One of the ancestral rituals of those who live beyond the Panadella when they come to Barcelona is to park "over there, the Barcelona pitch." No one knows for sure where this holy routine comes from (before Christ? After? During?), but it's still alive like an ancient herring dancing rock 'n' roll on crutches. Four days ago (or depending on which mathematical Church you follow, three, or two...) the Lleida Liam Gallagher, Llorenç Bonet, addicted to music and sports, this twenty-two-year-old being running after a tanned hide, did the same thing generations have been doing since the days of the Ilergets.
Bonet leaves the car, and being the athlete he is (sorry, kid), he walked from the Barça stadium to Plaça Universitat. Before you ask the depot, mortal or nuclear, what you think was supposed to happen didn't happen. Since he's more of a "you'll-never-finish-it" type, the local, traditional, nostrat souvenir, the Mexican meteorological hat that is the Barcelona heatwave, didn't finish him off. Phew, he said.
Our man has arrived at his destination. And he looks dazed. It's not heat stroke. Crushed. Disoriented. In the middle of the square, like a Paco Martínez Soria of the Britpop from Manchester, who's come to sing with his band in the city, lists everything he's seen in abundance, in abundance, on his five kilometers of legs. The list is only palatable for large families of size XXXLLL. There's everything. But Bonet still has that face of a rebel panopticon, of a town-neighborhood singer. When he's reviewed all the wheeled suitcases of all the tourists of all possible colors and bellies. When he's checked all the shops selling a thousand delicacies from a thousand countries that don't even appear on the map. When he's counted and counted scooters, bicycles, mobile junk with wheels that run on hydrogen... He says as if it were the first song to open the concert: "What surprised me about Barcelona is that I haven't seen any children playing in the street."
We already know that in Barcelona there are more dogs than scoundrels. And hamsters, declawed cats with a psychologist-diagnosed phobia of mice; mice with running wheels, sustainable donkeys, phosphorescent bee-eaters... It's the city of humanized beasts. Children are locked up in prisons, in rehabilitation centers, or in visual therapies called A Clockwork Orange. There are children, but they're blind. Now, out onto the street. None playing. None free. The street is for others. Children make a mess. Barcelona Clean of Children. Playing is anti-pedagogical. It can distort their future physically and psychologically. So says the hummingbird psychotherapist, expert in volatile creatures.
Barcelona prohibits taking flight. Look, now they've had to close the Museum of Forbidden Art. For everything. Now perhaps those who wanted him out would set up a Brunch Museum. Ephemeral and edible art. Prohibited works are not good for the stomach and the brain. Barcelona doesn't want people who build. Modernism would be impossible today. The Güells, the Gaudís. The Girona families of Urgell and Bonet-Gallagher who came to Barcelona to build it and left their cars in the countryside. Besides, they all had children. Today, no children, no playing in the streets, no nothing. What was built must be destroyed. Those who give birth must be buried. From fertilization to coitus interruptus as a business."No future", the punks sang. "There is no future," sings the Barcelonan sperm… and Catalan.
