Barcelona and the city of lost youth
Barcelona when I was eighteen meant nightclubs by the sea and the creaturely buildings of Antoni Gaudí. Now that many years have passed and my point of origin has changed from London to San Sebastián, Barcelona means something different. While Barcelona looks dainty and particular next to London, San Sebastián is even more so, being Basque and small enough for every person to count. Though relationships falter and fade, no-one fully disappears here; the streets dredge up people you thought you'd forgotten - the guy you didn’t want to go out with four years ago, the serially corrupt landlord, the first person to share their food and friends. As they pass you, they make eye contact, demand to be seen as part of your history. Given the frequency of these meetings, a casual trip to the bakery can be a reckoning, most of all with yourself. You can seldom escape who you are and what you’ve done here. When a city of this scale is your starting point, Barcelona becomes a metropolis – a variegated place with tentacles that connect you to other locations, both real and virtual. There on a Saturday in May, a theatre will host Blindboy, a podcaster who is from Limerick and the Internet at the same time. My boyfriend and I go to catch him in person.
The train journey from San Sebastián to Barcelona crosses the provinces of Navarra, Aragón and Catalonia. Somewhere on the border of Navarra we lose the green hills of the Basque Country and pick up the flat Spanish plain, rising temperatures and storks who build precarious twig nests on the highest point of every station. Though we’re travelling from one independentist region to another, difference becomes relative, and both the Catalan language and landscape seem more ‘Spanish’ than what we're used to.
As we walk around the city, a strange thing happens - neither me nor my boyfriend feel like this is a Barcelona we’ve seen before. Not until we visit Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's cathedral-in-progress, where a higher ratio of white to grey stone-carving seems consistent with the time that has passed. But mostly, we notice things that could be found anywhere– him the German sausage bars that are inexplicably around every corner, me the corolla imprint in the paving stones. I keep thinking about Daisy Miller in the story of the same name, who goes to Europe for the dresses and finds that the prettiest ones have already been sent to America. This place isn’t the one I expected.
Around the theatre, the streets fill with people who could be blurry photocopies of my boyfriend – blue eyes and skin that turns pink at the slightest suspicion of sun or sangria. This is exotic in Barcelona, where the average complexion is caramel. When the theatre lights dim and bring up Blindboy, black t-shirt and trademark plastic bag on his head, we’re transported into the same chamber of virtual space that surrounds us wherever we listen to him.
The next morning, our hunger drives us towards an all-American brunch place, the kind with avocado toast, heaps of pillowy pancakes and a queue that’s five buildings long. We’re still in Barcelona, just about, but we’ve also entered another place, the city of lost youth. Because in the queue and at the table next to ours, are young women made sick for love. They are pale beneath their suntans, their dresses shaped and patterned like tropical fish. Some man or other is draining them of energy and despite having made the effort to come here and queue, they’re not sure they want to stay at all.
You’re less beautiful since you met him, Red tells Green when we’re seated, I mean, in your soul. Green, in possession of an abundant garden, barely blinks, but Red who won’t be satisfied until she finds her fault line, keeps poking. I can’t help being impressed by Red's fearless command of what is certainly a second language, her ability to choose the sharpest words and twist them until they wound. Slowly, she wears her friend down. Next, she turns her attention to the waitress. Although they are more than halfway through their meal and there is a massive queue outside, Red wants the waitress to move them to a bigger table, so another friend can join them whenever she turns up. When the waitress refuses, Red threatens to stage a sit-in. At which point, the waitress, Italian, with a lion tattoo and chain of mosquito bites, puts her hands on her hips and insists that the friend will only be able to join when we, sitting at the next table, leave. We squirm at being thrown into the bargain and unwillingly thrust under Red’s radar. At the same time, we can barely contain our laughter at this definitive ‘storm in a teacup.’ It’s oddly comforting – as though the world couldn’t be in such trouble, while the minutiae of Sunday brunch are being fussed over. A white goddess statue looks down from a shelf of cookbooks and agrees.
This incident stays with me even after we surrender our table to Red’s friend, who waits anxiously in the wings. I think that the girls are ready to stop the world for a perfect brunch because they feel entitled, not only to the event itself, but to something beyond it. They are rich and privileged enough to think that circumstances should align to help them. They are young enough to feel that they have time and energy to waste on things that will barely have a lasting impact on their day, let alone their whole lives.
Normally, I’d roll my eyes, remember that I too wasted time on small matters, picked useless fights, imagined that the world was my court and I could control it. In the background however, lurks a young woman who can’t waste any more time. One who died suddenly at twenty-seven, though she’d probably woken up like the rest of us, thinking that this would have been a forgettable May weekday. She was the flatmate of a friend who moved away, a woman I knew only in fragments. I picture her, overcoat and dash, a big fish in a small pond.
How had it all gone wrong? When my friend returned to San Sebastián for the funeral, two days before I went to Barcelona, we debated what could have caused a seemingly healthy young woman to die of respiratory heart failure.
She was anxious, he conjectured, her body was undergoing too much stress for her heart to keep up.
We’re all anxious, I replied, there are anxious people in their sixties still knocking about.
Not to her level.
Unable to bear the fear and uncertainty, the fact that such losses just happen, we tossed about a few more theories.
After, I felt guilty; we’d spoken as though she’d lost her life by mistake; undervalued it, so that it slipped out of her grasp like loose change.
While the death of a person you know more remains visceral, the death of someone you know less becomes symbolic. After the initial sharp pain, you look for lessons. This young woman’s loss showed up two more. The first, was the irretrievable time frittered away in Red’s style; the fighting of campaigns that are eventually lost to indifference. How few of them will actually matter. And yet, as you can’t be sure of whether you’ll be granted a sonnet-brief life or a wandering epic, it’s hard to do what James Dean suggests and live as though you’re going to die today. Most of all, because you’d be out of sync with all the savers, dreamers and procrastinators around you. It would be the loneliest existence, and by avoiding the daily obsessions and worries, you might miss out on the texture of life itself.
The second loss was that of the friend who moved away. He had been my creative collaborator, the one I shared my ideas with. I lost him to another country and the earthier claims of those who were nearer. When someone moves there is that inevitable distance, the effort that can be made to compensate for it, or not. As we each invested in our separate worlds, our hold on each other’s time became superfluous, a luxurious extra that could be jettisoned in the face of more urgent ties and commitments. I learned that even if you are lucky enough to live, life is increasingly a process of welcoming death, of filtering down to the things and people who are closest to your heart.
Still, in cities like San Sebastián where the footfall is slower and impressions last a little longer, both presences and vacancies become conspicuous. There is the friend, gone; the young woman, gone and waiting for them by the window, in the style of last year, is her partner, a man in black, smoking.
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