Confessions (2 page)

Little Lola always ended up coming for me, rushing because she had to make dinner and hadn’t even started. That was why I shrugged when Mr Berenguer asked me when they were picking me up.

‘Come,’ he told me, lifting up a blank piece of paper. ‘Sit at the Tudor desk and draw for a bit.’

I’ve never liked drawing because I don’t know how; I haven’t a clue. That’s why I’ve always admired your skill, which I find miraculous. Mr Berenguer told me to draw for a bit because it bothered him to see me there doing nothing, which wasn’t true, because I spent the time thinking. But you can’t say no to Mr Berenguer. Seated there at the Tudor desk, I did whatever I could to keep him quiet. I pulled Black Eagle out of my pocket and tried to draw him. Poor Black Eagle, if he could see himself on that paper … That was before Black Eagle had had a chance to meet Sheriff Carson, because I’d acquired him that very morning in a swap with Ramon Coll for a Weiss harmonica. If my father finds out, he’ll kill me.

Mr Berenguer was very special; when he smiled he scared me a little and he treated Cecília like an inept maid, something I’ve never forgiven him for. But he was the one who knew the most about Father, my great mystery.

T
he
Santa Maria
reached Ostia on the foggy early morning of Thursday, September 2nd. His voyage from Barcelona was worse than any of the trips Aeneas took in search of his destiny and eternal glory. Neptune did not smile on him aboard the
Santa Maria
and he spent much of the journey feeding the fish. By the time he arrived, his skin colour had changed from the healthy tan typical of a peasant from the Plain of Vic to pale as a mystical apparition.

That seminarian had such excellent qualifications – he was studious, pious and polished, learned despite his age – that Monsignor Josep Torras i Bages had personally decided that he would be squandering his God-given gift of bountiful natural intelligence in Vic. They had a precious flower on their hands and it would wither in the humble vegetable patch that was Vic’s seminary; it needed a lush garden in which to thrive.

‘I don’t want to go to Rome, Monsignor. I want to devote myself to study bec

‘That’s precisely why I’m sending you to Rome, dear boy. I know our seminary well enough to know that an intelligence like yours is wasting its time here.’

‘But, Monsignor …’

‘God has great designs for you. Your instructors have been insisting,’ he said, shaking the document in his hands a bit theatrically.

‘Y
ou have no choice, my child.’

Fèlix Ardèvol didn’t dare to say that he hated boats, he who had been born on terra firma and had always lived far from the sea. Since he hadn’t known how to face up to the bishop, he’d had to undertake that arduous voyage. In a corner of the Ostia port, beside some half-rotted boxes infested with huge rats, he vomited up his impotence and almost all his memories of the past. For a few seconds, he breathed heavily as he
stood up again, wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, briskly smoothed the cassock he’d worn on the trip and looked towards his splendid future. Despite the circumstances, like Aeneas, he had arrived in Rome.

‘T
his is the best room in the residency.’

Surprised, Fèlix Ardèvol turned. In the doorway a short, somewhat plump student, who was sweating like a pig inside a Dominican habit, smiled kindly.

‘Félix Morlin, from Liège,’ said the stranger, taking a step into the cell.

‘Fèlix Ardèvol. From Vic.’

‘Oh! A namesake!’ he shouted, laughing as he extended a hand.

They were fast friends. Morlin told him that he’d been given the most coveted room in the residence hall and asked him what his inside connection was. Ardèvol had to confess that he had none; that at reception, the fat, bald concierge had looked at his papers and said Ardevole?, cinquantaquattro, and he’d given him the key without even looking him in the eye. Morlin didn’t believe him, but he laughed heartily.

Exactly a week later, before the school year began, Morlin introduced him to eight or ten students he knew in the second year; he advised him not to waste his time befriending students outside of the Gregorian or the Istituto Biblico; he showed him how to slip out unnoticed by the guard, urging him to have lay clothes prepared in case they had to stroll incognito. He was the guide for the new first-year students, showing them the unique buildings along the shortest route from the residence hall to the Pontifical Gregorian University. His Italian was tinged with a French accent but totally understandable. And he gave them a speech about the importance of knowing how to keep your distance from the Jesuits at the Gregorian, because, if you weren’t careful, they would turn your brain on its ear. Just like that, plof!

The day before classes began, all the new and old students, who came from a thousand different places, gathered in the huge auditorium of the Palazzo Gabrielli-Borromeo at the
Gregorian’s headquarters, and the Pater Decanus of the Pontifical Gregorian University of the Collegio Romano, Daniele D’Angelo, S.J., in perfect Latin, urged us to be aware of our great luck, of the great privilege you have to be able to study in any of the faculties of the Pontifical Gregorian University, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Here we have had the honour of welcoming illustrious students, and among them there have been a few holy fathers, the last of which was our sorely missed Pope Leo XIII. We will demand nothing more of you than effort, effort and effort. You come here to study, study, study and learn from the best specialists in Theology, Canonical Law, Spirituality, Church History, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

‘Pater D’Angelo is called D’Angelodangelodangelo,’ Morlin whispered in his ear, as if he were communicating worrisome news.

And when you have finished your studies, you will scatter all over the world, you will return to your countries, to your seminaries, to the institutes of your orders; those who are not yet will be ordained priests and will bear the fruit of what you were taught here. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera and then fifteen minutes more of practical advice, perhaps not as practical as Morlin’s, but necessary for everyday life. Fèlix Ardèvol thought that it could have been worse; sometimes the Orationes Latinae in Vic were more boring than that pragmatic instruction manual he was reciting for them.

T
he first months of the school year, until after Christmas, passed without incident. Fèlix Ardèvol particularly admired the brilliance of Pater Faluba, a half-Slovak, half-Hungarian Jesuit with infinite knowledge of the Bible, and the mental rigour of Pater Pierre Blanc, who was very haughty and taught the revelation and its transmission to the Church, and who, despite also having been born in Liège, had failed Morlin on the final exam in which his friend wrote about the approximations to Marian theology. Since he sat next to him in three subjects, he began to make friends with Drago Gradnik, a red-faced Slovenian giant who had come from the Ljubljana seminary and had a wide, powerful bull’s neck that
looked as if it was about to burst out of his clerical collar. They talked little, although his Latin was fluent. But both were shy and tried to channel their energies in getting through the numerous doors their studies opened for them. While Morlin complained and widened his circle of contacts and friends, Ardèvol locked himself up in cinquantaquattro, the best cell in the residence hall, and he discovered new worlds in the paleographic study of papyri and other biblical documents that Pater Faluba brought them, written in Demotic, Coptic, Greek or Aramaic. He taught them the art of loving objects. A destroyed manuscript, he would repeat, is of no use to science. If it must be restored, it must be restored no matter the cost. And the role of the restorer is as important as the role of the scientist who will interpret it. And he didn’t say etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, because he always knew what he was talking about.

‘Balderdash,’ declared Morlin when he mentioned it to him. ‘Those people are happy with just a magnifying glass in their hand and some tattered, mouldy papers on the table.’

‘Me too.’

‘What good are dead languages?’ he now said in his pompous Latin.

‘Pater Faluba told us that men don’t inhabit a country; we inhabit a language. And that by rescuing ancient languages …’

‘Sciocchezze. Stupiditates. The only dead language that’s truly alive is Latin.’

They were on Via di Sant’Ignazio. Ardèvol was protected by his cassock, and Morlin by his habit. For the first time, Ardèvol looked at his friend strangely. He stopped and asked him, perplexed, what he believed in. Morlin stopped as well and told him that he had become a Dominican friar because he had a deep yearning to help others and serve the church. And that nothing would dissuade him from his path; but that you had to serve the church in a practical way, not by studying rotting papers, but by influencing people who influence the life of … He stopped and then added: etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and the two friends both burst out laughing. Just then, Carolina passed them by for the first time, but
neither noticed her. And when I reached the house with Little Lola, I had to study the violin while she prepared supper and the rest of the flat grew dark. I didn’t like that at all because some villain could always come out from behind some door and that was why I carried Black Eagle in my pocket, since at home, as Father had decided years ago, there were no medallions, scapulars, engravings or missals, and Adrià Ardèvol, poor boy, had need of invisible help. And one day, instead of studying the violin, I stayed in the dining room, fascinated, watching how the sun fled to the west, along Trespui, in the painting above the dining room sideboard, lighting up the Santa Maria de Gerri abbot with magical colour. Always the same light, which drew me in and made me think of impossible stories, and I didn’t hear the door to the street open and I didn’t hear anything until my father’s deep voice frightened me out of my skin.

‘What are you doing here, wasting time? Don’t you have homework? Don’t you have violin? Don’t you have anything? Eh?’

And Adrià went to his room, with his heart still going boom-boom. He didn’t envy children with parents who kissed them because he didn’t think such a thing existed.

‘Carson: let me introduce you to Black Eagle. Of the brave tribe of the Arapaho.’

‘Hello.’

‘How.’

Black Eagle gave Sheriff Carson a kiss, like the one Father hadn’t given him, and Adrià put both of them, with their horses, on the bedside table so they could get to know each other.

‘Y
ou seem down.’

‘After three years of studying theology,’ Ardèvol said, pensively, ‘I still have yet to work out what really interests you. The doctrine of grace?’

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ insisted Morlin.

‘It wasn’t a question. The credibility of the Christian revelation?’

Morlin didn’t answer and Fèlix Ardèvol insisted, ‘Why do you study at the Gregorian if theology doesn’t …’

They were both far from the stream of students making the trip back from the university to the residence hall. In two years of Christology and Soteriology, Metaphysics I, Metaphysics II and Divine Revelation, and diatribes from the most demanding professors, especially Levinski in Divine Revelation, who thought that Fèlix Ardèvol wasn’t progressing in that discipline according to expectations, Rome hadn’t changed much. Despite the war that had thrown Europe into upheaval, the city wasn’t an open wound; it had just got a bit poorer. Meanwhile, the students at the Pontifical University continued their studies, oblivious to the conflict and its dramas. Almost all of them. And growing in wisdom and virtue. Almost all of them.

‘And you?’

‘Theodicy and original sin no longer interest me. I don’t want more justifications. It’s hard for me to think that God allows evil.’

‘I’ve been suspecting it for months.’

‘You too?’

‘No: I suspected that you’re getting yourself in a muddle. Observe the world, like I do. I have a lot of fun in the Canonical Law Faculty. Legal relationships between the church and civil society; Church Sanctions; Temporal Goods of the church; Divine gift of the Institutes of consecrated life; the canonical Consuetudine …’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Speculative studies are a waste of time; the ones based on rules are a welcome rest.’

‘No, no!’ exclaimed Ardèvol. ‘I like Aramaic; I love looking at manuscripts and understanding the morphological differences between Bohtan Neo-Aramaic and Jewish Barzani Neo-Aramaic. Or the reason behind Koy Sanja Surat and Mlahso.’

‘You know what? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do we study at the same university? In the same faculty? Are we both in Rome? Are we?’

‘It doesn’t matter. As long as I don’t have to have Pater
Levinski as a professor, I want to learn everything there is to know about Chaldean, Babylonian, Samaritan …’

‘What good will all that do you?’

‘What good will it do you to know the difference between ratified, consummated, legitimate, putative, valid and nullified marriage?’

They both started to laugh in the middle of Via del Seminario. A woman dressed in dark clothes looked up, a bit frightened to see those young chaplains making a commotion and violating the most basic rules of modesty.

‘Why are you down, Ardevole? Now it is a question.’

‘What interests you, in your heart of hearts?’

‘Everything.’

‘And theology?’