I see don Joan Maragall rolling down La Rambla with a Mexican hat, reciting in a LOUD VOICE and passing the plate: “Our Barcelona! The great sorceress!”. Charming, fascinating, magnetic. Like a human, cultural, social, emotional synchrotron, Barcelona is transforming into a Latin American city. Extremes. Rich and poor. Abundance and misery. Possible and impossible. Some and others. Between. In the middle of.
On one side, a Tour de France surrounded by millions. On the other, a 15-year-old boy shot dead. Everything happens in the same city. Daily. Pornographically. 3HD. 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 cannibal slices biting into the salted ham of the Barcelona middle class. Hinge, accordion, nuclear bubblegum, original, historic, structural, hopeful for a city and a country. Barcelona's bet is Latin America. Oysters and pistols. And above all, absolute sale of everything retail, wholesale, in droves. And plunder, theft, rapine. 24 hours of all-you-can-eat buffet. Zombie apocalypse. Capital of scarlet-colored freaks with money and a university of gangsters who want to make them. Barcelona, lobotomizing, washing, barbecue.
Georgie Dann has been spending his summers in Catalonia for years. The Gavarres are burning. Don't worry, most people 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 care. Just like last year they didn't care when La 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 highlight 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, healers who now talk to us about the importance of farmers, the undergrowth, the forest, the ultrabosque, forest, animal, sidereal management, km 0, the tomatoes that soak, the organic eggplant made by the wise tramuntana blowing in octagonal…. The failed sectarian leaders of a failed capital-country. The illiterate prophets who from the air-conditioned bunkers have for years been scolding us like red-faced reactionary priests telling us 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 and has arrived for you.
As that one 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 came to Catalonia are afraid will arrive: that Catalonia will become Latin America. They flee from this. 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”. We don't know the final future yet, but you will pay dearly for the water.
