How to explain Barcelona apart from the political tensions of recent years

A few weeks ago, David Uclés spoke at the CCCB about Mercè Rodoreda with such ignorance that, with a clear masochistic tendency, I was curious to read La ciutat de les llums mortes, with which he has won the Nadal prize. I had to stop at the second chapter: I'm too old to waste time on bad literature, especially when, moreover, it is a poorly disguised attempt to de-Catalanize Barcelona.Unlike Àngels Barceló, the experience of reading a foreigner talking about my city did not make me recognize it, quite the opposite. I could only shake off the bad mood by returning to a truly recognizable past. This is how I ended up on the pages ofEstrella fugada. Sideral (Editorial Contra), the biography about Aleix Vergés, written by his friend and cultural journalist Héctor Castells.Nineties, Plaça Joan Llongueras and the nights when DJ Sideral spun records on Nitsa's rotating dance floor. Castells describes very well what made Sideral special: a self-taught musician and DJ with an insatiable curiosity for music, an eclectic and hard-to-classify selection, and, above all, an almost physical ability to feel the pulse of the dance floor and intervene at the right moment. I have a memory of a night that, at times, seems like a dream. I was going through a very bad time at home and, at one point, I stopped dancing and stood to the side, looking at the venue with a sense of alienation. Then, one of my favorite Sade songs started playing, mixed with electronic music. I raised my head and it seemed to me that Sideral was attentively waiting for my reaction. The current of empathy, recognition, and warmth allowed me to return to the dance floor and spin again on another of those nights that seemed magical.All the memories of that time are scattered for me, as if I were seeing them through water. But the feeling of freedom and belonging that I felt in that place is not erased. Looking back, I have the impression that many of us were people who didn't quite find a place in other spaces, but there we recognized each other without yet being able to put words to it. It was a world that resembled Neverland. There were many lost children (Castells explains that many of the friends were literally orphans, or with absent parents) and, like Peter Pan, Sideral was the leader. Charismatic, intuitive, capable of creating a place where everything seemed possible and where, for a few hours, the outside world and adults ceased to exist.Sideral did not want to grow

Like Peter Pan, Sideral did not want to grow up and said he would die young. Indeed, he died at thirty-two, just when neuroscience today places the end of adolescence. The myth remains fixed here, at this suspended point.The rest of us lost children had to learn to grow up. Perhaps that's why I'm surprised by the gaze with which Castells unfolds the story. The book was published when he was already forty years old and was revised a decade later, but, on the other hand, he explains that world to us as if he were still twenty. Like when he describes a sixteen-year-old girl as "another minor who could unleash eight hundred cases of pedophilia in a second, Asian gaze, strawberry mouth, and long eyelashes" (it seems that no one, neither in 2013 nor in 2023, found it problematic). Or when it presents Barcelona as if it could be explained apart from the political tensions that have crossed it in recent years, with a mental framework that ends up resembling more that of a David Uclés than that of a Barcelonian. Perhaps it is here that the Land of Nevermore ceases to be magic and fascination, and also becomes a prison and a nightmare. The bad mood, therefore, I have not managed to drive away.