Barcelona brings ultra-localism to the 21st-century world. Not a microsecond goes by without us hearing the barricade's megaphone: "There's a real corner shop where they make croquettes according to grandma's post-war recipe, the kind that fed a whole block of the Eixample district." "There's a breakfast bar serving modernist knives and razors whose head of meat made Santiago Rusiñol give up his potato morphine." Barcelona is local-lethal.
Barcelona is meliquismo, bunker, burrow, community AmishHey, for Barcelonans and Catalans. The city is global, cosmic, Neanderthal to outsiders. Barcelona is sold out and fallen. Years and locks ago. Here's the rub: you can whistle all you want if the donkey doesn't want to see itself drink. Late and badly. Barcelona won the world in '92 but lost Catalonia. Today only junkies from a world that doesn't exist continue with the Cobi vein. And like ruined colonizers they try to exploit the Pyrenees to run their casino games or sell Serrat's aunt's crocheted panties. Misery and illiteracy.
Without Catalonia, Barcelona is not Barcelona. And vice versa. The independence of the rest of Catalonia is not a consequence of Barcelona's fall: it is a cause. It already was. It's not now. Catalonia no longer needs Barcelona, because now it is ultra-local and Catalonia already has that DNA. It's called reality. I think about this after reading Jordi Amat's book The Battles of BarcelonaAnd I wonder: which ones? There is no more battle.
It's been years since the war.Today, with the Barcelona army captured and disarmed, troops on all sides have achieved their final military objectives. The war is over."For the people of Barcelona, for the Catalans. Because Barcelona is and has been what it is because it is not Spanish (Gaudí? He's not a street). Passeig de Gràcia was built by all the people of Catalonia. All the neighborhoods are human villages from all over the country. Even the posh kids Noucentista writers (from the regions!) saw it. Jaume Bofill Mates: "One speaks of the hegemony of Barcelona, and one could also speak of the hegemony of the regions within Barcelona." Shall we continue? This is dying. Barcelona, go zombie. Coitus interruptus! But, hey, from the bed of dystopia, the world is an erect dream. Barcelona, Sleeping Beauty, Stupefying. She no longer wakes from the poison and always believes there will be a Prince who will ruin her utopian, cinematic kiss and bring her back to life. Beep-beep…
The clean Maragallian dream is dead. For being federal, for being Catalan. Barcelona is no longer Vázquez Montalbán-esque Barcelonas (also for the charnegos on life support). Barcelona is only Barcelona: monarchist, centralist, autistic, Francoist, provincial. Maragall the grandfather would write the pruned-ode today: "Barcelona doesn't listen." Because it doesn't listen.
In 2008, Lluís Calvo (and Jordi Valls) already wrote The latest ode in Barcelona"With dentures, / Barcelona bites the sea, / tears the salt from the / marine corpse / –skin kept in the ground– / and spits it out in the port and on the seagulls. / And we enter through the / tongue of stone / into the city of the unliving that welcomes us, indifferent. / Medieval body mausoleums, / pure nineteenth-century archaeology." Because the same old cultural boleros no longer work. The world has changed. And there is life beyond Barcelona. Humility, Cobi. Because right now, buying panellets in "a" shop that makes them from a coffin… Is that the solution? The sect? Strabismus, myopia? We have all lost this war. If the city falls, let the country not fall. Because this is the only future for everyone.
