This year marks the centenary of Blai Bonet’s birth. A hundred years already? It is hard to imagine that so much time has passed, because Blai Bonet has never truly left our collective imagination.
Not long ago, returning from a walk through the Pastoritx estate, I saw in the distance the silhouette of the Joan March hospital or, as our parents used to call it, the Caubet Sanatorium. It was an August day and it had just rained —one of those typical mid-summer ruixades— and suddenly I saw that the fields were full of flowering thistles.
Then I remembered that the novel El mar, the first published by the writer from Santanyí, ended with a reference to those very same flowering thistles: “Beside the road, the thistles open their purple flower, their white flower,” wrote Blai Bonet at the end of his novel, published in 1958, when the young priest attending to the sick leaves the sanatorium on his bicycle, remembering the poor adolescents who remain up there, in that beautiful building with white walls, subjected to the passion of illness, death and the desperate search for God.
Blai Bonet knew that landscape of Bunyola well, because he had been admitted to the Caubet Sanatorium as a tubercular teenager fresh out of the seminary, in the 1940s. He said he had had a wonderful time in the sanatorium —as he put it in a letter he sent to his friend Camilo José Cela— but it is hard to imagine that he had such a wonderful time when we read El mar.
Everything in the novel is steeped in sex, violence and an obsession with death. And it is impossible to read it without hearing the sinister screech of the stretcher on which the poor adolescents are taken to the fateful room number 13, the room of the dying, from which no one ever returns.
Today, the sanatorium is no longer a tuberculosis hospital, but is dedicated to oncology and palliative care. Yet the patients who contemplate the gentle Mallorcan landscape from its galleries are still there. And the flowering thistles are still there.
And Blai Bonet, with his novels, poems, reflections and diary pages, is still there too. Or rather, he is still here, there and everywhere. Because we cannot understand Mallorca without the work of Blai Bonet. And we cannot understand ourselves without the work of Blai Bonet.
“Happiness is like mirrors: it only reflects images, never reality,” poor Manuel Tur thinks at one point, one of the sick adolescents hospitalised in Caubet who, in some way, symbolises the spiritual torments experienced by Blai Bonet himself.
As a child, Blai lived through the horrors of the Spanish Civil War in Santanyí. Later he went to Barcelona and tried to make his way in literature, but he did not succeed. So he returned to Santanyí and shut himself away at home with his mother, his round table with a heater underneath, and his prodigious imagination.
And there he wrote an artistic body of work that remains the finest mirror in which we can contemplate ourselves and understand who we are.
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