I looked at the other scores he had with him.
‘I think it’s a good idea for you to play the Massià pieces. Who will accompany you on the piano?’
‘Haven’t you thought that you might get awfully bored studying those things you want to study, about ideas and all that?’
‘Massià deserves it. And they are lovely. The one I like best is Allegro spiritoso.’
‘And why study with a linguist, if what you want is cultural history?’
‘Watch it with the Ciaccona, it’s treacherous.’
‘Don’t go, you bastard.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘From Fine Arts.’
‘And what is it?’
The icy, distrusting figure of Mrs Voltes-Epstein terrified him. He swallowed hard and said she is missing some paperwork for the enrolment transfer and that’s why we need her address.
‘There is nothing missing.’
‘Yes there is. The recidivism policy.’
‘And what’s that?’ She sounded truly curious.
‘Nothing. A slight detail. But it has to be signed.’ He looked at the papers and casually let drop, ‘She has to sign it.’
‘Leave me the papers and …’
‘No, no. I’m not authorised to do that. Perhaps if you give me the name of the school in Paris where she has transferred her enrolment …’
‘No.’
‘They don’t have it in Fine Arts.’ He corrected himself. ‘We don’t have it.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Pardon?’
‘My daughter hasn’t transferred any enrolment. Who are you?’
‘And she slammed the door in my face. Bam!’
‘She saw right through you.’
‘Yup.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yup.’
‘Thanks, Bernat.’
‘I’m sorry … I’m sure you could have done it much better.’
‘No, no. You did the best you could.’
‘It makes me so angry, you know.’
After a while of heavy silence, Adrià said I’m sorry but I think I’m going to cry a little bit.
Bernat’s examination ended with our Ciaccona from the second suite. I had heard him play it so many times … and I always had things to tell him, as if I were the virtuoso and he the disciple. He began studying it after we heard Heifetz play it at the Palau de la Música. Fine. Perfect. But once again without soul, perhaps because he was nervous about the exam. Soulless, as if the last rehearsal at my house a mere twenty-four hours before had been a mirage. Bernat’s creative breath went flat when he was in front of an audience; he lacked that bit of God, which he tried to replace with determination and practice, and the result was good but too predictable. That was it: my best friend was too bloody predictable, even in his attacks.
He finished the exam dripping with sweat, surely thinking that he had pulled it off. The three judges, who’d had vinegary looks on their faces throughout the two-hour audition, deliberated for a few seconds and unanimously decided to give him an excellent, with personal congratulations from each of them. And Trullols, who was in the audience, waited until Bernat’s mother had hugged him, and all that stuff that mothers who aren’t mine do, and she gave him a kiss on the cheek, excited, the way some teachers get excited, and I heard her prophesise, you’re the best student I’ve ever had; you have a brilliant future ahead of you.
‘Extraordinary,’ said Adrià.
Bernat stopped loosening his bow and looked at his friend. He put it away in the case and closed it, in silence. Adrià insisted: impressive, lad; congratulations.
‘Yesterday I told you that you were my friend. That you are my friend.’
‘Yes. You recently said best friend.’
‘Exactly. You don’t lie to your best friend.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I played competently and that’s it. I have no élan.’
‘You played well today.’
‘You would have done it better than me.’
‘What are you saying! I haven’t picked up a violin in two years!’
‘If my bloody best friend is unable to tell me the truth and he’d rather just act like everyone else …’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Don’t ever lie to me again, Adrià.’ He wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘Your comments are very irritating and you’re making me angry.’
‘Well, I …’
‘But I know that you are the only one who says the truth.’ He winked. ‘Auf Wiedersehen.’
When I had the train ticket in my hands, I understood that going to Tübingen to study was much more than thinking of the future. It was ending my childhood; distancing myself from my Arcadia. Yes, yes: I was a lonely, unhappy child with parents who were unresponsive to anything beyond my intelligence, and who didn’t know how to ask me if I wanted to go to Tibidabo to see the automatons that moved like people when you inserted a coin. But being a child means having the ability to smell the flower that gleams amidst the toxic mud. And it means knowing how to be happy with that five-axle lorry that was a cardboard hatbox. Buying the ticket to Stuttgart, I knew that my age of innocence was over.
IV PALIMPSESTUS
There isn’t a single organisation that can protect itself from a grain of sand.
24
Long ago, when the earth was flat and those reckless travellers who reached the end of the world hit up against the cold fog or hurled themselves off a dark cliff, there was a holy man who decided to devote his life to the Lord Our God. He was a Catalan named Nicolau Eimeric, and he became a well-known professor of Sacred Theology for the Order of Preachers at the monastery of Girona. His religious zeal led him to firmly command the Inquisition against evil heresy in the lands of Catalonia and the kingdoms of Valencia. Nicolau Eimeric had been born in Baden-Baden on 25 November, 1900; he had been promoted rapidly to SS Obersturmbannführer and, after a glorious first period as Oberlagerführer of Auschwitz, in 1944 he again took up the reins on the Hungarian problem. In a legal document, he condemned as perversely heretical the book Philosophica amoris by the obstinate Ramon Llull, a Catalan native from the kingdom of the Majorcas. He likewise declared perversely heretical all those in Valencia, Alcoi, Barcelona or Saragossa, Alcanyís, Montpeller or any other location who read, disseminated, taught, copied or thought about the pestiferous heretical doctrine of Ramon Llull, which came not from Christ but from the devil. And thus he signed it this day, 13 July, 1367, in the city of Girona.
‘Proceed. I am beginning to have a fever and I don’t want to go to bed until …’
‘You can go untroubled, Your Excellency.’
Friar Nicolau wiped the sweat from his brow, half from the heat and half from fever, and watched Friar Miquel de Susqueda, his young secretary, finish the condemning document in his neat hand. Then he went out onto the street scorched by a blazing sun, barely catching his breath before he immersed himself in the slightly less hot shade of the chapel of Santa Àgueda. He got down on his knees in the middle of the room and, humbly bowing his head before the divine sacrarium, said oh, Lord, give me strength, don’t let my human feebleness weaken me; don’t let the calumnies, rumours, envy and lies unsettle my courage. Now it is the King himself who dares to criticise my proceedings to benefit the true and only faith, Lord. Give me strength to never stop serving you in my mission of strict vigilance over the truth. After saying an amen that was almost a fleeting thought, he remained kneeling to allow the strangely scorching sun to sink until it caressed the western mountains; with his mind blank, in prayer position, in direct communication with the Lord of the Truth.