Barcelona, Latin American city
I see Don Joan Maragall rolling down La Rambla with a Mexican hat, reciting in a LOUD VOICE and passing the little plate: “Our Barcelona! The great enchantress!”. Charming, fascinating, magnetic. Like a human, cultural, social, spiritual synchrotron, Barcelona is transforming into a Latin American city. Extremes. Rich and poor. Abundance and misery. Possible and impossible. One and the other. Between. In the middle of.
On one side, a Tour de France, a downpour of millions. On the other, a 15-year-old boy shot dead. Everything happens in the same city. Daily. Pornographically. 3D. Everything is multiplied. And it will be more so. Live and in slow motion. Like a perfume ad that costs an arm and a leg and that you can only see but not smell, buy, own. Barcelona is now two cannibalistic slices biting into the salted ham of the Barcelona middle class. Hinge, accordion, nuclear chewing gum, original, historic, structural, hopeful for a city and a country. Barcelona's bet is Latin America. Oysters and guns. And especially absolute sale of everything retail, wholesale, in droves. And plunder, robbery, rapine. 24 hours of a free buffet. Zombie apocalypse. Capital of coral-colored freaks with money and a university of gangsters who want to make it. Barcelona, lobotomizing, washing, barbecue.
Georgie Dann has been spending summers in Catalonia for years. The Gavarres are burning. Don't worry, many don't care. They are only bothered by not being able to go to their official residence in district XI of Barcelona, l'Empordà. They don't give a damn. Just like last year they didn't give a damn that the Segarra was burning all over their armpits and orifices. A reminder of yesterday, today and tomorrow: fire is a pencil that teaches geography. Thanks to the pedagogy of the flames, many (not a few) Catalans discover villages, mountains, rivers of Catalonia. Even that people live there every day. The fires are phosphorescent with blood that underline real Catalonia and the real world. No, it's not ketchup, flavor, smell, color of a plastic bag.
We are sorry when the red shit splashes us from all the charlatans, shamans, healing masters who now talk to us about the importance of farmers, the undergrowth, the forest, the ultrabosque, forest management, animal, sidereal, km 0, the tomatoes that are squeezed, the organic aubergine made by the wise tramuntana blowing in octagonal... The failed sectarian leaders of a failed capital-country. The illiterate prophets who from their air-conditioned bunkers have been scolding us for years like red-faced reactionary priests explaining who we are who are not them. And what we have to do and how we have to live in the crematorium-mortuary territory. Well, the time is here and has arrived for you.
As someone said: Latin America is the future. The future, the future… It is always the future. A future that never arrives. A future that even all the Latin Americans who have come to Catalonia are afraid will arrive: that Catalonia will become Latin America. They flee from it. Because the hypothesis is a dictatorial runner: it walks, it runs, like flames towards the twilight, towards menstruation, towards the barbecue of the horizon: we can die burned in Catalonia. Literally and metaphorically. Choose your adventure. And choosing is opining. That's why, now that Maragall is already Latin American, let's grab Màrius Torres's extinguisher: “I want peace, but I don't want oblivion”. The final future, we don't know it yet, but you will pay dearly for water.