duende

This entry is now a few days old! I told myself I'd give it a proper edit and never did. Here it is, rough as guts and twice as shiny.

Matt Douglas is here. I took him back to that vegetarian organic restaurant, and he too swooned at the muchos vegetal goodness. And this time there was chocolate mousse. Matt speaks and reads a little Spanish, quite enough to get by. It makes such a difference. I am by turns excited and annoyed by the fact that here I'm surrounded by not one but two languages I don't understand. I am probably mixing up Catalan and Castillian every time I try to produce a sentence. I haven't said anything yet that doesn't end in por favor, being still firmly in phrase book territory.

Yesterday when I was looking for La Pedrera, a Gaudi apartment block, I took a wrong turn on one of those endless avenues. At the corner I turned at, there was a confectioners that sold sugar figurines for the tops of cakes. Girls in pinafores, boys in football outfits, couples holding flowers. There was also a phone booth, and a woman crouched at its foot. She looked at me with stricken eyes and wailed and wailed a constant, musical lament. I don't know what language she was speaking, but it was perhaps hardly speaking and hardly language. Or a language pared back to the most basic sounds of grief. I gave her a euro, more out of shock than anything else, which she clamped in her fist without pausing for breath.

A few doors down I realised I'd made a wrong turn and had to backtrack. I crossed the street so I wouldn't have to pass the wailing woman, and headed back the other way. On the next corner, though, I found the strangest thing. The same confectioner's shop, with the same figurines, the same phone booth, and again the wailing woman. I looked back at the opposite corner in confusion. There was the first shop, the first phone booth. I looked closer at the woman now in front of me. Her wail sounded the same but her face was different. Weird. Looking-glass land weird. Maybe a city in this curvaceous, organic country has to buck against these long, straight avenues. You can rake out a straight line, but you can't stop the spirals and folds, the repetitions like a tile border on a facade.

I've enjoyed the Gaudi buildings I've seen. Having seen photos and taken a quick look around his Park Güell, I guess I thought of him as a decorative artist who embellished 'normal' buildings with whimsical mosaics. After visiting La Pedrera and the museum inside it, I see that his vision is not confined to the surface, but goes right through to the bones of the building. He made ingenious light wells to channel the sun into every corner of a place. He needed an excellent understanding of structural forces, to allow him to remove as many walls as possible and open up a space. Every stone in the unfinished Sagrada Familia church, has to be cut by hand, because most of them are not cubic in form, but shapes complicated enough to hold up the weight of a cathedral while perfectly resembling a graceful tree.

La Sagrada Familia is the most joyful church I've ever been into--and being a backpacker in Europe, I find I've been into a lot (from Barthes' Mythologies: "Christianity is the chief purveyor of tourism, and one travels only to visit churches"). Other great churches seem sublime insofar as they represent the human mind's attempt to convey the greatness of God. But La Sagrada Familia glorifies God's creation, and expresses the worshipper's joy that God created all this in the first place. It's a reaching upward of gratitude, rather than a bending down of God's abstract greatness. If that makes sense. Knowing next to nothing about either architecture or Christianity, let alone Christian architecture, I'll just chuck my two cents in.

Postscript: Matt left before me, so I spent my last night in Barcelona with two American girls who had smoked a lot of hash so their sentences took a while to come out but they were very friendly. We went to a club in the Barri Gotic looking for acid jazz, but for some reason it was one of those traditional Spanish bands instead, with the blarey trumpet and the flamenco guitar and all that. Lovely! Then the guy on trumpet said "Blah blah blah blah Yugoslavia blah" and the band launched into the music from Kusturica's Underground. Why not? I'm on the Cote d'Azur now, but I'll tell you about that later, I'm starving.