by Edie Meidav
And so in Barcelona with my guitar, the next morning I took Pierre up on his invitation and found him in the shade by the stairs leading up to a non-Gaudí cathedral in the Barri Gòtic, the gothic neighborhood. Of contemporary songs, I had Neil Young’s simple “Heart of Gold” down pat—I crossed the oceans for a heart of gold—which I taught Pierre, and also “Cinnamon Girl” with its strange string-tuning. He knew enough to teach me “Whiskey.”
We were an odd pair, a pair of convenience or congruence, playing outside La Catedral. Even when I was just tuning up, clearly no one’s adept, people would toss coins into my open blue plush guitar case. Either those passersby felt pity or recalled their own youthful foolish hijinks and selves: their coins’ arcs seemed markers of such recognition. Sometimes when a coin dropped, the passersby appeared to know something I didn’t about how this moment might look to me later: enviable or lost, the beginning or end of something, none or all of that, but surely awake.
Or else they were just in the habit of throwing—coins, stones, who cared? Hear music and you throw, much as my daughters, in Barcelona on this last trip of mine, always wished to coin-toss toward the most random supplicant, the beggar, the cartoonist, the human making himself into a monument about stasis.
Return
We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are—as far as we know—the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself. I don’t know that, but we’re made of the same stuff that stars are made of, or that floats around in space. But we’re combined in such a way that we can describe what it’s like to be alive, to be witnesses. Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell other things. I think being alive is responding.
—Mark Strand
This winter we came back to Barcelona and I say we because those coin-throwing daughters and my husband came, all supported by a different if equally genial grant which, in this case, required me to see as much of the contemporary art and literary scene as possible so as to better understand how sectarian tensions were reflected in the cultural production of the city, or some agglomeration of all those highly academic nouns. To put it most directly, if I could expand my international vista, my teaching would improve. If I could just get a wider, if more specific, view of life right now in a corner of the world rapidly molting, I would be better. That was the grant’s idea, a giant suckling head offered up on a gilded plate, apple in its mouth, ready for consumption. I cannot make fun of it, or I can: I proposed it and we ate the apple.
We came, together as a family, the idea being that we would be together and I would work in the stolen hours and then they would leave and I would work even more in earnest. That was the idea.
The vision that had first inspired writing the grant had included this: I had come across a postcard of Parc Güell, Gaudí’s playful park, one which you may have visited, or perhaps you’ve seen its image: a series of mosaic-covered benches twinkling in the sun, broadcasting all the playfulness of the mosaic self you too might know in such a place. I had the thought of bringing both daughters but especially the youngest, prone to architectural construction, to such a place: Gaudí’s conflation of imagery, his ability to bring together paradoxes, the biomorphic with the gaudy structural—forgive the pun, but it occurs also in Spanish, in a different form—it could inspire revolutions.
As an organism, my family sometimes feels as if it is a mobile artists’ colony, those moments when I realize that each of us works on projects near one another: my mate sketching, the youngest involved in elaborate tiny doll dramas, the eldest reading or sewing, the way I might be pecking at a book. Some mates and families do best with projects and the world of responsibility, say, building a table together, organizing camping gear; while we seem to thrive away from more extrinsic responsibilities in some kind of dreamy flow, and so we looked for ways to make my research part of the moment being together. I was to see Gaudí to know how current artists departed from him, the Gaudí I’d never seen much of in that bohemian busking past, and the wealth of this created a broad enough mission. At noon one day, we bought tickets for the next day to the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s unwieldy masterpiece, the vast unfinished cathedral which these days, in overcrowded, post-Olympics Barcelona, inspires lines of WWII-spared descendants snaking around the corner, a mix of Spaniards, Japanese, German, and French busloads descending with cameras to document that they too have been here and then here, hordes about whom locals complain, though not wishing to look their own gift horse in the mouth: visitors photograph Barcelona’s quaintness constantly, at this site, and then in this other site, too, half-attending to specificity while ignoring how much any particular in a photo album is a subset of the generic. And anyway why is it that we need to feel that our trajectory and vision is singular? Why must we feel our march across the earth is unique?
That day, the Sagrada Familia ticket-buying was a way station: we were heading toward the goal of the trip, in other words, the picture on the postcard, the Parc Güell that had inspired the grant that had inspired our long flight, a strange circuitous spice-route flight through Istanbul toward Barcelona.
On the subway to the park, my older daughter noted how many Barcelonas coincided: the cleaner Barcelona, the part of Gràcia in which we were staying, made up of planned hexagonal grids and luxe stores, as well as the Barcelona of the subways, a dirtier zone. A perfect transvestite flashed advertisement-white smiles at the kids, but the train was too crowded for anyone to note this.
At the Lesseps train station, we might have bought tickets for our more immediate entry to the park but, drawn to escape the subway, the kids sashayed forward and we ran to catch up. We followed the line of people moving inexorably like a sullen river out of Conrad along the sidewalks of the upper Gràcia neighborhood and up the huge hill toward Parc Güell. The faces reminded me of a little-known Kinnell poem about joggers which I recall, correctly or not, as having this line: Their faces tell there is a hell and they will reach it.
It seemed wise that someone head more quickly uphill to get our tickets, so I told my family we would meet at the top, where, to my surprise, I found a line to end all lines, a formidable line made up of sublines, conduits, diverters, line administrators, soothsayers, graphs, maps, timetables, and ropes, the line itself a kind of destination. Of course, this was Christmas week, and on another week the sublines and conduits might not have existed; perhaps we might have been able to enter. But we were there then, this was our day to see this postcard-documented place, and though the line’s grandeur took my breath, I was ready to stand, a willing soldier in the trenches of tourism.
In its way, the line was not unlike the art piece I would see later in the week, alone, at the Arts Santa Mònica exhibit at the base of Las Rambla: a pillar covered with tiny mirrors which you, like a package tourist, could place in picturesque spots, at the top of a mountain, say. An old-fashioned selfie pillar: you would see yourself reflected against the landscape from many angles.
So in that monumental line I stood while my kids and mate kept hoofing it up the hill, still some half hour away. We had one phone between us. I borrowed someone’s to tell the family how to find me in the line. Some lines ask you to enter what we as a family had seen while living in Cuba, the Communist line which asks of its adherents a kind of existential putting-on-hold. You forget yourself and must put yourself on hold.
But this line was of a very different order, seeking to keep you alert, with up-to-the-minute dispatches. Important representatives of the government holdings were dispatched in their blue smocks to answer questions about the line. Only so many people could walk the hallowed grounds at a time.
It is probably fair to say that all of us in line, if in different terms, had come to what we had th
ought would be sublime in order to dislodge ourselves. My memory, from having invited my sister to this same park years earlier, was that there had been no admission fee, no line, and that only a few desultory types wandered the terraces of Parc Güell. But surely my memory lacked the permanence of a monument or even the structure of this line. Every few minutes one of the blue-smocked people would come around to our crook in the line to flip a sign. Had we gotten our tickets at the subway station, we would’ve been able to enter at 3:30. But now it was 4:00, and then 4:15, 4:30, 4:45, 5:00—the time anyone waiting in line could enter. In winter, darkness would fall at 6:00 if not 5:30. Grumbles rippled backward. All this wait and for only an hour, a half hour, of witnessing.
As Elizabeth Bishop asks: Should we have stayed home and thought of here?
My mate and kids would still not make it up the hill for the next twenty minutes. Though I was bookless, a romantic tragedy started unfolding right in front of me. There stood the kind of French woman who in her youth had been, perhaps, a seeker of sun and men, a bouncy scamp on Greek islands or the budget Costa Brava holiday. It could seem odd that her neck and back alone told me this but I would have bet my cherished place in line on the certainty. She lacked the lithe angled presence Americans associate with the French, the one that inspires all the diet books: hers was the face and body of a lusty northern peasant in the fields, well-haunched while threshing grain to feed the village. For her own Parc Güell moment, she had encased herself in tight wide jeans, boots with a furry lined top hinting at childhood’s sentimental teddy bears, and a broad-shouldered leather jacket, cracked in its seams, over which a dark blue hood flopped. I linger on the clothes because none of their pretense or faux civilized casualness did away with the strong animal presence they enhanced. She had a tremendous head of curly protoblonde hair over a broad red northern face, seamed and cracked as her jacket, teeth pretending to no special mercantilist intervention or childhood abundance, but a mouth that smiled, ready for pleasure, at her pale Spaniard.
The Spaniard escorting her was a short man with the black hair and white skin of a courtier, maybe a decade younger, also in a black jacket if one more unctuous. So considerate, so courtly in his attentions, he bestowed upon her all that some women crave from their mates: it almost took my breath away to watch the performance of such exquisite sensitivity, such fatherly attention to her every shifting discomfiture.
From the display, it seemed they had only recently met—a bar or disco? a drunken ferry ride?—and perhaps only the night before: from the way they laughed a half beat too readily, each made clear how wildly fantasies spun for both.
All this observation might sound like charlatanism of the purest order and surely some part of it is. My first job, age twelve, was to read palms with a friend in Berkeley’s Walnut Square, at which age I found it strangely gratifying that adults would say, ah, really, how do you know so much about me? And perhaps such dangerous gratification, the tendrils of the potential knowing of others’ realities, equips or damages a person enough that she thinks she really should travel to a place like Barcelona from which she can learn the world. That if the outer contours of identity were really that transparent, that porous, from such damage, you might be forgiven for thinking being an artist would be a good thing, the artist as code for traveler. Both carry the same thing: a curiosity about others that makes one want to take the first step out the door, because otherwise, why not stay in the contours of the self and never head to Barcelona?
You and I, we travel because of our curiosity, but is it curiosity about what the place might be or who you might become in such an imagined space?
In that endless line, the Frenchwoman basked in the attentions of her solicitous compañero. His French was enough for him to have gotten by with foreigners before, a sweet, lispingly sufficient French. Tu l’aimes le froid—? Mais si. A laugh. At any gap in their conversation, at the point into which doubt might flood, they would plug all off with a hug, a reminder of what they had known the night before: physical rapprochement their ultimate sealer. Plug it up, push it in—the tactic would work until that exact plug would no longer be sufficient.
And I kept wondering: what does he want from her?
Though it seemed clear. She traded up in one domain while he did the same in another. As Hemingway has one of his characters say, early in my friend’s beloved The Sun Also Rises, everything is an exchange of values. In a post-austerity country, the Spaniard could use her relative wealth, mobility, or help. And she—understanding some vitality may have been lost on the altar of hedonism, lost in some plebe job—she could use some fun, all of it an equation older than Colette, going back to the time before Potiphar’s wife.
She, meanwhile, was keen on asking questions about his job. He did something that required both motors and public presentation. In America he would have been a used car salesman, speaking with the assumed dignity of someone who knows others might look down on him as little more than an aid to their plans or, worse, a monkey wrench. Oui, oui, mon travail, he said, yes, my job, and then sought to clarify, briefly, particulars important only to him and his petit microcosm, not lingering, knowing with masculine instinct she probably didn’t care one bit about it other than wanting to track future prospects, geographic commitments, class.
At this point I would’ve bet not only my place in line but also the price of my entire family’s entry to Parc Güell (which seemed fairly stiff for something which Gaudí had intended as an inducement to the bourgeoisie to enjoy la naturaleza) that she had been a party girl but the party had ended seven to ten years earlier. Still not so long that she hadn’t forgotten its savor. She kept glancing back at everyone behind her, with the force of an urban rat tearing into a hunk of meat in an alleyway, as if that gaze said: older, sure, but let me just enjoy this, it is mine to have. And also, a softer look after: is it such a crime? Another look at all of us behind her said: I know you are looking, and really, it is no crime, I need to have my fun, don’t even cast the first stone, you have no idea how bad (monotone, subservient) the rest of my life is.
I looked elsewhere. Perhaps their age difference was greater than I’d guessed, given the scouring headlight of that gaze. That said, I strangely wanted to assure her, to enter their story: I did think it good she was having fun. Except I could not help feeling a little worried, such became my overinvolvement in her petit drame, that her Spaniard with his courtly car-selling ways was probably using her, that perhaps her mobility or whatever little sum had enabled her to bake her young skin could be enough to lift him out of hard-times Spain, out of the car lot or grease-monkey world. Oui, oui, mon travail. He wanted to be somewhere other than where he was, perhaps to be someone other, and was no different from any of us in that line at Parc Güell: travelers having come far uphill for a vision. Is it fair to say that most of the time we are all always tourists, our bodies on loan, our time to take in anything so short? And the longer we stand waiting, the shorter our time will be. Let them both travel then, in line and out, let all of us travel, let us just finally get in to our destination.
It seemed almost certain that with his warm eyes, not-terrible French and his extreme attentiveness he would light-finger her heart and then take some of her material belongings: this increasingly was my conclusion. They needed very little interaction, as our line caterpillared forward, about who was paying, already her purse was in hand, ready to fork forward the combined entry fee, though they would only have, like me, an hour before the sun set. He acted with supreme clarity as if he ignored the purse. While he took very seriously his position as native guide. As the line continued to snake, he kept whispering to her, or rather speaking as if in a whisper, as if only to her, about how things were proceeding: I will make this terrain plain for you.
Parc Güell, continued
The family had come uphill, we had reunited, I left my French tragedienne and her male courtesan. As a family, we strolled the last bandwidths of sun, the pathways of the upper park awaiting ou
r entry into the lower park bedecked by Gaudí. In the upper park we heard a joyful dreadlocked ska band, saw a Serbian silhouette artist quickly cut paper profiles; as if some reminder of Pierre and me, we watched a lonely man from northern India make, with amazing skill, a rag doll belly-dance to his CD player until he sat, dejected, head in hand, at the lack of coins thrown his way. Mainly Pakistanis and northern Indians lined the upper esplanades, selling one of three things: necklaces, castanets, or themselves, defining the attraction with their narrowed range of wares as much as Spain, the park, the attraction defined all of us.
Once our hour arrived, 5:15, the time at which we could get into the lower part requiring admission, darkness swallowed most of the hill on which it perches. The distant city glimmered in the last of the day. What could we see if we only have half an hour or more before it was dark? The laundrywoman, answered a kind guard, see the salamander. The laundrywoman being a hearty stone fixture at the end of a terra-cotta wall, but as I looked at her she seemed to be weeping for us. Not far from her was splayed a mosaic salamander over which package tourists themselves splayed out in lizard fashion but one by one. Each stopped to pose, with a space of politesse carved around them, so that it would seem as if they alone had happened on a charming spot no one else had discovered.
Later in the trip I would see this exact photographic etiquette replicated on the rooftop of Gaudí’s beloved La Pedrera, an apartment building commissioned by a couple, high in the bourgeoisie. The rooftop’s famous chimneys and forms play against the boxlike roofs of the rest of the city, but certain refugees, heterogenous and hence lacking codes, bunched up and grumbled at the other aliens whose code stated it was a good idea to halt others from walking up and down the pathways so that the photo of a single person against the one ideal landscape could be taken, a sort of inverted Caspar David Friedrich tactic. When I look at my own photos from the visit to the Pedrera, very near the apartment in which we were staying, I see increasing disorientation. My last picture is of my thumb. Much better, in a way, to look up at the Pedrera from the street or the courtyard of the neighboring, free, and underpopulated Fundació Suñol, where you see a few unusual rooftop sentinels looking over you and also have no one’s idea of the ideal spot as the antiromantic scrim over your own.