Bernat and Tecla married, deeply in love, with excitement in their eyes; and I was the best man. During the wedding reception, still dressed as bride and groom, they played Brahms’s first sonata for us, just like that, bravely and without scores. And I was so jealous … Bernat and Tecla had their whole lives ahead of them and I joyfully envied my friend’s happiness. I longed after Sara and her inexplicable flight, deeply envying Bernat again, and I wished them all the good fortune in the world for their life together. They left on their honeymoon — smiling and expansive — and began — gradually, consistently, day by day — sowing the seeds of their unhappiness.
For a few months, as I got used to the classes, the students’ lack of interest in cultural history, the wild landscape of the Eixample, devoid of forests, I studied piano with a woman who was nothing like the memory I had of Trullols, but who was very efficient. But I still had too much free time.
‘ḥāḏ.’
‘hadh.’
‘trēn.’
‘trén.’
‘tlāt.’
‘tláth.’
‘arba.’
‘árba.’
‘arba.’
‘árba.’
‘arba!’
‘arba!’
‘Raba taua!’
Aramaic classes helped mitigate the problem. Professor Gombreny complained at first about my pronunciation, until she stopped mentioning it, I don’t know if it was because I’d improved or she was just fed up.
Since Wednesdays dragged, Adrià signed up for a Sanskrit class that opened up a whole new world to me, especially because it was a pleasure to hear Doctor Figueres cautiously venturing etymologies and establishing webs of connection between the different Indo-European languages. I was also doing slalom through the hallways to avoid the boxes of books. I had pinpointed their exact locations and didn’t even crash into them in the dark. And when I was tired of reading, I would play my Storioni for hours until I was drenched in sweat like Bernat on the day of his exam. And the days passed quickly and I only thought of you as I was making my dinner, because then I had to let down my guard. And I went to bed with a touch of sadness and, mostly, with the unanswered question of why, Sara. I only had to meet with the shop manager twice, a very dynamic man who quickly took care of the situation. The second time he told me that Cecília was about to retire and, even though I’d had few dealings with her, I was sad about it. I know it sounds hard to believe, but Cecília had pinched my cheek and mussed my hair more times than my mother.
The first time I felt a tickle in my fingers was when Morral, an old bookseller at the Sant Antoni market, an acquaintance of Father’s, told me I think you might be interested in coming to see something, sir.
Adrià, who was going through a pile of books from the ‘A Tot Vent’ collection, from its beginnings to the outbreak of the Civil War, some with dedications from unknown people to other unknown people that he found highly amusing, lifted his head in surprise.
‘Beg your pardon?’
The bookseller had stood up and gestured with his head for Adrià to follow him. He poked the man at the stall beside him, to let him know that he would be away for a while and could he keep an eye on his books, for the love of God. In five silent minutes they reached a narrow house with a dark stairwell on Comte Borrell Street that he remembered having visited with his father. On the first floor, Morral pulled a key out of his pocket and opened a door. The flat was dark. He switched on a weak bulb whose light didn’t reach the floor and, with four strides through a very narrow hallway, he stood in a room filled with a huge cabinet with many wide but shallow drawers, like the ones illustrators use to store their drawings. The first thing I thought was how could they have got it through such a narrow hallway. The light in the room was brighter than the one in the hallway. Then Adrià realised that there was a table in the middle, with a lamp that Morral also turned on. He opened up one of the drawers and pulled out a bunch of pages and placed them beneath the beam of light on the small table. Then I felt the palpitations, the tickle in my insides and my fingertips. Both of us gathered over the gem. Before me were some sheets of rough paper. I had to put on my glasses because I didn’t want to miss a single detail. It took me some time to get used to the strange handwriting on that manuscript. I read aloud Discours de la méthode. Pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la vérité dans les sciences. And that was it. I didn’t dare to touch the paper. All I said was no.
‘Yes.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘You’re interested, right?’
‘Where in hell did you get it from?’
Rather than answering me, Morral turned the first page. And after a little while he said I’m sure you are interested.
‘What do you know.’
‘You are like your father: I know you are interested.’
Adrià had the original manuscript of Discours de la méthode before him, written before 1637, which is when it was published along with Dioptrique, Les Météores and Géométrie.
‘Complete?’ he asked.
‘Complete. Well … it’s missing … nothing, a couple of pages.’
‘And how do I know that it’s not a scam?’
‘When you find out the price you’ll know that it’s not a scam.’
‘No: I understand that it will be very expensive. How do I know you aren’t cheating me?’
The man dug around in a briefcase that leaned against one of the table legs, pulled out some sheets of paper and extended them to Adrià.
The first eight or ten years of the ‘A Tot Vent’ collection would have to wait. Adrià Ardèvol spent the afternoon examining the packet and checking it against the certificate of authenticity and asking himself how in the hell that gem had surfaced and deciding that perhaps it was better not to ask too many questions.
I didn’t ask a single question that wasn’t related to the pages’ authenticity and I ended up paying a fortune after a month of hesitation and discreet consultations. That was the first manuscript I acquired myself, of the twenty in my collection. At home, procured by my father, I already had twenty loose pages of the Recherche, the entire manuscript of Joyce’s The Dead, some pages by Zweig, that guy who committed suicide in Brazil, and the manuscript of the consecration of the monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal by Abbot Deligat. From that day on I understood that I was possessed by the same demon as my father had been. The tickle in my belly, the itching in my fingers, the dry mouth … all over my doubts on the authenticity, the value of the manuscript, the fear of missing the chance to possess it, the fear of paying too much, the fear of offering too little and seeing it vanish from my life …
The Discours de la méthode was my grain of sand.
28
The first grain of sand is a speck in your eye; then it becomes a nuisance on your fingers, a burning in your stomach, a small protuberance in your pocket and, with a bit of bad luck, it ends up transforming into a weight on your conscience. Everything — all lives and stories — begins thus, beloved Sara, with a harmless grain of sand that goes unnoticed.
I entered the shop as if it were a temple. Or a labyrinth. Or hell. I hadn’t set foot in there since I’d expelled Mr Berenguer into the outer shadows. The same bell sounded when you opened the door. That same bell my whole life. He was received by Cecília’s affable eyes, still behind the counter, as if she had never shifted from that spot. As if she were an object displayed for sale to any collector with enough capital. Still well dressed and coiffed. Without moving, as if she had been waiting for him for hours, she demanded a kiss, like when he was ten years old. She asked him how are you feeling, Son, and he said fine, fine. And you?