The second meeting was easier. Xènia took off her coat without asking permission, she put her recording devices down on the little table and patiently waited for Bernat, who had gone to the other end of the flat with his mobile, to finish an endless argument with someone who was probably his lawyer. He spoke in a low voice and with a kind of stifled rage.
Xènia looked at some book spines. In one corner were the five books that Bernat Plensa had published; she hadn’t read the first two. She pulled out the oldest one. On the first page was a dedication to my muse, my beloved Tecla, who was so supportive to me in the creation of these stories, Barcelona, 12 February 1977. Xènia couldn’t help but smile. She put the book back in its place, beside its companions in the complete works of Bernat Plensa. On the desk, the computer was sleeping with the screen dark. She moved the mouse and the screen lit up. There was a text. A seventy-page document. Bernat Plensa was writing a novel and he had said no, no novels. She looked towards the hallway. She could hear Bernat’s voice at the far end, still speaking softly. She sat in front of the computer and read After buying the tickets, Bernat put them in his pocket. He gazed at the sign announcing the concert. The young man beside him, wearing a hat that hid his face and wrapped in a scarf, tapped his feet on the ground to ward off the cold, very interested in that night’s programme. Another man, who was fat and stuffed into a slender coat, was trying to return his tickets because of some problem. They took a walk along Sant Pere Més Alt and they missed it. When they were back in front of the Palau de la Música, it was all over. The sign that read Prokofiev’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 2 in G-Minor performed by Jascha Heifetz and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra directed by Eduard Toldrà had an aggressive JEWS RAUS scrawled on it in tar and a swastika that dripped from each arm, and the atmosphere had become darker, people avoided eye contact and the earth had become even flatter. Then they told me that it had been a Falangist gang and that the couple of policemen who’d been sent from the headquarters on Via Laietana, right around the corner, had coincidentally been away from their post in front of the Palau having a coffee break and Adrià was overcome with an irrepressible desire to go live in Europe, further north, where they say people are clean and cultured and free, and lively and happy and have parents who love you and don’t die because of something you did. What a crap country we were born into, he said looking at the smear that dripped hatred. Then the policemen arrived and said, all right, move it along, not in groups, come on, on your way, and Adrià and Bernat, like the rest of the onlookers, disappeared because you never know.
The auditorium of the Palau de la Música was full, but the silent was thick. We had trouble getting to our two empty seats, in the stalls, almost in the middle.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ said Adrià, timidly as he sat beside the lovely girl who smiled at him.
‘Adrià? Adrià Ican’trememberwhat?’
Then I recognised you. You didn’t have plaits in your hair and you looked like a real woman.
‘Sara Voltes-Epstein! …’ I said, astonished. ‘Are you here?’
‘What does it look like?’
‘No, I mean …’
‘Yes,’ she said laughing and putting her hand over mine casually, setting off a fatal electric shock. ‘I live in Barcelona now.’
‘Well, how about that,’ I said, looking from side to side. ‘This is my friend Bernat. Sara.’
Bernat and Sara nodded politely to each other.
‘How awful, eh, the thing with the sign …’ said Adrià, with his extraordinary ability to stick his foot in it. Sara made a vague expression and started looking at the programme. Without taking her eyes off of it, ‘How did your concert go?’
‘The one in Paris?’ A bit embarrassed. ‘Fine. Normal.’
‘Do you still read?’
‘Yes. And you, do you still draw?’
‘Yes. I’m having an exhibition.’
‘Where?’
‘In the parish of …’ She smiled. ‘No, no. I don’t want you to come.’
I don’t know if she meant it or if it was a joke. Adrià was so stiff that he didn’t dare to look her in the eye. He just smiled timidly. The lights began to dim, the audience started to applaud and Master Toldrà came out on the stage and Bernat’s footsteps were heard coming from the other end of the flat. Then Xènia put the computer to sleep and stood up from the chair. She pretending she’d been reading book spines and when Bernat entered the study she made a bored face.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, brandishing the mobile.
‘More problems?’
He furrowed his brow. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it. Or that he had learned he shouldn’t discuss it with Xènia. They sat down and, for a few seconds, the silence was quite uncomfortable; perhaps that was why they both smiled without looking at each other.
‘And how does it feel to be a musician writing literature?’ asked Xènia, putting the tiny recorder in front of her on the small round table.
He looked at her without seeing her, thinking of the furtive kiss of the other night, so close to his lips.
‘I don’t know. It all happened gradually, inevitably.’
That was a real whopper. It all happened so bloody slowly, so gratuitously and capriciously and, yet, his anxiety did arrive all at once, because Bernat had been writing for years and for years Adrià had been telling him that what he wrote was completely uninteresting, it was grey, predictable, dispensable; definitely not an essential text. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, stop asking me for my opinion.
‘And that’s it?’ said Xènia, a bit peeved. ‘It all happened gradually, inevitably? And full stop? Should I turn off the tape recorder?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Where are you?’
‘Here, with you.’
‘No.’
‘Well, it’s post-concert trauma.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m more than sixty years old, I am a professional violinist, I know that I do fine but playing with the orchestra doesn’t do it for me. What I wanted was to be a writer, you understand?’
‘You already are.’
‘Not the way I wanted to be.’
‘Are you writing something now?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No. Why?’
‘No reason. What do you mean by not the way you wanted to be?’
‘That I’d like to captivate, enthral.’
‘But with the violin …’
‘There are fifty of us playing. I’m not a soloist.’
‘But sometimes you play chamber music.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘And why aren’t you a soloist?’
‘Not everyone who wants to be one can be. I don’t have the skill or temperament for it. A writer is a soloist.’