Originally published in Spanish. Jorge San Miguel. Medium.
We arrived at Penedès at noon. We told the owner of the house that we are going to a wedding, just in case. Surely we exaggerate. It is a renovated farmhouse, with a white stone tower that rises on a ridge between vineyards. We eat at Avinyonet and my father-in-law gets lost a couple of times in translation. They tell me the rice is delicious. We go shopping at Carrefour.
At night, after a sneaky dip in underwear in a pool that is too cold, I light a fire with a few coals and roast black and white butifarra. There is a full moon over the vineyards. After dinner, I go out on the terrace to smoke a cigarette, one of the two or three that I allow myself a month. From time to time, the lights of a car pass on the other side of the vineyards, on a narrow road that hugs the hills like a ribbon. In the background, on the horizon, there is a strange clarity, like a dawn out of time and orientation. I promise to return under other circumstances, and immediately think, «As if it depended on me». But yes. I will be back.
We arrive in Barcelona on the Diagonal, listening to “How nice is Badalona”, which has become the song of the journey. Soon we begin to see groups of people with flags. Flags. I have never waved one, not even Real Madrid’s. But I go into a Pakistani shop and buy a senyera (Catalan flag) made of nylon.
After the demonstration we eat with friends, from Catalonia and from outside. Those who live in Catalonia are euphoric. They feel, perhaps for the first time, that the city is theirs. Through them, I also catch a glimpse of that Barcelona that I did not know about, that I didn’t get to know, and which won’t come back -that Barcelona we read about in Bruguera’s comics, on Jan’s rooftops, in Pepe Carvalho’s novels; that we intuited in semi-understood songs heard on family road-trips, like “La aristocracia del barrio”; and whose last breath we saw as teenagers in the Makinavaja stories. I drink to that city and to the one which is to come. We hit the bottom and we start to swim towards the surface.
