He chose to pay again and repeat the itinerary with a new group of cold-looking visitors. In the cloister, immobile, Adrià was still reading, his head bowed. And what if he was frozen? thought Bernat, terrified. He didn’t realise that what worried him most about Adrià freezing was that he wouldn’t have finished reading his story. But he looked at him out of the corner of his eye as he heard the guide who, now in German, said 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 young man, tall and thin, encased in an electric blue anorak).
‘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. Bernat heard the man starting to say this church, which still retains many late Gothic elements like this vault over our heads; but he heard it from the doorway because he was furtively going back, towards the cloister, and he hid behind a column. Page forty or forty-five, calculated Bernat. And Adrià was reading, struggling to keep Sara and Kornelia from turning into Elisa and he didn’t want to move from there despite the cold. Forty or forty-five, at the point where Elisa goes up the slope of Cantó on her bicycle, her hair fluttering behind her; now that I think about it, if she’s pedalling up, her hair can’t be fluttering because she can barely move the bicycle. I’ll have to revise that. If it were downhill, maybe. Well, I’ll change it to the descent of Cantó and let those locks fly. He must be enjoying it; he doesn’t even notice the cold. Making sure that his footsteps weren’t heard, he returned to the group that was just then lifting its head like a single person to gaze upon the coffered ceiling, which is a wonder of marquetry, and a woman with hair the colour of straw said wunderbar and looked at Bernat as if demanding to know his aesthetic stance. Bernat, who was bursting with emotion, nodded three or four times, but he didn’t dare say wunderbar because they’d be able tell that he wasn’t German and had no clue what it meant. At least not until Adrià had told him what he thought, and then he would jump and shriek, wild with joy. The woman with hair the colour of straw was satisfied with Bernat’s ambiguous gesture and said wunderbar, but now in a softer voice, as if only to herself.
On the fourth visit, the guide, who had been looking at Bernat suspiciously for some time, came over to him and looked him in the eyes, as if he wanted to figure out whether that mute and solitary tourist was pulling his leg or whether he was an enthusiastic victim of the charms of the Bebenhausen monastery, or perhaps of his wonderful explanations. Bernat looked enthusiastically at the leaflet that he’d nervously wrinkled, and the guide shook his head, clicked his tongue and said the Bebenhausen monastery, which we will now visit, was founded by Rudolf I of Tübingen in eleven eighty and was secularised in eighteen oh six.
‘Wunderbar. What does secularised mean?’ (a young, pretty woman, wrapped up like an Eskimo and her nose red with cold).
When they left the cloister after having admired the coffered ceiling, Bernat, hidden among the blocks of ice that were the visitors, saw that Adrià must be on page eighty and Elisa had already emptied the pond and let the twelve red fish die in the moving scene where she decides to punish the feelings and not the bodies of the two boys by depriving them of their fish. And that was the setup for the unexpected ending, of which he was particularly, and humbly, proud.
There were no more groups. Bernat remained in the cloister, staring openly at Adrià, who in that moment turned page one hundred and three, folded the papers and contemplated the icy boxwood hedges he had before him. Suddenly he got up and then I saw Bernat, who was watching me with a strange expression as if I were a ghost and said I thought you had frozen. We left in silence and Bernat timidly asked me if I wanted to do the guided tour, and I told him there was no need, that I already knew it by heart.
‘Me too,’ he replied.
Once we were outside I said that I needed a very hot cup of tea, urgently.
‘Well, what do you think?’
Adrià looked at his friend, puzzled. Bernat pointed with his chin to the packet of pages Adrià carried in his gloved hand. Eight or ten or a thousand agonizing seconds passed. Then Adrià, without looking Bernat in the eye, said it’s very, very bad. It lacks soul; I didn’t believe a single emotion. I don’t know why, but I think it’s terrible. I don’t know who Amadeu is; and the worst of it is that I don’t give a rat’s arse. And Elisa, well, it goes without saying.’
‘You’re kidding.’ Bernat, pale like Mother when she told me that Father had gone to heaven.
‘No. I wonder why you insist on writing when with music …’
‘What a son of a bitch you are.’
‘Then why did you let me read it?’
The next day they took the bus to Stuttgart Station because something was going on with the train in Tübingen, each looking out at the landscape, Bernat draped in a stubborn hostile silence and with the same brooding expression he’d had since their educational visit to the Bebenhausen monastery.
‘One day you told me that a close friend doesn’t lie to you. Remember that, Bernat. So stop acting offended, bollocks.’
He said it in a loud, clear voice because speaking Catalan in a bus travelling from Tübingen to Stuttgart gave him a rare feeling of isolation and impunity.
‘Pardon? Are you speaking to me?’
‘Yes. And you added that if my bloody best friend can’t tell me the truth and just acts like everybody else, oh, great, Bernat, what a load of … It’s missing the magical spark. And you shouldn’t lie to me. Don’t ever lie to me again, Adrià. Or our friendship will be over. Do you remember those words? Those are your words. And you went on: you said I know that you’re the only one who tells me the truth.’ He looked at him aslant. ‘And I won’t ever stop doing that, Bernat.’ With my eyes straight ahead, I added: ‘If I’m strong enough.’
They let the bus advance a few foggy, damp kilometres.
‘I play music because I don’t know how to write,’ Bernat said while looking out the window.
‘Now that’s good!’ shouted Adrià. And the woman in the seat in front of them looked back, as if they’d asked for her opinion. She shifted her gaze towards the sad grey, rainy landscape that was bringing them closer to Stuttgart: loud Mediterranean people; they must be Turks. Long silence until the taller of the two Turkish boys relaxed his expression and looked at his companion out of the corner of his eye: ‘Now that’s good? What do you mean?’
‘Real art comes from some frustration. It doesn’t come out of happiness.’
‘Well, if that’s the case, I’m a bona fide artist.’
‘Hey, you are in love, don’t forget.’
‘You’re right. But only my heart works,’ pointed out Kemal Bernat. ‘The rest is shite.’