Or a real desert. In El amigo del desierto (The Friend of the Desert), published in David Shook’s translation in 2019 (Parallax Press), the journey inwards is, if you like, brought outwards and to life through fiction. The novel deals with one man’s strange yet irrepressible attraction to those barren parts of the world that seem so hostile to human existence. And this attraction springs as if from nowhere. Even the man in question, Pavel, a 42-year-old unmarried man from Czechia, does not really know its origins:
Thanks to the back cover of a book I knew that there lived in Brno a man who had dedicated a good portion of his life to traveling through many of the world’s deserts . . . He had created an organization called Friends of the Desert. The organization’s email address appeared on the back cover of that book, which fell into my hands through fortuitous circumstances, and of course I wrote them.
Of course? Still today I don’t know what I expected from them.
From the very first page, then, we are introduced to a man who does not seem wholly sure of his choices or even if he is the one making them. Pavel acts on impulse, and then, reflecting on this impulse, struggles to justify it. And in this way, he decides to join a group of people who, apparently without reason, travel to deserts. What follows from this surreal and captivating opening is a peculiar kind of adventure story, in which the tests and trials our hero faces are doubt, rejection, confusion and worry—in a phrase, ordinary human feelings that we ourselves encounter often in the course of our lives. He himself is the main obstacle he must overcome.
What comes through as the story unfolds is that Pavel is searching for something; if there is a motivating factor for him, something that sustains him on this search, it is only the vaguest consciousness that he is dissatisfied with his life. As his interest in the desert grows, so does his awareness of this dissatisfaction, and of the “mediocrity” by which he is surrounded. Even after a disastrous first trip with the Friends of the Desert, during which his illusions about what might be found in these desolate, waterless wastelands are banished, he feels a “crushing nostalgia” for the desert. He stares at photographs of sandy expanses and imagines them to be places of an “absolute possibility” that is so desperately lacking from ordinary life:
When I say that I love the desert, what is it that I say I am loving? The scorching sands of day and the freezing sands of night? The many different shapes of the dunes? The starry sky and enormous moon, like a living, lost star? The solitude? The emptiness? Perhaps I only loved the concept of the desert, and perhaps I loved it because I wanted to be like it . . . The desert: that metaphor for the infinite.
The central question posed by The Friend of the Desert is this: What does it mean to live? Do we find our most intense fulfilment as people in the drama of our emotions, in our pursuit of pleasure, power and possessions? Or do we find it in the absence of those things, when the players leave the stage, as it were, and we are so alone with the world that we are no longer separable from it? Pavel, in the end, comes to find an answer to this question, but only by plunging himself into the questioning, persisting without signs, guidance or encouragement. The answers to big questions can only disclose themselves this way. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue,” wrote Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet (translated by Charlie Louth, Penguin Classics, 2011). “Do not now seek the answers.”
This—this kind of waiting in the right places for purpose to find us, if not the desire for purpose itself—may seem odd to the modern sensibility. Indeed, there is much in d'Ors’s book and his wider work that is counterintuitive and even paradoxical. Most of us are not in the habit of doing things without clear reasons, as Pavel is when he sets off to join the Friends. We are even less in the habit of persevering with something that seems to be bearing no fruit: “‘You must go back,’ said a voice within. ‘Go back home,’ it insisted. But I didn’t want to hear that voice, and I wanted even less to bow to such vehement orders.” To a great extent, Pavel does not often know precisely why he is doing what he is doing; that he does here confuses him. He presses on because he has faith: not uncritical belief, not certainty, but an intuition that his journey matters, and that it will yield something meaningful, something essential sooner or later. And that faith grows.
D’Ors renders all this in sharp, simple and very readable prose that David Shook, also the translator of Biografía del silencio, does a fine job of expressing faithfully in English. Like whatever it is that is driving the protagonist, his prose, which has been compared favourably to that of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, urges us on. In place of the dreamlike imagery of Biografía de silencio—of, for example, the “exotic flora and fauna” found in the depths of human consciousness—is a more spare, concrete kind of description: a sort of stylistic and narrative asceticism, though the book has its more poetic moments, such as when Pavel travels to the desert for a second time at the midpoint of the story:
Shasu was the protagonist of those days in the Algerian desert thanks to his indefinable charm and beauty. His beauty? I could also speak of his harmony, for example, or of his luminosity, since every bit of him gave off a shining aura that made him, whether he liked it or not, the obligatory center of attention.
There are certain unconventional and stylised structural elements of El amigo del desierto. It opens with an introduction typical of a play, for instance, with a ‘dramatis personae’, setting out the story’s characters. There is also a "Locations" page, which lists where the action takes place. In place of chapter numbers there are only titles. In the final third of the story are pictures of Pavel’s drawings of the desert and examples of his handwriting, which his encounters with the desert have changed. These devices make us part of the adventure. The theatrical elements announce to us that what follows is staged, not real, a performance, deliberate. And then we are shown, on the page, a slice of reality: Pavel holds up to us what he is holding in his hands. The performance all of a sudden becomes quite real.
D’Ors, a writer little-known outside the Spanish-speaking world, considers El amigo del desierto to be part of a trilogy. In Biografía del silencio and El olvido de sí (Forgetfulness of Self, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2021), the two texts that complete the trilogy, he explores similar themes of identity and meaning, authenticity and unity. In his own words, shared in an interview with El Pais, his central theme is life and death, "which in short, are the same". And he suggests that human beings need to reconnect with what is most basic about their experience—that, to quote Apollinaire, “now and then it is good to pause in our pursuit of happiness, and just be happy.” Reading the work of Pablo d'Ors is always refreshing, and El amigo del desierto is no different. This is a slim book, but a powerful one.
