Barcelona (3 page)

On the other hand, we probably wouldn't have recognized the name of an almost equally great architect, Lluís Domènech i Montaner, or even been able to pronounce that of Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867-1957), one of the most erudite and sophisticated designers ever to work in Europe. For the record, Puig, which means “peak,” is pronounced pooch, and this gave rise to a silly piece of doggerel, supposedly by a friend of that great Majorcan expatriate Robert Graves, which began:

 

How I would love to climb the Puig,

And watch the peasants huigy-cuig:

Beneath the plane-trees I would muig,

Upon the benches we would smuig …

 

We had no idea of how that singular piece of nineteenth-century utopian town planning, the Eixample or “enlargement” of Barcelona into a grid of equal squares that surrounds the original, medieval city, came into its existence, or who its designer, Ildefons Cerdà, was. The few guides to Catalan architecture in print back in the 1960s were unreliable and never in English. There was practically nothing on Catalan painting, though the world's greatest surviving body of Romanesque frescoes, salvaged from decaying churches in the Ampurdan and the Pyrenees, was (and is) right there in the Museu d'Art de Catalunya up on Montjuïc. No foreign visitor, except a few specialists who knew Catalan, could possibly get acquainted with the great writers and poets of Barcelona's past, from Ramón Llull and Ausiàs March in the Middle Ages to Jacint Verdaguer and Joan Maragall in the nineteenth century. Some of Barcelona's finest writers will never be translated because their work is either too voluminous (there are, for instance, more than thirty volumes of Josep Pla's essays and biographical sketches) or too local, or both.

Back in the 60s and 70s, Xavier Corberó and his friends—writers, artists, architects, economists, fledgling politicians—hoped to change this. What did they want? They imagined Barcelona becoming, as it had been in the past, a center of Mediterranean culture. Not
the
center: that, in the twentieth century, would have been impossible, and undesirable anyway. Centralism was exactly what Catalans had struggled against for the past several centuries—it connoted the tyrannous hand of Francoism and the dictator's insistence that Catalunya, which had always disliked and resisted him, was a mere province of Madrid and its language, Catalan, a mere dialect of Castilian Spanish. They saw his rule as only the last in a long series of efforts by Habsburg and Bourbon monarchs, from the seventeenth century onward, to deprive Catalunya of its
autodeterminació,
its self-government. They wanted to help Barcelona recapture some of the luster it had half a century before their birth, back in the 1880s. That would have to be a tall order, since this period, known to Catalans as their
Renaixenca
or rebirth into
modernisme,
which didn't exactly mean modernism as understood a century later, was forgotten by almost everyone in 1966, except the Catalans themselves—and imperfectly remembered by them. Its monuments and buildings were all around Barcelona but there was surprisingly little unanimity of opinion about what they meant.

None of these young people were Communists though a few were Marxists. Their general freedom from ideological constraint was one of those qualities which, thirty years later, helped to save Barcelona as a city and as a culture: a firm belief in the social responsibility of government, coupled with an equally strong conviction that cultures start with the individual and are not made on ideological command. This was the generation of Catalans, little known at the time—as next generations always are—that was going to change the city, and I had the enormous good luck to have them, along with Xavier, as my guides. I felt especially receptive to them because by the late 1960s I was getting fed up the back teeth with the imperial pretensions of American modernism; the idea, suffocating in its application even though once fairly liberating in its earlier assertion, that New York was now the center of everything worth having in the arts of painting and sculpture, not to mention the practice of art criticism, and that nothing counted if not ratified there. Maybe this was true and maybe not, but it wasn't something you could just assume, particularly if you were an Australian living in Europe. There had to be more to life, I thought, than all those hectares of lyric acrylic on unprimed duck; it might just be that Jackson Pollock, God rest his gifted, drunken soul, was not a creator of the same order as Winslow Homer or Marsden Hartley; and what was so incontrovertible about Clem Greenberg anyway, let alone the flat dry prose of his imitators? I can't say I was altogether unbiased. I know my Catalan friends weren't. They were the patriots, of a country other than Spain. They were Spanish
and
Catalan, and it is true beyond doubt that Spaniards and especially Catalans tend to put their homeland first in their affections.

Sometimes this loyalty attains a certain craziness for which one must learn to make allowances. Once, several years ago, I was having lunch with the Catalan architect Oriol Bohigas before, as I planned, catching the air shuttle to Madrid. It was late in the afternoon—we hadn't sat down to eat until 2:00, and to my horror when I looked at my watch it was already just shy of 4:00 and we weren't yet through our sausage and beans, the
butifarra amb monguetes,
which is one of the classic peasant dishes of Catalunya. Stricken, I told Oriol that I had miscalculated badly.

“Not possible. Where are you heading for?”

“Madrid.”

“
Madrid?
”

“Yes, Madrid.”

“But in Madrid,” said Oriol with an air of puzzled finality, “in Madrid there is
nothing.”
He swallowed a glass of excellent rioja and beamed at me.

“Well, there's the Prado,” I rejoined feebly.

“Oh well, the Prado,” said Oriol with the air of a man who extends a trivial concession to a friend who, come down to it, doesn't know too much. “Yes, there is the Prado. Of course. But I know you have been to it before, so what's the hurry?”

One main reason why Barcelona seemed hard to penetrate—apart from the unfamiliarity of its language, Catalan—was that it had decayed so badly since the loss of the civil war. Spain's dictator, Franco, hated the place and wanted revenge on it for opposing him. He had been in the saddle so long that most Catalans did not remember a world without him. After him, Spain had to be reinvented, a daunting if exhilarating prospect. The father of one of my best friends there had put away, years before, a magnum of fine champagne (Krug, I think). When Franco died he was going to open it, but not before. Franco's death was heralded by a fusillade of popping corks all over Barcelona, but not my friend's; it had been sitting in the fridge so long that it had gone flat. So, in a sense, had the city itself.
Barcelona grisa,
gray Barcelona, was how people referred to it, looking back on the years of Franco and his much despised Falangist mayor, Josep Maria de Porcioles i Colomer, who ran the most intellectually inert and historically oblivious city government of the twentieth century. Barcelona had turned into a sort of sleeping princess, neglected, and ignored. It was one enormous ashtray, covered in a mantle of grime and grit. The buildings that should have made it famous were suffocating and in decay. Even its great Christian monuments, like the Cathedral, had repulsive administrative-modern office blocks jammed next to them, an ugly modernism that signified contempt and seemed to mock the ostentatious piety of Franco's regime. Things were done to the nineteenth-century architectural masterpieces of Barcelona—Gaudí's Casa Milà, Domènech i Montaner's Casa Lle, Morera and his Palau de la Música Catalana—that would never have been allowed to happen to buildings from the medieval era, because although the earlier ones were rightly seen as historically precious, the later ones were wrongly thought of as old-fashioned or grotesque. (It should, in fairness, be added that Franco's appalling or merely sluggish and greedy lieutenants were not shy about applying the wrecker's ball to medieval buildings, secular ones, in other Spanish cities.)

And, of course, it wasn't only the Falangists who thought art nouveau was disposable rubbish. Here is George Orwell, in
Homage to Catalonia,
on Gaudí's Sagrada Família: “one of the most hideous buildings in the world … I think the anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.” At least he gave the old man a mention, as did Evelyn Waugh, who for some inscrutable reason decided that another Gaudí building, the Casa Batlló on Passeig de Gràcia, was the Turkish Consulate. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner didn't even include Gaudí in his canonical
Pioneers of Modern Design.

The Barcelona we value so much today had been punitively raped and degraded by business, by the unsupervised and opportunistic greed of developers, who set to work on its fabric not like artists or surgeons, but like amnesiac butchers who were also good family men. Was this the result of deliberately planned policy? The answer has to be No,
but.
No,
but
decay is a most powerful force, and amnesia too. No,
but
it's hard not to see in Barcelona's deterioration during the Porcioles years (1957-1973) the unfolding of a vengeful desire for entropy. Barcelona had resisted the caudillo. Bad idea. There would be money for cement works outside the city, because the businessmen who owned them were Franco supporters. But there was not going to be money to restore the great symbolic works of Catalanist architecture, like the Palau de la Música Catalana, because these, like the best of the city's culture, were opposed to the very spirit of Madrid centralism, of rule from outside Barcelona itself.

 

B
ARCELONA WAS SHAPED, AND ITS DESTINY DETERMINED,
by the fact that it began as a port and has been one ever since. Exactly when this birth occurred cannot now be fixed. At one point, there was a thin speckle of Bronze Age settlement by the sea there, extending up the seaward flank of what is now Montjuïc, the mountain which rears up to your right as you look out to sea from the waterfront. The people who inhabited it were known as the Laietani; they were, as far as anyone knows, indigenous; they were one of the various branches the Celtic tribesmen who, in prehistoric times, had come down across the Pyrenees to the coastal plains of what is now Catalunya and interbred with the resident Iberians, themselves the product and residue of earlier invasions from North Africa. Practically nothing is known about the Laietani. They did not have a written language (again, as far as anyone knows), which suggests that they did not trade except among themselves. One of the principal streets of modern Barcelona is known as the Via Laietana, and was so christened when an urban renewal scheme demanded a straight cut from hillside to waterfront; but there isn't a smidgen of evidence that its track, when pushed through in 1908, had anything to do with the elusive Laietani, and little trace of them—no artifacts, let alone buildings—was found in the excavations. A small fossil of their presence may have been (not certainly, only possibly) the name Barcino, which supposedly meant “welcoming port.” Current fashions in history tend to favor the underdog, but even allowing for that the Laietani would seem to have achieved little, made less, and vanished almost without a trace under the heel of the Romans, who colonized this part of the Spanish coast as a base from which to run their war against the Carthaginians in 210
B.C.
Even so, the future Barcelona did not become a significant colony—or not right away. That honor belonged to Tarraco (the future Tarragona), conquered in 210
B.C.
by the ferocious young general Scipio Africanus Major, who marched south the next year and utterly destroyed the Punic base of Carthago Nova. Tarraco was rich. So was Carthago Nova, whose silver mines alone brought in twenty-five thousand drachmas a day. These were colonial possessions worth having. Not so the future Barcelona, which produced little but fish, and a once much esteemed breed of local oyster—long since, alas, rendered extinct by the industrial pollution of the harbor water.

But when the Romans conquered a place, they took it over completely and re-formed it in their image. So it was with the little settlement that straggled up the slope of Montjuïc—a name, incidentally, that may (but again, not certainly) derive from Mons Iovis, the “hill of Jupiter.” The problem with Montjuïc was its lack of water. But two streams ran down from the plain to the beach, and it made sense to relocate the town (if it were to grow) between them, on a small, and today barely perceptible, eminence named Mont Taber. These framed the new city, which was hardly more than a village. It covered about thirty acres and was shaped liked a fat boot heel. Roughly at its center was the forum, which lies beneath what is still the administrative core of Barcelona—the Plaça Sant Jaume, between the Ajuntament, the seat of city government, and the Palau de la Generalitat, which houses the state government of Catalunya. In essence it was a Roman military camp, but one defined and outlined by thick masonry brick and cement walls. But small and rather ad hoc though Barcino (as it was named) might be, it still signified Rome, the greatest power on Earth, and consequently the cult of the Roman emperor and the Roman gods. Hence its temple dedicated to the Emperor Augustus, of which a few remains survive in the form of three Corinthian columns in the basement of a house at No. 10, Carrer del Paradis, just off Plaça Sant Jaume. They don't look like much. But on the other hand, none of the Roman relics of Barcelona do, except perhaps for a few parts of the old city wall, massive and obdurate and much built into by later construction. The lower levels of Barcelona are not a Pompeii. If you expected the interest of this ancient city to reside in its most ancient parts, you would be sorely disappointed.