‘Impressive,’ he summed up. ‘You’re a wine scholar and your sister would mix it with soda and pour it straight into her mouth from a pitcher.’
‘It takes all kinds. But only up to a point: the pitcher isn’t necessarily bad. But the soda, that’s a real sin.
‘Stay for dinner,’ he added. ‘Giorgio is an excellent cook.’
We sat down, surrounded by the world of wine and the unspoken question: what do you want, what do you want to talk about, why? that Max was trying not to formulate. We were also surrounded by a silence mixed with sea air that conjoined one not to do anything, to let the day pass placidly and not allow anyone or any conversation to complicate our lives. It was hard to get to the point of why he’d come.
‘What do you want, Adrià?’
It wasn’t easy to say. Because what Adrià wanted to know was what the hell had they told Sara, eh, to make her run away from one day to the next without saying anything and without even …
There was a silence only sliced, and then just partially, by the faint salty breeze.
‘Sara didn’t tell you all that?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ask her about it?’
‘Don’t ask me again, Adrià. It’s best that …’
‘Well, if she said that, then I …’
‘Max, look into my eyes. She is dead. Sara is dead! And I want to know what the hell happened.’
‘Perhaps you no longer need to.’
‘Yes, I do. And your parents and my parents are dead too. But I have a right to know what I’m guilty of.’
Max got up, went over to the window, as if he suddenly had to check some detail of the seascape that it framed like a painting. He stood there for a while, taking in the details. Or thinking, perhaps.
‘So you don’t know a thing,’ he concluded without turning towards me.
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to know or not.’
His reticence had made me nervous. I struggled to calm myself down. And I wanted to be more precise: ‘The only thing that Sara told me, when I went to see her in Paris, was that I had written her a letter saying that she was a stinking Jewess who could shove her shitty, snotty family, where the sun don’t shine, that they had a big broomstick firmly up their arses.’
‘Wow. I didn’t know that part.’
‘That was more or less what she said. But I didn’t write that!’
Max made a vague gesture and left the study. After a little while he came back with a chilled bottle of white wine and two glasses.
‘Let’s see what you think of this.’
Adrià had to contain his anxiousness and taste that Saint-Émilion and try to distinguish the flavours that Max explained to him; they slowly emptied the first glass like that, with little sips, discussing aromas and not what their mothers had told Sara.
‘Max.’
‘I know.’
He served himself half a glass and drank it not like an oenologist, but like a drinker. And when he was done he clicked his tongue, said help yourself and began to say that Fèlix Ardèvol was surprised by his customer’s appearance and I’ll tell you, beloved, because from what Max told me you only knew the tip of the iceberg. You have a right to the details: it is my penance. So, I have to say that Fèlix Ardèvol was surprised by his customer’s appearance, a man so weedy that when he wore his hat he looked like an open umbrella in the middle of the romantic garden at the Athenaeum.
‘Mr Lorenzo?’
‘Yes,’ said Fèlix Ardèvol. ‘You must be Abelard.’
The other sat in silence. He took off his hat and placed it delicately on the table. A blackbird passed shrieking between the two men and headed to the lushest patch of vegetation. The weedy man said, in a deep voice and in very artificial Spanish, that my client will send you a packet today right here. Half an hour after I’ve left.
‘Fine. I have time.’
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
The next day, Fèlix Ardèvol took a plane, as he did so often. Once he was in Lyon, he rented a Stromberg, as he did so often, and in a few hours he was in Geneva. The same weedy man with the voice of a Lower Bulgarian was waiting for him at the Hôtel du Lac, and had him go up to a room. Ardèvol delivered the packet and the man, after delicately placing his hat on the chair, parsimoniously unwrapped it and opened the security seal. He slowly counted five wads of banknotes. It took him a good ten minutes. On a piece of paper, he took notes and made calculations, and he wrote the results meticulously into a small notebook. He even checked the bills’ serial numbers.
‘Such trust, it’s really appalling,’ muttered Ardèvol, impatient. The weedy man didn’t deign to respond until he had finished what he was doing.
‘What did you say?’ he asked as he placed the banknotes into a small briefcase, hid the little notebook, tore up the paper with the notes, gathered the pieces and put them in his pocket.
‘That such trust is really appalling.’
‘As you wish.’ He stood up, extended a packet he had pulled out of the briefcase and slid it over to Ardèvol.
‘That is for you.’
‘Now I have to start counting?’
The man gave a corpse-like smile, rescued the umbrella from the chair, put it on as a hat, and said if you want to rest, your room is paid up until tomorrrow. And he left without turning around or saying goodbye. Fèlix Ardèvol carefully counted the notes and felt satisfied with life.
He repeated the operation with slight variants. And soon he did it with new intermediaries and with increasingly fatter packets. And larger profits. What’s more, he took advantage of the trips to scrutinise corners and sniff library shelves, archives and warehouses. And one day, the weedy man who went by the name of Abelard, had a voice like thunder and spoke an artificial Spanish, as if he liked to hear himself speak, made a mistake. He left the torn up pieces of the paper where he’d jotted down his sums on the table of the room in the Hôtel du Lac instead of putting them in his pocket. And that night, after patiently constructing the puzzle on the glass top, Fèlix Ardèvol could read the words on the other side. The two words: Anselmo Taboada. And some indecipherable scribblings. Anselmo Taboada. Anselmo Taboada.