When you fly from the American continent to Europe, the morning is skipped. You leave at night, and a few hours later you land into the afternoon, already. A short nap above the clouds, and no easy-ing into the day, the power of engineering deprives you of the basic condition of completing a daily cycle. But that is the price of being in Barcelona today, and how else in an age where the whole year’s worth of vacation is shorter than the time it would take to cross the ocean by boat, at “human speed” . To have a bit of a different coffee, to see men and women strolling with or without purpose, kindled by the illusion of their own youth, to see a beautiful city with a distinct culture in a present where the multi-colored people who defined that culture, from Catalan to Arabic, are at first sight quite indistinguishable from all others, tourists, new immigrants, or temporary expats. To meet with friends who chose to call Barcelona their home, although they are Argentinian or Romanian or Australian. To eat, to get lost through the streets, which are beautiful and alike, diligently lined by plane trees. To fight the jet lag, stealing a short nap on a bench.
To meet a friend, a good friend whom, in the whirlwind of global life, you’ve seen five times in 20 years, yet every time you see her it’s as if you’ve only talked yesterday and the conversation continues, natural, flowing and not awkward, all while you realize that you do not look the same anymore , somehow you are no longer young, neither you nor she, barely so, but still.
While sipping coffee on a fifth floor terrace of a trendy department store, I learned the story of my friend’s grandmother, an educated, rich, intelligent woman, young and beautiful at one time, hopeful and illusional when recently married and pregnant with child, who survived the Second World War to work as a janitor in the Romanian capital’s main train station, cleaning toilets after thousands, tens of thousands of shits, all different and all the same, while holding tight a fluent Latin, fluent German and fluent French behind her closed lips and also holding quiet the wildest roars of rage because her husband had been arrested and killed at the turn of political regimes, husband who, likewise, knew too many languages, but his lips did not stay shut tight, maybe they murmured, maybe they screamed and, whatever it was, bought him an early bird ticket to eternity, while she remained to clean those toilets after both the victorious and the defeated, all passing through the train station, going somewhere, uphill or downhill , as Pedro Paramo would have said, depending on whether they were coming or going, and to raise their son, who in turn ended up an early bird at the doors of eternity as well, leaving his own daughter instead, my friend, to continue the grandma’s fight, a woman’s fight of resisting, of being pragmatic and figuring it all out for herself.
And how I liked to see Joan Miro’s paintings, and laughed at the titles that he gave them, too. To be able to laugh when everything seems to be surreal in its tragedy, to understand that the only salvation is to eliminate the superfluous, to return to primary color and basic lines and to probably delight in the absurd yet concrete, both, that these can provide, and to be able to open your mouth, freely this time, and name the basic however you want, because the basic being so basic cannot be prey to interpretation, and gain a laugh, a splash of color and of joy and a long laugh instead of a ticket to jail. (Here is the sneaky skill of survival.) Because we will rescue whatever can be rescued and enjoy making beauty, not because it is necessary but because we enjoy ourselves in the process.
I hope those who aspire to be adopted by this little city of parabolic arches and consistency of trees, are able to assimilate Barcelonians’ joie de vivre as their northern star, because how otherwise could Barcelona stay the way it is? The rest of us could take example as well.