We are turned out like blind worms from the dark station into the glare of the sun and the red M of the metro. The buildings shimmer up the verdant Barcelona hillside like coral formations on the spine of some long-dead sea creature. It makes for a pretty picture and I hear the snapping of cameras behind me. I am no good with photographs. Generally, on the sip of my first beer the camera dissolves in my hand and tends to end up at the bottom of my suitcase, unused and obsolete. I grab a pen and begin. A blue haze hides the crosses on the blockwhite spires at the crests of the hillsides' green pregnant bellies. It looks like a cool drink up there; wet on the throat. We are down here, baking worms on the plaza’s searing pavement surrounded by old men with deep, cracked skin who may or may not have been there when the first white stone was chiselled and placed.
We trustingly asked a trustworthy-looking man – 70 odd, in a terracotta shortsleeve shirt and fitted khaki trousers for directions. He looked just like a professor and turned out to be so – in chemistry no less. He showed us the route up winding stairs with Jake, John and I behind the pack, sweating profusely in our stupid chivalry from carrying the girls‘ cumbersome luggage. I caught up with the old man and we spoke of his time at Cambridge, he was retired now with 6 sons all of whom had a career in laboratories. He mentioned the large English town of Ely, ‘What did you think of Ely cathedral?’ ‘It is O.K.’ he replied, as if the building was incomparable with Gaudi’s topsy-turvy bone edifices; as if Spain venerated their divine numbers and deities in a superior way or indeed, Barcelona had better gods. From the laughter of the indigenous and the karmic smiles on the faces of passers-by, this appeared to be the truth.
Conversation is a strange thing when done right - when it comes easy. A Hobbesian unity forms with the speaker taking pleasure in the knowledge that the other participant is taking pleasure in the smooth dialogue and so the other is enjoys it even more and it spirals madly up and up in a peculiar orgasmic verbiage. We’re not even talking sense anymore, his pig-English has degenerated (or improved) into gobbledygook and now it moves beyond language like birdsong or the yaddayaddayadda of old Jewish women at the hairdressers.
At a silent moment we parted ways and well wished each other for the coming day. All 8 of us were on a strange time – our body clocks warped and melted like Dali’s bizarre timepieces from too little sleep and waking up before the grey English sunrise for the flight. We ploughed on, climbing the narrow vertical streets; sweating our internal oceans onto the morning's dusty concrete floor.
Ben arrived and latched onto each of us like a wet tick having been away in Amsterdam for the past 6 months; learning how to write. With a pen in his hand he has a keen eye and a strong arm and hammers the words onto the line. His miller-esque sojourn seems to have lifted the veil on the world or a piece of the metaphysical cloth has been cut away and he seems worldlier now, weighing up his words before speaking like a thief palming his dagger. Even to tell a memorable anecdote about shitting in an alleyway requires a moments silence to perfect the recall to get the right resonant evocation like a magician finding the right spellword for the summoning forth of the embarrassing shit. He gets it right and the rumbles of laughter from the boys and peals of giggle from the girls echo out into the valleys.
The days passed us in a similar way that is always the same way on holidays; time jumping forward like a watch attached to a bounding gazelle. Drinking beers from fist-sized cool cans in the early golden afternoons until the amber evenings on either the dirty brown sands of a Barceloneta beach or in the silver hew of the central plaza.
The festival itself does not need to be spoken of and from the freeflowing whiskey and beer, it can hardly be recalled. Needless to say, bands were seen; some took drugs and lay out counting the stars and having to constantly start again when they noticed some of them moving. Others danced with warpaint slung on their faces to the drone of women singing Bacchic harmonies that only the back of the mind knows. I do remember listening to music that I would of been happy to leave in the nostalgic glow of the past, it now sounded cheap and irrelevant, like it needed to be pulped down and started again. Anyway, there were three nights and like the Vandals and the Goths were hiding in the trees of some sleepy Roman town, a short Dark Age ensued.
On the subsequent days we would freeze the hangovers by jumping into the cool Baltic sea, the girls screaming like lobsters saved from the kitchen’s boiling waters and thrown back into the freedom of icy pools. We would watch the nudists parade the beach - debating the aesthetics of the women from behind the privacy of our sunglasses and sniggering at the men with their hands on their hips; cocks blowing to-and-thro like tiny pink pendulums. Fiona got sand in her black swimsuit so swam out past the perverts, took it off and span it round her head like a helicopter landing at sea. The frozen green hangovers were then easily shattered with cans of coca-cola on the terracotta tiled roof of our hotel.
The view from up there was something to be grappled with. The burning citrus acacia that Sally and Laura said ‘smelt distinctly of semen’ and the blue haze of the hills coming down into the valley of La Rabassada and settling in each of our heads sleepy from long siestas. After one of these, I awoke and walked into the next room expecting to see the blue iguanas of dream but was greeted with the cinematic view of Laura and Cassie smoking out of the panoramic windows chattering away like parakeets in a warm tree.
Gilbert arrived and told great stories of old parties where bands played and blew the roof off houses – nothing literal but it sure makes the stories come alive. Ben span a couple about parties so hot you could not acclimatise and would stand in the city night panting like an old dog. After not too long, the whiskey from a long green bottle of JBs was brought out and moments later it is floating on my stomach, the blue haze mixes with a melting yellow and working itself into a wonderful green.
I did not talk so much as the torch of stories was passed around, being at home in the house of my head. I firmly shut the trapdoor on the basement of dream and I was awake, wide-eyed and alive in the world. We had places to be. Primavera, the music festival we have all travelled so far for had begun again so we flew into the night like bats in the first season and crawled through the hot underground caverns. On the L train, I sit with my eyes locked onto Laura and she giggles when I stare a moment too long. I left my ticket at the hotel and so travelled back alone, frowning most of the way as I had not been paying attention to the clear directions given out, the colours of the different lines making a rainbow all heading in the same direction.
Despite the bustling crowd moving like a series of tornadoes on and off the train, there was a silence around me. Even through the boiling gullet of Passeig de Gràcia where a lone guitarist strummed wildly like Orpheus trying to raise his love from the land of the dead; not a single note hit my ears – what is this state; a strange liveliness span in my stomach as if I was sleepwalking excitedly, obliviously turning towards Nirvana. I took a long sip of JBs and it is like a key to the bedroom door turning slowly until the click of the bolt holds me in. The tumble-dryer of my belly made the whole of my being shake.
After finding my ticket and getting back on the right coloured track, I was sitting next to some old crone with her hand tapping her stick to some chant the rest of carriage was deaf to. She asks me something in Spanish, ‘Habla usted Inglés?’ I reply, she shakes her head and says ‘Green frog yes?’ I shake my head in confusion. She looks disgruntled and stares wildly at the floor, the beat on her stick becoming more erratic as if the world was now out of balance.
