‘All right, I won’t say another word.’
Mr Ardèvol, despite the purges, still looked distrustingly at both the new and old professors. They would no longer pester him about his love life, probably because they were unaware of it, but they would surely say you’re skating on thin ice, my friend. What Fèlix Ardèvol wanted to avoid was having to give a lot of explanations to someone who looked at you with polite sarcasm and made clear with his silence that he hadn’t asked you for any explanation. Until one day he said that’s it: I’m not cut out to suffer and he went to the police headquarters on Via Laietana and said Professor Montells, palaeography.
‘What’s that you say?’
‘Professor Montells, palaeography.’
‘Montells, Palaeography,’ the superintendent wrote down slowly. And his first name?
‘Eloi. And his second last name …’
‘Eloi Montells Palaeography, I’ve already got his full name.’
The office of Superintendent Plasencia was dirty olive greenish, with a rusty file cabinet and portraits of Franco and José Antonio on the flaking wall. Through the dirty windowpane he could see the traffic on the Via Laietana. But Mr Fèlix Ardèvol was all business. He was writing down the full name of Doctor Eloi Montells, whose second last name was Ciurana, assistant to the head of Palaeography, also educated at the Gregorian in another period, who gave Fèlix cutting looks every time he visited Doctor Bosch about his matters, which it was imperative Montells didn’t stick his nose into.
‘And how would you define him?’
‘Pro-Catalan. Communist.’
The superintendent whistled and said my, my … and how could he have escaped our notice?
Mr Ardèvol didn’t say anything because the question was rhetorical and it wasn’t prudent to answer that he’d escaped their notice out of pure police inefficiency.
‘This is the second professor you’ve denounced. It’s odd.’ He tapped the desk with a pencil, as if he wanted to send a message in Morse code. ‘Because you aren’t a professor, are you? Why do you do it?’
To clean up the landscape. To be able to move about without inquisitive looks.
‘Out of patriotism. Long live Franco.’
There were more. There were three or four. And they were all pro-Catalan and communist. In vain, they all claimed unconditional support for the regime and exclaimed me, a communist? The longlivefrancos they offered up to the superintendent did them no good, because grist was needed for the mill that was the Model Prison, where they sent those untouchables who hadn’t chosen to accept the Generalísimo’s generous offers and stubbornly persisted in the error of their ways. Such convenient accusations cleared out the department, while Doctor Bosch had no clue and continued to provide information to that clever man who seemed to admire him so much.
For a little while after the professors were arrested, just in case, Fèlix Ardèvol stayed away from Doctor Bosch’s university office, instead showing up at his house, much to Carme Bosch’s delight.
‘How are you, beautiful?’
The girl, who was prettier by the day, always answered with a smile and lowered her gaze. Her eyes had become one of Fèlix Ardèvol’s most fascinating mysteries, which he was determined to get to the bottom of as soon as possible. Almost as fascinating as a handwritten manuscript by Goethe without an owner.
‘Today I’ve brought you more work, and better paid,’ he said when he entered Professor Bosch’s study. And Grandfather Adrià prepared to offer his expert opinion and certify its authenticity, charge his fee and never ask but Fèlix, listen, where in God’s name do you get all this stuff. And how do you manage to … Eh?
As he watched him pull out papers, Grandfather Adrià took a moment to clean his pince-nez eyeglasses. His task didn’t begin until he had the manuscript on the table.
‘Gothic chancery script,’ said Doctor Bosch putting on his spectacles and looking greedily at the manuscript that Fèlix had placed on the table. He picked it up and looked it over carefully from every angle over a long while.
‘It is incomplete,’ he said, breaking the silence that was lasting too long.
‘Is it from the fourteenth century?’
‘Yes. I see that you are learning.’
By that period, Fèlix Ardèvol had already set up a network through much of Europe that searched for any paper or papyrus, loose or bundled parchments in the often disorganised and dusty shelves of archives, libraries, cultural institutes, town halls and parishes. Young Mr Berenguer, a true ferreter, spent his days visiting these spots and making a first evaluation, which he explained over the faulty phone lines of the period. Depending on the decision, he paid the owners as little as possible for the treasure, when he was unable to just make off with it, and he brought it to Ardèvol, who did the expert’s report along with Doctor Bosch. Everyone came out a winner, including the posterity of the manuscripts. But it was best if everyone was kept in the dark. Everyone. Over ten years he had found a lot of junk. A lot. But every once in a while he happened upon a real gem, like a copy of the 1876 edition of L’après-midi d’un faune with illustrations by Manet, inside of which there were manuscripts by Mallarmé himself, surely the last things he had written. They’d been sleeping in the attic of a wretched municipal library in Valvins. Or three complete parchments in good shape from the corpus of the chancery of John II, miraculously rescued from an inheritance lot in an auction in Göteborg. Every year he’d get his hands on three or four gems. And Ardèvol worked day and night for those gems. Gradually, in the solitude of the huge flat he had let in the Eixample district, the idea took shape of him setting up an antiquarian’s shop where everything that wasn’t a true gem would end up. That decision led to another: accepting inheritance lots with other things beside manuscripts. Vases, bongos, chippendale furniture, umbrella stands, weapons … anything that was made a long time ago and wasn’t useful in the slightest. That was how the first musical instrument entered his home.
The years passed; Mr Ardèvol, my father, would visit Professor Bosch, my grandfather whom I knew as a small child. And Carme, my mother, turned twenty-two and one day Mr Fèlix Ardèvol said to his colleague I want to talk to you about your daughter.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Doctor Bosch, a bit frightened, taking off his pince-nez and looking at his friend.
‘I want to marry her. If you have no objections.’
Doctor Bosch got up and went out into the dark hall, flustered, brandishing his pince-nez. A few steps behind, Ardèvol watched him attentively. After some minutes of nervous pacing he turned and looked at Ardèvol, without realising that he had intense brown eyes.
‘How old are you?’
‘Forty-four.’
‘And Carme must be eighteen or nineteen, at most.’
‘Twenty-two and a half. Your daughter is over twenty-two.’
‘Are you sure?’
Silence. Doctor Bosch put on his glasses as if he were about to examine his daughter’s age. He looked at Ardèvol, opened his mouth, took off his glasses and, with a hazy look, said to himself, filled with admiration, as if before a Ptolemaic papyrus, Carme’s twenty-two years old …
‘She turned twenty-two months ago.’
At that moment the door to the flat opened and Carme came in, accompanied by Little Lola. She looked at the two silent men, planted in the middle of the hall. Little Lola disappeared with the shopping basket and Carme looked at them again as she took off her coat.
‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.
5
For a long time, despite his aloof nature, I was fascinated by my father and wanted to make him happy. Above all, I wanted him to admire me. Brusque, yes; irascible, that too; and he hardly loved me at all. But I admired him. Surely that’s why I find it so hard to talk about him. So as not to justify him. So as not to condemn him.