Mohamed Mbougar Sarr wrote, in The Most Recondite Memory of Men, that “chance is just a destiny written in invisible ink”

Hearing Jacqueline du Pré play Carnival of the Animals – The Swan, by Camille Saint-Saëns, fills me with rapture, like a forest invaded by the flood of a river. A feeling that time is moving and projecting me towards the past, away from the beautiful and unequal city in which I live, away from the brutal century in which my days follow one another – more dizzyingly than I would like. du Pré’s cello caresses my ears and my spirit. And it is impossible to suppress the regret that she populated the world for such a short time.

Jacqueline du Pré stopped playing at the age of 28 as a result of multiple sclerosis, which caused her to lose sensitivity in her fingers and other parts of her body, until she reached the age of 42. Married to another prodigious musician, Argentine pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, she interacted with some of the greatest instrumentalists of her time. He used to use Stradivarius cellos in his performances: one from 1673 and another from 1712. Compared to us, mere humans, the great instruments border on immortality.

It’s probably one of those Stradivarius that du Pré handles with absolute dexterity in the theme I’m listening to now, the Cello Sonata No. 2, Op.99 – II. Adagio Affettuoso, by Brahms. I found a recording of her and Barenboim playing this song on YouTube. I watch the instrumentalist in action: young, beautiful, energetic and focused, her long blonde hair tied back. The physical effort and emotional dedication required to give shape to the sublime is impressive.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr wrote, in The Most Recondite Memory of Men, that “chance is just a destiny written in invisible ink”. But aren’t all destinies like that, written in invisible ink? With what ink were the hieroglyphs that formulated multiple sclerosis in Jacqueline du Pré’s DNA printed? Probably the same one that decreed the emergence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in the body of Tony Judt, one of the most brilliant exponents of post-war British intellectuality. It’s as if there were a cruel predilection of fate against those who, as Borges said, are saving the world.

Judt narrates his final days in the beautiful The Chalet of Memory: “Perhaps the most disheartening consequence of my current illness – more depressing than its practical daily manifestations – is the knowledge that I will never ride a train again. This certainty weighs on me like a leaden blanket, pressing me deeper and deeper into the dark notion of an ending that marks true terminal illness: the realization that certain things will never happen again. This absence is greater than the mere loss of pleasure, the deprivation of freedom, the exclusion of new experiences.”

I change the subject a little (or maybe it’s just another variation on the same theme). This week I finished reading a wonderful novel by Cuban Leonardo Padura. It’s called Like Dust in the Wind and talks about the imposition of destiny on who we are and what we do. Here, however, we are not faced with lethal illnesses, but with History with a capital H, this avalanche that sweeps away millions of lives, liquefying the idea that we are individuals endowed with free will.

Padura describes the reality in Cuba between 1990 and 2016 and the diaspora that pushed thousands of Cubans into exile. He also reflects on how his and his characters’ generation was swallowed up by the misfortunes that ravaged the country: destitution, lack of prospects, the systematic collapse of dreams, disillusionment, waste. “A period? How long does a period last? Is it made up of instants, moments, days, years, decades, centuries? For the only fleeting and unrepeatable life we ​​have, how much of it can fit into a period without predictable limits? Weren’t the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, with thousands of years in tow, periods?”

But, when talking about the immeasurable value of friendship, Padura shows us that it is possible to erase the scribbles made with the invisible ink of destiny and grant life some consolation. “That night, as if they had agreed, the remnants of the Clan kept the demons deep in their caves, because, more than celebrating the birth of Jesus Nazareno, they celebrated the permanence of friendship. The existence of a brotherhood, that bond forged by them many years ago and which, despite the pain and blows that life always tends to offer, the rigors that history imposes, the personal motivations and the national circumstances that distanced them in geography in various places around the world, they had preserved.”