I see Don Joan Maragall rolling down La Rambla with a Mexican hat, reciting in a LOUD VOICE and passing the little plate: “Our Barcelona! The great enchantress!”. Charming, fascinating, magnetic. Like a human, cultural, social, spiritual synchrotron, Barcelona is transforming into a Latin American city. Extremes. Rich and poor. Abundance and misery. Possible and impossible. One and the other. Between. In the middle of.

To know how on earth I should see this eclipse, I read a book. I recommend it to you: On Astronomy: Its Origin and the Origin of the Laws of the Universe,from 1863. I haven't understood anything. This reaffirms me in the fact that the Universe, as Woody Allen said, is expanding, expanding… Is it a spasmodic bubble gum? The cheese in the shape of a taut bow without an arrow of a bikini? I would like to ask the author, but the ouija board doesn't suit me. What's up? Hey, wait.

Last year, some scrawny, sickly, and lazy creatures ended up in a health center. They made them open their mouths and their tongues were blue. Ovine catarrhal fever. The veterinarian discovered, however, symptoms of another pathology. One more proof that it was a plague, a blight: the lambs were stolen.

These days Antoni Gaudí is celebrating. June 13th is Saint Anthony of Padua. Patron of bricklayers, master builders, constructors, of armchair psychoanalysts and mortar. You can find Gaudí at the very top of his friend Jesus's tower. Celebrating on life's scaffolding. Having an oily herring sandwich, a cold beer, and the dessert of an eternal roll. Do you see him?

God is Catalan. We have scientific and metaphysical proof. Even though we are far apart, there has always been a very good relationship. From km 0. The gas station philosopher Francesc Pujols creates God's first service station on earth: Catalan religion. "Because if having your own system is equivalent to having your own car, having your own religion is like having your own home." It is a natural, real religion, which is why faith here is everything that surrounds us. And Catalans are "compatriots of truth." The mission is to offer truth to the world: "Catalonia will link the two paths, material and spiritual, of humanity, in a cross, not of death, but of life, not of war, but of peace and moral progress." But war arrives. Catalan religion, Catalonia, found itself "between the flames of fire and the rivers of blood of the Civil War unleashed by the supporters of Spanish Spain against the supporters of Catalan Spain." Fire in the shack.

The other day in a village a man fell. He was picking the hen on the upper floor of the farm. Poof! All-you-can-eat broken ribs. A lifetime of working, a lifetime of loving the land… And he fell to the ground at the end of his life. He is old now and no one is coming after him. There is pain… His broken ribs are our pain. A world, some people, are leaving. Without saying goodbye. Playing the last game on a mandatory horizontal bed playing field.

What color is the outfit Bad Bunny always wears? Tick-tock, tick-tock… Pantone Puerto Rico. Everything is blue, red, white. Tricolor 3HD. What is seen and what is not seen. United Colores of San José, Bayamón, Carolina, Ponce… Motley Caribbean. Gaudy Antilles. Kaleidoscopic island. Polychromatic nationalism. Nationalism through the eyes. Nationalism for all senses. But he is not a nationalist. Can you imagine a Catalan musician doing this?

The new-old pedagogy is textile. Polyester, cotton, wool, linen, silk… But also influenced by other currents: cellulose, rubber, polyethylene, PVC… There are parents who opt for this type of education. As good parents, they think about the future of their offspring: Spain must shelter Catalonia.

Do you hear it? Yes, in the coming years one of the noisiest changes will be phonetic. We will go from animal farms with the traditional: oink, oink; cock-a-doodle-doo; moooo; baaaa... to farms of people and their newly installed bellows, screams, groans: "Good morning", "Good night", "Who the hell has the remote?", "I don't know why the hell I married you!", "Make that kid shut up already!" This is what can be achieved with this Catalan law that will allow farms and warehouses to be converted into housing for other animals.

Like a World War II machine gun auctioned at a pacifist market, the culture of effort is being talked about again. Rat-a-tat-tat. But the body is dead. Effort and culture are needed to talk about this. And there is none. At least not in supermarkets. In other words: the culture of effort begins in the placenta. Even before. But let's take a step forward and go to P3.

The last time I saw Jordi Pujol we talked about the Big Ben. Rac, rac, rac. The president searches his infinite folder system. Here. This. And we return to the disco with his words. That and that. And he enters here and leaves there. He was also there. He also lived it.

“The entire basement was a terrifying expanse of dead men, and examining them all, one by one, was a harsh test of my endurance. The thought of finding Planes there troubled me more than the thought of not finding him. He was there, however, and before recognizing the person, I identified a navy blue suit with white pinstripes, which I had seen him wear many times. He also wore an unmistakable sky-blue shirt. I leaned over him until my face was level with his, and there was no longer any hesitation, despite an unknown grimace of terror that had remained frozen on his lips”.

Dalí, God rest him, was wrong. So was his father, the God of Catalan religion, Francesc Pujols, from Barcelona-Martorell. The one from Figueres dared to say that the center of the world, of the universe was… “This place is located exactly in the center of the Perpignan station.” And more disoriented than clock-like mustaches that strike neither quarter hours nor full hours, he recalls God the Father: “All important things happen there, and Pujols also saw it clearly, because Montpellier, Perpignan, is the place where truth is to be discovered.” We can't stop laughing. The truth is at La Panadella.

Tractors, at night, are advancing spaceships. Luminous, dominant giants. These days our terrestrial aliens are sulphating the land. Up and down. If you stop and start an intersidereal dialogue, they don't attack you. From these colossal beasts, worth two hundred, three hundred, four hundred thousand euros, pilots descend with a thousand missions in their hands and on their knees.

When I was Superman correspondent covering all of Lleida from top to bottom, if I climbed the stairs towards heaven I would stop for breakfast at Cal Farré de Baró. Over time I was becoming integrated as just another being in the fauna of those Pallars feasting tables. There I related to one of the most mythical orcs of that land. J.C. showed me the future and told me what would happen. Everything was backwards: the return of the meatball to minced meat. One thing he got right before the internet: “Everyone will live in human farms.” Amen.

There are some heroes. They are real and moral heroes. In the square. You won't see them. You won't hear them either. Let me introduce you: they are the teachers of the reception classrooms. But, hey, the ones who always speak in Catalan. Hello (in Catalan).

In the real Catalonia, repetitive, recidivist, bounced back… Rrrrrr. The van arrived and said we didn't exist. I reread: "Oops! Your shipment could not be delivered due to an incorrect address.". All my life living in a wrong place. A: we check. We reiterate: correct address. The same as always. Nothing to say? Neither reread the paper. Nor trace the streets. Nor look with your eyes. No scratching. Rationality 0 - Irrationality 10. If the GPS says that it is not here: it is not here: it is not here. The important thing is the trip. Rrrrrr.

This is the story of a sleepy girl and a bouncy fish. Many years ago, in a place called Catalonia, some grumpy gentlemen with mustaches and beards the color of shoe polish, or nuclear detergent, believed that Catalan wasn't dead but rather a Sleeping Beauty. They set up franchised stores throughout the country and christened them "La Renaixença" (The Catalan Renaissance). What did they want to sell? Salt spray! No, just kidding. They believed that Catalan would awaken after its narcolepsy of 1714, possessing a literary language, a language of culture. And how would they achieve this? With sex.

Today's Barcelona was born from a boom-boom. Hiroshima my loveThe demolition of the walls in the 19th century. Without a nuclear explosion, there is no love. As a Barcelonian said in 1854: Barcelona explodes and we fall in love… with a new Barcelona. Without the first great explosion, there wouldn't be the other two major upheavals: the War-Dictatorship, which is the transition from a free city to an occupied one. And the final explosion: the Olympic atomic dog, Cobi. A grand finale that leads us to the Barcelona of today, ripped open and with pieces damaged by the city's skin. And the umbilical cord?

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.