Barcelona Read Free Page B

into various cars, and off south and uphill to Esplugües de Llobregat, to the house of the best man who was, inevitably, the sculptor Xavier Corberó, who had begun my love affair with Barcelona and changed my life so many years ago by introducing me to la gran encisera, the great enchantress, as the nineteenth-century Catalan poet Joan Maragall called his native city.
    The wedding dinner was held in Xavier’s masia. His caterers had set up eight tables. To reach them you had to walk across a threshold strewn with aromatic branches of wild rosemary, which brings fortune and length to the marriage. We were given, first, a thick soup of white beans flecked with black grains of pureed truffle, and surmounted by a solid slice of duck foie gras. (This was so delicious that both my teenage stepsons, Garrett and Fielder, clamored for second and then third ladlefuls of it.) Then came a piece of roast lubina or sea bass, reticently perfumed with thyme. Then roast capon, garnished with a variety of wild mushrooms from the Catalan hill forests: rovellons, ous de reig, and the black sinister-sounding trompetes de mort, death trumpets. Finally, the wedding cake, four tiers of it, white, creamy, and unctuous, surmounted by a marzipan Doris and a marzipan Bob, in wedding attire, holding hands. We took a carving knife, which looked almost as impressive as the blade of Wilfred the Hairy, and plunged it right in, four hands on its hilt. Neither of my previous weddings had featured a cake with a tiny bride and groom, and I was enchanted. Neither of us quite broke down and cried, although I know that I was within a few millimeters of doing so.
    I thought about a lot of things during that party, though with increasing muzziness as the evening lengthened. Mainly about Doris, about happiness, and about loyalty: to her, and to old friends like Corberó, who probably knows me better than any living man, including my own relatives, just as my relations with Barcelona are so much closer and more pleasurable than with anywhere south of the Equator.
    Some provincials—and there is one in most Australian hearts, including mine—struggle to throw off the stigma of their provincialism by relating chiefly, or in some cases only, to the huge cultural centers: New York, Paris, London. And in fact I have lived and worked longer in New York (thirty-three years) than in Australia (which I left at twenty-six). But I have never lost my tropism for the big small town that feels like home. Hence, my feelings about Barcelona.
    Once, when I thought about becoming a citizen of some country other than Australia, I used to consider America—never England, of course, for that would have felt like a colonial capitulation, a craven wriggle backward into a womb that was not likely to be very welcoming. But then it was borne in on me that to be an American, even an adoptive one, was automatically and by definition to be a colonialist, and to become one by law was only to be a secondhand, adoptive colonialist. America by now was as imperial as England had been fifty years before my birth. Was I ever going to feel excited if my prospective fellow citizens colonized the moon, or visited Mars, or carried out the scientific, ideological, or cultural schemes that seemed to be boiling away in the scary limbic forebrains of America’s rulers—a bunch of strangers who, in George W. Bush’s phrase, already viewed my native country as their “sheriff” in the Pacific? No way, Hozay. This species of derivative grandeur was soggy, boring stuff. If you are going to change your citizenship, better to fly or flounder under the flag of a place that once had an enormous empire but now has none; that doesn’t pretend (or, as Americans like to say, “aspire”) to world moral leadership; that treats “inspiring” public discourse with a certain reticence and skepticism. How about being Catalan for a change? Well, I guess we shall