‘What are you doing, cutie?’ She smiled at me.
And I, mouth agape, because she looked like another woman.
‘What did you ask the Three Kings to bring you for Christmas?’ she inquired.
I shrugged because in my house we never celebrated Epiphany because it was your parents and not the Three Kings who brought presents and one shouldn’t fall for primitive superstitions: so, from the first time I ever heard of the Three Kings, the excited wait for their gifts was more of a resigned wait for the present or presents that my father had chosen and which had no relationship to my achievement at school, which was expected without question, or with whether I’d been nice instead of naughty, which was also assumed. But at least I was given gifts meant for a child, in contrast with the general seriousness of our home.
‘I asked for a …’ I remember that my father had informed me that I would receive a lorry that made a siren noise and that I’d best not make the noise inside the house, ‘a lorry with a siren.’
‘Come on, give me a kiss,’ said Cecília, waving me over.
Father returned from Bremen on the weekend with a Mycenaean vase that spent many years in the store, and, from what I understood, with many useful documents and a couple of possible gems in the shape of first editions and handwritten manuscripts, including one from the fourteenth century that he said was now one of his prized jewels. Both at home and at work, they told him he had received a couple of strange calls. And, as if he couldn’t care less about all that would happen in a few days’ time, he told me look, look, look how beautiful this is, and he showed me some notebooks: it was a manuscript of the last things Proust had written. From À la recherche. A hotchpotch of tiny handwriting, paragraphs written in the margins, notes, arrows, little slips of paper attached with staples … Come on, read it.
‘It’s unintelligible.’
‘Come on, boy! It’s the end. The last pages; the last line: don’t tell me you don’t know how the Recherche ends.’
I didn’t answer. Father, all on his own, realised that he had tightened the rope too much and he played it off in that way he was so good at: ‘Don’t tell me you still don’t know French!’
‘Oui, bien sûr: but I can’t read his handwriting!’
That must not have been the right answer because Father, without any further comment, closed the notebook and put it away in the safe while he said under his breath I’ll have to make some decisions because we are starting to have too many treasures in this house. And I understood that we were starting to have too many skeletons in this house.
10
‘Your father … How can I say this, my son? Father …’
‘What? What happened to him?’
‘Well, he’s gone to heaven.’
‘But heaven doesn’t exist!’
‘Father is dead.’
I paid more attention to Mother’s excessively pale face than to the news. It looked like she was the one who was dead. As pale as young Lorenzo Storioni’s violin before it was varnished. And her eyes filled with anguish. I had never heard Mother’s voice catch. Without looking at me, staring at a stain on the wall where the bed was, she was telling me I didn’t kiss him as he left the house. Perhaps I could have saved him with a kiss. And I think she added he got what he deserved, in a softer voice. But I wasn’t sure.
Since I didn’t fully understand her, I locked myself in my messy bedroom, holding tight to the Red Cross lorry that the Three Kings had given me, and sat down on the bed. I started to cry silently, which was how I always did everything at home because if Father wasn’t studying manuscripts, he was reading or he was dying.
I didn’t ask Mother for details. I couldn’t see my father dead because they told me he’d had an accident, that he’d been run over by a lorry on the Arrabassada road, which isn’t on the way to the Athenaeum and well, you can’t see him, there’s no way. And I felt distressed because I had to find Bernat urgently before my world crumbled and they put me in prison.
‘Boy, why did he take your violin?’
‘Huh? What?’
‘Why did your father take your violin?’ repeated Little Lola.
Now it would all come out and I was dying of fright. I still had the pluck to lie, ‘He asked me for it for some reason. I don’t know why.’ And I added desperately, ‘Father was acting very strange.’
When I lie, which is often, I have the feeling that everyone can tell. The blood rushes to my face, I think I must be turning red, I look to either side searching for the hidden incoherence crouching inside the fiction I am creating … I see that I am in their hands and I’m always surprised that no one else has realised. Mother never catches on; but I’m sure Little Lola does. And yet she pretends she doesn’t. Everything about lying is a mystery. Even now that I’m older, I still turn red when I lie and I hear the voice of Mrs Angeleta, who one day when I told her I hadn’t stolen that square of chocolate, grabbed my hand and made me open it, revealing to Mother and Little Lola the ignominious chocolate stain. I closed it again, like a book, and she said you can catch a liar faster than a cripple, always remember that, Adrià. And I still remember it, at sixty. My memories are etched in marble, Mrs Angeleta, and marble they will become. But now the problem wasn’t the stolen chocolate square. I made a sad face, which wasn’t difficult because I was very sad and very afraid and I said I don’t know anything about it, and I started to cry because Father was dead and …
Little Lola left the bedroom and I heard her talking to someone. Then a strange man — who gave off an intense odour of tobacco, spoke in Spanish, hadn’t removed his coat, and had his hat in his hand — came into the bedroom and said to me what’s your name.
‘Adrià.’
‘Why did your father take your violin.’ Like that, like a weary interrogative.
‘I don’t know, I swear.’
The man showed me pieces of wood from my student violin.
‘Do you recognise this?’
‘Well, sure. It’s my violin … it was my violin.’
‘Did he ask you for it?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘Without any explanation?’
‘No. Yes.’
‘Does he play the violin?
‘Who?’
‘Your father.’
‘No, of course not.’
I had to repress a mocking smile that came up at the mere thought of Father playing the violin. The man with the coat, hat and tobacco smell looked towards Mother and Little Lola, who nodded in silence. The man pointed, with his hat, to the Red Cross lorry in my hands and said that lorry is really nice. And he left the room. I was left alone with my lies and didn’t understand a thing. From inside the ambulance lorry, Black Eagle shot me a commiserating look. I know that he thinks little of liars.
The funeral was dark, filled with serious gentlemen with their hats in their hands and ladies who covered their faces with thin veils. My cousins came from Tona and some vague Bosch second cousins from Amposta, and for the first time in my life I felt that I was the centre of attention, dressed in black with my hair well parted and very kempt because Little Lola had given me a double dose of hair spray and said I was very handsome. And she kissed me on the forehead the way Mother never did, and even less now, when she doesn’t even look at me. They say that Father was in the dark box, but I wasn’t able to check. Little Lola told me that he had been badly injured and it was better not to look at him. Poor Father, all day long immersed in books and strange objects and he somehow manages to die covered in wounds. Life is so idiotic. And what if the wounds had been caused by a Kaiken dagger in the shop? No: they told me that it had been an accident.