Confessions by Jaume Cabré

inns on the most poisonous drinks they had on hand, as if he was in a hurry to disappear and not have to remember his memories. He also relapsed into sins of the flesh, obsessively, in a search for the oblivion and redemption that penitence hadn’t afforded him. He was a true soul in purgatory. Then the kindly smile of Brother Julià de Carcassona, caretaker of the Benedictine abbey of La Grassa where he had asked for hospitage to spend a freezing winter’s night, suddenly and unexpectedly illuminated his path. The night’s rest became ten days of prayer at the abbey church, on his knees beside the wall furthest from the community’s seats of honour. It was at Santa Maria de la Grassa where he first heard of Burgal, a cenobium so far from everything that they said that the rain reached it so weary that it barely dampened your skin. He held on to Brother Julià’s smile, which may have sprung from happiness, like a deep secret treasure, and he set off on the road to the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey, as the monks at La Grassa had advised him to do. He brought with him a pouch filled with donated food and the secret, happy smile, and he headed towards the mountains that are snow-capped all year round, towards the world of perpetual silence where, perhaps, with a bit of luck, he could seek redemption. He went through valleys, over hills and waded, with his destroyed sandals, through the icy water of the rivers that had just been born of the snow. When he reached the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey, they confirmed that the priory of Sant Pere del Burgal was so secluded and remote that no one knew forsure if thoughts reached there in one piece. And what the father prior there decides with you, they assured him, will be approved by the father abbot here.
    So, after a journey that lasted weeks, aged despite not having reached forty, he knocked hard on the door to the monastery of Sant Pere. It was a cold, dark dusk and the monks had finished evensong and were preparing for supper, if a bowl of hot water can be called supper. They took him in and asked him what he wanted. He begged for entrance into their tiny community; he didn’t explain his pain to them, instead he spoke of his desire to serve the Holy Mother Church with a modest, anonymous job, as a lay brother, on the lowest rung, just attentive to the gaze of God Our Lord. Father Josep de Sant Bartomeu, who was already the prior, looked into his eyes and sensed the secret in his soul. Thirty days and thirty nights they had him at the door to the monastery, in a precarious shack. But what he was asking for was the shelter entailed in the habit, the refuge of living according to the holy Benedictine law that transforms people and bestows inner peace on those who practise it. Twenty-nine times he begged them to let him be just another monk and twenty-nine times the father prior, looking into his eyes, refused. Until that one rainy, happy Friday that was the thirtieth time he begged for entrance.
    ‘Don’t touch it, goddamn it, you’re always touching everything!’
    The alliance with Father was shaky if not already cracked.
    ‘But I was just …’
    ‘No ifs, ands or buts. You want a smack? Eh? You want a smack?’
    That Friday had been long ago. He entered the monastery of Burgal as a postulant and after three freezing winters he took his vows as a lay brother. He chose the name Julià in memory of a smile that had changed his life. He learned to calm his soul, to tranquilise his spirit and to love life. Despite the fact that often the Duke of Cardona’s or Count Hug Roger’s men passed through the valley and destroyed that which did not belong to them, there in the monastery at themountain’s peak, he was closer to God and his peace than to them. Tenaciously, he initiated himself in the path to the shores of wisdom. He didn’t find happiness, but he attained complete serenity, which gradually brought him balance, and he learned to smile, in his way. More than one of the