‘Why?’
‘Because they pay the price I tell them and they leave contented. And some day they return, with their tongues hanging out, because they want more.’
Father knew a lot.
‘Musicians want an instrument to play it. When they have it, they use it. The collector doesn’t own it to play it: he might have ten instruments and just run his hand over them. Or his eyes. And he’s happy. The collector doesn’t play a note: he takes note.’
Father was very intelligent.
‘A musician collector? That would be a windfall; but I don’t know any.’
And then, in confidence, Adrià told Father that Herr Romeu was more boring than a Sunday afternoon and he looked at me in that way where his eyes went right through me and which, at sixty years old, still makes me anxious.
‘What did you say?’
‘That Herr Romeu …’
‘No: more boring than what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘Than a Sunday afternoon.’
‘Very good.’
Father was always right. His silence made it seem as if he were putting my words into his pocket, for his collection. Once they were tucked away carefully, he returned to the conversation.
‘Why is he boring?’
‘All day long he makes me study declinations and endings that I already know by heart and makes me say this cheese is very good; where did you buy it? Or I live in Hannover and my name is Kurt. And where do you live? Do you like Berlin?’
‘And what would you like to be able to say?’
‘I don’t know. I want to read some amusing story. I want to read Karl May in German.’
‘Very welclass="underline" I think you’re right.’
I repeat: very welclass="underline" I think you’re right. And I’ll take it even further: that was the only time in my life where he said I was right. If I were a fetishist, I would have framed the sentence, along with the time and date of its occurrence. And I would have made a black and white photo of it.
The next day I didn’t have class because Herr Romeu had been fired. Adrià felt very important, as if people’s fates were in his hands. It was a glorious Tuesday. That time I was glad that Father took a hard line with everyone. I must have been nine or ten, but I had a very highly developed sense of dignity. Or, better put, sense of mortification. Especially now that I look back, Adrià Ardèvol realised that not even when he was little had he ever been a little boy. He was caught up in every possible precociousness, the way others catch colds and infections. I even feel sorry for him. And that without knowing the details that I can now cobble together, such as that Father — after having opened the shop under very precarious circumstances, with Cecília who was learning to do her hair up very prettily — he received a visit from a customer who said he wanted to talk to him about some matter and Father had him enter the office and the stranger told him Mr Ardèvol, I haven’t come here to buy anything, and Father looked him in the eye and grew alarmed.
‘And would you mind telling me why you did come?’
‘To tell you that your life is in danger.’
‘Is that so?’ A smile from Father. A slightly peeved smile.
‘Yes.’
‘Would you mind telling me why?’
‘For example, because Doctor Montells has been released from prison.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘And he has told us things.’
‘And who are ‘us’?’
‘Let’s just say that we are very angry with you because you denounced him as pro-Catalan and communist.’
‘Me?’
‘You.’
‘I’m no grass. Anything else I can help you with?’ he said, getting up.
The visitor did not rise from his chair. He made himself even more comfortable, rolling a cigarette with unusual skill. And then he lit it.
‘No one smokes here.’
‘I do.’ He pointed to the hand with the cigarette. ‘And we know that you denounced three other people. They all send greetings, from prison or from their homes. From now on, be very careful with corners: they are dangerous.’
He put out the cigarette on the wooden tabletop as if it were a vast ashtray, exhaled the smoke into Mr Ardèvol’s face, got up and left the office. Fèlix Ardèvol watched a part of the tabletop sizzle without doing anything to impede it. As if it were his penitence.
That evening, at home, perhaps to rid himself of those bad feelings, Father had me come into his study and to reward me, to reward me especially for making demands on my teachers, that’s what my son has to do, he showed me a folded piece of parchment, written on both sides, which was the founding charter of the Sant Pere del Burgal monastery, and he said look, Son (I wished he’d added, after the look, Son, a ‘in whom I have placed all my hopes’, now that we’d established a close alliance), this document was written more than a thousand years ago and now we are holding it in our hands … Hey, hey, hold your horses, I’ll hold it. Isn’t it lovely? It’s from when the monastery was founded.’
‘Where is it?’
‘In Pallars. You know the Urgell in the dining room?’
‘That monastery is Santa Maria de Gerri.’
‘Yes, yes. Burgal is even further up. Some twenty kilometres more towards the cold.’ About the parchment: ‘Sant Pere del Burgal’s founding charter. The Abbot Deligat asked Count Ramon de Tolosa for a precept of immunity for that monastery, which was tiny but survived for hundreds of years. It thrills me to think that I hold so much history in my hands.’
And I listened to what my father was telling me and it wasn’t very hard at all for me to imagine that he was thinking the day was too luminous, too springlike to be Christmas. They had just buried the Right Reverend Father Prior Dom Josep de Sant Bartomeu in the modest, scant cemetery at Sant Pere where the life that burst forth in springtime from beneath the tender, damp grass into a thousand colourful buds was now held hostage by the ice. They had just buried the father prior and with him all possibility of the monastery keeping its doors open. Sant Pere del Burgal, before, when it still snowed abundantly, was an isolated, independent abbey; since the remote times of Abbot Deligat, it had undergone various transformations including moments of prosperity, with some thirty monks contemplating the magnificent panorama created each day by the waters of the Noguera River, with the Poses forest in the background, praising the Lord and giving thanks for his works and cursing the Devil for the cold that devastated their bodies and made the entire community’s souls shrink. Sant Pere del Burgal had also gone through moments of hardship, without wheat for the mill, with barely six or seven old, sick monks to do the same tasks a monk always does from when he joins the monastery until he is transferred to its cemetery, as they’d done that day with the father prior. But now there was only one survivor whose memory went back that far.
There was a brief, feeble prayer for the dead, a rushed and dismayed benediction over the humble box. Then the improvised officiant, Brother Julià de Sau, gave the signal to the five peasants from Escaló who’d climbed up to help the monastery with that mournful event. There were no signs yet of the brothers who were to come from the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey to confirm the monastery’s closing. They would arrive too late, as they always did when they were needed.
Brother Julià de Sau entered the small monastery of Sant Pere. He went into the church. With tears in his eyes, he used the hammer and chisel to make a hole in the stone of the high altar and pull out the tiny wooden lipsanotheca that held the saints’ relics. He was overcome with dread because for the first time in his life he was alone. Alone. No other brothers. His footsteps echoed in the narrow corridor. He glanced at the tiny refectory. One of the benches was up against the wall, and had damaged the dirty plaster. He didn’t bother to move it. A tear fell from his eye and he headed towards his cell. From there he contemplated the beloved landscape he knew like the back of his hand, tree by tree. Above his cot, the Sacred Chest that held the monastery’s founding charter and that now would also hold the lipsanotheca containing the relics of unknown saints that had been with them for centuries of daily prayers and masses. And the community’s chalice and paten. And the only two keys in Sant Pere del Burgaclass="underline" one to the small church and one to the monastic area. So many years of canticles to the Lord reduced to a sturdy savin wood box that would become, from that moment on, the only testimony to the history of a closed monastery. On one end of his straw mattress lay the handkerchief to make a bundle with two pieces of clothing, some sort of rudimentary scarf and the book of hours. And the little bag with the fir cones and maple seed pods that reminded him of the other, old life he didn’t miss much, when he was called Friar Miquel and he taught in the Dominican order; when, at the palace of His Excellency, the wife of the Wall-eyed Man of Salt stopped him near the kitchens and said here, Friar Miquel, pine and fir cones and maple seeds.