‘I don’t really know. I do it instinctively. I like to.’
‘I didn’t ask what you found there, I asked you what you’re searching for.’
‘I think about the monastery of Santa Maria de Gerri. But mostly I think about the little monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal, which is nearby and I’ve never visited. Do you remember that parchment by Abbot Deligat that I showed you? It was the founding charter of the monastery in Burgal, from so many years ago that I feel the thrill of history when I touch the parchment. And I think about the monks pacing through it over the centuries. And praying to a God who doesn’t exist for centuries. And the salt mines of Gerri. And the mysteries enshrined way up at Burgal. And the peasants dying of hunger and illness, and the days passing slowly but implacably, and the months and the years, and it thrills me.’
‘I’ve never heard you string that many words together.’
‘I love you.’
‘What else are you searching for in it?’
‘I don’t know; I really don’t know what I look for in it. It’s hard to put into words.’
‘Well, then what do you find in it?’
‘Strange stories. Strange people. The desire to live and see things.’
‘Why don’t we go see it in the flesh?’
We went to Gerri de la Sal in the Six Hundred, which threw in the towel at the port of Comiols. A very chatty mechanic from Isona changed some part of the cylinder head, can’t remember which, and insinuated that we should get a new car soon to avoid problems. We lost a day with those mundane misfortunes and we reached Gerri at night. The next day, from the inn, I saw the painting by Urgell in the flesh and I almost choked with emotion. And we spent the day looking at it, taking photographs of it, drawing it and watching the ghosts go in and out, ghosts of monks, peasants and salt miners until I sensed the two spirits of the monks who went to Sant Pere del Burgal to collect the key to close up that isolated, small monastery after hundreds of years of uninterrupted monastic life.
And the next day the convalescent Six Hundred took us twenty kilometres further north, to Escaló, and from there, on foot, along a goat path that climbed the sunny Barraonse slope, the only passable route to reach the ruins of Sant Pere del Burgal, the monastery of my dreams. Sara didn’t let me carry the large rucksack with her notebook and pencils and charcoals inside: it was her burden.
A bit further on, I picked up a stone from the middle of the path, not too big and not too small, and Adrià contemplated it pensively and the image of Amani the lovely and her sad story came into his head.
‘What is it about that rock?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Adrià, putting it into his rucksack.
‘You know what impression I get from you?’ you said, breathing a bit heavily from the climb.
‘Huh?’
‘That’s just it. You don’t say what impression, you say huh.’
‘Now you’ve lost me.’ Adrià, who was leading, stopped, looked at the green valley, listened to the Noguera’s distant murmur and turned towards Sara. She also stopped, a smile on her face.
‘You are always thinking.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you are always thinking about something far from here. You are always somewhere else.’
‘Boy … I’m sorry.’
‘No. That’s how you are. I’m special too.’
Adrià went over to her and kissed her on the forehead, with such tenderness, Sara, that I still get emotional when I remember it. You don’t know how much I love you and how much you have transformed me. You are a masterpiece and I hope you understand what I mean.
‘You, special?’
‘I’m a weird woman. Full of complexes and secrets.’
‘Complexes … you hide them well. Secrets … that one’s easy to fix: tell them to me.’
Now Sara looked down the path to avoid meeting his eyes.
‘I’m a complicated woman.’
‘You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.’
Adrià started to continue heading up, but he stopped and turned: ‘I’d just like you to tell me one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
I know it’s hard to believe, but I asked her what did my mother and your mother tell you about me. What did they tell you that you believed.
Your radiant face grew dark and I thought shit, now I’ve put my foot in it. You waited a few seconds and, with your voice a bit hoarse, you said I begged you not to ask me that. I begged you …
Annoyed, you picked up a stone and threw it down the slope.
‘I don’t want to relive those words. I don’t want you to know them; I want to spare you them because you have every right to be ignorant of them. And I have every right to forget them.’ You adjusted your rucksack with an elegant gesture. ‘It’s Bluebeard’s locked room, remember.’
Sara said it so rotundly that I had the impression that she’d never stopped thinking about it. We had been living together for some time and I always had the question on the tip of my tongue: always.
‘All right,’ said Adrià. ‘I won’t ever ask you again.’
They began their descent again. There was still a steeper stretch before I finally reached, at the age of thirty-nine, the ruins of Sant Pere del Burgal that I had dreamed of so often, and Brother Julià de Sau, who as a Dominican had been called Friar Miquel, came out to receive us with the key in his hands. With the Sacred Chest in his hands. With death in his hands.
‘Brothers, may the peace of the Lord be with you,’ he told us.
‘And may the peace of the Lord also be with you,’ I replied.
‘What did you say?’ asked Sara, surprised.
V VITA CONDITA
WRITTEN IN PENCIL IN THE SEALED RAILWAY-CAR
here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i[1]
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.’
1
Dan Pagis, Variable Directions, trans. Stephen Mitchell (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).