Ana, tall and slender, was wearing her usual: jeans and a white long-sleeved shirt rolled up over her thin wrists, cowboy boots that she had probably picked up in Italy. Her dark chestnut hair was pulled away from her oval face in a heavy braid down her back. She always looked beautiful, and never any different.
“When I wrote you two weeks ago I never dreamed you’d respond so quickly,” she was saying.
I tried to think what her letter had said. Lots about her work, something about being lonely…. I put on a sympathetic look. “It’s been hard for you since Lydia went back to Argentina, hasn’t it?”
“Lydia was a mad woman,” Ana shrugged. “It’s not Lydia so much. But this apartment can sometimes seem very big. It needs more life in it. Cassandra,” she fixed me with her soft brown eyes, “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“So am I,” I said warily. This didn’t sound at all like my independent friend Ana, who mocked Relationships almost as often as I did. “Of course I’ll be busy a lot, but I still hope we can get together for good long chats.”
She winced slightly at the word chats. I hoped she didn’t really think… no… she knew my character, she couldn’t possibly….
I changed the subject. “Why don’t you show me what you’ve been working on?”
When you asked her, Ana said she had always wanted to be an architect, she didn’t know why. But her ideas for buildings had proved so flighty and improbable that no architectural firm would hire her after university, and she had been reduced to creating fantastic houses for the small children of the wealthy. These houses were shaped exactly to the child’s fantasies. After consultation with a child who said, “I want a house like a cat,” for example, Ana would create a house curved like a sleeping Siamese from stuffed almond and brown velvet. If a girl fantasized about trains, Ana would build her a cardboard locomotive and sleeper, with a rear car for her baby sister; if a boy imagined a jungle, Ana’s house for him would be painted with lianas and tiled with orchids and monkeys.
All the rooms and closets of this enormous apartment were filled with construction materials and curios that Ana had picked up from dumpsters as well as antique shops. The living room, because of its huge dimensions, was her workroom, and at the moment it contained three projects in various stages.
The first house under construction was built on a wooden frame, a stuffed chambered nautilus five feet high with large and small compartments and a spiraling corridor. It had appliquéd designs of fish and shells all over its striped fabric exterior.
The second was a giant jewelry box made of wood and covered in blue plush. It had two drawers, the top one for sleeping in and the bottom for playing in. It even had a life-size ballerina on top, made of padded cotton with a stiff net skirt and a blue velvet bodice. If you pushed a button, she spun around to the strains of the Blue Danube waltz.
“I’m still working on the speed,” Ana said absent-mindedly. “If you make it too fast her skirt will rip off the child’s face; but if she goes too slow she looks crippled.”
The third project was in unassembled pieces of gaudy papier-mâché all over the floor. I saw what looked like a painted woman’s thigh and a colorful single breast.
“This is a house for a woman giving birth,” Ana said, picking up the thigh as if that would explain something.
We curled up on some pillows and I told her about Frankie, trying not to make it sound as if that were the only reason I’d come.
Ana said, “I don’t know, it sounds like a wild goose chase. Barcelona is enormous. And even if you find this husband of hers, is it as simple as Frankie is making it out to be? What if she’s out for revenge for some reason and plans to kill him?”
“Frankie seems absolutely harmless. A little dramatic, but after all, she’s an actress. Her real story may be different than the one she’s telling me, but I hardly think she’s a murderer.”
“It’s you I’m worried about,” Ana said with an embarrassment she tried to mask as severity. “Remember the last time you were here. That business with Carmen.”
“Carmen,” I mused, remembering. “I’ll definitely have to get in touch with Carmen.”
“I hope you’ll have time for me.”
“I always have time for you, Ana,” I said. “What’s wrong, anyway?”
She looked at me wistfully. “I want my life to change, that’s all.”
Oh god, next she’d be talking about babies.
“I want a child.”
“I think we should sleep on this, Ana. Let’s talk about it tomorrow, okay?”
She sighed and got up.
“Just don’t plan on spending all your time with Carmen,” she warned.
“Ana, really. I’m here to work.”
But before I went to sleep I looked at the ship’s figurehead that Ana had thoughtfully placed in my guest bedroom, and I remembered the single-minded expression of Ana’s that day in the antique shop. She had something on her mind that had to do with me.
Babies.
Frankie and I had agreed to meet the next morning at ten. I woke early and went down to the Café Zurich across from the Plaça de Catalunya. Even though it was only seven-thirty the streets were lively. Spaniards get up early and go to bed late, and I do the same when I’m in Spain. It must be all that coffee. But it also has a lot to do with the heat. Barcelona on this morning was cool and fresh, the sidewalks newly washed, only a light buzz of car exhaust in the air. I sat down at a table at the Café Zurich and thanked god I was here. Unlike London, where the most you could hope for in the morning on your way to work was a slop of milk in a weak brown stew, snatched in some horrid tea shop with linoleum tables and greasy windows, in Barcelona you could sit outside at your own table and the waiter would appear before you with a cup and two pitchers on his tray. From one pitcher he would pour a shot of black coffee, from the other a stream of hot milk. With a flourish: “Señora.”
And it was spring in Barcelona too, real spring, not drizzly on-and-off spring. England could have its lilacs under gray skies; I was relieved to be here where I could see plane trees overhanging the Ramblas and women going to work dressed like movie stars. I’d exchanged my leather bomber jacket for a printed Japanese wraparound shirt, and on my head I’d wound a purple and black turban.
I read El País and La Vanguardia, watched the bustle around me, had another coffee and two croissants and finally set off down the Ramblas, the long street that is Barcelona’s heart. It’s really made up of five separate streets, but they all flow into each other. The central tree-lined walkway is almost always crowded and the kiosks sell rabbits, canaries and roses as well as postcards and newspapers from all over the world.
I walked midway down to the Plaça Boquería and turned into a side street to reach the three small squares around the church of Santa María del Pi. I had suggested a small hotel off the Plaça del Pi to Frankie and was meeting her at a café outside a nearby bar.
She was waiting for me, more fragile than when we’d parted at the steps of the British Museum, less jaunty and more querulous. My heart sank a little as I approached her table and she turned accusing eyes on me.
“They put me in a room by the elevator shaft, I couldn’t sleep a wink all night for the noise, and the bed was too soft. The man at the desk doesn’t speak a word of English so I couldn’t complain to him. I’m feeling absolutely ragged.”
It was true, she didn’t look her best, even though she had made an effort. She had on her bangles and her red red lipstick and her silly little pointed shoes. But in the bright morning sun her pale skin looked sallow and slightly scarred with acne. Her ashtray was already full and she coughed between her words.
I produced soothing noises and promised to find her another hotel if she wanted. Frankie, stage trooper that she was, struggled to cheer up. “Americans abroad, we’re pathetic, aren’t we?”
And I liked her again.
We ordered more coffee and I decided to have another croissant. The tables outside the
Bar del Pi were full this morning: three Germans telling each other travelling stories, a couple of young women in black with art portfolios at their feet, a mother and her grown pregnant daughter, both looking quite pleased with themselves, and a lone scientist with a flight bag on the seat next to him. The flight bag was imprinted with the words EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION.
Frankie took out a scrap of paper from her huge purse. “Well, we might as well get started,” she said briskly. “Here’s the phone number I called. What you need to do is get the address and give it to me.”
“How do you suggest I do that?”
“That’s up to you.” Her tone was curt, then she remembered the charm. “I have so much confidence in you, Cassandra. Don’t mind me, it’s probably jet lag.”
I took the piece of paper and went into the bar to use the phone. I would use the only ruse I could think of—I’d pretend I had a wrong number.
“Hello.” A man’s voice answered the phone. He was speaking Catalan with what sounded like an American accent.
I asked, in Castilian, to speak to Isabella.
No Isabella lived here, he answered, switching to Castilian.
That was impossible. This was 99-67-73 and Isabella must be there.
She wasn’t, he repeated, and made as if to hang up.
I got worked up. That was completely impossible! Isabella had given me this number herself! Was he saying that Isabella would make a mistake about her own number? Then he didn’t know Isabella!
He admitted with some irritation that he didn’t know Isabella.
This was 99-67-73, I accused. Isabella lived there, right on València, number 34. I had been there, I knew.
This wasn’t València, he said triumphantly. It was Provença.
It wasn’t València? I allowed a small hint of doubt to creep into my voice. Not number 34?
“Provença, 261,” he repeated, and put down the phone.
I returned to the table. “It’s on Provença Street, number 261.”
Frankie looked shocked. “They told you, just like that?”
“No, of course not. I used subterfuge.” With real pleasure I surveyed the little square, the sooty church, the leisurely bustle of mid-morning. “You want to go there right now?”
Frankie lit another cigarette and finished her coffee. “Could you order me another one?”
“The man I talked to had an American accent,” I said. “But he spoke both Catalan and Castilian.”
“Ben only speaks Spanish,” Frankie said.
“Castilian is Spanish. Catalan is what they speak in Barcelona.”
“They don’t speak Spanish here? Someone should have told me. No wonder they didn’t understand me at the hotel desk when I tried to use my phrasebook.”
“They do speak Spanish as well,” I explained patiently. “But Catalan is their language and many people refuse to speak Castilian on principle. It goes back to the years when Franco tried to eradicate the Catalan language and culture. The first time I came to Barcelona, over twenty years ago, all the signs were in Castilian, and you could be fined for speaking Catalan on the streets.”
Frankie was uninterested. “Well I’m sure Ben doesn’t know Catalan.”
“Do you have any idea who it might have been? Has Ben ever mentioned a friend in Barcelona?”
“If he had I wouldn’t have had to employ you, would I?” snapped Frankie, then she murmured apologetically. “Sorry, I’m not myself this morning. I just don’t want to be rushed, that’s all. I mean, at least now we know the address, that’s the important thing.”
I restrained myself. Obviously I was in a rush, but whether it was in order to collect my two thousand dollars or to overcome the doubts that were beginning to form, was hard to say.
Frankie smoked and drank another cup of coffee. The lovely spring sun beat down upon us and the German tourists departed to be replaced by a woman with a baby in a stroller.
“Look,” she said finally, “It’s a little more complicated than I let on yesterday in London.”
Somehow I wasn’t that surprised.
“It’s not that Ben and I aren’t good friends,” she said. “But––in actual fact—we’re divorced. Everything else is true,” she hastened to assure me. “About his being gay and his family not knowing and us needing to keep it a secret—”
“If you’re such good friends,” I broke in, “why would he be upset to get a visit from you in Barcelona? Especially if you’re trying to give him something to sign for his family.”
Frankie sighed. “Ben is such an independent person, it’s hard to explain. He’s independent and… irresponsible. He just gets it into his head to do things… sometimes against his best interests….”
“The paper is something he might not want to sign?”
“Oh no,” Frankie dismissed that idea with a rattle of bangles. “Not if he’s approached in the right way,” she amended. “He hates to feel pressured.”
“And he might feel pressured if he thought you had flown halfway around the world to get him to sign it.”
“That’s not it at all,” Frankie pouted. “And there’s no point in you being so antagonistic. After all, it’s not like we know it’s even Ben you talked to. I just want to know what kind of situation I’m walking into. Isn’t that reasonable?”
“Yesss,” I said. “So how do you want to go about this then?”
“I want you to go over to the place he lives and just watch and see who comes in and out the door.”
“Dozens of people probably live in his building,” I protested. “Do you have a photograph of him?”
Once again Frankie seemed inappropriately taken aback. “Oh, ah, no. I should have thought of that.”
“Well, is he tall or short, what color is his hair, what kind of clothes does he wear?”
“He’s… medium-height… regular-looking… short hair… He wears, I don’t know, normal clothes. Jeans.” Frankie was floundering and I had no idea why.
“So I’m supposed to stand outside this building and look for a regular guy with absolutely no identifying marks?” I rebelled. “I think it’s pointless, I really do. How am I going to describe him to you?”
“We’ll get you a camera,” she said. “You can take photographs of everyone who goes in and comes out.”
“That should make me really inconspicuous.”
“A small hidden camera,” Frankie said, taking out a gold American Express card.
That cheered me up somewhat. If she had a gold card she wasn’t hurting for money. But I added one condition:
“I get to keep the camera.”
3
BARCELONA IS A DIVIDED CITY. Below the Plaça de Catalunya, a vast square enlivened by fountains and marred by stretches of artificial grass, the streets are ancient and narrow, gradually twisting their way from the modish leather and shoe shops, gorgeous patisseries and restaurants of the Barri Gòtic down to the tenements by the port, to the Chinese Quarter or Barri Xines— a warren of seedy hotels and squalid hostales, with bars on every corner and long strands of laundry draped back and forth across streets where sunlight never comes. There are social divisions all the way down the Ramblas to the statue of Christopher Columbus on the sea front—the streets above the Plaça Reial are richer than below, the left side of the Ramblas is much safer than the right—but they are differences of degree, not of scale.
Above the Plaça de Catalunya Barcelona is almost another city, built on a nineteenth-century plan, not a Gothic one. In the Middle Ages grandeur meant the cathedral and later the gloomy palaces along Carrer de Montcada; in the nineteenth century the wealthy industrialists and bankers wanted enormous boulevards for their carriages, and opulent banks and shops where the ceilings were twenty feet high. Thus the Passeig de Gràcia is less like a street than an enormous thoroughfare into the architectural imagination of the previous century. Even the sidewalks are wider than most streets in the old quarter, and tiled with slate blue stones covered with
swirling shell and flower patterns.
The address the man had given me, 261 Provença, was in the nineteenth-century part of Barcelona, not far from the apartment that Ana had inherited from her wealthy grandmother. I walked unhurriedly up Gràcia, past bank after bank, shop after shop. There was one of Antoni Gaudí’s buildings, the Casa Batlló, with its shimmering greeny mosaic facade and rippling rooftop, all curves and waves. Its roof has been called the “reptile’s back” for its vertebrae of ceramic pots, joined to make a closed gutter. As I passed it in admiration I realized I wasn’t far from La Pedrera, another famous Gaudí construction on Gràcia. It was on the corner of Provença. Some guidebooks call it Casa Milà, but its official nickname is La Pedrera, the Stone Quarry.
Provença. 261 Provença. Ben was living in La Pedrera.
I sank onto a white-tiled, curved bench across the street and considered how to approach the task Frankie had given me.
It’s a massive thing, this gray-white, five-story apartment building that dominates the corner with its porous stone facing, thick columns, cave-like windows, and serpentine balconies decorated with thickets of wrought-iron vegetation. Undulating like the reflection of a stone sculpture in water, La Pedrera has a three-dimensional feel that goes beyond architecture; it doesn’t give the sense of having been constructed from building materials according to blueprints, but of having risen up from the depths of the ocean.
It would be impossible to photograph everyone going in the main door on Gràcia. There were six tours a day and a constant stream of tourists with cameras walking back and forth. I got up and went inside a music shop to see if I could spy on the Provença doorway from behind a stack of cassettes, but the windows facing the street were covered with posters. I bought a half-price cassette of Gregorian Chants from Medieval Transylvania and went back outside and crossed the street.
Both entrances were wide open so that ostensibly anyone could enter. But in order to actually get upstairs you would have to use an elevator located directly behind the portero’s desk.
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