3. A Separate Peace

On a sunny day, the air so clear you might think you could smell a 'mandarina' or two on the breeze, I would likely find myself walking either the Old Port or the Gothic Quarter. The narrow passages winding through each 'vecindad' offered compressed blocks of buildings, stacked against one another, all somehow similar, yet all born from different generations and trailing a record of history deep into the past. Each was a maze in its own way. Nothing easier than getting lost in the ruins of another time.

The cobbles, the asphalt, the air were rich with sea salt. The mountains on the northwestern edge of Barcelona invited morning fogs to hang over the whole city, sinking only reluctantly back to the shoreline. These fogs lifted the sediment of history, daily, into the air, a ritual cleaning. A salty timeless savor would, daily, override the sooty-city residue of industry. For those intimate, empty hours, life itself opened up, became vulnerable, reliant upon our will. We tended to attempt to dwell among the salts.

No matter what my intended destination (many days I would have an insurmountable urge to pass by the Museo Picasso; other days, it was more important to find myself at the port’s edge, watching the world in flux), all streets, every exiting of an art gallery, every carreró or escondrijo —winding alleys, threading the enchantment of the old city, mixing two bold new languages into our own—, every late café luncheon, would lead me back to the xampanyería. We would sometimes joke that all of the Barri Gótic was a series of compartments of the spirit, all fascinating but exhausting, all begging the loud, unclean serenity of the crowded cava bar.

At four p.m., possibly, definitely within the hour, one could locate Michael or Saint Jerome or Renault, Farola or the Dutchman. Nevertheless, it was always the outside, the persistence of the old places, that would drive us there. It was always an integral part of a more organismal experience, never solely, or statically, ‘a separate peace’.