Barcelona
By GABRIELE ULLSTEIN
pROPELLED by assiduous kicks and shoves, our luggage screeched across the tiled bedroom floor. The tiny creature whose crumpled cotton shorts barely protruded beneath a man-sized bell-hop's tunic accepted his tip with urbane charm. Then he disappeared, banging the door so energetically that the metal-tagged key clattered to the floor. We shouted to each other (for the closed windows and shutters barely took the edge off the traffic din) that surely Barcelona was the noisiest city we had ever been in.
Our hotel was on the Ramblas, the chain of wide streets that links an elegant quarter of spacious avenues, international travel agencies (which the Spaniards cannot use because there is no foreign currency allowance), and fashionable hotels, with the businesslike Plaza de la Paz where Columbus from his column looks out over miles of docks and shipyards. Down the centre of the Ramblas runs an avenue of fine dusty plane trees with park seats and iron chairs where people gossip and argue and read the papers and eat huge home-made omelet sandwiches and buy lottery tickets from a steady stream of hawkers and listen to the loudspeakers. For the plane trees are wired for sound, and from our window we can hear an evenly matched contest between the Harry Lime theme and a wailing flamenco number about love and death. And we can see three flower stalls, and a man selling long-eared puppies, and two kiosks full of paper-backed thrillers and brand-new Spanish editions of Emile Ludwig's Marie Antoinette and Dostoyevsky's Idiot, and Spanish fashion magazines with chic glossy covers but coarse yellow paper and antiquated layouts inside, and three women offering black market bread from their aprons, and two blind boys and a man with no legs and a woman with an idiot child, all begging, and five bootblacks and six ravishingly pretty girls from a convent school going home for lunch with their arms linked (they sit still for eight hours a day doing scripture and sewing, and in the ten minutes morning break they are not allowed to run or giggle or link arms) and there is a man with a donkey carrying a load of hand-made pots in a bale of straw, and two men touting watches, and a double procession of boys and girls with water pots to a public fountain in a side street round the corner, and two men touting watches, and a smart woman with a beautiful tan on her bare midriff (for in Barcelona they have a lenient bishop and do not have to worry about el desnudismo as mach as they do in the rest of Spain, though even here the " blasphemy and the filthy word " are forbidden on public vehicles.
* The Agrarian Problem in Kenya. By Sir Philip Mitchell. Govern- ment Press, Nairobi. 1947.
It is two o'clock now, but the Ramblas would look much the same at eight or eleven or five or midnight. They are always full of people, some strolling, some hurrying purposefully along, and many apparently always moving house, for on their heads they carry the most unlikely objects ; cheval glasses, bits of machinery, sets of ovenware, sections of stained-glass. We came home at four one morning and found the cafés on both sides of the Ramblas still full of people drinking coffee and beer and iced bean juice (they scarcely ever drink wine or spirits), still arguing, still reading the papers (morning or evening ?), and still listening to the loud. speakers, one of which had now switched on to " Lili Marlene," while the other was relaying the Spanish football victory over the British at Rio (next to bull fighting which, as everybody agrees, is going through a period of decadence, el futbol is the favourite national sport).
On the right of the Ramblas as you go down to the sea lies the notorious Barrio Chino, a red light district that need fear no com- parison, even from Marseilles. On the left is the old town where in the peaceful golden Plaza Real we saw couples of ragged little girls dance solemnly under the central palm trees to the tune of three rival barrel-organs. The harsher noises of the Ramblas were excluded by an enclosed square of noble houses with balus- traded roofs and arcaded ground floors. A little farther on a narrow street echoes with frenzied rhythmical clappings and stamp. ings. Two rival gipsy establishments across the street from each other are bidding for customers. Now and then a fat handsome gipsy girl runs out and parades her polka-dotted muslin flounces past the, clients of a famous restaurant, where chickens turn on a spit in the street.
Going north again one comes to the Barrio Gotico, a whole town of mediaeval, renaissance, and baroque buildings. In the Palacio de la Generalidad, the typists of the Disputation Provincial look out on an upper courtyard shaded by orange trees, guarded by gargoyles, and inhabited by goldfish in tanks of blue and yellow tiles. A balustraded staircase descends into a fifteenth-century patio and the great carved gate brings you out behind the huge, sombre gothic cathedral, dark, elaborate, and awe-inspiring as only a Spanish church can be. But in the sunny fourteenth-century cloisters the sacred geese quack unabashed, businessmen read financial reports, guides and curio sellers pester foreign visitors, and art students chatter as they dab at copies of the paintings that are presumably hidden in the murky side chapels.
Between the Barrio Gotico and the docks lie the slums, evil smelling alleys overhung by tall tenements so decayed and sloping that the sky between them is only a narrow ribbon. A stench of rank oil emerges from cave-like openings and the walls are stained with slimy exudations whose origin one dare not guess. Half-human crones in black tatters and green-faced children with big sores on their half-naked bodies crouch against the walls, staring impassively. It is a shock to emerge suddenly into the glaring sunlight of the Paseo de Colon where all the shops are ship's chandlers and the offices of nautical engineers look out over steamer funnels to the brilliant Mediterranean.
There seem to be no moderate opinions about Barcelona. Either you love its vitality, its " loucheness," its quick, urban intelligence, its exuberance, and, of course, the beauty of its ancient buildings; or else, battered into antagonism by the noise, the speed, the gusto, the ruthlessness, you hate its vulgarity and mercenary temper, and sneer at its bad taste. No one sneers harder than the Madrilenos in their elegant moribund capital: and they have just extended their telephone exchange to include all the surrounding sunbaked villages because they cannot bear to compare the size of the Barcelona tele- phone directory with their own. Barcelona is a feared and hated rival. For though the government is at Madrid, Barcelona is the larger and more prosperous city ; the capital of Spanish industry and commerce ; the centre of Catalan independence ; the only city with a reasonably large, reasonably well-off, reasonably educated middle-class ; and, because of the traditionally cosmopolitan and independent outlook of the Catalans—which makes them (in their present mood) genially contemptuous of Franco's regime—it is the country's only window on the world.
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