‘Do you like it? It’s good, right?’
Adrià returned to his world. He stood up with a start.
‘Hey, we’re here!’
They got off at the stop on the side of the highway. Before them rose the frozen town of Bebenhausen. A woman with white hair had got off with them and gave them a smile. Adrià suddenly thought to ask her if she would take a photo of them with this camera, you see, madam? She puts her basket down, takes the camera and says sure, what button do I press?
‘Right here. Thank you very much, madam.’
The two friends posed in front of the town, which was covered in a thin layer of ice that made it very uninviting. The woman snapped the shot and said there you go. Adrià took back the camera and picked up the basket. He silently indicated for her to go ahead, that he would carry it for her. All three of them started to walk up a ramp that led to the houses.
‘Watch out,’ said the woman, ‘the frozen asphalt is treacherous.’
‘What did she say?’ asked Bernat, all ears.
Just then he slipped as he took a step, falling on his arse in the middle of the ramp.
‘That,’ replied Adrià, bursting into laughter.
Bernat got up, humiliated, mumbled a swear word and had to put on a good face. When they reached the top of the ramp, Adrià gave the woman back her basket.
‘Tourists?’
‘Students.’
He shook her hand and said Adrià Ardèvol. Pleased to meet you.
‘Herta,’ said the woman. And she headed off, with the basket in one hand and not slipping for anything in the world.
The cold was more intense than in Tübingen. It was obscenely cold. The cloister was tranquil and silent as they waited for the guided tour at ten on the dot. The other visitors were waiting in the vestibule, more sheltered. They stepped on the still virgin ice of the night’s freeze.
‘What a beautiful thing,’ said Bernat in admiration.
‘I like this place a lot. I’ve come six or seven times, in spring, summer, autumn … It’s relaxing.’
Bernat sighed in satisfaction, and said how can you not be a believer when you look at the beauty and peace of this cloister.
‘The people who lived here worshipped a vengeful and vindictive god.’
‘Have some respect.’
‘It pains me to say it, Bernat; I’m not kidding.’
When they were silent, all that was heard was the ice cracking beneath their feet. No bird had any interest in freezing. Bernat took in a deep breath and expelled a thick cloud, as if he were a locomotive. Adrià returned to the conversation: ‘The Christian God is vindictive and vengeful. If you make a mistake and you don’t repent, he punishes you with eternal hell. I find that reaction so disproportionate that I just don’t want to have anything to do with that God.’
‘But …’
‘But what.’
‘Well, he is the God of love.’
‘No way: you’ll burn in hell forever because you didn’t go to mass or you stole from a neighbour. I don’t see the love anywhere.’
‘You aren’t looking at the whole picture.’
‘I’m not saying I am: I’m no expert.’ He stopped short. ‘But there are other things that bother me more.’
‘Like what?’
‘Evil.’
‘What?’
‘Evil. Why does your God allow it? He doesn’t keep evil from happening: all he does is punish the evildoer with eternal flames. Why doesn’t he prevent it? Do you have an answer?’
‘No … Well … God respects human freedom.’
‘That’s what the clever priests lead you to believe; they don’t have the answers to why God does nothing in the face of evil, either.’
‘Evil will be punished.’
‘Yeah, sure: after it’s done the damage.’
‘Bloody hell, Adrià; I don’t what to say to you. I don’t have arguments, you know that … I just believe.’
‘Forgive me; I don’t want to … But you’re the one who brought up the subject.’
He opened a door and a small group of explorers, captained by the guide, prepared to start their visit.
‘Bebenhausen monastery, which we will now visit, was founded by Rudolf I of Tübingen in eleven eighty and was secularised in eighteen oh six.’
‘What does secularised mean?’ (a woman in thick plasticframed eyeglasses and a garnet overcoat).
‘That just means that it stopped being used as a monastery.’
Then the guide started to soft-soap them elegantly because they were cultured people who preferred twelfth- and thirteenth-century architecture to a glass of schnapps or a beer. And he went on to say that during several periods of the twentieth century the monastery was used as a meeting place for various local and regional political groups until a recent agreement with the federal government. It will be completely restored so that visitors can see a faithful reproduction of how it looked when it was a monastery and a large community of Cistercian monks lived here. This summer the construction will begin. Now, please follow me, we will enter what was the monastery’s church. Be careful on the stairs. Watch out. Hold on here, madam, because if you break your leg you’ll miss my wonderful explanations. And ninety per cent of the group smiled.
The frozen visitors entered the church, taking the stairs very carefully. Once inside, Bernat realised that Adrià was not among the nine ice-cold visitors. As the white-haired guide said this church, which still retains many late Gothic elements like this vault over our heads, Bernat left the church and returned to the cloister. He saw Adrià sitting on a stone that was white with snow, his back to him, reading … yes, reading his pages! He watched him anxiously. He was quite sorry not to have a camera because he wouldn’t have hesitated to immortalise the moment in which Adrià, his spiritual and intellectual mentor, the person he most trusted and most distrusted in the world, was absorbed in the fiction that he had created from absolute nothingness. For a few moments he felt important and no longer noticed the cold. He went back into the church. The group was now beneath a window that was damaged but the guide didn’t know how, and then one of the frozen visitors asked how many monks lived here, in the times of splendour.
‘In the fifteenth century, up to a hundred,’ answered the guide.
Like the number of pages in my story, thought Bernat. And he imagined that his friend must now be on page sixteen, when Elisa says the only thing I can do is run away from home.
‘But where will you go, child?’ Amadeu asked in fright.
‘Don’t call me a child,’ Elisa got angry, pushing her hair off her shoulders abruptly.
When she was angry, Elisa would get dimples on her cheeks that looked like tiny navels and Amadeu saw them, he looked at them and lost his bearings and all ability to speak.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You can’t stay here by yourself. You have to follow the group.’
‘No problem,’ said Bernat lifting his arms in a show of innocence and leaving his characters to Adrià’s thorough reading. And he went to the back of the group that was now going down the steps and be very careful with the stairs, they are very treacherous at these temperatures. Adrià was still in the cloister, reading, oblivious to the cold wind, and for a few moments Bernat was the happiest man in the world.