The many facets of Barcelona

Silenced by a lack of fluency in French and Spanish, REHMAN RASHID lets his eyes and heart absorb a city that’s a mosaic of art, music, architecture, history and outlandish individuals

‘NON parlez Francais?!” The taxi driver’s incredulity was reflected in his eyes in the rear-view mirror, appraising the swarthy Moor in the back seat as we sped through the rain on the Ronda Litoral heading out of Barcelona to the airport.

“Non, senor,” I said sadly. “I’m sorry.”

It was true. Two weeks in Barcelona had given me a fluency in Spanish akin to Mr Bean’s in French. (He knew the three words oui, non and gracias, while my own French extended to an entire sentence: Je ne sais pas parler Francais, ou est la toilette?)

What was most incomprehensible to my driver, however, was how anyone could have come to Catalonia with no facility in either Spanish or French. Frankly, I’d wondered that myself.

For the duration of my stay there, my tongue had lain like a slab of dead meat in the bottom of my mouth. This had had its advantages, to be sure. Consoling it with the alternative role of licking gelati, the rest of me was free to observe and absorb this city in solitary and reverent silence, allowing the whispers of a host of Catalonian ghosts to emerge and accompany me.

Forgoing the guidebooks in favour of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Robert Hughes’ Barcelona and a biography of the architect Antoni Gaudi, I wandered the labyrinthine passages of Barcelona lonely as a cloud and with as much lightness of being.

Hence, in the taxi taking me away on the day of my departure, as we passed the steep escarpment of Montjuic to our right, I could marvel at the 2,000-year-old stone blocks cladding its base, still doing the job for which the Romans had put them there.

But I could not share that wonderment with my driver. Just as I couldn’t impress the young agent who’d rented me the studio apartment where I’d stayed, in the heart of the Barri Gotico — the oldest part of the city — with my excitement at having learned that the narrow alleyway beneath my tiny balcony had once been the Caudus Maximus, the main road to Rome.

But that was in 15BC. Now it was just another of the Gothic Quarter’s enchanting mediaeval maze of alleys, bustling with pedestrians, melodious with street musicians and sparkling with jewellery shops, antique dealers, trendy boutiques and tapas bars.

Still, not a dozen paces from my front door lay the Placa Sant Jaume, a cobbled square flanked by the imposing edifices of the governments of Barcelona on one side and Catalonia on the other.

On both weekends of my stay, raucous crowds had thronged the plaza to brandish hammer-and-sickle flags, set off fireworks and mightily protest something or other. Specifically what, I had no idea. No habla Espanyol.

But the rallies were well-practised theatre in a city where conflict, revolt and rebellion had been formative principles for centuries. Here anarchists, communists and socialists had squared off in a fractious crew against the forces of fascism in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War (and lost, of course).

Here in our own time Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro had broken through into their own radical originalities, each of them somehow prefigured in the novel written by Miguel de Cervantes 300 years earlier, entitled The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha.

Here in the 9th Century, the Visigoth ruler Guifre el Pilos (Wilfred the Hairy) had allied with the Frankish Charles II (Charles the Bald, what a double act) to unite what would become the state of Catalonia against Saracens and Normans. Legend has it that as Wilfred lay wounded after yet another epic battle, King Charles honoured his bravery by taking Wilfred’s bloody hand and raking his fingers down his yellow shield, creating the flag now worn on the jerseys of Lionel Messi, Carles Puyol and Thierry Henry.

A millennium after Wilfred the Hairy’s death, his Quatro Barres now celebrate equally the hirsute heroism of Camp Nou, home of Barcelona FC. Even silent and deserted under a leaden and weeping sky (the rain in Spain falls mainly in October), the hulking stadium seemed to shimmer with the gelid fervour of Barca’s legions of devotees.

But devotion to divine glory is also a founding ethic of this city. It took me a week to do the research I felt was necessary to visit La Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi’s “Expiatory Temple of the Sacred Family”, his final achievement and Barcelona’s crowning icon. But Gaudi died in 1926, 40 years after beginning the work and at least a century before it could be finished. The Sagrada Familia is still a work in progress. Scaffolding, cranes and crews of plasterers and masons remain part of the experience.

What Gaudi himself designed of this astonishing structure is its Nativity facade, now, mystifyingly, the “rear” of the church, which has been likened to a Gothic cathedral smothered in melted wax — fantastic, organic, architecture drawn more-or-less directly from life-forms. The “front”, with its Passion facade, is a modern addition by the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs — angular, heroic and monumental.

Subirachs rightly elected not to even contemplate imitating Gaudi, so the Nativity facade is where to see Gaudi in the Sagrada Familia, not what the building is now or will be when it’s finished.

Better, then, to savour his special genius in his other marks on Barcelona: the glistening reptilian scales and harlequin-mask balconies of Casa Batllo on the grand avenue of the Passeig de Gracia, the serpentine contours of Parc Guell, his vision of a heavenly garden, the imposing figures atop La Pedrera, where chimneys and air ducts evoke sci-fi centurions and gave George Lucas the look for his Imperial stormtroopers in Star Wars.

Gaudi’s penchant for covering his surfaces in “trencadis” — mosaics of broken tile — has become Barcelona’s inescapable aesthetic, which I found peculiarly appropriate. The city indeed seemed a mosaic in which the shattered shards themselves constitute an integument, or a kaleidoscope, where random fragments arrange themselves in mathematically perfect precision.

Bereft of human interaction by functional illiteracy, this was my Barcelona — this trencadis of art, music, architecture, history, fabulous events and outlandish individuals, of Dali’s melted watches and Picasso’s cubism, of Don Quixote leaping on Rocinante and “charging madly off in all directions” and Christopher Columbus atop his iron pillar by the Mediterranean, pointing grandly in the wrong direction to the Spice Islands.

In Barcelona, all directions, however mad, make progress.