Barcelona

by Robert Hughes

  The Boqueria stands at the edge of the Ramblas, which makes it easy for buyers to reach from the Old City but difficult for vendors, who with their carts and donkey loads of goods had to negotiate the crowded and constricted maze of the Raval.

  For any serious lover of food—which most Catalans aggressively are—there is no other place in the world quite like the Boqueria, that vast covered space crammed with stalls that display just about everything short of human flesh that could conceivably be eaten, from skinned rabbits (their moist eyes still peering reproachfully at the hardhearted shopper) to soft brown hills of newly shot but unplucked partridges, neatly tied fagots of fat white Girona asparagus, frozen packages of fiendishly expensive but irresistible angullas or baby eels. One stall sells twenty kinds of olives and ten of capers, another a dozen kinds of jamón Serrano, the cured mountain ham whose quality ranges all the way upstairs from good-ordinary to the exquisite, almost buttery pata negra, and jabugo. The central ring of the Boqueria is given over to fresh fish and shellfish in a thousand guises; a dozen stalls compete for the attention of those who want baccala or salt cod, that staple of Catalan cuisine; there are more kinds of sausage, fresh and cured, than there are poets in New Jersey, and their rich, fatty, smoky flavors induce deeper reveries. And this does not begin to enumerate the vegetables and fruit, all new, fresh, and at the top of their season. One would cross an ocean for the habitas or baby fava beans, and another for those small crisp infantas of the lettuce kingdom, the tightly clenched heads of the cogollons de Tudela which, cut in half lengthways, anointed with olive oil and topped with an x of not-too-salty anchovy fillets, make the best salad in the world. And then the cheeses. And the yogurts. And the herbs and, in season, the stupendous arrays of fresh mushrooms. And the Catalan badinage of the white-coated women behind the counters, the red-knuckled fishwives brandishing their enormous, glittering, crescent-shape choppers, which look medieval but, honed to a razor edge, are capable of dazzlingly precise feats of dissection. (Yours for about twenty-five dollars at one of the kitchenware shops along the edge of the Boqueria, though sneaking such a formidable weapon past the antiterrorist guards at the airport is your problem, too.) If there were a grocery, butcher, and fishmonger attached to the Garden of Eden, in which one could sample what terrestrial food tasted like before the fall of man, it would be something like the Boqueria. “Non si pasce in cibo mortale / Chi si pasce in cibo celeste,” sings Mozart’s Commendatore, rather snottily, to Don Giovanni; but personally, if I could get it at the Boqueria, I would be more than happy to keep nourishing myself on mortal food and let the holy manna go rot. Since Les Halles so tragically decamped from the center of Paris, there has been no publicly accessible food market in the world with quite the same character, variety, and beauty of produce as the Boqueria.

  All this is perhaps hard on the gastronomically inclined traveler, who may not cook in his or her hotel room. My own solution, a victimless crime in which I have not yet been detected, is always to take something back to New York; a fuet, say, or whip, one of those oxtail-thin sausages; a good lump of fresh Manchego cheese, or a kilo of jamón Serrano on the bone. And the person behind the counter in the Boqueria will always vacuum-wrap it for you in stout plastic, so that the airport dogs at Kennedy can’t get a scent.

  But I digress. Or do I? To me, food seems so entirely central to any experience of Barcelona that I cannot think of the city without it. Catalan food has a directness, an unfussed and fundamental virtue, that is hard to find elsewhere, except in Italy and certain parts of France. It is one of the world’s great cuisines, and although some recent celebrity chefs like Ferran Adria have volatilized it into the sort of nouvelle performance excess that food editors dote on, it is on the whole free from the kind of over-elaboration that makes cooking feel artsy and decadent. It has never forgotten its peasant and artisanal roots. A too “refined” paella, for instance, one without the cremada or burned undercrust where the rice met the iron, would be no paella at all. You know, when gazing fork in hand upon a butifarra—the fresh pork sausage of Catalunya—with its attendant white beans, that you are looking at the Truth and, better yet, on the point of cutting into its blistered and slightly blackened skin, that you are about to taste the Truth of sausagehood, too.

  An institution of a very different and somewhat less democratic kind also rose on the Ramblas in 1847, not far from the Boqueria, dedicated to the ears rather than the stomach. This was the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona’s opera house, the classical counterpart and predecessor to the Palau de la Música Catalana. It stands where a convent of Trinitarian friars had once been. And so one might continue. All in all, one may fairly say that Mendizábal saved the economic life, and to no small extent the cultural life, too, of the city. So is there a plaza named after him? A wide and noble street? Not so much as an alley, alas. For this we must thank the malignant influence of a vengeful Church. The ultraconservative clergy of nineteenth-century Barcelona would no more have consented to naming anything after the liberal confiscator of their property than the rabbinate of Jerusalem would have permitted a Goebbels Street. But there is a solitary little Bar Mendizábal in the Carrer del Junta del Comerç, right behind the Boqueria. Its fiercely socialist owner would not for a moment consider changing its name.

  The Bourbons’s great gift to Barcelona was the Ramblas, that sublime and raffish avenue whose name means, in the original Arabic, “riverbeds.” Its first form appears in a city map published in 1740—a wide, uneven, and slightly bent street running north-northeast from a point near the harborside Drassanes to a gate in the northern ramparts of the new muralles. It was merely the fossil, the filled-in bed, of Barcelona’s western stream, the Cagallel, which served both as moat and as sewer. By the eighteenth century this foul trickle was so clogged with rubbish and ordure that it was filled and driven underground, a burial it long continued to resist. But it emerged as a more or less straight avenue, very different in form to the intestinal windings of the Old City. This straightness was imposed by authority, which wanted a clear line of fire for its grapeshot in the event of riots and disturbances. It became the first true modern avenue in Catalunya, and very beautiful it is, with its double line of mottled, cream-trunked plane trees. Today, for most people, the Ramblas is Barcelona. Here are the flower stalls, bursting with gaudy color. (Catalans are not known for the subtlety of their flower arrangements.) Here are the tiendas selling birds, from finches and squeaking budgerigars to lugubrious-looking, slightly moth-eaten toucans with their enormous, saberlike bills. (Every so often one of the green Amazonian parrots, or more rarely one of the aras or red macaws, escapes from its cage and flies off across the city like a brightly plumed comet, to join the refugee colonies of other parrots whose ancestors likewise escaped from the Ramblas and now lurk, screeching and flapping, in the trees of the Parc de la Ciutadella.) Here are the “human statues” poised immobile on their crates, bizarre and infrangibly silent. Here, above all, are the crowds: workers, shoppers, gawking tourists, flaneurs, whores, and thieves, the rich and the wretched of the Earth, moving in unending streams and eddies up and down the sloping pavement of the Ramblas, across the huge mosaic decorations laid into the footpath by the assistants of Joan Miró decades ago, engaged in the ever serious process of manifesting themselves as Barcelonans, real or temporary. The Ramblas is and always will be one of the great, seedy, absorbing theaters of Spain, or for that matter of Europe.

  GIVEN BARCELONA’S PROPENSITY FOR COMMITTING ITSELF to the flames and then rising from them like some clumsily singed phoenix, it’s hardly surprising that ideological violence in one form or another has marked the city so deeply. It was a place where socialist theory and fantasy bit early and would always stay close to the surface, well into the twentieth century—as the civil war would show.

  One of the exemplary figures in the modernization of Barcelona—though hardly a typical one, being far too unusual and gifted a man to be called that—was an inventor named Narcis Monturiol. I had n
ever heard of him, of course, before spending time in the city. He had not, in fact, changed the physical face of the city at all.

  But one day in the mid-1970s, I was strolling along a narrow street full of antique shops in the Old City, when an oddity in a window stopped me. It was a model of a ship, but like no ship I had ever seen. It was about thirty inches long and made, precisely and with care, of brass and copper. Its general form was fishlike. Though it lacked fins it had a shallow cloven tail, which served both as rudder and propeller guard. It had no deck, but what looked like a primitive hemisphere of a conning tower surrounded by a railing. It had fish-eye portholes and a glass nose, and set into its hull was a quite large clock, about five inches in diameter. All this suggested that the curio had once been a model of a real craft of some kind, and that it had been well-enough known as an image to demand no special explanation.

  It sat on a plinth, which bore a darkened brass plate. It read, in Spanish: ICTÍNEO, PRODUCT OF THE GENIUS OF NARCIS MONTURIOL.

  This was worth a look.

  With some difficulty—I had no more than a smidgen of spoken Catalan back then—the shop owner conveyed to me, politely but unambiguously, that he could scarcely believe that I, seemingly an educated man despite my linguistic deficiencies, had never so much as heard of the great Monturiol, inventor of the Catalan submarine and, as such, the father of all later submarines. He recommended a visit to Plaça de Catalunya, at the top of the Ramblas, where I could gaze on the monument to Monturiol by the contemporary sculptor Josep Subirachs, best known as the sculptor-in-chief to the Sagrada. And sure enough, the monument was there, a bigger cousin of the brass submarine clock in the window of the antique shop, clockless of course, and poised in the act of swimming through a formalized bronze grotto.

  I thought of my (“my,” already!) submarine clock, and was filled with cupidity. I am not a collector. But occasionally something strikes me with its curiosity, its sheer oddity. I want, I want … and yet I didn’t hightail it back to the store that afternoon. Something, I forget what, got in the way. Maybe I wasn’t feeling aggressive enough to bargain, which all forasters (outsiders) should ruthlessly do. In any event, I didn’t go back for two days, and when I did the velvet-covered table on which Ictíneo had reposed was empty except for a couple of porcelain shepherds. Apparently someone else in Barcelona lusted after a submarine clock. Could there be two such people in a city of less than three million? Apparently so. I had lost my chance.

  Disconsolate, I decided to turn the knife in the self-inflicted wound by reading about Narcis Monturiol and the Ictíneo. It turned out to be a story of considerable pathos which casts a light—oblique, yes, but bright—on Barcelona itself. As an inventor, Narcis Monturiol i Estarrol (1819-1885) was not a successful hero, like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. He was altogether interesting, though, as a failed hero: one of the potential gods of early technology who didn’t quite make it, despite a certain indubitable genius.

  Nineteenth-century Catalans took vast pride in being first in any technology. And if not first in the world, which they never were, or in Europe, which seldom happened, then first in Spain—a lot less difficult, since Spanish technology and practical science were so far behind that of most other countries.

  By the 1860s Barcelona was first among the industrialized cities of Spain, with twice the manufacturing capacity as all the rest of the country put together.

  This was due to textiles. Barcelona was fourth in the world in the manufacture of cotton goods, after England, France, and the United States. In Spain, the city had a monopoly of machine spinning and weaving, and was the Manchester of the south. This mechanization came from what the Spanish called the selfactina or self-acting machine loom, which came into use in Spain in 1832, half a century after its invention in England. By 1861 Catalunya had 9,695 such looms, and their use fostered Barcelona’s second industry, mechanical engineering. By the end of the 1840s the big cotton and silk companies of Barcelona included La Fabril Igualadina (1847), La Espana Industrial (1847), Güell, Ramis i Cia (1848), and the Batlló Brothers (1849). By 1862, the engines of the Catalan textile industry accounted for more than a third of Spain’s steam power; raw cotton was Catalunya’s biggest import; and the industrial barons, especially the Güells and Batllós, would be the emergent patrons of a new architectural style.

  The first daily newspaper to be printed in Spain (and the second in Europe after the Times) was El Brusi, the old Diario de Barcelona. The train from Barcelona to Sarrià, opened in 1863, was the second metropolitan railroad (after London’s) in the world. The first city-to-city train in Spain connected Barcelona to Mataró in 1848. Barcelona had the country’s first cinema and its first public phone, and ran its first airline (to Majorca).

  And being the industrial leader of Spain, it was also the chief incubator of labor unrest in southern Europe.

  Its politics were riven by anarchism and terrorism. Given the enormous power of the Catholic Church and its embrace of the most right-wing elements in Spanish capitalism, leftist ideology—particularly anarchism, which appealed to disillusioned young Catholics because of its promise of irrational, “pie in the sky” justice—had the ground prepared for it: The last years of the nineteenth century in Barcelona unrolled to the sound of terrorist bomb explosions, and the Setmana Tragica or Tragic Week of 1909 in which, once again, the city was burned by its citizens, made Barcelona the world capital of politically inspired violence. It also hosted Europe’s first Workers’ Congress, staged the first general strike south of the Pyrenees, and so on.

  One strand in the Catalan left, however, was inherently peaceful and wished only to secede from capitalism and form its own ideal society, inside Spain if possible, outside if necessary. Its spiritual godfather was a Frenchman, Étienne Cabet (1785-1856). Prosecuted for publishing a socialist sheet, he fled to England in 1834, and there came in contact with the benignly utopian manufacturer and social theorist Robert Owen. He labored in that hatchery of a million schemes, the British Museum Reading Room, devouring texts on republican brotherhood: François-Emile Babeuf, Charles Fourier, Owen himself. Cabet was not a mad visionary like Fourier. His eccentricity took the mild form of seeing Christ’s Sermon on the Mount for what it clearly was: an early socialist tract. It was based on “gentleness and charity.” “We find in it the source of all the modern systems that now shake the world … there is no gulf between the social teachings of the Gospels and those of socialism.”

  The result of this belief was Cabet’s text A Voyage to Icaria, 1839, in which he laid out a plan for an ideal society (Icaria) in the form of imagined dialogues between an English aristocrat (based on Owen) and a young, exiled artist (Cabet). To most people today, Cabet’s Icaria would be a hellish place, a dystopia without free will, where everything from diet to publishing is controlled by the state, and no irritants, especially no byproducts of the competitive instinct, are allowed. Cabet’s vision of intellectual life in Icaria is like an even more sinister version of the toxic vogue for political correctness on American campuses, or the witless loathing of elitism in Australian journalism in the late twentieth century.

  Cabet’s ideas were ignored in France. But a small number of Catalan intellectuals were excited by them, and his chief disciple among these Catalans in the late 1840s and ’50s was an attractive figure—Narcis Monturiol, socialist, editor, mechanical inventor, and pioneer of the submarine, who hailed from the fishing port of Figueres and is still regarded there as its favorite son.

  In 1847 he and a few other earnest progressives formed an Icarian group in Barcelona. Its anthem ran:

  Desde hoy todos los hombres son hermanos

  ni siervo se conoce, ni seño.

  Marchemos, O marchemos Icarianos,

  tendiendo el estandarte del Amor!

  From today, all men are brothers,

  there will be no slave or master

  Let us march, O march onward, Icarians,

  holding up the banner of Love!

  “Th
e Universal Era,” declared the group’s news sheet, “begins with the foundation of Icaria. January 20, 1848, is the moment fixed for the regeneration of the World.”

  This was the date on which Étienne Cabet sailed for America to found an Icarian community on land purchased sight unseen from a real estate shark, northwest of New Orleans, near Shreveport, Louisiana. It was sand and swamp, and only mosquitoes and venomous snakes flourished there. Monturiol did not go with the first group, believing that twenty thousand people would join it. Only sixty-nine did. Some, guessing what lay before them, committed suicide. The remainder trekked north to Nauvoo, Illinois, and founded a new settlement there, which lasted a few more years. Monturiol never got to join them. Harried by his resentful disciples, Cabet died of heartbreak in Nauvoo in 1856.

  That was the end of Icaria, which survived only as the name given to an industrial slum in Barcelona. Around 1900 the city fathers renamed it Poblenou (“New Town”). One broad street, which not inappropriately stops dead at the gates of the Old Cemetery, retained the name of Avinguda d’Icaria. Then in 1992 the Olympic Village, built for the games in Barcelona, was named Nova Icaria—an extraordinarily silly notion, since Olympic contests are about nothing but competition, which the original Icarians had sworn to eliminate from their future world.

  So the image of invention and industrial newness floated over Catalunya like a liberating angel. Inventing the submarine belonged to such an order of things, whether the submarine really worked or not. Monturiol was not a bit discouraged by the evaporation of Icaria. It just put the emphasis back where his talents required it to be: in exploration through technology. “The poles of the Earth,” he declared, “the depths of the oceans, the upper regions of the air: these three conquests are undoubtedly reserved for the near future … such is the task I have taken on.”