by Edie Meidav
In the Parc Güell, at the salamander, the salamanders posing for the others were hoping to post their photo publicly, believing it added to the capital of their being, given that others would note their curatorial eye and unique experience.
To a fault, probably, I had never been drawn to movie stars whom everyone loved, having found perverse pride in finding beautiful what I thought the masses did not. And in this curatorial eye, there must live a double infatuation: one loves one’s ability to pick up form from background, to see behind a stone, to shine a light into a neglected space.
And so, it seemed to me, was also true for my two daughters back at the Parc Güell. Too many other people had come to revel in Gaudí; they did not want to take in any more Gaudí. No more gaudiar, as the Spanish verb has it.
In past travels, I used to like to come to a semiarbitrary place in which I roosted, getting to know its habits, and had done this in a few locales: a village off a tobacco plantation in the mountain country of Sri Lanka, a medieval village in the Pyrenees. The serendipity of insight arising from this habit made me prefer it: more interesting salamanders seemed to crawl out from unforeseen rocks. Whereas this adult travel felt different: there were proper nouns to amass, architects to know, guidebooks to consult. And the very idea of a priori, of being a particular tourist who comes to see a specific thing for a specific reason, lacks much of the grand discovery of youth.
After ten minutes in the park, the sun still sufficient to show my youngest’s face, I kneeled down with her, trying to read her mood. You want to go? I said.
It was true; she wanted to leave soon after we entered.
One definition of dramatic irony: every step you take toward your goal pushes you farther from your truest goal. And to her good credit, at seven, she saw the joke and laughed: we had come for this place, such a long trip to Barcelona, partly for her. The postcard and fantasy, the arrangements, the trip and wait, only to arrive and, ten minutes into its heart, the place released us from its spell. And why? Some imagined truer (happier, more comfortable, more alive) self awaited her anywhere but here. The irony, the irony.
We moved like victors through the sullen photographing crowd, jubilant and freed, liberated from the need to add to any quantity of hordes or the need to take in the moment. Speeding away in the cab, our driver opined warmly about the imminence of Catalunyan independence, all of us happy to free ourselves from the hordes dictating our movements.
And the French tourist and her Spaniard? Last I saw them, they leaned against a mosaic wall, trying their best in the dimming day to take, on her better phone, a selfie that would let them recall their Barcelona moment in the best light.
Speeding toward an end
There is another premise of travel that when you are about to leave a place you suddenly meet everyone interesting whom you should have met earlier.
Why should this be so? You abandon your ideas about what you came to find, you expand, and then you are fully in the place as if you are ready to die.
I only partly found the Barcelona from my pitiable-busker days, the Barcelona I thought I had known, toward the end, when I rented a bike and the bicycle let me take in the city, riding among hell-bent bicyclists who loved the cuneiform dotted into city streets and pedestrian esplanades, obeyed by locals but ignored by visitors, the bike paths a smart urban plan letting you cheerfully go all the way from the mountain to the sea or through vast swaths of mercantile enterprise while not having to push through crowds.
The man from whom I rented the bicycle had been a racecar driver but had taken over this shop which his grandfather had owned. He was surprised by the mobility of Americans: the global radar-darting across a map cannot be wholly comprehensible to someone who opens a business in a shop his grandfather has owned. After motorcars, he had decided that it was better to know the city freely, on a bicycle, and surely there was something of the adrenaline-laced motorcar-racing enterprise in biking in Barcelona, fleeing the masses while knowing yourself as part of the arteries of the city.
In that biking moment, I considered what the skateboarders knew, so serious outside the contemporary art museum in Barcelona’s Raval neighborhood, a spot famous for skateboarders, such that a film was made about them: the fun of speed in a known trajectory, speed itself becoming the perception. Speed alone can be the eros, and never mind the helmetless thanatos, the bloody spill I saw one skateboarder take, or the four-year-old long-haired boarder so gung-ho on impressing his father he jumped a wall to disastrous effect.
A last note
Where is everyone going on a Sunday in Barcelona? They linger slowly, go for a walk, they go to dar un paseo, they don a beret and go for their errands. People’s gazes are drawn to the stores advertising 50 percent sales after the New Year. Women wear uncomfortably high heels, young men push shopping baskets and empty strollers, and no one has very big families. This is Europe of 2015. People are having fewer children, or when they have more than one, they are poor or they had twins or they have them all at once, close to one another, to be done with it, and surely demographic data to both discount and support all this could be found.
What is it to find you no longer have Serendib, that mythical island toward which the Dutch sailed, ending up in Sri Lanka, from which the idea of serendipity comes? What is it to fix any point on the map? Perhaps this is what Elizabeth Bishop means when she talks about being in one place, thinking of there instead of getting here. We must have a biological urge to retain an illusion of Valhalla, to keep escape our option, even if here be dragons.
To bring my family here meant, in a sense, to slay that girl who had been an earnest dreamy busker outside that cathedral with that French trompettiste. To show them something of the old, to induct the next generation into the charms of travel. My older daughter, eleven, loved walking anywhere, and then stopping to choose tapas or a croissant, imagining a future life that would include only these elements: walking, exploring, eating. My younger daughter found elements of travel overwhelming, especially the crowds that made one-on-one perception harder. Perhaps part of returning to a place is that you discover how much less self-infatuated you are than when you were all blind potential.
I write this from the Fifth Avenue of Barcelona, not far from La Pedrera, with only a few more days to go before returning home. The faces of the Barcelonans, walking by in pairs as if exiled from Noah’s boat and forced into lives of endless consumption, getting and spending, look weary, but at least they are together: in this city they understand not only walking but also the beauty of walking together. Spanish men and Japanese women, a common pairing, pass by: it is, as Robert Hughes fulminates in his magisterial, cranky book, a city taken over by Californian and Japanese tastes.
Mothers and daughters wear identical boots. One mother strokes her daughter’s vest, produced by sweat factories in Asia. Dogs, humorous and spotted, drag owners along. Servitude to the bourgeois ideal, to Kinder, Küche, Kirche far from the madding crowd, surrounds me. People do not treat children here with southern warmth but more with the watchful, warm regard you might have toward a particular investment: often parents walk by, anxious but purposely unheeding as a child cries behind them. These children study their parents for cues, while waiters watchful for more business, wearing jeans originally fashioned in San Francisco at the time of the gold rush, try luring the unheeding parents in for an adult café. Everyone has a phone and an attitude toward bags and belongings.
This is a neighborhood which sees people having a lonely air at night as they let themselves into their apartment buildings hung with tasteful art. Certain hours bring unhappiness, people trying to find succor. They belong, they don’t question, but they are exhausted from enjoyment while trying to move ahead. In luxurious neighborhoods, signs of Europe’s austerity measures are inverted but somehow live on in body parts: on display in the length of a women’s legs, paraded in elaborate tights, or proudly displayed in boots and fetish objects. Couples comfortable with each other still have lo
ts of opining and creature comforts to share within themselves and with other couples: you very much feel Marx’s idea of the bourgeois in this part of Barcelona, where you do not find package tours but you find the urban French, those coming to seek in their travels, so often, a place similar to home.
At a local exhibit of the photographer Salgado, people bunched up to look at the Kuikuros’ monkey-spine photos, Salgado showing us the extreme areas of the earth where the details vary, but as the gallery-goers left, in their self-satisfied, weary faces sizzled the death of dreams. If you talk with them, they are unfailingly present, helpful, but the friendliness has its boundaries. And yet what was it, after all, that I was trying to induct my children into?
A true final thought
In my last sight of Pierre the busker, he was awake in my bed, shirtless and smiling like a smaller Jean-Paul Belmondo. I was leaving for the day; we would meet up later; I think I was answering some message from the publicidad agency. Faites comme vous êtes chez vous, he said jokingly before I left, feel at home. We had not slept together, we had merely slept next to each other, compañeros of the camino, fellow buskers, followers of separate romantic myths, survivors of La Catedral, talking all night. When I came back a few hours later, he was gone, as was the camera my father had given me and perhaps some other important items.
What had he robbed me of? Is it not always safer to have stayed home and thought of here? There was nowhere to send that bolus of violence, the asymmetry of the letter his theft sent me. I fled then, late in the day, heading to the train station. I took the train partway to Annecy, which would have been his next destination, and then turned back. I would never reach Annecy and its beautiful lake, as I would never reach many beautiful places: Should I have stayed in them and thought of home? Instead I went on to follow the more organized idea of the rest of the summer, the green, taking the boat to Cork, making my way through crowds filling the streets for a U2 concert, and from there to Yeats’ grave in Sligo, keeping the Barcelona I knew a similarly buried memory. What burial song could accompany the loss of the romantic dream?
In an alleyway on my truly last day, just outside the cabinet of curiosities near the Catedral, a museum of solicitude, a guitar player named Justi with a saddened wise way about him and a cheerful sax player from Mexico City do what they can to sing Justi’s songs into a mic. Up the cobblestoned street comes a gypsy girl in socks with great glee and a not-terrible voice. She takes over the mic which harmonizes a tone one third above her voice and, so augmented, she belts out the chorus of a dispensable pop anthem while Justi and his Mexican accompanist smile, trying to silence her with grace, as now they can take up public space solely by dispensation of the town’s bureaucracy, which has started to assign buskers two-hour intervals. And the gypsy girl with her libido for song could ruin it for Justi and his pal, because she cannot just sing into the mic but must do so loudly, her song of self. Clearly this exact charade has been enacted plenty of times: she has them and their polite smiles do little to fend her off. How come you don’t let me sing with you? she keeps saying, just a little. Like all of us, she wants that interpenetration of realms that a port city allows: gypsy become busker become tourist with family. But she must stay in her role, their kind firmness succeeds in shushing her, while the cabinet of curiosities museum and its oversolicitous guards await me. Long before the guards think it appropriate, I flee the museum, which, with an enchanting but overwhelming collection, makes me drown in the stuff of Barcelona. As I walk back out into that square emptied of Justi, his sax-player, the bestockinged gypsy girl, this last day returns Barcelona to me: the perverse cheer of travel for which there is no real guidebook. First you must pass the chaos of uninvited loudness before entering an enclave of the professionally overfriendly. As you head through an open passageway, admire the last of the day’s light slanting. So that you might again appreciate the generosity of travel, note that some random mute might sidle right up to you: toothless, he wants to hand you a paper napkin folded into a rose, with, this time, no coin needed. Inside the rose the questions: to travel well, must you leave behind the self you thought you were coming to see? Once you had within you someone who knew how to appreciate, to live in the moment, walking to see the sea, someone who thought less and lived more. Is Serendib the place where the dragons in the corner of the map assault you most with questions about the self? Is our greatest travel the one we make through time?
Forget the mute beggar. As Bishop asks: Why, why must we have our dreams and also fulfill them? Stay naked for one more second. Is it not enough just to have the dream? Take Barcelona.
DAUGHTER OF CALIFORNIA
Is there no change of death in paradise?
—Wallace Stevens
Pitch dirt onto a parent’s dead body and in that second understand that bits of dirt just became as much part of the parent as any other bit you might hold onto: a snapshot, a clock with bent hands, shoes still bearing the imprint of feet, ties scented with stale aspiration. We mortals grasp. In my father’s last minute as a living, breathing, incorporated entity, he was on the phone with me—or rather a nurse I’ll call Bob held the phone up to my father’s ear.
Before my last conversation with my father last September, the first of many unilateral discussions ever since, I had fallen asleep next to my three-year-old, helping her get to bed, a custom probably far too common in our house with its tilt toward entropy.
This house: it is situated in the kind of town for which Manhattanites leave the grid. Faces radiant, they come to trip over our uneven sidewalks, aquiver with the possibility of serendipity and rustication. Obedient to hebdomadal divisions, they rise for their upstate sabbath fully pagan, rousting in ancient corporeal nostalgia: antiques and wine, jam, farmers’ markets, holiday festivals, round bread, any ritual useful in making sense of time, not to mention the oddity of toting around a body bearing desire and all its malfunctions.
My father, a geophysicist, would have remarked less on the Manhattan tourists and more on the old granite of upstate New York, its igneous intrusive, so different from the endless metamorphic slop and shift of soft Californian plates in which sections of oceanside cliff change overnight, where if a tsunami won’t get you, a shark will.
This same scientist once stood in his office, an old, almost condemned Art Deco building in an Oakland not yet refurbished by Jerry Brown’s idealism. Under and around him the great earthquake of 1989 terrorized the earth. In a building not up to code in its seismic retrofitting, there my father stood under an antique chandelier and not under a doorframe as all Californian schoolchildren learn to do early in primary school, nor under a desk or table, but keeping his balance on the rolling earth.
From timing the swings of that potentially lethal lamp, my father factored the P and S waves on the surface of the land and in this way estimated the geographic navel of the earthquake, its epicenter. Later he was pleased not so much to have survived without a scratch, given that the quake figured 6.9 on the Richter scale and caused scads of devastation, but rather more tickled that his knowledge of California fault lines and mathematics had positioned the epicenter accurately, some fifty-six miles away on the coast of Santa Cruz.
The night of his death, while half sleeping in New York, the night that started a period of not just unilateral conversation but unknowable maps, I heard my husband say: I got a call. Your father’s dying. This time it’s real.
For years this father, half bon vivant and half scientist, had been creeping farther and farther out onto an isthmus of abstraction. I found it easiest to understand the clouds that increasingly populated his watery blue eyes and his similarly aqueous mind as some brilliant philter the body seeped into one’s brain as a way to soften the fear of dying.
My father loved putting on a brave show. Despite his early years in Israel that had made him a chalutznik, yet another pioneer taught that men should sport only fur but no sensitivity, like all of us he had his favorite talismans against fear and the frequency of
their apparition could show even a casual observer how afraid he really was. His military posture, for one, with its rigid grace, which made his bearded self look at, say, a party—this was a man who loved parties—like a blue-eyed Lincoln reconfigured as your average broad-shouldered lieutenant. He would sit smiling and upright as if to say: I am here, I claim this spot on the mobile earth, nothing threatens me, I am ready for pleasure.
Another talisman against fear would be one of his favorite morning songs, a kabbalistic melody whose words, translated from Hebrew, told him that all the world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to fear (the passage from life to death). In his long, stretched-out dying, he showed a survivor’s tenacity, his final talisman: if theoretically he wanted to die, in reality he found it hard to leave the party.
We the living become quick adepts in our trafficking in the jargon of meds which, in our modern-day business of dying, act as a professional undertaker, fake in their helpfulness, words that slither and whisper and prompt us alongside our slow processionals toward a funeral.
Or you could say we become a kind of snake swallowing the elephant of death, à la the illustration in the early pages of The Little Prince which shows the elephant bulging inside the boa constrictor.
Therefore, to use the jargon our family so obediently swallowed: for months prior to the flash and siren of the last ambulance taking him to the last hospital, my father could be found in a skilled nursing facility, an infelicitous phrase which always made me wonder, what, as opposed to that other facility known for its staff so judiciously unskilled?