‘So you were acting.’
‘To a certain extent. But you surpassed me.’
Both of them looked at their plates, until Adrià put down his fork and covered his full mouth with his napkin.
‘The value of the weight of history!’ he said, bursting into laughter.
The dinner continued with long rifts of silence. They tried to avoid eye contact.
‘So your mother wrote you a book of instructions.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were following it.’
‘Yes.’
‘You seemed … I don’t know: different.’
‘Different in what way?’
‘Different from how you usually are.’
‘How am I, usually?’
‘Absent. You’re always somewhere else.’
They nibbled on olives in silence, not knowing what to say to each other, as they waited for their dessert. Until Adrià said he didn’t know she was so far-sighted and perceptive.
‘Who?’
‘My mother.’
Laura placed her fork on the table and looked him in the eye.
‘Do you know I feel used?’ she insisted. ‘Did you get that, after everything I’ve said?’
I looked at her carefully and I saw that her blue gaze was damp. Poor Laura: she was saying the great truth of her life and I still didn’t want to recognise it.
‘Forgive me. I couldn’t do it alone.’
That night Laura and I made love, very tenderly and cautiously, as if we were afraid of hurting each other. She curiously examined the medallion that Adrià wore around his neck, but she didn’t mention it. And then she cried: it was the first time that smiling Laura showed me her perennial dose of sadness. And she didn’t explain her heartaches. I was silent as well.
After strolling through the Vatican museums and silently admiring the Moses at San Pietro in Vincoli for over an hour, the patriarch took a step forward, with the tablets of the law in his hand and, when approaching his people and seeing that they were worshipping a golden calf and dancing around it, he angrily grabbed the stone tablets where Jahweh had engraved in divine script the points of the agreement, the new alliance with his people, and he threw them to the ground, smashing them to bits. While Aaron knelt and picked up a jagged piece, not too big and not too small, and saved it as a souvenir, Moses raised his voice and said you good-for-nothings, what are you doing adoring false gods the second I turn my back, bloody hell, what ingrates! And the people of God said forgive us, Moses, we won’t do it again. And he replied I am not the one who has to forgive you, but rather God the merciful against whom you have sinned by worshipping false gods. Just for that you deserve to be stoned to death. All of you. And when they went out beneath the blazing Roman midday sun, thinking of stones and smashed tablets, it occurred to me, out of the blue, that, a century earlier, in the Hijri year of twelve hundred and ninety, a crying baby had been born in the small village of al-Hisw, with her face illuminated like the moon, and her mother, upon seeing her, said this daughter of mine is a blessing from Allah the Merciful; she is beautiful like the moon and splendorous as the sun, and her father, Azizzadeh the merchant, seeing his wife’s delicate state, told her, hiding his anxiousness, what name should we give her, my wife, and she responded she will be called Amani, and the people of al-Hisw will know her as Amani the lovely; and she was left drained by her words; and her husband Azizzadeh, with bitter tears in his dark eyes, after making sure that everything was in order, gave a white coin and a basket of dates to the midwife; looked, worried, at his wife, and a black cloud crossed through his thoughts. The mother’s cracked voice still said Azizzadeh: if I die, take good care of the golden jewel in my memory.
‘You aren’t going to die.’
‘Listen to me. And when lovely Amani’s first monthly blood comes, give it to her and tell her it is from me. To remember me by, my husband. To remember her mother who didn’t have enough strength to.’ And she began to cough. ‘Promise me you will,’ she insisted.
‘I promise, my wife.’
The midwife came back into the room and said she needs to rest. Azizzadeh shook his head and went back to the shop because he had to supervise the unloading of the delivery of pistachios and walnuts that had just arrived from Lebanon. But even if it had been engraved on tablets like the law of the infidel sons of Mūsa who call themselves the chosen people, Azizzadeh would never have believed the sad end lovely Amani would meet in fifteen years’ time, praise be the merciful Lord.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘You see, see how you’re always somewhere else?’
They took the train back to Barcelona and arrived on Wednesday: Laura missed two classes for the first time in her life and without prior notice. Dr Bastardes, who must have sensed many things, didn’t reproach her for it. And I, after the Roman operation, already knew that I would be able to devote my life to studying what I wished and teaching a few classes, just enough to maintain a presence in the academic world. It seemed that, apart from my romantic problems, the sky was clear. Even though I hadn’t come across any juicy manuscripts lately.
29
Adrià had got a weight off his shoulders, with the help of his aloof mother who had considered his inability to handle practical matters and had watched over her son from the other side, the way every mother in the world except mine does. Just thinking of it gets me emotional and calculating that perhaps in some moment Mother did love me. Now I know for sure that Father once admired me; but I am convinced that he never loved me. I was one more object in his magnificent collection. And that one more object returned from Rome to his house with the intention of putting it in order, since he had been living too long stumbling into the unopened boxes of books that had come from Germany. He turned on the light and there was light. And he called Bernat to come over and help him to plan this ideal order, as if Bernat were Plato and he Pericles, and the flat in the Eixample the bustling city of Athens. And thus the two wise men decided that into the study would go the manuscripts, the incunabula that he would buy, the delicate objects, the books of the fathers, the records, the scores and the most commonly used dictionaries, and they divided the waters from below from those above and the firmament was made with its clouds, separate from the sea waters. In his parents’ bedroom, which he had managed to make his own, they found a place for the poetry and music books, and they separated the lower waters so that there was a dry place, and they gave that dry spot the name earth, and they called the waters ocean seas. In his childhood bedroom, beside Sheriff Carson and valiant Black Eagle, who kept constant watch from the bedside table, they emptied out, without a second glance, all the shelves of books that had accompanied him as a child and there they put the history books, from the birth of memory to the present day. And geography as well, and the earth began to have trees and seeds that germinated and sprouted grasses and flowers.
‘Who are these cowboys?’
‘Don’t touch them!’
He didn’t dare to tell him that it was none of his business. That would have seemed unfair. He just said, nothing, I’ll get rid of them some other day.
‘How.’
‘What.’
‘You’re ashamed of us.’
‘I’m very busy right now.’
I heard the Sheriff, from behind the Arapaho chief, spitting contemptuously onto the ground and choosing not to say anything.
The three long hallways in the flat were devoted to literary prose, arranged by language. With some endless new shelving that he ordered from Planas. In the hallway to the bedroom, Romance languages. In the one beyond the front hall, Slavic and Nordic languages, and in the wide back hall, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon.