Confessions (56 page)

‘I wish I could say something like that about Bernat. I can say it about his music, but he pays me no mind.’

And he went back to Horace and read ac neque iam stabulis gaudet pecus aut arator igni / nec prata canis albiant pruinis.

‘Fine. Fantastic. Merveilleux.’

‘Huh?’ Adrià lifted his head again as he thought nec prata cani albicant pruinis. Sara looked at him furiously. She was going to say something, but chose instead to leave the room. She half-closed the door angrily, but without making noise. Even when you got mad, you did it discreetly. Except for that one day. Adrià looked at the half-open door, not entirely aware of what was happening. Because what came into his head, like a tumultuous torrent, offended by being put off for so long, was that dum gravis Cyclopum/Volcanus ardens visit officinas.

‘Huh?’ said Sara, opening the door but keeping her hand on the knob.

‘No, sorry. I was thinking out loud.’

She half-closed the door again. She must have been standing on the other side. She didn’t like to go around the house in a nightgown when other people were there. I didn’t know that you were debating between being true to your word and going for my jugular. She opted to be true to her word and came back in, got into bed and said goodnight.

F
or whom do you tie back your blonde hair with such simple elegance? thought Adrià absurdly, looking puzzled at his Sara, lying with her back to him, cross about who knows what, with her black hair spilling over her shoulders. With such simple elegance. I didn’t know what to think and I opted for closing
the book of odes and turning off the light. I lay there for a long time with my eyes open.

The next day, when Sara and Adrià got up, at the usual hour, there was no trace of Bernat, nor his violin and scores, nor his clothes. Just a note on the kitchen table that said, thank you, dear friends. Really, thank you. In the guest room, the sheets he had used were folded on the bed. He was completely gone and I felt very badly.

‘How.’

‘What.’

‘You really screwed up, dear hunting companion.’

‘I didn’t ask for your opinion.’

‘But you really screwed up. Right, Carson?’

Adrià could only hear the unpleasant sound of the valiant sheriff’s disdainful spit hitting the ground.

Strangely, Sara, when she realised that Bernat had fled, didn’t reproach me at all. Life continued along its course. But it took me years to put the pieces together.

A
drià had spent the whole afternoon looking at the wall of his study, unable to write a line, unable to concentrate on any reading, staring at the wall, as if searching for the answer to his perplexity there. At mid-afternoon, when he hadn’t even made good use of ten minutes, he decided to prepare some tea. From the kitchen he said would you like a cuppa?, and he heard a mmm that came from Sara’s studio and he interpreted it as yes, thank you, what a good idea. When he went into the studio with the steaming cup, he contemplated the nape of her neck. She had gathered her hair in a ponytail, as she usually did when she was drawing. I love your plait, your ponytail, your hair, no matter what you do with it. Sara was drawing, on an oblong sheet, some houses that could have been a half-abandoned village. In the background, she was now sketching a farmhouse. Adrià took a sip of tea and stood there with his mouth open, watching how the abandoned farmhouse grew bit by bit. And with a cypress tree half-split, most likely by lightning. And without warning, Sara returned to the foreground with the street of houses, on the left side of the sheet, and made the voussoirs that marked a window which didn’t yet exist. She drew it so quickly that Adrià had to wonder how that had happened, how had Sara been able to see the window there where there’d been only white paper. Now that it was finished, it seemed to him that it had always been there; he even had the impression that when she’d bought the paper at Can Terricabres they had sold it to her with the window already drawn on to it; and he also thought that Sara’s talent was a miracle. Without giving it the slightest importance, Sara went back to the farmhouse and darkened the open front door, and the house – which up until that point was a drawing – began to come to life, as if the darkness of the blurred charcoal had
given her permission to imagine the life that had been inside. Adrià took another slurp of Sara’s tea, awestruck.

‘Where do you get that from?’

‘From here,’ she said, pointing to her forehead with a blackened finger and leaving a print there.

Now she started to age the path, restoring the wagon tracks that had gone from the farmhouse to the town over decades, and I envied Sara’s creative ability. When I finished the tea I had brought for her, I returned to my initial bewilderment that had kept me from working all afternoon. When she had come back from the gynaecologist, Sara had left her bag open by the door and gone quickly into the toilet, and Adrià went through her bag because he was looking for some money so he wouldn’t have to go by the bank and he found the report from Doctor Andreu for her general practitioner that I couldn’t help but read, mea culpa, yes, because she hadn’t showed it to me, and the report said that the womb of the patient Mrs Sara Voltes-Epstein, which had only carried one gestation to term, despite the sporadic metrorrhagias, was perfectly healthy. Therefore, she had decided to remove her IUD, which was the most likely cause of the metrorrhagias. And I secretly consulted the dictionary, like when I looked up what brothel and poof meant, and I remembered that ‘metro-’ was the prefixed form of the Greek word
mētra
, which means ‘uterus’, and that ‘-rrhagia’ was the suffixed form of the Greek word
rhēgnymi
, which means ‘to spurt’. Spurting uterus, which could be the name of one of Black Eagle’s relatives, but no: it was the bleeding that had her so worried. He’d forgotten that Sara had to go to the doctor about that bleeding. Why hadn’t she mentioned it? And then Adrià reread the part that said she had only carried one gestation to term and he understood why so much silence. Holy hell.

And now Adrià was before her, his mouth hanging open like an idiot, drinking her cuppa and admiring her ability to create profound worlds in just two dimensions, and her obsession with keeping everything secret.

A fig tree; it looked like a fig tree. To one side of the farmhouse a fig tree grew and, leaned against one wall, a cart wheel.
And Sara said are you going to stand there all day breathing down my neck?

‘I like to watch you draw.’

‘I’m shy and I hold back.’

‘What did the doctor say? Didn’t you have an appointment today?’

‘Nothing, fine. I’m fine.’

‘And the bleeding?’

‘It’s the IUD. She took it out, as a precaution.’

‘So nothing to worry about.’

‘Right.’

‘Well, we’ll have to think about what to use now.’

What is that about your womb only having carried one gestation to term? Eh, Sara? Eh?

Sara turned around and looked at him. She had a small charcoal mark on her forehead. Did I think out loud?, thought Adrià to himself. Sara looked at the cup and wrinkled her nose and said hey, you drank my tea!

‘Oh, man, sorry!’ said Adrià. And she laughed with that laugh of hers that always reminded me of the babbling of a brook. I pointed to a drawing: ‘Where is that supposed to be?’

‘It’s how I imagine Tona from the way you describe it, back when you were a boy.’

‘It’s lovely … But it looks abandoned.’

‘Because one day you grew up and abandoned it. You see?’ She pointed to the road. ‘This is where you tripped and grazed your knees.’

‘I love you.’

‘I love you more.’

Why didn’t you tell me anything about that pregnancy you had, when a child is the most important thing in the world. Is your child alive? Did it die? What was it called? Was it really born? Was it a girl or a boy? What was it like? I know that you have every right to not tell me everything about your life, but you can’t keep all the pain to yourself and I’d like to share in it.

‘Rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsr.’

‘Coming,’ said Adrià. About the drawing, ‘When you finish it, I’d like to reserve half an hour of contemplation.’

When he opened the door for the messenger, he still had the empty cup in his hand.

A
t dinnertime they opened the bottle that looked like it was the most expensive one in the package Max had sent them. Six bottles of wine, all top-quality reds and all jotted down in the little book that Max himself had had published with his own tasting comments. The lavish book, filled with fine photographs, was some sort of ‘Easy Guide to Wines’ aimed at the rushed palate of the American gourmet.

‘You have to taste it in a glass.’

‘Pouring straight from the pitcher into my mouth is more fun.’

‘Sara: if your brother suspected that you drink his wines like that …’

‘Fine. But only for the tasting.’ She picked up the glass. ‘What does Max say about this one?’

Adrià, all serious, served two glasses, picked one up by the stem and was about to read the text with a solemn expression; vaguely, he thought about school, in the times that, because of some scheduling error, he had attended mass and seen the priest up on the altar, with patens and cups, and cruets, officiating mysteries muttered in Latin. And he began to pray and he said domina mea, aged Priorat is a complex, velvety wine. It has a dense aroma, with a clove aftertaste and toasted notes, due to the quality of the oak barrels in which it was aged.

He gestured to Sara and they both had a taste as they’d seen Max do when he taught them how to taste wines. That day they had almost ended up dancing the conga on the dining room table.

‘Do you notice the clove?’

‘No. I notice the traffic on València Street.’

‘Try to block that out and focus,’ ordered Adrià, clicking his tongue. ‘I … I think I note some sort of coconut aftertaste.’

‘Coconut?’

Why don’t you tell me your secrets, Sara? What aftertaste does your life have, with the episodes I don’t know? Truffle or blackberry? Or the aftertaste of a child I’ve never met? But
having a child is something normal, something everyone wants. What do you have against life?

As if she had heard his thoughts, Sara said look, look, look, look what Max says: this Priorat is virile, complex, intense, potent and structured.

‘My giddy aunt.’

‘Sounds like he’s talking about a stud.’

‘Do you like it or not?’

‘Yes. But it’s too strong for me. I’ll have to dilute it.’

‘Poor you. Max will kill you.’

‘He doesn’t need to know about it.’

‘I could tell on you.’

‘Mouchard, salaud.’

‘It’s a joke.’

They drank, read the poetic prose that Max directed at the American buyers of Priorats, Costers del Segre, Montsants and I don’t remember what other wines, and we got tipsy enough that the shrill explosion of a rushing motorcycle, instead of annoying us, made us burst into laughter. And you ended up pouring the diluted wine straight into your mouth with your little spouted pitcher, may Max forgive you, and I will never tell your brother. And I was unable to ask you what was all that about having had a child or having been pregnant. Had you lost it? Whose child was it? And then the damn phone rang, appearing in my life when it shouldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough to get rid of the telephone altogether but, given the results, my life without it would have been a bit more tolerable. Bloody hell, I was quite dizzy. No, no, I’m on my way. Hello.

‘Adrià.’

‘Max?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bloody hell. We are celebrating with your wines! I swear Sara isn’t using the pitcher, all right? We started with a Priorat that was virile, potent, complex and I don’t know what the hell else. It was so strong it could walk. Thanks for the gift, Max.’

‘Adrià.’

‘Fantastic.’

‘Father’s died.’

‘And the book is wonderful. The photos and the text.’

Adrià swallowed hard, still a bit cloudy, and said what did you say? And Sara, you always attentive, said what’s wrong?

‘Father’s died, did you hear, Adrià?’

‘Holy hell.’

Sara got up and came over to the telephone. I said it’s your father, Sara. And into the telephone: we’re on our way, Max.

The two notices of the deaths of your parents, both over the phone and unexpectedly, even though Mr Voltes had been in poor health for a several years and his heart had been acting up, and we already knew that at his age one day we would get the unpleasant news. And Max seemed very affected because even though he’d been taking care of him – he had never moved out of his parents’ house – he hadn’t seen it coming and wasn’t home when he died, and as soon as he arrived, the nurse told him Mr Voltes, your father. He felt vaguely guilty; and I took him aside and I said Max, you’ve been a model son, always by your parents’ side. Don’t beat yourself up because it would be as unfair to you as … how old was he? Eighty?

‘Eighty-six.’

I didn’t dare to use his advanced age as an argument to assuage Max’s conscience. I merely repeated eighty-six a couple of times, without knowing what else to say, strolling through the grandiose parlour of the Voltes-Epstein house, beside Max who, even though he was more than a head taller than me, looked like a disconsolate child. Yes, yes: I was capable of preachiness. It’s so easy to give others advice.

This time I was allowed to accompany the family to the synagogue and the cemetery. Max explained to me that his father had wanted to be buried according to the Jewish ritual and so they wrapped him in a white shroud and put his tallit over it, which the Chevra Kaddisha asked Max, as first-born son, to tear. And in the Jewish cemetery of Les Corts, he was buried in the earth, beside his Rachel, the mother that no one allowed me to love. Sara, what a shame that things went the way they did, I thought as, at the cemetery, the rabbi recited
the maleh rachamim. And when silence fell, Max and Sara stepped forward and, holding hands, recited the kaddish for Pau Voltes and I began to cry, hiding from myself.

Sara lived through those days in profound grief and the questions that I wanted to ask you were no longer urgent because what was about to happen to us would erase it all.