38

‘Once you’ve had a taste of artistic beauty, your life changes. Once you’ve heard the Monteverdi choir sing, your life changes. Once you’ve seen a Vermeer up close, your life changes; once you’ve read Proust, you are never the same again. What I don’t know is why.’

‘Write it.’

‘We are random chance.’

‘What?’

‘It would be easier for us to never have been and yet we are.’

‘…’

‘Generation after generation of frenetic dances of millions of spermatozoa chasing eggs, random conceptions, deaths, annihilations … and now you and I are here, one in front of the other as if it couldn’t have been any other way. As if there were only the possibility of a single family tree.’

‘Well. It’s logical, isn’t it?’

‘No. It’s ffucking random.’

‘Come on …’

‘And what’s more, the fact that you can play the violin so well, that’s even more ffucking random.’

‘Fine. But …’ Silence. ‘What you’re saying is a bit dizzying, don’t you think?’

‘Yes. And then we try to survive the chaos with art’s order.’

‘You should write about this, don’t you think?’ ventured Bernat, taking a sip of tea.

‘Does the power of art reside in the artwork or rather in the effect it has on someone? What do you think?’

‘That you should write about this,’ insisted Sara after a few days. ‘That way you’ll understand it better.’

‘Why am I paralysed by Homer? Why does Brahms’s clarinet quintet leave me short of breath?’

‘Write about it,’ said Bernat immediately. ‘And you’ll be doing me a favour, because I want to know as well.’

‘How is it that I am unable to kneel before anyone and yet when I hear Beethoven’s Pastoral I have no problem bowing down to it?’

‘The Pastoral is trite.’

‘Not on your life. Do you know where Beethoven came from? From Haydn’s one hundred and four symphonies.’

‘And Mozart’s forty-one.’

‘That’s true. But Beethoven was only able to do nine. Because almost every one of the nine exists on a different level of moral complexity.’

‘Write about it.’

‘We can’t understand an artwork if we don’t look at its evolution.’ He brushed his teeth and rinsed out his mouth. As he dried himself off with a towel, he shouted through the open bathroom door: ‘But the artist’s touch of genius is always needed, that’s precisely what makes it evolve.’

‘The power resides in the person, then,’ Sara replied, from bed, without stifling a yawn.

‘I don’t know. Van der Weyden, Monet, Picasso, Barceló. It’s a dynamic line that starts in the caves of the Valltorta gorge and has yet to end because humanity still exists.’

‘Write about it.’ It look Bernat a few days to finish his tea and then he put the cup down delicately on the saucer. ‘Don’t you think you should?’

‘Is it beauty?’

‘Is it beauty’s fault? What does beauty mean?’

‘I don’t know. But I recognise it when I see it. Why don’t you write about it?’ repeated Bernat, looking him in the eye.

‘Man destroys man, and he also composes Paradise Lost.’

‘It’s a mystery, you’re right. You should write about it.’

‘The music of Franz Schubert transports me to a better future. Schubert is able to say many things with very few elements. He has an inexhaustible melodic strength, filled with elegance and charm as well as energy and truth. Schubert is artistic truth and we have to cling to it to save ourselves. It amazes me that he was a sickly, syphilitic, skint man. Where does his power come from? What is this power he wields over us? I bow down before Schubert’s art.’

‘Bravo, Herr Obersturmführer. I suspected that you were a sensitive soul.’

Doctor Budden took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled a thin column of smoke as he went over the beginning of opus 100 in his head and then sang it with incredible precision.

‘I wish I had your ear, Herr Obersturmführer.’

‘It’s not much of an achievement. I studied piano.’

‘I envy you.’

‘You shouldn’t. Between all the hours devoted to studying medicine and music, I feel like I missed out on many things in life.’

‘Now you’ll make them up, wholesale, if you’ll allow me the expression,’ said Oberlagerführer Höss waving his open arms. ‘And you’re in the prime of your life.’

‘Yes, of course. Perhaps too suddenly.’

Silence from both men, as if they were keeping tabs on each other. Until the doctor made up his mind and, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray and leaning over the desk, said in a lower voice: ‘Why did you want to see me, Obersturmbannführer?’

Then Oberlagerführer Höss, in the same low tone, as if he distrusted the walls of his own house, said I wanted to talk to you about your superior.

Silence. They must have been calculating risks. Höss ventured a what do you think of him, between us.

‘Well, I …’

‘I require … I demand sincerity. That is an order, dear Obersturmführer.’

‘Well, between us … he’s a blockhead.’

Hearing that, Rudolf Höss leaned back smugly in his chair. Staring into his eyes, he told Doctor Budden that he was laying the groundwork for Voigt the blockhead to be sent to some front.

‘And who would run the …’

‘You, naturally.’

Wait a second. That’s … And why not me?

Everything had been said. A new alliance without intermediaries between God and his people. The Schubert trio still played beneath the conversation. To break the awkwardness, Doctor Budden said did you know that Schubert composed this marvellous piece just months before he died?

‘Write about it. Really, Adrià.’

But it was all left momentarily up in the air because Laura returned from Uppsala and life at the university and particularly in the department office became somewhat uncomfortable again. She came back with a happier gaze, he said are you well? And Laura smiled and headed to classroom fifteen without answering. Adrià took that as a yes, that she was well. And pretty: she had come back prettier. Sitting at the sublet desk – that semester, from Parera – Adrià had trouble getting back to those papers that dealt with the subject of beauty. He didn’t know why, but they distracted him and they’d made him late for class for the first time in his life. Laura’s beauty, Sara’s beauty, Tecla’s beauty … did they enter into these ruminations? Hmm, did they?

‘I’d say yes,’ Bernat answered cautiously. ‘A woman’s beauty is an irrefutable fact. Isn’t it?’

‘Vivancos would say that’s a sexist approach.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ Confused silence from Bernat. ‘Before it was a petit-bourgeois idea and now it’s sexist reasoning.’ In a softer voice so no judge would hear him: ‘But I like women. They are beautiful: that I know for sure.’

‘Yeah. But I don’t know if I should talk about it.’

‘By the way, who is that good-looking Laura you mentioned?’

‘The Laura that you cite.’

‘No, I was thinking of Petrarch.’

‘And that’s going to be a book?’ asked Bernat, pointing to the papers resting atop the manuscript table, as if they needed careful examination under Father’s loupe.

‘I don’t know. At this point it’s thirty pages and I’m enjoying feeling my way around in the dark.’

‘How is Sara?’

‘Well. She calms me.’

‘I’m asking how she is: not how she affects you.’

‘She’s very busy. Actes Sud commissioned her to illustrate a series of ten books.’

‘But how is she?’

‘Fine. Why?’

‘Sometimes she looks sad.’

‘There are some things that can’t be solved even with a bit of love.’

Ten or twelve days later the inevitable happened. I was talking to Parera and suddenly she said, listen, what is your wife’s name? And just then Laura came into the office, loaded down with dossiers and ideas, and she heard perfectly as Parera said listen, what is your wife’s name? And I lowered my eyes in resignation and said Sara, her name is Sara. Laura put the things down on her chaotic desk and sat down.

‘She’s pretty,’ continued Parera, as if twisting the knife into my heart. Or perhaps into Laura’s.

‘And have you been married long?’

‘No. In fact, we’re not …’

‘Yeah, I mean living together.’

‘No, not long.’

The interrogation ended there, not because the KGB inspector ran out of questions, but because she had to go to class. Eulaleyvna Parerova left the office, before closing the door, said take good care of her, these days things are …

And she closed it gently, not feeling the need to specify exactly how things are. And then Laura stood up, put a hand at one end of the dossiers, papers, books, notes and journals on her always cramped desk and slid everything onto the floor, in the middle of the office. A tremendous clamour. Adrià looked at her, contrite. She sat down without glancing at him. Then the office telephone rang. Laura didn’t pick it up, and, I swear, there is nothing that makes me more nervous than a telephone ringing with no one picking it up. I went over to my desk and answered it.

‘Hello. Yes, one moment. It’s for you, Laura.’

I stood there with the receiver in my hand; she staring out into the void without any intention of picking up the one on her desk. I brought it back to my ear.

‘She’s stepped out.’

Then Laura picked up the phone and said, yes, yes, go ahead. I hung up and she said hey, pretty lady, what are you up to! And she laughed with a crystal-clear laugh. I grabbed my papers on art and aesthetics that still had no title and I fled.

‘I’ll have to think about it,’ said Doctor Budden, as he stood up and straightened his impeccable Obersturmführer uniform, ‘because tomorrow there are new units arriving.’ He looked at Oberlagerführer Höss and smiled and, knowing that he wouldn’t understand him, said, ‘Art is inexplicable.’ He pointed to his host: ‘At best, we can say that it is a display of love from the artist to humanity. Don’t you think?’

He left the Oberlagerführer’s house, knowing that he was still slowly digesting his words. From outside he heard, faintly, swaddled in the cold, the finale of the Trio opus 100 by angelic Schubert. Without that music, life would be terrible, he should have told his host.

Things began to sour for me when I had practically finished writing La voluntat estètica. The galleys, the translation to German that spurred me on to make additions to the original, Kamenek’s comments on my translation, which also inspired me to add nuance and rewrite, all of it left me considerably agitated. I was afraid that the book I was publishing would satisfy me. I’ve told you many times, Sara: it is the book of mine that I like best. And following the imperatives of my discontented soul, which has caused you such suffering, in those days when Sara brought serenity into my life and Laura pretended she didn’t even know me, Adrià Ardèvol’s obsession was devoting hours to his Storioni, as good a way as any to hide his anxiety. He revisited the most difficult moments with Trullols and the most unpleasant with Master Manlleu. And a few months later he invited Bernat to do the sonatas of Jean-Marie Leclair’s opus 3 and opus 4.

‘Why Leclair?’

‘I don’t know. I like him. And I’ve studied him.’

‘He’s not as easy as he seems.’

‘But do you want to give it a try, or not?’

During a couple of months, on Friday afternoons, the house filled with the music of the two friends’ violins. And during the week, Adrià, after writing, would study repertoire. As he did thirty years earlier.

‘Or twenty. But there’s no way I can catch up to you now.’

‘I should hope not. It’s all I’ve been doing.’

‘I envy you.’

‘Don’t mock me.’

‘I envy you. I wish I could play the way you do.’

Deep down, Adrià wanted distance from La voluntat estètica. He wanted to return to the works of art that had provoked the book’s reflections.

‘Yes, but why Leclair? Why not Shostakovich?’

‘That’s beyond me. Why do you think I envy you?’

And both violins, now a Storioni and a Thouvenel, began to fill the house with longing, as if life could start anew, as if wanting to give them a fresh start. Mine would be having parents that were more parents, more different, more … And … I don’t know exactly. And you? Eh?

‘What?’ Bernat, with his bow too taut and trying to look the other way.

‘Are you happy?’

Bernat began sonata number 2 and I found myself forced to follow along. But when we finished (with three heinous errors on my part and only one rebuke from Bernat), I resumed my attack:

‘Are you happy?’

‘No. Are you?’

I played the second sonata, number 1, even worse. But we were able to reach the end without interruption.

‘How are things going with Tecla?’

‘Fine. And with Sara?’

Silence. After a long while:

‘Well … Tecla … I don’t know, but she’s always getting mad at me.’

‘Because you live in another world.’

‘Look who’s talking.’

‘Yeah, but I’m not married to Tecla.’

Then we tried some études-caprices by Wieniawski from his opus 18. Poor Bernat, as first violin, ended up drenched in sweat, and I felt pleased despite the three curt rebukes he gave me, as if he were me criticising his writing in Tübingen. And I envied him, a lot. And I couldn’t help but tell him that I would trade my writing for his musical ability.

‘And I accept the swap. I’m thrilled to accept it, eh?’

The most worrisome part of it was that we didn’t burst into laughter. We just looked at the clock because it was getting late.

The night was short as the doctor had predicted because the first units of material began arriving at seven in the morning, when it was still dark.

‘This one,’ said Budden to Oberscharführer Barabbas. ‘And those two.’ And he went back to the laboratory because he’d been given an exorbitant amount of work. Also for a darker reason, because deep down it angered him to see that line of women and children advancing in an orderly fashion, like sheep, without a shred of dignity that would lead them to revolt.

‘No, leave her be!’ said an older woman with a package in her arms, a violin case of some sort, as if it were an infant.

Doctor Budden washed his hands of the argument. As he headed off, he saw Doctor Voigt emerge from the officer’s canteen and head over to the scuffle. Konrad Budden didn’t even bother to conceal his disdainful look towards his superior officer, who was always attracted to conflict. He went into his office, still calm. He had time to hear the crack of a Luger firing.

‘Where are you from?’ he said in a harsh voice without looking up from the papers. Finally he had to lift his eyes because the mute little girl just stared at him in confusion. She was wringing a dirty napkin in her hands and Doctor Budden was starting to get nervous. He raised his voice, ‘Would you mind keeping still?’

The girl stopped, but her perplexed expression remained. The doctor sighed, took in a breath and gathered his patience. Just then the telephone on his desk rang.

‘Yes? / Yes, Heil Hitler. / Who?’ Confused. / ‘Put her on. (…)’ ‘Heil Hitler. Hallo.’ Impatient. ‘Ja, bitte? / What’s going on?’ Annoyed. / ‘Who is this Lothar?’ Peeved. / ‘Ah!’ Scandalised. ‘Abject Franz’s father? / And what do you want? / Who arrested him? / But why? / Girl … Here I really … / I’m very busy right now. You want to expose us all? / He must have done something. / Look, Herta: someone’s got to pay the piper.’

And he looked the girl with the dirty napkin up and down:

‘Holländisch?’ he asked her. And into the telephone: ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m working. I have too much work to waste time on such nonsense. Heil Hitler!’

And he hung up. He stared at the girl, waiting for a reply.

The girl nodded. As if holländisch was the first word she had understood. Doctor Budden, in a softer voice, so no one would see that he wasn’t using German, asked her in his cousins’ Dutch what town she was from and she answered Antwerp. She wanted to say that she was Flemish, that she lived on Arenberg Street, and where was her father, that he’d been taken away. But she stood there with her mouth hanging open, observing that man who was now smiling at her.

‘You just have to do what I tell you to.’

‘It hurts me here.’ And she pointed to the back of her neck.

‘That’s nothing. Now, listen to me.’

She looked at him, curious. The doctor insisted, ‘You have to do what I say. You understand?’

The girl shook her head.

‘Then I’ll have to rip off your nose. Did you understand me now?’

And he looked patiently at the horrified girl, who frantically nodded her head.

‘How old are you?’

‘Seven and a half,’ she replied, exaggerating to make herself seem older.

‘Amelia Alpaerts. Twenty-two Arenberg Street, third apartment.’

‘Fine, fine.’

‘I said that’s fine!’ Irritated. ‘And stop messing with that damned handkerchief if you don’t want me to take it away from you.’

The girl lowered her gaze and instinctively put her hands behind her back, hiding the blue-and-white chequered napkin, perhaps to protect it. She couldn’t hold back a tear.

‘Mama,’ she implored, also in a soft voice.

Doctor Budden snapped his fingers and one of the twins who were holding up the back wall came forward and grabbed the girl brusquely.

‘Get her prepped,’ said the doctor.

‘Mama!’ shouted the girl.

‘Next!’ answered the doctor without looking up from the file he had on the desk.

‘Holländisch?’ heard the girl with the blue-and-white chequered napkin as they made her enter a room that smelled very strongly of medicine and I didn’t know what to do: I didn’t give any justification or explanation, because Laura didn’t demand one of me. She could have calmly said you are a fucking liar because you told me that there was no other woman; she could have said why didn’t you just tell me; she could have said you’re a coward; she could have said you never stopped using me; she could have said many things. But no: life went on like always in the office. For a few months I barely went in there. A couple of times we passed each other in the cloister or we saw each other in the bar. I had become a transparent person. It was hard to get used to. And forgive me, Sara, for not having told you any of this before.

Doctor Konrad Budden, after a very intense month, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted. When he heard a heel stomp in front of his desk he lifted his head. Oberscharführer Barabbas stood firm, rigid, always ready, awaiting orders. With a weary gesture, the doctor pointed to the stuffed file with the name of Doctor Aribert Voigt clearly visible, and the other man picked it up. When the subordinate stamped his heels hard, the doctor shook, as if he had stomped on his head. Barabbas left the office with the detailed report explaining that, unfortunately, the patellar tendon regeneration experiment, which consisted in exposing the tendon, slicing it, applying Doctor Bauer’s salve and observing whether it would regenerate without the aid of any suture, hadn’t succeeded as they had foreseen, neither in adults nor in children. They had expected it wouldn’t be effective on the elderly, but they’d hoped that in the case of growing organisms the regeneration following the application of the Bauer salve could be spectacular. That failure put an end to the possibility of triumphantly offering this miraculous medication to humanity. What a shame, because if it had worked, the benefits for Bauer, Voigt and him would have been, not only triumphant, but unimaginable.

It had never been so hard for him to finalise an experiment before. After months of seeing moaning little guinea pigs – like the boy with that dark skin, or the albino who said Tėve, Tėve, Tėve, cornered in his bed, refusing to get out of it until they finally had to finish him off right there, or that bloody girl with the dirty rag that was unable to stand up without crutches and, when they didn’t sedate her, bellowed with pain to fuck with all the staff as if they didn’t have enough with the responsibility of some of the experiments and brutal pressure of their blockhead superior, who it seems had friends in high places because not even Höss himself was able to get him sent off to some front so he would stop being such a nuisance – had to accept that it was useless to expect a more positive response on the cartilage treated with the Bauer salve. Twenty-six guinea pigs, boys and girls, and no restored tissue, revealed the conclusions he very reluctantly gave Professor Bauer. And one fine day Doctor Voigt left on a postal plane, without saying a word. That was very strange, because he hadn’t left any instructions for how to continue the experiments. Doctor Budden understood it later on that day, when he began to receive word of the alarming advance of the Red Army and the inefficiency of the German lines of defence. And as the primary medical authority in the camp, he decided that it was time to mop up everything with bleach. First, with the help of Barabbas, he spent five straight hours burning papers and photographs, destroying any documentary evidence that could lead to the suspicion that anyone at Birkenau had experimented on little girls who clung desperately to dirty rags. Not a trace of the pain inflicted because it was too impossible to be believed. All burned, Barabbas, and the simpleton still kept saying what a shame, so many hours and so much work going up in smoke. And neither of them thought of all the people who had also gone up in smoke, right there, two hundred metres from the laboratory. And the copies sent by the research department must be in some part of the Health Ministry, but who would go looking for them when the only important thing then was saving their hides.

Under the cover of night, his hands still blackened by smoke, he went into the guinea pigs’ bedroom with loyal Barabbas. Each child was in his or her bunk. He administered the injection into each of their hearts without any explanation. Except for that one boy who asked what the injection was, and he told him it was to calm the pain in his knees. The others probably died knowing they were finally dying. The girl with the dark, dirty rag was the only one who received him wide awake, with those accusatory eyes. She also asked why. But she asked in a different way. She asked why and she looked him straight in the eye. Weeks of pain had stripped her of her fear and, sitting up in her bunk, she opened her shirt so Barabbas could find the perfect spot to inject her. But she stared at Doctor Budden and asked him why. This time it was he who, unwillingly, had to look away. Why. Waarom. She said it until her lips darkened, tinted by death. A seven-year-old girl who doesn’t despair in the face of death is a very desperate, very devastated girl. There is no other way to explain such composure. Waarom.

After leaving everything prepared to flee the Lager in the morning with several unassigned officers, for the first time in many months, Doctor Budden didn’t sleep well. It was the fault of the waarom. And those thin, darkening lips. And Oberscharführer Barabbas smiling and giving him an injection, without taking off his uniform, and smiling with his lips blackened by a death that never quite came because the dream continued.

In the morning, without making much noise and before Oberlagerführer Rudolf Höss realised, some twenty officers and subordinates, among them Budden and Barabbas, took off, headed anywhere that was far from Birkenau.

Both Barabbas and Doctor Budden were lucky because, taking advantage of the confusion, they were able to get far enough away from their work and the Red Army that they were able to pass themselves off to the British as soldiers coming from the Ukrainian front, anxious to see the war end so they could finally get home to their wives and children, if they were still alive. Doctor Budden had transformed into Tilbert Haensch, yes, from Stuttgart, Captain, and he had no documents to prove it because with the surrender, you know. I want to go back home, Captain.

‘Where do you live, Doctor Konrad Budden?’ asked the officer in charge of the interrogations, as soon as the other man had abandoned his claim.

Doctor Budden looked at him, mouth agape. All he could think of to say was what?, with a very shocked expression.

‘Where do you live,’ insisted the British lieutenant, with that horrific accent.

‘What did you call me? What did you call me?’

‘Doctor Budden.’

‘You’ve never set foot on the front, Doctor Budden. Much less the Eastern front.’

‘Why do you call me doctor?’

The British officer opened the folder he had on the desk in front of him. The army file. Their fucking obsession with archiving and controlling everything. He was a bit younger, but it was him, with that gaze that didn’t gaze but rather punctured. Herr Doktor Konrad Budden, surgeon of the graduating class of 1938. Oh, and professional level piano studies. Wow, doctor.

‘That is a mistake.’

‘Yes, Doctor. A big mistake.’

It wasn’t until the third of the five years in prison they’d given him – because by some last-minute miracle no one had linked him to Auschwitz-Birkenau – that Doctor Budden started to cry. He was one of the few prisoners that had yet to receive a single visitor, because his parents had died in the bombing of Stuttgart and he hadn’t wanted to let any other relatives know where he was. Particularly not those in Bebenhausen. He didn’t need visitors. He spent the day staring at the wall, especially when he began to suffer several days of insomnia. Like a sip of sour milk, the faces came back to him, the faces of each and every one of the patients who had passed before him when he was under Doctor Voigt’s orders in the medical research office at Birkenau. And he took it upon himself to try to remember as many as possible, the faces, the moans, the tears and the frightened screams, and he spent hours sitting, immobile, in front of the bare table.

‘What’s that?’

‘Your cousin Herta Landau still wants to visit you.’

‘I said I don’t want any visitors.’

‘She’s in front of the prison on hunger strike. Until you agree to see her.’

‘I don’t want to see anyone.’

‘This time you’ll be forced to. We don’t want scandals on the street. And your name has begun to appear in the newspapers.’

‘You can’t force me.’

‘Of course we can. You two, take him by the arms and let’s put an end to this little scene that madwoman has staged, for once and ffucking all.’

They put Doctor Budden in a visiting room. They made him sit in front of three austere Australian soldiers. The doctor had to wait five endless minutes until the door opened and an aged Herta came in, walking slowly towards the table. Budden lowered his gaze. The woman stood before him; they were only separated by a few feet of table. She didn’t sit down. She only said on behalf of Lothar and me. Then Budden looked up and Herta Landau, who had leaned towards him, spat in his face. Without adding anything further, she turned around and left, her motions a bit more animated, as if she had shook off a few years. Doctor Budden didn’t move to wipe his face. He stared into space for a little while until he heard a harsh voice saying take him out of here and he thought he heard take away this carrion. And alone again in his cell, the memory of the patients’ faces came back to him, like a sip of sour milk in his mouth. Each and every one of the patients. From the thirteen that had been the subjects of the sudden decompression experiments, and the many that had received grafts and died of infections, to the group of children chosen to prove the possible beneficial effects of the Bauer salve. The face he saw most often was the little Flemish girl who asked him waarom without understanding why so much pain. Then he got into the habit, as if it were a liturgical act, of sitting at the bare table and unfolding a dirty rag with one poorly cut, fraying side, and on which a blue-and-white chequered pattern could barely be made out; and he would stare at it, without blinking, until he couldn’t stand to any more. And the void he felt inside was so intense that he was still unable to cry.

After a few months of repeating more or less the same gestures each day, morning and afternoon, over the third year of his imprisonment, his conscience became more porous: in addition to the moans, shrieks, sobs and panicked tears, he started to remember the smells of each face. And the time came when he could no longer sleep at night, like the five Latvian subjects whom they were able to keep awake for twenty-two days until they died of exhaustion, with their eyes destroyed by looking at so much light. And one night he began to shed tears. Konrad hadn’t cried since he was sixteen, when he’d asked Sigrid out on a date and she’d responded with a look of total disdain. The tears emerged slowly, as if they were too thick, or perhaps indecisive after remaining hidden for such a long time. And an hour later they were still streaming down slowly. And when, outside of the cell, the rosy fingers of dawn tinted the dark sky, he broke out into an endless sob as his soul said waarom, how can it be, warum, how can it be that I never thought to cry in the presence of those sad, wide eyes, warum, mein Gott.

‘Works of art are of an infinite solitude, said Rilke.’

The thirty-seven students looked at him in silence. Professor Adrià Ardèvol got up, left the dais and began to deliberately ascend a few of the terraced rows of chairs. No comments?, he asked.

No: no one had any comments. My students have no comment when I prod them with that bit about works of art being an infinite solitude. And if I tell them that artwork is the enigma that no reasoning can master?

‘Artwork is the enigma that no reasoning can master.’

Now his walking had led him to the middle of the classroom. Some heads turned to look at him. Ten years after Franco’s death, students had lost the impetus that made them participate in everything, chaotically, uselessly but passionately.

‘The hidden reality of things and of life can only be deciphered, approximately, with the help of art, even if it is incomprehensible.’ He looked at them, turning to take them all in with his gaze. ‘In the enigmatic poem echoes the voice of unresolved conflict.’

She raised her hand. The girl with the short hair. She had raised her hand! Perhaps she would ask him if all that about the incomprehensible was going to be on the exam the next day; perhaps she would ask him for permission to use the toilet. Perhaps she would ask him if through art we can grasp all that which man had to renounce in order to build an objective world.

He pointed to the girl with the short hair and said yes, go ahead.

‘Your reprehensible name will always be remembered as one of those that contributed to the horror that vilified humanity.’ He said it in English with a Manchester accent and a formulaic tone, not worrying if he’d been understood. With a dirty finger he pointed to a place on the document. Budden raised his eyebrows.

‘Here must sign you,’ said the sergeant impatiently, in a terrible German he seemed to be making up as he went along. And he tapped several times with his dirty finger to show exactly where.

Budden did so and returned the document.

‘You are free.’

Free. Once he was out of prison, he fled for a second time, again without any clear destination. Yet he stopped in a frozen village on the Baltic coast, in the shelter of a humble Carthusian monastery, and he spent the winter contemplating the fireplace of the silent house where they’d taken him in. He did just enough odd jobs around the house and the town to survive. He spoke little because he didn’t want to be recognised as an educated person and he worked hard to toughen up his pianist and surgeon’s hands. In the house that took him in they didn’t speak much either because the married couple who lived there were grieving over the death of their only son Eugen on the Russian front during damn Hitler’s damn war. The winter was long for Budden, who had been put into the mourned son’s room in exchange for all the work he could do; he stayed there for two long years, during which he spoke to no one, except when strictly necessary, as if he were one of the monks in the neighbouring Carthusian monastery; strolling alone, letting himself be whipped by the cutting wind off the Gulf of Finland, crying when no one could see him, not allowing the images that tormented him to vanish unjustly because in remembrance there is penitence. At the end of that two-year-long winter, he headed to the Carthusian monastery of Usedom and, on his knees, asked the brother doorman for someone to hear his confession. After some hesitation at his unusual request, they assigned him a father confessor, an old man who was accustomed to silence, with a grey gaze and a vaguely Lithuanian accent whenever he strung together more than three words. Beginning when the Terce rang out, Budden didn’t leave out a single detail, with his head bowed and his voice monotonous. He could feel the poor monk’s shocked eyes piercing the back of his neck. The monk only interrupted him once, after the first hour of confession.

‘Are you Catholic, my son?’ he asked him.

Throughout the other four hours of the confession, he didn’t say a peep. There was one point where Budden thought that the man was crying silently. When the bells rang to call the monks to the Vespers prayers, the confessor said ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis with a trembling voice, and he made a shaky sign of the cross as he mumbled the rest of the formula. And then there was silence, even with the echo of the bell; but the penitent hadn’t moved.

‘And the penance, Father?’

‘Go in the name of …’ He didn’t dare to take God’s name in vain; he coughed uncomfortably and continued. ‘There is no penance that could … No penance that … Repent, my son; repent, my son. Repent … Do you know what I think, deep down?’

Budden lifted his head, distressed but also surprised. The confessor had leaned his head sweetly to one side and was engaged by a crack in the wood.

‘What do you think, Father? …’

Budden stared at the crack in the wood; he had trouble seeing it because the light was starting to fade. Father? he said. Father? And it seemed that he was that Lithuanian boy who moaned and said Tėve, Tėve!, from the bunk bed at the back. The confessor was dead and he could no longer help him, no matter how much he begged. And he began to pray for the first time in many years, some sort of invented prayer pleading for relief he didn’t deserve.

‘Honestly, poems or a song … they don’t make me think all that.’

Adrià was thrilled because the girl hadn’t asked if that was going to be on the exam. His eyes were even shining.

‘All right. What do they make you think?’

Some laughter. The girl turned, a bit bothered by the laughing.

‘Quiet,’ said Adrià. He looked at the girl with the short hair, encouraging her to continue.

‘Well …’ she said. ‘They don’t make me think. They make me feel things I can’t describe.’ In a softer voice, ‘Sometimes …’ even softer voice, ‘they make me cry.’

Now no one laughed. The three or four seconds of silence that followed were the most important moment of that course. The beadle ruined it by opening the door and announcing the end of the class.

‘Art is my salvation, but it can’t save humanity,’ responded Professor Ardèvol to the beadle, who closed the door, ashamed by that professor who was off his rocker.

‘Art is my salvation, but it can’t save humanity,’ he repeated to Sara as they breakfasted in the dining room, in front of the Urgell that seemed it was also awakening to the new day.

‘No: humanity is hopeless.’

‘Don’t be sad, my love.’

‘I can’t stop being sad.’

‘Because I think that …’

Silence. She took a sip of tea. The doorbell rang and Adrià went to answer it.

‘Watch out, move aside.’

Caterina came in and ran to the bathroom with a dripping umbrella.

‘It’s raining?’

‘You wouldn’t even notice lightning and snow,’ she said from the bathroom.

‘You’re always exaggerating.’

‘Exaggerating? You couldn’t find water in the sea!’

I went back to the dining room. Sara was finishing her breakfast. Adrià put a hand over hers to keep her from getting up.

‘Why can’t you stop being sad?’

She was silent. She wiped her mouth with a blue-and-white chequered napkin and folded it slowly. I was waiting, standing, as I heard the usual noises Caterina made at the other end of the flat.

‘Because I think that if I stop … I am sinning against the memory of my people. Of my uncle. Of … I have so many dead.’

I sat down without taking my hand off hers.

‘I love you,’ I told you. And you looked at me sadly, serenely and beautifully. ‘Let’s have a baby,’ I finally dared to say.

You shook your head no, as if you didn’t dare to say it out loud.

You lifted your eyebrows and said oof.

‘It’s life against death, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t have the heart.’ You shook your head while you said no, no, no, no, no.

For a long time I wondered why you gave so many nos in response to having a child. One of my deepest regrets is not having watched a girl who looked like you grow up and to whom no one would say be still, damn it, or I’ll rip off your nose, because she would never have to nervously wring a blue- and white-checked napkin. Or a boy who wouldn’t have to beg Tėve, Tėve in panic.

After that confession he’d paid so dearly for on the frozen island of Usedom, Budden left the chair in front of the fireplace, he left behind that icy town on the Baltic shore having robbed his trusting hosts of an ID card from their beloved Eugen Müss to save himself problems with the Allied forces of occupation, and he began his third flight, as if he were afraid that the poor confessor, from his grave, could accuse him before his grieving brothers of any number of deserved sins. Deep down it wasn’t the Carthusians and their silence that he was afraid of. He wasn’t afraid of the penance they hadn’t imposed on him; he wasn’t afraid of death; he didn’t deserve suicide because he knew that he had to make amends for his evil. And he knew full well that he deserved eternal hellfire and he didn’t feel he had the right to avoid it. But he still had work to do before going to hell. ‘You have to see, my son,’ the confessor had told him before absolution and death, in the only, brief comments he had made during the long, eternal confession, ‘how you can make amends for the evil you have done.’ And in a lower voice, he had added: ‘If amends are possible …’ After a few seconds of doubt, he continued: ‘May divine mercy, which is infinite, forgive me, but even if you try to make amends for the evil, I don’t think there is a place for you in paradise.’ During his flight, Eugen Müss thought about making amends for his evil. He’d had it easier the other times, because in his first flight they’d only had to destroy archives; he had to destroy the corpus delicti; the little corpses delicti. My God.

In three monasteries, two Czech and one Hungarian, they turned him away with kind words. The fourth, after a long period as a postulant, accepted him. He was luckier than that poor friar who was fleeing from fear, who begged to be admitted as just another monk twenty-nine times and the father prior at Sant Pere del Burgal, looking into his eyes, refused him. Until one rainy, happy Friday that was the thirtieth time he begged to be admitted. Müss wasn’t fleeing from fear: he was fleeing from Doctor Budden.

Father Klaus, who was then the master of the novitiates, also kept a hand in with the aspirants. His interpretation was that the still young man had spiritual thirst, an eagerness for prayer and penance that the Cistercian life could offer him. So he accepted him as a postulant at the Mariawald monastery.

The life of prayer brought him close to the presence of God, always with the fear and certainty that he wasn’t worthy of breathing. One day, after eight months, Father Albert collapsed in a heap as he was walking through the cloister in front of him, when he headed to the chapterhouse where the father abbot was waiting to speak with them about some changes to their schedule. Brother Eugen Müss didn’t calculate his reaction well and when he saw Father Albert on the ground he said it’s a heart attack and he gave precise instructions to those who rushed over to help him. Father Albert survived, but the surprised brothers discovered that Novice Müss not only had medical knowledge but was, in fact, a doctor.

‘Why have you hidden this from us?’

Silence. He looked at the ground. I wanted to start a new life. I didn’t think it was important information.

‘I am the one who decides what is important and what is superfluous.’

He was unable to hold either the father abbot’s gaze or Father Albert’s, when he went to visit him in his convalescence. What’s more, Müss was convinced that Father Albert, as he thanked him for his response that had saved his life, guessed his secret.

Müss’s reputation as a doctor grew over the following months. When it came time for him to take the first vows and change his first name from Eugen, which wasn’t his anyway, to Arnold – this time according to the Rule, as a sign of renunciation – he had already cured a bout of collective food poisoning effectively and selflessly, and his reputation was firmly established. So when Brother Robert had his crisis, very far to the West, in another monastery in another country, his Abbot decided to recommend Brother Arnold Müss as a medical expert. And that was where his despair began again.

‘In the end, I can’t help but refer to that bit about how there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.’

‘Who said that?’

‘I don’t: there is poetry after Auschwitz.’

‘No, but I mean … that there shouldn’t be.’

‘No. After Auschwitz, after the many pogroms, after the extermination of the Cathars, of whom not one remains, after the massacres in every period, everywhere around the world … Cruelty has been present for so many centuries that the history of humanity would be the history of the impossibility of poetry ‘after’. And yet it hasn’t been that, because who can explain Auschwitz?’

‘Those who have lived through it. Those who created it. Scholars.’

‘Yes. All that will be evidence; and they’ve made museums to remember it. But something is missing: the truth of the lived experience. That cannot be conveyed in a scholarly work.’

Bernat closed the bound pages and looked at his friend and said and?

‘It can only be conveyed through art; literary artifice, which is the closest thing to lived experience.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Yes. Poetry is needed after Auschwitz more than ever.’

‘It’s a good ending.’

‘Yes, I think so. Or I don’t know. But I think it is one of the reasons for the persistence of aesthetic will in humanity.’

‘When will it be published? I can’t wait.’

A few months later, La voluntat estètica appeared, simultaneously in Catalan and in German, translated by me and meticulously revised by the patient Saint Johannes Kamenek. One of the few things I’m proud of, my dear. And stories and landscapes emerged and I stored them away in my memory. And one day, behind your back and behind mine, I went to visit Morral again.

‘How much?’

‘That much.’

‘That much?’

‘Yes. Are you interested, Doctor?’

‘If it were this much, yes.’

‘That’s a leap! This much.’

‘This much.’

‘All right, fine: this much.’

That time it was the hand-written score of Allegro de concert by Granados. For a few days, I avoided the gazes of Sheriff Carson and the valiant Arapaho Chief Black Eagle.