Free Confessions by Jaume Cabré

hey, hold your horses, I’ll hold it. Isn’t it lovely? It’s from when the monastery was founded.’
    ‘Where is it?’
    ‘In Pallars. You know the Urgell in the dining room?’
    ‘That monastery is Santa Maria de Gerri.’
    ‘Yes, yes. Burgal is even further up. Some twenty kilometres more towards the cold.’ About the parchment: ‘Sant Pere del Burgal’s founding charter. The Abbot Deligat asked Count Ramon de Tolosa for a precept of immunity for that monastery, which was tiny but survived for hundreds of years. It thrills me to think that I hold so much history in my hands.’
    And I listened to what my father was telling me and it wasn’t very hard at all for me to imagine that he was thinking the day was too luminous, too springlike to be Christmas. They had just buried the Right Reverend Father Prior Dom Josep de Sant Bartomeu in the modest, scant cemetery at Sant Pere where the life that burst forth in springtime from beneath the tender, damp grass into a thousand colourful buds was now held hostage by the ice. They had just buried the father prior and with him all possibility of the monastery keeping its doors open. Sant Pere del Burgal, before, when it still snowed abundantly, was an isolated, independent abbey; since the remote times of Abbot Deligat, it had undergone various transformations including moments of prosperity, with some thirty monks contemplating the magnificent panorama created each day by the waters of the Noguera River, with the Poses forest in the background, praising the Lord and giving thanks for his works and cursing the Devil for the cold that devastated their bodies and made the entire community’s souls shrink. Sant Pere del Burgal had also gone through moments of hardship, without wheat for the mill, with barely six or seven old, sick monks to do the same tasks a monk always does from when he joins the monastery until he is transferred to its cemetery, as they’d done that day with the father prior. But now there was only one survivor whose memory went back that far.
    There was a brief, feeble prayer for the dead, a rushed and dismayed benediction over the humble box. Then the improvised officiant, Brother Julià de Sau, gave the signal to the five peasants from Escaló who’d climbed up to help the monastery with that mournful event. There were no signs yet of the brothers who were to come from the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey to confirm the monastery’s closing. They would arrive too late, as they always did when they were needed.
    Brother Julià de Sau entered the small monastery of Sant Pere. He went into the church. With tears in his eyes, he used the hammer and chisel to make a hole in the stone of the high altar and pull out the tiny wooden lipsanotheca that held the saints’ relics. He was overcome with dread because forthe first time in his life he was alone. Alone. No other brothers. His footsteps echoed in the narrow corridor. He glanced at the tiny refectory. One of the benches was up against the wall, and had damaged the dirty plaster. He didn’t bother to move it. A tear fell from his eye and he headed towards his cell. From there he contemplated the beloved landscape he knew like the back of his hand, tree by tree. Above his cot, the Sacred Chest that held the monastery’s founding charter and that now would also hold the lipsanotheca containing the relics of unknown saints that had been with them for centuries of daily prayers and masses. And the community’s chalice and paten. And the only two keys in Sant Pere del Burgal: one to the small church and one to the monastic area. So many years of canticles to the Lord reduced to a sturdy savin wood box that would become, from that moment on, the only testimony to the history of a closed monastery. On one end of his straw mattress lay the handkerchief to make a bundle with two pieces of clothing, some sort of rudimentary scarf and the book of hours. And the little bag with the fir cones and maple seed pods that