Romania

I go up to Romanyà after rereadingDeath and Spring.Rodoreda wrote this novel in Geneva in the early sixties. In Romanyà, she only revised it before she died. "I hope that with the cold weather these ladylike desires [to write] will return and that in no time I'll finish a very chilling book," she wrote to Marta Pessarrodona in September 1981. (It makes one think of Kafka telling Felice that he has written a "rather terrifying" story. It is saidThe Metamorphosis"and it would terrify you.") "I finished twenty-five pages and got so tired that I started rewriting," he writes to her a month later.

She died a year and a half later. Publishers today can't agree on how to publish "one of the most important novels that has been written in Europe in the last four thousand years," as Rodoreda described it to her publisher, with the exaggeration of someone who doesn't dare to tell the truth, which is that she held in her hands one of the masterpieces of Catalan literature.

Romanyà is the magic repository of the Vall d'Aro. I deliberately get a little lost in the car. Somehow, I end up at the last house where Rodoreda lived, on Carrer de les Roques Altes. Romanyà and Vall d'Aro are full of rocks that appear among the cork oaks, but I don't know if the street's name comes from here or from the High Stones ofDeath and SpringBecause I have no doubt that Romanyà is the little village from the novel, with the stream and the fountain, the primitive rituals that the megalithic remains evoke, and above all the corks with the rind that can be opened as in the novel.

Did Rodoreda Romanyà foresee the future from Geneva? It's said that perhaps she remembered a trip to Coll de Nargó, but I don't think she needed to look back. Art is prophetic, it's tragic. She died confronted with spring. Death cannot win because without life there is no awareness of death, no death, but it's impossible to close one's eyes to that awareness.

That is why Oedipus will gouge out his eyes, too late.Death and SpringThe protagonist witnesses his father's death, a father who also cannot close his eyes. Pregnant women wear blindfolds so that their children do not see the men's gaze: so that they do not see death. Another teenager who lived on another mountain, Mila deLonelinessHis eyes also opened "as if they wanted to take away his whole face," just like in the legend of the Lord of Lisquens. Catalán also prophesies Rodoreda.

"To find a druid in Romanyà on a moonlit night would take years of life," Rodoreda wrote, and so the novel remained unfinished, I think for the best.