‘There are loose ends!’ said Mother.
‘Ma’am, I have work to do,’ responded the commissioner, remembering his half-eaten sandwich.
‘A Nazi who lives without a care in the world. If he’s still alive.’
‘Names. Without names, it’s all just smoke and mirrors.’
‘A Nazi. Aribert Voigt. I’m giving you a name!’
‘Farewell, madam.’
‘On the evening of the crime my husband told me he was going to the Athenaeum to see someone named Pinheiro …’
‘Mother, why didn’t you take it to court?’
‘… but that wasn’t true, he wasn’t meeting up with Pinheiro. A commissioner had called him.’
‘Names. Ma’am. There are lots of commissioners in Barcelona.’
‘And it was a trap. Aribert Voigt was acting under the protection of the Spanish police.’
‘What you’re saying could get you sent to prison.’
‘Mother, why didn’t you take it to court?’
‘And the man lost control. He wanted to hurt my husband. He wanted to scare him, I think. But he ended up killing him and destroying him.’
‘Ma’am, don’t talk nonsense.’
‘Instead of arresting him, they kicked him out of the country. Isn’t that how it went, Commissioner Plasencia?’
‘Ma’am, you’ve read too many novels.’
‘I can assure you that is not the case.’
‘If you don’t stop badgering me and getting in the way of the police, you are going to have a very bad time of it. You, your little girlfriend and your son. Even if you flee to the ends of the earth.’
‘Mother, did I hear that right?’
‘Hear what right?’
‘The part about your little girlfriend.’
The commissioner pulled back to observe the effect his words had had. And he drove them home: ‘It wouldn’t be difficult to spread information in the circles you frequent. Farewell, Mrs Ardèvol. And don’t ever come back.’ And he opened the half-empty drawer, with the remains of his thwarted sandwich, and he closed it angrily, this time in front of the black widow.
‘Yes, yes, all right, Mother. But how did you know that all that about the brothels and the rapes was a lie?’
Mother, even though she was dead, grew silent. I was fretfully awaiting a response. After an eternity: ‘I just know it.’
‘That’s not enough for me.’
‘Fine.’ Dramatic pause, I suppose to gather courage. ‘Early on in our marriage, after we conceived you, your father was diagnosed with total sexual impotence. From that point on, he was completely unable to have erections. That made him bitter for the rest of his life. And it embittered us. Doctors and pitiful visits to understanding ladies, none of it did any good. Your father wasn’t perfect, but he couldn’t rape anyone, not even a child, because he ended up hating sex and everything related to it. I guess that’s why he took refuge in his sacred objects.’
‘If that was the case, why didn’t you take them to court? Did they blackmail you?’
‘Yes.’
‘About your lover?’
‘No.’
And Mother’s letter ended with a series of more general recommendations and a timid sentimental effusion at the end when it said goodbye, my beloved son. The last sentence, I will watch over you from heaven, has always seemed to contain a slight threat.
‘Oh, boy …’ said Mr Berenguer, stretched out in the office chair, wiping non-existent specks from his impeccable trouser leg. ‘So you’ve decided to roll up your sleeves and get to work.’
He was sitting in Mother’s office, with the smug air of someone who’s reconquered valuable territory, and the sudden appearance of lamebrained Ardèvol Jr, who’s always got his head in the clouds, distracted him from his thoughts. He was surprised to see the lad entering his office without knocking. That was why he said oh boy.
‘What do you want to talk about?’
Everything, Adrià wanted to talk about everything. But first, he cleverly laid the groundwork for them to clearly understand each other: ‘The first thing I want to do is extricate you from the shop.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘Do you know about the deal I have with your mother?’
‘She’s dead. And yes, I’m familiar with it.’
‘I don’t believe you do: I signed a contract obliging me to work at the shop. I still have a year left in the galleys.’
‘I’m releasing you from it: I want to see the back of you.’
‘I don’t know what it is with your family, but you’ve all got a real nasty streak …’
‘Don’t start lecturing me, Mr Berenguer.’
‘Lectures, no; but some information, yes. Do you know that your father was a predator?’
‘More or less. And that you were the hyena who tried to pinch the remains of the gnu from him.’
Mr Berenguer smiled widely, revealing a gold incisor.
‘Your father was a merciless predator when it came to making a profit from a sale. And I say sale, but it was often a blatant requisition.’
‘Fine, a requisition. But you will gather up your things today. You are no longer welcome in the shop.’
‘My, oh my …’ A strange smile tried to conceal his surprise at the words of the Ardèvol pup. ‘And you call me a hyena? Who are you to …’
‘I am the son of the king of the jungle, Mr Berenguer.’
‘You’re as much of a bastard as your mother was.’
‘Farewell, Mr Berenguer. Tomorrow the new manager will call on you, if necessary, in the company of a lawyer who will be fully informed about everything.’
‘You do know that your fortune is built on extortion?’
‘Are you still here?’
Luckily for me, Mr Berenguer thought that I was solid as a rock, like my mother; he mistook my resigned fatalism for some sort of deep indifference and that disarmed him and strengthened me. He gathered, in silence, all that he must have only very shortly before placed in a drawer of my mother’s desk and left the office. I saw him rummaging through various nooks and crannies until I noticed that Cecília, pretending to be working with the catalogues, was glancing curiously at the hyena’s movements. She soon understood what was going on, and a lipsticked smile grew wide on her face.
Mr Berenguer slammed the door to the street, trying to crack the glass, but he didn’t pull it off. The two new employees didn’t seem to understand anything. Mr Berenguer, after working there for thirty years, had barely taken an hour to disappear from the shop. I thought he had disappeared from my life as well. And I locked Mother and Father’s office with a key. Instead of demanding information and searching out signs of the king of the jungle’s prowess, I began to cry. The next morning, instead of demanding information and searching out signs, I put the shop in the hands of the manager and went back to Tübingen because I didn’t want to miss any more of Coșeriu’s classes. Information and signs.
27
During my last months in Tübingen I began to long for that city, along with the landscape of Baden-Württemberg and the Black Forest and all of it, which was so lovely; because Adrià was going through the same thing that happened to Bernat: he was happier longing after something that was out of his reach than looking at what he held in his hands. He was thinking more about how the heck will I be able to live so far from this landscape when I return to Barcelona, how? And this was while still finishing his dissertation on Vico, which had somehow become some sort of atomic pile where he’d deposited all of his thoughts and which I knew would provide me with an unceasing series of intellectual reflections that would accompany me throughout my life. That could explain, my dear, why I didn’t want to get distracted by information and signs that could disrupt my life and my studies. And I tried not to think about it much until I got used to not thinking about it at all.