The death of Mr. Esteve
Wanted: Mr. Esteve. Where is he? Exiled? Freeze-dried? Dead? Choosing is opinion. Choose. One of his relatives tells me. In a few months, he'll close his shop. One of those old-fashioned ones. Why? For a thousand reasons. But he's closing the shutters. There's a lot of talk about Barcelona, but not about the Esteves who built it.
Santiago Rusiñol is the creator of the new, modern, international Barcelona. He is 1888. The Barcelona of shopkeepers, artisans, apprentices, bourgeois, artists. Mr. Esteve's auca It's the great act of love and sex in nuclear Barcelona. The one that takes you to 1929, 1992, 2025. Today she is denied, manipulated, formatted, lobotomized. The city washed, rinsed, bleached. Soap!
They don't want it known that the Barcelona of today lives off the Barcelona of more than a century ago. There is no Barcelona without Rusiñol and Señor Esteve. Open the door of that store: La Puntual. Of veins and threads. Founded by grandfather Esteve. But grandson Ramonet doesn't want to continue: he wants to be an artist. A mortal blow. Señor Esteve is the symbol of the Barcelona of the industrial and neuronal renaissance of the 19th century. Of the people who emigrate from the rest of Catalonia to Barcelona and boil the pot. The intergenerational clash. The duality between money and art. The store as a scale. Like the beacon of a city that will illuminate the world. That's why the work is poisonously stereotyped.
They've made people believe it's a fierce, hungry, cannibalistic critique of Barcelona's small and middle-class. And they paint Señor Esteve as a mix of Lucifer, Charles Manson, and Bin Laden. But Rusiñol wrote it and said: thanks to Señor Esteve, Ramonet will be able to be an artist, like Rusiñol. Fiction and reality embrace in mourning and make eternal peace. When Señor Esteve dies. At the funeral: "He hadn't harmed anyone," said one. "He hadn't done anything, nor could he," said another. And Ramonet, who was leaving in tears, stopped before a statue and thought, "I will." And, remembering the deceased, he added with a grateful heart: "
Yes, that's why people come to Barcelona today and Barcelona is for sale. photocall and a 21st-century all-you-can-eat buffet for things that were made, that we paid for out of pocket, in the 19th century and that are still standing: Modernism, Gaudí, Rusiñol... And they did it in Catalan. They were copied everywhere. Those Esteves gentlemen, with a Superman cape from a store of veins and threads, have been paying for it, fighting for drawers full of the future. With domestic superpowers: "Serious, moderate, prudent, good payer and good collector, and practical," Rusiñol defined him. Have a good time and be beautiful.
In Barcelona, the shops pay for the death party of the dazzling, kaleidoscopic, original, unique Barcelona... Dying. And everyone vindicates the souls in pain. The spectral shops pay for the brilliant history of a city. They are the city. When they die, the city is dead. And if the shops die, it's because they were alive. But no one fools death, and it drowns you. Death is knocking at the door: the problem isn't the dying of shops, but the dying of people.
Joan Sales wrote in 1949, upon returning to Barcelona: "We must return to the holy virtues of Señor Esteban, so shaved by ourselves but so nobly Catalan: tenacity, insistence. If one door closes, ten open discreetly for those who don't call out their steps." Where are the doors and the Señores Esteban?