Pamela Petro - The Slow Breath of Stone - A Romanesque Love Story

Here was a very different relationship between humankind and rock – the brutal disagreement between the immovable object of immemorial age and human impatience to proceed in a straight line – and it was a fierce one. The narrow passageway was something nightmarish that Escher might have dreamt up had he been a sculptor: knife-sharp, angular thrusts of rock lunging at the car from every conceivable direction, and so dark I had to put on the lights. After I emerged, the land abruptly relaxed and grew agricultural, hills rolled, and a pretty haze formed from the exhalations of asparagus.

Many hundreds of hours earlier, it seemed, I’d begun the day in Prades, with a visit to the abbey of St Michel de Cuxa. Lucy’s journal hardly recommended it: ‘Once a famous Benedictine monastery, now served by a handful of Cistercian monks. Little left of its past grandeur.’ She added, ‘They talk with interest of … restoring church and cloisters (but out of what?). An old abbot (almost blind) and several dirty monks came and talked with us while we photographed the portal of the abbey.’

What Lucy didn’t say is that the monks had only taken charge a year earlier, in 1919; before that the abbey had been empty since the French Revolution, when the previous order was kicked out and the place sacked to a state of desolation. Today it is again run by Benedictines; in fact, a time traveller from the twelfth century would be more likely to recognize St Michael de Cuxa now, thanks to nearly a century of renovations, than would either of the Porters. Nonetheless, an older continuity than Christianity – the sun in this luxuriant enclave beneath the snow-capped Pic de Canigou, the orchards here, the lilacs, wildflowers and rosemary, the scent of cypress, the quietude broken by cuckoos’ cries, above all an inkling of Mediterranean ease while yet in sight of the great, cold mountains – created a kind of sacred serenity beyond the abbey walls that Lucy and Kingsley had surely experienced. Despite the discontinuity in architectural time, I felt very close to them in this secret place.

In 1920 there had been no crypt to visit; it was only resurrected in 1937. At its heart I found a domed room called the Chapel of Our Lady of the Crib (Christ’s crib, of which the abbey had reputedly owned a shard), supported by a single massive central pillar. At its peak the ceiling just permitted me to stand my full height (5 foot 5). The floor was earthen. Imagine a stone fountain spouting forth a circular jet of stones; imagine a perfect half-sphere of a cave with one magnificent stalactite growing in the centre from ceiling to floor; imagine if Buckminster Fuller had been born in the twelfth century and built his geodesic dome of mushroom-coloured stones mortared with lime.

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