I decided to write about the drought, aware that before publishing this chronicle it would still rain, to annoy. But I thought that if the chronicle served to finally rain, like the prayers, welcome. Also, they told me that it could already rain, because if it doesn’t rain for sixty days and nights —I don’t know if it’s a scientific fact or a biblical reminiscence— the swamps won’t fill up and we’ll continue without water. It has been plunging (maybe that’s not the word) into the drought and feeling as if I were drying myself up. Possibly it is a natural process and to live is to gradually dehydrate, wither, lose moisture and become lean, gloomy and withered, mummifying ourselves, in short. Deep down, to paraphrase Eugen Leviné, the optimistic German Jewish Bolshevik who led the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic and was shot by the army and the Freikorps in 1919, we are all mummies on leave.
With these encouraging thoughts in my head, I decided that my approach to the drought should have literary support, to contribute something, since the meteorological, climatic, social, economic, territorial or political angles of the crisis (and even religious) are already very well covered. I would add my approach an existential view of what the drought is doing to us inside. When choosing a companion book for my walk through the drought, I thought of the obviousness of the wasteland, by TS Eliot, which, apart from citing hyacinths several times, has distressingly current passages —and not just the one about “April is a cruel month” or, bringing water to my mill (pardon me again for the expression), “ we who were alive are dying/ with a little patience”—but disturbing verses to read while walking through withered nature, verses about “dry cisterns and exhausted springs” and “sterile thunder without rain.” I could have placed my drought also under the patronage of Dune, by Frank Herbert, or desert rebellion, by T. E. Lawrence. But I finally settled on the drought, by J.G. Ballard.
the drought is one of the famous apocalyptic novels by Ballard (Shanghai, 1930-London, 2009), the man who said that the future died a few years ago and that the best way to deal with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction. It deals with that, with a drought that extends over the entire planet, desertifying the landscape but also causing disturbing changes in the minds of the characters. My favorite novel by Ballard, for whom, since he was a child, he lived through the Japanese conquest of China (which he described in The Sun’s empire), life was a disaster zone, it had always been the crystal worldbut read the drought now it is a unique experience. The protagonist, Charles Ransom, watches as the lake and river he lives next to dry up and as the water evaporates, exposing beds of silt and dead fish, so do memories and feelings. All around them, civilization and morality are collapsing and their neighbors engage in bizarre, savage and even psychopathic behavior, while a desperate mass migration to the coast takes place, where the sea is receding off a salt beach that stretches to the sea. horizon. The drought, which causes a fight for water, has a rational (and ecologist) explanation in the novel. ahead of the letter: dated 1965), industrial waste accumulated in the oceans has formed a film of saturated polymers that prevents evaporation and the formation of clouds and rain. But Ballard, an admirer of the surrealists, is more interested in the dreamlike and psychological nature of the catastrophe, symbolized by the painting Ransom is hanging, lens days, by Yves Tanguy, and expressed in a powerful display of images and metaphors. Among the unforgettable pictures, the merry-go-round half buried in the dunes, the stranded ships and turned into a junkyard, like cars; the sinister camp set up in an empty pool, or the demented youth who has made a headdress with a thirsty swan.
With the images of Ballard (whom I met and interviewed one hallucinated afternoon on April 4, 1995 in an apartment on Enric Granados street) in my head, I went to see the drought where I could best describe it, in the environment that is closest to me, and therefore where it hurts the most: in Viladrau, in Montseny, which in spring should be so humid and overflowing with fertility. I went first to the old farmhouse of Can Batllic, my Arcadia and my Brideshead: surrounded by fields, they stretched out like a yellowish and charred excrescence. The shady chestnut forest before we arrived was a thirsty brown desolation with the usual fragrant mulch turned into a parched shroud of earth and dead leaves. In that leprous and thirsty environment, nothing was heard except the occasional plaintive squawk of a jay. I walked through the fields with a heavy heart as a heavy and hopeless atmosphere stretched as far as the eye could see. Life seemed to have left the place along with the water, the great fig tree was dying like an old lady and the pool under the holm oak was but dust to dust.
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Later, at a second Via Crucis evaporated station, I went to the river, under the Mas de la Vila. After leaving behind some abandoned implements and the remains of a rusty wheelbarrow that reminded me of the crashed automobiles in another Ballard novel, crash (in the drought they bury the dead in cars half buried in the dunes), I walked along the stretch of a stream where I usually see salamanders and which is always a wonderful fairy kingdom of moss and water where you never rule out finding one dona d’aigua, an Amades and Waterhouse-style water nymph. The contrast was terrifying. It barely descended a small miserable flow, a trickle, between dying ferns. Not even a rebruja witch lived there. The scarce water was concentrated in unhealthy puddles and the entire narrow channel was flanked by two brownish strips of dirty mud. From that barely surviving space, what there was was a territory of dead leaves, broken branches, on which you advanced as if you were stepping on old bones, and sickly undergrowth that seemed to crawl like a thirsty drunk in search of a few drops of liquid. Instead of the usual crystalline song, the stream gave off an anguished murmur. I considered running home and standing guard with the spear around the pool, which we still have full and next to which the plum tree blooms as a challenge. But I continued and came to the esplanade of Castanyer de les Nou Branques, which looked like a Ballardian terminal area, with the iconic chestnut tree and its emaciated congeners raising their arms to heaven like thirsty crucified begging for the Roman centurion’s sponge with vinegar (in addition to Ballard, I was influenced by , as can be seen, Holy Week). The birds had disappeared. Everywhere light and shadows crept slowly.
After continuing on the path and coming across two roe deer no doubt attracted by the sight of my canteen, I sat down emotionally exhausted on a stump near l’Arimany and extracted from my bag my worn dedicated copy of the drought (Minotauro, 1979) to seek an impossible consolation, since there is no redemption in Ballard, in its last pages. “It was as if he had finally completed his journey by entering the interior landscape that he had carried in his mind for so many years. An immense pall of darkness stretched over the arena as if the entire outside world were ceasing to exist.” And I finished: “It was a little later when he didn’t realize that he had started to rain.”
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