‘Are you Catholic, my son?’ he asked him.
Throughout the other four hours of the confession, he didn’t say a peep. There was one point where Budden thought that the man was crying silently. When the bells rang to call the monks to the Vespers prayers, the confessor said ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis with a trembling voice, and he made a shaky sign of the cross as he mumbled the rest of the formula. And then there was silence, even with the echo of the bell; but the penitent hadn’t moved.
‘And the penance, Father?’
‘Go in the name of …’ He didn’t dare to take God’s name in vain; he coughed uncomfortably and continued. ‘There is no penance that could … No penance that … Repent, my son; repent, my son. Repent … Do you know what I think, deep down?’
Budden lifted his head, distressed but also surprised. The confessor had leaned his head sweetly to one side and was engaged by a crack in the wood.
‘What do you think, Father? …’
Budden stared at the crack in the wood; he had trouble seeing it because the light was starting to fade. Father? he said. Father? And it seemed that he was that Lithuanian boy who moaned and said Tėve, Tėve! from the bunk bed at the back. The confessor was dead and he could no longer help him, no matter how much he begged. And he began to pray for the first time in many years, some sort of invented prayer pleading for relief he didn’t deserve.
‘Honestly, poems or a song … they don’t make me think all that.’
Adrià was thrilled because the girl hadn’t asked if that was going to be on the exam. His eyes were even shining.
‘All right. What do they make you think?’
‘Nothing.’
Some laughter. The girl turned, a bit bothered by the laughing.
‘Quiet,’ said Adrià. He looked at the girl with the short hair, encouraging her to continue.
‘Well …’ she said. ‘They don’t make me think. They make me feel things I can’t describe.’ In a softer voice, ‘Sometimes …’ even softer voice, ‘they make me cry.’
Now no one laughed. The three or four seconds of silence that followed were the most important moment of that course. The beadle ruined it by opening the door and announcing the end of the class.
‘Art is my salvation, but it can’t save humanity,’ responded Professor Ardèvol to the beadle, who closed the door, ashamed by that professor who was off his rocker.
‘Art is my salvation, but it can’t save humanity,’ he repeated to Sara as they breakfasted in the dining room, in front of the Urgell that seemed it was also awakening to the new day.
‘No: humanity is hopeless.’
‘Don’t be sad, my love.’
‘I can’t stop being sad.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I think that …’
Silence. She took a sip of tea. The doorbell rang and Adrià went to answer it.
‘Watch out, move aside.’
Caterina came in and ran to the bathroom with a dripping umbrella.
‘It’s raining?’
‘You wouldn’t even notice lightning and snow,’ she said from the bathroom.
‘You’re always exaggerating.’
‘Exaggerating? You couldn’t find water in the sea!’
I went back to the dining room. Sara was finishing her breakfast. Adrià put a hand over hers to keep her from getting up.
‘Why can’t you stop being sad?’
She was silent. She wiped her mouth with a blue-and-white chequered napkin and folded it slowly. I was waiting, standing, as I heard the usual noises Caterina made at the other end of the flat.
‘Because I think that if I stop … I am sinning against the memory of my people. Of my uncle. Of … I have so many dead.’
I sat down without taking my hand off hers.
‘I love you,’ I told you. And you looked at me sadly, serenely and beautifully. ‘Let’s have a baby,’ I finally dared to say.
You shook your head no, as if you didn’t dare to say it out loud.
‘Why not?’
You lifted your eyebrows and said oof.
‘It’s life against death, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t have the heart.’ You shook your head while you said no, no, no, no, no.
For a long time I wondered why you gave so many nos in response to having a child. One of my deepest regrets is not having watched a girl who looked like you grow up and to whom no one would say be still, damn it, or I’ll rip off your nose, because she would never have to nervously wring a blue- and white-checked napkin. Or a boy who wouldn’t have to beg Tėve, Tėve in panic.
After that confession he’d paid so dearly for on the frozen island of Usedom, Budden left the chair in front of the fireplace, he left behind that icy town on the Baltic shore having robbed his trusting hosts of an ID card from their beloved Eugen Müss to save himself problems with the Allied forces of occupation, and he began his third flight, as if he were afraid that the poor confessor, from his grave, could accuse him before his grieving brothers of any number of deserved sins. Deep down it wasn’t the Carthusians and their silence that he was afraid of. He wasn’t afraid of the penance they hadn’t imposed on him; he wasn’t afraid of death; he didn’t deserve suicide because he knew that he had to make amends for his evil. And he knew full well that he deserved eternal hellfire and he didn’t feel he had the right to avoid it. But he still had work to do before going to hell. ‘You have to see, my son,’ the confessor had told him before absolution and death, in the only, brief comments he had made during the long, eternal confession, ‘how you can make amends for the evil you have done.’ And in a lower voice, he had added: ‘If amends are possible …’ After a few seconds of doubt, he continued: ‘May divine mercy, which is infinite, forgive me, but even if you try to make amends for the evil, I don’t think there is a place for you in paradise.’ During his flight, Eugen Müss thought about making amends for his evil. He’d had it easier the other times, because in his first flight they’d only had to destroy archives; he had to destroy the corpus delicti; the little corpses delicti. My God.
In three monasteries, two Czech and one Hungarian, they turned him away with kind words. The fourth, after a long period as a postulant, accepted him. He was luckier than that poor friar who was fleeing from fear, who begged to be admitted as just another monk twenty-nine times and the father prior at Sant Pere del Burgal, looking into his eyes, refused him. Until one rainy, happy Friday that was the thirtieth time he begged to be admitted. Müss wasn’t fleeing from fear: he was fleeing from Doctor Budden.
Father Klaus, who was then the master of the novitiates, also kept a hand in with the aspirants. His interpretation was that the still young man had spiritual thirst, an eagerness for prayer and penance that the Cistercian life could offer him. So he accepted him as a postulant at the Mariawald monastery.