Fire

Not long ago, there was a fire on my street. It woke me up in the middle of the night. I opened my eyes and the room felt like a nightclub. The wall lit up and went out to the rhythm of a burst of electric blue light that passed through the curtains. I went to the window. I saw a police car in front of the house, its lights flashing. I got dressed and went out to the street to do some reporting. The street was cordoned off. There were two fire trucks with a dozen firemen trying to break down a door. Many neighbors I knew were watching the spectacle.

A fire had caught fire in a ghost kitchen next to my house. A business like this should be in an industrial park, but, to use a Josep Pla euphemism, the country's anarchic spirit allows for things like this, and in my city, this kitchen is in the middle of the Eixample neighborhood, on the ground floor of a large apartment building. When they started the kitchen, the neighbors in the apartments above us were in a state of despair: the stench of organic waste, refrigerated trucks loading and unloading parked on the sidewalk, the noise of refrigeration equipment, and unpleasant odors. It was even reported in the newspaper. Now they don't complain. Ours isn't a country for protesters. It's a country of stoics, a country of amor fati or love of fate.

On the days when rice is cooked, the streets become a Venice of canals filled with sofritos, and I cover my nose and close the windows. The smell of fish and shrimp, onion, and oil wafts through the streets. Just as there is a visual landscape, there is an acoustic landscape and an olfactory landscape. But ours is not a country for the faint of heart. Just ask the commuter train users. I was very accustomed, my city, to the smell of the sea and the sweet perfume of boiled cork. Times change and smells change. Many years ago, in the premises where this kitchen is now, there was a bakery: I remember the warm, soft, and pleasant smell when I passed by the shore on my way to school.

The smell I smelled the other night, while the firefighters were working, came out with the smoke through the kitchen windows. The firefighters broke down the door. Luckily, the upper floors didn't have to be evacuated. Without having done investigative journalism, I suppose I would have turned on an extractor fan. The whole neighborhood smelled of charred grease, like a barbecue or an animal sacrificed to the gods of doom. I went back to bed and fell asleep imagining a town with squares of damp, freshly mowed grass, houses like chocolates with a faint scent of bergamot, bouquets of flowers for buildings, and a clean smell.