Barcelona (2 page)

The Saló de Cent inside the Ajuntament

The Saló de Cent housed the governing body of the city of Barcelona, which had developed out of an order by that great city-shaping king of the thirteenth century, Jaume I, who created a committee of twenty high-ranking citizens, known as peers or
probi homines
(in Catalan,
prohoms)
who would advise on city management. The group had among other abilities the power to convene general meetings of citizens, an important step on the much disputed road toward democracy as we understand it now. By 1274 a system emerged from this that, in essence, would govern Barcelona until it was erased by the Bourbons in Madrid in the early eighteenth century. A committee of seven people, made up of five
consellers,
the mayor, and the chief magistrate, picked a council of about a hundred representative citizens. They were drawn from all walks of life, cobblers and bakers as well as bankers and the upper mercantile orders. Although there were more of the latter, the vote of a tailor or a cooper had more or less the same weight as that of an international textile trader on the Consell de Cent. To some Catalans this seemed highly inconsistent: One might as well, complained a fifteenth-century political scribe named Jaume Safont, put
cabrós
(a ferociously insulting term, meaning literally “he-goats”) on the committee as men of “vile condition.” To a modern eye, of course, such a policy was the seedling of an egalitarian democracy, long before so radical an idea was launched in any other European state. The Consell de Cent was by a long way the oldest proto-democratic body in Europe. It enshrined the principle that, in a good and well-shaped society, things should happen by contract based on mutual regard rather than by divine right. The most famous political dictum of early Catalunya was uttered there—the unique oath of allegiance sworn by Catalans and Aragonese to the Spanish monarch in Madrid. “We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws—but if not, not.”

This seemed then, and still does, a perfectly fair and admirable template for marriage as well. It would be an honor to be married in a room associated with such ideals, particularly since neither of us was a practicing Christian (one lapsed Catholic, one lapsed Episcopalian, one an atheist, the other an agnostic, both fond of ceremony but both churchgoers mainly for the sake of the architecture). Even today, when one thinks of monarchy as a decorative and essentially harmless fossil, those words from the Consell de Cent have the sharp and thrilling ring of political truth: They evoke a people who have no doubt about themselves and their identity
as
a people.

And what is more, a people who are not necessarily big respecters of other peoples' personages. Catalans had a traditional knack for putting kingship in perspective. On the facade of the Ajuntament there is a statue of a fifteenth-century merchant named Joan Fiveller. His effigy was put there in the 1850s instead of a figure of Hercules, as an emblem of civic strength. Why? Because at one point in his service as conseller to the city, the Castilian king of Catalunya and Aragon came on a state visit to Barcelona, with his retinue, which was of course large. And Fiveller endeared himself to the Catalans by insisting that the king and his traveling court should pay taxes on the
baccala,
the salt cod, they consumed. In doing so, he became an uncanonized patron saint of a tendency in Catalan political life which no authority has ever been able to extinguish—a sort of collectivist populism which expresses itself in citizens' associations and strikes. This demand was entirely a symbolic gesture—it's unlikely that the royal retinue could have been so big that its consumption of tax-free salt cod would have put very much of a strain on Barcelona's fiscus—but the point, it was felt, ought and had to be made. It applied to more serious expenditures, too. Thus in 1878, a gas strike left the city in darkness for a year because the Barcelonans balked at paying what they considered an exploitive municipal tax. Thus in 1951, they joined together to challenge the Franco regime with a tram strike, which paralyzed the city for weeks but indubitably got results. The whole historical tendency of Barcelonans has been to show themselves, not as mere spectators of the comings and goings of power, but as participants in it. They have always wanted something more, much more in fact, than mere “transparency.”

The Saló de Cent was designed around 1360 by the architect Pere (Peter) Llobet and inaugurated in 1373. Badly damaged by bombardment in 1842 during a workers' uprising, it was rebuilt in the 1880s by the patriot architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, a great figure who came within a split hair of being as remarkable, if more conservative, an architect as Antoni Gaudí. (Gaudí also entered the competition for the job of designing a new Saló de Cent, but his design got nowhere and since its drawings have long since been lost we have no idea what it may have looked like.) Some neo-Gothic decor was added in 1914, but it is still one of the noblest spaces in Spain. It also radiates ceremonial richness, not least because the upper half of its walls are hung in broad stripes of contrasting red and gold silk—a heraldic design based on and evoking the
quatres barres
(four stripes) of the Catalan flag. How did they get on the flag? Supposedly, as the finger marks of Charlemagne's son, Louis El Piados (the Pious), who created an armorial design for Wilfred the Hairy by dabbling his four royal digits in the wounded warrior's blood and scraping them down the shield—a sort of minimalist claw mark that has endured as Catalunya's sign for a thousand years. But the story has a catch: Wilfred the Hairy was born around
A.D.
840 and died in about 897. Louis the Pious' corresponding dates were 778 and 840, which, if strictly insisted on, can only mean that he drew the four red bars in Wilfred's blood nearly half a century after his own death. This is a mystery whose solution lies beyond the historian's own fingers.

The December evening on which we were scheduled to be married was bright and cold and—unusually for Barcelona—dusted with snow. Whiteness clung to every stringcourse and crocket of the Cathedral's facade. It crunched underfoot. This early snowfall was seen by our Catalan friends as an omen, though exactly of what—beyond a generalized kind of happiness—no two of them seemed quite to agree. It rarely snows in Barcelona before Christmas. It hadn't done so in more than fifteen years—so this had to be an exceptional date. And it certainly felt like one. I have not forgotten, and never will, looking down from an embrasure of the Casa de la Ciutat at the cold medieval stone staircase and seeing Doris walking so gracefully up its shallow steps, unaware (I think) that I was watching her, slender in her white-and-pale-blue wedding dress, the sparse flakes of snow falling negligently, in slow motion, past her shoulders and seeming to rhyme with her pale and gleaming hair. Had I ever been so happy at a wedding before? No, I had not. I still can't imagine how one could be. The mayor, Joan Clos, hitched us in Catalan and very slightly awkward English. We answered in awkward Catalan: “
Si, vull
—Yes, I want to.” Doris's younger son, Fielder, produced the rings with perfect aplomb, not missing a beat. My fear that he might drop one of them, and that we would see it rolling into a crack between the old paving stones of the Saló de Cent, was quite unfounded. A string quartet played, sweetly and ceremoniously. And then it was down the stairs, into various cars, and off south and uphill to Esplugües de Llobregat, to the house of the best man who was, inevitably, the sculptor Xavier Corberó, who had begun my love affair with Barcelona and changed my life so many years ago by introducing me to
la gran encisera,
the great enchantress, as the nineteenth-century Catalan poet Joan Maragall called his native city.

The wedding dinner was held in Xavier's masia. His caterers had set up eight tables. To reach them you had to walk across a threshold strewn with aromatic branches of wild rosemary, which brings fortune and length to the marriage. We were given, first, a thick soup of white beans flecked with black grains of pureed truffle, and surmounted by a solid slice of duck foie gras. (This was so delicious that both my teenage stepsons, Garrett and Fielder, clamored for second and then third ladlefuls of it.) Then came a piece of roast
lubina
or sea bass, reticently perfumed with thyme. Then roast capon, garnished with a variety of wild mushrooms from the Catalan hill forests:
rovellons, ous de reig,
and the black sinister-sounding
trompetes de mort,
death trumpets. Finally, the wedding cake, four tiers of it, white, creamy, and unctuous, surmounted by a marzipan Doris and a marzipan Bob, in wedding attire, holding hands. We took a carving knife, which looked almost as impressive as the blade of Wilfred the Hairy, and plunged it right in, four hands on its hilt. Neither of my previous weddings had featured a cake with a tiny bride and groom, and I was enchanted. Neither of us quite broke down and cried, although I know that I was within a few millimeters of doing so.

I thought about a lot of things during that party, though with increasing muzziness as the evening lengthened. Mainly about Doris, about happiness, and about loyalty: to her, and to old friends like Corberó, who probably knows me better than any living man, including my own relatives, just as my relations with Barcelona are so much closer and more pleasurable than with anywhere south of the Equator.

Some provincials—and there is one in most Australian hearts, including mine—struggle to throw off the stigma of their provincialism by relating chiefly, or in some cases only, to the huge cultural centers: New York, Paris, London. And in fact I have lived and worked longer in New York (thirty-three years) than in Australia (which I left at twenty-six). But I have never lost my tropism for the big small town that feels like home. Hence, my feelings about Barcelona.

Once, when I thought about becoming a citizen of some country other than Australia, I used to consider America—never England, of course, for that would have felt like a colonial capitulation, a craven wriggle backward into a womb that was not likely to be very welcoming. But then it was borne in on me that to be an American, even an adoptive one, was automatically and by definition to be a colonialist, and to become one by law was only to be a secondhand, adoptive colonialist. America by now was as imperial as England had been fifty years before my birth. Was I ever going to feel excited if my prospective fellow citizens colonized the moon, or visited Mars, or carried out the scientific, ideological, or cultural schemes that seemed to be boiling away in the scary limbic forebrains of America's rulers—a bunch of strangers who, in George W. Bush's phrase, already viewed my native country as their “sheriff” in the Pacific? No way, Hozay. This species of derivative grandeur was soggy, boring stuff. If you are going to change your citizenship, better to fly or flounder under the flag of a place that once had an enormous empire but now has none; that doesn't pretend (or, as Americans like to say, “aspire”) to world moral leadership; that treats “inspiring” public discourse with a certain reticence and skepticism. How about being Catalan for a change? Well, I guess we shall see.

Back in the 1960s it was easier to imagine being dead than being over sixty and, as duly confessed, I had no more idea of Barcelona than I did of Atlantis. What little I knew of the city was that three decades before, in the name of the Spanish Republic, it had resisted General Franco (1892-1975) and paid a heavy, bitter price for it; that George Orwell, one of my literary heroes, had written a book about it called
Homage to Catalonia;
that in that book he had got most things right, but had been spectacularly wrong in dissing the admittedly very peculiar Antoni Gaudí, claimed by the French surrealists, who had designed that enormous penitential church seemingly made of melted candle wax and chicken guts.

If my knowledge of Barcelona some forty years ago was lamentably slight, so was that of most Europeans and Americans. Not just slight—embarrassingly so. So embarrassing that we weren't even embarrassed by it. The 1,500 years of the city's existence had produced only five names that came readily to mind. There was Gaudí, of course, and the century's greatest cellist, Pau Casals. There were the painters Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, who though he was actually born in Málaga and spent nearly all his long working life in France had become a sort of honorary Catalan, having attended art school there and used the city as his point of departure for Paris. Of other Catalan artists who were older than Picasso, and were at the time very much his superiors—that superbly fluent and piercing draftsman Ramón Casas comes to mind, among others—we were quite ignorant. We had heard about Gaudí but we got him entirely wrong, because we knew little or nothing about his deeply Catalan roots, his obsession with craft culture, and his deeply right-wing piety. We thought he was some kind of proto-surrealist weirdo, which trivializes his achievement. We simply had no idea where to put him, and this was largely due to the fact that, although he was so manifestly a radical artist, we were too blinded by the rhetoric of the 1960s to imagine a radicalism that was both right wing and intensely fruitful.