‘The American government can shove it up their ass.’
‘Timothy, son: what religion do you practise?’ interjected Vico.
‘Sticking it to the people who are screwing up the country.’
‘There is no such religion,’ Ramon Llull, patient. ‘There are three known religions, Timothy: namely, Judaism, which is a terrible error with apologies to Mr Berlin; Islam, which is the mistaken belief system of the infidel enemies of the church, and Christianity, which is the only just and true religion, because it is the religion of the Good God, who is Love.’
‘I don’t understand you, old man. I kill the government.’
‘And the forty children you killed are the government?’ Berlin, wiping his glasses with a handkerchief.
‘Collateral damage.’
‘Now I don’t understand.’
‘1:1’
‘What?’
‘One to one.’
‘The colonel who doesn’t stop the massacre of women and children,’ states Vico, ‘must go to jail.’
‘But not if he kills men?’ Berlin, mockingly, to his colleague, putting on his glasses.
‘Why don’t you three just all shove it up your ass, huh?’
‘This boy has a strange verbal obsession with the posterior,’ observed Llull, very perplexed.
‘All those who live by the sword, die by the sword, Timothy,’ Vico reminded him just in case. And he was going to say which verse of Matthew it was, but he couldn’t remember because it had all been too long ago.
‘Would you doddering old fogies mind fucking leaving me alone?’
‘They are going to kill you tomorrow, Tim,’ Llull pointed out.
‘168:1.’
And he began to fade out.
‘What did he say? Did you understand anything?’
‘Yes. One hundred and sixty-eight, colon, one.’
‘It sounds cabbalistic.’
‘No. This kid has never heard of the cabbala.’
‘One hundred and sixty-eight to one.’
Llull, Vico, Berlin was a feverish book, written quickly, but it left me exhausted because each day, when I got up and when I went to sleep, I opened Sara’s wardrobe and her clothes were still there. Writing under such circumstances is very difficult. And one day I finished writing it, which doesn’t mean that it was finished. And Adrià was overcome with a desire to throw all the pages off the balcony. But he just said Sara, ubi es? And then, after a few minutes in silence, instead of going out on the balcony, he made a pile of all the pages, put them on one corner of the table, said I’m going out, Little Lola, without realising that Caterina wasn’t there, and he headed to the university, as if it were the ideal place to distract himself.
‘What are you doing?’
Laura turned around. From the way she was walking, it looked as if she were taking measurements of the cloister.
‘Thinking. And you?’
‘Trying to distract myself.’
‘How’s the book?’
‘I just finished it.’
‘Wow,’ she said, pleased.
She took both of his hands in hers, but immediately pulled them away as if she’d been burned.
‘But I’m not at all convinced. It’s impossible to bring together three such strong personalities.’
‘Have you finished it or not?’
‘Well, yes. But now I have to read it all the way through and I’ll come up against many obstacles.’
‘So it’s not finished.’
‘No. It’s written. Now I just have to finish it. And I don’t know if it’s publishable, honestly.’
‘Don’t give in, coward.’
Laura smiled at him with that gaze that disconcerted him. Especially when she called him a coward because she was right.
Ten days later, in mid-July, it was Todó, with his deliberateness, who said hey, Ardèvol, are you going ahead with the book in the end or what. They were both looking out from the first floor of the sunny, half-empty cloister.
I have trouble writing because Sara is not around.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Shit: if you don’t know …’
She’s not around: we aren’t speaking because of a damn violin.
‘I’m having trouble bringing together personalities that are so … so …’
‘Such strong personalities, yes: that’s the official version that everyone knows,’ interrupted Todó.
Why don’t you all just leave me alone, for fuck’s sake?
‘Official version? And how do people know, that I’m writing …’
‘You’re the star, mate.’
Bloody hell.
They were in silence for a long while. Ardèvol’s lengthy conversations were filled with silences, according to reliable sources.
‘Llull, Vico, Berlin,’ recited Todó, his voice arriving from a distance.
‘Yes.’
‘Shit. Vico and Llull, all right: but Berlin?’
No, no, please, leave me alone, you annoying fuck.
‘The desire to organise the world through scholarship: that is what unites them.’
‘Hey, that could be interesting.’
That’s why I wrote it, you bloody idiot, you’re making me swear and everything.
‘But I think it’s still going to take me some time. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish it: you can consider that the official version.’
Todó leaned on the stone railing.
‘Do you know what?’ he said after a long pause. ‘I really hope you work it out.’ He looked at him out of the corner of his eye. ‘It’d do me good to read something like that.’
He patted him on the arm in a show of support and went towards his office, in the corner of the cloister. Below, a couple walked through the cloister holding hands, uninterested in the rest of the word, and Adrià envied them. He knew that when Todó had told him that it would do him good to read something like that, it wasn’t to butter him up and even less because it would do his spirit good to read a book where the unlinkable was linked and he struggled to show that the great thinkers were doing the same thing as Tolstoy but with ideas. Todó’s spirit was featherweight and if he was yearning for a book that didn’t yet exist it was because he had been obsessed for years now with undermining Doctor Bassas’s position in their department and in the university, and the best way to do that was by creating new idols, in whatever discipline. If not for you, I would have even felt flattered to be used in other people’s power struggles. The violin belongs to my family, Sara. I can’t do that, because of my father. He died over this violin and now you want me to just give it away to some stranger who claims it’s his? And if you can’t understand that it’s because when it comes to Jewish matters, you don’t listen to reason. And you let yourself be hoodwinked by gangsters like Tito and Mr Berenguer. Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani.