of Mrs Ardèvol, who was shelling out a fortune for her son to play in Paris, in one of Pleyel’s chamber halls with a seating capacity for one hundred, of which about forty were filled. The musicians travelled alone, to concentrate on their work. Mr Castells and Adrià, in third class. Master Manlleu, in first so he could focus on his multiple roles. The musicians fought insomnia by reading the concerto and Adrià was amused to see Master Castells singing and marking his entrance and he pretended to be playing and singing softly, humouring him; it was a brilliant system to get their entrances properly in sync. That was when the steward had to come in to make the beds and he turned right around thinking that it was a compartment filled with lunatics. When they had passed Lyon, after nightfall, Master Castells confessed that Master Manlleu had him under his thumb and he wanted to ask Adrià for a favour, could he ask Master Manlleu to let them take a walk alone before the concert because … I have to see my sister and Master Manlleu doesn’t want us mixing work and pleasure, you know?

Paris was a contrivance designed by my mother to make me decide to continue studying the violin. But she didn’t know that it would change my life. That was where I met you. Thanks to her contrivance. But it wasn’t in the music hall, but before, during the semi-clandestine side trip I made with Mr Castells. To the Café Condé. He had to meet his sister there, and she brought a niece with her, who was you.

‘Saga Voltes-Epstein.’

‘Adrià Ardèvol-Bosch.’

‘I draw.’

‘I read.’

‘Aren’t you a violinist?’

‘No.’

You laughed and the sky entered the Condé. Your aunt and uncle chattered, absorbed in their things, and they didn’t notice.

‘Don’t come to the concert, please,’ I implored. And for the first time I was honest and I said in a lower voice, I’m scared to death. And what I liked best about you was that you didn’t come to the concert. That won me over. I don’t think I ever told you that.

The concert went well. Adrià played normally, not nervous, knowing that he would never see the people in the audience again in his life. And Master Castells turned out to be an excellent partner because on the couple of occasions when I hesitated he covered me very delicately. And Adrià thought that perhaps with him as a teacher he could make music.

We met thirty or forty years ago, Sara and I. The light of my life, and the person I weep most bitterly for. A girl with dark hair pulled back into two plaits, who spoke Catalan with a French accent she never lost, as if she were from the Roussillon. Sara Voltes-Epstein, who came into my life sporadically and whom I’ve always missed. The twentieth of September of the early nineteen-sixties. And after that brief encounter at the Café Condé we didn’t see each other again for two years, and the next time was also random. And at a concert.

~ ~ ~

Then Xènia stood before him and said, I’d love to.

Bernat looked into her dark eyes that matched the night. Xènia. He replied all right then, come up to my house. We can talk as long as we want. Xènia.

It had been a few months since Bernat and Tecla had parted ways in a meticulous and gruelling effort on both sides to ensure that it was a noisy, traumatic, useless, painful, angry break-up filled with petty details, particularly on her side, I don’t understand how I ever was interested in a woman like that. Much less share my life with her, it’s astounding. And Tecla explained that their last few months of living together were hell because Bernat spent all day looking in the mirror, no, no, you have to understand: he only cared about himself, as always; only his things were important at home; he was only worried about whether a concert went well, that the critics were more and more mediocre each day, how could they not mention our sublime interpretation; and whether the violin was tucked away in the safe or whether we should replace the safe because the violin is the most important thing in this house, you hear me Tecla? and if you don’t get that into your head, we’ll regret it; and, above all, what hurt me was his absolute tactlessness and lack of love for Llorenç. I couldn’t get past that. That was when I started to put my foot down. Until the blow-up and the sentencing a few months ago. He’s a terrible egomaniac who thinks he’s a great artist and he’s just a good-for-nothing idiot who, in addition to playing the violin, is constantly playing on my nerves because he thinks he’s the greatest writer in the world and he’ll say here, read it and tell me what you think. And poor me if I give him a single but, because then he’ll spend days trying to convince me that I was completely wrong and that he was the only one who knew anything about it.

‘I didn’t know he wrote.’

‘No one knows: not even his editor, really. He writes boring, pretentious crap … anyway. I still don’t understand how I could have ever been interested in a man like that. Much less spend my life with him!’

‘And why did you give up the piano?’

‘I gave it up without realising I was. Partly …’

‘Bernat continued with the violin.’

‘I gave up the piano because the priority in our house was Bernat’s career, you understand? This was many years ago. Before Llorenç.’

‘Typical.’

‘Don’t get all feminist on me: I’m telling you this as a friend; don’t get me worked up, all right?’

‘But do you really think that separating … at our age?’

‘So what? If you’re too young, because you’re too young. If you’re old, because you’re old. And we’re not that old. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. Well, I’ve got half my life ahead of me, all right?’

‘You’re very nervous.’

It was understandable: among other things, in that well-planned break-up process, Bernat had tried to get her to be the one to move out. Her reply was to grab his violin and throw it out the window. Four hours later she received word of her husband reporting her for serious damage to his assets and she had to go running to her lawyer, who had scolded her as if she were a little girl and warned her don’t play around like that, Mrs Plensa, it’s serious: if you want, I can handle the case; but you’ll have to do what I tell you to.

‘If I ever see that ruddy violin again, I’ll throw it right out the window, just like I did before, I don’t care if I end up in prison.’

‘That’s no way to talk. Do you want me to handle the case?’

‘Of course: that’s why I’ve come here.’

‘Well, I have to say that it’d be better to fight, to hate each other and throw dishes. Dishes: not the violin. That was a serious mistake.’

‘I wanted to hurt him.’

‘And you did; but you chose an idiotic way to do it, excuse my frankness.’

And he explained their strategy.

‘And now I’m telling you my problems because you’re my best friend.’

‘Don’t worry, go ahead and cry, Tecla. It’ll do you good. I do it all the time.’

‘The judge was a woman and she ruled in her favour on everything. See how unjust justice can be. All she did was give her a fine for destroying the violin. A fine she hasn’t paid and never will. Four months in Bagué’s clinic and I still don’t think it sounds the same.’

‘Is it a good instrument?’

‘Very good. A mirecourt from the late nineteenth century. A Thouvenel.’

‘Why don’t you insist she pays the fine?’

‘I don’t want to have anything more to do with Tecla. I hate her from the bottom of my heart. She’s even prejudiced me against my son. And that is almost as unforgivable as destroying the violin.’

Silence.

‘I meant the other way around.’

‘I knew what you meant.’

Every once in a while, large cities have narrow streets, silent passageways that allow your footsteps to echo in the stillness of the night, and it seems like everything is going back to the way it was, when there were only a few of us and we all knew each other and greeted each other on the street. In the period when Barcelona, at night, also went to bed. Bernat and Xènia walked along the lonely Permanyer Alley, the child of another world, and for a few minutes all they heard were their own footsteps. Xènia wore heels. Dressed to the nines. She was dressed to the nines even though it was almost an improvised meeting. And her heels echoed in the night of her dark eyes; she’s simply lovely.

‘I feel your pain,’ said Xènia when they got to Llúria and were greeted by the honk of a noisy taxi in a hurry. ‘But you have to get it out of your head. It’s better if you don’t talk about it.’

‘You were the one who asked me.’

‘If only I’d known …’

As Bernat opened the door to his flat he said right back where I started from, and then explained that he had grown up in the Born district and now, coincidentally, after his separation, he had moved back. And I like being back here because I have memories around every corner. You want whisky or something like that?

‘I don’t drink.’

‘Neither do I. But I have some for guests.’

‘I’ll have some water.’

‘The bitch didn’t even give me the option of staying in my own home. I had to pull myself up by my bootstraps.’ He opened his arms as if he wanted to show her the whole flat in one swoop. ‘But I’m glad to be back in my old neighbourhood. This way.’

He pointed towards where she should go. He went ahead to turn on the light in the room. ‘I think that people make a journey and then come back to where they started from. We always return to our roots. Unless we die first.’

It was a large room, surely meant to be a dining room. There was a sofa and an armchair in front of a small round table, two music stands with scores on them, a cabinet with three instruments and a table with a computer and a large pile of papers beside it. The opposite wall was covered with books and scores. As if they summed up Bernat’s life.

Xènia opened her purse, pulled out the tape recorder and placed it in front of Bernat.

‘You see? I’ve haven’t got it all fixed up yet, but this is meant to be a living room.’

‘It’s quite comfortable.’

‘Tecla, that bitch, didn’t even let me take a stick of furniture. It’s all from Ikea. At my age and shopping at Ikea. Hell’s bells, are you recording?’

Xènia turned off the tape recorder. In a tone he hadn’t heard the whole evening: ‘Do you want to talk about your bitch of a wife or about your books? So I know whether to turn the tape recorder on or not.’

The silence was so deep they could have heard their own footsteps. But they weren’t walking along a deserted narrow street. Bernat could make out his own heartbeat and he felt incredibly ridiculous. He waited for the sound of a motorbike going up Llúria to pass.

‘Touché.’

‘I don’t speak French.’

Bernat vanished, embarrassed. He returned with a bottle of some water she’d never seen before. And two Ikea glasses.

‘Water from the clouds of Tasmania. You’ll like it.’

They spent half an hour talking about his short stories and his writing process. And that the third and fourth collections were the best. Novel? No, no: I like the short form. As he calmed down, he mentioned that he was embarrassed about the scene he’d made talking about his bitch of an ex-wife, but that it was still all going through his head and he couldn’t believe that even after he’d paid a fortune to the lawyer they’d sided with Tecla on almost everything, and I’m still shaken up about it and I’m really sorry to have told you all that, but as you can see writers — all artists — are people too.

‘I never doubted that.’

‘Touché pour la seconde fois.’

‘I told you I don’t speak French. Can you tell me about your creative process?’

They spoke for a long time. Bernat explained how he started, many, many years ago, to write, in no particular rush. I take a long time to finish a book. Plasma took a good three years.

‘Wow!’

‘Yes. It wrote itself. How can I explain it …’

Silence. A couple of hours had passed and they’d finished off the Tasmanian cloud water. Xènia listened, rapt. The occasional car still went up Llúria. The place was comfortable; for the first time in many months, Bernat was comfortable at home, with someone who listened to him and didn’t criticise him the way poor Adrià had always done.

Suddenly, he was overcome by the fatigue that followed the tension of so many hours of conversation. The years take their toll.

Xènia settled back in the Ikea armchair. She extended her hand as if she wanted to turn off the tape recorder, but she stopped halfway.

‘Now I’d like to discuss … your double personality, as a musician and a writer.’

‘Aren’t you tired?’

‘Yes. But this is something I’ve been wanting to do for some time, an interview so … like this.’

‘Thank you so much. But we can leave it for tomorrow. I’m …’

He knew that he was spoiling the magic of the moment but there was nothing he could do about it. For a few minutes they were seated in silence, as she put away her things and both of them calculating whether it was a good moment to continue or if it was best to be prudent, until Bernat said I’m very sorry that I only offered you water.

‘It was excellent.’

What I’d like to do is take you to bed.

‘Should we meet tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow’s not good for me. The day after.’

To the bedroom, right now.

‘Very well. Come here, if that works for you.’

‘All right.’

‘And we’ll talk about whatever.’

‘Whatever.’

They grew silent. She smiled and he smiled back.

‘Wait, I’ll call you a cab.’

They were so close. Looking at each other, in silence, she with the serene night in her gaze. He, with the vague greyness of unconfessable secrets in his eyes. But despite everything, she left in the ruddy blooming taxi that always had to spoil everything. Before, Xènia had given him a furtive kiss on the cheek, near his lips. She’d had to stand on tiptoe to reach. She’s so cute on tiptoes. Downstairs on the street he watched the taxi take Xènia out of his life, even just for a couple of days. He smiled. It had been two long years since he’d last smiled.

The second meeting was easier. Xènia took off her coat without asking permission, she put her recording devices down on the little table and patiently waited for Bernat, who had gone to the other end of the flat with his mobile, to finish an endless argument with someone who was probably his lawyer. He spoke in a low voice and with a kind of stifled rage.

Xènia looked at some book spines. In one corner were the five books that Bernat Plensa had published; she hadn’t read the first two. She pulled out the oldest one. On the first page was a dedication to my muse, my beloved Tecla, who was so supportive to me in the creation of these stories, Barcelona, 12 February 1977. Xènia couldn’t help but smile. She put the book back in its place, beside its companions in the complete works of Bernat Plensa. On the desk, the computer was sleeping with the screen dark. She moved the mouse and the screen lit up. There was a text. A seventy-page document. Bernat Plensa was writing a novel and he had said no, no novels. She looked towards the hallway. She could hear Bernat’s voice at the far end, still speaking softly. She sat in front of the computer and read After buying the tickets, Bernat put them in his pocket. He gazed at the sign announcing the concert. The young man beside him, wearing a hat that hid his face and wrapped in a scarf, tapped his feet on the ground to ward off the cold, very interested in that night’s programme. Another man, who was fat and stuffed into a slender coat, was trying to return his tickets because of some problem. They took a walk along Sant Pere Més Alt and they missed it. When they were back in front of the Palau de la Música, it was all over. The sign that read Prokofiev’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 2 in G-Minor performed by Jascha Heifetz and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra directed by Eduard Toldrà had an aggressive JEWS RAUS scrawled on it in tar and a swastika that dripped from each arm, and the atmosphere had become darker, people avoided eye contact and the earth had become even flatter. Then they told me that it had been a Falangist gang and that the couple of policemen who’d been sent from the headquarters on Via Laietana, right around the corner, had coincidentally been away from their post in front of the Palau having a coffee break and Adrià was overcome with an irrepressible desire to go live in Europe, further north, where they say people are clean and cultured and free, and lively and happy and have parents who love you and don’t die because of something you did. What a crap country we were born into, he said looking at the smear that dripped hatred. Then the policemen arrived and said, all right, move it along, not in groups, come on, on your way, and Adrià and Bernat, like the rest of the onlookers, disappeared because you never know.

The auditorium of the Palau de la Música was full, but the silent was thick. We had trouble getting to our two empty seats, in the stalls, almost in the middle.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello,’ said Adrià, timidly as he sat beside the lovely girl who smiled at him.

‘Adrià? Adrià Ican’trememberwhat?’

Then I recognised you. You didn’t have plaits in your hair and you looked like a real woman.

‘Sara Voltes-Epstein! …’ I said, astonished. ‘Are you here?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘No, I mean …’

‘Yes,’ she said laughing and putting her hand over mine casually, setting off a fatal electric shock. ‘I live in Barcelona now.’

‘Well, how about that,’ I said, looking from side to side. ‘This is my friend Bernat. Sara.’

Bernat and Sara nodded politely to each other.

‘How awful, eh, the thing with the sign …’ said Adrià, with his extraordinary ability to stick his foot in it. Sara made a vague expression and started looking at the programme. Without taking her eyes off of it, ‘How did your concert go?’

‘The one in Paris?’ A bit embarrassed. ‘Fine. Normal.’

‘Do you still read?’

‘Yes. And you, do you still draw?’

‘Yes. I’m having an exhibition.’

‘Where?’

‘In the parish of …’ She smiled. ‘No, no. I don’t want you to come.’

I don’t know if she meant it or if it was a joke. Adrià was so stiff that he didn’t dare to look her in the eye. He just smiled timidly. The lights began to dim, the audience started to applaud and Master Toldrà came out on the stage and Bernat’s footsteps were heard coming from the other end of the flat. Then Xènia put the computer to sleep and stood up from the chair. She pretending she’d been reading book spines and when Bernat entered the study she made a bored face.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, brandishing the mobile.

‘More problems?’

He furrowed his brow. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it. Or that he had learned he shouldn’t discuss it with Xènia. They sat down and, for a few seconds, the silence was quite uncomfortable; perhaps that was why they both smiled without looking at each other.

‘And how does it feel to be a musician writing literature?’ asked Xènia, putting the tiny recorder in front of her on the small round table.

He looked at her without seeing her, thinking of the furtive kiss of the other night, so close to his lips.

‘I don’t know. It all happened gradually, inevitably.’

That was a real whopper. It all happened so bloody slowly, so gratuitously and capriciously and, yet, his anxiety did arrive all at once, because Bernat had been writing for years and for years Adrià had been telling him that what he wrote was completely uninteresting, it was grey, predictable, dispensable; definitely not an essential text. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, stop asking me for my opinion.

‘And that’s it?’ said Xènia, a bit peeved. ‘It all happened gradually, inevitably? And full stop? Should I turn off the tape recorder?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Here, with you.’

‘No.’

‘Well, it’s post-concert trauma.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m more than sixty years old, I am a professional violinist, I know that I do fine but playing with the orchestra doesn’t do it for me. What I wanted was to be a writer, you understand?’

‘You already are.’

‘Not the way I wanted to be.’

‘Are you writing something now?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No. Why?’

‘No reason. What do you mean by not the way you wanted to be?’

‘That I’d like to captivate, enthral.’

‘But with the violin …’

‘There are fifty of us playing. I’m not a soloist.’

‘But sometimes you play chamber music.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And why aren’t you a soloist?’

‘Not everyone who wants to be one can be. I don’t have the skill or temperament for it. A writer is a soloist.’

‘Is it an ego problem?’

Bernat Plensa picked up Xènia’s recording device, examined it, found the button and turned it off. He placed it back down on the table while he said I am the epitome of mediocrity.

‘You don’t believe what that imbecile from

‘That imbecile and all the others who’ve been kind enough to tell me that in the press.’

‘You know that critics are just …’

‘Just what?’

‘Big poofs.’

‘I’m being serious.’

‘Now I understand your hysterical side.’

‘Wow: you don’t pull your punches.’

‘You want to be perfect. And since you can’t … you get cranky; or you demand that those around you be perfect.’

‘Do you work for Tecla?’

‘Tecla is a forbidden subject.’

‘What’s got into you?’

‘I’m trying to get a reaction out of you,’ replied Xènia. ‘Because you have to answer my question.’

‘What question?’

Bernat watched as Xènia turned on the recorder again and placed it gently on the little table.

‘How does it feel to be a musician writing literature?’ she repeated.

‘I don’t know. It all happens gradually. Inevitably.’

‘You already said that.’

It’s just that it happens so bloody slowly and yet his anxiety arrives all at once because Bernat had been writing for so many years and Adrià had been saying for so many years that what he wrote was of no interest, it was grey, predictable, unessential; it was definitely Adrià’s fault.

‘I am about to break off all ties with you. I don’t like unbearable people. That’s your first and last warning.’

For the first time since he had met her, he looked into her eyes and held Xènia’s black gaze of serene night.

‘I can’t bear being unbearable. Forgive me.’

‘Can we get back to work?’

‘Go ahead. And thanks for the warning.’

‘First and last.’

I love you, he thought. So he had to be perfect if he wanted to have those lovely eyes with him for a few more hours. I love you, he repeated.

‘How does it feel to be a musician making literature?’

I am falling in love with your obstinacy.

‘It feels … I feel … in two worlds … and it bothers me that I don’t know which is more important to me.’

‘Does that matter?’

‘I don’t know. The thing is …’

That evening they didn’t call a cab. But two days later Bernat Plensa screwed up his courage and went to visit his friend. Caterina, with her coat already on and about to leave, opened the door for him and, before he could open his mouth, said in a low voice he’s not well.

‘Why?’

‘I had to hide yesterday’s newspaper from him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if I don’t notice, he reads the same paper three times.’

‘Boy …’

‘He’s such a hard worker, I hate to see him wasting his time rereading the newspaper, you know?’

‘You did the right thing.’

‘What are you two conspiring about?’

They turned. Adrià had just come out of his study and caught them speaking in low voices.

‘Rrrrriiiiiiinnnnnnnnnngggg.’

Caterina opened the door for Plàcida instead of answering, while Adrià had Bernat enter his study. The two women discussed their shift switch quietly and Caterina said loudly see you tomorrow, Adrià!

‘How’s it going?’ asked Adrià.

‘I’ve been typing it up when I have a moment. Slowly.’

‘Do you understand everything?’

‘Yeah,’ he answered falteringly. ‘I like it a lot.’

‘Why do you say yeah like that?’

‘Because you have the handwriting of a doctor, and it’s tiny. I have to read every paragraph a couple of times to get it right.’

‘Oh. Sorry …’

‘No, no, no … I’m happy to do it. But I don’t work on it every day, obviously.’

‘I’m making a lot of work for you, aren’t I?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘Good evening, Adrià,’ said a young woman, a smiling stranger, sticking her head into the study.

‘Hello, good evening.’

‘Who’s that?’ Bernat asked in a surprised whisper when the woman had left the study.

‘Whatshername. Now they don’t leave me alone for a second.’

‘Whoa.’

‘Yeah, you have no idea. This place is like the Ramblas with all the coming and going.’

‘It’s better that you’re not alone, right?’

‘Yes. And thank goodness for Little Lola, she takes care of organising everything.’

‘Caterina.’

‘What?’

‘No, nothing.’

They were silent for a little while. Then Bernat asked him about what he was studying and he looked around him, touched the book on his reading table and made a vague expression that Bernat was unable to interpret. He got up and grabbed the book.

‘Hey, poetry!’

‘Huh?’

Bernat waved the book. ‘You’re reading poetry.’

‘I always have.’

‘Really? Not me.’

‘And look how things turned out for you.’

Bernat laughed because it was impossible to get angry at Adrià now that he was ill. And then he repeated I can’t do any more, I can’t go any faster with your papers.

‘Fine …’

‘Do you want me to hire someone?’

‘No!’ Now the life came back into his appearance, his face and the colour of his hair. ‘Definitely not! This can only be done by a friend. And I don’t want …. I don’t know … It’s very personal and … Maybe once it’s typed up I won’t want it published.’

‘Didn’t you say I should give it to Bauça?’

‘When the time comes, we’ll discuss it.’

Silence came over the room. Someone was going through doors or making noise with something in some part of the house. Perhaps in the kitchen.

‘Plàcida, that’s it! Her name is Plàcida, this one.’ Pleased with himself. ‘You see? Despite what they say, I still have a good memory.’

‘Ah!’ said Bernat, remembering something. ‘The backside of your manuscript pages, what you wrote in black ink, you know? it’s really interesting too.’

For a moment, Adrià hesitated.

‘What is it?’ he said, a bit frightened.

‘A reflection on evil. Well: a study of the history of evil, I’d say. You called it ‘The Problem of Evil’.’

‘Oh, no. I’d forgotten. No: that’s very … I don’t know: soulless.’

‘No. I think you should publish it too. If you want, I can type it up as well.’

‘Poor thing. That’s my failure as a thinker.’ He was quiet for a few very long seconds. ‘I didn’t know how to say even half of what I had in my head.’

He grabbed the volume of poems. He opened and closed it, uncomfortable. He put it back down on the table and finally said that’s why I wrote on the other side, to kill it.

‘Why didn’t you throw it away?’

‘I never throw away any papers.’

And a slow silence, as long as a Sunday afternoon, hovered over the study and the two friends. A silence almost devoid of meaning.

17

Finishing secondary school was a relief. Bernat had already graduated the year before and he’d thrown his heart and soul into playing the violin while half-heartedly studying Liberal Arts. Adrià entered university thinking that everything would be easier from that point on. But he found many cracks and prickly bushes. And even just the low level of the students, who were frightened by Virgil and panicked over Ovid. And the policemen in the assembly rooms. And the revolution in the classrooms. For a while I was friends with a guy named Gensana who was very interested in literature but when he asked me what I wanted to devote myself to and I answered to the history of ideas and culture, he dropped his jaw in shock.

‘Come on, Ardèvol, nobody says they want to be an historian of ideas.’

‘I do.’

‘You’re the first I’ve ever heard. Jesus. The history of ideas and culture.’ He looked at me suspiciously. ‘You’re having a laugh, right?’

‘No: I want to know everything. What is known now and what was known before. And why it’s known and why it’s not yet known. Do you understand?’

‘No.’

‘And what do you want to be?’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Gensana. He fluttered his hand vaguely over his forehead. ‘I’m all batty. But I’ll figure out something to do, you’ll see.’

Three pretty laughing girls passed by them on the way to Greek class. Adrià looked at his watch and waved goodbye to Gensana, who was still trying to digest the bit about being an historian of ideas and culture. I followed the pretty laughing girls. Before entering the classroom I turned around. Gensana was still pondering Ardèvol’s future. And a few months later, during a very cold autumn, Bernat, who was in his eighth year of violin, asked me to go with him to the Palau de la Música to hear Jascha Heifetz. Which was a one-of-a-kind opportunity and Master Massià had explained that despite Heifetz’s reluctance to play in a fascist country, Master Toldrà’s had finally managed to convince him. Adrià, who in most arenas had yet to lose his virginity, discussed it with Master Manlleu at the end of an exhausting lesson devoted to unison. After some seconds of reflection, Manlleu said that he had never known a colder, more arrogant, abominable, stupid, stuck-up, repulsive, detestable and haughty violinist than Jascha Heifetz.

‘But does he play well, sir?’

Master Manlleu was looking at the score without seeing it. Violin in hand, he played an involuntary pizzicato and kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. After a very long pause: ‘He plays to perfection.’

Perhaps he realised that what he’d said had come from too deep inside and wanted to temper it, ‘Besides me, he is the best violinist alive.’ Tap of the bow on the music stand. ‘Come now, let’s get back to it.’

Applause filled the hall. And it was warmer than usual, which was very noticeable because, in a dictatorship, people get used to saying things between the lines and between the applause, with indirect gestures, glancing at the man in the mackintosh with the pencil moustache who was most likely a secret agent, careful, look how he’s barely clapping. And people had grown accustomed to understanding that language which, from fear, strove to fight against fear. I only sensed that, because I had no father, and Mother was absorbed by the shop and only turned her loupe on my violin progress, and Little Lola didn’t want to talk about such things because during the war they had killed an anarchist cousin of hers and she refused to get into the thorny territory of street politics. They began to dim the lights, people clapped and Master Toldrà came out on stage and leisurely walked over to his music stand. In the penumbra, I saw Sara writing something in her programme and passing it to me and asking for my programme so she wouldn’t be left without one. Some digits. A telephone number! I handed her mine, like an idiot, without jotting down my own phone number. The applause ended. I noticed that Bernat, wordless, in the seat to my other side, was observing my every move. Silence fell over the hall.

Toldrà played a Coriolano that I’d never heard before and really enjoyed. Then, when he came back out on stage, he brought Jascha Heifetz by the hand, probably to show his support or something like that. Heifetz made a cold, arrogant, abominable, stupid, stuck-up, repulsive, detestable and haughty nod of his head. He didn’t have any interest in concealing his irritated, severe expression. He gave himself three long minutes to shake off his indignation while Master Toldrà stood, looking to either side, patiently waiting for the other man to say let’s begin. And they began. I remember that my mouth hung open throughout the entire concert. And that I cried without the slightest embarrassment during the andante assai, compelled by the physical pleasure of the binary rhythm of the violin set on top of the triplets of the orchestral backdrop. And how the piece was left in the hands of the orchestra and, at the end, the horn and a humble pizzicato. True beauty. And Heifetz was a warm, humble, kind man devoted to the service of the beauty that captivated me. And Adrià thought he saw Heifetz’s eyes gleaming suspiciously. Bernat, I know, held back a deep sob. And at intermission he rose and said I have to go meet him.

‘They won’t let you backstage.’

‘I’m going to try.’

‘Wait,’ she said.

Sara got up and gestured for them to follow her. Bernat and I looked at each other quizzically. We went up the small stairs on the side and through a door. The guard inside gave us the sign for vade retro, but Sara, with a smile, pointed to Master Toldrà, who was talking to one of the musicians, and he, as if he had caught Sara’s gesture, turned, saw us and said hello, princess, how are you? How’s your mother?

And he came over to give her a kiss. He didn’t even see us. Master Toldrà explained that Heifetz was deeply offended by the graffiti that it seems was everywhere around the Palau and that he was cancelling his performance tomorrow and leaving the country. It’s not the best moment to bother him, you understand?

When the concert was over and we were out on the street, we saw that it was true, that the tarred graffiti on the sign and on the walls, all over, suggested, in Spanish, that the Jews leave.

‘If I were him, I would have done the concert tomorrow,’ said Adrià, future historian of ideas, without knowing anything about the history of humanity. Sara whispered in his ear that she was in a rush and she also said call me, and Adrià barely reacted because his head was still filled with Heifetz and all he said was yes, yes, and thanks.

‘I’m giving up the violin,’ I said before the profaned sign, before an incredulous Bernat and before myself. All my life I’ve remembered myself saying I’m giving up the violin, at the exit, before the profaned sign before an incredulous Bernat and before myself, all my life I’ve remembered myself saying I’m giving up the violin.

‘But … but …’ Bernat pointed to the Palau as if he wanted to say what better argument cou

‘I’m giving up the violin. I’ll never be able to play like that.’

‘Practise.’

‘Bullshit. I’m giving it up. It’s impossible. I’ll finish seventh, take the exam and that’s it. Enough. Assez. Schluss. Basta.’

‘Who was that girl?’

‘Which one?’

‘That one!’ He pointed at Sara’s aura, which still lingered. ‘The one who led us to Master Toldrà like Ariadna, that one! The one who said Adrià Ican’trememberwhat, my pet. The one who said call me …’

Adrià looked at his friend with his mouth hanging open.

‘What have I done to you this time?’

‘What have you done to me? You’re threatening to give up the violin.’

‘Yes. It’s final. But I’m not giving you up: I’m giving up the violin.’

When Heifetz finished the Prokofiev concert, he was transformed, to the point that he seemed taller and more powerful. And he played, I would almost say arrogantly, three Jewish dances and then I found him even taller and with an even more powerful aura. Then he gathered himself and gave us the gift of the Ciaccona of the Partita for Violin No. 2, which, apart from our attempts, I had only heard on a shellac 78 played by Ysaÿe. They were minutes of perfection. I have been to many concerts. But for me this was the foundation, the concert that opened up the path to beauty for me, the concert that closed the door to the violin for me, the concert that put an end to my brief career as a musician.

‘You’re a lousy bum,’ was Bernat’s opinion, who saw that he would have to face his eighth year all on his own, without my presence one year behind him. All alone with Master Massià. ‘A lousy stinking bum.’

‘Not if I learn how to be happy. I’ve seen the light: no more suffering and I’ll enjoy music played by those who know how.’

‘A lousy bum, and a coward to boot.’

‘Yes. Probably. Now I can devote myself to my studies without added pressures.’

Right there in the street, as we walked home, the pedestrians caught in the cold wind coming down Jonqueres Street were witnesses to one of the three times I’ve seen my friend Bernat explode. It was terrible. He began to shout and to say German, English, Catalan, Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Latin, counting on his fingers. You’re nineteen and you can read one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight languages, and you’re afraid of eighth-year violin, idiot? If I had your brain, for fuck’s sake!

Then silent snowflakes started to fall. I had never seen it snow in Barcelona; I had never seen Bernat so indignant. I had never seen Bernat so helpless. I don’t know if it was snowing for him or for me.

‘Look,’ I said.

‘I don’t give a shit about the snow. You’re making a mistake.’

‘You’re afraid to face up to Massià without me.’

‘Yeah, so?’

‘You have what it takes to be a violinist. I don’t.’

Bernat lowered his voice and said don’t think that, I’m always at my limit. I smile when I play, but not because I’m happy. It’s to ward off panic. But the violin is as treacherous as the horn: you can play a false note at any moment. Even still, I don’t give up like you, like a little shit. I want to get to tenth and then I’ll see whether I go on or not. Give it up after tenth.

‘There will come a day when you’ll smile with pleasure while you play the violin, Bernat.’

I realised I came off sounding like Jesus Christ with that prophecy, and if we examine how things turned out … well, look, I don’t know what to say.

‘Give it up after tenth.’

‘No. After the exams in June. For appearances. Because if you really make me angry, I’ll stop right now and fuck appearances.’

And the snow continued to fall. We walked to my house in silence. He left me in front of the dark wooden door without even a good night or any slight gesture of affection.

I’ve fought with Bernat a few times in my life. This was the first serious fight, the first one that left scars. Christmas break that year took place in an unusually snowy landscape. At home, Mother was silent, Little Lola attentive to everything, and I was spending more and more hours in Father’s study each day. I had earned the right to with the outstanding honours I’d received at the end of term, and the space drew me irresistibly further and further in. The day after Boxing Day I went for a walk along the white streets and I saw Bernat, who was living at the top of Bruc Street, skiing down Bruc with his violin on his back. He saw me but said nothing. I confess that I was overcome with jealousy because I immediately thought whose house is he going to go play at, the bastard, without saying anything to me. Nineteen- or twenty-year-old Adrià, in the throes of a fit of jealousy, started to chase after him, but he couldn’t catch up to the skis and soon Bernat was just a tiny crèche figure, probably already at the Gran Via. How ridiculous, panting, exhaling through his scarf, watching his friend leave. I never found out where he went that day and I would give … I was about to say I would give half my life, but today that expression makes no sense. But what the hell, still today I would give half my life to know whose house he went to play at on that day during Christmas break when Barcelona was enveloped in several feet of unexpected snow.

That night, desperate, I went through the pockets of my coat, my jacket and my trousers, cursing because I couldn’t find the concert programme.

‘Sara Voltes-Epstein? No. Doesn’t ring a bell. Try the Betlem parish, they do those sorts of activities there.’

I went to about twenty parishes, trudging through increasingly dirty snow, until I found her, in the neighbourhood of Poble Sec, in a very modest parish church, in an even more modest, and almost empty, room with three walls covered in extraordinary charcoal drawings. Six or seven portraits and some landscapes. I was impressed by the sadness of the gaze in one entitled Uncle Haïm. And a dog that was amazing. And a house by the sea that was called Little Beach at Portlligat. I’ve looked at those drawings so many times, Sara. That girl was a real artist, Sara. My mouth hung open for half an hour until I heard your voice at my neck, as if scolding me, your voice saying I told you not to come.

I turned with an excuse on my lips, but all that came out was a shy I just happened to be passing by and. With a smile she forgave me. And in a soft, timid voice you said, ‘What do you think of them?’

18

‘Mother.’

‘What?’ Without looking up from the papers she was going over on the manuscript table.

‘Can you hear me?’

But she was avidly reading financial reports from Caturla, the man she had chosen to get the shop back on a sound footing. I knew that she wasn’t paying attention, but it was now or never.

‘I’m giving up the violin.’

‘Fine.’

And she continued reading the reports from Caturla, which must have been enthralling. When Adrià left the study, with a cold sweat on his soul, he heard his mother’s eyeglasses folding with a click-clack. She must have been watching him. Adrià turned. Yes, she was watching him, with her glasses in one hand and holding up a sheaf of reports in the other.

‘What did you say?’

‘That I’m giving up the violin. I’ll finish seventh year, but then I’m done.’

‘Don’t even think it.’

‘I’ve made up my mind.’

‘You aren’t old enough to make such a decision.’

‘Of course I am.’

Mother put down Caturla’s report and stood up. I’m sure she was wondering how Father would resolve this mutiny. To begin with, she used a low, private, threatening tone.

‘You will take your seventh year examinations, then your eighth year examinations and then you will do two years of virtuosity and, when the time comes, you will go to the Julliard School or wherever Master Manlleu decides.’

‘Mother: I don’t want to devote my life to interpreting music.’

‘Why not?’

‘It doesn’t make me happy.’

‘We weren’t born to be happy.’

‘I was.’

‘Master Manlleu says you have what it takes.’

‘Master Manlleu despises me.’

‘Master Manlleu tries to goad you because sometimes you’re listless.’

‘That is my decision. You are going to have to put up with it,’ I dared to say.

That was a declaration of war. But there was no other way I could do it. I left Father’s study without looking back.

‘How.’

‘Yes?’

‘You can start painting my face with war paint. Black and white from the mouth to the ears and two yellow stripes from top to bottom.’

‘Stop joking, I’m trembling.’

Adrià locked himself in his room, unwilling to give an inch. If that meant war, so be it.

Little Lola’s voice was the only one heard in the house for many days. She was the only one who tried to give an appearance of normality. Mother, always at the shop, I at university, and dinners in silence, both of us looking at our plates, and Little Lola watching one of us and then the other. It was very difficult and so intense that, for a few days, the joy of having found you again was subdued by the violin crisis.

The storm was unleashed the day I had class with Master Manlleu. That morning, before vanishing into the shop, Mother spoke to me for the first time that entire week. Without looking at me, as if Father had just died: ‘Bring the Storioni to class.’

I arrived at Master Manlleu’s house with Vial and, as we went down the hallway to his studio, I heard his voice, now sweet, telling me we could look at some other repertoire that you like better. All right, lad?

‘When I’ve finished seventh, I’m giving up the violin. Does everybody understand that? I have other priorities in my life.’

‘You will regret this wrong decision for every day of your entire life’ (Mother).

‘Coward’ (Manlleu).

‘Don’t leave me alone, mate’ (Bernat).

‘Negroid’ (Manlleu).

‘But you play better than I do!’ (Bernat).

‘Poof’ (Manlleu).

‘What about all the hours you’ve invested, what about that? Just flush them down the drain?’ (Mother).

‘Capricious gypsy’ (Manlleu).

‘And what is it you want to do?’ (Mother).

‘Study’ (me).

‘You can combine that with the violin, can’t you?’ (Bernat).

‘Study what?’ (Mother).

‘Bastard’ (Manlleu).

‘Poof’ (me).

‘Watch it, or I’ll walk out on you right now’ (Manlleu).

‘Do you even know what you want to study?’ (Mother).

‘How’ (Black Eagle, the valiant Arapaho chief).

‘Hey, I asked you what it is you want to study. Medicine?’ (Mother)

‘Ingrate’ (Manlleu).

‘Come on, Adrià, shit!’ (Bernat).

‘History’ (me).

‘Ha!’ (Mother).

‘What?’ (me).

‘You’ll starve to death. And get bored’ (Mother).

‘History!?’ (Manlleu).

‘Yes’ (Mother).

‘But history …’ (Manlleu).

‘Ha, ha … Tell me about it’ (Mother).

‘Traitor!!’ (Manlleu).

‘And I also want to study philosophy’ (me).

‘Philosophy?’ (Mother).

‘Philosophy?’ (Manlleu).

‘Philosophy?’ (Bernat).

‘Even worse’ (Mother).

‘Why even worse?’ (me)

‘If you have to choose between two evils, become a lawyer’ (Mother).

‘No. I hate the normalisation of life with rules’ (me).

‘Smart arse’ (Bernat).

‘What you want is to contradict just for the sake of contradicting. That’s your style, isn’t it?’ (Manlleu).

‘I want to understand humanity by studying its cultural evolution’ (me).

‘A smart arse, that’s what you are. Should we go to the cinema?’ (Bernat).

‘Sure, let’s go. Where?’ (me).

‘To the Publi’ (Bernat).

‘I don’t understand you, Son’ (Mother).

‘Irresponsible’ (Manlleu).

‘History, philosophy … Don’t you see they’re useless?’ (Manlleu).

‘What do you know!’ (me).

‘Arrogant!’ (Manlleu).

‘And music? What use is it?’ (me).

‘You’ll make a lot of money; look at it that way’ (Manlleu).

‘History, philosophy … Don’t you see they’re useless?’ (Bernat).

‘Tu quoque?’ (me).

‘What?’ (Bernat).

‘Nothing’ (me).

‘Did you like the film?’ (Bernat).

‘Well, yeah’ (me).

‘Well, yeah or yes?’ (Bernat).

‘Yes’ (me).

‘It’s useless!’ (Mother).

‘I like it’ (me).

‘And the shop? Would you like to work there?’ (Mother).

‘We’ll discuss that later’ (me).

‘How’ (Black Eagle, the valiant Arapaho chief).

‘Not now, damn, don’t be a drag’ (me).

‘And I want to study languages’ (me).

‘English is all you need’ (Manlleu).

‘What languages?’ (Mother).

‘I want to perfect my Latin and Greek. And start Hebrew, Aramaic and Sanskrit’ (me).

‘Whoa! What a disappointment …’ (Mother).

‘Latin, Greek and what else?’ (Manlleu).

‘Hebrew, Aramaic and Sanskrit’ (me).

‘You’ve got a screw loose, lad’ (Manlleu).

‘That depends’ (me).

‘The girls on aeroplanes speak English’ (Manlleu).

‘What?’ (me).

‘I can assure you that you have no need for Aramaic when flying to New York for a concert’ (Manlleu).

‘We speak different languages, Master Manlleu’ (me).

‘Abominable!’ (Manlleu).

‘Maybe you could stop insulting me’ (me).

‘Now I understand! I’m too difficult a role model for you’ (Manlleu).

‘No, no way!’ (me).

‘What does “no, no way” mean? Eh? What do you mean by “no, no way”?’ (Manlleu).

‘What is said cannot be unsaid’ (me).

‘Cold, arrogant, abominable, stupid, stuck-up, repulsive, detestable, haughty!’ (Manlleu).

‘Very well, as you wish’ (me).

‘What is said cannot be unsaid’ (Manlleu).

‘Bernat?’ (me).

‘What?’ (Bernat).

‘Want to go for a walk along the breakwater?’ (me).

‘Let’s go’ (Bernat).

‘If your father could see you now!’ (Mother).

I’m sorry, but the day that Mother said that, in the middle of the war, I couldn’t help a booming, exaggerated laugh at the thought of a decapitated corpse seeing anything. I know that Little Lola, who was listening to everything from the kitchen, also stifled a smile. Mother, pale, realised too late what she’d said. We were all exhausted and we just left it at that. It was the seventh day of conflict.

‘How’ (Black Eagle, the valiant Arapaho chief).

‘I’m tired’ (me).

‘All right. But you should know that you’ve begun a war of attrition, of trenches, like World War One; I just want you to keep in mind that you are fighting on three fronts’ (Black Eagle, the valiant Arapaho chief).

‘You’re right. But I know that I don’t aspire to be an elite musician’ (me).

‘And, above all, don’t confuse tactics with strategy’ (Black Eagle, the valiant Arapaho chief).

Sheriff Carson spat chaw on the ground and said keep it up, what the hell. If what you want is to spend your life reading, go ahead, you and your books. And tell the others where they can stuff it.

‘Thank you, Carson’ (me).

‘Don’t mention it’ (Sheriff Carson).

It was the seventh day and we all went to sleep, worn out from so much tension and hoping an armistice would come. That night was the first of many in which I dreamt about Sara.

From a strategic point of view it was very good that the armies of the Triple Alliance fought amongst themselves: Turkey stood up to Germany in Master Manlleu’s house. And that was good for the Entente, who had time to lick its wounds and begin to think about Sara constructively. The chronicles of the battle say that the old allies were bloodthirsty and cruel and that the screams could be heard echoing through the courtyard of Master Manlleu’s house. She said everything that had been kept quiet for years and accused him of not being able to hold on to a boy who was very flighty but had an extraordinary intellectual ability.

‘Don’t exaggerate.’

‘My son is extremely gifted. Didn’t you know? Haven’t we discussed it enough?’

‘There has only ever been one extremely gifted person in this house, Mrs Ardèvol.’

‘My son needs a guiding hand. Your ego, Mr Manlleu …’

‘Master Manlleu.’

‘You see? Your ego keeps you from seeing reality. We have to rethink the financial agreement.’

‘That’s unfair. This is all your extremely gifted son’s fault.’

‘Don’t try to be funny, it’s lame.’

Then they moved straight into the insults (negroid, gypsy, coward, poof, cold, arrogant, abominable, stupid, stuck-up, repulsive, detestable and haughty on one hand. On the other, only pathetic.)

‘What did you just say to me?’

‘Pathetic.’ And bringing her face very close to his: ‘Pa-thet-ic!’

‘The last straw. Insulting me! I’ll take you to court.’

‘It would be a pleasure to be able to set a few lawyers on you. Now I won’t even pay you for next month. As far as I’m concerned … As for me … I’ll speak with Yehudi Menuhin.’

And, it seems, they came to blows, he saying that Menuhin was greyness personified and that he’d charge her ten times more, while she headed towards the door, followed by an indignant Manlleu, who kept repeating do you know how Menuhin teaches? Do you know?

When she heard the whack of the door to Manlleu’s house, after she herself had slammed it in rage, Carme Bosch knew that her dream of making Adrià into the finest violinist in the world was finished. What a shame, Little Lola. And I told Bernat that he would get used to it and I promised we could play together whenever he felt like it; at my house or his, whichever he preferred. Then I began to breathe and to be able to think about you without impediments.

19

Et in Arcadia ego. Although Poussin made the painting thinking that it was death speaking, death which is present everywhere, even in the corners of happiness, I have always preferred to believe that it is my own ego speaking: I have been in Arcadia, Adrià has his Arcadia. Adrià, so sad, bald, miserable, pot-bellied and cowardly, has lived in an Arcadia, because I have had several and the first, the personified one, is your presence, and I’ve lost it forever. I was expelled from it by an angel with a fiery sword, and Adrià headed out covering his naughty bits and thinking from now on I’ll have to work to earn a living, alone, without you, my Sara. Another of my Arcadias — the one that is a place — is Tona, the ugliest and prettiest town in the world, where I spent fifteen summers frolicking on the edges of the fields of Can Casic, my body covered in the itchy spikes that came off the harvested piles where I hid from Xevi, Quico and Rosa, my inseparable companions during the eight weeks my summer out of Barcelona lasted, far from the tolling bells of the Concepció, the black and yellow taxis and anything that reminded me of school. Far from my parents; later, far from my mother, and far from the books that Adrià couldn’t bring with him. And we scampered up to the castle, to look out at Can Ges, the large house, the gardens and, in the distance, the farms; the landscape looked like a nativity scene. And closer, the fields covered in harvested piles and Can Casic, the small house, the old gnawed haystack, also like in a nativity scene. And further on, the cork mountains, the Collsacabra to the northeast and the Montseny to the east. And we shouted and were the kings of the world, especially Xevi, who was six years older than me and beat me at everything, until he started helping his father with the cows and stopped playing with us. Quico also won all the time, but one day I beat him in a race to the white wall. All right: it was because he tripped; but I won fair and square. And Rosa was very pretty and, yes, she too beat me at everything. At Aunt Leo’s house life was different. It was life without grumbling, without silences. People spoke and made eye contact. It was an immense house where Aunt Leo reigned without ever removing her neat, beige apron. Can Ges, the Ardèvol family home, is a vast house with more than thirteen rooms, open to every current in the summer and all the urban comforts in the winter, conveniently distanced from the cow barn and the horse stables, and whose southern face is adorned with a porch that was the best place in the world to read and also the best spot for practising the violin. My three cousins would casually come over to hear me, and I would practise repertoire instead of doing exercises, which is always more enjoyable, and one day a blackbird alighted on the porch’s parapet, beside a potted geranium, and watched me as I played Leclair’s Sonata No. 2 from his Second livre de sonates, which is very ornate and the blackbird seemed to really like and that Trullols had made me play one year in the opening concert at the conservatory on Bruc. And Tonton Leclair, when he wrote the last note, blew on the manuscript because he had run out of drying powder. Then he got up, satisfied, picked up his violin and played it without glancing at the score, thinking of impossible continuations. And he clicked his tongue, proud of himself. And he sat back down. On the lower half of the last page, which was blank, in his most ceremonious hand, he wrote: ‘I dedicate this sonata to my beloved nephew Guillaume-Francois, son of my beloved sister Annette, on the day of his birth. May his passage through this vale of tears be auspicious.’ He read it over and had to blow again, cursing all the servants in the house, who were incapable of keeping his writing implements in proper order. Everyone knew what had to be done, at Can Ges. Everyone, including me now, was welcome there as long as they fulfilled their duties. And in the summer, I didn’t have anything to do except eat bountifully, because these city lads are skinny as beanstalks, look at his colour when he gets here, poor thing. My cousins were older; Rosa, the youngest, was three years ahead of me. So I was sort of the spoiled baby they had to fatten up with real cow’s milk and proper sausage. And bread smeared with oil. And bread drizzled with wine and sprinkled with sugar. And streaked bacon. What worried Uncle Cinto was that Adrià had the somewhat unhealthy habit of shutting himself up in his room for hours reading books without illustrations, only letters: and that, at seven, ten or twelve years old, was frankly distressing. But Aunt Leo would gently place her hand on his uncle’s arm and he would change the subject, saying to Xevi that he’d have to come with him that afternoon because Prudenci was going to pay the cows a visit.

‘I want to come too,’ Rosa.

‘No.’

‘And me?’

‘Yes.’

Rosa stormed off, affronted because Adrià, who was the littlest, could go with you and I can’t.

‘It’s very unpleasant, my girl,’ said Aunt Leo.

And I went to see how Prudenci jammed his fist and entire arm into Blanca’s arsehole and then said something I didn’t catch to my uncle and Xevi jotted it down on a piece of paper and Blanca chewed her cud, oblivious to the worries of the—

‘Watch out, watch out, watch out, she’s pissing!’ shouted Adrià in excitement.

The men moved aside, still discussing their matters, but I stayed in the front row because watching a cow piss and shit from the stalls was one of the great spectacles life in Tona had to offer. Like watching Parrot, the mule at Can Casic, piss. That was really something to see, and that’s why I think my aunt and uncle were being unfair with poor Rosa. And there were more things, like fishing for tadpoles in the stream beside the Matamonges gully. And returning with eight or ten victims that we kept in a glass bottle.

‘Poor creatures.’

‘No, Auntie, I’ll feed them every day.’

‘Poor creatures.’

‘I’ll give them bread, I promise.’

‘Poor creatures.’

I wanted to see how they turned into frogs or, more often, into dead tadpoles because we never thought to change their water or about what they could eat inside the bottle. And the swallows’ nests in the lean-to. And the sudden downpours. And the apotheosis of the threshing days at Can Casic, where the grain was no longer winnowed but separated by machines that made the haystack and filled the town and my memories with straw dust. Et in Arcadia ego, Adrià Ardèvol. No one can take those memories from me. And now I think that Aunt Leo and Uncle Cinto must have been made of solid stuff because they pretended nothing had happened after the fight between the two brothers. It was a long time ago. Adrià hadn’t been born yet. And I knew about it because the summer I turned twenty, to avoid being alone with Mother in Barcelona, I decided to spend three or four weeks in Tona, if you’ll have me. I was also feeling somewhat forlorn because Sara, who I was already dating while keeping it secret from both families, had had to go to Cadaqués with her parents and I was feeling so, so alone.

‘What does if you’ll have me mean? Don’t ever say that again,’ said my Aunt Leo, indignant. ‘When are you coming?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Your cousins aren’t here. Well, Xevi is, but he spends all day at the farm.’

‘I reckoned.’

‘Josep and Maria from Can Casic died this past winter.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘And Viola died of grief.’ Silence on the other end of the line. As a consolation: ‘They were very old, both of them. Josep walked in a right angle, poor thing. And the dog was also very old.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Bring your violin.’

So I told Mother that Aunt Leo had invited me and I couldn’t refuse. Mother didn’t say yes or no. We were very distant and didn’t speak much. I spent my days studying and reading, and she spent hers in the shop. And when I was at home, her gaze still accused me of capriciously throwing away a brilliant violin career.

‘Did you hear me, Mother?’

It seems that, as always, in the shop, there were problems she didn’t want to let me in on. And so, without looking at me, she just said bring them a little gift.

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Something small, you choose it.’

My first day in Tona, with my hands in my pockets, I went into town to find a little gift at Can Berdagué. And when I reached the main square I saw her sitting at the tables of El Racó, drinking tiger nut milk and smiling at me as if she were waiting for me. Well, she was waiting for me. At first I didn’t recognise her; but then, wait, I know her, who is she, who is she, who is she. I knew that smile.

‘Ciao,’ she said.

Then I recognised her. She was no longer an angel, but she had the same angelic smile. Now she was a grown woman, simply lovely. She waved me over to sit by her side, and I obeyed.

‘My Catalan is still very spotty.’

I asked her if we could speak in Italian. Then she asked me caro Adrià, sai chi sono, vero?

I didn’t buy any gift for Aunt Leo at Can Berdagué. The first hour was spent with her drinking tiger nut milk and Adrià swallowing hard. She didn’t stop talking and she explained everything to me that Adrià didn’t know or pretended not to know because even though he was now twenty years old, at home such things weren’t discussed. It was she, in Tona’s main square, who told me that my angel and I were siblings.

I looked at her, stunned. It was the first time that anyone had put it into words. She could sense my confusion.

‘É vero,’ she insisted.

‘This is like something out of a photo-novel,’ I said, wanting to conceal my bewilderment.

She didn’t bat an eyelash. She clarified that she was old enough to be my mother, but that she was my half-sister, and she showed me a birth certificate or something where my father recognised his paternity of some Daniela Amato, which was her according to her passport, which she also showed me. So she had been waiting for me, with the conversation and the documents at the ready. So what I half knew but no one had come out and said was true; I, only child par excellence, had an older, much older, sister. And I felt defrauded by Father, by Mother, by Little Lola and by so many secrets. And I think it hurt me that Sheriff Carson had never even ever insinuated it. A sister. I looked at her again: she was just as pretty as when she’d showed up at my house in angel form, but she was a forty-six year old woman who was my sister. We had never played over boring Sunday afternoons. She would have gone off laughing with Little Lola, and covering her mouth with her hand every time they’d caught a man looking at them.

‘But you’re my mother’s age,’ I said, just to say something.

‘A bit younger.’ I noticed an irritated tone in her reply.

Her name was Daniela. And she told me that her mother … and she explained a very beautiful love story, and I couldn’t imagine Father in love and I kept very quiet and listened, listened to what she told me and tried to imagine it, and I don’t know why she started to talk about the relationship between the two brothers, because Father, before beginning his studies at the seminary in Vic, had had to learn to winnow the wheat, to thresh properly and to touch Estrella’s belly to see if she had finally got knocked up. Grandfather Ardèvol had taught both sons to tie the hampers tightly to the mule and to know that if the clouds were dark but came from Collsuspina they always blew past without a sprinkle. Uncle Cinto, who was the heir, put more care into things around the farm. And in the management of the land, the harvests, and the hired hands. Our father, on the other hand, was in the clouds whenever he could be, thinking and reading hidden in the corners, like you do. When they, somewhat desperately, sent Father to the seminary in Vic he was already, despite his lack of interest, half-trained to be a farmer. There he found his motivation and started to learn Latin, Greek and some lessons from the great teachers. Verdaguer’s shadow was still fresh and ran through the hallways, and two out of three seminarians tried their hand at writing verse; but not our father: he wanted to study the philosophy and theology they offered him in instalments.

‘And how do you know all this?’

‘My mother explained it to me. Our father was quite talkative as a young man. Later, it seems he shut up like a closed umbrella, like a mummy.’

‘What else?’

‘They sent him to Rome because he was very clever. And he got my mother pregnant. And he fled Rome because he was a coward. And I was born.’

‘Wow … like something out of a photo-novel,’ I insisted.

Daniela, instead of getting annoyed, smiled encouragingly and continued with her story saying and your father had a fight with his brother.

‘With Uncle Cinto?’

‘You can shove the idea of marrying me off to that drip where the sun don’t shine,’ said Fèlix, pushing the photo back at him.

‘But you won’t have to lift a finger! The estate is a well-oiled machine. I’ve looked into it carefully. And you can devote yourself to your books, hell, what more do you want?’

‘And why are you in such a hurry to marry me off?’

‘Our parents asked me to; that if you ever left the path of priesthood … then you should marry; that I should have you marry.’

‘But you’re not married! Who are you to …’

‘I will be. I have my eye on a …’

‘As if they were cows.’

‘You can’t offend me. Mama knew it would be work to convince you.’

‘I’ll marry when I’m good and ready. If I ever do.’

‘I can find you a better-looking one,’ said Cinto, putting away the grey photo of the heiress of Can Puig.

Then our father asked, too curtly, if Cinto would buy out his share of the estate because he wanted to move to Barcelona. That was when the shouting began and the words thrown like rocks, to hurt. And both brothers looked at each other with hatred. It didn’t come to blows. Fèlix Ardèvol got his share and they didn’t have much to do with each other for a few years. Thanks to Leo’s insistence, Father showed up when she and Cinto married. But then the brothers grew apart. One, buying up land in the area, raising livestock, making fodder, and the other, spending his share on mysterious trips to Europe.

‘What do you mean by mysterious trips?’

Daniela slurped up the last of her tiger nut milk and said no more. Adrià went to pay and when he returned he said why don’t we take a walk, and Tori, the waiter at El Racó, as he sullied the table with a cleaning rag, made a face as if to say damn, I wouldn’t mind getting my paws on that French lady, no, I would not.

Still standing, in the square, Daniela stood in front of him and put on dark glasses that gave her a modern and inevitably foreign air. As if they shared a private secret, she came over to him and undid the top button on his shirt.

‘Scusa,’ she said.

And Tori thought bloody hell, how did that punk kid get a French lady like that. And he shook his head, astonished that the world moved so fast, as Daniela’s gaze fell on the little chain with the medallion.

‘I didn’t know you were religious.’

‘This isn’t religious.’

‘The Madonna of Pardàc is a Virgin Mary.’

‘It’s a keepsake.’

‘From who?’

‘I don’t rightly know.’

Daniela stifled a smile, rubbed the medallion with her fingers and let it drop onto Adrià’s chest. He hid it, angered by that invasion of his privacy. So he added it’s none of your business.

‘That depends.’

He didn’t understand her. They walked in silence.

‘It’s a lovely medallion.’

Jachiam pulled it out, showed it to the jeweller and said it’s gold. And the chain is too.

‘You haven’t stolen it?’

‘No! Little Bettina, my blind sister, gave it to me so I would never feel lonely.’

‘And so why do you want to sell it?’

‘That surprises you?’

‘Well … a family heirloom …’

‘My family … Oh, how I miss the living and the dead. My mother, my father and all the Muredas: Agno, Jenn, Max, Hermes, Josef, Theodor, Micurà, Ilse, Erica, Katharina, Matilde, Gretchen and little blind Bettina … I miss the landscape of Pardàc too.’

‘Why don’t you go back?’

‘Because there are still people there who want to hurt me and my family has let me know that it wouldn’t be prudent to …’

‘Yeah …’ said the goldsmith, lowering his head to get a better look at the medallion, not even slightly interested in the problems of the Muredas of Pardàc.

‘I sent my siblings a lot of money, to help them.’

‘Aha.’

He continued to examine it before giving it back to its owner.

‘Pardàc is Predazzo?’ he said, looking him in the eye, as if he had just thought of something.

‘The people of the plains call it Predazzo, yes. But it’s Pardàc … Don’t you want to buy it?’

The jeweller shook his head.

‘If you spend the winter with me, I’ll teach you my trade and when the snows melt you can go wherever you like. But don’t sell the medallion.’

And Jachiam learned the trade of smelting metals to turn them into rings, medallions and earrings and for a few months he buried his longing at that good man’s house until one day, shaking his head, he said, as if picking up the thread of their first conversation: ‘Whom did you entrust the money to?’

‘What money?’

‘The money you sent to your family.’

‘A trustworthy man.’

‘From Occitania?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘No, nothing, nothing …’

‘What have you heard?’

‘What was the man’s name?’

‘I called him Blond. His name was Blond of Cazilhac. He was very blond.’

‘I don’t think he got past …’

‘What?’

‘They killed him. And robbed him.’

‘Who?’

‘Mountain people.’

‘From Moena?’

‘I believe so.’

That morning, with the winter’s wages in his pocket, Jachiam asked for the jeweller’s blessing and rushed northward to find out what had happened to the Muredas’s money and poor Blond. He walked rapidly, spurred on by rage and throwing all caution to the wind. On the fifth day he reached Moena and began bellowing in the main square. Come out, Brocias, he said, and a Brocia who heard him warned his cousin, and that cousin told another, and when they were ten men they went down to the square, snatched up Jachiam and brought him to the river. His panicked screams didn’t reach Pardàc. The medallion of the Madonna dai Ciüf was kept, as a reward, by the Brocia who had seen him.

‘Pardàc is in Trento,’ said Adrià.

‘But in my house,’ replied Daniela, pensively, ‘they always said that a sailor uncle I’d never met brought it back from Africa.’

They strolled to the cemetery and the chapel of Lourdes without saying anything, and it was a lovely day for walking. After half an hour of silence, sitting on the stone benches in the chapel’s garden, Adrià, who now trusted her more, pointed to his chest and said do you want it?

‘No. It’s yours. Don’t ever lose it.’

The sun’s trajectory had shifted the shadows in the garden, and Adrià again asked what do you mean about Father’s mysterious trips.

He had checked into a little hotel in the Borgo, five minutes from St. Peter’s in the Vatican, on the edge of the Passetto. It was a discreet, modest and inexpensive hostel called Bramante that was run by a Roman matron who had spent many years rearing geese with an iron hand and who looked like a page pulled from the transition between Julius and Augustus. The first person he visited once he was set up in the narrow, damp room overlooking the Vicolo delle Palline was Father Morlin, whose initial reaction was to stand staring in the door to the cloister of the Santa Sabina monastery, struggling to remember who that man was who … no!

‘Fèlix Ardevole!’ he shouted. ‘Il mio omonimo! Vero?’

Fèlix Ardèvol nodded and submissively kissed the friar’s hand, who was sweating beneath his heavy habit. Morlin, after looking him in the eyes, hesitated for a moment and instead of having him enter one of the visiting rooms, or stroll in the cloister, he sent him down an empty corridor, with the occasional worthless painting on its white walls. A very long corridor with few doors. Instinctively lowering his tone of voice, like in the old days, he said what do you want, and Fèlix Ardèvol replied I want contacts, only contacts. I want to establish a shop and I think you can help me to find top quality material.

They walked a few steps in silence. It was strange because despite the barrenness of the location, neither their footsteps nor their words echoed. Father Morlin must have known it was a discreet spot. When they had passed two paintings, he stopped in front of a very modest Annunciation, wiped his brow and looked him in the eye: ‘While you are at war? How were you able to get out?’

‘I can come and go pretty easily. I have my system. And I have contacts.’

Father Morlin’s expression seemed to indicate that he didn’t want to know any more details.

They talked for a long time. Fèlix Ardèvol’s idea was crystal clear: in the last few years, many Germans, Austrians and Poles began to feel uncomfortable with Hitler’s plans and searched for a change of scenery.

‘You are looking for rich Jews.’

‘People on the run always have great bargains for an antiquarian. Take me to those wanting to move to America. I’ll take care of the rest.’

They reached the end of the corridor. A window overlooked a small austere cloister, decorated only with geraniums the colour of blood in some pots on the ground. Fèlix had trouble imagining a Dominican friar watering a row of geraniums. On the other side of the small cloister a similar window perfectly framed, as if on purpose, the distant dome of Saint Peter’s. For a few seconds, Fèlix Ardèvol thought that he’d like to take the window and its view along with him. He returned to reality, convinced that Morlin had brought him there to show him the window.

‘I need three or four addresses, of people in such circumstances.’

‘And how do you know, dear Ardevole, that I could help you with this?’

‘I have my sources: I devote many hours to my work and I know that you’ve been constantly widening your circle of contacts.’

Father Morlin took the blow but showed no outward reaction.

‘And where does this sudden interest in others’ objects come from?’

He was about to say because my work fascinates me; because when I find an object that I’m interested in, the world reduces to that object, whether it’s a statuette, a painting, a document or a fabric. And the world is filled with objects that need no justification. There are objects that …

‘I’ve become a collector.’ He specified: ‘I am a collector.’

‘A collector of what?’

‘A collector.’ He opened his arms, like Saint Dominic preaching from the throne. ‘I’m looking for beautiful things.’

And heavens did Father Morlin have information. If there was one person in the world able to know everything while barely ever leaving Santa Sabina, it was Father Fèlix Morlin, a friend to his friends and, according to what they say, a danger to his enemies. Ardevole was a friend and, therefore, they soon came to an agreement. First, Fèlix Ardèvol had to put up with a sermon about the frenzied times that were their lot and no one wants, and to make a good impression he added a you can say that again, you can say that again, and if you were watching from a distance, you’d think they were reciting the litanies of the rosary. And the frenzied times that Europe was experiencing were starting to force a lot of people to look towards America and, thanks to Father Morlin, Fèlix Ardèvol spent a few months travelling through Europe before the fire, trying to save the furniture from any likely earthquake. His first contact was Tiefer Graben, in Vienna’s Innere Stadt district. It was a very nice house, not very wide but surely quite deep. He rang the bell and smiled sympathetically at the woman who had opened the door to him somewhat reluctantly. With that first contact he was able to buy all of the house’s furnishings, which, after setting aside the five most valuable objects, he resold for twice the price without leaving Vienna, almost without crossing the Ring. Such a spectacular success that it could have given him a swelled head, but Fèlix Ardèvol was an astute man, as well as intelligent. And so he proceeded with caution. In Nuremberg he bought a collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting: two Fragonards, an evanescent Watteau and three Rigauds. And the Mignon with the yellow gardenias, I imagine, which he saved for himself. Pontegradella, near Ferrara, was where he first held a valuable musical instrument in his hands. It was a viola made by Nicola Galliano of Naples. As he considered buying it, he even lamented not having learned to play that type of instrument. He knew enough to stay silent until the seller, a viola player named Davide Fiordaliso who, according to what his sources had informed him, had been forced out of the Vienna Philharmonic because of the new race laws and was reduced to earning a living playing in a café in Ferrara, anxiously told him due milioni in a very soft voice. He looked at Signor Arrau, who’d spent an hour examining the viola with a magnifying glass, and Arrau gave him the sign with his eyes that meant yes. Fèlix Ardèvol knew that what he had to do then was give the object back to its owner with an offended expression on his face and offer some absurdly low figure. He did it, but he was so reluctant to endanger his chances of possessing that viola, that afterwards he had to sit down and rethink his strategy. One thing was buying and selling with a cool head and the other was setting up the shop, if he ever did. He bought the viola for duecentomila lire. And he refused to have a coffee with the seller whose hands trembled violently, because in war they teach you not to look your victim in the eye. A Galliano. Signor Arrau told him that, although instruments weren’t his strong suit, he’d venture that he could get three times that if he discreetly spread the word and wasn’t in a rush to sell. And if he wished, he would introduce him to another Catalan, Signor Berenguer, a promising young man who had learned to appraise things with extraordinary precision and who, when the war ended in Spain, which had to happen someday, planned to return home.

On the advice of Father Morlin, who seemed to know it all, he rented a storage space in a village near Zurich and stockpiled the sofas, canapes, console tables, Fragonards, Chippendale chairs and Watteaus there. And the Galliano viola. He still couldn’t even imagine that one day a string instrument, similar on the face of it, would be his end. But he had already made a clear distinction between the shop and his private collection comprised of the most select objects in his catalogue.

Every once in a while he returned to Rome, to the Bramante hostel, and met with Morlin. They talked about possible clients, they talked about the future, and Morlin let on that the war in Spain would never end because Europe was now undergoing a convulsive period and that meant things would be very uncomfortable. The world map had to be reworked and the fastest way to do that was with bombs and trenches, he said with a touch of nonchalant resignation.

‘And how do you know all this?’

I was unable to ask any other question. Daniela and I had gone up the Barri path to the castle, as if we were walking with someone elderly who didn’t want to tackle the other, much steeper, one.

‘What a marvellous view,’ she said.

In front of the castle’s chapel, they looked out at the Plana, and Adrià thought about his Arcadia, but only fleetingly. ‘How do you know so much about my father?’

‘Because he’s my father. What’s the name of that mountain in the distance?’

‘The Montseny.’

‘Doesn’t it all look like a nativity scene?’

What do you know about my crèches, the ones we never set up at home, I thought. But Daniela was right, Tona looked more like a nativity scene than ever and Adrià couldn’t help but point downhill, ‘Can Ges.’

‘Yes. And Can Casic.’

They walked to the Torre dels Moros. Inside it was filled with piss and shit. Outside, there was the wind and the landscape. Adrià sat beside the precipice to get a good view of his landscape. Until then he hadn’t formulated the right question: ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

She sat beside him and without looking at him said that they were brother and sister, that they had to understand each other, that she was the owner of Can Casic.

‘I already know that. My mother told me.’

‘I’m planning on demolishing the house, the filth, the pond, the manure and the stench of rotten hay. And put up new houses there.’

‘Don’t even think it.’

‘You’ll get used to the idea.’

‘Viola died of grief.’

‘Who is Viola?’

‘The bitch of Can Casic. Dark beige with a black snout and droopy ears.’

Surely Daniela didn’t understand him, but she didn’t say anything. Adrià stared at her for a few seconds in silence.

‘Why are you telling me all this?’

‘You need to know who our father was.’

‘You hate him.’

‘Our father is dead, Adrià.’

‘But you hate him. Why have you come to Tona?’

‘To talk to you without your mother around. To talk to you about the shop. When it’s yours I would like to be involved as a partner.’

‘But why are you telling this to me? Deal with my mother …’

‘Your mother is impossible to deal with. And you know that full well.’

The sun had hidden behind Collsuspina some time ago and I felt an immense void inside of me. The light was gradually dimming and I thought I could hear the crickets starting. The pale moon awoke drowsily, rising early, over the Collsacabra. When the shop is mine, was that what she had said?

‘It will eventually be yours, sooner or later.’

‘Go to hell.’

I said that last bit in Catalan. From her slight smile I could tell she had understood me perfectly even though she didn’t bat an eyelash.

‘I still have more things to tell you about. By the way, what violin did you bring with you?’

‘I’m not planning on practising much at all. In fact, I’ve stopped my lessons. I only brought it for Aunt Leo.’

Since it would soon be dark, they started the walk down. Along the steep path, in revenge, he took long strides, making light of the precipice, and she, despite her narrow skirt, followed him without any apparent problems. The moon was already at its height when they reached the level of the trees, near the cemetery.

‘But which violin did you bring with you?’

‘My student one. Why?’

‘As far as I know,’ continued Signor Somethingorother, still standing in the middle of the street, ‘it is a violin that has never been played regularly: like the Stradivarius Messiah, do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘No,’ said Ardèvol, impatient.

‘I’m saying that makes it even more valuable. Guillaume-François Vial made off with it the very same year it was made, and its whereabouts since then are unknown. Perhaps it has been played, but I have no record of it. And now we find it here. It is an instrument of incalculable value.’

‘That is what I wanted to hear, caro dottore.’

‘Is it really his first?’ asked Mr Berenguer, his interest piqued.

‘Yes.’

‘I would forget about it, Mr Ardèvol. That’s a lot of money.’

‘Is it worth it?’ asked Fèlix Ardèvol, looking at Somethingorother.

‘I would pay it without thinking twice. If you have the money. It has an incredibly lovely sound.’

‘I don’t give a damn about its sound.’

‘And exceptional symbolic value.’

‘That does matter to me.’

They said goodbye because it was starting to rain. They said goodbye after Signor Somethingorother got paid his expert’s fee, right there on the street. The ravages of war, besides millions of dead and entire cities destroyed, had got people out of the habits of courtesy and they now settled things on any old street corner, deals that could seriously affect more than one life. They said goodbye when Fèlix Ardèvol said all right, that he would take Mr Berenguer’s advice and that yes, fifty thousand dollars was too much money. And thank you both very much. And until we meet again, if we ever do. Mr Berenguer, before going round the corner, turned to observe Ardèvol. He pretended to be lighting a cigarette that he didn’t have in his hand in order to get a better look. Fèlix Ardèvol felt the other man’s gaze on the back of his neck but didn’t turn.

‘Who is Mr Falegnami?

He was back at the Santa Sabina monastery. They were back in the discreet corridor without an echo. Father Morlin checked his watch and sent Ardèvol, forcefully, out towards the street.

‘Blast it, Morlin, it’s raining!’

Father Morlin opened a huge umbrella, the size used by country folk, grabbed Ardèvol by the arm and they started walking in front of the monastery. They looked like a Dominican friar consoling and giving advice to a poor mortal with a heavy conscience, pacing in front of Santa Sabina’s facade, as if they were speaking of infidelities, fits of lust, sinful feelings of envy or rage, and it’s been many years since my last confession, Father, and for the passers-by it was an uplifting image.

‘He’s the concierge of the Ufficio della Giustizia e della Pace.’

‘I already know that.’ Two drenched strides. ‘Who is he, come on. How is it that he has such a valuable violin?’

‘So it really is incredibly valuable …’

‘You’ll have your commission.’

‘I know what he’s asking.’

‘I reckoned as much. But you don’t know what I’m going to give him.’

‘His name isn’t Falegnami: it’s Zimmermann.’

He looked at him out of the corner of his eye. After a few steps in silence, Father Morlin tested the waters: ‘You don’t know who he is, do you?’

‘I’m convinced his real name isn’t Zimmermann either.’

‘It’s best if you continue to call him Falegnami. You can offer him a quarter of what he asked you for. But don’t make him feel choked because …’

‘Because he’s dangerous.’

‘Yes.’

An American army jeep passed quickly along the Corso and splashed the bottoms of their habit and trousers.

‘Damn it to hell,’ said Ardèvol, without raising his voice. Morlin shook his head with displeasure.

‘My dear friend,’ he said with a distant smile as if looking into the future, ‘your character will be your undoing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That you should know that you aren’t as strong as you think you are. And even less so in times like these.’

‘Who is this Zimmermann?’

Félix Morlin took his friend by the arm. The whisper of the rain hitting the umbrella didn’t drown out his voice.

Outside, the extreme cold had turned the downpour into a profuse, silent snowfall. Inside, as he looked into the iridescent colour of the wine in his raised glass, he said, I was born into a wealthy and very religious family, and the moral rectitude of my upbringing has helped me to assume the difficult task, by direct order from the Führer via the explicit instructions from Reichsführer Himmler, of becoming a stalwart defence against the enemy inside our fatherland. This wine is excellent, Doctor.

‘Thank you,’ said Doctor Voigt, a bit weary of so much talk. ‘It is an honour for me to be able to taste it here, in my improvised home,’ he thought to say. With each passing day he was more repulsed by these grotesque characters without the slightest manners.

‘Improvised but comfortable,’ said the Oberlagerführer.

A second little sip. Outside, the snow was already covering the earth’s unmentionables with a modest thick sheet of cold. Rudolf Höss continued, ‘For me, orders are sacred, no matter how difficult they may seem, since as an SS I must be willing to completely sacrifice my personality in the fulfilment of my duty to the fatherland.’

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

‘Of course, Obersturmbannführer Höss.’

And then Höss told him, loudly, about that pathetic episode with Soldier Bruno something or other, until, as if he were Dietmar Kehlmann at the Berliner Theater, he ended with the famous line take away this carrion. He had told it to about twenty people and, as far as Doctor Voigt knew, always concluded with the same shrill ending.

‘My parents, who were fervent Catholics in a predominantly Lutheran, if not Calvinist, Germany, wanted me to be a priest. I spent quite some time considering it.’

Envious wretch.

‘You would have made a good priest, Obersturbannführer Höss.’

‘I imagine so.’

And conceited.

‘I’m sure: everything you do, you do well.’

‘What you’ve just made out to be a virtue, could also be my ruin. And especially now that Reichsführer Himmler is going to visit us.’

‘Why?’

‘Because as Oberlagerführer, I am responsible for all the failings of the system. For example, I only have two or three cans at the most left from the last shipment of Zyklon gas and the quartermaster hasn’t even thought to tell me to make a new order. And so I’ll have to ask for favours, get some lorries to come here that probably should be somewhere else, and stifle my craving to yell at the quartermaster because we are all working at our limit, here at Auschwitz.’

‘I imagine that the experience of Dachau …’

‘From a psychological point of view, the difference is vast. At Dachau we had prisoners.’

‘From what I understand huge numbers of them died and still do.’

This doctor is an imbecile, thought Höss. Let’s call a spade a spade.

‘Yes, Doctor Voigt, but Dachau is a prison camp. Auschwitz-Birkenau is designed, created and calculated to exterminate rats. If it weren’t for the fact that Jews aren’t human, I would think we are living in hell, with one door that leads to a gas chamber and another place that’s cremation ovens and their flames, or the open pits in the forest, where we burn the remaining units, because we can’t keep up with all the material they send us. This is the first time I’ve talked about these things with someone not involved in the camp, Doctor.’

And who does this brainless piece of shit think he was then?

‘It’s good to vent every once in a while, Obersturmbannführer Höss.’

It feels good to really get things off your chest, even if it’s with a conceited, stupid doctor like this one, thought Höss.

‘I’m counting on your professional secrecy, because the Reichsführer …’

‘Naturally. You, who are a Christian … In short, a psychiatrist is like a confessor, the confessor you could have been.’

‘My men have to be strong to carry out the task they have been entrusted with. The other day a soldier, more than thirty years old, not some teenager, burst into tears in one of the barracks in front of his comrades.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Bruno, Bruno, wake up!’

Although it’s hard to believe, the Oberlagerführer, the Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, was about to relate the entire scene again from start to finish as soon as he drank his second glass of wine. By the fourth or fifth, his eyes were glassy. Then he began to be incoherent and inadvertently let slip that he was fixated on a Jewish girl. The doctor was shocked but he concealed it, telling himself that it could be very interesting information to use in periods of hardship. So the next day he spoke with Gefreiter Hänsch and very politely asked him whom the Obersturmbannführer was referring to. It was simple: his maid. And he jotted it down in his ‘just in case’ notebook.

A few days later, he had to once again tend to the odious task of selecting merchandise. Shielded, Doctor Voigt observed the soldiers, who tried to forcefully convince the women to let their children be taken away. He saw the selection that Doctor Budden made, the ten girls and boys that he had ordered, and then he noticed an old woman who was coughing and weeping. He went over to her.

‘What’s this?’

He touched the case with his hand, but the old shrew stepped back; who did that contemptible hag think she was, he thought. The old woman clung to the case in such a way that it was impossible to get it from her. Sturmbannführer Voigt pulled out his pistol, aimed it at the back of the woman’s worn, grey neck and fired; the weak pac! was barely heard amid the general wailing. And the disgusting crone splattered blood on the violin case. The doctor ordered Emmanuel to clean it off and bring it to his office at once; meanwhile he headed off as he put away his weapon, followed by many terrified eyes.

‘Here’s the thing you asked for,’ said Emmanuel, a few minutes later. And he put the case down on the desk. It was a fine one; that was what had caught Doctor Voigt’s eye. A fine case doesn’t usually hide a bad instrument. A person who spends money on a case has already spent plenty on the instrument. And if the instrument is good, you hold on to it for dear life, even if you are headed to Auschwitz.

‘Break the lock.’

‘How, commander?’

‘Use your imagination.’ Suddenly startled: ‘But don’t shoot it!’

The assistant opened it with a non-standard issue knife, a detail which Voigt wrote down in his ‘just in case’ notebook. He waved him off and, somewhat excited, opened the violin case. There was an instrument inside, yes; but at first glance he could already see it was nothing … No, wait a minute. He picked it up and read the label inside: Laurentius Storioni Cremonensis me fecit 1764. Would you look at that.

Höss, that idiot clodhopper, had him come in at three, wrinkled his nose and dared to tell him that, as a temporary guest to the Lager, you have no right to make a scene by executing a unit in the reception and selection area, Doctor Voigt.

‘She refused to obey me.’

‘What was she carrying?’

‘A violin.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘It’s nothing valuable, Obersturmbannführer.’

‘Doesn’t matter, but I still want to see it.’

‘Trust me, it’s of no interest.’

‘That’s an order.’

Doctor Voigt opened the door to the pharmacy’s cabinet and said, with a soft voice and a fawning smile, ‘As you wish, Obersturmbannführer.’

As he examined it and checked its scars, Rudolf Höss said I don’t know any musician who can tell me what it’s worth.

‘Must I remind you that I am the one who found it, Obersturmbannführer?’

Rudolf Höss lifted his head, surprised by Doctor Voigt’s excessively curt tone. He let a few seconds pass so the other man would have a chance to realise that he had realised what there was to realise, although he wasn’t altogether sure what that was.

‘Didn’t you say it wasn’t worth anything?’

‘It’s not. But I like it.’

‘Well, I’m going to keep it, Doctor Voigt. In compensation for …’

He didn’t know in compensation for what. So he let it trail off with a dot dot dot as he put the instrument back in its case and closed it.

‘How disgusting.’ He extended his arms to look at it. ‘That’s blood, right?’

He leaned back against the wall.

‘Because of your little whim, I’ll have to change the case.’

‘I’ll do it, because I’m keeping it.’

‘You are mistaken, my friend: I’m keeping it.’

‘You are not keeping it, Obersturmbannführer.’

Rudolf Höss grabbed the case by the handle, as if he was preparing to come to blows. Now he clearly saw that the instrument was valuable. From the Doctor Commander’s boldness, it must be very valuable. He smiled, but he had to stop smiling when he heard the words of Doctor Voigt, who brought his breath and his thickset nose close to Höss’s face: ‘You can’t keep it because I will report you.’

‘On what grounds?’ Höss, perplexed.

‘Six hundred and fifteen thousand, four hundred and twenty-eight.’

‘What?’

‘Elisaveta Meireva.’

‘What?’

‘Unit number six hundred and fifteen thousand, four hundred and twenty-eight. Six, one, five, four, two, eight, Elisaveta Meireva. Your maid. Reichsführer Himmler will condemn you to death when he finds out you’ve had sexual relations with a Jewess.’

Red as a tomato, Höss put the violin down on the desk with a thud.

‘All your talk about confessional secrets, you bastard.’

‘I’m no priest.’

The violin remained with Doctor Voigt, who was just passing through Auschwitz, supervising with an iron hand the experiments of Doctor Budden, that stuck-up Obersturmführer who must have swallowed a broomstick one day and had yet to shit it out. And also the experiments of three more deputy doctors; what he had conceived as the most in-depth investigation ever attempted on the limits of pain. As for Höss, he spent a few days nervously clenching his arse cheeks together, wondering whether that artful poof of a bandit, Aribert Voigt, was, in addition to being an artful poof of a pirate, also a blabbermouth.

‘Five thousand dollars, Mr Falegnami.’

The man with the frightened, increasingly glassy eyes stared into Fèlix Ardèvol’s.

‘Are you pulling my leg?’

‘No. Look, you know what? I’ll take it for three thousand, Mr Zimmermann.’

‘You’ve gone mad.’

‘No. Either you give it to me for that price or … Well, the authorities will be very interested in knowing that Doctor Aribert Voigt, Sturmbannführer Voigt, is alive, hidden a kilometre away from the Vatican City, probably with the complicity of someone high up in the Vatican. And that he’s trying to sell a violin nicked from Auschwitz.’

Mr Falegnami had pulled out a feminine little parlour gun and aimed it at him nervously. Fèlix Ardèvol didn’t even flinch. He pretending to be stifling a smile and shook his head as if he were very displeased, ‘You are alone. How will you get rid of my corpse?’

‘It will be a pleasure to face that challenge.’

‘You’ll still be left with an even bigger one: if I don’t walk out of here on my own two feet, the people waiting for me on the street already have their instructions.’ He pointed to the gun, sternly. ‘And now I’ll take it for two thousand. Don’t you know that you are one of the Allies’ ten most wanted?’ He improvised that part in the tone of someone scolding an unruly child.

Doctor Voigt watched as Ardèvol pulled out a wad of notes and put them on the table. He lowered the gun, with his eyes wide, incredulous: ‘That’s not even fifteen hundred!’

‘Don’t make me lose my patience, Sturmbannführer Voigt.’

That was Fèlix Ardèvol’s doctorate in buying and selling. A half an hour later he was out on the street with the violin, striding quickly with his heart beating fast and the satisfaction of a job well done.

‘You just broke with the most sacred of diplomatic relations.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You acted like an elephant in a Bohemian glassware shop.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about?’

Friar Fèlix Morlin, with indignation in his face and voice, spat out, ‘I’m in no position to judge people. Mr Falegnami was under my protection.’

‘But he is a savage son of a bitch.’

‘He was under my protection!’

‘Why do you protect murderers?’

Félix Morlin closed the door in the face of Fèlix Ardèvol, who didn’t really understand his reaction.

As he left Santa Sabina, he put on his hat and raised the lapels of his coat. He didn’t know that he would never again see that Dominican who was full of surprises.

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘There are more things I can tell you about our father.’

It was already dark. They had to walk along dark streets and be careful not to trip on the hardened wheel tracks sculpted in the road’s mud. Daniela gave him kiss on the forehead in front of Can Ges and for a few seconds Adrià was reminded of the angel she’d once been, now without wings or any special aura. Then he realised that all the shops were closed and Aunt Leo wouldn’t be getting any little gift.

20

It was a face filled with tragic wrinkles. But I was impressed by his clear direct gaze, which made me feel as if he were accusing me of something. Or, depending on how you looked at it, as if he were begging for my forgiveness. I sensed many misfortunes in it before Sara told me anything. And all the misfortunes were contained in strokes made in charcoal on thick white paper.

‘This is the drawing that most impressed me,’ I told her. ‘I would have liked to meet him.’

I realised that Sara hadn’t said anything; she just stood in front of the charcoal of the Cadaqués landscape. We contemplated it in silence. The entire house was silent. Sara’s huge flat, which we had entered furtively, today my parents aren’t here and neither is anyone else. A rich home. Like mine. Like a thief, like the day of the Lord, I will come like a thief in the night.

I didn’t dare to ask her why we had to go there on a day when no one was home. Adrià was thrilled to see the surroundings of that girl who got deeper into his bones with each passing day, with her melancholy smile and delicate gestures he’d never seen before in anyone else. And Sara’s room was larger than mine, twice as large. And very pretty: with wallpaper with geese and a farmhouse that wasn’t like Can Ges in Tona: it was prettier, neater, without flies or odours; more like a picture book; the wallpaper of a little girl who hadn’t changed it even now that she was … I don’t know how old you are, Sara.

‘Nineteen. And you are twenty-three.’

‘How do you know that I’m twenty-three?’

‘I can tell by your face.’

And she put a new drawing on top of the one of Cadaqués.

‘You draw really well. Let me see that portrait again.’

She put the drawing of Uncle Haïm on top of the pile. His gaze, his wrinkles, his sad aura.

‘Did you say it was your uncle?’

‘Yes. He’s dead now.’

‘When did he die?’

‘Actually, he’s my mother’s uncle. I didn’t get to know him. Well, I was very young when …’

‘And how …’

‘A photo.’

‘Why did you draw his portrait?’

‘To keep his story alive.’

They queued up to enter the showers. Gavriloff, who during the entire trajectory in the cattle wagon had warmed two girls who had no one to hold their hands, turned towards Doctor Epstein and said they are taking us to our death, and Doctor Epstein answered, in a murmur so other people wouldn’t hear, that that was impossible, that he was crazy.

‘No, they’re the ones who are crazy, Doctor. When will you see!’

‘Everyone inside. That’s it, men on this side. Of course the children can go with the women.’

‘No, no; leave your clothes neatly folded and remember the number of the hook, for when you get out of the shower, all right?’

‘Where are you from?’ asked Uncle Haïm looking into the eyes of the man giving the instructions.

‘We’re not allowed to speak to you.’

‘Who are you? You are Jews, too, aren’t you?’

‘We aren’t allowed, for fuck’s sake. Don’t make things difficult for me.’ And shouting, ‘Remember your hook number!’

When all the naked men were advancing slowly towards the showers, where there were already a group of naked women, an SS officer with a pencil moustache and a dry cough entered the dressing room and said is there a doctor in here? Doctor Haïm Epstein took a step towards the showers, but Gavriloff, beside him, said don’t be an idiot, Doctor; that gives you a chance.

‘Shut up.’

Then Gavriloff turned and pointed to Haïm Epstein’s pale back and said er ist ein Arzt, mein Oberleutnant; and Herr Epstein cursed his companion in misfortune, who continued towards the showers with his eyes slightly happy and softly whistling a csárdás by Rózsavölgyi.

‘Are you a doctor?’ asked the officer, planted before Epstein.

‘Yes,’ he said, resigned and, most of all, tired. And he was only fifty years old.

‘Get dressed.’

Epstein dressed slowly while the rest of the men went into the showers, shepherded by prisoners with grey, worn gazes.

The officer paced impatiently while that Jew put on his clothes. And he began to cough, perhaps to cover up the muffled screams of horror that emerged from the shower area.

‘What is that? What’s going on?’

‘Come on, that’s enough,’ the officer said nervously, when he saw the other pulling up his trousers over his open shirt.

He took him outside, into the inclement cold of Oświęcim, and he had him go inside a guard post, pulling out the two sentries who were loitering there.

‘Listen to my chest,’ he ordered, putting a stethoscope in his hands.

Epstein was slow to understand what he wanted. The other man was already unbuttoning his shirt. He unhurriedly put the stethoscope in his ears and felt, for the first time since Drancy, invested with some sort of authority.

‘Sit down,’ he ordered, now a doctor.

The officer sat down on the guard post stool. Haïm listened to his torso carefully and, from what he heard, he imagined the depleted cavities secreting mucous. He had him change position and listened to his chest and his back. He had him stand up again, just for the fun of ordering around an SS officer. For a few moments he thought that while he was listening to his chest they wouldn’t send him to those showers with the horrifying screams. Gavriloff had been right.

He wasn’t able to completely hide his satisfaction as he looked into his patient’s eyes and told him that he would have to undergo a more thorough examination.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Genital exploration, tactile examination of the kidney area.’

‘Fine, fine, fine …’

‘Do you feel unexplained pains here?’ he asked pressing hard on his kidney with fingers of steel.

‘Watch it, fuck!’

Doctor Epstein shook his head, pretending he was concerned.

‘What is it?’

‘You have tuberculosis.’

‘Are you positive?’

‘Without a shadow of a doubt. The illness is quite far along.’

‘Well, they’ve been ignoring me here. Is it serious?’

‘Very much so.’

‘What do I have to do?’ he said, ripping the stethoscope from his hands.

‘I would have you sent to a sanatorium. It’s the only thing that can be done.’ And pointing to his yellow fingers, ‘And no more tobacco, for God’s sake.’

The officer called the sentries and told them to take that man to the showers, but one of the sentries gave him the sign that they’d finished for the day, that that had been the last turn. Then he put on his coat and shouted, as he went down to the buildings accompanied by his persistent cough, ‘Take him to barracks twenty-six.’

And that saved his life. But he’d often said that saving his life was a worse punishment than death.

‘I never imagined it was so horrific.’

‘Well, you haven’t heard it all.’

‘Tell me.’

‘No. I can’t.’

‘Come on.’

‘Come here, I’ll show you the paintings in the parlour.’

Sara showed him the paintings in the parlour, she showed him family photos, she responded patiently about who each person was, but when it was time to think about leaving because someone might be coming home, she said you’ll have to go. You know what? I’ll walk you part of the way.

And that was how I didn’t meet your family.

21

No art was cultivated and developed by the Sophists as systematically as rhetoric. Sara. In rhetoric, the Sophists saw a perfect instrument to control men. Sara, why didn’t you want to have children? Thanks to the Sophists and their rhetoric, public speeches became literary, since man began to see them as works of art worthy of being preserved in writing. Sara. From that point on, oratory training became essential to the career of a statesman, but the rhetoric included, in its realm of influence, all prose and particularly historiography. Sara, you are a mystery to me. Thus man can understand that in the fourth century the dominant position in literature was held by prose and not poetry. Strange. But logical.

‘Where have you been, man, I can never find you anywhere.’

Adrià looked up from the Nestle opened to chapter fifteen, to Isocrates and new education, where he was immersed. As if he had trouble focusing his eyes, he took a few seconds to recognise the face that entered the cone of light given off by the green lampshade in the university library. Someone hushed them and Bernat had to lower his voice as he sat in the chair in front of him and said Adrià hasn’t been here for a month; no, he’s out; I don’t know where he went; Adrià? He spends the whole day out. Really, man … Not even in your own house does anyone know where you are!

‘Here I am, studying.’

‘That’s twaddle; I spend hours here.’

‘You?’

‘Yes. Making friends with pretty girls.’

It was hard to emerge from the fourth century before Christ, especially if Bernat was there to scold him.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Who’s this girl that they say’s been stuck to you like a leech?’

‘Who says that?’

‘Everyone. Gensana described her to me and everything: dark, straight hair, thin, dark eyes, an art student.’

‘Well, then you already know everything …’

‘Is it the one from the Palau de la Música? The one who called you Adrià Ican’trememberwhat?’

‘You should be happy for me, shouldn’t you?’

‘Bloody hell, now you’re in love.’

‘Will you please be quiet!?’

‘Sorry.’ To Bernat: ‘Should we leave?’

They strolled through the cloister and Adrià told someone for the first time that he was definitively, absolutely, devotedly, unconditionally in love with you, Sara. And don’t say a word about it at my house.

‘Oh, so it’s even a secret from Little Lola.’

‘I hope so.’

‘But some day …’

‘We’ll see about that when that day comes.’

‘In such circumstances, it’s hard for me to imagine that you could do a favour for your former best friend who’s now been demoted to mere acquaintance because your world revolves around that luscious girl named … what was her name?’

‘Mireia.’

‘Liar. Her name is Saga Voltes-Epstein.’

‘Then why did you ask? And her name is Sara.’

‘So why do you have to lie to me? And hide from me? Huh? It’s me, Bernat, what the hell?’

‘Don’t get like that, for god’s sake’

‘I get like this because it seems like you don’t care a whit about your life before Sara.’

Bernat extended his hand to him and Adrià, a bit surprised, shook it.

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Ardèvol. My name is Bernat Plensa i Punsoda and until a few months ago I was your best friend. Will you grant me audience?’

‘My goodness.’

‘What.’

‘You are a bit soft in the head.’

‘No. I’m angry: friends come first. And that’s that.’

‘The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong.’

We cannot look for a philosophical system in Isocrates. Isocrates takes what he can use from wherever he finds it. Pure syncretism and no systematic philosophy. Sara. Bernat stood in front of him to keep him from continuing, and stared: ‘What are you thinking about?’

‘I don’t know. I’m very …’

‘It sucks to see a pal in love.’

‘I don’t know if I’m in love.’

‘What the hell, didn’t you say you were definitively, absolutely, devotedly, unconditionally in love? Bloody hell, it’s only been a minute since you made that declaration.’

‘But deep down I don’t know if I am. I’ve never felt a … a … um, I don’t know how to say it.’

‘I can tell you that you are.’

‘That I am what?’

‘That you are in love.’

‘How would you know, you’ve never been in love.’

‘What do you know?’

They sat down on a bench in a corner of the cloister and Adrià thought that Isocrates was interested in the Sophists, but only in specific questions: for example, Xenophanes and his idea of cultural progress (I’ll have to read Xenophanes). And his interest in Philip of Macedonia was the result of his discovery of the importance of personality in history. Strange.

‘Bernat.’

Bernat, pretending that he didn’t hear, looked the other way. Adrià insisted, ‘Bernat.’

‘What.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’m angry.’

‘Why?’

‘Because in June I have my ninth-year exam and I’m not ready.’

‘I’ll come to hear you.’

‘Oh, you mean you won’t be too busy with that girl who’s got such a monopoly on you lately?’

‘And come over if you want, or I’ll come over to your house and we can practise.’

‘I don’t want to distract you from wooing the Mireia of your dreams.’

Definitively, Isocrates’s Athens school, more than a philosophy, offered that which in Rome was called humanitas and which we would today call ‘general culture’, all that which Plato, and his Academy, left out. Oh, bloody hell. I’d like to peep in on them through a keyhole. And see Sara and her family.

‘I swear that I’ll come to hear you play. And if you want, she’ll come too.’

‘No. Only friends.’

‘You’re a bastard.’

‘How.’

‘What?’

‘You can bet on it.’

‘On what?’

‘On that you’re in love.’

‘And what do you know?’

The Arapaho chief adopted a dignified silence. Did that child think that he was going to reveal his experiences and his feelings? Carson spat on the ground and took up where he’d left off: ‘You can see it a mile off. Even your mother must have noticed.’

‘Mother only has eyes for the shop.’

‘Trust me.’

Isocrates. Xenophanes. Sara. Bernat. Syncretism. Violin exam. Sara. Philip of Macedonia. Sara. Sara. Sara.

Sara. Days, weeks, months of being by your side and respecting that ancestral silence you were often enveloped in. You were a girl with a sad but marvellously serene gaze. And I had increasingly more strength to study knowing that afterwards I would see you and I would melt looking into your eyes. We always met on the street, eating a hot dog in Sant Jaume Square or strolling through the gardens in Ciutadella Park, in our joyful secrecy; never at your house or at my house unless we were absolutely sure that no one was there because our secret had to be a secret from both families. I didn’t know exactly why; but you did. And I let myself be carried along by days and days of unremitting happiness without asking questions.

22

Adrià was thinking that he’d like to be able to write something like the Griechische Geistesgeschichte. That was an impossible model: thinking and writing like Nestle. And he thought many more things, because those were intense, lively, heroic, once-in-a-lifetime, epic, magnificent, superb months of discovery. Months of thinking of and living for Sara, which multiplied his desire and energy for studying and more studying, abstracted from the daily police charges against anything that sounded like student, which was a synonym for communist, mason, pro-Catalan and Jew, the four great scourges that Francoism strove to eliminate with truncheon blows and shots. None of that blackness existed for you and me, we spent our days studying, looking towards the future, looking into each other’s eyes, and saying I love you Sara, I love you, Sara, I love you, Sara.

‘How.’

‘What?’

‘You’re repeating yourself.’

‘I love you, Sara.’

‘Me too, Adrià.’

Nunc et semper. Adrià sighed with satisfaction. Was he satisfied? I often asked myself if life satisfied me. In those months, waiting for Sara, I had to admit that yes, I was satisfied, that I was eager to live because in a matter of minutes, a thin woman with dark, straight hair, dark eyes, an arts student, would come round the bakery corner, wearing a plaid skirt that was really cute on her, and with a soothing smile and she’d say hello, Adrià, and we would hesitate over kissing because I knew that there on the street everyone would stare, they’d stare and point at us and say look at you two, growing up and leaving the nest, secretly in love … The day was grey and cloudy, but he was radiant. It was ten past eight, and that was strange. She is as punctual as I am. And I’ve been waiting ten minutes. She’s sick. A sore throat. She got flattened by a hit and run taxi. A flowerpot fell on her from a sixth-floor flat, my God, I’ll have to go to every hospital in Barcelona. Ah, here she is! No: it was a thin woman, with dark, straight hair, but with light eyes and lipstick and twenty years older, who passed by the tram stop and probably wasn’t named Sara. He struggled to think of other things. He lifted his head. The plane trees on the Gran Via sprouted with new leaves, but the passing cars couldn’t care less. Not me! The cycle of life! Spring … Follas novas. He looked at his watch again. Unthinkable, twenty minutes late. Three or four more trams passed and he couldn’t help being overcome by a strange premonition. Sara. ¿Qué pasa ó redor de min? ¿Qué me pasa que eu non sei? Despite the premonition, Adrià Ardèvol waited two hours on a stone bench on the Gran Via, beside the tramvia stop, his eyes glued to the bakery corner, not thinking about the Griechische Geistesgeschichte because his head was filled with the thousand horrible things that could have befallen Sara. He didn’t know what to do. Sara, the daughter of the good king, is sick; doctors come to see her, doctors and other people. It doesn’t make any sense to keep waiting. But he doesn’t know what else to do. He didn’t know what to do with his life now that Sara didn’t show up. His legs carried him to Sara’s house, despite his beloved’s strict orders against it: but he had to be there when the ambulance carried her off. The doors were closed and the doorman was inside, distributing the post in the letter boxes. A short woman was vacuuming the central carpet. The doorman finished his work and opened the doors. The sound of the vacuum was like an insult. Dressed in some sort of ridiculous apron, the doorman looked up at the sky to see if it had made up its mind to rain or if the weather would hold out. Or perhaps he was waiting for the ambulance … Daughter, my daughter, what is it that ails you? Mother, my mother, I think you know full well. He wasn’t sure which balcony was hers … The doorman noticed that boy loitering, watching the building; he shot him a suspicious look. Adrià pretended to be waiting for a taxi; maybe the one that had mowed her down. He began to take a few steps down the street. Teño medo dunha cousa que vive e que non se ve. Teño medo á desgracia traidora que ven, e que nunca se sabe ónde ven. Sara, ónde estás.

‘Sara Voltes?’

‘Who shall I say is calling?’ A confident, elegant, well-dressed lady’s voice.

‘No, uh. The parish of … The drawings, the show of drawings at …’

When you make up a lie, you have to think it over before you start talking, bloody hell. You can’t take the first step and stand there with your mouth open and nothing coming out, you idiot. Ridiculous. Dreadfully ridiculous. So, it was logical that the elegant, confident lady’s voice said I think you’ve got the wrong number and hung up delicately, politely, softly, and I cursed myself because I hadn’t been up to the task. It must have been her mother. Poison you have given me, Mother, you want to kill me. Daughter, my daughter, now you must confess. Adrià hung up. At the back of the flat, Little Lola was going through the closets because she was changing the sheets. On the large table in Father’s study, Adrià had a heap of books, but he could only focus on the useless telephone, which was unable to tell him where Sara was.

Fine Arts! He had never been there. He didn’t know where it was, if it even existed. We had always met in neutral territory, at your indication, waiting for the day when the sun sparkled on the horizon. When I got out of the metro at the Jaume I stop, it had started to rain and I had no umbrella because I never carried an umbrella in Barcelona and I was only able to make the ridiculous gesture of raising my jacket lapels. I stood in the square of the Verònica, in front of that strange neo-classical building, which I never knew existed before that day. No sign of Sara inside nor outside; not in any hallway or classroom or studio. I went to the Llotja building, which retained the name of its former function as a fish market but there they knew nothing of fish or fine arts. At that point I was completely soaked; but then I thought to go to the Massana School and there, at the entrance, protected by a dark umbrella, I saw her chatting and laughing with a boy. She wore the pumpkin-coloured scarf that was so pretty on her. And unexpectedly she kissed the boy’s cheek and she had to get on her tiptoes to do it, and Adrià felt the brutal stab of jealousy for the first time, and an unbearable tightness in his chest. And then the boy went into the school and she turned and started to walk towards me. My heart wanted to leap out and into someone else’s body because the happiness I had felt a few hours ago faded into tears of disappointment. She didn’t say hello; she didn’t notice me; she wasn’t Sara. She was a thin girl, with straight, dark hair but light eyes and, most of all, not Sara. And I, dripping with rain, was once again the happiest man in the universe.

‘No, uh … I’m a classmate of hers in art school who …’

‘She’s out of town.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘She’s out of town.’

Was it her father? I didn’t know if she had an older brother, or if there was another uncle besides the memory of Uncle Haïm who lived with them.

‘But … what do you mean by out of town?’

‘Sara has moved to Paris.’

The happiest man in the universe, when he hung up the phone, watched as his eyes, all on their own, against his will, began to cry disconsolately. He didn’t understand anything; how could it be that Sara …, but she didn’t tell me anything. From one day to the next, Sara. On Friday, when we saw each other, we made a date to meet at the tram stop! The forty-seven, yes, as we always did since … And what is she doing, in Paris? Huh? Why did she run away? What did I do to her?

Adrià, for ten days, rain or shine, every morning, went to the tram stop at eight, hoping for a miracle and that Sara hadn’t moved to Paris, but that really she was back here; or that it was just a test to see if you really loved me; or I don’t know but something, anything and let’s see if she shows up before five trams pass. Until the eleventh day when, as soon as he reached the tram stop, he told himself that he was sick and tired of watching trams pass that they would never get on together. And he never again set foot on that tram stop, Sara. Never again.

In the conservatory, lying left and right, I managed to get the address of Master Castells, who had been a teacher there some time back. I imagined that, since they were relatives, he would have Sara’s address in Paris. If she was in Paris. If she was even alive. The doorbell to Master Castell’s flat went do-fa. My impatience led me to press do-fa, do-fa, do-fa and I pulled my finger away, frightened by how little control I had over my feelings. Or no: more likely because I didn’t want Master Castells to get angry and say now I won’t tell it to you, because of your poor manners. No one opened the door to offer me Sara’s address and wish me luck.

‘Do-fa, do-fa, do-fa.’

Nothing. After a few moments of insistence, Adrià looked round without knowing what he should do. Then I rang the neighbours’ bell across the landing, which made an impersonal, ugly sound, like the one at my house. Very quickly, as if they had been waiting for some time, a fat woman opened the door, dressed in a sky-blue smock and a flowered kitchen apron. The evil eye. Hands on her hips, defiantly. ‘What?’ she said.

‘Do you know if …’ pointing behind me, towards Master Castells’s door.

‘The pianist?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Thank God he died, it’s been …’ She looked back and shouted, ‘How long has it been, Taio?’

‘Six months, twelve days and three hours!’ said a hoarse voice from a distance.

‘Six months, twelve days and …’ Shouting into the flat, ‘How many hours?’

‘Three!’ the hoarse voice.

‘And three hours,’ repeated the woman to Adrià. ‘And thank God for the peace and quiet, now we can listen to the radio without interruptions. I don’t know how he made that pianola play every day, every day, all day long.’ As if remembering something, ‘What did you want from him?’

‘Did he have …’

‘Family?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘No. He lived alone.’ Into the flat: ‘He didn’t have any relatives, did he?’

‘No, just that damned bloody piano!’ Taio’s hoarse voice.

‘And in Paris?’

‘In Paris?’

‘Yes. Relatives in Paris …’

‘I have no idea.’ Incredulous: ‘That man, relatives in Paris?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’ As a general conclusion: ‘For us he’s dead and gone.’

When she left him alone on the landing with that flickering light bulb, Adrià knew that many doors were closing to him. He went back home and then the thirty days of desert and penitence began. At night he dreamt that he went to Paris and stood in the middle of the street calling her name, but the din of the traffic drowned out his desperate cries and he woke up sweaty and crying, not understanding the world that, until recently, had seemed so placid. He didn’t leave the house for a few weeks. He played the Storioni and was able to get a sad sound out of it; but he felt his fingers lazy. And he wanted to reread Nestle but couldn’t. Even Euripides’s voyage from rhetoric to truth, which had enthralled him on his first reading, now said nothing to him. Euripides was Sara. He was right about one thing, that Euripides: human reason cannot win out over the irrational powers of the emotional mind. I cannot study, I cannot think. I have to cry. Come, please, Bernat.

Bernat had never seen his friend in such a state. He was impressed to learn that heartache could be so profound. And he wanted to help him, although he didn’t have much experience in binding hearts and he told him look at it this way, Adrià.

‘How?’

‘Well, if she just left like this, without any explanation …’

‘What?’

‘Well, she’s a bi

‘Don’t even think about insulting her. Got it?’

‘Very well, as you wish.’ He looked around the study, opening his arms. ‘But don’t you see how she left you? And without even a sad piece of paper that says Adrià, lad, I found somebody better-looking? Bloody hell. Don’t you see that that’s not right?’

‘Better-looking and more intelligent, yes, that’s what I thought.’

‘There are plenty better-looking than you, but more intelligent …’

Silence. Every once in a while, Adrià shook his head to show he didn’t understand any of it.

‘Let’s go to her parents’ house and say: Mr and Mrs Voltes-Epstein, what the hell is going on? What are you hiding from me? Where is Saga, etcetera. What do you think?’

Both of us in Father’s study, which is now mine. Adrià stood up and approached the wall where years later your self-portrait would hang. He leaned against it as if he wanted to tickle the future. He shook his head: Bernat’s idea wasn’t very well thought out.

‘Do you want me to entertain you with the Ciaccona?’ attempted Bernat.

‘Yes. Play it on Vial.’

Bernat did so, very well. Despite his pain and anguish, Adrià listened to his friend’s version attentively and came to the conclusion that it was correctly played, but that, sometimes, Bernat had a problem: he didn’t get deep into the soul of things. He had something about him that didn’t allow him to be truthful. And there I was, wallowing in pain and unable to keep myself from analysing the aesthetic object.

‘Are you feeling better?’ he asked when he finished.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘No.’

I should have kept it to myself, I know. But I’m unable to. I’m like Mother in that way.

‘What do you mean by no?’ Even his tone of voice had changed, it was more shrill, more on guard, more gobsmacked …

‘Doesn’t matter, forget about it.’

‘No, I’m very interested.’

‘Fine, all right.’

Little Lola was at the back of the flat. Mother, in the shop. Adrià dropped onto the sofa. Standing in front of him, the Storioni in his hand, Bernat waited for the verdict and Adrià said welllll technically it’s a perfect version, or almost perfect; but you don’t get to the heart of things; it seems like you’re afraid of the truth.

‘You’re insane. What is truth?’

And Jesus, instead of replying, remained silent as Pilate left the room impatiently. But since I’m not sure what the truth is, I was forced to reply.

‘I don’t know. I recognise it when I hear it. And I don’t recognise it in you. I recognise it in music and in poetry. And in prose. And in painting. But only every once in a while.’

‘Ffucking envy.’

‘Yes. I can admit I envy your ability to play that.’

‘Sure. Now you’re trying to smooth things over.’

‘But I don’t envy how you play.’

‘Bloody hell, don’t pull your punches.’

‘Your goal is to trap that truth and figure out how to express it.’

‘Whoa.’

‘At least you have a goal. I have none.’

So the friendly evening in which Bernat came over to comfort his afflicted friend ended in a bitter fight in hushed voices over aesthetic truth and you can go fuck off, you hear me, fuck off. Now I understand why Saga Voltes-Epstein split. And Bernat left, slamming the door. And a few seconds later, Little Lola peeked into the study and said what happened?

‘No, Bernat was in a big rush, you know how he always is.’

Little Lola looked at Adrià, who was carefully examining the violin to keep from gazing idly into his pain. Little Lola was about to say something, but she stopped herself. Then Adrià realised that she was still standing there, as if wanting to chat.

‘What?’ I said, with an expression that showed I didn’t have the slightest desire to converse.

‘Nothing. Do you know what? I’m going to make dinner because Mother should be coming soon.’

She left and I started to clean the rosin off the violin and I felt sad to the marrow of my bones.

23

‘You’re mad as a hatter, my boy.’

Mother sat down in her armchair where she takes her coffee. Adrià had outlined the conversation in the worst possible way. Sometimes I wonder why she didn’t tell me to buzz off more often. Because instead of starting by saying Mother, I’ve decided to continue my studies in Tübingen and her answering in Germany? Aren’t you doing fine here, my son? Instead of that, I started by saying, Mother, I have to tell you something.

‘What?’ Frightened, she sat in her armchair where she takes her coffee; frightened because we had lived together for years without any need to tell each other things, but, above all, without the need to say Mother, I have to tell you something.

‘Well, a while back I spoke with a woman named Daniela Amato.’

‘Whom did you say you spoke with?’

‘With my half-sister.’

Mother leapt up as if she’d sat on a pin. I had her against me for the rest of the conversation: fool, worse than a fool, you don’t know anything about getting what you want.

‘You have no half-sister.’

‘The fact that you’ve hidden it from me doesn’t mean I don’t have one. Daniela Amato, from Rome. I have her phone number and address.’

‘What are you conspiring?’

‘Oh, please. Why?’

‘Don’t trust that thief.’

‘She told me that she wants to be a partner in the shop.’

‘You know she stole Can Casic from you?’

‘If I understood correctly, Father gave it to her; she didn’t steal anything from me.’

‘She’s like a vampire. She’ll want the shop for herself.’

‘No. She wants to be a part of it.’

‘Why do you think she wants it?’

‘I don’t know. Because it was Father’s?’

‘Well, now it’s mine and my answer is no to any offer that comes from that tart. Fuck her.’

Wow: we’d got off on a good foot. She hadn’t said ffuck because she’d used it as a verb and not an adjective, like the previous time I had heard her say it. I like Mother’s linguistic refinement. Still standing, she paced around the dining room, silent, thinking whether or not she should continue with the cursing. She decided not to: ‘Is that all you wanted to tell me?’

‘No. I also wanted to tell you that I’m leaving home.’

Mother sat back down in the armchair where she took her coffee.

‘You’re mad as a hatter, my boy.’ Silence. Nervous hands. ‘You’ve got everything here. What have I done?’

‘Nothing. What makes you ask that?’

She wrung her hands nervously. Then she took a deep breath to calm down and placed both hands flat on her skirt.

‘And the shop? Don’t you ever plan on taking it over?’

‘It doesn’t appeal to me.’

‘That’s a lie. It’s your favourite place.’

‘No. I like the things in the shop. But the work …’

She looked at me with what I took for resentment.

‘What you want is to contradict me. As always.’

Why didn’t we ever love each other, Mother and I? It’s a mystery to me. All my life I’ve envied normal children, who can say mum, oh, I hurt my knee so bad, and whose mother would frighten away the pain with a mere kiss. My mother didn’t have that power. When I dared to tell her that I’d hurt my knee, instead of trying for the miracle, she sent me to Little Lola while she waited, impatiently, for my intellectual gift to begin to make some other sort of miracles.

‘Aren’t you happy here?’

‘I’ve decided to continue my studies in Tübingen.’

‘In Germany? Aren’t you fine here?’

‘I want to study under Wilhelm Nestle.’

To be precise, I had no idea if Nestle still taught at Tübingen. Actually, I didn’t even know if he was still alive. In fact, at the time of our conversation, he had been dead for a little over eight years. And yes: he had taught classes in Tübingen, and that was why I had decided I wanted to study in Tübingen.

‘Who is he?’

‘A historian of philosophy. And I also want to meet Coşeriu.’

That time I wasn’t lying. They said he was unbearable but a genius.

‘Who is he?’

‘A linguist. One of the great philologists of our century.’

‘These studies won’t make you happy, my son.’

Let’s see: if I look at it with perspective, I’d have to say she was right. Nothing has ever made me happy except you, and you are the one who has made me suffer most. I have been close to much happiness; I have had some joy. I have enjoyed moments of peace and immense gratitude towards the world and towards some people. I have been close to beautiful things and concepts. And sometimes I feel the itch to possess valuable objects, which made me understand Father’s anxiousness. But since I was the age I was, I smiled smugly and said no one ever said I had to be happy. And I was silent, satisfied.

‘Look at how stupid you are.’

I looked at her, disarmed. Because with six words she had made me feel completely unpresentable. And then I attacked viciously, ‘You made me how I am. I want to study, whether it makes me happy or not.’

Adrià Ardèvol was that much of a smart arse. If I could start my life over again now, the first thing I would search for would be happiness; and I would try, if possible, to shield it and keep it close throughout my entire life, without any other aspirations. If a child of mine had answered me the way I answered my mother, he would have got a slap. But I have no children. All my life I’ve only ever been a son. Why, Sara, why didn’t you ever want to have children?

‘What you want is to get far away from me.’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘Why would I want that?’

‘What you want is to run away.’

‘Come now!’ I lied again. ‘Why would I want to run away?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’

I would never tell her, even if I were drunk, about Sara, my desire to merge, to start afresh, to search Paris from top to bottom, about the two visits I had made to the Voltes-Epstein house until, on the third, her father and mother told me, very politely, that their daughter had, voluntarily, gone to Paris because, in her words, she wanted to get away from you, who were hurting her so much. So you can understand that you are not welcome in this house.

‘But I …’

‘Don’t insist, young man. We have nothing against you,’ he lied, ‘but you must understand that our duty is to defend our daughter.’

Desperate, I didn’t understand a thing. Mr Voltes got up and indicated for me to do the same. Slowly, I obeyed him. I couldn’t help the tears because I’m the crying type; they burned like drops of sulphuric acid cleaving my humiliated cheeks.

‘There must be some misunderstanding.’

‘It doesn’t seem that way,’ said Sara’s mother, in guttural Catalan. She was tall, with hair that had been dark and was now slightly greyed and dark eyes, as if she were a photo of Sara thirty years on. ‘Sara doesn’t want to have anything to do with you. Not a single thing.’

I started to leave the room, forced out by Mr Voltes’s gesture. I stopped, ‘She didn’t leave anything in writing, any note, for me?’

‘No.’

I left that house that I had visited secretly when Sara loved me, without saying goodbye to her ever-so-polite but ever-so-inflexible parents. I left stifling my sobs. The door closed silently behind me and for a few seconds I remained on the landing, as if that was somehow a way to be closer to Sara. Then I burst into unbridled tears.

‘I don’t want to run away, nor do I have any reason to.’ I paused to add emphasis. ‘Do you understand, Mother?’

I had lied to Mother for the third time and I swear I heard a rooster crow.

‘I understood you perfectly.’ Looking into my eyes: ‘Listen, Adrià.’

It was the first time she called me Adrià and not son. The first time in my life. The twelfth of April, nineteen sixty- or seventy-something.

‘Yes?’

‘You don’t have to work if you don’t want to. Devote your time to the violin and to reading your books. And when I’m dead, hire a manager for the shop.’

‘Don’t talk about dying. And I’m finished with the violin.’

‘Where do you say you want to go?’

‘To Tübingen.’

‘Where is that?’

‘In Germany.’

‘And what’s there that you’re missing out on?’

‘Coșeriu.’

‘Who is that?’

‘Don’t you spend all your time at the library, chasing girls? System, norm, speech.’

‘Come on, who is he?’

‘A Romanian linguist I want to study under.’

‘Now that you mention it, his name rings a bell.’

He grew silent, sulky. But he couldn’t help himself: ‘Aren’t you studying here? Aren’t you half finished, with A+s in everything, bloody hell?’

I didn’t mention my wanting to study under Nestle because when Bernat and I had met up at the university bar, surrounded by shouting, pushing, hurrying and white coffees, I already knew that Wilhelm Nestle had been dead for some time. It would have been like faking a quote in a footnote.

After two days and no news, he came over to the house to practise for his exam, as if I were his teacher. Adrià opened the door and Bernat pointed an accusatory finger in greeting: ‘Don’t you realise that in Tübingen they teach classes in German?’

‘Wenn du willst, kannst du mit dem Storioni spielen,’ replied Adrià with an icy smile, as he ushered him inside.

‘I don’t know what you just said, but all right.’

And as he put rosin on the bow, just a smidge, concentrating so as to not saturate the instrument, he grumbled that it would have been nice to have been consulted.

‘Why?’

‘Come on, we’re supposed to be friends.’

‘That’s why I told you now.’

‘Best friends, you twat! You could have told me that you were considering the crazy idea of spending a few weeks in Tübingen; what do you think, best pal of mine? Haven’t you ever heard of that?’

‘You would have told me to forget about it. And we’ve already had this conversation.’

‘Not exactly in these terms.’

‘You want to always have me around.’

Bernat, in response, left the scores on the table and started to play the first movement of the Beethoven concerto. Ignoring the introduction, I was his out of tune orchestra, following the piano reduction, even imitating the timbre of some instruments. I ended up exhausted, but thrilled and happy because Bernat had played impeccably, beyond perfect. As if he wanted to make it clear that he hadn’t liked my last comment. When he finished, I respected the silence that reigned.

‘What?’

‘Good.’

‘That’s all?’

‘Very good. Different.’

‘Different?’

‘Different. If I heard it right, you were inside the music.’

They grew silent. He sat down and wiped away the sweat. He looked me in the eye: ‘What you want is to run away. I don’t know from what, but you want to run away. I hope it’s not from me.’

I looked at the other scores he had with him.

‘I think it’s a good idea for you to play the Massià pieces. Who will accompany you on the piano?’

‘Haven’t you thought that you might get awfully bored studying those things you want to study, about ideas and all that?’

‘Massià deserves it. And they are lovely. The one I like best is Allegro spiritoso.’

‘And why study with a linguist, if what you want is cultural history?’

‘Watch it with the Ciaccona, it’s treacherous.’

‘Don’t go, you bastard.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘From Fine Arts.’

‘And what is it?’

The icy, distrusting figure of Mrs Voltes-Epstein terrified him. He swallowed hard and said she is missing some paperwork for the enrolment transfer and that’s why we need her address.

‘There is nothing missing.’

‘Yes there is. The recidivism policy.’

‘And what’s that?’ She sounded truly curious.

‘Nothing. A slight detail. But it has to be signed.’ He looked at the papers and casually let drop, ‘She has to sign it.’

‘Leave me the papers and …’

‘No, no. I’m not authorised to do that. Perhaps if you give me the name of the school in Paris where she has transferred her enrolment …’

‘No.’

‘They don’t have it in Fine Arts.’ He corrected himself. ‘We don’t have it.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Pardon?’

‘My daughter hasn’t transferred any enrolment. Who are you?’

‘And she slammed the door in my face. Bam!’

‘She saw right through you.’

‘Yup.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yup.’

‘Thanks, Bernat.’

‘I’m sorry … I’m sure you could have done it much better.’

‘No, no. You did the best you could.’

‘It makes me so angry, you know.’

After a while of heavy silence, Adrià said I’m sorry but I think I’m going to cry a little bit.

Bernat’s examination ended with our Ciaccona from the second suite. I had heard him play it so many times … and I always had things to tell him, as if I were the virtuoso and he the disciple. He began studying it after we heard Heifetz play it at the Palau de la Música. Fine. Perfect. But once again without soul, perhaps because he was nervous about the exam. Soulless, as if the last rehearsal at my house a mere twenty-four hours before had been a mirage. Bernat’s creative breath went flat when he was in front of an audience; he lacked that bit of God, which he tried to replace with determination and practice, and the result was good but too predictable. That was it: my best friend was too bloody predictable, even in his attacks.

He finished the exam dripping with sweat, surely thinking that he had pulled it off. The three judges, who’d had vinegary looks on their faces throughout the two-hour audition, deliberated for a few seconds and unanimously decided to give him an excellent, with personal congratulations from each of them. And Trullols, who was in the audience, waited until Bernat’s mother had hugged him, and all that stuff that mothers who aren’t mine do, and she gave him a kiss on the cheek, excited, the way some teachers get excited, and I heard her prophesise, you’re the best student I’ve ever had; you have a brilliant future ahead of you.

‘Extraordinary,’ said Adrià.

Bernat stopped loosening his bow and looked at his friend. He put it away in the case and closed it, in silence. Adrià insisted: impressive, lad; congratulations.

‘Yesterday I told you that you were my friend. That you are my friend.’

‘Yes. You recently said best friend.’

‘Exactly. You don’t lie to your best friend.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I played competently and that’s it. I have no élan.’

‘You played well today.’

‘You would have done it better than me.’

‘What are you saying! I haven’t picked up a violin in two years!’

‘If my bloody best friend is unable to tell me the truth and he’d rather just act like everyone else …’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Don’t ever lie to me again, Adrià.’ He wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘Your comments are very irritating and you’re making me angry.’

‘Well, I …’

‘But I know that you are the only one who says the truth.’ He winked. ‘Auf Wiedersehen.’

When I had the train ticket in my hands, I understood that going to Tübingen to study was much more than thinking of the future. It was ending my childhood; distancing myself from my Arcadia. Yes, yes: I was a lonely, unhappy child with parents who were unresponsive to anything beyond my intelligence, and who didn’t know how to ask me if I wanted to go to Tibidabo to see the automatons that moved like people when you inserted a coin. But being a child means having the ability to smell the flower that gleams amidst the toxic mud. And it means knowing how to be happy with that five-axle lorry that was a cardboard hatbox. Buying the ticket to Stuttgart, I knew that my age of innocence was over.