Barcelona Read Free Page A

a strain on Barcelona’s fiscus—but the point, it was felt, ought and had to be made. It applied to more serious expenditures, too. Thus in 1878, a gas strike left the city in darkness for a year because the Barcelonans balked at paying what they considered an exploitive municipal tax. Thus in 1951, they joined together to challenge the Franco regime with a tram strike, which paralyzed the city for weeks but indubitably got results. The whole historical tendency of Barcelonans has been to show themselves, not as mere spectators of the comings and goings of power, but as participants in it. They have always wanted something more, much more in fact, than mere “transparency.”
    The Saló de Cent was designed around 1360 by the architect Pere (Peter) Llobet and inaugurated in 1373. Badly damaged by bombardment in 1842 during a workers’ uprising, it was rebuilt in the 1880s by the patriot architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, a great figure who came within a split hair of being as remarkable, if more conservative, an architect as Antoni Gaudí. (Gaudí also entered the competition for the job of designing a new Saló de Cent, but his design got nowhere and since its drawings have long since been lost we have no idea what it may have looked like.) Some neo-Gothic decor was added in 1914, but it is still one of the noblest spaces in Spain. It also radiates ceremonial richness, not least because the upper half of its walls are hung in broad stripes of contrasting red and gold silk—a heraldic design based on and evoking the quatres barres (four stripes) of the Catalan flag. How did they get on the flag? Supposedly, as the finger marks of Charlemagne’s son, Louis El Piados (the Pious), who created an armorial design for Wilfred the Hairy by dabbling his four royal digits in the wounded warrior’s blood and scraping them down the shield—a sort of minimalist claw mark that has endured as Catalunya’s sign for a thousand years. But the story has a catch: Wilfred the Hairy was born around A.D. 840 and died in about 897. Louis the Pious’ corresponding dates were 778 and 840, which, if strictly insisted on, can only mean that he drew the four red bars in Wilfred’s blood nearly half a century after his own death. This is a mystery whose solution lies beyond the historian’s own fingers.
    The December evening on which we were scheduled to be married was bright and cold and—unusually for Barcelona—dusted with snow. Whiteness clung to every stringcourse and crocket of the Cathedral’s facade. It crunched underfoot. This early snowfall was seen by our Catalan friends as an omen, though exactly of what—beyond a generalized kind of happiness—no two of them seemed quite to agree. It rarely snows in Barcelona before Christmas. It hadn’t done so in more than fifteen years—so this had to be an exceptional date. And it certainly felt like one. I have not forgotten, and never will, looking down from an embrasure of the Casa de la Ciutat at the cold medieval stone staircase and seeing Doris walking so gracefully up its shallow steps, unaware (I think) that I was watching her, slender in her white-and-pale-blue wedding dress, the sparse flakes of snow falling negligently, in slow motion, past her shoulders and seeming to rhyme with her pale and gleaming hair. Had I ever been so happy at a wedding before? No, I had not. I still can’t imagine how one could be. The mayor, Joan Clos, hitched us in Catalan and very slightly awkward English. We answered in awkward Catalan: “ Si, vull —Yes, I want to.” Doris’s younger son, Fielder, produced the rings with perfect aplomb, not missing a beat. My fear that he might drop one of them, and that we would see it rolling into a crack between the old paving stones of the Saló de Cent, was quite unfounded. A string quartet played, sweetly and ceremoniously. And then it was down the stairs,