I sit down to read outside. They have said on TV that it may rain, but nothing foreshadows it. Half an hour later, distant thunder sounds, I close the book and dedicate myself to listen to the approaching storm. What is important must be paid attention to. Besides, I’m supposed to be on vacation. Or almost, because I have to write this article. I haven’t decided on the topic yet. I have several possible ones and the storm is not among them.
Summer storms have their own literature. Memory a story by Cesare Pavese in which one of them surprises bathers in a river and turns their lives upside down. There is a moment in that story —of which I have forgotten almost everything: in what exact place in Italy it takes place or what its characters were called— when someone dives into the river, which seems to boil with the downpour, and feels that under the water everything is calm. The storm is above, it belongs to another world. In this other reigns a strange and, in a way, eternal peace.
It badly needs rain but it still hasn’t rained “on the land that doesn’t comfort you”, says a verse from Joanna Raspall, extracted from a poem entitled ‘Tempesta d’estiu’. A poem without metaphors, literal. However, summer storms and metaphors attract each other, and I remember a bulería by Xavier Ruibal that my friend Angeles always quotes: «Summer storm they say you are / my friends, my fears and my women. / And I tell them, that next winter I will be with you.»
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It starts to rain. I park the bulerías and the metaphors and run out with the book and the glasses and the flip-flops and the towel, as expected. Lightning snakes through the sky and thunder makes us understand the classics. I mean, when it thunders, it is understandable that the classics attributed this scandal to divine anger or to gruesome revenge by the stars or to something horrific. Pliny the Elder, the wisest man of his time (which was the 1st century) had a rather bizarre theory as to why it thundered, which he left written in great detail (and a good jumble) in his Natural History (book 2, in case anyone is curious). Although those lucubrations, I think, must have reassured many of his contemporaries: of course it is not the same to know oneself as a victim of the unpredictable gods than of the unpredictable nature. Any day we all end up diluted in the sea, as Xenophanes of Colophon predicted would happen.
I go to the balcony to see the rain. My neighbors’ grandchildren splash around in the yard. A friend announces on WhatsApp that she hails on Cervantes street in Barcelona. The piece of sea that is normally seen from my studio is now indistinguishable. I open the windows well. The heat is gone (what a blessing). I hear the sizzle of rain on the neighborhood rooftops and start writing this article. As I reach the end, the rain persists. With all its metaphors, its meanings, its memory and its blessing. At least in this crazy world we inhabit, very simple things continue to happen that are worthwhile.