The Lizard and the Nightingale

As I've already mentioned, I spend a few days in the Pyrenees, in Molló, and in the morning I greet the sun from a flagstone patio. Amid the din of sparrows and swallows, two neighbors approach me: the lizard and the nightingale.

Seeking the sunny corners of the patio, the lizard crawls along the ground, sometimes swift and nervous, sometimes motionless as a stone; sometimes curious, sometimes fleeting. It only remains at rest for a short time. It moves its head in syncopated motion, like a jazz melody. It waves its tuned tail, twisting and turning with the plasticity of a serpent, archaic and greenish, solemn in its role as a miniature ambassador of the era of the great saurians. It runs and stops, curls, sunbathes, darts out its forked tongue, and, in short, lives, like us, in constant restlessness between the longing for stillness and the demands of haste.

While sparrows, swallows, blackbirds and even larks converse joyfully with very short songs, often more like a squeak or a whistle than a melody, the nightingale's song is long and colorful, like a phrase by Haydn or Mozart.

Sing again and again in a hurry; we run, run and keep running

Verdaguer compared the nightingale's voice to a stream of pearls, and Tomàs Garcés, to a diamond. But sensual comparisons abound: Josep Pla said the nightingale had the velvety voice of a ripe pomegranate. Neruda related it to the orange. John Keats, in the famous Ode to a Nightingale , associates the nightingale with a wine chilled in the heart of the earth, bearer of the music of water and forests; but he asserts that this bird has never known restlessness, tiredness, or fever. I perceive in the nightingale, on the other hand, the nervous and metallic character of the transverse flute and even the high, strained artificiality of the countertenor's timbre.

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A traditional Catalan song approaches the mystery of the nightingale more subtly: "Entrust me to my mother," the ill-married young woman asks the "nightingale who is going to France." In other words: "Tell my mother that I'm sad." The nightingale's voice is melodious, but not cheerful. Like people today, it conceals its inner unrest with speed. The nightingale sings again and again in a hurry; we run, run, and keep running, without knowing why.