We flew from New York in coach, the plane packed like a tuna can: an ordeal for a 64-year-old man with a right leg still not healed from the five fractures it had sustained in an auto accident four years earlier. But the prospect of getting to Barcelona made that unimportant. What did matter was that once again I was off to my favorite city in Europe, or the world. For the twentieth time? The thirtieth? Long ago, I lost count.
You are lucky if, not too late in life, you discover a city other than your birthplace which becomes a true hometown. You may not think of your birthplace as your hometown. Certainly I don’t think of Sydney that way. I would be sad not to see its blue, many-lobed harbor again, but I know (insofar as anyone can see the future through the prism of desire) that I shall never live there, that returning there forever would be neither an adventure nor a fulfillment. It is too far away, at least from me. Why should patriotism have been fixed for you when you were a fetus? I claim the right to choose what I love, and that includes cities. You may not wish to repudiate your origins (certainly I don’t), but you must embrace what you prefer. Forty years ago I had that marvelous stroke of luck: Barcelona and, better still, an unending introduction to that place by people who are still my dear friends.
Wiped out by the flight, and hoping to catch a few hours’ sleep before Saturday lunch (which would wipe us out again, and send us down to a deeper level of rest before dinner with Xavier Corberó, whose baby eels with dried red peppers in boiling oil and subsequent paella would at last weigh us down into full unconsciousness), Doris and I collapsed in our room in the Hotel Colon, overlooking the Cathedral square. Colon is the Catalan name of Columbus. Many Catalans firmly believe, as an article of faith almost, that Christopher Columbus really was Catalan, not Genoese: a notion for which there is not a crumb of evidence, though that has never dissuaded Catalans from believing anything they think will redound to their fame and glory. After all, many Catalans are also quite sure that it was some nameless compatriot of theirs who, centuries ago, became the first person in the whole wide world to rub a cut ripe tomato on a slice of bread, thereby creating the pa amb tomaquet, which is such a staple of the Catalan table; and next to discovering a dish as fundamental as this, discovering America is not such a transcendental deal.
We slept. Bright buttery patches of morning sun crept across the carpet. Very gradually we were woken by music floating up from the Cathedral square. Not the aggressive grating of rock radio, still less the degenerate thump and jabber of rap (a favorite now with Catalan teenies). It crept into the room with extraordinary sweetness, repetitive yet subtly varied.
Oboes and cornets, no strings, nothing amplified. “Be not afeard: this isle is full of noises / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.” The Catalans were dancing their national dance, the sardana. They had spontaneously formed rings of eight, ten, as many as twenty people, holding hands. In the middle of each ring was a little pile of coats, hats, shopping baskets, set down on the cobbles so that all the dancers could keep an eye on their things.
Their movements were stately and minimal. They did not prance; they shuffled, so that the old ones could keep up with the young. What the sardana declares is cooperation. It is a citizenship dance. It does not highlight individual virtuosity, still less egotism. (If you want those, the Cathedral square is usually zipping with skateboards.) It includes children and teenagers, the old and gray, the slow, the lame, the fat and the whippet thin, the elegant and the dowdy. It brings families and friends together, in sweetness, without a trace of irony. It is a perfect expression of shared goodwill, and lovely to watch. We watched, with delight. Doris and I felt very far from New York City, and we were.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROBERT HUGHES has been an art critic for Time magazine since 1970. He is the author of many books, including the bestselling Fatal Shore, as well as the originator and narrator of the highly acclaimed PBS television series The Shock of the New, American Visions, and Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Hughes lives in New York City.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES
JAN MORRIS A Writer’s House in Wales
OLIVER SACKS Oaxaca Journal
W. S. MERWIN The Mays of Ventadorn
WILLIAM KITTREDGE Southwestern Homelands
DAVID MAMET South of the Northeast Kingdom
GARRY WILLS Mr. Jefferson’s University
A. M. HOMES Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN The Island: Martinique
FRANCINE PROSE Sicilian Odyssey
SUSANNA MOORE I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai‘i
LOUISE ERDRICH Book and Islands in Ojibwe Country
KATHRYN HARRISON The Road to Santiago
ARIEL DORFMAN Desert Memories: Journeys Through the Chilean North
BARRY UNSWORTH Crete
HOWARD NORMAN My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries & Preoccupations
UPCOMING AUTHORS
ANNA QUINDLEN on London
JAMAICA KINCAID on Nepal
DIANE JOHNSON on Paris
GEOFFREY WOLFF on Maine
JON LEE ANDERSON on Andalucia
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON on Western Ireland
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS
Featuring works by some of the world’s most prominent and highly regarded literary figures, National Geographic Directions captures the spirit of travel and of place for which National Geographic is renowned, bringing fresh perspective and renewed excitement to the art of travel writing.
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