‘No, Fèlix. We can’t make that mistake.’
I heard the small sound of someone spitting curtly.
‘Yes?’
‘What is Aramaic?’ asked Sheriff Carson in a deep voice.
‘I don’t really know: we’ll have to research it.’
I was a strange kid; I can admit that. I see myself now remembering how I listened to what would be my future, clinging to Sheriff Carson and the brave Arapaho chief and trying not to give myself away, and I think I wasn’t strange, I was very strange.
‘It isn’t a mistake. The first day of school a teacher I’ve already got my eye on will come to teach him German.’
‘No.’
‘His name is Romeu and he’s a very bright lad.’
That irked me. A teacher at home? My house was my house and I was the one who knew everything about what happened inside it: I didn’t want awkward witnesses. No, I didn’t like that Romeu chap, poking his nose around my house, saying oh, how lovely, a personal library at seven years old and that kind of crap grownups say when they come to the house. No way.
‘And he will study three majors.’
‘What?’
‘Law and History.’ Silence. ‘And a third, which he can choose. But definitely Law, which is most useful for manoeuvring in this dog-eat-dog world.’
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. My foot began to move of its own accord, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. I hated law. You don’t know how much I hated it. Without knowing exactly what it was, I hated it to death.
‘Je n’en doute pas,’ disait ma mère. ‘Mais est-ce qu’il est un bon pédagogue, le tel Gomeu?’
‘Bien sûr, j’ai reçu des informations confidentielles qui montrent qu’il est un individu parfaitement capable en langue allemagne. Allemande? Tedesque? Et en la pédagogie de cette langue. Je crois que …’
I was already starting to calm down. My foot stopped moving in that out of control way and I heard Mother get up and say what about the violin? Will he have to give it up?
‘No. But it will be secondary.’
‘I don’t agree.’
‘Good night, dear,’ said Father as he opened the newspaper and paged through it because that was what he always did at that time of the day.
So I was changing schools. What a drag. And how scary. Luckily Sheriff Carson and Black Eagle would go with me. The violin will be secondary? And why Aramaic so much later? That night it took me a while to get off to sleep.
I’m sure I’m mixing things up. I don’t know if I was seven or eight or nine years old. But I had a gift for languages and my parents had realised that and wanted to make the most of it. I had started French because I spent a summer in Perpignan at Aunt Aurora’s house and there, as soon as they got a little flustered, they’d switch from their guttural Catalan to French; and that’s why when I speak French I add the hint of a Midi accent I’ve maintained my whole life with some pride. I don’t remember how old I was. German came later; English I don’t really recall. Later, I think. It’s not that I wanted to learn them. It was that they learned me.
Now that I’m thinking about it in order to tell you, I see my childhood as one long and very boring Sunday afternoon, wandering aimlessly, looking for a way to slip off into the study, thinking that it would be more fun if I had a sibling, thinking that the point would come when reading was boring because I was already up to my eyeballs in Enid Blyton, thinking that the next day I had school, and that was worse. Not because I was afraid of school or the teachers and parents, but because of the children. It was the children at school that frightened me, because they looked at me like I was some kind of a freak.
‘Little Lola.’
‘What?’
‘What can I do?’
Little Lola stopped drying her hands or applying lipstick and looked at me.
‘Can I go with you?’ Adrià, with a hopeful look.
‘No, no, you’d be bored!’
‘I’m bored here.’
‘Turn on the radio.’
‘It’s a yawn.’
Then Little Lola grabbed her coat and left the room that always smelled of Little Lola and, in a whisper, so no one would hear it, she told me to ask Mother to take me to the cinema. And louder she said goodbye, see you later; she opened the door to the street, winked at me and left; yeah, she could have fun on Sunday afternoons, who knows how, but I was left condemned to wander the flat like a lost soul.
‘Mother.’
‘What.’
‘No, nothing.’
Mother looked up from her magazine, finished the last sip of her coffee, and glanced at me over it.
‘Tell me, Son.’
I was afraid to ask her to take me to the cinema. Very afraid and I still don’t know why. My parents were too serious.
‘I’m bored.’
‘Read. If you’d like, we can study French.’
‘Let’s go to Tibidabo.’
‘Oh, you should have said that this morning.’
We never went there, to Tibidabo, not any morning nor any Sunday afternoon. I had to go there in my imagination, when my friends told me what Tibidabo was like, that it was filled with mechanical devices, mysterious automatons and lookout points and dodgem cars and … I didn’t know what exactly. But it was a place where parents took their children. My parents didn’t take me to the zoo or to stroll along the breakwater. They were too staid. And they didn’t love me. I think. Deep down I still wonder why they had me.
‘Well, I want to go to Tibidabo!’
‘What is all this shouting?’ complained Father from his study. ‘Don’t make me punish you!’
‘I don’t want to study my French!’
‘I said don’t make me punish you!’
Black Eagle thought that it was all very unfair and he let me and Sheriff Carson know how he felt. And to keep from getting utterly bored, and especially to keep from getting punished, well, I started in on my arpeggio exercises on the violin, which had the advantage of being difficult and so it was hard to get them to come out sounding good. I was terrible at the violin until I met Bernat. I abandoned the exercise halfway through.
‘Father, can I touch the Storioni?’
Father lifted his head. He was, as always, looking through the magnifying lamp at some very odd piece of paper.
‘No,’ he said. And pointing at something on top of the table, ‘Look how beautiful.’
It was a very old manuscript with a brief text in an alphabet I didn’t recognise.’
‘What is it?’
‘A fragment of the gospel of Mark.’
‘But what language is it in?’
‘Aramaic.’
Did you hear that, Black Eagle? Aramaic! Aramaic is a very ancient language, a language of papyrus and parchment scrolls.
‘Can I learn it?’
‘When the time is right.’ He said it with satisfaction; that was very clear because, since I generally did things well, he could brag of having a clever son. Wanting to take advantage of his satisfaction, ‘Can I play the Storioni?’
Fèlix Ardèvol looked at him in silence. He moved aside the magnifying lamp. Adrià tapped a foot on the floor. ‘Just once. Come on, Father …’
Father’s expression when he is angry is scary. Adrià held it for just a few seconds. He had to lower his eyes.
‘Don’t you understand the word no? Niet, nein, no, ez, non, ei, nem. Sound familiar?’
‘Ei and nem?’
‘Finnish and Hungarian.’
When Adrià left the study, he turned and angrily proffered a terrible threat.
‘Well, then I won’t study Aramaic.’
‘You will do what I tell you to do,’ warned Father with the coldness and calmness of one who knows that yes, he will always do what he says. And he returns to his manuscript, to his Aramaic, to his magnifying glass.