Barcelona

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

I
FIRST WENT TO
B
ARCELONA NEARLY FOUR DECADES AGO,
in 1966. This happened because I was an opinionated and poorly informed loudmouth. I spoke little Spanish and no Catalan, but at a party in London, under the influence of various stimulants, I had been holding forth on the subject of the great and long-dead Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. I had some theories, entirely cribbed from French writers, about the surrealist affinities of Gaudí's work. (In fact it has no surrealist affinities of any discernible kind. Indeed it is utterly and fundamentally opposed to everything the surrealists believed in and tried to propagate, but well, hell, it was the swinging sixties in London and you didn't need proof. Bullshit would do.) As I warmed to my theme, or themes, if you could call them that, I observed that a foreign-looking man was watching me and listening, quizzically. He was youngish, but older than me, about thirty. He was very close shaven but had the swarthy look of a Gypsy. His pomaded hair, long at the back, curled somewhat greasily over a stiffish and striped collar. He had a brown suit, tobacco colored and of extreme though somehow dated elegance, the jacket tubular and tightly buttoned, in the utmost contrast to the flowing and flopping garments or patched self-embroidered jeans worn by the other men in the room. A handmade Turkish handkerchief hung negligently from his breast pocket. His shirt was formal and his shoes had clearly been handmade, too, smoothly encasing his small and birdlike feet like shining purses. He was smoking an unfiltered Players—about the fiftieth of the day, I would later come to realize.

“It is good to meet a fan of Gaudí in England,” he said in a dense growling accent, “even if you know so little about him.”

And this was how I came to meet the man who before the evening was out became my friend, and forty years later is still my dearest and oldest one: the Catalan sculptor Xavier Corberó. Xavier forgave me for prating about a subject of which I knew nothing, since I could hardly be blamed for not having been to Barcelona. “Very few people have,” he said, a trifle dismissively, implying that the world is full of fools anyway. But he was not going to let me continue to be a fool, and the only way around that was to ensure that I should actually see the works of Gaudí, not just the Sagrada Família—the unfinished temple that everyone mentioned as the epitome of his work, but which in his view was by no means its summa—but a number of other buildings by him as well. He reeled off their names in his sharply clacking Catalan accent, leaving me quite nonplussed: I might call myself an art critic, and in point of fact I did, but I had never heard of any of them. The same for the various other Catalan architects of the art nouveau period (about 1870-1920) whose names Xavier let fall, and the artists, and so on and so forth. Clearly, there was a whole bunch of stuff just down there, under the shadow of the Pyrenees, of which I was quite virginally ignorant. And Xavier wanted me to know about it; not in the spirit of an art dealer promoting his fondest find, but because, as a serious Catalan—a creature not to be confused with a normal Spaniard—he could not endure the spectacle of someone else's ignorance of his own
patria chica.

So I went. And shortly afterward, returned. And then, the next spring, went again. I was hooked and couldn't stay away. Once I lived in a peculiar, once grand but now somewhat ramshackle hotel at the foot of the road up whose middle the electric tramway ran, clattering and groaning, to Tibidabo, the vantage point from which the whole plain of Barcelona could be seen spreading below; this hotel, though much lower than Tibidabo, had a domed mirador on the roof sumptuously ornamented with 1900-style mosaics, in which one could sit, look at the city, and dream on a hot day. It seemed to have no other clients (at least I never saw one) and its room rate was somewhat less than ten dollars a day. The bed sagged and the faucet spat a thin stream of boiling brown water. It was, I thought, heaven.

But mostly I stayed in Xavier's house. It was not in town. It was a country
masia,
in a village named Esplugües de Llobregat, which had not yet been absorbed by the southerly expansion of Barcelona itself. (Today it almost has, but Xavier owns most of the cobbled street the home stands in, so the place is in no danger. It's just a completely unexpected, and unpredictable, oasis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the middle of the twenty-first—a time warp in brick and stucco.) Named the Can Cargol (House of the Snail), it stands on a back road above the village. Esplugües in Catalan means “caves”—it comes from the Latin
speluncas—
and that is what the Can Cargol has in its basement: an extended, twisting series of grottoes dug deep into the hillside for reasons of storage and, perhaps originally, defense, by farmers who owned the area in Roman times. Possibly these subterranean windings reminded people of the secret labyrinth of a snail shell, and so named the house. But even when I was staying in the Can Cargol in the '60s, I never ventured to properly explore these catacombs, being cravenly afraid of spiders and darkness. Only God, or perhaps Pluto, deity of the underworld, knows with any certainty what is down there. One of the caves has, or at least had, an enormous printing press in it, a greasy dusty Moloch of a machine dating from the mid-nineteenth century, on which some long-dead radical Catalanist may well have run off anti-Carlist tracts in bygone days. For years Xavier and his friends, including myself, drank an excellent red wine of which someone in Penedes had given him hundreds of bottles: Since he had not bothered to have storage racks made, those bottles were simply dumped, higgledy-piggledy, on the earthen floor of the catacomb, where their labels were nibbled away to illegibility over the years by rats, mold, and insects.

The Can Cargol was one of the few rustic buildings of its kind left near Barcelona—a splendid example of the structure known, since time immemorial, as a
casa pairal
or patriarchal house. Those who know the early work of the great Catalan painter Joan Miró will know such structures immediately: The house of his childhood depicted in “The Farm,” 1922, is one. They have small windows, heavy roofs like thick cakes of terra-cotta, and walls of a cyclopean thickness, built to keep out centuries of bandits and foul weather. Their roofs project like drooping, angled wings, creating an overriding sense of shelter and enclosure. And their core, spiritual as well as physical, is the
llar de foc,
the fireplace (you could almost translate this as the “lair of the fire”)—more like a whole room in itself, where the entire peasant family assembled, always depicted as ranked in order of age from grandparents to infants: a house within a house. Xavier lived in yet another house across the narrow road, to which there was no access except by a key that he refused to have copied, and the lock on the front door of the Can Cargol was of an old-fashioned type which could only be shut with its own key. Synchronizing one's comings and goings with his was, therefore, a complicated business, but most of the time one could at least hope for, if not wholly rely on, the appearance of an elderly and toothless housekeeper who, muttering like the porter in
Macbeth,
would let one in or out.

 

O
NCE I HAD GOT USED TO
C
ATALAN HOURS (NOT AN
easy business, in a city where an earlyish dinner meant eating at 10:30), Xavier would drag his guest off to places I know I could hardly find again. Not just the hole-in-the-wall junk shops, or the Gothic churches in which Barcelona is so overpoweringly rich, or the dark restaurants full of noisy
catalanistas,
but real oddities: There was, I distinctly remember, a house for sale which we visited and fantasized about buying and turning into a house of assignation for rich tourists (Xavier seemed to know precisely where the girls would be found). The house was a gloomy gem of 1900 design whose main feature, apart from an abandoned ebony cradle inlaid with ivory, was a magnificent screen bisecting the main
salón,
a glass screen with painted and fired designs and panels inlaid with the iridescent blue wings of Amazonian morpho butterflies, which must have been installed for the pleasure of some
indiano,
as Catalans who went to South America and made fortunes in slaves or coffee were known. Neither of us had any money. We could not buy the place, and today I have no memory of where it was. But it would have made the grandest cathouse in Spain.

In a different vein, there was the subterranean former workshop of Xavier's late father, a metalworker and decorative sculptor of large repute who had turned out massive bronze stair rails for hotels in Boston, towering light fixtures for the Palau Nacional up on Montjuïc, and even a gilt bronze tabernacle for the high altar of the Catedral de Havana: This costly devotional object was shipped off just before the 1959 Cuban revolution, and the elder Corberó's bill was never paid, leaving him with a hatred of Fidel Castro that burned with a hard and gem-like flame until his death. (It did not pass to his son, who remained resolutely apolitical through the 1960s.) The walls of the
taller
were encrusted with layer on layer of the sculptor's molds and models, a collage so thick that you couldn't see the layers below. It was an Aladdin's cave of decorative sculpture, utterly unlike the pure and minimal forms that Xavier was busy shaping from marble in his studio up in Esplugües.

At night there would be restaurants, some rather grand, most of a refined but vernacular sort, serving out the intense, agrestic cooking of the Ampurdan coast and mountains, for which Xavier and his friends, their wives and girlfriends and women colleagues, had a particular liking. Full speed ahead, and don't hold the garlic. If Barcelona had any tourist restaurants then, I don't remember seeing one or eating in it. I do, however, remember the postprandial nightlife, particularly an extraordinary and raddled old music hall on the Paral-lel down by the harborfront, El Molino. Its acts, stage sets, costumes, and dramatis personae seemed not to have changed since the 1930s. Seated in a box framed by sticky-looking green velvet curtains, happily drunk on a kind of sweet bubbly
cava
served by an ancient waiter who resembled the mad grandfather from
The Munsters,
and not understanding a syllable of the dirty-minded Catalan dialogue, I would watch a stereotypical character known as El Anglès, the Englishman, attired in plus fours and a revolting tweed jacket as loud as Evelyn Waugh's, mincing clumsily about the stage twirling a wooden golf club amid roars of approbation from the clientele. What he was saying, I did not know then and dread to think now.

 

W
HERE COULD YOU WISH TO BE MARRIED, IF NOT IN SUCH
a city and among such people? I have been married three times, in three places. The first was in 1967, to an Australian, in a Jesuit church on Farm Street in London. The marriage lasted fourteen years, ended in divorce, and was, for the most part, both crazed and miserably unhappy. The second, which also lasted fourteen years, was to an American, in a rustic summerhouse in the painter Robert Motherwell's garden in Connecticut. Bugs and tiny spiders dropped out of the thatch above our heads as we swore to love, honor, and cherish one another, and we were happy for about eight years. But this union, though promising, also failed because, having been faithful to one another all that time, I met someone else who I knew with certainty would be the love of my life: a tall, beautiful artist from Virginia named Doris Downes. The inevitable divorce was neither easy nor pleasant for either me or my wife, and very expensive for me; but by the fall of 2001 it was an acknowledged legal fact, and Doris and I were free (not without misgivings on her part, though with none on mine) to marry.
Third time lucky,
I kept thinking, and so it has turned out to be.

But there was a question. Where to get hitched? It ought not to be in Manhattan, where I lived. Neither Doris nor I is a particularly social animal. Neither of us wanted a fearsomely expensive wedding, and in my post-divorce financial blues almost anything from a New York caterer beyond a sausage on a stick and a can of beer seemed extravagant. In any case, post-9/11 Manhattan did not feel like a jolly place to tie the knot. But the clincher was that, with three previous wedding receptions between us, neither Doris nor I felt up to shouldering the quasi-moral burden of choice: whom to invite, whom not to, whom we could get away with offending, who was centrally important to our lives—all that exasperating stuff had to be faced, and neither of us felt up to it. But there was a solution. It was Barcelona. Doris didn't have strong feelings about Barcelona—not yet—but I most emphatically did. I had been going there at intervals, to work and to disport myself, for more than thirty years. I had written a biography of the city, some ten years before: not a travel guide, nor really a formal history, but something like an attempt to evoke the genius loci of this great queen city of Catalunya, so little known even to educated foreigners then—and to tell the story of its development through its formidably rich deposit of buildings and artworks, and to show (necessarily in a small compass) what vitality could reside in “provincial” cultures, a project that had its natural appeal to a writer from another “provincial” place, Australia.

I don't think I have enjoyed writing any book as much as
Barcelona.
Years of research went into it, and long deep friendships were forged in the process. I also learned to read, if not fluently to speak, Catalan, and got some insight into the marvelous and rich literature that has been produced in it: a literature which has never been properly translated into English, because the effort of doing so for the small returns it would reap would break any publisher's back these days. Writing the book necessarily brought me close to the people who ran the city government, and to three consecutive mayors: Narcis Serra first, and then Pasqual Maragall (descendant of one of the cardinal
modernista
poets of Barcelona, Joan Maragall, 1860-1911), and finally his successor at the Ajuntament or Town Hall, Joan Clos. And then, as the right hand of all three successively, there was my beloved friend Margarita Obiols, the cultural minister of the socialist party of Barcelona who had watched over me through two failed marriages and was determined to see the third, which would also be the last, take place and stick together. And so—to make short work of what proved to be a diplomatic near-marathon, its complexities arising from the somewhat labyrinthine Spanish laws governing what
forasters
or non-Spaniards must do, not do, declare, and if necessary conceal in order to get married in Spain (for marrying there in the twenty-first century sometimes feels, for the non-Spaniard, as difficult as divorcing in the long-gone days of Franco)—Joan Clos and Margarita announced the glad news that we had been cleared to be married, and in Barcelona. Not only in Barcelona, but in the Town Hall, originally known as the Casa de la Ciutat (“house of the city”), and by Joan, in his capacity as
alcalde.
And not only by him and in the Ajuntament, but in its most splendid and history-laden ceremonial room, the Saló de Cent (Hall of the Council of One Hundred).