Transnarcís | 13 January - 14 March 2026

It was a glaucous winter morning and I was walking down Rambla de Catalunya. As always at that hour, I felt a deep need to change my life. Sometimes I think that I only truly exist at such moments: when I want to be someone else, when I am seized by an irresistible urge to flee or to slip into another skin. And yet I also have the distant, blurred certainty that, in fact, I live in transit between many bodies, that there is an organic continuity between the elusive joy of the façades and my thoughts, between the rhythm of our footsteps and the silky writing of the balconies. While I was brooding over all this —Rambla de Catalunya is an ideal place to think about the migration of souls— I turned right into Consell de Cent. I had no reason to do so, but I had no reason not to either. Seldom are we offered the chance to make such a gratuitous decision, one without any particularly serious or meaningful consequences. For an instant, I felt that I was in the right place at the right moment, that I lacked nothing and had nothing to spare. This must be freedom, I thought: a total and transparent accord between yourself and the world, the edges of consciousness fitting perfectly with the turbulence of the universe; in short, the disappearance of inside and outside. Thus, absorbed in meditation, I found myself standing before that garden.

It was separated from the street by a simple wooden fence. I can’t remember its colour, but it looked fairly new, with the tops finished in the shape of a cross. People walked past it without paying any attention, as if it had always been there, even though I had never seen it before. In vain, I looked for a little gate or a latch to open the fence. The best way to enter a garden is furtively, without asking permission.

I was greeted by a chorus of twenty-three gladioli: lilac, pink, orange like a newly born sun. Couldn’t they hear it out there? Their perfume traced vapoury lines in the air, binding the flowers to one another, from stamen to stamen. Romanesque voices flooded the enclosure. The gladioli sang with clouds on their lips and made me levitate. Had I walked amid those melodies, the crown of threads would inevitably have unravelled. I forgot my prejudices and moved forward, floating among the flowers.

As I flew, I saw the landscape below and took notes with my lucky green pen: «a jasmine clings to the torso of a sculpture, which berates it with words of chalk. An abandoned piano, wax butterflies, a head sprouting from the earth like a black potato, stairways to the sky, a dying nun on a marble bed…»

‘Hey, you!’, a carnation suddenly cried. It was a telepathic shout; I caught it perfectly. ‘Fingers are growing on your corneas, can’t you see? Watch how you look — you’re scratching’. And it was true. Without meaning to, I crumbled a stone with a blink. In that garden, contemplation could be a violent and delicate act.

Speaking became increasingly difficult for me: at the centre of my tongue a white, metallic ear began to sprout. Little by little, I learned to listen to the meridian taste of the daffodils.

The garden went on endlessly, for as long as I wished. And I liked wandering like that, aimlessly, among caresses and cobwebs and leaves that had become inconstant amulets of grace.

The issue —the true difficulty of that crossing— was to interrupt the adoration, to proscribe any desire for transcendence with some piece of idiocy; that is, to mock myself for having felt admiration. Otherwise, faith turns into something monotonous and sad, an instrument of apathy. Not knowing what will happen. That is the only way to be transformed, I thought.

Gabriel Ventura