He left before the sun came up, with the van that came from Kikongo and brought medicines and foodstuffs, and a sprinkling of hope for the ill in that extensive area that dipped its feet in the Kwilu.
32
I came back from Paris with my head bowed and my tail between my legs. In that period Adrià Ardèvol was teaching a course on the history of contemporary thought to a numerous audience of relatively sceptical students despite his reputation as a surly-sage-who-does-his-own-thing-and-doesn’t-go-out-for-coffee-ever-and-wants-nothing-to-do-with-faculty-meetings-because-he’s-above-good-and-evil that he had started to have among his colleagues at the Universitat de Barcelona. And the relative prestige of having published, almost secretly, La revolució francesa and Marx? two fairly provocative little books that had started to earn him admirers and detractors. The days in Paris had devastated him and he had no desire to talk about Adorno because he couldn’t care less about anything.
I hadn’t thought about you again, Little Lola, because my head was filled with Sara. Not until some obscure relative called to tell me my cousin is dead and she left some addresses of people she wanted to be notified. She added the information of the place and time and we exchanged various words of courtesy and condolence.
At the funeral there were about twenty people. I vaguely remembered three or four faces, but I couldn’t greet anyone, not even the obscure cousin. Dolors Carrió i Solegibert ‘Little Lola’ (1910–1982), born and died in the Barceloneta, mother’s friend, a good woman, who screwed me over because Little Lola’s only real family was Mother. And she was probably her lover. I wasn’t able to say goodbye to you with the affection that, despite everything, you deserved.
‘Hey, hey, but that was what, twenty years ago, that you broke up?’
‘Come on, not twenty! And we didn’t break up: they broke us up.’
‘She must already have grandchildren.’
‘Why do you think I’ve never looked for another woman?’
‘The truth is I have no idea.’
‘I’ll explain it to you: every day, well, almost every day, when I go to sleep, you know what I think?’
‘No.’
‘I think now the bell is going to ring, ding dong.’
‘Your bell goes rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs.’
‘All right: rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs, and I open it and it’s Sara saying that she left because of something or another and asking do you want me in your life again, Adrià.’
‘Hey, hey, kid, don’t cry. And now you don’t have to think about her any more. You see? In a way it’s better, don’t you think?’
Bernat felt uncomfortable in the face of Adrià’s rare expansiveness.
He pointed to the cabinet and Adrià shrugged, which Bernat interpreted as go ahead. He pulled out Vial and he played him a couple of Telemann’s fantasies, at the end of which I felt better, thank you, Bernat, my dear friend.
‘If you want to cry more, go ahead and cry, eh?’
‘Thanks for giving me permission,’ smiled Adrià.
‘You are delicate, fragile.’
‘It devastated me that my two mothers conspired against our love and we just fell right into their trap.’
‘All right. The two mothers are dead and you can keep on …’
‘I can keep on what?’
‘I don’t know. I meant …’
‘I envy your emotional stability.’
‘Don’t be fooled.’
‘Yes, yes. You and Tecla, wham bam.’
‘I can’t get Llorenç to understand anything.’
‘How old is he?’
‘He’s the soul of contradiction.’
‘He doesn’t want to study violin?’
‘How did you know?’
‘I’ve heard that old song and dance somewhere before.’
Adrià was pensive for a while. He shook his head: I think life is a botched job, he said, in conclusion. And, like someone who takes up the bottle, he went to the Sant Antoni market on Sunday to relax and he contrived a way to bump into Morral at his stand, who signalled for Adrià to follow him. This time they were the first ten pages of the Goncourt brothers’ manuscript of Renée Mauperin, written in a uniform hand — with a few corrections in the margin — that Morral assured me was Jules’s.
‘Are you knowledgeable about literature?’
‘I sell things: books, trading cards, manuscripts and Bazooka chewing gum, you know what I mean?’
‘But where in the hell do you get it from?’
‘The chewing gum?’
Sly Morral didn’t tell me his methods. His silence ensured his safety and guaranteed that his mediation was always necessary.
I bought the Goncourt pages. And, in the following few weeks, as if they’d been waiting for me, manuscripts and loose pages appeared by Orwell, Huxley and Pavese. Adrià bought them all, despite his theoretical reticence to buying for buying’s sake. But he couldn’t let the eighth of February of he wasn’t sure which year of Il mestiere di vivere slip through his hands, a loose page that spoke of Guttoso’s wife, and of the hope of living with a woman who waits for you, who will sleep beside you and keep you warm and be your companion and make you feel alive, my Sara, which I don’t have and never will. How could I say no to that page? And I’m sure that Morral noticed my trembling and, depending on its intensity, upped the price. I am convinced that it is very difficult to resist possessing the original pages of texts that have moved you deeply. The paper with the handwriting, the gesture, the ink, which is the material element that incarnates the spiritual idea which will eventually become the work of art or the work of universal thought; the text enters the reader and transforms him. It is impossible to say no to that miracle. Which is why I didn’t think it over long when Morral, as an intermediary, introduced me to a man whose name I never knew, who was selling two poems by Ungaretti at ridiculous prices: Soldati and San Martino del Carso, the poem that speaks of a town reduced to ruins by war and not by the passing of time. È il mio cuore il paese più straziato. And mine as well, dear Ungaretti. What melancholy, what grief, what joy to own the piece of paper the author used to convert his first intuition into a work of art. And I paid what he asked, almost without haggling, and then Adrià heard a curt spitting on the ground and he looked around.
‘What, Carson.’
‘How. I have something to say, too.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘We have a problem,’ they both said at the same time.
‘What’s that?’
‘Don’t you realise?’
‘I don’t want to realise.’
‘Have you looked at how much you’ve spent on manuscripts these last few years?’
‘I love Sara and she left because our mothers tricked her.’
‘You can’t do anything about that. She has remade her life.’
‘Another whisky, please. Make it a double.’
‘Do you know how much you’ve spent?’
‘No.’
The buzzing of an office calculator. I don’t know if it was the valiant Arapaho chief or the coarse cowboy who was using it. A few seconds of silence until they told me the scandalous amount of money that
‘All right, all right, I’ll stop. That’s it. Are you happy now?’
‘Look, doctor,’ said Morral another day. ‘A Nietzsche.’