Shipwrecked from the superblocks
In Barcelona, authentic Italian restaurants are full of authentic Italians. You walk through the door and out pops a waiter, a busboy, a cook, a kitchen assistant, a phonetics expert, a toponymy trainer… All Italian. And the flour is Italian and speaks Italian to you from every pore. So do the tomatoes, the cheese, the olives, the thyme, the bay leaves, the wine, the beer… Even the air you breathe has been bottled in Castelvetro di Modena or Pieve di Teco. If this happened in a Catalan restaurant, it would be shut down immediately (by some law of the dictatorship of lethal morality) for being racist, discriminatory, unwelcoming, etc. It's easier to be Italian in Barcelona than in Catalan. Or… not.
The owner approaches me with a Lombard accent while I converse with a pizza that is an exact replica of the forests that gnaw at Lake Garda. With a sprig of basil in his mouth, he asks me: "What's wrong with Barcelona?" "What do you mean, Sagal?" And the guy sits down as if I have to feed him. Look, his restaurant is near one of these superblocks. And the man has felt threatened for some time now. The bigwigs of the islets don't want the restaurant van unloading anything. They don't want the neighbors going in or out of the parking garages. They don't want taxis circulating. The sheriffs of the superblocks of temptation want the town to be theirs. They want only them to live there. Only them to pass through. Only them to breathe. And above all: no vehicles, even if it's legal. They want bicycles, scooters, flies with hang gliders, or silkworms mountaineering. The sect is detected by the Italian and the Barcelonans who aren't part of the superblock elite.
The superblocks were created by Barcelona neocastes to live in a simulation. The show Truman-style lettuce. A green Alcatraz. Just for them. A diorama of despair. Now that the city is falling, they're barricading themselves in their fake towns of their fake Wild West. And they don't want outsiders. Not Italians, not Catalans, nothing. But they're leftists, environmentalists, sun-kissed chard photosynthesizing, defenders of Eskimo rights against the speculation of igloo construction by capitalist bones, and also expados Without a compass. And all that ideological drug. Now they want the superblocks to be Amish communities. Bunkers to escape the city, the world, and the galaxy. And they're the ones who denounce you with their gaze, their gestures, their words.
They're these separatists who have never left the Eixample. These Spanish nationalists who have also never left the Ensanche. They're these Europeans who one day left their city to occupy another and live locked up here scolding us. They're all the same: provincials. They're castaways. On islands where the fiction of phosphorescent Pyrenean-green meadows is the moan of truth, of sorrow, of sadness, of drama. The superblocks are a shipwreck. The TitanicRobinson Crusoe. The isolation of the chosen few who have ruined the city and its citizens. The Italian restaurant with real Italians is more real than they are. They're cartoons. Unfunny clowns clinging to their virtual coconut tree while snorting any weed that thrives on pollution. These people wanted a metropolis, a global capital, and they've ended up trapped on an island. They are fiction, and reality lies beyond the island.