Shadows of the City

Barcelona at Night During the Dictatorship

I don't know what it is about Spain. The place had somehow gotten under my skin. There was some kind of itch that kept irritating somewhere at the back of my mind. I had to return.

I'd just finished reading the latest Jack Kerouac book. It was all his fault. I'd read On The Road when I was fifteen, and immediately followed with The Dharma Bums. Right from the start I thought he was my kind of guy. I didn't have the car, and the gang consisted of only one, and I was a lot younger than he was when he busted out of college and hit the road in a sozzled, confused kind of partying way, but there must have been something in the air.

I hitch-hiked around England, and then started wandering abroad, but the big magnet was always Barcelona. I considered the city to be home. I always felt good when I got into town and shacked up at a little hotel in a street off the Ramblas. The staff were used to me turning up at irregular intervals and welcomed me back.

That first evening in my favourite city I came downstairs and sat in the gloomy dining room, and gorged myself on a massive paella, with two bottles of tinto. To hell with England. To hell with school. I really didn't care about school any more. I wanted to be where nobody else knew how to find me. I wanted to be wandering around on my own, and I didn't know what was going to happen next. For the first time in my life it dawned on me that I was a natural bum, and that mucking about serendipitously was the only life for me.

With a luxurious paella inside me and those two bottles of tinto I felt in control of my world. Everything was fine. The waiter, a tiny fellow, always standing on tip-toe and teetering back and forth as he spoke, as if he was being blown by the wind, came up and started a conversation. He quoted a poem he had just written, and asked me what I thought about it. I looked sagely at the table, and asked him to declaim it once more so I could appreciate the full affect of his words. He stood beside me, a plate in one hand, a napkin over his arm, slowly teetering backwards and forwards, and spoke very softly.

As he finished I smiled slowly, and said, "Fine, very fine." Then I turned and looked at him. "And does she like it?"

He suddenly came over all shocked, then went very shy on me, stuttered something I didn't understand, and was off back to the kitchen.

Half an hour later I had taken my usual walk down to the fountains, and was sitting on the steps. Two students behind me were playing guitars, one of them singing very softly.

I always found something strangely magical about the evenings in Spain. Everything seemed slightly distant. The traffic sounded miles away. The voices were always hushed. The guitars were always played quietly. People spoke almost in a whisper. There was something furtive about Spain that I couldn't grasp.

I knew there was some dark secret in the Spanish soul but I couldn't quite work out what it was. Was it the long shadow of the civil war, or the fear of the guns of the guardia, and that quiet but seething hatred for Franco?

Barcelona is split by a long wide avenue that runs from the Plaza Catalunya up to the fountains. It was listed as Avenida Generalissimo Franco, but if you made the mistake of asking anyone for directions and used that name you would get a malevolent stare followed by silence for a reply. It was, as everybody in Catalunya knew, El Diagonal.

I had a map of the city on my bedroom wall at home. At one end of the city was this section of boxes; a grid of streets, carefully laid out, which was almost viciously sliced through by this massive highway. It was an arrow into the heart of the city; so said the little waiter back in the hotel.

The following evening I asked him to recite me his poem about the heart of Barcelona. It was all about the arrow that flew from the centre of the city and pierced the coloured heart of the fountains, and then in the next stanza the arrow, tinged with the blood of the magical waters, came flying back to the heart of the city, where it pierced its very soul.

He spoke the stanzas with grave solemnity, stood for a moment to recover himself, then picked up my empty plates and walked back to the kitchen on tiptoe.

I went to my room and wrote down as much of the poem as I could remember, then walked down to the centre of the great metropolis, up the flight-path of the arrow to the fountains where I sat in my customary place and started writing.

The usual suspects were there; the two students singing to the quiet strumming of their guitars; a couple of smart businessmen, still in their business suits, standing in the centre of the steps, smoking cigarettes; and on each side of the staircase the little bowls of flickering red light.

This was home. England and school were thousands of miles away. I felt they were even centuries away.

At eleven o'clock I walked slowly back towards the palace on the hill, past the bullring, and turned down one of the paths in the old palace park, and wound my way round to the customs building and the docks. Against the walls stood the girls, some looking slightly bedraggled and sad, some looking jaunty and confident. A tall girl dressed all in black was standing talking up to a lorry driver. He was considering taking her along with him on his drive to Valencia, but of course it was against the law to carry a girl in the cab.

Further along the wall was another girl dressed in black; a black short skirt with a hoop of red around the hem, and a black top tinged with lace at the neck, and a necklace with a cross hanging from it. I smiled at her and walked on into the old town. The restaurants were busy, but the streets were almost empty. In the distance I heard a few shots. The guardia were out again, hassling some poor blighter. There would be more lies in the papers tomorrow. These were scenes from a dingy and spooky movie, like a set from The Third Man. There were shadows everywhere, and echoes, and they did not reflect the right Spain. Somehow they reflected a different Spain altogether.

I stood outside the theatre. The man from the box office strolled out from a side door and started smoking a cigarette.

"The shadows are noisy tonight" I said quietly.

"The shadows are noisy every night my friend," he said, blowing smoke into the lamplight. "In Barcelona we have a saying that at night the shadows of the wind blow through the city streets. And every night the shadows cry."

I woke up in the early hours of the morning. The cats were howling on one of the walls behind the houses. I stared out of the window, then started to write a poem. I revised it later after I had received in interesting lecture on how to read a newspaper. I'll upload that discussion next week, but here's the poem:

Shots in the Street

there are
shots
shattering the dark
and a small
frightened
wind
blows
broken shadows
around some empty corner
tomorrow
the type on page two
will be
spaced apart
to show
what cannot be shown
the talk
will lie
but the
silence
will speak so loud
that everyone can hear

but the wind
blows
every night and the
shadows
stretch
across every
corner
and along
every street
the street light
shines
so small
and the shadows
feel out
beneath the broken walls
does the light
shine bright
to kill
the dark
or does the light
just make the shadows
grow